Bruno Latour

In a famous article on the normative dimension of science studies, discussing the question of how to talk about the body, the prolific social scientist Bruno Latour, with characteristic joie de vivre, has an imagined character identified as ‘the articulated body’ exclaim: ‘My kingdom for a more embodied body!’ (Latour, 2004, p. 212). The article argues in favour of relativizing distinctions between subjective and objective bodies through a proliferation of propositions about their situated status within fluid and changing contexts. Latour favours ‘propositions (which are articulate or inarticulate) instead of statements (which are true or false)’ as a way ‘to give back to the body all the material impedimenta that make it sensitive to differences’ (Latour, 2004, p. 206). Before commenting on this perspective in relation to Latour’s perhaps most seminal study, We Have Never Been Modern, as a means of introducing its themes that are central to my critical approach, it is well worth discussing the dialogue in which ‘the articulated body’ takes part. The interlocutor is ‘the traditional subject’ ‘registering the world through accurate statements about it and converging on one world’ by corroborating the accounts offered by other traditional subjects:

‘Ah’, sighs the traditional subject, ‘if only I could extract myself from this narrow-minded body and roam through the cosmos, unfettered by any instrument, I would see the world as it is, without words, without models, without controversies, silent and contemplative’; ‘Really?’ replies the articulated body with some benign surprise, ‘why do you wish to be dead? For myself, I want to be alive and thus I want more words, more controversies, more artificial settings, more instruments, so as to become sensitive to even more differences. My kingdom for a more embodied body!’