Phenomenology of Reading Latour

As per your suggestion a little while ago, here are some scattered notes on what it's like (for me) to read Latour.

I'll start by jumping off from something you wrote to me (in an e-mail): "he actually is quite a great article-writer... usually I find that you can oppose article-writers to book-writers, but he's great at both!" I think this is true, although I've got to say that so far I give a slight edge to his books: Latour is such an ambitious theorist, always wanting to lay down the maximum bet and shake things up as much as possible (sometimes at the risk of caricaturing others' positions, as you point out in your most recent post), that I think he does better with a little room to stretch out and indulge his theatrics, rather than being forced, for reasons of space, to keep one line of argument going from beginning to end. Another way of putting it would be to say that, like Norbert in Aramis, Latour's method is to make as much of a mess as possible, and then see what's required in order to clean it up — an approach that seems crazy until you realize how closely it reflects the socio-logic of how actors actually make sense of the world. So I guess what I'm saying is that in the articles he sometimes doesn't have enough time to make a mess and clean it up.

You also mention that reading Latour gets you "talking more in terms of strategy rather than about ideas": "Something about how you get a little more frank and unashamed while reading this stuff has to be communicated to people..." Again, I totally agree, and this is something I get from Bourdieu as well: the sense of non-stop devious strategizing (which in Bourdieu, of course, is also thematized) is, once you get used to it, actually very useful as a model, a manner you can imitate, at least to a certain extent, to make your own arguments (which obviously don't need to be the same kinds as the ones Bourdieu or Latour make).

But Latour is such a rhetorical writer that it can even be slightly off-putting, not to mention confusing, because he's also got such a rhetorical view of life. (In this, he's like Nietzsche, who keeps coming up, which perhaps shouldn't be so surprising: as I recall reading somewhere — maybe Harman's book? — he's one of Latour's biggest unacknowledged influences.) In other words, Latour is always trying to convince you that everything in the world is trying to convince everything else: as if reality is in fact made up of innumerable little Bruno Latours. He pays nearly everything the compliment of assuming it's as clever as he is. (He does make some exceptions, usually for other sociologists.) I realize this sense on my part contradicts some of what you said towards the end of your last post about BL's positive valuation of a certain kind of "stupidity," or "forgetting," that goes along with being on the inside of a network. If we're on the inside, and we can just forget what we're doing and sort of go limp, then there's no real need to strategize and rhetoricize all the time. We don't really need "the logic of practice" to explain how anything happens. And there does seem to be a general shift in Latour's work away from a Bourdieusian assumption that everything is infinitely clever (which we find in Pasteurization of France and Science in Action) towards an assumption that everything is kind of stupidly enthusiastic.

But this is rather vague, so I'll finish with a specific passage that I think illustrates many of the hallmarks of Latour's style pretty well. It's from "Where are the Missing Masses?" (1992), which I believe we both read a couple of weeks ago:

The most interesting (and saddest) lesson of the note posted on the door at La Villette is that people are not circumspect, disciplined, and watchful, especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130 (I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white; no one else seems to bother, except the mourning families). Well, that is exactly the point of the note: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed." In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman — that is, machines and gods. This note indicates how desperate its anonymous frozen authors were (I have never been able to trace and honor them as they deserved). They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans; this failed, the door was always left open. Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal, that is, to a nonhuman who regularly and conveniently does the job in place of unfaithful humans; to our shame, we must confess that it also failed after a while, the door was again left open. How poignant their line of thought! They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is, there was, and ever will be. If human and nonhuman have failed, certainly God will not deceive them.
(166-167)

What's going on in this passage? Let's taxonomize:

1. Humor. This is probably one of the first things that strikes readers of Latour: he's very funny, and not afraid to make jokes about pretty much anything, at any point of his argument. (Graham Harman says somewhere that he initially got interested in Latour because he was the only funny person in Continental philosophy.) Here the jokes are at the expense of French drivers (they don't obey the speed limit), the authors of the note ("How poignant their line of thought!" — treating them as if they themselves weren't making a joke), and Latour himself as a scholar (he regrets being unable to properly cite the authors of the note). And the improbably specific details ("French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130," and then, a little later in the sentence, "the mourning families") are also funny.

2. Symmetry. These kinds of parallel constructions are so characteristic of Latour as to be almost an obsession: "In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman…"; "They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans… Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal…" One of the odd things about Latour is that, for a thinker so committed to asymmetries and hybrids and quasi-objects, he divvies up and juxtaposes and dichotomizes like Derrida never gave dualisms a bad name. Often his symmetrical formulations are ironic, i.e. he's caricaturing what some other person or group thinks (the moderns, the epistemologists, the technologists, et al.), but he's still clearly addicted to them. And I should say, I don't think this is a problem; that is, I don't think he's really a dualistic thinker, or at least not at all a rigid or limited one. In Latour these pairs ("epistemological couples," in Bachelard's parlance) are always getting pulled apart and recombined and mapped on to others (and not simply reversed, as in dialectic). But stop him at nearly any point and he's always working with a clear-cut distinction.

3. Sacred/theological language. This is another persistent verbal habit of Latour's: it pops up as early as Irreductions and plays a big role in the rhetorical vocabularies of both We Have Never Been Modern and Aramis. One way to deal with this would be simply to read it under the heading of (1), that is, as a joke — and sometimes Latour does use sacred language as a joke, or for merely hyperbolic or blasphemous effect. But knowing that he's a practicing Catholic puts an interesting spin on his continual recourse to a religious idiom. I don't quite know what to say about it here, but I'd just like to add a little more to the passage I quoted above:

I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this February day, the door was open. Do not accuse God, though, because the note did not make a direct appeal; God is not accessible without mediators — the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well — so instead of asking for a direct miracle (God holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel, as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison) they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough. (167)

Who is Latour reassuring here? On one level he seems to still be joking: who would possibly think to "accuse God" of leaving a door open? And again, he's hyperbolically specific: that "as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison" is obviously an unnecessary flourish, and a bit of a goof on Latour's own multidisciplinary scholarly authority (oh, you're a theologian now?). But even without knowing anything about Latour's own beliefs, the last three sentences are charged with a sort of melancholy resignation: "instead of asking for a direct miracle … they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough." Of course, the whole point of Latour's article is that much of what we think of as autonomous human morality is in fact preordained by clever engineers, who make it practically impossible not to wear a safety belt, or exceed the speed limit on a residential street, or leave a door open. As you'd expect from him, he seems for the most part to see this as a good thing, as well as a technological marvel, and he would like sociologists, technologists, and moralists all to see that what they talk about is so densely intertwined. But that final caveat — "In our secular times, this is no longer enough" — suggests a somewhat darker (almost Heideggerian?) picture of the "missing masses," a sort of nostalgia for a (probably imaginary) past in which humans really did make moral decisions, in which autonomy was real and society did not make so many of the crucial choices for human beings ahead of time.

Of course, I could be way over-reading (an occupational hazard), and Latour's "secular times" is just total sarcasm: he does cast doubt on the very idea of secularization in We Have Never Been Modern and numerous other places. But it's the sort of troubling ambiguity that he opens up, again and again, through his use of sacred language, and also, for different reasons and to a different degree, through his use of the language of politics.

But I'll stop here, having made a mess and not cleaned it up. Suffice it to say that the more one thinks about Latour's style, the more fascinating a rhetorical case study it becomes. And I haven't gotten to his own writings on style (of matters of concern and so on). I'm sure this is a subject we'll both have a lot more to say about as we go on.