Bruno Latour and the End of De(con)structive Critique

This is a brief lecture on Bruno Latour's essay "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern." In it, I explain Latour's new skepticism towards a vision of critique as a tool for the destruction of facts. In our era, the problem has ceased to be that people are too gullible and willing to believe in facts -- today, people are too skeptical -- too unwilling to believe facts. To respond this crisis, Latour calls for the invention of a mode of critique that is mobilized to build knowledge rather than destroy it, taking a new care for the object of critique rather than "interrogating" it as a means to undermining belief in fact.

[wonderfacts]

Could you upload the other lectures from this semester, please? It's helpful, thanks a lot.

[robertb]

The critique included a deep critique of knowing and historical contingency and went way beyond simply "correcting the record". The 1619 project was a historical corrective but Post-Modernism took things so far that now any given attempt to describe the facts or history becomes undermined.

[johannesgh]

This is very good teaching, thank you for making it available.

Fun fact: The word "thing" has a cognate in Icelandic which means "a gathering" in the social sense, and is a common word, not just something in a dictionary, to such an extent that our parliament is called "Alþingi" or "all-thing" because it started as a national gathering, so hearing the explanation here connected the dots for me on that.

[whyilee]

One good thing that came out of this lecture not being in person is that I and many other interested could watch it. Thank you so much!! <3