Where I'm coming from

I thought it would be good to go over where I'm coming from and what I hope, generally, to get out of reading Latour and the others on our reading list.

Like you, Evan, I'm coming from literary criticism. I have a bit of background in philosophy but I'm mostly out to look for what can be useful for interpretation. This includes certain aspects intrinsic to interpretation like techniques or methods, but also extrinsic ones (if I can displace the old New Critical distinction, and use it not to apply to poems but to interpretation itself) like where to situate the critical act.

I generally like to work on the intrinsic, or reform interpretation and criticism from the inside. So I have a tendency to think the situation of the critic in terms of the act of criticism. In this, I follow Derrida, who, as you know, is important to me. But I also recognize a limit to this approach--and see Derrida as fraught when it comes to situating reading. In fact, I'd go so far as to say he is interesting to me as the culmination of a tradition of attempts to reform interpretation from the inside, from within--among other things. So I turn to Latour (and sociology and historicism in general, but here Latour) for a different take on where interpretation takes place. It is his achievement, I think, to try and find a new axis along which interpretation can happen, that thereby pushes it in a new direction intrinsically. I agree with him--what I have read of him already--fundamentally that criticism has to take a new turn in which it "adds reality to the object," as he says.

This might take certain aspects of what he is doing and push it back into the old disciplines, yes (what he complains about at the beginning of We Have Never Been Modern). But I think the project of taking criticism in a new direction has to proceed slowly, or rather through many changes in very diverse practices which we often do not perceive--and not the quick adoption of a new "theory" in literary theory's sense of this word (to which Latour's work assuredly does not amount), which ends up preserving all the old practices. In short, while I might be looking more for the possible effects of Latour's work on how we conceive criticism (and not so much at the work itself, as it were--though of course I'll take issue with it on its own terms), I'm definitely not looking for anything like Latourian literary criticism. I am looking for the right ways to "add reality to the object." And different ways--a task which entails looking at the history of criticism (and the alternative histories critics envisioned that directed their critical work), as well as reading Latour back through the long tradition of criticism.

Regarding Speculative Realism (of course, too simple a label for many diverse and interesting thoughts), I'd say similar things, though in general my interests tend just to be philosophical. My philosophical background has been in philosophy of mind and phenomenology, and am primarily interested in the new movement as it grows out of and contests the phenomenological tradition. Latour is interesting to me too from that perspective, via Harman. Of course I see this as related to (but distinct from) my first reason for reading him.

I mentioned that I have read some Latour before, but not as much as you, Evan. Just a few essays and We Have Never Been Modern. So I'm excited to go through the whole list. I'm more familiar with Harman's work, though it has been a while since I've read Tool Being and I had to read Prince of Networks too quickly during the summer.