Reifing nature - Mike Michael

This returns us to Latour's advocacy of a strategic realism (infrareflexivity).

If what we aim to do is convince others via our polished representations, and

if part of this process entails the attempted inoculation of our texts against

the outrages of the deconstructionists who everywhere lie in wait, one option

is to evoke and invoke the real as energetically and cannily as possible. This

'real' could be the typically 'social' (e.g. interests, values, institutional positioning

and the like), or it could be the typically 'non-social' and 'nonhuman' .

It all depends on the contexts and exigencies - both social and non-social.

Thus to 'reify' the environmental crisis, animal suffering or human disease

and despair is perfectly acceptable when one's purpose is to enable and

encourage political action and to enrol others as political activists.

Mike Michael , 1997 - PP 39