I've been reading Bruno Latour (anthropologist and sociologist of science studies) for about a year, but I only just found out that he co-curated an art show for ZKM in 2002! duh. It's called Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. The essay he wrote for the catalogue is pretty good. I love Latour because he is so interdisciplinary in the way that he conceptualizes the construction of meaning: networks, hybrids, non-human agency (extending to objects and apparatus), nature/culture come together. I think of Latour as post-postmodern (there has to be a better word for it) because he is trying to get discursive construction and empirical reality back together. I've just been reading Jacques Rancière for school and he seems to have a similar agenda. Maybe its a French thing. Anyhow, I like it. Here's a snippet from Latour's Iconoclash essay.
If westerners had really believed they had to choose between construction and reality (if they had been consistently modern), they would never have had religion, art, science, and politics. Mediations are necessary everywhere. If you forbid them, you may become mad, fanatic, but there is no way to obey the command and choose between the two-polar opposites: either it is made or it is real. That is a structural impossibility, an impasse, a double bind, a frenzy. It is as impossible as to request a Bunraku player to have to choose, from now on, between showing his puppet or showing himself on the stage.
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- sally mckay 1-09-2010 3:58 pm