Not razors, boxes!

This will pick up on certain things you say in your second-to-last post (on time and simplicity), and black-box the remarks in your last post (on Heidegger). Actually, let me start very simply: what is a "black box," for Latour? Here's what he says in Science in Action:

“The word black box is used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of machinery or a set of commands is too complex. In its place they draw a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output.” (Science in Action, 2-3)

So when I say I'm black-boxing what you say about Heidegger, what I mean is: I see that there's an issue about spatialized time and the differences and similarities between Latour and Heidegger, and I see that you ultimately resolve it to your satisfaction by declaring them compatible, both holding that "representation is dependent … on what reality does, rather than what it is--such that what it does is what it is." And I am content to leave it at that, and not engage you on this issue, either to argue or to agree. If I did work through it, at the cost of a great deal of time and mental energy, I would more than likely find things that I deeply disagree with Heidegger about. Or maybe not; maybe I'd become a Heideggerian (in which case I might stop caring about Latour). But in this particular case, I'm happy to just leave the box black, because I'm not a Heideggerian, and I'm satisfied that you feel the difficulties are mostly resolved. From the standpoint of dialectic, this might seem insulting or unfair, but from the standpoint of "reality" as Latour sees it it's just the way things work: not everybody needs to know everything underlying a particular state of affairs in order to accept that state of affairs as compatible with their own interests.

So I think I see what you mean when you say that "Latour is solving the huge dilemma of historicism that characterizes so much humanities research which bases itself on a scientific model." By showing us the way science actually works (as opposed to the way epistemology and the history of science claim it works), he both shows us that the dilemma is false (we don't need to try to arrive at exact, pure, perfect knowledge of history, because the scientists don't get it of nature either) and gives us a new way to work, one premised on simplicity rather than progression or accumulation. Not "Always historicize!" but "Always simplify!" (Latour — or rather, Norbert — actually says this in Aramis, on page 94. But that's next week's text.) And you're right to link this commitment to simplicity to Latour's concept of temporality, his sense of what it is possible to do with the past:

All of time becomes reversible, and there are no longer theories that get more concrete and "settled" because they are "historical" than newer or more "open" ones”

and

we slim down things by making time reversible, or stop seeing time as some process of accumulating--anything at all (here, knowledge or error).

It seems to me that the black box has great possibilities for historicist work. Because it does away, once and for all, with the “archaeological” metaphors that Foucault et al. espouse. The working assumption, for the New Historicists (and also, I think, Jameson), is always that the actors knew more — even if only unconsciously — than we do; and in order to understand them, we need to reconstruct that knowledge. So we’re always playing catch-up; and this is part of why it’s so easy to criticize, even dismiss, historicist work: well, if you just knew a bit more about X then your interpretation would be better. Your failure to take Y into account invalidates your whole argument. You don’t seem to have realized that Z is a condition of everything you say.

But we can say, with Latour: yes, the actors knew lots of things we didn’t, consciously or unconsciously; but much of what they knew took the form of black boxes which they never thought, or perhaps were unable, to open. And here’s where we have an advantage over the actors we study: we can safely open the black boxes, question their contents [the abstracting move you see, rightly, as the hallmark of “Theory”], and make connections and draw conclusions that the historical actors didn’t or couldn't.* We have nothing to lose by this activity, because it’s all already over: we don’t need the black boxes in the same way the actors did. Their projects are not ours, so we’re free to nitpick, reframe, reconsider, theorize. And I don't think Latour's against this at all. You say:

I can make an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it. It is this that I think people are talking about when they confusedly call theory "ahistorical." Nevertheless, theory is only taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences--or so I imagine Latour saying. Regardless, it is allowing the "opening" of "settled" knowledge precisely by grounding ever more thoroughly the notion that there are "open" and "settled" knowledges.

And I agree with you that BL might see much of “theory” — especially that part of it that descends from Canguilhemian epistemology, by way of Althusser, Foucault and Bourdieu — as ironically “taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences.” But it’s important, I think, not to paint him as against theory, even the kind of theoretical maneuvers you’re talking about (which I associate, perhaps naively, with Derrida: “mak[ing] an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it”). After all, he’s a theorist himself! What Latour adds, I think, is a refreshing reminder of the always provisional and local nature of theorization, and the necessity of it taking an object.

But, also, at the same time as he gives us license to theorize, he gives us license not to theorize. (Here he reminds me of Wittgenstein: "The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to.") Because we can always skip some steps; because we can always leave black boxes black (just not necessarily the same ones as the historical actors did). In fact, we have to do this; if we went into everything, theorized everything, we'd never get anywhere. But it's a relief, this restraint, this simplicity.

And one more thing about Latour's brand of simplicity: it's a proliferative simplicity, because it is — precisely — not a reduction. It is not the boring old medieval logic of Occam's Razor: thou shalt not multiply entities beyond necessity. Quite the contrary: it multiplies entities all over the place, but shuts up most of those entities inside black boxes, until we, the analysts, want to let them out. A way to acknowledge the (Deleuzian?) interconnectedness of everything, while still enabling us to stop doing actor network theory when we want to — what could be better?

But why is this not just warmed-over epistemology — us arrogant post- or even-more-moderns, arriving after all the games are over, playing with the views or beliefs of the ancients (in this case, the modernist ancients) from the standpoint of our superior modernity? In other words, exactly what Latour rails against in We Have Never Been Modern? Because we need to test it against the objects. And this is why, as you correctly say, “the notion rejected … is not that science works with facts, but that there are epistemological breaks, total changes in perspectives that close off not just outdated series of facts, but whole sets of ‘knowledge’-producing outlooks and techniques--all in the name of progress.” There do need to be facts, and there do need to be objects — this is what’s realist about Latour’s method — but there doesn’t need to be progress in our way of viewing them. (This is possibly why Latour's position strikes you as "pro-scientific-(but anti-science? how to describe that)-realism.") We can keep the empiricism of science without the progressivism of the history of science: the moderns’ way of looking without their certainty that they’ve revolutionized everything. Which I think is probably as good a way as any to think about the heritage of historicism, not to mention close reading.

* Some black boxes that literary historical actors have used that we can open: God; technology; race; gender; ideology; “literature”; and, yes, modernity. It’s this last that’s most exciting for my field (modernism/twentieth century poetry): because here, all the actors were so convinced that they were modern/avant-garde/progressive — and much academic criticism of their work has consisted of weighing in on whether they really were or not. (Yes, you were aesthetically modern, but you were politically reactionary! Go to the back of the class!) But if we are free to open the black boxes marked “modernity” and “modernism,” then we can really reread these authors, without being hamstrung by the framework or paradigm or epistème they themselves have brought into being.