Latour and New Historicism

I take your point that, in my first post, I ignored what is surely the most obvious thing to strike almost any reader of Guerre et Paix des microbes: that it discusses nonhuman actors (the microbes) on the same plane, and using the same analytic terms, as it does human ones (the Pasteurians, the hygienists, the physicians, et al). Partly it may be that I’m already used to this bizarre trademark move of Latour’s from his other texts, and I was in fact struck by the fact that, in G&P, he mostly does talk about human agents, with the great exception of the microbes. Leaving aside the possibility that he just hadn’t fully developed his theory of actants yet, I think Latour stays away from multiplying nonhuman actors in this book because he wants to make a strong case for how novel it was for Pasteur to introduce the microbes into political discussions in late nineteenth-century France. In other words, if he focused on how many other actants there are that somebody might have introduced, he would fail to make as strong a case for the effectiveness of the Pasteurian strategy.

(And by the way, I absolutely agree that “this perfect case of Pasteur and his microbes sometimes ends up passing over into an allegory for Latour's irreductions.” There are plenty of times when terms BL uses to discuss Pasteur could equally well apply to himself. E.g. this passage, on Pasteur’s movements: “Wherever we expect him to pursue the development of a science in which he will have some success, Pasteur chooses not to pursue this fundamental research but to step sideways in order to confront some difficult problem that interests more people than the one he has just abandoned… [But at the same time] he was faithful to a single problem, that of distinguishing the agents involved” (69); and a page later, when he speaks of “the transversal strategy that seemed to become ever more imperious as he reached the end of his course … to work on the whole of society” (70). The parallels with Latour's own course through the academic disciplines should speak for itself.)

If you don’t mind, I’d like to delay the discussion of Latour’s role vis-à-vis sociology — and also vis-à-vis Marxism which, I’d like to remind us, is historically partly coextensive with sociology: i.e. there have been many Marxian sociologists, and Marx is frequently taught in sociology departments — until we have a little more evidence; certainly by the time we get to Reassembling the Social I think his views w/r/t various different sociological schools will be clear. I promise I’m not dodging your question, which is actually very close to my own “interests” — just buying myself some time.

Instead, I’ll pick up on your fruitful parenthesis about Latour’s use of narratives — even fictional ones — and the New Historicism. You’re quite right that Latour is “trying to admit new sorts of groups” into sociology, although one could equally say that he’s trying to disqualify others, or at least ignore them (he’s noticeably uninterested in classes, for instance). You say “it's only a narrative that will recover these other ‘groups’” and, a little later (and even better) “we narrativize to reactivate certain groups.” This is exactly right, and what’s going on in Pasteurization does seem very close at times to the New Historicism (or, more accurately probably, to Foucault, whose work lies behind all New Historicist practice). You said that “these new groups are people like the hygienists, who disappear from the accounts of power, the narratives of conflict.” First, a slight caveat: according to Latour, the hygienists weren’t missing from “the accounts of power,” they were recorded as consequences of Pasteur’s discovery: Pasteur discovers microbes, and society is changed by the gradual repercussions of this epochal discovery (what Latour elsewhere criticizes as the “diffusion” model). So Latour is not adding anything to the record, the way New Historicists do, he’s just adjusting relations between objects, granting more autonomy to the hygienists than some previous historians have: “Where would the hygienist movement have gone without Pasteur and his followers? In its own direction. Without the microbe, without vaccine, even without the doctrine of contagion or the variation in virulence, everything that was done could have been done: cleaning up the towns; digging drains; demanding running water, light, air, and heat” (23).

But even if Latour were talking about some group whose role in the Pasteur story had been totally overlooked, I would say he still operates differently from the New Historicists. If the New Historicists (and not only them) would say Let’s recover forgotten actors, then Latour could say, Let’s invent or discover new actors/actants [is there a difference between these? I’m still not sure I’ve got a handle on the distinction] and see if we can extend the networks that we already master by doing so. Even if the narrativizing practices are basically the same, it seems to me that the gesture is still different. Latour is at once less “political” (less interested in politics, or ideology) than the NHs, and more political, in that he is actively constructing new polities of things whereas the NHs just look for more political explanations of what we already know existed. Again, whereas the NHs' supposedly radical recoveries show how things were more firmly fixed than we thought, how literature or culture has been determined from the outset by ideology or power relations, Latour's speculations about networks actually change things a lot more, but they're also more fragile and contingent: easier to argue with. (One of the most effective, but also most frustrating, aspects of grand Foucauldian concepts like epistème, dispositif, etc., is how difficult they are to alter or contradict.)

This difference is totally consonant with what I wanted to say about Latour’s swerve away from traditional sociology: the New Historicists are in fact more “sociological” than Latour in their desire to dig up new “social facts” that previous archaeologists had somehow missed, to make the historical record fuller and more factual than it used to be. Fuller, but less interested (and often, I'd venture to say, less interesting). To me, it seems like giving interests to more actors is precisely what historians and sociologists don’t do: rather, they believe there are just a few interests (economic, neurological, or cultural) and that these determine how all the smaller actors act. So when you say “we see that the sort of move away from ‘interest’ that you describe so well is done precisely to move away from a position that would have to give ‘interests’ to things,” I think we may actually be interpreting differently: I read BL as saying that things, like people, do have interests, in that they start from positions of inequivalence and are translated by other things (such as, but not only, humans). Again, I’m not sure I’m with you when you say that

perhaps we can see the move away from "interest" that you describe as a consequence, not of some opposition to interests held in common, but as an opposition to giving microbes "interests" rather than what they really need — reality.

Because “interests,” for Latour, are “reality” (or, at least, are real): they’re what lie between actors at punctiform instants, making them want to move. So I don’t see a “move away from ‘interest’” at all: rather, I see an extension of it, to things as well as people. The important feature, though, is that, as I quoted last time, “common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent” (65), and all the more so, I would think, when you extend the notions of “community” and “politics” to encompass nature and technology as well as human beings.

I feel like I might confuse the issue by going on, but I just want to make clear that I don't think Latour, at least in this early work, does away with the sociological understanding of the world as "interests." On the contrary, it actually seems to be one of the few sociological concepts he wants to keep (see his disparaging remarks, passim, on "legitimacy," "prestige," "power," etc.). What he doesn't like about conflict sociology isn't the emphasis on interests, but the insistence that these interests are only of a few kinds, and that actors always seek to destroy, rather than enlist, those with different interests. That's my sense of things right now, at any rate: I'm sure this will all become much clearer as we read on.