Bruno Latour

Entonces, tienen que tomar este, este paso, ¿no? Y se ha hablado muy poco de esa arquitectura fast food, eh, yo creo, ¿no? Y del papel que están haciendo, pues yo qué sé, la transformación de los mercados municipales en espacios gourmet supercaros.

Ostras, aquí tenemos que hablar de esto, ¿no? De qué está pasando y de si de verdad esto es lo que queremos como, como ciudadanía, ¿no? Entonces, por eso digo que, que las formas como no discutidas políticamente de transformación de nuestro entorno son permanentes, ¿no? Bruno Latour, que es un sociólogo que para mí fue como un padre intelectual, siempre hablaba del Parlamento de las cosas, que está el Parlamento político donde se discuten las cosas con palabras y todo el mundo se pelea y todo el mundo se posiciona, ¿no? Y la hay, está ahí.

Pero hay un Parlamento de los objetos, que es cosas que suceden y que nadie las ha discutido.

Y suceden.

I don't know.

He hadn't read Bruno Latour, so he doesn't have all the, the nuances of how the scientific, the, the [laughs] the, the not just the instruments, but the, uh-

It's all just social practice, me and-

Yes, the practice of how we use the instruments, how we interpret the instruments.

It's not just something happening in the brain, but it's also not just something happening in the environment, but it's in the relationality of it that's important, or as you say, in the in-between.

That sort of motivates a question I have, I've had, and it's something that has come up recently from some people I'm working with in Japan, actually, a group of architects that have asked me about the notion of agency and have mentioned the work of Bruno Latour and This is something also I know in your material engagement theory, you mentioned Latour's ANT model.

And it seems maybe you can clarify this for me.

It seems to me that Latour would be saying something like, well, agency is not just in the individual embodied agent, but it can be in elements of the environment.

I mean you have to think of agency in my view in the same way we think about those interactions we've been discussing before.

So agency for me is by definition relational.

You mentioned Bruno Latour.

Now what Bruno Latour was trying to do in my understanding of his work on what he calls actor-network theory is to adopt a kind of symmetrical perspective on how we think about human and non-human agency.

And I would like to know how, You choose these elements, it means it's material.

Do you start from a theoretical idea or from a gesture, from a physical intuition? And how this relationship with matter has changed over the years? I think, of course, of the notion of agentivity, of the tower, Bruno Latour, etc.

So animate the elements that are not which was not animated, so theater in this possibility, so to instill a life and a possibility to also re-signify the elements.

I think

So my favorite chapter of the book, if I had to pick just one, [laughs] was chapter four.

Uh, it's called We Have Never Been Social, and it's named obviously after the famous book of Bruno Latour.

Um, and in this chapter, you point to ways, uh, of thinking and living with the non-human that can actually bring in newer imaginations of the economy.

And so, uh, this, this work sort of, uh, tends to intervene or counters a limited version of sociality that is present in the new materialist texts.

Um, and I think new materialism has, had, has, uh, became popular because it was very much about stories.

Um, it was very accessible.

It had sort of good, good writing that was, um, sort of going beyond the academic writing, especially if you think of, for instance, uh, Donna Haraway's writing or Bruno Latour's Network, e-e-even Jane Bennett and so on.

They're, they're very accessible, uh, writers.