Fables

It's interesting that there are so many fables in Latour--especially in Pandora's Hope, though We Have Never Been Modern is indeed one big fable. "Do You Believe in Reality?" sketches out the problem of skepticism over the years along these fabular lines, and "A Politics Freed from Science" sketches out in mythical terms the relation of politics to science and scientists:

By unwinding the adventures of Reason, we can imagine how it was before it turned into an unlivable chimera, a monstrous Big Animal whose unrest horrifies the masters even today. Needless to say, this is an attempt at archaeology-fiction: the invention of a mythical time when political truth-saying would have been fully understood, a world that was later lost through the accumulation of mistakes and degeneration (237).

The essay in other words seeks to see how reason worked in politics (through a reading of the Gorgias) in order to politicize science--since scientists would make politics external to science precisely by claiming reason isn't political. Reason, in other words, is not expert knowledge.

In true Nietzschian fashion (I am tagging this as I go: someday we can return to all these #Nietzsche-s), there's a lot of Socrates-bashing along these lines:

To see a political project through, with the crowd, for the crowd, in spite of the crowd, is so stunningly difficult that Socrates flees from it. But instead of conceding defeat and acknowledging the specificity of politics, he destroys the means of practicing it, in a sort of scorched-earth policy the blackened wreckage of which is still visible today. And the torch that set the public buildings ablaze is said to be that of Reason! (239)

The utterly non-Nietzschian thing here is that this does not describe war, but rather the state of peace and politics (which is why, by the way, Latour refuses to see the science wars as a war, and not as a political crisis for the sciences, which I think is an unbelievably brilliant move, killing off the "two cultures" bullshit--which, remember, is C.P. Snow's depressingly British, moralistic formulation--for good). Nietzsche was, after all, quite apolitical--unless you stretch him or modify him (sorry, Nietzschians).

Regardless, Latour goes on to outline a political reason that "cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge" (239), and reconstructing the original Body Politic by "simply taking positively the long list of negative remarks of Plato" (237). What's really interesting is that this all involves a reversal of the role of rhetoric (which, however, does not land him in an English department dripping with postmodern extensions of Sapir-Whorf)--something evident of course from Science in Action onward but something we haven't quite really remarked upon yet (except in terms of fiction). Socrates makes politics into rhetoric, and then his whole philosophical effort turns around deciding "what sort of knowledge rhetoric is" (239). Latour turns this around not by celebrating rhetoric and mobilizing it against Socrates' knowledge (a la Derrida in Dissemination--and everywhere else). Rather, he thinks rhetoric is first and foremost political, and therefore its relationship to knowledge (Socrates' focus) has less weight than its ability to shape reality:

The nonprofessional nature of the knowledge of the people by the people turning the whole into an ordered cosmos and not a "disorderly shambles" [Latour quotes Plato] becomes, through a subtle shift, the right of a few rhetoricians to win over real experts if they know nothing (240).

Latour is fine with this, even though that shift is the shift of the Gorgias as a whole, i.e. a shift made by Plato following Socrates, and altering the remarks of Callicles--Latour's hero--and others. He's so fine, he goes on to say the following, in an unbelievably refreshing reconsideration of Sophism, which does not just valorize it (Derrida again), but also makes the Sophist's point differently:

What the Sophists meant was that no expert can win in the public agora because of the specific conditions of felicity that reign there (240).

But then comes Socrates, who changes this around by divorcing rhetoric from the political:

After Socrates' translation, this sensible argument becomes the following absurd one: any expert will be defeated by an ignorant person who knows only rhetoric (240).

You have to read the whole thing to see how great this argument is, but one thing I want to take away from it all is that rhetoric is returned out of language to the sphere of politics. When so much literary theory is based on the linguistic turn itself, this makes possible some notion that language, after all, is not that primary, and that perhaps theory can be something other than the assertion of the primacy of language or language-substitutes (traces)--with the corollary that if language isn't primary all of theory collapses (as some theorists now feel, as they come under attack from Latour-like realists). Nor does this mean that we have to return to some notion of reference, as pro-theory people (who see it developing along a suspiciously straight line) might assume, and which leads me to think that perhaps most theory (this is the entire aim of de Man's work) is not even an effort to deal with the primacy of language so much as the effort to keep the referent suspended (something structuralist poetics did much better than any Foucauldian theory of discourses)… and that maybe a new consideration of the role of language is actually made possible by this Latourian position, beyond postmodernism.

Anyway, rhetoric is returned to politics, and thereby reason is never allowed to become apolitical, in this vast sort of alternate history Latour sketches out by reading the Gorgias against its author and main protagonist. And this fable, this counter-dialectic (in all senses), shows both the real state of politics and the real role of reason, by narrating how a specialized form of it "was kidnapped for a political purpose it could not possibly fulfill," (258), and turned, now, into the banner under which anti-political politics of science can mobilize.

In other words, the fable ends up as policy. But how did this happen? Like in "Do You Believe in Reality?" and We Have Never Been Modern, these fables--which suspiciously look like histories of ideas--are turned into those powers or punctuations (as Law calls them) which need to be undone by ANT. I guess Latour is thinking that as long as he's dealing with powers (with Constitutions), he might as well explicitly mark his own narratives as accounts of powers, not forces--that way they can be analyzed by ANT when the time comes. In other words, these fables (which so often deal with big terms--like realism, materialism, research, science, critique) shouldn't be taken as networks themselves, but power-sketches, organizations of the punctuations--a nice inversion of the task of real rhetoric, which would then be ANT itself, coming along to undo and make specific all of the fabular.

But that's not the whole story. For in the case of something like Aramis, or Pasteur--which, while they are novelized (or at least the story of the first is), are also case studies (and Aramis is indeed a true fiction, as Latour says in his intro)--we have something like these fables not working only in this sort of punctuated sphere. They are, rather, narratives that easily slip into ANT itself. How? Precisely through what you were noting a long time ago, Evan, and I too noticed: allegory--the weird way that pasteurization and now even the Aramis project itself works exactly like a network, before ANT gets to it and messes it up (shows it to be much larger, etc.).

Now, my question here about the fables--which is, in a way, a sort of basic question of how to take these sort of more general essays and works by Latour (like WHNBM itself)--is not just one of trying to figure out what plane Latour is working on, the punctuated plane or the plane of the network itself. I'll leave it to Reassembling the Social to try and work on this more precisely, make it more specific. I'll also be putting up little entries that actually work out this concept of punctuation (or the operative shift from powers to forces and back again, which indeed ANT can account for--I think it is its most interesting concept).

Rather, I'm trying also to weigh what Latour's way of looking at things is concretely giving us in terms of ways into problems via his particular concepts. On this point, I think it is important to pay attention to the phenomenology of reading Latour, as it were--or what I'd prefer to call just the feeling of the concepts at work here. As we move into philosophical characterizations of Latour, through Harman, we are inevitably going to be more focused on the system itself, the coherence of the concepts and their interrelatedness: this (metaphysics) is all right, but its also not where we're at home, as literary critics. Where we're at home is, I think, in this sphere of feeling… feeling the contours as it were, of the notions, testing them out, using them, touching them in a way that philosophy--if you'll pardon my turning a conflict of the faculties into a conflict of the senses--can only try and get at by seeing (or characterizing as "aesthetic"), however much it tries to become pragmatic or turn the philosopher himself into a phronemos. This no doubt gives us a bit of an edge (which a more rhetorically minded philosophy like Harman's is itself somewhat regaining) in seeing these concepts as somewhat useless insofar as they are not also seen to relate to this experience of deploying them somewhat against the grain, or applying them to new cases or areas in which they might not (if you just viewed them in terms of system) really be seen as pertinent (in the semiological/structuralist sense of this word that I love--though pertinence also constitutes scientificity for Greimas and these same semiologists, let's not forget).

In short, this sort of (literary critical--and I stress both of these words as we move into essays on critique, though perhaps we might describe literary criticism more as analysis and reading, and thereby evade much of the anti-critical talk) sense of how concepts work allows us to see how they at times don't work, or work according to tendencies that are somewhat weird. Here--just to bring this all to a conclusion--we get the odd resemblance of these fables to something like a history of ideas… which is something that, if you view it in the terms of the philosophy/theory itself, you won't be able to see--since you'd rather be making sense of this precisely in terms of that system (ANT).

What I'm saying is that there is something in Latour--in this allegory-fable connection--that seems like it's too familiar for a system that claims to do what it is claiming to do. This, I'll say again, is something typical of philosophies of immanence, but doesn't just reduce to something like an incongruity between the "doctrine" and the "performance," which is then quickly made into a (bogus) refutation. It is an aspect of the way that Latour is opening up problems, and I just want to mark it here… as my sort of contribution to an account of how reading Latour feels (phenomenology of reading Latour).