“Ah! Philosophy, that’s what I want to do.”
Should you find yourself reading this Substack post, chances are you already have some familiarity with Bruno Latour. In that case, you might prefer waiting for my next post, in which I turn my focus to the Dear Bruno newsletter origins.
For those less or unfamiliar with Bruno Latour, this post is for you…
Meet Monsieur Latour
Four years ago in 2021, just one year prior to his passing at age 75, Bruno Latour was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, an international award of Japanese origin honouring “individuals who have made significant contributions in the fields of science and technology, as well as arts and philosophy.”
One of the best ways to cultivate an initial impression of Monsieur Latour is to watch this brief video curated by the Kyoto Prize’s Inamori Foundation. Go ahead. Take a few minutes. I’ll wait.
Welcome back.
In this soft-paced, self-narrated, introspective video, we learn a few salient details about Latour’s life and vocation:
He is French
Bruno Latour grew up the son of a wine-maker in Beaune, a provincial region responsible for producing the famous Burgundy wines (his family winery is not the Château Latour of some international renown, but instead the independent, still family-owned Maison Louis Latour). At some point in his educational journey, he found himself in Paris feeling self-aware and out of place, appearing to others “like a hillbilly,” he self-deprecatingly notes. Much of his professorial life played out in Paris at institutions such the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines (1982-2006) and Sciences Po (2006-2017). He was a well-travelled professional, however, holding visiting professorships at both the London School of Economics and Harvard University. He also spent time inhabiting a number field sites doing research in locales such as southern California (San Diego) and Brazil (Boa Vista) and, more recently, visiting two so-called Critical Zone (CZ) observatories for study in rural South Carolina (USA) and the Ardennes (France).
He is a Scholar-Intellectual
When it comes to Bruno Latour, the oft-claimed differences between a scholar and an intellectual is entirely useless as he is most convincingly both. Latour is additionally hybrid, however, due to the fact that he describes himself as, “a mixture of sociology, anthropology, philosophy.” He is thus a hybridised hybrid. For me, this double hybridity is one of the traits that makes his work so dynamic, engaging, and influential. Latour’s undying interest in the notion of truth grounds him firmly in philosophy; his skillful use of ethnographic research methods ties him to anthropology; and his empirical studies of the production of truth within modern cultural settings such as scientific laboratories links him to sociology. Ironically, all three modern disciplines have simultaneously claimed and disavowed his work, which makes him something of a maverick and a trouble-maker. In this education-focused newsletter, I aim to learn and draw from his innovative, criss-crossing sociological cum anthropological cum philosophical work.
He is a Writer
Bruno Latour kept personal notebooks from the age of 12. “I began to think,” he says, “when I began to write.” He then adds, “I guess I get ideas because I write all the time. If you try to have ideas and then to write, it never works. You have to write first, and then you get ideas.” This insightful, reflective sentiment is partially what catalyzed the birth of this Substack: I grew tired of thinking about the vast, multi-faceted universe of Latour’s ideas for so many years.1 And so, I finally decided to begin writing in the hope that, as Latour foretells, my own ideas about education will flow more freely, like hot currents of electricity through elegantly engineered circuits.
He is an Ideator
Bruno Latour is an artist of sorts; he creates trailblazing ideas and shares them not only through the medium of fieldwork and writing, but also via public performances, community workshops, interdisciplinary collaborations, original plays, and uniquely curated exhibitions. During his long professional career, which stretches back to the 1970s, he both inspected and challenged our most widely shared understandings of the very threads forming the rich tapestry of modernity including science, technology, society, nature, culture, law, politics, and religion. Latour specialises in addressing these largely unquestioned categories and effectively re-rendering them as investigable concepts. One of my central aims in the Dear Bruno newsletter is to redirect Latour’s many decades worth of novel ideas toward yet another important thread of modernity: education.
What else is Bruno Latour?
Bruno Latour is self-deprecating. He’s soft-spoken. He’s widely read in two senses: he reads widely himself and he’s widely read by scholars from disciplines outside of his own. He’s acutely perceptive. He’s courageous. He’s exceedingly original. He’s symmetrically empathetic, that is, he cares equally for both humans and non-humans. He’s generous. He’s not afraid to smile. He’s not afraid to disrupt. He’s witty. He’s funny. He’s distinctive. He’s enchanting. He’s rather magical. To put it differently, Bruno Latour possesses all of the traits of a world-class educator.
In my next post, I plan to establish a few humble connections between Bruno Latour and myself, and to explain why I decided to start a newsletter designed to honour his work by bringing it into relations with education.
