"Why would you think so much about thinking?"

Looking back in my notes from this course, I am impressed with not only the variety of issues we discussed, but also the density of each. What is important though, is that Ben and Robin allowed us as students the ability to give those topics such density. The way we looked at each was guided, but not hindered or steered toward biases that belonged to Robin and Ben. I think this is just one of the ways the class was ran that gives it such a rich quality.

We, as the students, were not simply told to contemplate and study the critiques of other writers/critics, but instead were given actual texts and then given the tools (I think Bruno Latour really helped us in this way) to be critics ourselves. What was so great about the texts that we were studying is that they were written by a mixture of authors who executed each text in a different way. We were to draw our own conclusion about the texts instead of being told what to think about them.

This is why I was so interested in Bruno Latour's article, Why has Critique run out of Steam?


I wish we would have been able to spend more time on this article in class. Latour presents us with the idea of a thing vs. object. He is making the point that we too think of entities in this distinct way of either a thing/concern or as a object/meaning. The thing is the entity that the critic gives him/herself authority of and in turn creates an objectivity or meaning around it through his/her process of critique and it becomes the fetish of the audience/naive believers or the critic. It is possible for the audience to become completely fetishized within the entity because of the language of authority that the critic uses and so allows the critic to "always be right" (Latour, 239).

Latour wants this type of critique to be thrown away. He does not see it as being critique at all. I agree with latour because I see that there is so much time spent from people seeking what others/critics/media figures say and rely on in order to not only receive information, but most importantly to reinforce a blief they already have, to reinforce and confirm their own habitus (remember rhetoric according to Robin?). The was I see it is that the critic is deeply filled with rhetoric, which as we all know can have huge influences amongst an individual as well as entire groups of people.

When we were discussing this article, a couple students brought up that Latour tells us that critique much change, but not how it can be changed. We went on to discuss that he does actually let us know, but we still questioned the possibility of his visualization.

Latour wants us to move forward which entails us not looking at an entity seperately as a thing vs. object but looking at them as "things, mediating, assembling, gathering" (Latour, 248), or in other words ceasing the reduction of any given entity as a mere thing or an object.


Yes, as we all know Latour is complicated and makes your mind spin. To some he may be a little annoying in this regard especially because his solution seems almost impractical or impossible. Jacques most eloquently asked, "Why would you think so much about thinking?". A legitimate question, but I think we have been doing this all semester. From the beginning when we first read the article about Apotempnophilia and how a person's mind could be sane if they thought their body would be better off without a specific limb. What about Descartes and the mind/body split? Back to Fausto-Sterling and the idea of human beings wanting to be a sex or gender they were not necessarily born as, or perhaps were changed as in order to be viewed as normal. When we looked at A Billion Wicked Thoughts and how every male and female mind can be decoded through enough statistics and internet research. Pollan was thinking about the way people thought about the nutrition of their food or how they didn't think enough about the nutrition of their food. Michael Crichton of course gave us the different ways of thinking about global warming (being against it of course as being the right way to think about it)...and what did I miss? My point is that this all comes down to not only us thinking about what these authors are thinking about, but also us thinking about why we think the way we do. Where do we get our (what seem to be) natural thoughts? Does it all come from how we grew up (blank slates) or does it come from some place else?

I think Latour himself can answer Jacques' question in this article alone, that we must think about thinking because otherwise other people (critics) may think for us. AHHHH! I feel like in a way this class was built around Latour's article (perhaps not intentionally), and I think by Ben and Robin allowing us to have our own minds in this class, especially giving us the ability to communicate through blogging, really gave us the opportunity to not allow any of the authors we read to think for us. It challenged us to think for ourselves and better understand language and the overall influence and power it holds.

(Can you tell I love this class?)