Latour and the External

Largely due to our conversation on Friday morning, I have been thinking a great deal about all of the readings we have done and the relationship between external information and a kind of internal working relationship with this information. Your description ,almost spherical, which represented an approach that seemed to encompass the whole spectrum of ideas covered, helped contextualize and define a lot of the things rumbling around in my head. I have mentioned before that in doing the readings I place myself, perhaps a little more accurately, in this world. It is at once a set of tools or 'useful ideas' but this implies that these are external devices to be used in the construction of my internal Frankenstein or Metroplolis 'witch.' In reading the beginning of Latour I tangentially have been thinking about the definition of epistemology, and how this relates to all that we have read in the past year and a half, and this notion of knowledge connected with belief and how that might interrelate. So loosely, there are these external ideas which we have been ruminating over that become connected with my belief system in a culling process that then act as new internal conceptual base from which to begin from. So my departure points are moving as I assimilate Mills, or Harvey etc. I sensed with your description there is even more at play here but I need a little more reflective time with this. Latour with his reference to the nonhuman existence outside the 'cave' is a different take on this concept of the external or maybe not. Given that say there is a freedom of thought in this space and possibly the readings indeed have been coming from a somewhat enlightened place then using them to build a core knowledge/belief base makes sense. Ideally, like you had mentioned, we can put these things to use without 'reifying' them in the process.