The “Political Ecology” of Bruno Latour

Chapter 7 is an overview of the work of the French thinker, Bruno Latour and how his recent thinking and writing seems to align well with those thinkers who place themselves in the camps of ecomodernism and postenvironmnetalism. While Neyrat begins by espousing the importance and scholarly merit of Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, which allows a myriad of fields to further examine non-anthropocentric conceptions of how we represent human worlds aesthetically, politically, and socially. The rest of the chapter is a critique of Latour’s recent thinking in its promotion of technological development and what Neyrat describes as Latour’s “political ecology.” To do this, Neyrat performs a careful and critical reading of Latour’s essay, “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care For Our Technologies As We Do Our Children.” Using the story of Frankenstein as his vehicle, Latour explains our continual suspicion and distrust for technological advancements, that is, “our monsters,” with which we must come to terms with having to care for.