Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern
--  Bruno Latour

Full Citation Latour, Bruno. `Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters
of Fact to Matters of Concern'. Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225 - 248. Print.


Notes
- Opens with main question: in a time of generalized war, should academics too
 not be at war? (pp. 225)
- Argues that scholarship should rethink its targets and methods (pp. 225);
 scholarly approaches as "one critique late" with a need to urgently reorient
 (pp. 226)
- Worrying signs:
- Artificially maintained controversies (pp. 226)
 - Presents an example of right-wing deconstruction in service of oil and gas,
   notes his own worry that the work of critical scholarship laid the
 groundwork for this (pp. 226-227)
- Danger not from ideology dressed up as fact but fact treated as ideology (pp.
 227)
- The fact that there is no sure ground, not even for critique (pp. 227)
- Instant revisionism = the fact that historical revisionism can happen during
 an event (pp. 228)
- Associated with conspiracy theories (pp. 228)
- Knee jerk disbelief, demands for proof, free use of powerful explanatory
 models from social critique (pp. 230)
- questions whether critical theories are any different from conspiracy
 theories; they have the same "structure of explanation" which presents
 shadowy causes for events/conditions (229)
- Questions whether this approach is useful anymore (pp. 229)
- Clear articulation that this is a reductio ad absurdum argument, where
 critical theory is shown in its most extreme version (pp. 230)
- The "computerization" of critique, how it miniaturized like computers and
 became more available, sellable (pp. 230)
- Notes the necessary inversion: society not as a cause (this position causing
 weakening of critique) but as an effect/consequence (nt. 8)
- Argues again for the need for reorientation since, whatever has changed, the
 conditions of the present have changed materially and new tools are needed to
 approach the new speed of transformation (pp. 231)
- That critical spirt has led us to the wrong places, wrong conclusions, and
 wrong allies (pp. 231)
- Calls for a renewal of empiricism, a "stubborn realism" that deals with
 "matters of concern" rather than "matters of fact" (pp. 231)
- The mistake being that the only way of critiquing matters of fact was to move
 further away from them, but also meant accepting too readily that we know
 what they are (pp. 231)
- In this, critique has not been critical enough, dealing only with a subset of
 what exists in the world: "matters of concern" ⸧ "states of affairs"; matters
 of fact are partial, polemical renderings of matters of concern (pp. 232)
- Critical apparatus of the Enlightenment of "debunking" worked very well until
 is turned back upon itself and started eating up the matters of fact that
 were supposed to keep it stable (pp. 232)
- The question of whether we can develop critical tools approaching matters of
 concern which are not meant to debunk but to protect and care a la Harraway
 by adding reality to rather than subtracting it from matters of fact (pp. 232)
- Discussion of the term "thing" = what is out there, outside of language,
 representation, and dispute (pp. 233)
- Thing as both out there and in here; thing as a "gathering" (pp. 233)
- Thing = matters of fact and matters of concern (pp. 233)
- Matters of fact as shorthand representations of matters of concern (pp. 234)
- Section critiquing Heidegger's split between "objects" and "things";
 proposing that anything can be treated with the richness of a thing, that the
 split is artificial (pp. 233-234)
- The fact that science studies is best equipped to deal with everything as
 things (in the richness of their existence rather than as inert objects)
 since its object (science itself) is so extraordinarily complex and rich,
 resisting already a process of being reduced to a matter of fact (pp. 234)
- Thingness is produced by the extraordinary event: becoming noticed, gathering
 various people around it; and not from the everyday (pp. 234); the fact that
 it assembled "a thousand folds" (more than the 4 that Heidegger posited); the
 fact that it can assemble and disband in a moment (pp. 235)
- Columbia explosion: object  thing; Iraq war: thing -/-> object (pp. 234-235)
- Proposal that everyday life has become "re-thinged" (pp. 236)
- A reduction in the powers of matters of fact and their merging into rich,
 diverse, complex matters of concern (pp. 237)
- Serres' "quasiobject" which does not neatly fit into the categories of object
 nor thing (nt. 19)
- Notes that following scientific objects back to their "thingyness" usually
 reduces their reality rather than adds to it (pp. 237)
- Due to the constitution of objects in the social sciences in either a fact or
 fairy position (p. 237)
- Iconoclastic gesture is outlined: 1) movement from fairy (the cause you see
 is not really a cause) to fact (but is really an effect of an undisputable
 social fact) back to fairy (which makes you believe in the efficacy of the fake
 cause) (pp. 238); 2) movement from fact (you are free of the illusion) to fairy
 (but that freedom is an illusion) to fact (since the power of the social facts
 make you unfree) (pp. 239)
- Notes that in the above, the historicity and operativity of those facts are
 left unexamined (pp. 239)
- Notes as well the individualism of the critic: critic as the only one having
 a clear view of the situation in some way; snobbishness of the critic (pp.
 239)
- That this has made professional scholars lose the trust of the public (pp.
 239)
- The real kicker is that the critic reserves certain objects they believe in
 as untouchable and not open to critique (pp. 240), which makes a
 contradiction within each individual critic: 1) an iconoclast of all things you
 don't like; 2) a positivist for your favourite science; 3) a realist for
 anything you do like -- these ae each applied to different sets of object so
 the contradiction goes unnoticed (pp. 241)
- This kind of criticality is untenable for science studies since the states of
 affairs under examination do not afford a clear cut separation between the
 three sets of objects (pp. 242)
- Matters of concern never totally sit in fact or fairy position since they do
 things, have things done to them, and make you do things (pp. 243)
- Any attempt to fit them into the two positions as a kind of "barbarity" o
 "disrespect" (pp. 243)
- Retrieving the realist attitude by going to Whitehead: going to experience
 since matters of fact are simply poor representations of experience and are
in fact totally unrealistic (pp. 244)
- To get at matters of concern through "gathering" (Heidegger's term) or
 "societies" (Whiteheads term) or "associations" (Latour's term) (pp. 245)
- Not a question of what the preconditions of a thing are, but how many must
 participate for reality to be retained (pp. 245)
- What we have is stabilization by enrichment (pp. 245)
- Failure exists in this model when not enough participants are assembled to
 retain the reality of the thing (pp. 245)
- New role for the critic: not debunker but assembler by offering "arenas to
 gather" which must be protected since they are fragile (pp. 245)
- Discusses Alan Turing to examine a notion of critique associated with the
 surprise of experimentation (pp. 246), a process of generating more ideas
 than were received (pp. 247-248)

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