Remember the objects!

Okay, I've got my coffee and am ready to go. I'll write a response to your excellent first post, and another on scale and time in Irreductions. I'll make my apology for being so late in responding by way of remarking that it's interesting to refer to "Irreductions" as a separate book as we do (and it's not only us): after finishing it (after getting through Science in Action), I went back to reread parts of "War and Peace of Microbes," because I saw the former as something like an illustration of the latter. I saw it as this, rather than as an attempt to summarize or build/extract principles up out of the more detailed analysis (as Latour does in his other works). In other words, I found rereading "War and Peace" much more fascinating after reading "Irreductions," and saw why Latour so often refers to the essays as "Part 1" and "Part 2," rather than by their names. They're really interconnected, and this makes the book a much better introduction to Latour, I think, than any other--Science in Action, while clear, doesn't have the right stuff (too many particular examples/narratives), and We Have Never Been Modern is, for me, too much to take at first (I'll write more about this next week). That said, I'd actually advise people who pick this up to read the second part--"Irreductions"--first, because, like I said, you'll find everything there thickened or deepened then by the first part of the analysis.

But of course that doesn't make "War and Peace" (it's fun to shorten it this way and induce that confusion between Latour and Tolstoy, for the reasons you noted--and I might note here something I think I'm going to return to often, which is the strategy of deliberate ambiguity that Latour uses to get at his networks) a mere example, even if I am indeed interested in to what extent this perfect case of Pasteur and his microbes sometimes ends up passing over into an allegory for Latour's irreductions. Turning to your points, let me just say that we should remember the objects--here the microbes--and that Latour is constantly trying to produce some form of analysis that will not only be more adequate than sociology but will also grasp a level that irrupts when it gets applied to science. Or, since this can end up as an empty slogan ("Remember the objects!" like one would the Alamo), and actually discount the brilliance of what you're doing--which is reading Latour both against the grain and with it, in order to modify something like interest, or grasp it in a new way--I would say it's good to remember that as much as Latour is trying to decompose groups through that double move of 1) converting them into actants (which then have to be taken as a whole or as a network of smaller actors) and 2) considering them as misunderstanding each other (as you outline perfectly), he's also trying to admit new sorts of groups.

Before we get to things, these new groups are people like the hygienists, who disappear from the accounts of power, the narratives of conflict (we get something very close to a new historicist effort of recovery in Latour--and indeed also something like the "immanent" reading that Jameson convincingly describes them doing). Latour even goes so far as to claim it's handy to get fictional:

Even at the cost of a fiction, it is crucial to rediscover, at least in imagination, the crowds moving the mountain, so that we can understand later how the Pasteurians came to be their spokesmen and where regarded as the "cause" of the movement (23).

Given everything that Latour claims and will go on to claim philosophically--about retracing networks--that's a real risk he's taking. But it's necessary to try and make what is a description (a term he uses a little too often) into something more like a narrative (I'm trying to find his article "Fact and Fiction Writing," which might illumine this issue--I do hope we get into the immense problem of the status of fiction in Latour). For it's only a narrative that will recover these other "groups." And this, I think, is crucial for understanding where he's disagreeing not just with some types of sociology, but sociology as a whole. In fact, I'd actually argue he's closer to the Marxists on this particular point (though obviously farther from them in pretty much every respect), since Marxists aren't only out to describe things (Durkheim's famous review of Labriola misunderstands, and yet also understands, this precise point). And while I'm at it, I might say that Latour is also close to Marxists when they say, not just that real social interests are held in common, but that they are in truth held in common, or rather become more social to the extent that they become more real. That avoids the problem you sketched out a bit (insofar as it turns away converts "common" back into "social"), but it also inflects it down a line where, I think, a Marxist actually has room to possibly use something like Latour (let's extend networks) against what you're saying (i.e. that Latour has the Frankfurt School in his sights)--though he wouldn't get very far, of course, and is probably only saying something that sociology already says better (with the caveat that sociology in Latour's view still describes).

So, we narrativize to reactivate certain groups. But while Marxism does this (I'm claiming--and it perhaps only does this by becoming ambiguous, by giving us less knowledge--but this isn't something foreign to Latour either) it still only concerns itself with the same objects as sociology, and so this is the only similarity they have. And here's where we go beyond the people and towards objects. And this is where things really get interesting, because 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. Such a position we find in Pasteur's little note about what the bacillus wants:

"Urine is an excellent culture medium for the bacillus; if the urine is pure and the bacillus pure, the latter will multiply promptly" (82, my emphases).

Latour describes the significance of something here being excellent for the bacillus:

For the first time in the history of the world (a solemn tone is not out of place here), the researchers at the Rue d'Ulm were to offer these still ill-defined agents an environment entirely adapted to their wishes (82).

And while Latour wants to recognize this as what is really going on here--he wants to tak seriously the fact that scientists actually talk like this about their cultures etc. and are indeed actually describing what the objects themselves find "excellent"--he also realizes that we can have a better language for it than "their wishes." So, in short, I'm claiming 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.

Of course, it's also an opposition to a notion of interests held in common--you're exactly right about that. I'm just trying to track down the right origin of Latour's move here (though as he says it's probably wrong to do that). Where you're most definitely right is in emphasizing how, for Latour, "we cannot all be in the same place," or how we're all in different places and don't have any common position. Latour surely introduces this to describe social groups better. But again, we also, I think, have to say that this might have been introduced to describe how we don't stand in the same place as nature. Interests are what are between us there, too, and they're not just equally divergent, they're equally irrelevant (or, as you say, relevant only in terms of how they are translated). Such a picture indeed makes Latour the thinker of situations where--as you so nicely put it--there is that "temporary sense that 'everybody wins,'" and I think you are very right for tracing that sort of sociological theme in him. But he's also the thinker of situations where that "everybody" is made up of objects--and that makes things absolutely fascinating and absolutely weird. I myself am still trying to get a handle on it--so take this post not so much as a rejoinder (though I would like to see you respond to Latour's criticism's of sociology) as an inflection of what you said by someone who is himself trying to get familiar with that object-oriented viewpoint, saying to himself, even if it ends up sometimes as an empty slogan, "Remember the objects!"