gistfile1.txt

Prince of Networks, http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_780980544060_Prince_of_Networks.pdf , page 89

For Latour all reality is political,
not because human power inexorably shapes the truth, but because truth
and reality are assembled through chains of actors in the same way that
bills go through Congress: slightly transformed and translated at each step,
and failing as often as they succeed. All reality is political, but not all poli-
tics is human.
referring to the ‘cosmopolitics’ of his friend Isabelle Stengers,
Latour speaks of a redefined political order that ‘brings together stars, pri-
ons, cows, heavens, and people, the task being to turn this collective into a
“cosmos” rather than an “unruly shambles”’ (PH, p. 261). It is no accident
that Latour’s book
Politics of Nature
is translated into German as
Das Parlament
der Dinge
: ‘The Parliament of Things’. We must liberate politics from the
narrowly human realm and allow prions and the ozone hole to speak as well.
Whether babble is reduced by reason (Socrates) or by power (Callicles), in ei-
ther case political
mediators
are eliminated. Latour’s position is not just more
politically attractive than this, but more metaphysically acute.