January 24, 2016 January 24, 2016 ggguida Bruno Latour, quasi-object, Serres Leave a comment. I believe that the Latourian amodernism is the most important contribution to thinking the role of the social sciences anew. Latour’s “Copernican counter-revolution” consists of treating the modernist “poles” of nature and society as “outcomes” of processes of negotiation and struggle of “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects,” that is of “collectives of humans and non-humans” that are not yet divided up neatly between these poles. June 19, 2011 at 10:36 am. Latour calls all these objects and entities hybrids or quasi-objects. Quasi-Objects – Serre “Of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks. But they are collective because they attach us to one another, because they circulate in our hands and define our social bond by this very circulation" (Latour 89, italics mine) Bruno Latour spoke about this particular task of objects in his work Reassembling the Social (2005). 51 3.3 Philosophies Stretched Over the Yawning Gap 55 3.4 The End of Ends 59 3.5 Semiotic Turns 62 3.6 Who Has Forgotten Being? Compare with Latour who writes: The moderns […] did not make quasi‐objects disappear by eradicationand denial,as iftheywanted tosimply repress them. 65 3.7 The Beginning of the Past 67 3.8 The Revolutionary Miracle 70 3.9 The End of the Passing Past 72 3.10 Triage and Multiple Times 74 Bruno Latour Quasi-Objects. Thus, they are dazzling and dangerous, enfants terribles. Unlike their modern counterparts, quasi-objects have an existential and historical character, lack clearly defined boundaries, and have productive capacities. Serres (1983, 1987) and Latour (1987, 1988a,b, 1996) show how quasi-objects mediate and transform personal and collective identity and network relations (Serres & Latour… However, Latour himself has mostly been concerned with the issue of hybrids (or quasi-objects) in the natural sciences (such as microbes). On the contrary, they recognized their existence but emptied it of any relevance […] The modern explanations consisted in … In “Quasi-Obects” I collected ad interpreted following my sensitivity the invite of Latour to think the unthinkable of moderns, in the ambit of an “Emended constitution where nets turn legal, where the Middle Empire, the almost-objects are represented”. own, Latour calls them "quasi-objects" (p. 51 ff.) Latour constructs and observes the intermingled operations of natural and cultural formations in scientific research and technological projects by following the circulation of “quasi-objects.”3 The quasi-object names the objecthood of subjects (such as human persons) and the subjecthood of objects (such as machines and nonhuman organisms). "ANT raises the challenge of studying reality as transitional in its becoming and as trajectories of creation. way in which Latour sorts the world according to the concepts of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, which refer to the opposite ends of the continuum of hybrids. They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. While reading Latour on these "objects," I decided to pick up my own newspaper: Behold, I saw … I understand a quasi-object as a node which focuses the efforts of people and other objects and at the same time changes the people and the other objects and is changed by them. viii CONTENTS 3 REVOLUTION 49 3.1 The Moderns, Victims of Their Own Success 49 3.2 What Is a Quasi-Object? They are real, quite real, and we humans have not made them. Latour's treatment of dialectics is a set of tricks arrows and circles. Recent work on Quasi-objects by Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, Pierre Lévy, and Niklas Luhmann has significantly changed actor network theory. Thank you for a very insightful post! It is something in itself, but its existence and its meaning depend on human action. In order to elucidate these - they really have no history, no upbringing, no parentage, either scientifically or socially. Latour argues that up to Plato-Hegel-Marx point there is an additional missing term, in the between, and that the term missing in dialectic is the 'quasi-object.' "Of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects, we shall simply say that they trace networks.