Forgetting/stupidity

It just struck me, looking over some articles and reflecting on Aramis, that indeed there it is better to start with Latour as a sociologist rather than as something else... as a philosopher (which is pretty much how I started grasping him), say, or as what I want to consider now: Latour as historian. Obviously history has a lot to do with the the ANT-Science-Studies-Latour project in general. But ultimately--as you, Evan, have reminded me in the past--the use of the black box is there to close off certain historical avenues and keep the field being investigated tightly bound to the movements and relationships of the actual actors (by opening other closed boxes others only peeped into). But in this sort of arrangement, you do end up with something more sociological, ultimately, than any history--don't you? Early on in Aramis, Latour says the following, as Aramis' network is being reconstructed (or constructed):

Our interviewees no longer even manage to recall who might have come up with the dream of PRT. They can't tell you what institutions were behind its development.[...] Of course, a historian of technology outght to work back toward that origin and replace it with groups, interests, intentions, events, opinions. [...] She would reposition Aramis "in its historical framework;" she would etermine its place in the entire history of guided-transportation-systems. She would go further and further back in time. But then she would lose sight of Aramis, that particular event, that fiction seeking to come true. Since every study has to limit its scope, why not encompass it within the boundaries proposed by the interviewees themselves?
-Aramis, 18-19

But there's also some connection here, I'd like to suggest, between something Latour says in the introduction to Pandora's Hope:

"But is science cumulative?" he continued with some anxiety, as if he did not want to be won over too fast.
"I guess so," I replied, "although I am less positive on this one, since the sciences also forget so much, so much of their past and so much of their bygone research programs [...]"
-"Do You Believe In Reality?" 1-2.

Don't we hear what Latour is saying in Aramis in another key? The lost networks can't in other words, be thought in any way as something like lost history. The "forgetting" here is not the same thing as the "forgetting of history," with all its sort of massive, catastrophic weight. This is what I find weirdest in Latour--the sort of realigning of affects that focusing on networks allows us. I'm going to come back to this in another post replying to your wonderful review of Aramis and its stress on the passions of research--something Latour, in a little two page blurb "From the World of Science to the World of Research," and at the end of Aramis itself ("The whole thing should have been a research project," 287) makes clear should be distinguished from the passion for science (though both, of course, are wrapped up in problems of the nonexistent modernity).

For now, I just wanted to note how forgetting here takes a sort of different form. In a Nietzschian way, it becomes both easier and harder to forget--essentially because its not so taboo. Obviously, this is nowhere near the sort of total, extremely active forgetting we have in Nietzsche--but fundamentally forgetting, even ignorance for Latour becomes... okay, because we're concerned only with action at a distance. So back in Aramis, something like the ignorant non-questioning merges with a more practical it-being-out-of-the-question:

For all of them [researchers], PRTs are beyond discussion: everyone wanted them; they had to be developed. There is no disagreement on this point. No engineer leaves open the possibility of mechanical uncoupling of cars. It's out of the question.
-Aramis, 19.

And somehow this has to be matched by a counter-stupidity that is just as okay. I was preparing another post, and I came across this quote I had forgotten:

"Always assume people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you're studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point when the thing is irresistible, when what you really want, yourself, is to take out your checkbook so you can, I don't know…"
"Buy a share in the Chunnel?"
"That's it, or even shares in the Concorde."
"Even in La Villette?"
"Which one, the first scandal or the second?"
"The second."
"Oh, the La Villette museum. I don't know; it's a disaster, after all, why not, it had to be tried. Never say it's stupid. Say: if I were in their shoes, I'd have done the same thing."
-Aramis, 36.

The pupil tests Norbert, and we're off having a different (I guess one could say, differently stupid [if you take this in the best sense] willing-to-forget) regard for history--which brings me back to my first point:

"Even in that business of the sniffer planes?"
"Of course, silly boy, you would have bought into it, and not because you're naive; on the contrary, precisely because you're a clever fellow. It's like the Galileo affair. You have to get inside it until you're sure: that one is guilty; he should be exiled, and even, yes, even fried a little, the tips of his toes at least. Otherwise, if you thick differently, you're a little snot. You play the sly one at the expense of history. You play the wise old owl."
-Aramis, 36-7.

That brings me round to innovation and utopia... two topics that will take up your last post.