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A Few Steps Toward an Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour*
Affiliation:
Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris
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The argument

A large part of our critical acumen depends on a clear distinction between what is real and what is constructed, what is out there in the nature of things and what is in there in the representation we make of them. Something has been lost however for the sake of this clarity and a heavy price has been paid for this dichotomy between ontological questions on the one hand and the epistemological questions on the other: it has become impossible to understand the simplest features of action. What the critical gesture smashes into pieces is precisely the very possibility of hearing as synonyms the two sentences, “I have fabricated it well, thus it is autonomous.” The paper tries to find a way to avoid the critical gesture and link again together facts and fetishes, producing this rather strange hybrid: factishes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 63 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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