ABSTRACT
In considering the influential thought of Bruno Latour, I would like to explore some questions that are likely to interest contributors to this volume. I met Latour almost a decade ago in Vienna. I remember this fairly clearly because his book Pandora’s Hope (1999) was in press. He was discussing with my brother, Joseph Leo Koerner, plans for the exhibition and catalogue (edited volume) Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002). In the introduction to the volume, Latour posed the remarkable question:
Iconoclasm, Latour (2002: 14) said, is when we feel that we can assume to know the motivations of acts of breaking images. Iconoclash, by contrast, is when we hesitate-are troubled by an action, and are unable to say whether the claim is that ‘we must have images’ or that ‘we cannot have images’ (cf. Galison 2002). Iconoclash is when we cannot say, without further inquiry, whether there is a ‘crisis over representations’ or a settlement, on the part of those in power, that the problem lies with the beliefs of the ‘others’ being excluded from negotiations. Since then I have come to work at the University of Manchester and have had opportunities to publish on the relevance for challenges nowadays facing anthropology and archaeology of themes of Latour’s writings and to begin working on an edited volume based on lectures for an introductory core course in art history and visual culture studies. Throughout I have recurrently thought about possible implications of concerns that his work shares with Stephen Toulmin, especially in his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990), including:
the centrality amongst timbers of modern dualist forms of reasoning and practice of deterministic conceptions of nature, the relevance for appreciating the long history of alternative pedagogical and political ideals of shifting foci away from ‘crises over representation’ towards instantiations of settlements grounded in such presuppositions as those outlined above, ‘ways ahead’ against the grain of such supposed settlements.
