97 Spinoza Gblatour Milosz

WHAT IS THE S TYLE OF M ATTERS OF C ONCERN ?
B RUNO L ATOUR
Spinoza Lectures
Will Kymlicka - States, Natures and Cultures

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WHAT IS THE
S TYLE OF M ATTERS
Manfred Frank - Selbstbewutsein und Argumentation
ISBN 90 232 3278 X
Richard Rorty - Truth, politics and post-modernism

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OF C ONCERN ?
Albrecht Wellmer - Revolution und Interpretation
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Axel Honneth - Suffering from Indeterminacy

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B RUNO L ATOUR
Seyla Benhabib - Transformations of Citizenship
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Hilary Putnam - Enlightenment and Pragmatism

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Judith Butler - Giving an Account of Oneself

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Nancy Fraser - Reframing Justice

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Hubert Dreyfus - Skilled Coping as Higher Intelligibility in Heideggers

Being and Time
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John Dupr - The Constituents of Life

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Bruno Latour - What is the Style of Matters of Concern

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Bruno Latour TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Spinoza Lecture II 27
ISBN 978 90 232 4379 3
The Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam presented the

Spinoza Lectures by Bruno Latour in April and May 2005.
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S PINOZA L ECTUR E I
NATURE AT THE
C ROSS - ROADS :
THE B IFURCATION OF
NATURE AND ITS E ND
F IRST L ECTURE
We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fel-

low creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox
philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each
enjoying an illusory experience.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 50
Why theology? Because the first must be first,

And first is the notion of truth
Its poetry precisely
With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency
Of a windowpane that testifies to the fact
That we dont know how to live in a phantasmagoria.
Let reality return to our speech.1
And yet we seem to know very well how to live in a phantasmago-

ria and it seems more and more difficult to let reality return to our
speech. Why is this so? Probably because we have difficulty associat-
ing truth and poetry. Is it not poetry itself that allows us to escape
from the harsh truth conditions of referential language? What forces
us to suspend belief and disbelief and enjoy the sheer beauty of lan-
guage, independently, so the formalists say, of any acquaintance, any
association with reality? And yet Milosz asks us to follow the move-
ment of a bird, a bird, he says who has the strange behaviour of
thrashing against the transparency of a windowpane.
This must have happened to you, surely: you hear the flutter-
ing noise of a bird, who by some mistake, some strange conduit, has
become a prisoner of the room where you are sitting; desperate to
escape, he comes thrashing against the windowpane, which he takes,
mistakenly, for the open sky, unaware as he is of the human inven-
tion of transparent glass. What do you do then? You try to open the
window without frightening him.
1 Milosz, Czeslaw. A Theological Treatise. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spiritual-

ity, Volume 2, Number 2, Fall 2002, The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 123-
204.
The first part of the poem entitled A Young Man reads:
A young man couldnt write a treatise like this,
Though I dont think it is dictated by fear of death.
It is, simply, after many attempts, a thanksgiving.
Also, perhaps, a farewell to the decadence
Into which the language of poetry in my age has fallen.
9
WHAT IS THE STYLE OF M ATTERS OF CONCERN? F IRST L ECTURE
Can we, too, open the window and follow the poet who directs us In a nature that as bifurcated, its in vain that the nightingale
to carefully follow the behaviour of the bird? sings: the singing is entirely in our mind, or even in our brain. If we
The difficulty of becoming, in effect, the ethologist of such behav- could look directly at nature (I will come back to that way of looking
iour, of such a bird, of such poetry, of such an escape toward real- in the second lecture), it would be soundless: the throat of the night-
ity, comes, as I will argue in these two lectures, from a strange phi- ingale would simply agitate the air, the waves of which will strike our
losophy invented somewhere in the 17th century which has made it eardrums triggering some electric effects in our neurons, and some-
impossible to let reality return to our speech. where in the auditory folds of our cortex a pure invention will emerge
The diagnosis of this philosophy has been discussed by Alfred which has no correspondence whatsoever with anything of a similar
North Whitehead under the name of the bifurcation of nature: tone in nature: the song of the soundless nightingale.
I dont know if Miloszs bird, the bird to which he compared the
What I am essentially protesting against, he says, is the bifur- obstinacy of poetry and its will to escape the prison of language, was
cation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as a nightingale or not. But surely, if Whiteheads diagnosis is right, in
they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the philosophy that has been developed around a bifurcated nature,
the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative the bird will come thrashing against a transparent windowpane and
physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; there is not the slightest chance for reality to return to our speech:
although in this theory it is never known. For what is known is the world is made of primary qualities for which there is no ordi-
the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus nary language but that of science a language of pure thought that
there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other nobody in particular speaks and which utters law from nowhere; as
is the dream.2 to ordinary language, it deals with secondary qualities which have no
reality. On the one hand there is nature which is real, but is a dull
Now Whitehead was the quietest and the most urbane and polite and meaningless affair, the hurrying of material endlessly; on the
of philosophers; so when he protests you should take that as a typi- other hand there is the lived world of colours, sounds, values, mean-
cally British understatement and hear instead an ear splitting scream ing, which is a phantasmagoria of our senses but with no other exis-
of indignation! Why? Because the result is to make impossible the tence than in the circumvolution of our brain and the illusions of our
truth of poetry, as well as, as we will see later, the realism of science: mind.
In this philosophical world, how could we follow Miloszs appeal
Bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not if the poets, as Whitehead amusingly suggests, have to devise odds
belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring to themselves? Far from having the behaviour of a bird thrashing of
of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be a windowpane, poetry should rather accept its limits and habituate
reserved for ourselves; the rose for its scent; the nightingale for us to live in phantasmagoria. Instead of behaving as if they could
his song; and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely grasp reality, poets should rather help us say things like: O my tem-
mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and poral lobe how beautiful you are, and you my cochlear nucleus how
should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excel- clever you are to make me hear the nightingale, and you my olfactory
lence of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, bulbs how nice of you to invent the smell of the roses, and you my
scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, nicely moist striate cortex, how elegant of you to let me feel the splen-
meaninglessly.3 dour of a sunset when there is nothing more than the connections
between my hypothalamus and my cerebellum Exit the poets,
enter the neuroscientists.
2 Alfred North Whitehead. (1920). Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 30.
And yet Whitehead, even more forcefully than Milosz, suggests
3 Alfred North Whitehead. (1925[1967]). Science and the Modern World. New that wed better believe the poets. Even though philosophers have, for
York: Free Press, p. 72. three centuries now, tried to make us live in phantasmagoria, we, I
10 11
mean we the common sense folk, have never believed them and have Forced to impose this amazing choice, this bifurcation, is it really
never abandoned the idea of letting reality return to our speech. surprising that philosophy, the bearer of such bad news, goes from
But for this obstinate reaction, for this obdurate attempt to escape crisis to crisis and triggers in ordinary people a sort of well founded
from the prison of being registered in any way, we first have to redress suspicion? Who are those guys who give me no choice about the
the bifurcation of nature. way to live except for throwing myself either into conjecture or
I know this is difficult, so difficult indeed that it might explain into dream, that is, into meaninglessness one or meaninglessness
why the attempts of Whitehead have been so thoroughly abandoned two. And the common folk keep insisting: Why cant I say that I
by most philosophers after him. Actually he was so well aware of this hear the nightingale, that I smell the rose, and that the sunset is red
difficulty that in the preface of the Concept of Nature he warned his without, for that reason, losing the science of ethology, the chemistry
reader by saying: It is, perhaps, as well to state explicitly that if the of odours and the spectral lines of solar physics? Would it not be a
reader indulges in the facile vice of bifurcation not a word of what poor philosopher, the one who will retort to this brave and insistent
I have here written will be intelligible. I am afraid that this warn- appeal: Because you have to learn to live in phantasmagoria, make
ing applies to my two lectures as well: the difficulties do not come the best of it, forget that speech can articulate truth; reality is one
only from what I am going to say although I am ready to take my thing, meaning another; become adult at last; shut the window and
fair share of blame but also because my listeners (I am afraid that be content to look at the desolate spectacle of the dull world as it is
this is you) might have indulged in the facile vice of letting nature reflected through the fully opaque windowpane of your well sealed
bifurcate. And I would say the more philosophically literate you are, prison.
the more this vice passes for a virtue, indeed for the greatest virtue And yet the bird keeps on having the behaviour of thrashing
of thinking like a philosopher a modernist philosopher, that is against this windowpane, and the poets are proved right against the
instead of simply clinging to common sense. (If you complain that philosophers, or, rather, we have to follow those rare philosophers
you have never indulged in this vice then think for a moment whether who accept that they must follow the poets in their relentless quest
the reason might not be that you take the bifurcation so thoroughly for reality.
for granted that you have accepted working on one side of it without How can we do this? Whitehead tells us: by not letting nature
ever realizing that you have abandoned half of what is given into bifurcate, that is by not letting the primary and secondary qualities
experience). go their separate ways. The reception of Whiteheads cosmology over
Anyway, its no exaggeration to say that since the time of Galileo the last century is proof enough that this is not an easy matter. So
and Locke the inventors of the distinction between primary and how can I do my little bit to help, with my feeble resources, to make it
secondary qualities all the way up to contemporary so called cog- impossible for philosophy to deride common sense in the way I have
nitive science, a large part of what it is to be a philosopher consists just mockingly suggested?
in deriding common sense because it believes naively that the night- I want to try this impossible feat by tackling the problem via its
ingale sings, the rose has an odour, the sunset is red and that real- two opposite ends: the social first, and then the natural.
ity has never left speech. Poor folk, we seem to tell them with an Imagine the following scene: you are trying to build a bridge
amused and condescending smile, you have forgotten that no resem- over a rather tumultuous river. Lets say that one bank of this river is
blance exists between primary qualities, the dull and senseless stuff the social and the other, far away, inaccessible, separated by a vio-
out of which nature is really made and the secondary qualities with lent current, by many eddies and dangerous rapids, is the natural.
which you add a meaningless and arbitrary meaning to the sense- Now suppose that, instead of trying to cross this river and build this
less and meaningless hurrying of matter. Since the time of Locke, bridge, you decide instead to go with the flow, that is, to get involved
philosophers, in the name of what I call the first empiricism, have in a bit of canoeing, kayaking or rafting. Then the absence of a bridge
forced upon common sense a rather stark choice between two types is not such a problem. What counts is your ability to equip yourself
of meaninglessness: either the meaninglessness of senseless but real with the right paraphernalia so that you can go down the river with-
nature; or the meaninglessness of meaningful but unreal values. out drowning yourself. You might be scared to get into the turbulent
12 13
river, you might regret the task of bridge building, but you will prob- republished book Monadologie et Sociologie, a book which had a cru-
ably agree that the two riverbanks are bound to look rather different cial influence on Gilles Deleuze. I quote:
once you apprehend both of them from the point of view of such a this means that every thing is a society and that all things are
kayaking movement forward. This flowing lateral direction, turned societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical
at 90 from the obsessive question of bridge building, is, if I am not sequence of its earlier movements, tends to strangely generalize
mistaken, what William James has called pure experience. the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of
What I invite you to participate in is a little bout of kayaking, or atomic societies? not to mention societies of stars, solar systems.
rafting and also, I am afraid, a bit of drifting. My question is: what All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology.5
will happen if, instead of trying to bridge the distance between words
and worlds, we were trying to move sideways along with the various What is important for my purpose here is that Tarde is one of
elements that appear to go in the same direction? What would happen those philosophers qua scientists who goes with the flow, moves side-
to the senseless hurrying of matter called nature if we were to go in way, does not try to bridge some imaginary gap between a symbolic
the same direction? Would it be as senseless as before? What would order that of humans and the material world out there. He is out
happen to the so-called secondary qualities if they were viewed as there from the start, moving through the eddies and immersed in the
being that which allows us to grasp the other entities with which we stream of associations (its not by accident that he was the predeces-
keep moving? Would they appear as secondary, their meaning as sor of Bergson at the Collge de France since bergsonian dure has
devoid of any importance and reality as before? My intuition is rather obviously some only some of the characters of the flow I am try-
that the two riverbanks would take on an entirely different meaning ing to descend into with you tonight).
and that nature, having stopped bifurcating because of the way you When Tarde begins with societies and extends the notion to every
have let it pass, (passage of nature is another Whiteheads expres- group of agencies, this does not mean that he is naturalizing human
sion) will be now able to mingle with our speech and other behav- societies; he is too much of a reader of Darwin to indulge in any social
iours in many more interesting connections. This is, at least, the way Darwinism and this for a reason that goes already at the heart of our
I would advertise the kayak trip before you embark on it its for you question: social Darwinism is impossible because organisms are
to tell me at the end if I have committed the sin of false publicity... already societies and highly complex ones. Here we begin to see the
advantage of kayaking over bridging: naturalisation is what happens
So tonight I will start from one bank, the social one and, in the when you try to transport, to transfer the senseless hurrying of mat-
next lecture, I will start from the other. The social sciences too have ter from the nature bank to the social or human side. That is when
their Whitehead: his name is Gabriel Tarde, he lived at the end of you treat the human with the strange notion of primary qualities
the 19th century, was first a judge, then a criminologist and then the handed down to you by the already bifurcated nature. It is because of
most famous sociologist in France.4 However his refoundation of this treatment that humanists of all hues and colours, recoil in hor-
French sociology has been even more thoroughly buried than White- ror, and rightly so. They clearly see the imposture of treating humans
heads renovation of speculative philosophy. What is of interest for as objects but what they dont realize is that it is also an imposture
me, in this first lecture, is that Tarde, an attentive reader of Darwin to treat objects as objects, that is to reduce the maintaining in exis-
and Marx among countless others makes no attempt, at any point tence of organisms to the dull hurrying of nature. (More of this in
in his sociology to distinguish human from natural societies nor the next lecture). What is important to remember is that bifurcation
does he make, and this is of course important for me, any distinc- is unfair to both sides: to the human and social side as well as to the
tion between social sciences and philosophy as is clear in his recently
4 Bruno Latour. (2002). Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social, in Patrick Joyce 5 Gabriel Tarde. (1895/1999). Monadologie et sociologie, [Monadology and soci-
(edited by) The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. ology]. Paris: Les empcheurs de penser en rond, [Barriers to circular thinking],
London: Routledge. p. 58.
14 15
non-human or natural side a point always missed by phenomenol- new properties in the renewed sense Tarde gives to this tired little
ogists. word. In an amazing feat of sociological metaphysics, Tarde proposes
For now the question is as follows: how do things look when you replacing being by having:
begin to move sideways and go with the flow? You quickly realize that
all societies share some common features: they are never faced with So far, all of philosophy has been founded on the verb To be,
the rather absurd choice of hurrying forward without any sense or of whose definition seemed to have been the Rosettas stone to
adding meaning without reality only the bridge makers are faced be discovered. One may say that, if only philosophy had been
with this choice. No, they have another entirely different set of deci- founded on the verb To have, many sterile discussions, many
sions to make: they have to repeat themselves in existence, to oppose slowdowns of the mind, would have been avoided. From this
one another in order to proceed forward, or to adapt to one another principle I am, it is impossible to deduce any other existence
by differing from one another no matter how slightly. Repetition, than mine, in spite of all the subtleties of the world. But affirm
opposition and adaptation are the three social laws that are first this postulate: I have as the basic fact, and then the had as
common, according to Tarde, to everything that moves forward in well as the having are given at the same time as inseparable.6
the same direction and that he calls societies.
But remember that society is not a word specifying in advance See the change of perspective? A philosopher can write lEtre et
the type of associations as if human societies were different from le Nant, Being and Nothingness, but there is no sense in writing
plant, plankton, stellar or atomic societies only that its necessary Having and Nothingness.
to associate with others in order to remain in existence. Contrary to So what does the front line of this current, this stream forward,
the classical conatus, which is the persistence of being through sub- look like now? Its made up of what could be called betting organ-
stance, Tarde defines conatus as the persistence through difference. isms having differences among themselves, provided you accept the
Any society has to buy, if I may say that, its continuation in exis- use of the word organism as a synonym of societies, that is, provided
tence through the exploration of new types or new degrees of differ- you extend the difficulty of being to all organisms, to the so-called
ence. Exister cest diffrer, such is Tardes redefinition of conatus. material, biological ones as well as the so-called social ones. Those
betting organisms have trajectories which define what they have been
To exist is to differ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial and what they might become if they manage to persist by exploring
side of things, what they have most in common and what makes enough differences. Sociology (conceived by Tarde as a really general
them most different. One has to start from this difference and science) becomes the documentation of those trajectories, or those
to abstain from trying to explain it, especially by starting with networks, to use my own expression, what is transported, sent, car-
identity, as so many persons wrongly do. Because identity is a ried over, enunciated, from one moment to the next, from one site to
minimum and, hence, a type of difference, and a very rare type the next, from one actant to the next. Tarde is still known, at least in
at that, in the same way as rest is a type of movement and the the United States, for having studied one of these trajectories quite
circle a type of ellipse.6 thoroughly: imitation. But I wont deal with this now.
I hope you realize already, I will come back to this in a minute,
To persist in being, you cannot count on a substance, a substrate that the relations of a nightingale, the potential mates of the night-
behind your properties or qualities that would allow you to subsist
indefinitely per inertia so to speak. Substance has become subsis-
tence not substrate.7 On the contrary, you have to persist by having This is at the heart of what I call tre en tant quautre (being qua other) and not
tre en tant qutre (being qua being): The point is that the enduring organisms
are now the outcome of evolution; and that, beyond these organisms, there is
6 Gabriel Tarde. (1895/1999). Monadologie et sociologie [Monadology and sociol- nothing else that endures. On the materialistic theory, there is material such
ogy], p. 73. as matter or electricity which endures. On the organic theory, the only endur-
7 Alfred North Whitehead. (1925[1967]). Science and the Modern World. p. 134. ances are structure of activity, and the structures are evolved.
16 17
ingale, the poet, the common listener and, lets add it now, the bird small numbers we have a much more intimate knowledge of human
ethologist with her recording equipment, will be rather different if societies than we have of other non-human societies viewed from the
they are all seen as moving forward, as so many betting organisms, outside and so to speak in bulk, or statistically. I quote:
each of them entering into relations in order to have enough differ-
ences to prolong their existence a bit longer. This shift in the orienta- It means that we experience the sensation of a sentient thing,
tion of philosophy, no matter how small, might offer a better chance the volition of a conating thing, and the belief in a believing
for the bird to escape from the room inside which, since the begin- thing, the perception, in short, of a personality in which the
ning of this lecture, he has been doing nothing, according to Milosz, perceiving personality is reflected, and which the latter cannot
but thrashing helplessly against the transparent windowpane. deny without denying itself. ibid pp. 19-20
You will have also noticed I am sure, that this type of relations,
what Tarde calls societies, are impossible to detect for those who Everywhere else, we might believe that there is some super struc-
are carrying on the bridge building engineering feat and theres ture holding things in place: a sort of Body Politik, at least a whole
no question about that: its a feat. This is the sort of change between that is more than the sum of its part. But not for human societies,
incompatible viewpoints that relativity theory has rendered famil- viewed from inside: we know for certain that, in this case, the sum
iar to us with its little anecdotes of a falling body viewed from an is always less than the tiniest of its part. To summarize Tardes argu-
embankment and the same falling body viewed from the inside of a ment: when a society is seen from far away and in bulk it seems to
train carriage. Except here the different accounts are irreconcilable: have structural features, that is a set of characteristics that floats
from the bridge nothing is seen except the passage of a violent stream beyond, or beneath the multiplicity of its members. But when a soci-
which has to be deflected by the throwing of sturdy pillars. The only ety is seen from the inside, its made up of differences and of events
question for the bridge engineers is to decide whether or not with a and all its structural features are provisional amplifications and sim-
word I can reach a reference out there, on the other bank, in the plifications of those linkages. Dont immediately rule out Tarde as a
world. The grave question is to know if one can escape the constraints French madman and dont rule me out as even madder for resus-
of one social and linguistic limitation in order to jump to the other citating such an odd way of considering the social sciences. (Tarde,
bank through this salto mortale to use James mocking expression. for many years, directed a statistical institute and wished for noth-
This relation, the bridge one, is a zero sum game: either you are on ing more than finding the right quantum for a sturdy science of the
one bank or you are on the other: the more you remain close to lan- social.) 8
guage, the further away you are from reference; the further away To render his argument less strange, look at the consequences it
you are from the nature bank, the freer you have become from the has for social theory. Structures, social structure especially, are just
limitations of language. But along the flow, many other connections the illusion one has to escape to establish a solid sociology:
may become possible. This is at least what I am exploring with you.
Before we consider some of those intriguing possibilities the only This conception is, in fact, almost the exact opposite of ()
way, in my view, to let reality return to our speech as Milosz said Monsieur Durkheims. Instead of explaining everything by the
we have to consider two more crucial inventions made by Tarde in his supposed supremacy of a law of evolution, which compels collec-
efforts to redefine sociology. The first is that there is, in fact, a differ- tive phenomena to reproduce and repeat themselves indefinitely
ence between human and non-human societies. But this is not what in a certain order, instead of thus explaining lesser facts by
you might think; its a difference of numbers not of kinds; paradox- greater, and the part by the whole, I explain collective resem-
ically, non-human societies are much more numerous than human blances of the whole by the massing together of minute elemen-
societies. There are only nine billion humans but the smallest stone, tary acts the greater by the lesser and the whole by the part.
the tiniest brain, the humblest table has many orders of magnitude,
more atoms, neurons or molecules than the largest human society 8 Bruno Latour. (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Net-
which for Tarde, as it is still for us actually, was China! Because of its work Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
18 19
This way of regarding phenomena is destined to work a transfor- Whats the problem with structure? Whats the link between this
mation in sociology similar to that brought about in mathemat- topos or rather clich of social theory namely the micro/macro dis-
ics by the introduction of the infinitesimal calculus.9 tinction got to do with our question? Because the link between a
structure and some event is what happens to the bridge builders and
Yes, I know, Tarde was not as lucky as Leibniz: his monadology did not to the practitioners of kayaking... For the bridge builders, events
not transform sociology as much as the infinitesimal calculus trans- are always lacking something, namely the law of their development
formed mathematics. But history is still young and if nature stops which is always supposed to be somewhere else, and this somewhere is
bifurcating, Tardes innovation might still come true. either a Platonic idea or a thought, or a projection, or some law dic-
The reason why it is so important for me to make structural fea- tating its pronouncements from nowhere. In the same way as in per-
tures a local consequence of looking at societies in bulk and from ception where the mind has to do the work of adding secondary qual-
the outside, is that its one of the main reasons why philosophy lets ities to meaningless primary qualities in order to obtain something
nature bifurcate: on the one hand you have the pulverization of small that makes sense, in social sciences and in science generally the
elements atoms, humans, situations, acts of language and on the structure is needed to make the elements have a connection that has
other hand you have laws of transformation to which those small ele- been withdrawn first by the divide between agencies:
ments should conform but to which they contribute no part what-
soever. It is permissible to explain events by appealing to other sets This attempt to confine social facts within lines of development
of connections, not to provide the explanations through their own which would compel them to repeat themselves en masse with
connections with one another and, so to speak, laterally. The case of merely insignificant variations, has hitherto been the chief pitfall
social theory is only one place where the danger of structural expla- of sociology, and that, whether under the more rigid form con-
nation is seen by Tarde as a philosophical imposture: ceived by Hegel, consisting of successions of triads, or under the
more exact and scientific form that it has since received at the
The evolutionists of his school [he has Spencer in mind], in hands of the modern evolutionists. () It remained to be dis-
thus formulating the laws of linguistic, religious, economic, covered later that these supposed rules are honeycombed with
political, moral, and aesthetic development, understand, at least exceptions, and that evolution, whether linguistic, legal, reli-
implicitly, that these laws are capable of governing, not merely gious, political, economic, artistic, or moral, is not a single road,
the single succession of peoples whose privilege it is to be called but a network of routes with many intersecting cross-ways. ibid
historic, but equally well all peoples that have existed or are to p. 18
exist in future. But still, in a multitude of forms, though on a
smaller scale, the same error always comes to light, namely, the You might be worried that by going into social theory with Tarde
error of believing that, in order to see a gradual dawn of reg- I have been forgetting our imprisoned nightingale. I hope you under-
ularity, order, and logic in social phenomena, we must go out- stand that I have not left it for a single minute: in the primary/sec-
side of the details, which are essentially irregular, and rise high ondary qualities scenography I will explain this term in the second
enough to obtain a panoramic view of the general effect; that lecture the only problem that the bridge builders could solve was
the source and foundation of every social coordination is some the one of knowing whether or not our sense perceptions were right
general fact from which it descends gradually to particular facts, or misleading or a little bit of both. But in the second scenography,
though always diminishing in strength; in short, that man acts, the one I associate with the art of kayaking, rafting and yes drift-
but a law of evolution guides him. ibid p. 75 ing too the situation is already entirely different: the nightingale is
a society a society of societies actually10 but so is the listener of
9 Gabriel Tarde. (2000 [1899]). Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Translated 10 Didier Debaise. (2006). Un empirisme spculatif. Lecture de Procs et Ralit.
by Howard C. Warren. Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche Books, p. 35. [A speculative empiricism. Lecture in Process and Reality.] Paris: Vrin.
20 21
its song for instance the poet and so is the potential mate of the of the new differences necessary for them to persist in their being
nightingale; and so, as I said, is the ethologist recording the songs or rather in their having. Wouldnt that begin to bring some real-
and trying to make sense of the present crisis nightingales are going ity back to our speech?
through (more on this in a minute). The first scenography (on the All the more so, if we could do for science for instance bird ethol-
bridge) forces us to be interested in the rather impossible question ogy, the physiology of bird songs, the acoustics of evolution and so on
of the song an sich; in the second you might become aware of the the same relocalization as I just did with the poets metaphors. I told
relations of all those various societies or organisms inter se, to use you at the beginning: lets follow the poets in their quest for reality,
Whitehead again. The shift from German to Latin is quite consider- lets believe the poet who tells us that nature has not bifurcated, more
able. The nightingale bets that it can do something with his song, but than the first empiricist who tells us that, of course, it did. Is there a
so does the poet and so does his mate, and so does the ethologist. Rela- way to locate the power of the sciences in extracting new correspon-
tions established between betting and risking organisms repetition, dence from the nightingale in a way that does not force us to gen-
opposition and variation are not the same as those between words erate the phantasmagoria of primary and secondary qualities? And
(in the plural) and the world (in the singular). New connections are here I want to stress the second of Tardes innovations which is very
possible inter se that were impossible, absurd, or simply had no important for me as a science student: the sciences (in the plural) are
room, in the narrow path and along the only movement allowed on adding differences of equipment and attention to the world; they are
the bridge. To use one of my terms, the various organisms that all go not what allows us to jump to the other side of the bank smack in the
forward may be articulated in ways infinitely more varied and sur- middle of the primary qualities which are real but unknown if
prising than what was available to them when a human mind was you remember Whiteheads quote.
trying to look through the transparent windowpane: in the next For Tarde and this is what sets him apart from all other social
lecture I will propose a genealogy for this pane which I will extract in scientists you should let the sciences go with the flow as well:
part from art history, and particularly from painting.
What are the advantages of going with the flow then? As regards the structure of science, probably the most impos-
Because the first must be first let us look at poetry. Its now per- ing of human edifices, there is no possible question. It was built
fectly possible that Milosz could strike a correspondence with some- in the full light of history, and we can follow its development
thing of the nightingale through the clever use of his unmatched almost from the very outset down to our own day. Our sciences
poetry. Do you begin to see the differences between the two scenog- began as a scattered and disconnected collection of small dis-
raphies, between the engineering feat of the bridge-builders and what coveries, which were afterward grouped into little theories (each
the canoeing people see? For a bridge builder, the poet either bridges group being itself a discovery); and the latter were welded, later,
the gap or else he just lives in a phantasmagoria and his metaphor into broader theories, to be confirmed or amended by a host
has no reference except in his imagination: what doesnt clearly lead of other discoveries, and finally bound firmly together by the
toward the outside should be placed firmly inside the mind. Not so arches of hypotheses built over them by the spirit of unification:
in the second scenography: the metaphor and what is a metaphor this manner of progress is indisputable. There is no law or sci-
if not an attempt to drift forward with the rest of the world and get entific theory (any more than there is a system of philosophy)
entangled with it in surprising ways might find itself enmeshed that does not bear its authors name still legibly written. Every-
in some surprisingly accurate ways with the nightingale life trajec- thing here originates in the individual; not only the materials,
tory. In other words the poets metaphor could begin to correspond but the general design of the whole, and the detailed sketches
to the nightingales own experience in betting on life. Yes, finally, a as well; everything, including what is now diffused among all
correspondence theory of truth, but where correspondence takes on an cultured minds, and taught even in the primary school, began
entirely different meaning from that which is acceptable to the bridge as the secret of some single mind, whence a little flame, faint
builders: the poets metaphorical drift and the nightingales drift and flickering, sent forth its rays, at first only within a narrow
might co-respond to one another, that is, involve one another in some compass, and even there encountering many obstructions, but,
22 23
growing brighter as it spread further, it at length became a bril- For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We
liant illumination. pp. 85-86 may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset
should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and elec-
Science is adding itself to the world. For the bridge builders this tric waves by which men of science would explain the phenom-
addition is impossible without having to be faced with the following enon. (29) ()For example, the fire is burning and we see a
choice: either you have to forget the networks of individuals, the wel- red coal. This is explained in science by radiant energy from
ter of equipment, the pullulations of occasions that make it possible, the coal entering our eyes.() The real question is, When red is
or else you have to deny its truth value and turn it into an illusion, found in nature, what else is found there also? Namely we are ask-
at least a social construction or, slightly better, a useful convention. ing for an analysis of the accompaniments in nature of the dis-
No wonder: the only movement allowed on the bridge is toward the covery of red in nature. p. 41
world or away from it. The only game is a zero sum game. But if the
sciences can be added to the flow of experience as yet another way to Notice Whiteheads repetition: in nature of the discovery of red
fold oneself inside it, to let organisms correspond to one another on, in nature. Not in our mind. No bridge building here, no two banks,
so to speak, another wavelength, then you could finally obviate the no salto mortale, no reconciliation, no dialectic, no clever interme-
primary/secondary quality divide, you could, in other words retain diary solution: So far as reality is concerned all our sense-percep-
the reality of the scientific grasp without its fanciful epistemology: tions are in the same boat, and must be treated on the same principle.
nature would have stopped bifurcating. (p. 44). The attempt of science studies, of sociology in Tardes sense
Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosopher of science and one of is to look at those accompaniments in order to detect what else is
Whiteheads greatest commentators, has been trying to pinpoint the found also. How many other things are accompanying, flowing with
exact point of inflexion when the fabulous invention of the sciences the flow, when we try to be attentive to new features of what is also
which are adding to what is given in experience, are suddenly turned given in experience? Answering those questions would allow us to
into a way of disqualifying this experience. When do science studies find an exit for Miloszs bird and to respect the truth telling of poetry
turn into epistemology? When, in other words, does the nightingale and the veridiction of the sciences without, for this reason, confusing
ethologist who is recording the song as a wave, begin to claim that them with one another.
this wave allows her to deduct the song you hear from the total sum I will bring this lecture to an end by alluding to a third way in
of experience?11 which connections can be made if we go with the flow, that are
James defined radical empiricism, what I prefer to call second impossible if we stay on the bridge: the nightingale specialists some
empiricism, as a way not to choose: we dont want more than what of them like Marc Naguib and Valentin Amrhein have written hun-
is given in experience, he said, but we certainly dont want less either. dreds of articles12 tell us that the songs of the males have been dra-
This is the question that kayakers keep wondering about the bridge matically altered in recent times because of the noise of traffic they
builders: Why is it that instead of giving us more, the sciences have have to raise their voices and because of the fragmentation of their
been kidnapped into the rather dirty business of giving us less. Here forest habitat they have to sing at a higher and higher pitch and for
is Whiteheads plea again from Concept of Nature: longer and longer to be listened to and to find a mate. The result is
that their voice (like that of a tired lecturer!) becomes hoarse and
they exhaust themselves in singing, so much so that they might, in
the end, be incapable of fulfilling their marital duty even if they have
11 Isabelle Stengers (1994) Leffet Whitehead. [The Whitehead Effect.] Paris: Vrin; ended up finding a mate Now, where would you lodge this type of
(2000) The Invention of Modern Science (translated by Daniel W. Smith). The Uni- relation or rather interferences inside the scenography of the bridge
versity of Minnesota Press; (2002) Penser avec Whitehead : Une libre et sauvage
cration de concepts. Paris: Gallimard (and see in English Bruno Latour (2005)
What is Given in Experience? A Review of Isabelle Stengers Penser avec White-
head. Boundary 2. pp. 222-237). 12 http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/biologie/vhf/NG/Naguib_Publications.htm
24 25
WHAT IS THE STYLE OF M ATTERS OF CONCERN?
building? It would be at best interesting but immaterial to the knowl- S PINOZA L ECTUR E II
edge activity, or at least on an entirely different plane from the word/
world referential business. And yet, who could deny that those sorts
of relations, of interferences, of intermingling have become so cru-
cial in recent years that the very existence of one of the terms, namely
the nightingale, could be interrupted? The nightmare of idealism was
that when the mind was shut off, the world itself vanished. Idealism
has now come true: human minds might be able to shut the night- T HE A ESTHETICS OF
ingale song out of existence altogether. Surely you would agree that
there should be a philosophy that allows ecological relations to be
added to those of science creation and to the grasp of poetry. M ATTERS OF C ONCERN
I hope I have shown why we dont know to live in the phantasma-
goria of divided experience, having to choose between meaning with-
out reality and reality without meaning. Organisms and societies, in
other words, might not have the luxury of being disciples of Kant:
they might have no time to add secondary qualities on top of primary
ones in order to fumble for a synthesis, especially if such a synthesis
is impossible. To the inevitable an sich they might prefer the connec-
tions inter se.
26
S ECOND L ECTURE
An active school of philosophy is quite as important for the

locomotions of ideas, as an active school of railway engineers
is for the locomotion of fuel
Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
Adrian Walker is posing for the great photographer Jeff Wall.13 A

mummified limb is also posing, detached rather unwillingly from the
rest of a body once alive, its shapes and shadows brightly contrasted
on a greenish-blue table-cloth. The artist is pondering how to com-
plete his drawing whose shape and shadows are clearly detached on
the large white brightly lit drawing paper the greenish-blue table-
cloth and the white paper being of almost the same size. No doubt
that the artist, Adrian Walker, is also pondering what it means to be
a model for a fastidious photographer like Jeff Wall. After all, what
he is attempting with the limb, Wall is trying to do to him, that is, to
capture the whole site through the highly elaborated and carefully
staged pellicle of his analogue photographic machinery, much like
Walker himself has been trying for some time now, to have the limb
jump from out of the greenish-blue cloth to the white paper (and
surely it takes as much time to draw so delicately as it does to take
photographs in such a carefully staged manner).
Walker is absorbed in his task, so much so that the art historian,
Michael Fried, in commenting on this image, considers it as a very
contemporary example of what he calls absorption by its opposition,
13 Theodora Visher and Heidi Naef (2005) Jeff Wall: Catalogue raisonn. [Cata-
logue of all works] 1978-2004. Ble: Schaulager.
29
WHAT IS THE STYLE OF M ATTERS OF CONCERN? S ECOND L ECTURE
to use his terms borrowed from Diderot, to theatrical art, and to art the picture as a model of a situation you want to study critically.
which is turned explicitly toward the spectator.14 So while this scene As a model of a way of knowing in science. I can comment only
has been staged, it is a picture of total, almost maddening absorption, on one or two points. I understand that the situation I depicted
both for Walker drawing his limb, and for Jeff Wall photographing can be considered an implausible model of scientific knowl-
his Walker pondering over his limb. And I dont doubt that your edge and of the relation between the world and the mind. But
response will be the same as Frieds or mine: total absorption in the it is an actual depiction of Adrian Walkers relation to his draw-
total strangeness of this scene. What is happening here? ing work and his art in general. It is really a documentary pho-
You will surely have noticed the plastic containers and the white tograph of his corner of the anatomy lab where he worked for
tiling, so white and so reflective as if the northern light, so impor- some months. I didnt invent anything in this situation, I just
tant for art history, had almost overexposed the whole print. We are recorded it with Adrians collaboration. He didnt do anything
not in an artists studio but, as the full title of the work clearly says: different either, just sat still for a few minutes for a few days. I
(I quote) Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing From a Specimen in a Labora- specify this because your lecture gives me the impression you
tory in the Dept. of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Van- think the picture was done starting from an idea or subject I had
couver (1992). This is an instance of Laboratory Life, the white light in mind, and then stage it. Thats not what happened. I think
of the Enlightenment floods over the skills of the draughtsman in one it is also a completely plausible and authentic depiction of any
of the rare remaining disciplines, namely anatomy, where drawing instance of drawing something visible. I could have made a pic-
remains superior in scientific precision to photographs and the direct ture of Adrian drawing something else if it had come up at the
impressions produced by automated techniques. To this day, compe- time, but he was in fact drawing from specimens in the lab. He
tent artists are still necessary to make a limb jump from the table- wasnt purporting to do science, just to be working on his figure
cloth to the paper. And this mysterious jump, or rather this abysmal drawing in a rather conventional way (even if almost nobody
gap between the model and its copy, might be what has suspended does it any more). I dont think it is really accurate to say that
Adrian Walkers gaze and made him hold his chin in a posture just as Adrian is a self-absorbed artist acting as a scientist. I think its
absorbed as that of Rodins Thinker: and indeed, for an artist as well better to say he is an artist doing something artists have done
as for a scientist or for any combination of the two , what is more for a long time, and which depends, to a certain extent, on the
mysterious than this gap between a copy and a model? So mysterious opportunities made available by science and medicine. I say to
that Jeff Wall, the second in line, has accepted running the risk that a certain extent because drawing from specimens is only a sin-
his whole canvass, I mean his print, is devoured by such an obses- gle aspect of drawing, not absolutely essential. My picture is just
sively bright light. a specific instance of drawing, distinguished only by its subject,
And yet we, who are third in line in this chain of contaminating not by anything else much. He could be drawing a vase of flow-
absorption, should resist this bright light which is blinding us to the ers.
utter implausibility of such a staged situation. What is fascinating in I think its the picture that indicates, or hints at, what makes
this print is that a contemporary artist, Jeff Wall, gives us in one shot Adrian want to draw the specimen. The specimen cant reveal
the history of three centuries of a very peculiar aesthetics, at the very that, no subject of a depiction can. What reveals it is the feeling
moment when it has so thoroughly disappeared. Or this is, at least, in the picture, the feeling that drawing is something one loves
how I wish to interpret this photograph tonight with you. and needs to do, in order to make depictions properly. I like to
think my picture is made properly too. And that, if it is beauti-
I have since benefited from Walls comments: I cant say too ful and gives pleasure, then that pleasure suggests the pleasure
much about your interpretation. I see that you are looking at of all depictions, Adrians included. So, to me, its not so much a
cognitive model, but a depiction of the love of depiction. (With
14 Michael Fried (1988) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the permission from an email).
Age of Diderot. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
30 31
I want to say that this print summarizes the whole aesthetics of self-destruct in the most suspended, self-absorbed meditation, in the
matters of fact as it has emerged around the 16th century in a close brightest self disappearing light. In the white space, it is the notion of
and complex association between artists, scientists, theologians and matters of fact, indeed it is its whole aesthetic that is being suspended
their various patrons. One could object at this point: how could mat- and that is fading away.
ters of fact depend on any sort of aesthetic? Matters of fact are mat- Still, one could object and say that this scene, because it takes
ters of fact and if there is something that escapes any staging, any place in a laboratory, reveals the normal, mundane ways in which
artificial trick, any mediation it is exactly that: a God-dammit solid objectivity is produced. Although it might seem extravagant in terms
matter of fact beyond any human intention: It is there whether you of daily experience, because, apart from butchers and cannibals, no
like it or not! (And here it would do a lot of good to bang the lectern one meets detached limbs this way, there is nothing strange in having
with a gesture of a fist15). But the splendid beauty not to say the sub- scientists face an object that they try to make jump from a 3-D mate-
tle irony of Jeff Walls print tells the exactly opposite story: there is rial reality into a 2-D shape on a piece of paper. This is not what ordi-
nothing more amazingly artificial, more carefully staged, more his- nary people do, but it is for sure what anatomists do.
torically coded than meeting a matter of fact face to face.
Look at the picture again: you can say everything you want to I am sorry to say that this is far from
about this scene but not that it is a summary of common sense expe- the case, and here I have some experi-
rience! Where on earth would you meet a mummified limb on a table- ence in studying laboratory practice.
cloth? Is this the way you recognize your own limb, or caress the Look for instance at Dr. Marylin Perrin,
arm of your lover, or indeed encounter the fist of the realist who is at Salk in 2002: she is not seated, she is
trying to punch you in the nose with hard facts much like Thomas not taking the pose of Rodins Thinker,
Gradgrind in Dickenss Hard Times? Of course not. When is it the but rather the active pragmatic pose of
case that you find yourself seated, quietly facing such a matter of fact? the Tinkerer: she is standing up, actively
Even cannibals, if there still are any, would not remain seated like engaged in pipetting, shaking reagents,
that in front of such an appetizing delicacy. Most of our experience and if there is one thing she cannot do it
is not obtained that way: instead we run with a pack of simultaneous is to make the receptor of CRF, to which
events running parallel to us. And tell me, if, by the most extraor- she has devoted fifteen years of her life,
dinary contrivance, you were asked to be seated face to face with a jump in one salto mortale from the
piece of dead body, when would you be requested in addition, not world to the word but instead, as it is
to touch it, not to hold it with your own hand, not to vomit on it out the case for all chains of reference, she is anxiously following its suc-
of disgust much like Roquentin, but instead to draw it from a dis- cessive reincarnation through a bewildering number of steps of which
tance of about 40 centimetres, as if you wanted, through a feat of an my own shots not as clever as Jeff Wall, I grant you that have
even more extravagant anatomy, to detach its drawable shape from its extracted only a tiny few.16 If you had to follow objectivity-making
undrawable material composition? practice, you would have to use a very long videotape in which many
Everything in this scene is implausible, contrived, in such a face different actors would also appear. So, in no way, can the aesthetic
to face situation of a human mind pondering over the yawning gap of matters of fact pass for a description of what it is that scientists do.
of an object that he wants nonetheless to transport by building an Look here, for instance, at the assembly made of brain scientists in
impossible bridge between the greenish-blue table-cloth and the San Diego: 25,000 posters side by side in a huge hall?17 Where would
white rectangular paper. No surprise that Adrian Walker has been
asked by Jeff Wall to hold his chin in his hand and let his attention
16 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. (1979, 1986). Laboratory Life. The Construc-
tion of Scientific Facts (second edition with a new postword). Princeton: Princ-
15 Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter. (1994). The Bottom eton University Press.
Line: the Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations. Configurations. pp. 1-14. 17 See the picture in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (edited by) (2005) Making
32 33
you put this immense crowd, necessary to make sense of the brain, in lowed the rotting flesh of the limb; or, if using Peter Sloterdijks type
the Hamletian soliloquy of mind pondering over matter? of interest, we had become suddenly sensitive to the tiny bubble inside
Is it not extraordinary then that the primeval scene of matters of which this whole scene takes place: what sort of envelops Sloterdijks
fact remains the total absorption of one mind facing a piece of dead expression have to be in place for Walker to work in peace, without
material, when such a stage cannot pay justice even to the making of any noise, disturbance, agitation?18 What is the strange air-condition
objects so dear to epistemologists, namely scientific facts? How can another of his concepts for the very scene to unfold? If we had
we explain that we take matters of fact to be the anhistorical ingredi- shifted our attention in any of those ways, no doubt suddenly, The
ents of the world, when they are visible only in highly artificial sites, Gigantic Gap between The World Out There and the Mind In there
where you need a seated human usually a middle-aged male , gaz- would have vanished because another entirely different topology of
ing (not touching, not hearing, not manipulating); at something that inside and outside would have appeared: this time the one between
is of middle size, brightly lit, highly contrasted; something which, the Vancouver Department of Anatomy and the rest of the Univer-
in addition, is situated at about average height (not much higher or sity: a tiny bubble of objects and subjects mixed up within a fragile
lower than the horizon line); standing never much farther away than foam of other tiny bubbles whose presence is deduced from the pic-
a distance of about a metre; a strange situation in which both the ture but who remain nonetheless wholly invisible.
man and the object are engaged in the amazing feat of crossing the No doubt that if we were practicing such a series of operations, we
bridge, without any visible intermediaries, between only two elements, would consider Jeff Walls print as a freeze frame of a highly mobile
I insist on this, the copy and the model, which are themselves related and quickly changing film presenting us with an entirely different
mimetically: the copy has to resemble the model, and ideally to be story, much like Svetlana Alpers did, when in her masterpiece the Art
super-imposable onto it? Nowhere, in any laboratory that we know, of Describing, she forced the amateurs of still lives and Dutch paint-
has any objective fact ever been produced that way, and yet this is the ings to replace their fascinated gaze over so-called objective and
model for all our relations to matters of fact: the limb is on the blue mimetic style by an inquiry into the whole Dutch Republic Empire.19
table-cloth; the cat is on the mat; The facts are there, God-dammit, No doubt, matters of fact are the result of a specific style, they do not
whether you like it or not. stand for reason, they do not stand even for empiricism, if by this
label we mean what is given in experience. And they certainly do not
In the last lecture, I tried to contrast two ways of rendering what stand for the sciences, as if those had nothing else to do but to bridge
is given in experience. I used the metaphor of riverbanks, one of the the gap between words and world.
sides being the word or the social, or the mind while on the other What I will argue tonight is that the other mystery to ponder, the
side lay the world or the material, or the natural. One enterprise one to make us seize our chin in our hand and imitate Rodins pose
consisted in trying to bridge the river by achieving the feat of accu- for a very long time, is not how we can convince the world to jump
rate reference. But there was another enterprise, as I showed, that con- into representation, (or a human limb to somersault onto a piece of
sisted of going with the flow and considering what sort of grasp we paper much like a lion through a circle of fire) but how come we have,
have of experience when, drifting sideways, we practice a bit of what for three centuries, discounted what is given to us through experience
I called kayaking I proposed that we consider that the mystery and replaced it instead with something never experienced that philos-
of bridging the gap this abyss that makes Adrian Walker ponder in ophers have nonetheless the nerve to call empirical and matters of
such a self-absorbed way is not as deep and revealing as the experi- factual. Now, this is quite a feat! As I said earlier, using Alfred North
ence of going with the flow: this is what would happen for instance if
Jeff Wall had tried to capture the movements, the duration in which
those organisms are by necessity involved; for instance if he had fol- 18 Peter Sloterdijk. (2005). Foreword to the Theory of Spheres. in Melik Oha-
nian and Jean Christophe Royoux, (edited by) Cosmograms. New York: Lukas and
Sternberg.
19 Svetlana Alpers. (1983). The Art of Describing. Chicago: University of Chicago
Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Press.
34 35
Whiteheads marvellous expression: how did we manage to behave on the other hand, had to solve the hopeless problem of deriv-
as if Nature had bifurcated into primary qualities which, if you ing psychic from physical phenomena. It is not surprising that
remember, are real, material, without value and goals and only known their ways began to diverge, that the natural sciences began to
through totally unknown conduits and secondary qualities which follow a course of their own without bothering too much about
are nothing but psychic additions projected by the human mind the philosophical legitimacy of what they were doing, and that
onto a meaningless world of pure matter and which have no exter- philosophy proved less and less capable of fulfilling, with regard
nal reality although they carry goals and values. How did we succeed to the study of nature, the leading role it ought to have played in
in having the whole of philosophy reduced to a choice between two an ideal co-operation of the mental faculties. ibid
meaninglessnesses: the real but meaningless matter and the mean-
ingful but unreal symbol? So, no matter how futile this distinction has been, philosophy
This situation, which was fully developed in the 17th century, has until now has been trying to solve the hopeless problem of bridging
been well summarized by your great historian of science whose name a non-existent gap. The question before us tonight is to see whether
unfortunately a French mouth cannot pronounce, Dijksterhuis: or not we can exert the rights of reason all the way that is along
the flow of experience , abandon this hopeless task, and lead our
The distinction in question may be defined as an objective treat- mental faculties along a more promising path. Can we end the bifur-
ment of the primary qualities and a subjective treatment of the cation of nature and pay our respects to experience without having to
secondary qualities, i.e. the former are considered as objectively discount it on behalf of a totally artificial and implausible feeling that
present, independent of the perceiving subject, in the physical passes for common sense? This is how Whitehead puts the problem
body perceived, and the latter as only existing in the conscious- in Modes of Thought about President Roosevelts (second) inaugura-
ness of the perceiving person.() The fact that the primary tion in 1937:
qualities (size, shape, motion) are, after all, presented to us only
through sense perception, so that the very distinction is really My aim in these lectures is briefly to point out how both New-
futile was realized very seldom. The feeling that in mathematics tons contribution and Humes contribution are, each in their
and mechanics it was possible to arrive, apparently without any way, gravely defective. They are right as far as they go. But they
recourse to sense-experience and yet with a sense of being sup- omit those aspects of the universe as experienced, and of our
ported by sufficient evidence, at an extensive knowledge of the modes of experiencing, which jointly lead to the more penetrat-
geometrico-mechanical qualities, inevitably gave these sciences ing ways of understanding. In the recent situations at Washing-
a place apart .20 ton DC the Hume-Newton modes of thought can only discern
a complex transition of sensa, and an entangled locomotion of
And then he adds: molecules, while the deepest intuition of the whole world discerns
the President of the United States inaugurating a new chapter in
While for science the mechanistic conception was stimulat- the history of mankind. In such ways the Hume-Newton inter-
ing and productive, it confronted philosophy with the difficult pretation omits our intuitive modes of understanding.21
problem of the real relation between the world of our percep-
tions and feelings and the world of the mechanical process out- Violence is committed to common sense when we are asked to
side, which is so entirely different in character. The natural sci- omit from our understanding that an important event has been
ences were faced with the difficult but promising task of devising happening and we are requested to accept as scientific a gaze from
mechanical systems to account for physical facts; philosophy, nowhere: you are mistaken, nothing has happened, only molecules
20 E.J. Dijksterhuis. (1961). The Mechanization of the World Picture Pythagoras to 21 Alfred Whitehead. (1938). Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press, pp.
Newton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 241. 135-136.
36 37
agitation. This is exactly the same violence, to use my last lectures matters of fact and matters of concern a banal expression in English
example, as when we are asked to consider that the nightingale that I wish to render more technical.22 A matter of concern is what
sings only in our mind (or our brain) and not in the world out there, happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole scenography,
because hearing a song is not part of the list of primary qualities (a much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to
list which is, remember, established for the most futile and fleeting the whole machinery of a theatre. This is, for instance, what has hap-
of historical reasons). pened to science when seized by the recent science studies, what
Let us be careful here: I am not saying that we have to recon- has happened to Dutch landscape painting in Svetlana Alpers able
cile the scientific with the poetic worldviews, to bring together hands, and what has happened to anatomical drawing when restaged
science and art, because such an enterprise would produce only the by a contemporary artist like Jeff Wall. Instead of simply being there,
most monstrous hybrid: two artifacts brought together just makes for matters of fact begin to look different, to render a different sound,
a third artifact, not for a solution. What we have to do, if we want they start to move in all directions, they overflow their boundaries,
to be faithful to what William James called radical empiricism, is to they include a complete set of new actors, they reveal the fragile enve-
deny the claims of the bifurcates in the first place to represent com- lopes in which they are housed. Instead of being there whether you
mon sense and to speak in the name of science. We dont have, on like it or not they still have to be there, yes (this is one of the huge
the one hand, a harsh world made of indisputable matters of fact and, differences), they have to be liked, appreciated, tasted, experimented
on the other, a rich mental world of human symbols, imaginations upon, mounted, prepared, put to the test.
and values. The harsh world of matters of fact is an amazingly nar- It is the same world, and yet, everything looks different. Matters
row, specialized, type of scenography using a highly coded type of of fact were indisputable, obstinate, simply there; matters of concern
narrative, gazing, lighting, distance, a very precise repertoire of atti- are disputable, and their obstinacy seems to be of an entirely differ-
tude and attention, of which historians of science like Lorraine Das- ent sort: they move, they carry you away, and, yes, they too matter.
ton, Horst Bredekamp, Steve Shapin, Simon Schaffer and Peter Gali- The amazing thing with matters of fact was that, although they were
son, to name a few, have made a careful inventory. While it seemed material, they did not matter a bit, even though they were immedi-
barely possible in the time of Whitehead to overcome the bifurca- ately used to enter into some sort of polemic. How really strange they
tion of nature because of the total grasp the first empiricism had on were.
European minds, it is much easier now that matters of fact appear Another extraordinary feature, as I have shown at length in Poli-
for what they always were: a certain style as convoluted, as interest- tics of Nature, is that although they were mute, they were supposed
ing, as historical, as artistic as Louis the XIVs court etiquette, Leib- to speak directly facts after all speak for themselves, dont they?
nizs baroque monadology, Maurice of Nassaus invention of military and not only that but, through an amazing feat of spokesmanship,
drilling or Immanuel Kants interpretation of the Copernican revolu- mute and yet speaking facts were able to shut the dissenters voice
tion. Indeed, it is, in my view, precisely because matters of fact have down.23 And those who have invented this amazing feat of inani-
become so historical that Jeff Wall has been able to stage his medita- mism are deriding the poor people who believe in animism.24
tion of a self-absorbed artist qua scientist: no scientist can pretend But before we bid farewell to this scenography, we need to fathom
anymore to gaze at the world that way. The opportunity is there to out its extraordinary power, what Dijksterhuis considered to be its
be seized: science has been so thoroughly historicized that we can
now ask in an entirely new light: what has happened to us under the
22 Bruno Latour. (2004). Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of
name of (first) empiricism? How can it be that common sense has Fact to Matters of Concern, Special issue on the Future of Critique. Critical
been forced to drift so far from what is seized on by experience? And Inquiry, pp. 25-48.
even more important: whats next? 23 Bruno Latour. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democ-
racy. (Translated by Catherine Porter). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press.
In order to code this huge sea change between two empiricisms 24 Philippe Descola. (2005). Par del nature et culture. [Beyond nature and cul-
the first and the second I have proposed using the contrast between ture]. Paris: Gallimard.
38 39
main technical source of efficacy. To do so, however, it would be away from their form. It is possible, as Jonathan Crary has argued,
insufficient to look only at worldviews, at ideas, at a mechanization that Locke has imagined the mind to be one of those boxes where,
of the world picture, unless, that is, we take the world picture liter- once again, a silent mind meets the world as what can be projected
ally and not metaphorically as he does and as so many historians of flat onto a piece of paper.25 What a strange box for Locke to lock his
the Scientific Revolution have done after him. More humble media- mind into! A camera box even more artificial than the one captured
tors have to be added to render understandable the history of this digitally by Jeff Wall. And yet, it is the only practical situation where
odd divide between primary and secondary qualities, namely draw- the divide between what is transportable on a piece of paper and
ing itself, the very nature of what it is to picture something. As is well what is geometry and what is not sound, odour, agitation, dura-
known to historians of empiricism, John Locke, for many years a tion can be easily separated.
frequent visitor to art shops around this very section of Amsterdam,
was obsessed with metaphors from painting, camera obscura, won- This is what Locke readily recognizes:
derkammer, stocks of various goods as is clear from the Treatise: An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform color,
e.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby
2. All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then sup- imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed,
pose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all char- with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes.
acters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? But we having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind
Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and bound- of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us; what alter-
less fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the
ety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? sensible figures of bodies; the judgment presently, by an habit-
To this I answer, in one word, from Experience. In that all our ual custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that
knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. from that which is truly a variety of shadow or color, collecting
() The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of a figure, and frames to
empty cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform color;
some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously
to them. Afterwards, the mind proceeding further, abstracts colored, as is evident in painting. ibid p. 58
them, and by degrees learns the use
of general names. In this manner Without the experience of being tricked by painting in taking a
the mind comes to be furnished with plane variously coloured for a convex figure, philosophers would
ideas and language, the materials never have sustained for long the idea that the world itself could be
about which to exercise its discur- made of primary streams of causalities that our mind transforms
sive faculty. And the use of reason into non existing secondary qualities. Similarly, without the obses-
becomes daily more visible, as these sive metaphor of painting, epistemologists never would have imag-
materials that give it employment ined that in science there are only two steps a copy and a model
increase. p. 121 and a mimetic relation between the two. To put it much too bluntly:
the idea of a bridge between representation and the represented is an
You need some extraordinary situ- invention of visual art.
ations, as Jeff Wall has shown us, to
try to take knowledge as being what
appears on a white piece of paper after 25 J. Crary. (1990). Techniques of the observer. On vision and modernity in the
the material qualities have been peeled nineteenth century. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
40 41
I hope you see the reason why it would be useless to try to recon- hand its steadily increasing naturalism and on the other its
cile art and science, since what we take for science is nothing, most purely schematic and logical extensions. It is submitted that
of the time, but a derivative epistemology, without any relation to the both are due in largest part to the development and pervasion of
visual effects of science, and which is a scion of a highly specific methods which have provided symbols, repeatable in invariant
moment in art history. I am sorry to say but epistemology is the fault form, for representation of visual awareness, and a grammar of
of Dutch painters and merchants You the Dutch impressed visitors perspective which made it possible to establish logical relations
so much, and especially Descartes, that he ended up confusing the not only within the system of symbols but between that system
white piece of paper on which figures are drawn with its res extensa! and the forms and locations of the objects that it symbolizes.
Catastrophic consequences for philosophy: never did it recover from ibid pp. 12-13
this confusion between ontology and visualisation strategies.
No one has understood this better that the genial curator of prints You see that the Mechanization of the World Picture is an apt
William Ivins. There is, he argues two very specific reasons why the title: it is indeed a picture allowing us to see things in a mechani-
white sheet of paper on which only shapes are drawn in a geometrical way because you can turn around and predict their deformations
cal idiom allows for such an enormously powerful tool. Before the and projections. To use my terms they are immutable mobiles, for
Renaissance, he claims: the first time you can reconcile the mobility of information with the
immutability of what is being transported: it is as if Parmenidian
There were two great reasons for this inefficiency; one that no forms could be extracted out of Heracliteus flow. No wonder every
picture could be exactly duplicated, and the other, that was no literate mind all over Europe became intoxicated with such a fabu-
rule or grammatical scheme for securing either logical relations lously powerful aesthetics of reason. And yet, it remains an aesthetic,
within the system of pictorial symbols or a logical two-way, or a way to draw things together.27
reciprocal correspondence between the pictorial representations To enter into a debate over perspective, its history and its impor-
of the shapes of objects and the locations of those objects in tance, would be of course impossible in a few minutes, indeed in a
space.26 few weeks, but what Ivins has seen with unmatched clarity is the
missing link in Whiteheads philosophical account of the bifurcation
But after print was invented and then, a bit later, perspective draw- of nature, namely the confusion by philosophers and scientists alike
ing followed, half a century after, by projective geometry, for the first of what is given in experience with what Whitehead calls the opera-
time in the history of human codes, a two-way connection could be tions of the mind required to transmit information from someone
established between people about the things they mean, even though to someone else. I quote from Concept of Nature:
they remained thoroughly incapable of describing them in words.
The platonic power of geometry was at last incarnated into a prac- Thus what is a mere procedure of mind in the translation of
tice: the Book of Nature was written in geometric characters, but we sense-awareness into discursive knowledge has been transmuted
should not forget that was a printed book made of many sheets of into a fundamental character of nature. In this way matter has
white drawing paper: emerged as being the metaphysical substratum of its properties,
and the course of nature is interpreted as the history of matter.
The most marked characteristics of European pictorial repre- p. 16
sentation since the fourteenth century have been on the one
And again:
26 Williams M. Ivins Jr. ([1930] 1973). On the rationalization of sight: with an exami-
nation of three Renaissance texts on perspective. De artificiali perspectiva, [The
artificial perspective]: reproducing both the first edition (Toul, 1505) and the sec- 27 Bruno Latour. (1990). Drawing Things Together in Mike Lynch and Steve Wool-
ond edition (Toul, 1509). New York: De Capo Press and Plenum Press. pp 8-9. gar, (edited by) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
42 43
Thus matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and today become the principal avenue of the sensuous awareness
temporal characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an upon which systematic thought about nature is based. Science
individual entity. It is this refusal which has caused the muddle and technology have advanced in more than direct ratio to the
of importing the mere procedure of thought into the fact of nature. ability of men to contrive methods by which phenomena which
The entity, bared of all characteristics except those of space and otherwise could be known only through the sense of touch,
time, has acquired a physical status as the ultimate texture of hearing, taste, and smell, have been brought within the range
nature; so that the course of nature is conceived as being merely of visual recognition and measurement and thus become sub-
the fortunes of matter in its adventure through space. p. 20 ject to that logical symbolization without which rational thought
and analysis are impossible. The discovery of the early forms of
Here Whitehead offers his own historical explanation which has these grammars and techniques constitutes that beginning of
to do with the differential development of the scientific disciplines: the rationalization of sight which, it is submitted, was the most
important event of the Renaissance. p. 13
This distinction is the product of an epoch in which physical sci-
ence has got ahead of medical pathology and of physiology. Per- None of us in this room, I suppose, will deny that Ivins is right:
ceptions of push are just as much the outcome of transmission for proof, you simply have to look at your computer, the epitome of
as are perceptions of color. When color is perceived the nerves Renaissance space to which we should add the ideal Leibnizian library.
of the body are excited in one way and transmit their message Digitalisation, as Simon Schaffer and Adam Lowe have shown, is not
towards the brain, and when push is perceived other nerves of so much an innovation as the achievement of a three centuries old
the body are excited in another way and transmit their message dream. Leibnizs nickname is Google scholar28 Whether you are
towards the brain. p. 44 architects using CAD design, engineers, accountants, physicians pon-
dering over patients files, down-loaders of some sort, video games
And yet pushiness has been attributed to primary qualities and addicts, your live in the Rationalization of sight (Ivinss title). And
colour to secondary ones. See how futile this whole distinction is? yet what is amazing is that this enormously developed and material-
But the muddle remains unclear: how on earth could Descartes have ized aesthetics of matters of fact has been unable to evolve to absorb
made the amazing mistake of confusing res extensa with what hap- the new matters of concern. Inundated by innovations, we are living
pens when you begin to draw a form geometrically on a piece of white in a more and more archaic representation of our real state of affairs.
paper? What Ivins, and more recent historians account for, is the con- But before I reach this last question, we have to summarize our
nection established between the recently emerging scientific commu- progress so far. If you remember my last lecture, you will notice
nity and this new geometrical idiom: a two way connection can be that we now have a precise conduit for explaining the bifurcation
established between savants because on the paper (plates, diagrams, of nature. The distinction between primary and secondary quali-
figures or the calculations they depend on) transformations can be ties is the professional hazard of watching mummified limbs for too
accurately predicted. Once the operations of the mind are brought in, long Then the idea might come to you to separate what you can
it is only a small step to confuse immutable mobiles as a solution for draw on the white paper the form from the matter the limb
communications, with immutable mobiles as being what the world an sich and then, through another extraordinary move, to fuse the
itself is made of. Matters of fact shift from being a descriptive mode, ability of Adrian Walker to transport the painted limb to some other
a style of reasoning, to what is furnishing the world itself. place without this limb rotting or being in any way corrupted into
Here is Ivins again:
28 Adam Lowe and Simon Schaffer. (1999). N01se, 1999. An exhibition held simul-
From being an avenue of sensuous awareness for what people, taneously at Kettles Yard, The Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cam-
lacking adequate symbols and adequate grammars and tech- bridge, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge and the Well-
niques for their use, regarded as secondary qualities, sight has come Institute, London. Cambridge: Kettles Yard.
44 45
the ways in which the limb itself transports its material component much more difficult to discern the future than to make a history
through time. Substance is a digital dance on paper. By complement- of the past, I have to sketch at least what would happen if we pos-
ing Whitehead with Ivins we can now understand this enigmatic sen- sessed an aesthetics of matters of concern. The only way to do that in
tence of Concept of Nature: the few remaining minutes is to briefly indicate what, in industry, is
called the specifications of the tender not the project itself but the
Thus even if you admit that the adherents of substance can conditions which you have to fulfil if you want to submit a proposal
be allowed to conceive substance as matter, it is a fraud to slip for the tender. Here are a few that this alternative scenography should
substances into space on the plea that space expresses relations be able to stage through whatever means you see fit. And I have no
between substances. p. 21 doubt that there are many people in this room more competent than
My argument is that this dragging in of the mind as mak- I to submit a proposal.
ing additions of its own to the thing posited for knowledge by Specification one: Matters of concern have to matter. Matters of
sense-awareness is merely a way of shirking the problem of nat- fact were distorted by the totally implausible necessity of being pure
ural philosophy. That problem is to discuss the relations inter stuff of no interest whatsoever just sitting there like a mummified
se of things known, abstracted from the bare fact that they are limb while at the same time being able to make a point, humili-
known. () Natural philosophy should never ask, what is in ate human subjectivity, speak directly without speech apparatus and
the mind and what is in nature. p. 30 quieten dissenting voices. Now, this is a bit too much to do at once
for some middle size dry goods. Can we do better and distinguish
The question before us is to see how can we suspend this fraud- those various and confused layers to make sure that our scenography
ulent export of ways of knowing (in Ivinss rendering: drawing in registers that they matter for some people who have to be specified,
perspective) into the relations inter se among betting organisms. But and for whom they are the source of an intense interest and a redi-
at least we now have a comprehensible historical path to explain rected attention? The matter of materialists was a fraudulent mixture
through which intermediary nature has bifurcated somewhere in of politics, art and science: by contrast, let matters of concern dis-
the 17th century and thus presented to the philosophical mind, from tinguish clearly the population of those for whom they matter. The
Hume all the way to contemporary neurophilosophers, the hopeless mummified limb does not tell the story of why Adrian Walker has
task of bridging a non-existing gap. There is no gap to be bridged taken the pains to draw it so carefully; but if the nightingale song has
but there is a joint history of science, of art and I will add, of poli- drawn the attention of bird watchers, let this conduit for attention
tics to be taken up. Now that we begin to see how the aesthetics be now visible, instead of playing this strange dance of inanimism
of matters of fact works, it is a much less impossible undertaking through which pure disinterested objectivity interests no one and yet
to explore what would happen were we to modify the scenography seems of great import in our quarrels.
through which experience tries to capture matters of concern. Specification two: Matters of concern have to be liked. The great
Act I scene I of table thumping realists was that matters of fact were
I hope it is clear that there is no possible reconciliation between there whether you like it or not. Except that this indisputable pres-
art and science, no aestheticisation of beautiful results of science ence was at once turned into a way of stopping the dispute. Now we
(fractals, galaxies, brain scans, etc), but an immense building site have to choose: if matters of concern have to be closed, then a dispute
where once again, just as in the 16th and 17th century every intel- has to be put to an end, and not by thumping on the table saying:
lectual skill from artists, scientists, politicians, statesmen, organizers the dispute has ended because the facts are there. The matters of
of all kinds, merchants and patrons, are trying to reinvent an Art of facts are there and the dispute has to go on until closure is obtained.
Describing, or rather an Art of Re describing matters of fact to stop It is fair to say that the whole first wave of empiricism had an odd
the fraudulent export and uptake what is given in experience. way of conceiving democracy and was rather a clever way of escaping
I am afraid that it must also be terribly clear how unfit I am for controversies by putting a premature end to them. Since discussions
the task that I have now laid before us. And yet, even though it is are what are in question with matter, then for Gods sake, carry them
46 47
on instead of stopping them abruptly and falling back, in the end, tion.30 How do you keep a limb from rotting? Who is keeping up the
on brute force. Are you not tired of this odd succession whereby an whole Vancouver Department of Anatomy? What is allowing Adrian
appeal to undisputable facts is followed by pure violence? Here again, Walker to remain in his Rodins pose forever? Facts are not the ahis-
can we not do better? How can one be polite and still be using mat- torical, uninterpreted and asocial beginning of a course of action,
ters of fact? but the extraordinary fragile and transient provisional terminus of a
Specification three: Matters of concern have to be populated. To whole flow of betting organisms whose reproductive means have to
use an expression I have somewhat overused they have to become be made clear and paid to the last cent in hard currency. Endurance
something that is to be explicitly recognized as a gathering, as Ding is what has to be obtained, not what is already given by some sub-
and not as Gegenstand. The best measure of the incredible archaism strate, or some substance. Let us remember Whitehead, here again:
of our present modes of representation is that we are still portray-
ing objectivity as if we were in the time of Locke whereas every bit of Then physical endurance is the process of continuously inher-
science and technology has now become a convoluted, controversial iting a certain identity of character transmitted through a his-
affair, a cause, yes a res. Objects have become things and yet we have torical route of events. This character belongs to the whole
no way to represent them except in the bifurcated manner of pure route, and to every event of the route. This is the exact prop-
objects, on the one hand and human organisations on the other. Even erty of material. (...) Only if you take material to be fundamen-
though the Shuttle Columbia, to use this dramatic example, makes no tal, this property of endurance is an arbitrary fact at the base of
sense as an object except inside the troublesome NASA, as was made the order of nature; but if you take organism to be fundamental,
clear during the inquiry launched after the disaster, we still have no this property is the result of evolution.31
way to describe technical entities other than Gaspard Monges assem-
bly drawings. Strange drawings indeed that are incapable of showing This is what Ludwig Fleck had so beautifully shown: all the drama
the genuine assemblies necessary for the smallest object to come into of table-bumping realists will not allow a fact to remain in existence
being.29 How can we still be stuck in modes of togetherness that our for one minute. Matters of concern, on the other hand, have to be kept
daily experience, our daily press, our daily encounters with artifacts up, cared for, accompanied, restored, duplicated, saved, yes, saved, we
contradict? How can a whole industry of visualization be wallowing know that for our hard disks content and we still act as if facts could
in hype when we cannot even solve this simplest of all riddles: show be hard forever, at no cost, without making any backup.32 Once again,
me the people necessary to activate what you have drawn on a CAD we represent our experience in a way which is appropriate for a cen-
design software. Soft indeed! Where are the artists, the designers, the tury long past and for a scenography we have long deserted. We live
programmers, who could finally extract us from the 17th century in the ruins of modernism, and we seem to be content with them.
and bring us eventually to the 21st century?
Specifications four: Matters of concern have to be durable. Oddly Many more specifications could be listed, but I have said enough
enough, this is what was more widely vaunted about matters of fact: to indicate the drift of this second empiricism. Let me conclude by
they remained there while the fickle history of our representations offering a counter case. When Otto Neurath devised his isotypes he
passed away. Except we now know that this was a fraudulent export was trying to do something which was the equivalent of what had
of our ways of representing them in the passage of nature. If there is been attempted during the Renaissance, namely to link together in
one thing that the Jeff Walls print does not account for it is through a powerful synthesis a certain conception of science logical posi-
which means, which vehicles, which subsistence, it maintains itself in
existence. Freeze framing is a pretty bad way of accounting for dura-
30 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. (edited by) (2002). Iconoclash. Beyond the
Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
29 Bruno Latour. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik. How to Make Things 31 Alfred North Whitehead. (1920). Science and the Modern World. pp 134-135.
Public. An Introduction. in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, (edited by) Making 32 Ludwig Fleck. (1935 [1981]). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chi-
Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. cago: The University of Chicago Press.
48 49
WHAT IS THE STYLE OF M ATTERS OF CONCERN?
tivism , a certain political aspiration the socialism of Red Vienna

with a certain artistic style Bauhaus modernism.33 When he cre-
ated his Museum of Statistics it was to render visible again the facts of
the matter of economics to those mainly concerned by its scandalous
destruction, namely the workers who were in the grips of the Great
Depression.34 When we look at his enterprise from the point of view
I have presented in those two lectures, it is clear that nothing much
remains of logical positivism, of socialism and of modernist aesthet-
ics. And yet, we are forced to say that, at least, he had respected the
rights of reason by inventing for matters of fact a full scenography
of great beauty and great relevance. We live in a different world. But
at least Neurath gives us the exact magnitude of the task to be com-
pleted. If we have to redo every plank of his proverbial boat which has
to be refitted without ever reaching a dry dock, nothing less will do.
I believe it is the responsibility of Europeans to refuse to live in the
ruins of the modernist scenography and to have the courage, once
again, to put their skills to work in devising for matters of concern a
style that does justice to what is given in experience.
33 Thomas E. Uebel, Nancy Cartwright and L. Fleck. (1996) Otto Neurath: Philos-
ophy Between Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
34 Frank Hartmann. (2005). Humanization of Knowledge through the Eye in Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel (edited by) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democ-
racy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press pp. 698-707.
50

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WHAT IS THE S TYLE OF M ATTERS OF C ONCERN ?

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