I’m with Pickering that projecting human qualities thinking/etc onto non-humans (let alone figures of speech) is to erase their truly alien otherness so interesting to see Latour push back in this way.
Check out an essay by Latour on How Forests Think — free, and oddly interesting.
The essay, which is featured in the Journal of Ethnographic Theory (an awesome, peer-reviewed, open-access on-line journal), is about far more than just reviewing Eduardo Kohn’s fascinating and fascinatingly odd book How Forests Think. Latour, using a conversational tone that at times annoying but still quite engaging because of its seriousness, positions Kohn’s book among as a tiny little part of a broader movement to equip social scientists with new shift toward ontology and finding methods for studying things like nature (i.e., these human-nonhuman carpets of existence).
Latour is an interesting choice to review the book because Kohn — armed with Pierce and semiosis — dishes on good old actor-network theory. Now, it was my thinking that Latour had sort of left behind that old theory-not-a-theory, but in this essay (posted only days…
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synthetic zerØ 
Kohn’s book is available on aaaaarg.org, should anyone wish to pursue these thoughts further. If you’re not an aaaaarg member, I’d be happy to share the pdf, and/or a membership invitation.
thanks for pitching in, be glad to share any and all related comments folks may have to share here, a bit of back history @ http://jeremyjschmidt.com/2014/03/10/eduardo-kohn-thinking-with-a-forests-thoughts/
Great, I’ll go look at that! Thought I’d also share the rest of the Hau forum on Kohn’s book from which the Latour piece is taken: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/view/12, including a reply from Kohn.
more the merrier, hey are you the Adam Henne who writes on Bookchin?
if so we’d be glad to share any such efforts here on syn-0 as we build our resources/community.
Oh hey, yeah! That was an encyclopedia entry ages ago, but he was kind of my entry into radical philosophy, if that’s the right word. I’m definitely hoping to join in this here community more, soon as I find some time and something useful to say!
great thanks we could use a hand (well many really but ya know), looks like we are going to read Guatarri’s 3 Ecologies if you’re interested might be a good/easy way into the mix.
http://darkecologies.com//?s=bookchin&search=Go
too little too late?
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2014/12/deforestation-puts-cultural-survival-of.html