Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Morephisms: or, forget otherness!

I promise a more substantial post on Aramis, replying to your great presentation. But I want now to begin our consideration of Latour's many essays (which we'll be doing this week) and consider Latour's interesting reading of Rick Powers and great reading of Alan Turing, "Powers of the Facsimile: a Turing Test on Science and Literature," because it really has to do with this issue of stupidity/forgetting as I see it--through an interesting detour through the distinction construction/deconstruction which I consider fundamental (because it brings out the difference between a logic of moreness and a logic of alterity), and which this essay picks up.

Now, Latour basically is interested in "Powers of the Facsimile" to make the case for Richard Powers as the novelist of Latour's realism--a realist novelist in a new sense, a novelist of matters of concern, not just matters of fact (which an inadequate Zola-esque realism would, instead, deal with).

Unfortunately, in one of those weird over-polemical moments in Latour, Latour makes it out as if no literary critic has ever really seen this in Powers--or in fact in novels generally... indeed that literary critics don't have the right tools at all to see this. He is considering in particular the inability for reviewers of Powers' work (who magically turn into literary critics and then into all literary criticism) to see that Powers is not just writing about science in literature, but also showing how matters of science become research, and how it is full of objects of concern. This problem allegedly focuses itself in Powers' use of characters, who develop only insofar as they are channels for these matters, and it is here that actually the reviewers (and/or critics) miss the realism the most:

Reviewers often accuse Powers of being a “brainy” writer whose characterization suffers from an obsession with putting semiotic legs on mere ideas and facts drawn from science and technology. But one of the main problems explored by his novels is exactly the problem of the progressive emergence of individuals: Powers asks what it is for a character to exist at all, when so much of existence depends upon the things one is attached to – the most important connection being to the biological basis of life itself, which is the theme of The Gold Bug Variations (1991). By accusing Powers of simply “clothing ideas with flesh,” critics imply that they know what it is to be an idea, what it is to be a character, what it is to possess a “realistic” psychology, what it is to play the role of a “fact” on the stage of the narrative, what it is to be an episode in a narrative, whereas all of those features are explicitly and relentlessly questioned by the novels they are reviewing … It’s as if critics believe that Agatha Christie has provided the definitive realistic view of the world … or that “water boils at 100° Celsius” is the paramount example of a scientific statement"... But Powers takes science and technology much more “realistically.” Consider, for instance, the strand of Plowing the Dark that takes place in a Bill Gates-like digital factory, and is entirely devoted to exploring what it takes to produce a realistic-looking image out of calculations, and whether this is an intelligent idea or, on the contrary, a dangerous sin … meanwhile, in the other intertwined plot, a young English teacher has to survive for months after being kidnapped in Lebanon by an Islamic terrorist group. So, as usual, what critics see as a weakness – “M. Powers, why do you give us so many ideas when we want flesh and blood characters?” – is actually the subject of the novel: “what will happen to you if you dare to produce flesh and blood realistic characters out of ideas, signs, symbols, calculations, you reckless makers of facsimiles?” And in parallel: “What will happen to you if you are kidnapped, blindfolded, and left for months without any signs, symbols, pixels, images?” In addition, the very objection that critics raise about Powers’s characters (“are they brains with legs?”) is actually the argument that divides most of the characters in the novel, since the protagonists argue amongst themselves about whether or not the calculated image is really just calculation, or something else that escapes calculation.
-"Powers of the Facsimile," 94-95

I don't bring this up because we're literary critics so much as to note the supposition--sometimes occuring in Latour--that other disciplines just don't get at what Latour is doing, or only do so inadequately. Here, it is as if literary critics have never read and understood Greimas, or have never considered characters as shady sorts of complexes rather than full on psychologies. Meanwhile the problems of plot brought up by Wayne Booth, and the masterful consideration of Defoe by Ian Watt, as antiquated perhaps and theoretically unsophisticated (unscientific--in Greimas' sense) as they are, both deal with such issues. So it's this sort of position Latour can always inhabit--at one moment he recognizes all sorts of good things in various other disciplines can be integrated into his project, and at another he can say that because they're modern, or because what they do doesn't presuppose the entire shift that focusing on nature-cultures brings about, what Latour is getting at is wholly new.

This doesn't seem to me to be a big deal--except that it seems typically philosophical, which is something I don't usually expect from Latour since what he's up to usually appears so very different in its form. I'll put differently: Ultimately, what reviewers I think object to in Powers is his taking his de-priveliging of character in the psychological, anthropomorphic sense to the nth degree. However, when Powers does this full-on, in his recent The Echo Maker, he precisely gets the National Book Association award and is a finalist for the Pulitzer... so go figure. Meanwhile narratology has long picked up this issue of the over-anthropomorphization of characters, even when they're made into actants. So, the situation is complicated. Latour comes along and oversimplifies it--as anyone who confronted such a situation would. But he also does so in a typically philosophical way: he wants to presume we all read like 19th century readers of Dickens, or present-day readers of Harry Potter, in order to demystify that fact. This leaves us with the sense that, yet again, we're getting an essay on the "aesthetic dimension" of a philosophy, or the review of a piece which best exemplifies this work--a task which has to say all the considerations before it appears take the function of art in the wrong way.

Regardless, we begin to see the connection between taking things as mattes of concern and understanding characters as less anthropomorphic. It is first and foremost a change in the role of the human in general, along the lines Latour sketches at the end of We Have Never Been Modern: anthropomorphism is just one sort of morphism. However, we must also apply this back to other things--and here is where Latour does something interesting. For he's outlining how, concretely, we can begin to treat things as matters of concern by refusing to confine them in one sort of morphism--like we have done with the human:

What is constant in RP [Richard Powers], and so important for our investigation, is the morphism structure that he employs and that the above passage [of Powers'] instantiates pretty well. I call (x)-morphism the matrix of transformative metaphors where (x) can be replaced by all sort of particular instances, or layers of discourse: anthropo-, techno-, ideo-, psycho-, logo- morphisms, etc. For instance, in the example of the reading of Yeats’s poem [in a scene in Powers], words are compared to gadgets, to toys, to machines, to factories (a technomorphism) which is also crossed with a biomorphism (the evolutionary theory implied by “female mammal’s” reproductive success) and a phusimorphism (expenditure of energy). Now, bad writers – of novels as well as of academic articles – take those morphisms to be stable, so that when they do anthropomorphism they take what they believe we know about humans – a sort of Simenon’s or Agatha Christie’s typical psychology – and bring it to bear on, for instance, a robot (most science fiction never goes further than this sort of “animation,” or projection trick).
-"Powers of..." 7

I've been reading some SF lately and I don't really find the last comment convincing (it seems to me another polemical instance), but the point in general is great. Because these morphisms as Latour says in his more recent work on ANT, extend reality to the matters of fact. And this is something different than presupposing a whole change in our Constitution in order to get at these matters (something less local, or more totalizing). It is showing how our various descriptions of events can begin to pull out the shape of a thing from its hard, objective edges, make it pliable, in a more discrete and particular act--turn it into silly putty. I think Latour goes on to say that this is the virtue of the best literature in general--and that smacks of the aesthetic approach mentioned before. But this smaller point, I think, we can extract from the general presentation and really appreciate--largely because both you and I know more concretely how metaphoric language in particular has a tendency to do this. That is (just to sum up) I think Latour's point is not based on the viability of the aesthetics he's outlining in this paper, so much as his real familiarity with what happens in the shaping process in trials of strength... and we literary critics too have some familiarity with something like that, in a way that can't so easily be rejected by Latour or chalked up to our having some wrong Constitution and thus wrong aesthetics.

So, morphisms extend reality to matters of fact, making them into matters of concern--over and above any sort of explicit adoption of a modern Constitution (though they imply this adoption, or work to bring it about). Latour goes on to say that this is also present in the best writing on science and technology (and here he's on much surer footing--you can tell in the essay itself). He reads the fascinating Alan Turing's famous "Computing Machinery" essay, familiar to students of philosophy of mind in particular--though Latour would, just like he did with literary reviewers critics, say they haven't read it for its morphisms either (and thus haven't really read it). In this, he's a bit more correct--but because philosophers proceed in a very different way than literary critics--and I can speak confidently here since I have some (but perhaps only some) familiarity in philosophy of mind. In the various classes, the issues Turing brings up get presented to you in snippets--perhaps in Jaegwon Kim's great summaries in his excellent overview/intro Philosophy of Mind. Then, if you're interested (as I was), you actually pick up "Computing Machinery,"--and are completely blown away at just how much is cut out. This isn't anything bad, really--philosophy proceeds by reducing and refining problems and explanations, Occam's razor-like (even the SR people, who try to resist this, do it--it's just how things proceed). But it cuts out all the morphisms, which end up making the computer, the mind, pianos, piles of neutrons, and all sorts of things come together in amazing ways to bring out the reality of the confrontation between mind and this technology, or the functions involved in both (not able to be reduced, now, to any sort of functionalism):

The whole question of what an automaton is, what it means to generate something – a later obsession of Turing in his work on “biomorphs” –, what it means to produce an idea, what it means to probe agency and its limits, are all explored in one single paragraph that goes from the machine in general, to the piano, then to the atomic pile, then to the human mind, then to animals, then to the computer… Lady Lovelace thinks that agencies can be mobilized like the finger-keys of a piano although, even for the piano this is no simple feat as any pianist knows: you inject an input, it does something, and then “drop[s] into quiescence.” But this is not the sort of agency that Turing’s machine have, he argues: it is more like that of an atomic pile.
-"Powers of..." 18

So, in short, this sort of writing, or this sort of way of putting these problems, extends reality to the objects. I might play on words here and say that not only are these morphisms, but that they are morephisms: they give more reality to things, or turn objects into things (or are the objects becoming things).

This is important, and brings me to that sort of detour/distinction I mentioned earlier. For in the middle of the essay, Latour says the following about Powers:

Am I wrong in thinking that such a parsing of competences, layers after layers, competence after competence, is unheard of in literature? Instead of giving us a despairing feel for the infinite distance between words and things, Powers gives us – gives me at least – an incredible confidence in the capacity of description: if someone is able to make us see engineers making us feel the turning of the knob in a drawer of a non-existent reproduction of the existing painting by the no longer existing painter of a no longer existing hotel room in Arles [...], then every thing can be carried in language! All the usual resources of criticism, fiction, and illusion which usually go into chic commentaries of Escher-like ‘abyme’ effects, are here all telescoped by Powers to provide more reality, not less. Constructivism is made to be the exact opposite of deconstruction while, at the same time, using many of the same resources. But the way they are nested in one another is entirely different. “Telescoped” is actually a good metaphor: the more elements nested the better the view, whereas in the logic of critical deconstruction the more elements the more delayed the grasp should be. That is the major difference between deconstruction and what I have called elsewhere the promise of constructivism.
-"Powers of..." 12-13

I tried early on to characterize the difference between deconstruction and Latour in these terms. But I also have tried to say that the difference is one between this insistence on more, and this insistence on the delayed-grasp. Or, rather, I've insisted really on the distinction between more and other--and Latour's innovation (which someone like Harman picks up on) being in allowing us to pass beyond the logics of the latter (logics of otherness).

But now, I just want to be as clear as possible about this, because deconstruction is often seen as an proposing an ontology open to otherness (in the manner of Lacan, perhaps), but also of always more otherness, of infinite otherness: the other, in Derrida, is never simply an other (as it might be in Levinas), but always more other than any other. The other is always more other than an other. Thus, we see how the more (to reify this concept in order to compare it to the other), is actually already addressed by deconstruction. But, as Latour points out quite clearly here, it is still subordinated to a logic of otherness, which turns it into moreness that doesn't add, but undermines (along the lines I outlined early on). Latour allows us to break out of this and finally liberate moreness from otherness, and--moreover--understand all the relationships that were previously thought in terms of otherness (my relation to another person, or to a thing, say) in terms of this new moreness (I have allies, and they give me more reality; or I relate to things, and we form a more-real collective). Harman, I think, will get even more sophisticated about how this moreness needs to work, as it were, but for now, I just want to emphasize that finally we can get rid of that agonizing logic of alterity that weighs over so much theory in the humanities. And perhaps this might allow us to restore some sort of real concreteness to alterity itself--though I don't think Latour would like to look back here--in the way that the Lacanians do through some of the most dire and drastic measures (mathemes, etc.). If morphism is suddenly something that adds reality to the thing, language in particular is in the service of making things more real--and no longer do we have to really keep saying literature undermines, overturns, undoes, etc. etc., as some theorists (de Man, etc. etc.) would have liked us to believe (but their readings themselves--and their familiarity with this shaping which I mentioned above--we can see could never really bring about).

And this brings me back, in closing, to your last post. I should have been more clear in my original post to which you responded, that stupidity all connects to reinvesting our understanding of technology with love/passion, as you nicely pointed out in your post--and thus that I am really less "worried" about stupidity/forgetfulness as I might have sounded (my point is less about whether Latour is advocating it than whether it is a way to characterize our relation to networks). But I do think you were able to draw the ethical line clearer than I did as regarded the uses to which stupidity/forgetfulness is put, when you say the following:

So it's not that Latour likes, or advocates, forgetting or stupidity (which, unless I'm misreading you, is something you're a bit worried about). But he does think that forgetting and stupidity are so inevitable, omnipresent, and equally shared that it's just not a good rhetorical strategy to accuse others of it. There's clearly an ethical dimension to this way of looking at arguments...


You insist rightly on the difference between stupidity qua being swept up in a network (stupidity as limitation of our abilities, the finitude of the network, as enthusiasm, as the unreasonable reason of scientific research/discovery) and stupidity qua thinking of technology/discovery "as the historians of technologists do," or thinking it is less omnipresent than it is, precisely in order to disconnect science from politics (or design/dreams from the possible worlds that the thing is designed for), in turn to reconnect them in a shoddy oily way. The former attitude is seeing stupidity as the basis for relationships in collectives--that is, as something different than familiarity, something less rational and much more forgetful because it is also excited (thus I used Forest Gump). Thus it is something like a virtue in the investigator--a way to (paradoxically) characterize his knowledge of the network: no longer is a researcher closer to the work on the basis of how familar he is with it, or how close he is to the primary sources, native informants, etc. etc.. Familiarity is replaced with forgetting: out knowledge of the networks is better insofar as it is stupid and excited--crying, full of passion like the passion of the scientists we follow. Thus at the end of Aramis, Norbert doesn't retreat to his other sociologists--as if the subjects he studied didn't matter--but returns to them, not without some just stupid, unexplainable fondness.

In short, stupidity or forgetfulness is a way to characterize the relationships between the actors in a different way than through "misunderstandings"--mostly because the latter involves something like the undermining, through its sort of inevitability. "Misunderstanding" is right, but it needs to move over a little towards this excited sort of state in order to add reality. I was thinking of this because after reading Latour for a while, you see the sorts of critiques that you mention (Gray, etc.) as of even less worth than the accusations of the people involved in the projects. In other words, these critiques, which do not at all add reality to the object, but take it away, don't just refuse to add reality in some sort of intellectual sense... they really don't have any active stake in the object that they are dealing with. But this sort active stake is not really--we see now--one of having more or less familiarity or knowledge of the network (a sort of "being-in" the group involved), but of being stupid in the right way, of not knowing--of misunderstanding, yes, but in a sort of forgetful way that adds more shapes, that has more morphisms, rather than less.

This, ultimately, is the basis of a rejection of shoddy critique--I'd say. And I'm claiming here that it involves, perhaps, less a problem in critique as such (as many of the SR people think it does, and which gets directed towards literature, among other humanities department, perhaps more than it needs to be) than with the logic of otherness which makes us think of moreness on the basis of its sort of undermining project... and which the morephisms of Latour can replace. This is just a hunch, but it's how I'd address a lot of what is going on. Forget the other!

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