Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Curved minds

Graham Harman says, in response to my last post: "I’m never convinced by the notion of Latour as a devious strategizer or rhetorician." Fair enough: it's a bit too Sokalian, and makes him sound too much like a sophist (in the colloquial, derogatory sense). But I happened to come across a passage just now in Latour's article "What If We Talked Politics A Little?" (2003) that obliquely addresses this very issue (I love it when that happens):

We have to be careful here so as not to draw the hasty conclusion that it is enough to be devious in order to utter political talk accurately. Unquestionably, politics is imposture; we are well aware that the virtue of autonomy can be secured only at the price of a fundamental vice, betrayal, both there and back; we acknowledged that lying — as opposed to the supposedly easy truth of faithful transfer of information — is an integral part of the work of composition; we know that expecting a spokesperson to "tell the truth," to be "authentic," amounts to killing the process of transubstantiation. However, this does not, for all that, mean that to be a good politician it is enough to lie, to be a phoney. That would be too easy. The Prince of Twisted Words would simply have replaced the White Knight of Transparency … One can walk skew, think curved, cut across, be sly, without necessarily drawing the political circle. It is not because they all differ equally from the straight line that all acts of envelopment are similar. "Curved minds" are clearly distinct from one another, even if they are all an object of ridicule for "straight minds." (153)

So perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that Latour is devious, but always in the service of enveloping something, of drawing a political circle, of catching something in his net. And in this he's not far off from the devious politicians who, as he sees it, are always so despised.

1 comments:

Michael said...

I feel a little guilty here--since it was my word "strategy" that kicked things off. But I'd say I meant something precisely like this--seeing things politically in the sense of requiring deviousness, just basic sorts of frankness about lying, about having other motives (or focusing a lot of other motives), I guess you could say, which doesn't make it lying in the end. When I used the term I was talking about how reading Latour made me think more on this level in outlining my dissertation--asking questions like "how many people do I need to convince?" rather than "is the idea alone correct?" It is important, though, to emphasize the anti-Sokal here, as you say. I didn't mean this deviousness to undercut reality, but bolster it, along the lines that you outline.