Bruno Latour- "UFO en folie"

Very interesting discussion of being attached to, or possessed by, “others” or mediations, and thus of being “alienated”. The question is not can one cease to be alienated, but can one modify or<br /> transform one’s alienation. The problem is to take care of oneself and of one’s attachments, to pass from black magic to white magic. This idea of Latour’s, of making a better alienation, making a<br /> better fiction, sums up the positive project of my three great inspiring Nietzshean “intercessors” (Deleuze, Feyerabend, Hillman). It is also a good summary for the later François Laruelle with his<br /> philo-fiction, and perhaps also for Bernard Stiegler. Patrick Crogan has suggested that for Stiegler the problem is not so much to leave Plato’s cave in a gesture of scientific or epistemological<br /> transcendence, but that the organological move would be to make a better fiction. This may be another point of convergence between Laruelle, Latour, and Stiegler.<br /> <br /> In a similar vein, in REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL Latour says: “freedom is getting out of a bad bondage, not an absence of bonds” (230). I think it goes the same with mediations too. So making better<br /> fictions would correspond in his terms to creating or interposing better mediations, linking with better bonds, taking care of our attachments. This is close to Bernard Stiegler’s long chains of<br /> transindividuation, though Latour remains descriptive. However in his recent Gifford lectures he does give an ethical criterion: being a friend of Gaia, being attached to Gaia, tying one’s<br /> subjective individuation to the collective individuation of those who pay attention to and take care of the technical mediations that foster the ongoing individuation of Gaia as favourable to our<br /> individuation, taking care that it does not bifurcate in a direction hostile to human life, that it does not turn into a line of demolition.