Evil Twins

(Note: I've added a conclusion).

I've been trying to find something like the anti-Latour lately, his arch-nemesis. There's good reason to believe it's Mike Davis.

That is, at least on the sort of public-intellectual level--where this bears on politics. We've already established the more scholarly anti-Latours: Foucault and (I'll add here) Carlo Ginzburg, Weber, maybe adding Jameson. But as these discussions tend to focus more on what results from method, though you've already brought this into the question of politics by talking about the despairing focus on "the system" and indeed the "conflict" view of history.

Here, however, I want to just focus on the bare-bones, flat-out, public-intellectual political statements (the whole incendiary work of the necessary condemnations, expressions of solidarity, warnings etc. etc.), of the nature of that closing remark in "Irreductions:"

I will not yield to them; I will not believe in "the sciences" beforehand; and neither, afterwards, will I despair of knowledge when one of the relationships of force to which the laboratories have contributed explodes above France ("Irreductions," 4.7.11; 236).

I want to contrast the sort of sentiment behind this remark (for it still remains too philosophical) with Davis' political statements in Ecology of Fear. Davis' position is, I think, laudable and somewhat similar to that of Latour's: he's focused on how the environmental community-action groups throughout Southern California have lost their focus by 1) splitting up and losing their allies in the pursuit of 2) holier-than-thou all-out ecological defense against the perversity of growth as such. What slips through this approach is the particularly Southern Californian urban growth-technique of sprawl, which overflows into nature so long as the development companies assure the people and the local governments (through a truly cynical process) that X acres of hillside--that is, the nice-looking but tract-housing-resistant parts of the land--will be "preserved" as "open-space" (the old attempt by business interests to secure the commons in 18th century England and 19th century Russia has now turned into its opposite: they now dole out free communal space in order to dissolve any commons). Sprawl takes these local battles and uses them against any larger anti-development movement, because the pro-environment people are always also against larger government intervention (who they see as providing worse-quality housing solutions)--they'd rather retain the populist position than actually oppose the forces involved.

This sort of impasse, Davis argues, has been resolved symbolically by imagining Los Angeles as a disaster-city. Always about to fall into the ocean, or burn up in flames, or be invaded by the Japanese (in WWII and after), LA and its environs is thought and managed as a site of the apocalypse: disaster, whether sprawl or nukes
(see the picture of a great sci-fi novel Davis references, and which I contrast to the Latour quote above), will have to come sometime--underneath the sheen there is the molten lava ready to erupt again out of La Brea, and there's no way to avoid this. Fatalism is dialed up and made into an aesthetic. Impasse is made only into the motion of tectonic plates.

Of course, on the more scholarly level, Davis' position here might also be that other Southern California resident's--namely that of Adorno. And so perhaps the opposite of Politics of Nature is really Minima Moralia. But I want to stick with Davis because he's more consciously Benjaminian or Simmel- or Ginzburg-like--that is, he digs up more and more bits of culture in order to do this, producing his little semi-convincing microhistories and registers of the symbolic. Here we return to the methodological level--which I think Adorno even in Minima Moralia can't quite duplicate, always pulled away from the particular as he is into the more abstract and principled level (thus he thinks all disaster really on the basis of one event--the Holocaust--and this in terms of an ultimate ethical injustice made concrete).

Regardless, everything reaches a climax in Davis' chapter on the Malibu fires. He here contrasts the handling of these fires--immense spending in order to save a few rich-people's homes, which are built basically as tinderboxes and placed in the most vulnerable locations--to the handling of inner city fires, which are actually (if not as frequent) much more damaging (in terms of lives, not property). The discrepancy is appalling. But Davis links this to that sort of fatalism: no one asks the state to come in and say people can't build their houses in the middle of chaparral on a hard-to-reach hill overlooking Zuma. People just give in and see it as destined to happen, because the politics are too complex.

Now, it's Davis' solution that seems absolutely anti-Latourian to me. For it isn't to analyze all the relationships and forces once more, and bring us back from this symbolic level to the actual impasses. It isn't to offer new strategies, however many political problems Davis isolates and however many recommendations Davis makes. It is, in a final chapter, to "move beyond Blade Runner," the arche-dystopia of LA, which, in the light of all this dispersed disaster, now looks a bit foolish. It isn't megacorporations that destroy LA, it is large corporations working in small but constant ways to make resistance weary, to grind it down in dispersed conflicts over land se, all the while working the politicians. The danger isn't that LA will become Bangkok, overcommercial and overindustrialized, but that Southern California as a whole will become Orange County--over-residential.

In short, the solution is to imagine a more accurate dystopian future. Latour would most definitely laugh at this: it's redolent of the scare-tactics of the Bush administration (terror level orange!), which really just were there to keep us complacent in the present. My point? Latour's remark about the nuke has to be taken against such a background, a background where the only solutions people have regarding the politics of nature (where weird sorts of eco-human relationships like the ozone hole proliferate) are dystopian or utopian (but only the latter in, again, a negative sense--and not many have the guts anymore even to think of these). It isn't a fatalism that characterizes this comment about a particular relationship of force--I think--but a need to provoke precisely a closer analysis that brings us back to the most immediate and non-symbolic problems. The problem, for Latour, is never going to be solved by linking the imagination to the present in the way Davis does: imagining a better dystopia doesn't do anything. It just expends energy in trying to attribute powers to forces, to say that impasses are due to groups with irreconcilable interests. As you have shown, Evan--this is the upshot of the emphasis on misunderstanding in Latour--people are always understanding each other in Latour. There's too much understanding, never too little.

So we don't need to go looking for all the bits of reality that show us, really, how the situation gives us a different dystopia than the one we really are imagining, in the way my parenthesis above argues for a linkage to the 18 Century battle over the commons. I meant that as a sort of illustration (maybe in a sort of Zizekian manner), but some might take it as a real causal attribution: what we're seeing on the hillsides of California just is the actual inverse of a process that happened earlier in the very same system or network. For Latour, this is as implausible as it is for me--who should really just be trying to give some thickness to the phenomenon in such gestures (Zizek- or Jameson- or Sartre-like). But such attribution makes up most of Davis' book. Davis = point out new symbolic locations to find violence that is political, to solidify the connection between politics and the symbolic; posit solutions that are better linkages between those two levels. Latour = follow networks to produce analyses of real locations, pare down the amount of symbols on the presupposition that everything is from the start political and so doesn't need my "revealing" of it as political to be, indeed, political. Visibility then becomes freed from this hermeneutic revealing--and we rethink what all the traditional political rhetoric of openness, of things being in plain sight, can now actually mean.

I'll conclude things here, with a question that really all this opens up: Doesn't this really provide a new, and better, critique of the Cultural Studies-type enterprise, of which the urban studies sort of extension (as if interpretive schools were little phone-lines and we can stand at the switchboard, linking them all or disconnecting them at whim) is the basis of the more sophisticated aspects of Davis' work? At recent conferences, we've seen the critique put in terms of Jonathan Culler's new book, The Literary in Theory: namely, that such multiplication of interpretation forgets the objects that we should be actually interpreting. It's intriguing that this theoretical problem then gets read on to Cultural Studies, as if it were just another symptom of the fate of High Theory--a classic de Manian move of which we should be extremely suspect (since theory only seems to expand in force when, as I've said before, it is a quite limited and frail adventure). Latour offers us a way out: it's all multiplication of interpretation that is the problem--insofar as this happens where there isn't a network. The Davis project is at fault not only because it involves "the comfortable old pursuits of image-counting and thematics" (Jameson, speaking not of this school of criticism but of all criticism in 1979, though I find it as relevant today--"Modernism and Its Repressed"), but also because these methodological failures are indeed comfortable and old. Interpretation doesn't do anything new, doesn't give us any new connections, when it tries to simply multiply them before checking whether they are real or not. Or rather, by multiplying them precisely to show that all the problems can lie on an ideological level, comfortably welded to an infrastructure that will change with the changes in representations. Latour isn't against imagining new aesthetics--that's clear. He's just against the sort of co-optation of that artistic function by critics, which makes the latter think that if we imagine better dystopias, we're actually getting somewhere. One could say he posits an absolute difference between the aesthetic and critical act, restoring to the former its creative function, and lancing off any of its sort of negative valences that come from the out-of-steam latter. He might then have little to say about satires (unless by the scope of their vision they give us interesting new networks--perhaps Swift then falls in there, or the satiric aspects of More). However, he certainly has a lot more to say about why literature and art doesn't have to merely represent or symptomatize some sort of imaginary in order to be effective.