December 2, 2015 - 22:56
I'm actually having a lot of trouble absorbing this very dense essay... This is what I've managed to extract:
1. the contructs of objectivity and subjectivity are nullified due to our current Earth-context; the process of scientific investigation must be reimagined (11).
"There is no distant place anymore. And along with distance, objectivity is gone as well, or at least an older notion of objectivity that was unable to take into accoun the active subject of history" (2).
"A new problem arises: how to understand the active role of human agency not only in the construction of facts but also in the very existence of the phenomena those facts are trying to document?" (2).
"Earth is no longer "objective"; it cannot be put at a distance and emptied of all Its humans. Human action is visible everywhere-- in the construction of knowledge as well as in the production of the phenomena those sciences are called to register" (5).
2.) we must look beyond the blurriness of the subject-object relationship, and work towards "the return of object and subject back to the ground-- the "metamorphic zone" (16).
3.) something about the animated and the deanimated? something about actants?
Is there any way to make this essay clearer? In philosophy, we are asked to use many examples in order to clearly and concisely explain our claim, but Latour's references seem out of reach for me. How can we make philosophical writing accessible? So how do we completely uproot our current scientific practices and perspectives in order to take into consideration the dynamism of Gaia? (I don't even understand my sentence)