Latour on Critique

Things and objects have had for some time a separate and distinctive relationship. Things have been assigned a privileged status based on their complicated qualities and complex artisanal or intellectual connections while more technical and scientific objects have been taken for granted as commodity and consumption items, and therefore disregarded in the realm of discussion and debate. An object has been designated as a matter of fact and hence not questioned, while a thing is a matter of concern, debate and critique. ‘Things have become things again’ because a number of things have to participate in the gathering of an object, and so this reciprocal and cohesive relationship entails that things are both a matter of fact – the actual object – and a matter of concern – the gathering. A thing can now be described as both an object in the public arena and the ensuing issues related to said object, which are to be debated and discussed within a gathering or body of people. “A world of objects, unconcerned by any sort of [gathering] has come to a close. Things are gathered again.” (p236)

The realist attitude that Latour celebrates acknowledges that matters of fact are “totally implausible, unrealistic, unjustified definitions of what it is to deal with things.” He seeks to abandon outdated social theories in favour of a new critical attitude “launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence”. He celebrates a realist attitude in which the word criticism is spun in a positive and more inclusive way.