7 - Bruno Latour: Common Spaces

Summary

We must not save vanishing existential spaces but ask how we can exist in a networked world.

Latour, Paris: ville invisible (my translation)

Coexistence begins in space more than in time.

Latour, Paris: ville invisible

A common space emerges only through discussion and negotiations.

Latour, War of the Worlds

There is probably no more decisive difference among thinkers than the position they are inclined to take on space: Is space that within which objects and subjects reside? Or is space one of the many connections made by objects and subjects?

Latour, “Spheres and Networks”

The writers studied up to now have all been suspicious of the idea that technology will bring salvation to our current spatial crises. They concur, too, when they champion an existential relation with place and space in order to mitigate the damages of unfettered capitalism and modernism. Bruno Latour follows their path. Trained both as a philosopher and an anthropologist, he emphatically declares that all over the world technological developments have altered our grasp of space and time as well as that of the nature and quality of subjectivity. They have repercussions on city- and world-spaces. However, Latour criticizes those who declare that machines dominate us from the top down. He rejects the fiction of a society living in the yoke of a highly circumscribed power elite. He asks how it is possible to live in a world whose demographic density has increased enormously and where space is lacking.