Latour « Klaustoon’s Blog

Russian Connection

May 28, 2012

Just in time to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Mathias Rust’s famous vacation to Moscow, Russian Magazine Project International features this month an old cartoon from this blog. Actually -unlike Mr. Rust- I came in as a guest. Last month, Sergei Sitar, from Project Russia, contacted me in order to publish one of the Latour&Sloterdijk cartoons done on occasion of the “Networks and Spheres” lecture at Harvard GSD on 2009.

Project Russia is the head of an editorial project launched in 1966 by The A-Fond Foundation with the aim to support the development of architecture and design in Post-soviet Russia. Based in Moscow and published both in English and Russian, it has spawned several other publications. Among those, Project International (Проект International), launched in 2001 and published in Russian, was conceived as a window for Russian architects onto the international scenery, and along with international practices includes a section publishing translations of Western architectural theory centerpieces and adjacent philosophical/cultural/social studies texts – Heidegger, Foucault, Baudrillard, Virilio, Lefebvre, Harvey, Mitchell, Jameson. This last issue includes a translation of the double lecture by Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk, “Networks and Spheres: Two Ways to Reinterpret Globalization” that was originally published in the Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009, issue 30 (pdf here). And -hence- the drawing.

It will never cease to amaze me how Internet, especially since the irruption of blog culture, is changing the face and mechanics not just of communication, but, more interestingly, of creation itself. Rather than globalization, it is de-localization, in its various meanings, which is altering, feeding, fostering and even plainly making possible the development of practices that before the WWW would have been suffocated before birth. The advent of the internet and its increasing user-friendliness supports, with its expanded exposure, creation of any kind, finding a way to find an audience for niche interests that would otherwise be condemned to remain unarticulated in their geeks’ minds or sitting in a drawer in their way towards the recycle bin. Internet self-publishing makes it normal to produce for an audience that’s half a world away, de-localizing production/creation to an extent that it may be easier for you to publish in another continent than in your home town. It’s funny that the perfect expression of this glocality (apologies) in the context of this blog finds its place by means of a cartoon on Bruno Latour (pity they didn’t choose Latour in Urbicande, instead).

Anyway, for those among you who can read Russian -and for me while I wait for the paper copies to arrive- there you have a scan of the cartoon as published, so that you can tell me about the translation. Only thing I miss is that they didn’t translate the balloons themselves. It would have been intriguing to see the cartoons speaking in Cyrillic lettering. Although that’s something that will be solved in a different forthcoming publication.

click to enlarge

Posted by klaustoon

Filed in Actor-Network Theory, GSD Lectures, Hairstyles, Klaus outside the blog, Latour, Mohsen Mostafavi, Peter Sloterdijk, Sloterdijk ·Tags: Actor-Network Theory, Bruno Latour, GSD Lectures, Mohsen Mostafavi, networks and spheres, Peter Sloterdijk, Project International, Project Russia

Latour in Urbicande

October 17, 2010

Click to enlarge

“Octobre 17:

The physical manifestation of the actor-network theory reappeared last night. I took a couple of Glocalyne tablets, but they just seemed to worsen the effect.It seems delightfully paradoxical that this state of hyperconnectivity has confined me to the solitude of my room…”

Hmm… After a couple of weeks of obscurity, I’ve decided to shed some light on this drawing, a cross-breeding between Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Schuiten&Peeters’ La fièvre d’Urbicande (with a little bit of L’Étrange cas du docteur Abraham). Although it had rested in a drawer for a long time, it got finally done after watching one of Schuiten and Peeters’ delightful performances at the Once Upon a Place conference in Lisbon.

For some insight about the ANT, I would go to Anthem, “a gathering of human and nonhuman actors that are interested in both actor-network theory and the work of Martin Heidegger” that has become the online referent for Latour studies. For more on the obscure yet fascinating work of Franco-Belgian megastars Schuiten and Peeters, check Urbicande or the über-comprehensive Obskür (Spanish readers, might want to go here). The complete text of “On the Difficulty of Being Glocal” can be found in this older -and even more obscure- post.

And for more on Bruno Latour check out the Latour category in the blog (WARNING: There’s some Sloterdijk scattered in there, too).

Posted by klaustoon

Filed in Actor-Network Theory, Great Moments of Architectural Theory, Latour, Schuiten and Peeters, Urbicande ·Tags: Actor-Network Theory, Architectural Theory, Architecture cartoons, Bruno Latour, La Fiévre d'Urbicande, Les Cités Obscures, On the Difficulty of Being Glocal, Schuiten and Peeters, Urbicande

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Le Grand Tour (On Being Glocal)

October 2, 2010

Universalism used to be a rather simple affair: the more detached from local traditions, the more universal you became. If the stoics could be called ‘citizens of the world’, it’s because they accepted being part of the ‘human race’, above and beyond the narrow labels of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’. A regular scale seemed to lead from local to global, offering a compass along which every position could be mapped. Until recently, the more modern you were, the higher up you ascended; the less modern you were, the lower down you were confined.

Things have now changed a lot. What now is more universal: the American world order or the French Republic? The forces of globalization or those who call themselves anti-mondialists? Local farmers daily influenced by the price fluctuations of commodities or local teachers insulated behind the walls of civil service? Amazon Indians able to mobilize NGOs in their defence or some famous philosopher secluded on campus? And what about China? Certainly a billion and a half people will add some weight to whichever definition of the world they adhere to, no matter how local it might appear to Westerners – if there is still a West.

The situation is all the more confusing because, as many anthropologists have shown, people devise new ‘localisms’ even faster than globalization is supposed to destroy them. Traditions are invented daily, entire cultures are coming into existence, languages are being made up; as to religious affiliations, they may become even more entrenched than before. It’s as if the metaphor of ‘roots’ had been turned upside down: the more ‘uprooted’ by the forces of modernization, the farther down identities are attaching themselves. Modernization, with its clear frontlines, has become as confusing as a game of Go at mid-play.

Hence the success of the word glocal, which signifies that labels can no longer be safely positioned along the former scale, stretching, by successive extensions, from the most local to the most universal. Instead of subtracting one another, conflicting identities keep being added. And yet they remain in conflict and thus have to be sorted out, since no one can belong to all of them at once…

But if the compass of modernization is spinning so madly, how can we distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate glocal attachments? First we have to modify this bad habit of ranking all entities of society from the largest to the smallest through some sort of zooming effect. ‘Large’ and ‘small’ are devoid of practical meaning. It’s wrong to assume that society is made of Russian dolls fitting into one another, all the way from planet Earth to the inside secrets of an individual heart. Wall Street is not a bigger space than, let’s say, Gaza. From the boardroom of IBM, one can’t see farther outside than a shopkeeper in Jakarta. As for the Oval Office, who could think it’s inhabited by people with ‘larger views’ than those of my concierge?

What we really mean by size is connectedness. Yes, the floor of Wall Street might be more connected, through many more channels, with many other places on Earth than my study, but it’s not bigger or wider; it does not see clearer; it’s not more universal than any other locus. All places are equally local – what else could they be? – but they are hooked up differentially to several others. Apart from those links, we are all blind. Thus, it’s the quality of what is transported from place to place that creates asymmetries between sites: one can be said to be ‘bigger’ than some other, but only as long as connections are reliably maintained. It’s never the case that one site is more universal, more encompassing, more open-minded than any other, in and of itself.

Once this radical ‘flattening’ of the land has been obtained, once every global view has been firmly localized into one specific site, once attention is focused on the connecting networks, it’s possible to ask a second question: since we see something only thanks to what circulates between sites, how can we be made aware of the fragility of our own interpretations? A club is not good or bad depending on its extension – the more inclusive the better, or, on the contrary, the more exclusive the better – but depending on its ability to fathom its own limitations when it excludes or includes other members.

This is where the old label cosmopolitan could get a new meaning. Although Ulrich Beck recently tried to use it as a synonym of ‘having multiple identities all at once’, Isabelle Stengers has proposed a much more radical meaning: politics of the cosmos. How can we entertain not just many identities at various degrees of extensions, but different cosmos?

That cosmos are also up for grabs is a new and unsettling idea. Before, there existed a single nature and different cultures, some of which were ‘limited’ to a local point of view while others were broad enough to offer membership to ‘citizens of the cosmos’. But how to build the City of which they are supposed to be the citizens? Where is the common home that we could live in? Such a task can no longer be simplified in advance by saying that the wider the perspective the better it is, for there is no ‘larger’ view anymore.

In the old cosmopolitan view, there were no politics and no cosmos because the higher unit was already given: one had only to break away from one’s own attachments in order to reach it. But in Stengers’ view, there is no more strenuous task than to invent political tools capable of revealing how all cosmos differ from one another. It’s an even more risky endeavour to imagine how they could be gathered into some future common arrangement. If cosmopolitan is an adjective fit for a fashion magazine, cosmopolitics, on the other hand, is the duty of the future, the only way to build the common Domus.

– Bruno Latour: On the Difficulty of Being Glocal. Domus, March 2004