...in the last post: namely that, if we take Latour's statement in We Have Never Been Modern about how "it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting" (WHNBM 76; Latour's emphasis), we might think time gets spatialized, and this would mean some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour would be overlooked. Now, these commonalities weren't necessarily in terms of an interpretation of time as nonspatialized, either. It is clear that while Heidegger holds something like this (crudely put, spatiality has its "end" in time--though we should also point out that time ultimately has its "end" in the destining of being, though Heidegger, rightly, would not see in this history any return to spacing... enter Derrida) because Latour holds that time and space are mere "frameworks" we use to describe the relations of force between actants (as I made clear last time, but here's just another quote to remind you: "If time depends on associations, associations don't depend on time," 141), it can't be on the issue of any "interpretation of time" that they might agree.
So what's the commonality? A commitment to subordinating time ultimately to something like practice--seeing time generated practically or through the practical. Now, I don't mean to say something stupid like, for Heidegger, time is a result of Dasein's projections, etc. This should be clear from my parenthesis above (time is historical). By "practical," I mean something different--namely that the emphasis falls on how it is always more like a framework than a form. So while the two systems are distinguished clearly--roughly we can say something like Heidegger takes time to be real and Latour doesn't (he takes trials of strength as real)--nevertheless both want to undo time as representable and make it into something like the contours of any and all action. (John Protevi in his Political Physics has a compelling chapter on this--"Philosophy and Leisure"--ultimately dealing with how philosophy has to be a difficult activity for Heidegger... and of course not just for Heidegger).
In other words, the similarity is in the sort of meta-level (that is, on the edge of the concepts and the systems, which are indeed formally incompatible on the issue of time) "critique of representation" (as Jameson aptly calls it--and we'll get more on this as he is supposedly writing a book on Heidegger) that I mentioned in the last post:
Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces).
I'm now just trying to say how this is indeed "less temporal"--in terms of time as representable unrepresentable, or form (Kant, of course)--but also "more temporal" than we might think--in that we find the position of Latour being similar to the position of Heidegger when it comes to de-representing time, among other things... that is, by bringing a practical emphasis--only most visible in Heidegger's privileging of phronesis over sophia--to bear on their conceptions.
I'll be clearer. I'm saying that on the issue of time, we can see a meta-level tendency to claim the following in both Latour and Heidegger:
There are not two problems of representation, just one (WHNBM, 143).
And this is because representation is dependent (if I can put it way too simply) on what reality does, rather than what it is--such that what it does is what it is. This might sound odd if one has a superficial understanding of Heidegger as "the thinker of being," but really it is only through the emphasis on doing that Heidegger recovers that question of is-ing (and this is what makes what he does something other than ontology as it has always been done). Now, if reality is, on the other hand, simply what it is, it becomes able to be represented (grasped) in two ways, not one: first, reality is delegated (the discussion of the figural and non-figural in "Where are the Missing Masses," is a great concrete discussion of this, anticipating for us various concerns of Aramis, though I'm obviously saying it underlies everything that Latour is getting at--and we've already talked about it at length in discussions of "translation"), and then reality is doubled over (as it were), folded to produce something other than delegation--something that indeed defines itself as non-delegation, an image or a non-reality (representation in another sense). This is why we can look inside the book (for characters) and outside it (at its "material conditions of production"--history of the book stuff): though Latour in his own readings (of the excellent Rick Powers) will emphasize the first, he is able to go "outside" the text with ease and in such a way that we could imagine him also looking at the production of the book "object" in the same way.
However, we might also look to WHNBM's concern with a "Constitution" as the main site of such a "critique of representation," for Latour uses the term precisely to stress the "delegating" aspect of representation. Latour is saying that a Constitution's purpose is to guarantee representation ("a constitution is judged by the guarantees it offers," 139) or allow delegation. But the Modern Constitution precisely sought to represent in such a way that it produced representation in another sense than delegation, so as to draw a line between what could be represented and what could not. He says the aim of the book is to allow amend this Constitution to allow the representation of things. But this undoes the second sense of representation, because no longer do questions of representation--qua what can be represented and what cannot, or representation in explicit opposition to representation qua delegation--have to come up: everything is delegated. Reality is a series of tubes--I mean, networks. No doubling over, no folding, no surfaces:
Technological networks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way. The work of relative universalization remains an easy-to-grasp category that relationism can follow in a thoroughgoing way. Every branching, every alignment, every connection can be documented, since it generates tracers, and every one of them has a cost. It can be extended almost everywhere; it can be spread out in time as well as in space, yet without filling time and space (118, my emphasis).
There is no filling because we only have one problem of representation, not two. This is why delegation is really only transcendence that lacks a contrary: "I call this transcendence that lacks a contrary 'delegation'" (129).
I hope I've outlined the connection between Heidegger and Latour, then. For me, the sort of Heideggerian commonality is most apparent in thinking of science in action, which is of course all over Latour. I just wanted to bring this out in what appears to be the most abstract part of the work--time--though it's present right there in the title (we have never been). The sort of closing off of old theories, which I talked about in the last post, lends to scientific knowledge a way of developing that is practical, that turns it into an activity--and of course opposes any sort of Popperian logic.
I'm also connecting things to my earlier posts that resisted taking Latour as a sociologist. For while sociology has a lot to do with this sort of "praxis, not theory" emphasis, if we see Latour's "Heideggerian" preference for the practical producing his critique of representation, then one way of putting my objections or qualifications to the post of yours on "Translation--or How Everybody Wins" was that perhaps Latour is a crappy sociologist. In other words, I'm just trying to defend sociology here. To that end, it was absolutely correct to see in Pasteurization the most sustained engagement with human actors in Latour's career, perhaps, and therefore the most strictly sociological part of his work. But still, while he's got an analysis of "how everybody wins," aren't there better, more sophisticated sociological accounts of that same phenomenon precisely because there we have, indeed, some knowledge of what is going on? That is, less of a stress on practice (isn't the "sense that everybody wins" less practical than Latour's sense of it)? In other words, might we not have a better understanding of such group dynamics in sociology because Latour is more interested in making that "everybody" include all the practical actors (microbes too!), more than in actually outlining the dynamics of this particular phenomenon--where everyone can get what they want, even if they misunderstand each other? In other words, it's your genius to see how this strictly sociological notion was at work in Latour. But I'm saying that precisely means there has got to be a more accurate account within sociology--one that wouldn't be so focused on objects, yes, but would be able to analyze more various human groups (consider this the elaboration of my point about "small groups" in Latour). Latour would see in this precisely a purification--it is his insight to see that this "variability" I'm attributing to the sociological analysis is actually only hardening the divisions that really need to be dissolved (between humans and things).
Which means, fundamentally, I'm skeptical about Latour's claim that we can just extract certain things from the modern Constitution, and get rid of the rest with little loss (Latour, rightly, would never say that this would happen completely without loss). Latour, I think, is absolutely right to want to cut across so many existing boundaries, and his ability to do so really makes his remarks persuasive. But doesn't there have to be a point at which we sacrifice accurate analysis brought about by specialization for something less accurate but more relevant? Latour would undoubtedly say yes--and then bolster this claim by saying basically we try to be relevant all the time without being accurate at all. Science is really and truly experimental before it is accurate--thus, why not experiment some more? This will make Alan Turing his hero in the "Critique" essay, and I like that. But I wonder whether, ultimately, we can't do things differently. Indeed, can't we envision a form of accurate analysis, brought about even by specialization, that is indeed moving in a better direction? If this sounds too Popperian, I apologize. But doesn't Latour's claim cash in on 1) an antimodern or postmodern critique of specialization (though Latour is perhaps the only person--besides Bourdieu--to enjoin us to really follow bureaucratic compartmentalization rather than dismiss it) and 2) a sense that scientific practice is no different than practical activity--as I explained above. No doubt, Latour would claim that this would be true, if the world itself wasn't one in which a person in a lab could actually alter something way across the globe (by curing a disease, say), in which micro-actors knock down or infinitely empower macro-actors. But... what if the world really wasn't that way?
I'm not saying that so much out of belief that the world isn't precisely that one which Latour sees in his newspaper at the beginning of the book. I'm just forced into this sort of position--which renders things pretty moot--because of the immensity of the structure of Latour's argument. I would say that this is, for me, the only real massive argument against him in this book, and is what makes his other works much more suggestive and much more helpful for me: here, either you get on the same page with him, or you act in your own way, which he claims is also amenable to his project. This certainly marks the triumph of a way of arguing that only seeks to add reality (which is good!), but it most definitely means the death of any sense that there may be more and less viable methods and procedures, or differing ways of getting at something (which may be bad).
Maybe I can put this differently by saying that Latour isn't satisfied if he just convinces us that he has a better description of the way things work. For we might actually be willing to grant, even from within sociology, say, that his analysis is better or more full than the sociological one if it described things more accurately. That is, we might willingly dissolve even our knowledge if we were convinced that he had a better grasp on things--that is, in such a situation where there has to be some sacrifice of "accuracy" for "relevance:" if relevance is in the end more accurate than accuracy, doesn't it make sense to switch sides? But I'm not sure Latour wants that. He wants to transform what knowledge we have into something different, which presupposes not even the relevancy of his case but something else--a notion that being modern has always been being nonmodern. It is in this deep sense--that we have to not only see things in the right way but do them in the right way, that I've been trying to align with Heidegger: it is this that makes the Heideggerian approach (and the Derridian deconstruction) so impoverished when it comes to issues of method, since the issue is always, above seeing things the right way (phenomenology itself) doing them. And it is this that is really involved in the critique of representation, and constitutes that sort of immanence that Jameson critiques in postmodern thinkers, and that Latour tries to combat head on, as it were--by making delegation precisely transcendence, and insisting that we follow them, step by step, "locally" despite their local-global character--but (in my view) can't quite overcome. I might say, anticipating Latour's remarks on critique to which we will soon turn ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"), that perhaps this is what happens when arguments (see the whole beginning of Science in Action on rhetoric) are seen first as acts, as pure persuasion (no representation qua depiction, figuration, fiction), and ultimately as things that stage a Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung or polemic (in the sense of polemos--the stress on war as you first brought up in the "Translation" post), and then turned around and said to be absolutely non-polemical, anti-polemical, weaknesses. But that's another issue (though it bears on there being no real represented "inside" to something like Galatea 2.2 or The Echo Maker--though that is, of course, an issue these novels themselves interrogate [especially the first], which is why Latour likes them so much).
I'll conclude, though, by saying that perhaps this does lean too hard on the notion that at some point, in amending our Constitution, we have to sacrifice accuracy. This comes too close, of course, to saying that Latour is anti-science, when his position gains its strength from precisely it's pro-scientific-(but anti-science? how to describe that)-realism. I'd say that it is in this sense that we can say the network notion of reality is better than the notion of Heidegger--though not because Heidegger isn't a realist (it will be Harman's contention that he is precisely this), and not because (despite popular opinion) Heidegger is flat out anti-science (it's more complicated than this). There's another post waiting here, going back to the (to me, compelling) advantages of the technological network enumerated in the Latour quote above, but I need to gather my thoughts in order to articulate it.
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