"How Better to Register the Agency of Things: Ontology"

March 27, 2014

Bruno Latour is Professor and Vice President for Research at Sciences Po in Paris. His lecture “How Better to Register the Agency of Things: Ontology” was given on March 27, 2014, as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. In this second of two lectures, Latour takes up the ontology of things, what he considers to be a more challenging task than the “semiotics of things” discussed in his first talk. Latour prefers ontology over epistemology and quotes Isabelle Stengers’s claim that “epistemology will lead us nowhere.” Instead of “dragging the mind into things,” forcing what we call “the mind” to mediate between a subject and an object, Latour argues that we should focus on asking questions about what exists in the world in a new way, through a “deontology” that focuses on “what should be assembled in the common world.” In the course of this argument, Latour touches on the relationship of these claims to the role of the humanities, arguing that the function of the humanities is not that of adding values to a valueless world.