Latour, Science and Technology

The bio-bibliographical account of the second set of writings

1. What Happened in 1992?

What happened in 1992? One answer is, “Epistemology happened.” What I mean was spelled out in the first document of this set, entitled, “The Black Hole: Epistemology and the Liberal Roots of Adult Education.” I wrote this essay over the summer of 1992. The essay itself was, in fact, an integral piece of the ’92 experience.

The second document in this set, called, “Coming Back to ‘the Bible’ From the Other Side of the Mountain,” is also absolutely integral to the ’92 experience, though written in 1994, two years later. It was a direct consequence of that experience.

            What follows are two further answers to the question The first is the simplest of all.: I decided to go back to Northern Illinois University for a doctorate and in fact did so. One sunny Saturday morning in June I arrived home after taking a final exam in a class on programming in the “C” programming language. I was feeling good. I knew I had done well. I liked my job at LanMind. All my questions about the future seemed settled. By Sunday evening of that weekend, however, I found myself feeling shocked and surprised as all of my confidence drained away. I felt as if I had to go back out to Northern Illinois University, this time to get a doctorate. I even told Ruth I felt that we had to move out to DeKalb, where NIU was located, two hours west of Chicago and had to do so immediately. We did not pack up and move to DeKalb, but, by January of 1993, I was again taking courses at NIU, one at a time, this time having been admitted into the doctorate program in Adult Education That is what happened on the outside.

What follows is an extended description of what happened on the inside taken from my journals:

What happened? ’92 happened. It began early Saturday afternoon, June 13. “It” lasted all summer long. (It has in fact, never stopped happening). For about two weeks I was engaged in a pros and cons calculation. Then I realized that I was no longer using the language of pros and cons. I was thinking in terms of faithful versus betrayal. Over the rest of the summer, I was in effect engaged on two tracks. I spent the summer writing a paper to present to one of the NIU faculty whom I had met, proposing what I intended to do with the program. It was primarily a test of whether I could articulate to someone else what was driving me.  At the same time, I was keeping a journal describing the furious struggle going on inside. I’ve never shared anything from that account with anyone.

            The first entry in my journal about what had happened occurs exactly a week after it began, on June 20. Here’s how it begins:

            There is a voice in me saying thing like: “I will die if I cannot get back into the conversation about ‘epistemology,’ meaning the ‘textures’ and functions of knowing in living.” This voice, the philosopher, is saying, “I am dying. I am starving. I am feeling desperate, alone, suffocating. I am having a hard time breathing.”  “It” is reminding me of the experience of ‘calling’ I had in Tubingen, the deeply energizing, integrating sense I had that I had been called to let my soul become a battleground for the struggle over the truth claims of Westminster versus the claims of ‘liberal theology.’ At that moment, sitting at my deskin Tubingen, it was as if a deep underground stream had suddenly picked me up and was carrying me down a mountain. It was exciting, and scary. It carried me down and deposited me, three years later, in Chicago, in 1968, on the beach of the world, this world.

            In 1992 That voice acquired a name, Alessandro, the protagonist of a novel I had read, A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin. It was the voice of adventure, life, energy, wonder, vision, play, imagination and excitement – not the voice of a dry pedantic academic.

            There was another ‘voice’ in me, another will, that dictated the choice to stop pursuing a teaching position and pursue advancement at DCFS and then led me into a computer career, to the program at DePaul, that now challenges and questions the philosopher’s project of returning to doctoral studies. This is the voice of sober reasoning reality, that speaks in the name of prudence and limits and caution, the voice of a great friend. This character gets caustic and cynical about the philosopher and regards him as quixotic, living in a fantasy world; he gets irritated and disgusted. He is the voice of the thousands of demons’ swarming like flies, buzzing, suffocating, drowning me in a heavy choking cloud of dread, fear, weariness. “You’ll never make it. You will make a fool of yourself.”

Meanwhile, Allesandro is fighting for his life. He is obsessed with epistemology. “Epistemology” as he uses this cold word, is the voice of my soul. In fact, Epistemology, capitalized, became my “baptism” name. Another feature of this ’92 experience was that I felt as if had been struck dumb. The image that came to me was of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, who was struck dumb until the baby was born, for doubting the promise of the angel to his wife Elizabeth, that she would have a son. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had not been struck dumb! What did happen, however, was that “words moved.” From below, as the Word. Instead of being down below, the Rock or on which I stood, words moved up, as means, as “media,” not inert, not lifeless. And, another feature that has also remained as a vivid part of the experience, I felt as if I had put down “my anchor” into “the murk,” a dark life-filled swam, in contrast to the anchor to which I had been attached up to this point and which was stuck, holding me back whenever I tried to move forward. Finally, one more feature which belongs to this experience as vividly today as it felt then: the whole experience held imperative force

July 7, one month later, a short entry provides a concrete example of the kind of knowing, or epistemic, I was now after. Ruth had heard the Harvard psychiatrist, James Gilligan, speak. He was talking about working with prisoners on death row. He said, “compared to the tragedies that I see and hear daily in the worlds I am bringing back a report from, the abstractions of the ‘social sciences’ are a pale imitation of reality like the shadows of Plato’s cave. …only the horrors described in Thucydides and the Bible map with fidelity the universe of human violence as I have seen it.” 

July 13. “I hear the waves crashing against the rocks and shoals of harsh, hard reality and I fear for the strength of the frail spirit to keep me moving.”

By July 17 epistemology had become the river of my soul, the same river that rose up inside in Germany and took me on a three-year ride down the mountain and out onto the shore of the world in Chicago in 1968, with my whole being wide open. That same day I wrote that it “has turned into a swamp at times in which I have floundered, started to drown, get sucked under…. But,” and here I “chanted the heroes”: Wallace Stegner, Andrew Brink, Iris Murdoch, Garry Wills, Nasty Girl, Manon of the springs, Weizenbaum, Winograd, Wendell Berry, Lewis Lapham, Rosaldo, Sharansky – a community sustaining me.

July 18 I wrote: “I was drained and exhausted, struggling against the demons. Now I feel the sails fill, I feel a lift, I feel the powerful thrust through the water, the river of life I share in. I must not ever allow myself to be cut off from that surging source.

Of the “work” I was contemplating returning to by giving up my job to go to NIU I wrote. “This work is a gift. I do not own it. It is a share in something larger than myself. I must ‘hold it lightly,’ a phrase I learned from Ruth. I must let it be nourished, take time to water it, renew it, feed it. … The violence of the spirit, anguish, pain; the indomitable spirit of Sharansky, the tears, laughter, humor; the exuberance and fear of Grace Paley’s children; the awesome approach of the two characters in Brink’s novel; the outrage of John Fry; of the American Indian Movement; the cold, calculating bigotry and malevolence of the murderers of Cheny and the other two in Mississippi; the stirring power of Martin Luther King’s words. We have an impoverished epistemology when there is no room in it for learning courage, determination, loyalty, generosity of spirit, joy, vision, responsibility, tenderness and gentleness as well as toughness and strength … the capacity for self-deceit looms larger here, the capacity for babble at one end of the continuum and utilitarian denial at the other, especially when it comes to this arena; the capacity for self-righteousness, for arrogance, for pride, for violence! 

            In late July I came across this: “Structures of feeling differ from such concepts as ‘worldview’ and ‘ideology’ because they are just emerging, still implicit, and not yet fully articulate. Instead, they so tightly interweave feeling and thought as to make them indistinguishable … thought as feeling and feeling as thought.”[1] I knew immediately I had stumbled on a blaze, a way-marker.

            August 30, a Sunday. I write: “Epistemology is the center of the lostness of our age.” A week later, Labor day weekend, Ruth and I drove up to Old Mission Inn, a one-hundred-year old hotel a few miles north of Traverse City on a peninsula jutting up into the lake, a marvelous place for a family reunion. We were scouting it out. Over the next years we celebrated two rich reunions there. I sat on the porch that evening and wrote: “My vision is being assaulted… a spiritual battle is going on, a battle over a vision.” The lynchpin.of that battle is the belief that the crisis we face globally is in part epistemological, that epistemology is at the core of the global future.”

I was acutely aware of how pretentious I sounded. This thing, I wrote, “is a matter of faith. Faith in what? In a vision, a purpose, not really faith in something but faithfulness to a commitment, to a project, a ‘cause.’ a work started, a matter of faith in the sense that it is not a matter of proof, “it’ being the validity of my hunches, the legitimacy, relevance of my interest, my sense of things, the Alessandro obsession, the impulse. It is disturbing to use religious vocabulary – calling, vocation, faith – disturbing because I feel the charge of idolatry, of investing something temporal with ultimate importance and weight. Is that what I am doing, or is it by conceding that it is a matter of decision [ faith] not proof, not certainty, that I am avoiding the charge of hubris? Isn’t it the “Protestant principle” and the modesty of Erasmus and the humanists cited by Toulmin, Ruth’s ‘holding lightly,’ – aren’t these the same thing?

I also find myself conscious of a sense of stewardship, that my project is being done on behalf of others, as a representative of? I am very strongly aware of a sense of inevitability, but these sensations and awareness bring to mind Greek religious sensibilities of destiny.

What I sense from this weekend is, among other things a need to take this calling seriously as a calling – going back to the high school experience; that this is a corollary of the realization that this is not a matter of proof. It is a personal vision that I am called to live out and be faithful to … a destiny that I cannot escape or run from; that my own experience, these stepping stones of calling are the seeds, the source, the wellspring, the compass, the clues, the ‘signs’ [keyword]”.

            On the way home from Traverse City Monday when we stopped in Muskegon I wrote, “the volume has been deafening on the vocation language …wrestling with the angel.” Later on, I describe the struggle over “calling” in terms of owning “a sense of fusion of personal and collective purpose without succumbing to righteous, arrogant, pretentious, pompous violence and dogmatism,”

            Wednesday, September 9, drinking coffee in a Starbucks Café on the north side, looking out the window at the wet raining grey morning before work. I wrote: I feel energy and confidence and relief. No good reason. Yesterday morning I woke up with a vague sense of despair, a sense of helplessness, powerlessness. Wild swings of mood. One ingredient of the energy- the sheer weight of miles of sand, beach, stone, crashing surf, rain, driftwood, bluff, trees, tangled thick meadow growth, vivid colors of grasses and flowers in the wet rain on South Manitou Island.

Another source is the sheer astonished delight at how Stegner’s biography of Powell is turning out. Astounded at the suspense, the interest, the breadth of ideas and perspective coming through pages about government surveys, outcroppings of detail about land I know nothing about. Important, important, important. themes – home-grown, soil-grown cooperative vision, science, system.

            The intensity with which I was fleeing from “epistemology,” the word, even as “it,” this word, was taking possession of me comes through in an entry a few days later. On the one hand there is a “glimpse of the way in which my personal battle is fusing with a sense of being part of something larger.” Then, in the very next sentence, comes this: “I fear suffocation, solipsism, isolation, loneliness, idiosyncrasy and have fled my fate, fled from epistemology, fled the ivory tower, the stacks’ dead air, only to land in another suffocating constricting place constructed of computer parts – fleeing, fleeing, fleeing from death, from standing outside looking at the life going on around me as a stranger, a ghost.”

            A little later I note that “hovering above these musings is the cosmic warfare of fundamentalists of all stripes who need enemies, who wage war between good and evil. Hovering above my consciousness, almost out of view is the presence of evil, Niebuhr, Gilligan, Arendt, Sharansky. On the one hand I find myself insisting on the reality and presence of evil against the whitewash of technology and science and rationalism and liberal optimism and Peale positivism. On the other hand, I find myself terrified of the jihad, the arrogance and self-righteousness and fury of Christian soldiers or soldiers of any other stripe who can cheerfully destroy to save.”

            Still later I recall an experience I had at Bible College. I was part of a quartet on an evangelistic trip to North Carolina. Usually I just played the trumpet, but this time I was the preacher. When I finished my friend Jon Chaffin began mouthing to me furiously from the front row to give the invitation. I was petrified, and refused, and simply sat down instead.

            In early October, a few days before I attended the annual fall retreat held by NIU out at the Lorado Taft Field Campus on the Rock River, I had one of the most vivid experiences of this love/hate relationship towards “epistemology.” “I twist and turn and try to escape its clutches – like Richard Pryor, talking to his pipe.” I had just listened to his brutally honest “comedy” account of setting himself on fire freebasing. I wrote:” Epistemology is a six-syllable word. There are charged words, like “sex.” There are colorless words, like “procedure.” Words or phrases can become threadbare with use, like “love.” they can also become loaded with explosive meaning like “pc” as in political correctness. Epistemology is a non-word for most people, or at best thin abstract, neutral, grey, uninteresting. But words can acquire power, magic. Words can cast spells. The word epistemology started haunting my consciousness over thirty years ago, drifting in and out at first over long intervals. then it began to obsess me. It began to come after me. I would find myself talking to it, the way Richard Pryor talked to his seductive pipe full of coke. And it began to talk back, the way his pipe would talk back to him, in whispers, in sharp reminders. “Hey, I’m still here. You’re neglecting me.” The word has now become charged with the force of a black hole.

From my perspective today, writing in 2026, the German experience liberated me from a politically fundamentalized version of Christianity that, in its extreme form, has split planetary humankind in two, between the eternally saved and the eternally damned, an ultimate form of what we tend to refer to so glibly today as “inequality.”

The “’92 experience,” what happened inside, was felt in its most intense form that weekend. It has, however, continued, as my journals show, over the next weeks, months and years, and continues today. Again and again, when I have felt lost, disoriented, as if I had lost the scent, I have eventually found myself back in ’92, listening to the underground stream of my soul. ’92 turned out to be the beginning of a positive project of healing, healing that split, driven by a vision of what I describe today as a project of planetary demogenesis and which is represented for me by such figures as Jonathan Z. Smith. Kate Raworth, Bruno Latour. In 1992, it was Phyllis Cunninham who represented, who incarnated democratic citizenship most palpably and concretely. For Phyllis, Adult Education was education in citizenship. Phyllis, like Greg Coler wanted power, not for its own sake, not for domination, but for the purpose of engendering and nurturing democratic citizenship. That is why I felt I had to go back to NIU, because I knew I needed help to break the spell of the media technological revolution I was caught up in. It was crystal clear by 1992 that there was already a fight taking place over who was going to own, to possess, to control this new form of power.

The first “public” expression of the 92’ experience was a document I wrote that summer putting into words a statement of what I intended to accomplish in the doctoral program at NIU. It would be a test of whether that initial ’92 experience was a mad impulse or not. That document, “The Black Hole: Epistemology and the Liberal Roots of Adult Education,” became the programmatic statement for this second set of writings, all of them written, and several of which I presented at conferences or other events, including the dissertation which I completed in 1997.

            The purpose of “The Black Hole” essay was to challenge certain “liberal” practices and self-understandings of Adult Education in the name of democratic citizenship. “Liberalism” has become what I call a “trickster” word and with it “epistemology,” by which I mean our relationship to cognitive power, the dangerous and wonderful gift that makes us human beings.  This was the reason for approaching Adult Education through the philosophical lens of epistemology, which has to do not with just knowledge, or information, or data, but with the human experience of being knowledge-creators, or better, knowledge co-creators, which is what it means to be a citizen. (See later essays on Jonathan Z. Smith and the essay on Jediah Purdy’s “A Tolerable Anarchy.”)  Here is how the essay begins:

Epistemology has been, until recently, like a black hole.[2] Black holes absorb all the light that hit them so that they appear to be nothing more than a void in the sky, remote, irrelevant, uninteresting except to specialists. Epistemology, likewise, has been almost a non-word except to philosophers. Furthermore, those who get involved too deeply with epistemology tend to turn inward on themselves.[3] On the other hand, I would contend that epistemology is like a black hole in another way, in that there is an enormously dense concentration of powerful significance and meaning massed behind the word, a “mascon.”[4] This paper is an attempt to begin opening up the importance of epistemology for adult education.

The Adult Education Association defines its purpose as “to further the concept of education as a process continuing throughout life . . .” (Knowles, 1962, p. 219). Northern Illinois University says that the “central idea of adult education is that conscious purposeful learning should be a lifelong process for everyone” (Information sheet for doctoral degree candidates). Learning is about knowing. Lifelong learning is about lifelong knowing. Adult education has tended to be seen, in its simplest sense, as being about the acquisition of knowledge by and the dissemination of knowledge to adults. But what is “knowledge”? 

Adult education as an organized enterprise can no longer, if it ever could, take for granted what is meant by knowledge, not in today’s world, especially, when what is meant by knowledge and knowing, when the whole wide universe of knowing activities and behaviors, is the subject of intense interest on the part of a growing number of individuals and groups in a widening range of academic disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, physics, neurology, biology, computer science, literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, as well as outside the academic world.[5]

Epistemology as knowledge about knowing has long since spilled across the boundaries of academic philosophy and has become an issue in the self-understanding of every academic field of study and discipline.[6]

[1] Renato Rosaldo, the author, was an anthropologist who had done fieldwork with his wife in the Philippines among headhunters. In his first work he tried to understand why they hunted heads, but could not make sense of their answers, which had to do with their feelings. Several years later his wife died in an accident, falling from a mountain trail. He discovered his mourning was turning to anger, anger at her, and he began to rethink his efforts at explaining head-hunting on the basis of anthropological theory.

     [2]One indication of a new kind of attention to epistemology is the collection of essays in Feminist Epistemologies.

     [3] Stephen Toulmin warns at the outset of his study of human understanding of the “continual risk of being trapped in an intellectual hall of mirrors” (1972, p. 2).

     [4]The National Aeronautics and Space Administration invented the term “mascon” to refer to a “massive concentration” of matter below the lunar surface after it was observed that the gravitational pull on a satellite was stronger in some places than in others. I owe the discovery of this word to Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry, New York: William Morrow, 1973, p. 44.

     [5]One outcome of this interest has been the creation of a new field, cognitive science, with participants from philosophy, psychology, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience. See Gardner, 1987. For an extremely important critique of the “cognitive revolution” by one of its founders, Jerome Bruner, see his Acts of Meaning. Bruner argues that the original revolution has been diverted, “technicalized.” His essay is the beginning of work on “a renewed cognitive revolution” concerned with “meaning-making.”

     [6]Thomas Kuhn’s impact on the academic landscape is one indication of this near universal attention (Kuhn, 1962).