Sarah Lambert about 200 words
sel15@geneseo.edu
Student, INTD 105-19: Scientific Writing
Latour’s Argument About The Sidewalk
By Sarah Lambert
Throughout his argument, Latour insists that “translation,” or the “mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture,” is a type of interpretation necessary to consider oneself modern. Latour exemplifies this motif through his own term coined, “nature-culture,” which he defines implicitly as an overarching term that refers to aspects of society and their interactions. Latour’s argument is similar to my own in that we agree that not all things can be categorized, especially when it comes to man-made things we define as ‘artificial.’
While Latour sufficiently supports his claim that this “nature-culture” exists, I cannot also accept that it is most advantageous to see the world from a “pure” standpoint. Though I concede that it is helpful to separate ideas to clarify them, I do not believe that “all [ideas] have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate.”
Though he touches upon how the sciences and politics interact on issues like global warming, Latour fails to illustrate how some interactions of the universe are nearly impossible to “purify” and “categorize.” Creation, for example, is a direct interaction between one being and the next. This specifically shows how these two things cannot ever be entirely separate because if it were not for the first, there would be no second.
Hi Sarah, Is this blog post the one in which you were supposed to talk about your object and the way your adopted thinker might view it? I don’t see that happening here. In terms of the discussion of Latour’s ideas, I don’t think the disagreement you bring up in the second paragraph is really a disgreement—he does not advocate the separation of things into categories through purification–he is a translator and urges us to think of things across categories.