"Are you not fed up at finding yourself forever locked into language alone, or imprisoned in social representations alone, as so many social scientists would like you to be? ... Do you not have more than enough of being continually dominated by a Nature that is transcendent, unknowable, inaccessible, exact, and simply true, peopled with entities that lie dormant like the Sleeping Beauty until the day when scientific Prince Charmings finally discover them? ... Are you not a little tired of those sociologies constructed around the Social only, which is supposed to hold up solely through the repetition of the words 'power' and 'legitimacy' because sociologists cannot cope wiether with the contents of objects or with the world of languages that nevertheless construct society? ... Are you not fed up with language games, and with the eternal scepticism of the deconstruction of meaning? ... Are you not tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, of living in a base world emptied of all its substances, all its sacredness and its art?" --Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
I like this quotation because it sounds like Latour is starting an existential infomercial. "Friends, is your world philosophy looking a bit ragged around the edges? Has your personal ideology personally let you down? Are your ready for a new worldview for the new modernity? Well, you're in luck, because relativism is for you!"
Later Days.
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