Re: empty or not

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Mon, 22 Apr 96 23:26:18 EDT

Really wish I had time for a thorough reply, but just to say my
reading of Latour is that it is _psyches_ he is trying to dissolve,
and the projects of only those approaches to a psychology which
depend on a more classical Cartesian notion of the psyche as an
'autonomous' agent outside the material domain.

I don't read Latour as being a sociologist the way say Bourdieu
fairly clearly is. He is trying to break away from the ideas that
allow one to separate a social from a mental analysis, as I think
most of us are.

It is only from the (ironic in Latour, I think) viewpoint of the classical
notion of a psyche that there is anything to 'empty out'. All the
processes and activities are still there, but now they are there
in networks of activities which cross the Cartesian boundary, which
dissolve that boundary, and define units of analysis with respect
to which BOTH the personal and the social are constituted, rather
than constitutive. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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