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... the eikos of ecology ... - Bruno Latour
Let's begin with 'a glitch' as Lauren Berlant describes it: 'an interruption amid a transition' (Berlant, 2011, 198) - or, as a devotee of Lucretius and Ovid might prefer to define it, a swerve in the midst of a metamorphosis. All of which is a roundabout way of saying my epigraph is a typo. Let me explain. Toward the end of his 'Compositionist Manifesto,' in which he proposes that we replace what he describes as the predictable sledge-hammering of critique with a congenial practice of 'compositionism' that asks how well or badly something is made, Bruno Latour writes:
Everything happens as if the human race were on the move again, from one utopia, that of economics, to another, that of ecology. Two different interpretations of one precious little root, eikos , the first being a dystopia and the second a promise that as yet no one knows how to fulfill. How can a livable and breathable "home" be built for those errant masses?
(Latour, 2010, 488)
Setting up this etymological punchline a few pages earlier, Latour refers to 'the eikos of ecology' (Latour, 2010, 484). I have confirmed with the author that in both cases he meant to write the Greek word oikos (for 'house' or 'household'), which lies at the root of our words 'economy' and 'ecology.' What he actually wrote - eikos - is the Greek word for 'likely' or 'probable' in the Classical rhetorical sense, which should be distinguished from the post-Pascalian statistical sense. Rhetorical 'probability' concerns things plausibly expected by intelligent people based on experience, rather than events predictable according to some inscrutable algorithm; a likely story, in other words: 'that which looks to be true' (see Hacking, 1975; cf. Blumenberg, 2010, 82).
Let's harness this parapraxis - this mistaking of eikos for oikos , of likelihood for household, of habits of expectation for habitat - to an inquiry into the relation between what we perceive to be likely and where it is that we dwell . I want to investigate what spurs for thought and action that one precious little erratum may contain in excess of, or despite, Latour's designs.1
'Where we dwell,' in fact, gives too much away already:...