Each week the British newspaper The Guardian publishes a short section called 'The Digested Read' which is a satirical, mocking summary of a recently published book that has been digested 'in the style of the original'. Here is an effort to do something similar for the works of Bruno Latour...

the digested read... bruno latour

Death. War. Sex. Kaboom. I always make sure I get everyone's attention with the first few words – got to make them exciting and controversial, that's what I always say. Otherwise how am I going to get them to read another one of my articles on the same old stuff about how social theory only focuses on social relations and ignores technologies and the non-human. Sure it's always the same basic point, but at least I give you all a new buzzword each time, collectives, pragmatogonies, gatherings, actants, hybids, purification – I am a veritable goldmine of good ideas. Still they don't listen though, O if only they could all transcend their disciplinary shackles (like me). You know sometimes I really think I am the only one who doesn't worship at the altar of sacred human subjectivity. Even with all those diagrams I draw, they still don't seem to get it. But I soldier on – critique may have run out of steam, but I never will.

I do publish a lot of articles now I think about though. Perhaps it's because my writing style is so engaging and conversational – see the way I use contractions like don't and it's?  none of that formal academic prose for me like those other Parisian layabouts who call themselves intellectuals. And yet people still seem to cite Foucault more. How sad. Genealogies are all the rage these days I suppose – but as I tried to show you, you can't do genealogies of modernity if we have never been modern can you? Nobody likes an unveiler I guess. Such an ego some of those intellectuals have. Me, I'm not even Latour (wink, wink), I'm actually Jim Johnson, or Tom Thomson or something like that. I don't publish for the personal glory you see, it's all about the ideas. See how I use parentheses all the time? It's like we're having a cosy little chat you and me (so refreshing, no?).

Anyway where was I? O yes, I was saying how you moderns are so desperate to keep the spheres of nature and culture, human and non-human, social and technological apart they can't see the radical symmetry of it all. O why can't you just give those non-humans a little dignity? No matter how much it offends you you've got to abandon your cherished boundaries between subjects and objects. Nature isn't transcendent, society isn't transcendent... nothing's transcendent. Well maybe because I was the one who saw through it all, I might be a little transcendent, but that's it, nothing else. As I said in another one of my articles only baboons construct their society socially, without non-humans. Come to think of it, since all you other social scientists construct your understandings of society from the purely social, that kind of makes you baboons too! (Ha ha, see what I did there?) Perhaps in the end some of us are just more radically symmetrical than others.

the digested read, digested...

You're all objects to me.