The Flywheel of the Collective. Bruno Latour on Aesthetic Habits and the Practice of Sensibility

Abstract

This paper will consider the role that aesthetics, understood as the theory of sensibility, plays in Bruno Latour’s philosophy. Aesthetics is the keystone of Latour’s thought because it connects his peculiar metaphysical theory of effects as coming before their causes, with his view of how we come to accord moral respect to other beings, and finally with his conceptualization of political (and especially ecological) praxis. The paper will argue that the role Latour assigns to art and science depends precisely on their capacity to extend sensibility; that sensibility is the motor for the creation and the maintenance of the «collective»; and that it is always sensibility that provides the ground for political action, making it possible to generate the affects without which any issue would remain ineffective.