Books, Papers, and Stained Coffee Mugs

“The infrequently read second half of Pasteurization, ‘Irreductions’, contains a striking philosophical set piece: Latour describes driving from Dijon to Gray in 1972 when he is so beset by what he called an ‘overdose of reductionism’ that he is compelled to pull over. Gazing at the blue winter sky like Sartre’s Roquentin at the chestnut tree, ‘for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and set free’. The lesson he draws is simple: ‘nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’.”