Latour, Lyotard, and The Problematics of Legitimation

Freed, Mark M.

doi:10.1080/09697250500424361

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…[47] More pointedly, Mark Freed argues that, 'If the humanities … want to maintain their ability to interpret human experience, they will increasingly have to take account of the interactions between humans and nonhumans.' [48] Sustainability frameworks are an established provocation for design practice, Victor Papanek's The Green Imperative (1995) marking the broad articulation of the needs of the ecological environment in respect of design practice. [49] Australian design history currently incorporates a variety of theoretical approaches, but its established interest in aesthetics, materiality, visuality and the communication of meaning is yet to be widely challenged by a cross-disciplinary dialogue with environmental history and science.…”

Section: Of 8 15/01/2010 11:55 Ammentioning

confidence: 99%

Robin Boyd, Expo ’70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment

Barnes

Jackson

2009

Design Philosophy Papers

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This paper offers a critical reading of Robin Boyd's narrative of the Australian nation created for Australia's pavilion at Expo'70. The critique offered is from an environmental perspective, using this example to lead into a broader reflection on Australian design history's 'modernity problem'. We argue that although the examination of Australia as a socio-cultural context for the practice of design continues to engage scholars, the will to profess the existence of progressive Australian design has precluded significant examination of design's regressive effects. The current environmental crisis is, as Arturo Escobar argues, 'a crisis of modernity, to the extent that modernity has failed to enable sustainable worlds.'[1] Design is implicated here for its contribution to environmental degradation, as is design history for accounts that validate designers' development of concepts, processes and products that impose the unsustainable on societies. The latter is pronounced in Australian design history. When modernity and its cultural manifestations are understood as European inventions, admitting limited scope for cultural exchange, claiming historical significance for Australian design inevitably involves the uncritical application of imported principles.[2] The halting attempts to write Australian design history are mostly bound up in proselytizing for the values and benefits of the modern and eulogising designers' efforts to force change in the face of conservative cultural establishments and indifferent publics. Even the most recent treatments continue to be engulfed by discussions of derivativeness, marginality and uniqueness.[3] Elsewhere, however, the culture of 'peripheral' localities is seen to disrupt fundamental suppositions about the modern, challenging the totality and uniformity generally ascribed to it. A key text here is Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996).[4] Appadurai accepts modernity as virtually omnipresent, but sees its localised expression creating an assortment of corrupted, discontinuous and mixed forms. In this vein, Tony Fry argues the historical examination of the material, social and cultural effects of Australia's economic development "can and should provide useful and critical transformatory knowledges" in relation to the condition of modernity.[5] Following Fry, this paper explores the proposition that when the perceived unevenness of cultural transmission in modern design is set aside, engaging with Australia as a location for the expression of the modern, highlights unsustainable relations between ecological environments and design values, processes and production. Australia is a vast continent, but its capacity to provide for the style of human habitation pursued by Anglo-Europeans since colonisation is limited. This is especially the case for the burgeoning consumerist lifestyle supported by the activities of many Australian designers from the mid-twentieth century onwards. A critical historical consciousness challenges the purported benefits of design by revealing the eco...

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Section: Of 8 15/01/2010 11:55 Ammentioning

confidence: 99%

Robin Boyd, Expo ’70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment

Barnes

Jackson

2009

Design Philosophy Papers

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Friends or Foes of Nonhumans? The Place of Scientific Experts in the Philosophy of Bruno Latour

Antolínez

2023

Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change

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Bruno Latour has long denounced the constraints on political deliberation caused by the alleged impersonal objectivity of scientific discourse. However, throughout his career, the French philosopher has advanced some critiques of the role of scientific experts. With his proposal of the Parliament of Things, Latour expected to redefine the scientific expert as a translator for nonhumans in the general quest of integrating sciences and politics. However, the late Latour re-elaborated this alternative under the light of the new climate regime, which reveals that scientists are no longer able to translate the legion of nonhuman actors bursting into contemporary politics. This paper aims to give a recount of the Latourian assessment of scientific expertise, while also indicating another plausible redefinition of the scientific expert as a teaching figure. This is derived from the vindication of rhetoric and the pedagogical vein that traverse Latourian philosophy. At the end, there will be a review of three specific practices which exemplify that pedagogical role: cartography of controversies, art exhibitions and citizen science.

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Latour, Lyotard, and The Problematics of Legitimation

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Robin Boyd, Expo ’70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment

Robin Boyd, Expo ’70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment

Friends or Foes of Nonhumans? The Place of Scientific Experts in the Philosophy of Bruno Latour

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