Present!

This seems like a useful exercise. I will hopefully get more directed and succinct as we move on to the actual texts, but here's a provisional attempt at self-definition.

I would say our common ground is an interest in academic literary criticism and its history, and also in the ways that literary criticism has been inflected, affected and contested by various other disciplines and styles of thinking and writing. For you, that means primarily philosophy (and, within philosophy, phenomenology and deconstruction); for me, so far, it means sociology and history. And I think both of us are attracted to Latour (correct me if I’m wrong) not just as a theorist to absorb for our own use, but as someone who might help us get a purchase on what actually happens when literary criticism interacts with other disciplines and traditions in this way. In other words, Latour offers us something on a meta-theoretical level: he tries to explain the way science and technology secure allies and translate interests from other fields in order to create some new, solid and durable “reality.” And over the course of time literary criticism has also found new allies, and translated interests, and had its interests translated in return. So Latour might help us understand how this has happened, and how it might continue to happen in the future. (Perhaps this is what you mean by “taking criticism in a new direction”; the question is whether Latour’s work can provide that direction or just help us describe it.)

But other theories — like, say, Foucault’s — could help us understand interdisciplinarity, and still others — like Jameson’s — could help us understand the effect of social environment on criticism. What Latour adds is this interest in solidity and durability — a practical emphasis we’d be less likely to find in, say, Foucault or the New Historicists, who do sometimes speak as if it were only human beliefs and ideologies that kept reality in place (making them “correlationists,” to use Quentin Meillassoux’s term, I hope correctly).* So it seems to me that Latour’s method would be most useful to describe those critical movements and tendencies that have themselves been most durable and influential: e.g., Aristotelianism, the New Criticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc. Latour allows us to think that these movements might be durable for a reason — that is, there is indeed some reality to them — without us necessarily having to choose one superior reality to explain all the others.

What I am hoping for from Latour is a way of reading sociologically — “externally,” in your terms — without falling into materialist reductionism on one side or correlationist idealism on the other. That is, I don’t want to see things like value judgments or interpretations as mere reflections of social conditions, but I also don’t want to see them as free acts of subjectivity that heroically transcend their historical context. I want to see how critics and schools of criticism have interacted, and why some triumph over others, without reaching for the familiar explanations derived from Kant and Marx. In other words, I don't feel like I need Latour to help me construct interpretations or make judgments, but I may need him to help me see why some judgments and interpretations have lasted, while others have fallen by the wayside.

Also, I must admit that I’m seduced by Latour’s prose style: so straightforward and so rhetorically ambitious at the same time, and with such great examples (many of which I hope to catalogue here). I can’t help but hope a little of that mojo will rub off on me.

*This interest in durability is also found in Pierre Bourdieu, my own previous theoretical hero, but he attributes everything lasting to the habitus: a durable set of dispositions inculcated in the body. This, not some "reality," is what leads us to view the world in the same way over and over again, as well as accounting for the incredible homogeneity among class fractions. All of which makes him, I would say, a realist w/r/t the physical world (the body is indisputably there, and gets impressed upon/marked up by powerful forces) and something like a correlationist w/r/t the social world (the world is nothing but will and representation). He accepts, in other words, the Enlightenment split between nature and society that Latour does away with in We Have Never Been Modern: he just doesn’t have anything much to say about the “natural” side. But we can return to this issue later, maybe.