"2-3% GNP--that is not much"

That's an excellent post--you link together how measurement is an ontological fact as well as a human practice, as you say at the end.

I'll just make a quick response in order to perhaps speed up the conversation. We're doing big posts, which are good, but take a lot of work! I'll also be able to get in a few remarks on "Irreductions" before we head into the reading for this week--though our weeks, of course, will overlap, and "Irreductions" was for me such an unbelievable, eye-opening ride (much more than WHNBM) that I probably will be harping on it for some time. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow me to do full justice to the excellence of that post. But we'll have opportunity to go back and cite previous remarks, and I'm sure it will get its due that way.

I'm interested in the two payoffs that you outline, the "methodological" and the "political" payoffs. You rightly show how the first is tied to the second in the way that (as I just recalled) the facts are linked to practice, or in the way that metaphysics can be empirical ("infraphysics" is the other great Latourian word for this). Or, the way that the use of one set of tools produces an analysis that allows you to open more black boxes (rather than lock them up), and even simplify the explanation (more on this in a second). But I'm wondering about the second "political" payoff. You rightly say that the use of the same tools--the symmetrical rejection of macro and micro actors, and the focus simply on actors--keeps us away from the despairing feeling of being only a small part in something too large, a sort of more global "level" that we'll only be able to change minutely, if at all. This is right because it rejects the Marxist (and Hegelian) overemphasis on the part-whole relationship, and does so precisely from the Latourian standpoint of scale: we understand that such part-whole relationships (and their generation of levels) really may be just attempts to scale up what is really less important, and overlook the places where the tiny actor knocks down the macro actor.

I don't have any beef with that. My beef is with another "political" move that Latour does over and above this sort of demystification of the part-whole, which moves in the opposite direction. This is the move of insisting that if we scale down the macro actor (or the actor that appears more macro than it is), it will become richer. Granted, whenever Latour couples this with the notion that we are, in the same moment, moving from analysis of powers to an analysis of forces, the claim is a bit (but perhaps only a bit) more solid. But isn't there a sort of equally political payoff to the following claim, which he emphasizes twice (by my count) in "Irreductions?"

Sometimes people talk of "nature" when referring to the crowd of slaves and subjugated actants that have been reduced to silence, or when speaking about the commands given by a class of researchers who, in turn, march to the tune of a handful of "great thinkers." But it is most unlikely that the forces are really like this. After all, only two to three percent of the GNP of a few countries circulates inside the sparse and fragile networks of "science." We might as well try to reduce all the journeys in the world to airline networks (4.6.4; p. 229).

Or more simply:

Two to three percent of the GNP of a few industrial nations, two thirds of which is spent on industry and for military purposes--that is not much (4.2.1; p. 216).

"That is not much," sort of says it all. The claim has its opposite: there is much more elsewhere, once we open the black boxes.

This is the general merit of the notion of the black box in general, I think--to turn to Science in Action. What we have is a sort of displacement of the logic of same/other, which ends up becoming so unbelievably constraining if you have used it too often. Such a logic becomes, instead, same/more-than-the-same. Where there is elsewhere, where there is the otherwise, there is more. We'll see that it is Graham Harman's genius to insist on this continually--though he certainly developed the notion before he really read a lot of Latour (through a reading of the tool-analysis). Suddenly, we're talking about how little we can grasp, and actually how that is not a problem (this is the basis for the speculative move). We simply go beyond and grab it--what we don't do is start reducing it, or, in this case, totalize it, and simply look for what goes in and what goes out. There are no Big Others anymore, and we don't have to insist on the unrepresentability of the otherwise--just simply that our representation of it will be inadequate. This change in tone is, to me, and to the rest of those following the anxiety-ridden tradition of Continental Philosophy, a huge relief.

But along with that comes a tendency to say that reduction in general is bad. And, to put all my cards on the table, I see too much continuity between Latour and the postmoderns (including Derrida) in this area to take him seriously when he couples this with a new (and welcome) realism. For what we get is not only the idea that the local is more important than the large totality, and the idea that the real is more important than representation, but the notion that as we get more local or smaller, we approach the real. The stress on variable ontology here--that the real has a more or less aspect to it (see WHNBM p. 86, fig. 3.4)--is nice, but it's too neat to get him out of this general rejection of abstraction and reduction. For isn't the problem sometimes not that we're constantly reducing, but that we can't reduce in an adequate way? I follow Frances Ferguson, and to an extent Derrida (who, more than other postmoderns, broaches this issue), and indeed to an extent Jameson (who I am seeing is much more amenable to this idea and I originally thought him to be) in insisting on this. To that extent, the problem of levels is again crucial, and the differentiation of tools--rather than the use of the same ones--becomes important (that is, it's not just a matter of handling things more rationally).

Nevertheless, I think it is to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how the creation of larger categories can be reductive in the sense of scaling down the problem (or black-boxing it). And it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler (I am always for simplicity in a discipline that, perhaps even more than others--because it is internal to the process of confronting the object itself in reading it--produces "interpretations" merely by problematizing texts that aren't problematic). This all makes us think more about how irreduction can go against even some of our best efforts not to reduce things--and, more than that, produces studies that actually demonstrate this (we end up with something like what Ian Hacking says is a singular virtue of experimentation--the creation of phenomena--and its in this particular sense that I think we end up with an "experimental metaphysics"). I don't really think that my objection here is incompatible with such a focus on the proliferation of hybrids (what I'm calling reduction might be slightly different than purification). But, as I said, when we start going in this other political direction, we end up saying things like the following:

Do they turn toward nature? What could this mean? Look at them! They lean over their writing and talk to one another inside their laboratories. Look at them! Their only principle of reality is one that they have determined themselves. Look at them! The "external" referents they created exist only inside their world (4.3.5; 219).

Which I take to be similar to what you say in that last post:

The "empirical" part comes from his attention to the ways humans — and here he's a conventional sociologist — actually do scale and measure, which he sees as dependent on a prior measurement or adequation, and thus questionable.

That's okay, but the notion behind that might be that the form of questionability is, precisely, at this level (if I can be a bit of a dialectician, and look at Latour from precisely the angle he doesn't want to be looked at--though not by attributing him any reduction). Ultimately, for me, this ends up producing statements like this (which Zizek, for one, takes as the postmodern (!) critical (!) statement par excellence):

Every totalization, even if it is critical, helps totalitarianism (We Have Never Been Modern, 125).

There's certainly good sense in saying this is because "a system that is total and sleek does not get divided up" (WHNBM, 125)--certainly more sense than in the critical postmodern project, which would see totalization merely in those real idealities that are philosophemes, discursive regimes, etc. etc. Indeed, as I lead us into the book we're considering this week, I'm not saying that if you catch Latour being modern or postmodern, his project is invalidated--he himself, though he can't find "words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement" (WHNBM, 61), would still save a lot of what they do (WHNBM, 134). But I'm just wondering about the viability of the general tendency behind this "other" political move.

And I'm wondering, generally, about its politics. We shouldn't forget that "Irreductions" ends on, not an apocalyptic, but a post-apocalyptic note:

I will not yield to them; I will not believe in "the sciences" beforehand; and neither, afterwards, will I despair of knowledge when one of the relationships of force to which the laboratories have contributed explodes above France ("Irreductions," 4.7.11; 236).

And that this seems to follow (how, exactly, I'm still working out--it might be good to take up WHNBM on this point), from an ("agnostic") conviction that:

Those who think that they can do better and work more quickly will always do worse because they will forget to share their only means of knowing and testing. They will believe that they have done enough when they have "diffused" reasons, codes, and results. In fact, all of these wither once they are removed from the scorned networks that keep them strong (4.7.11; 235).

That's some serious realism. It's so realist, we might seek a more forceful word: "common sense" might be better, as if that influential early 18th century Scottish school has come back with a vengeance. Latour, of course, goes to Spinoza and Machiavelli. Regardless, the following is at the same pitch:

Listen, it is very simple. We will never do better than those who have simply to convince themselves about trifling matters, have everything they need to hand, and are properly fed, well lit, and appropriately taught. How many mistakes do they make before they start to give up the tiniest prejudice? Tens, hundreds, thousands? So how many wars will it take to convince five billion men and women? Ten? A hundred? Unless, that is, the multitudes can think more quickly and clearly than those in the laboratory (4.7.10; 235).

I'll stop here, but let me just say that we see in the last remark maybe a prejudice of Latour himself, at least in the earlier work. Latour seems to me to be pulled always towards what we never have called influential small groups--however much these groups in turn end up spilling into society, or contracting around one of their more prominent individuals. Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab? That's all well and good from one standpoint, which sees the analysis as an analysis of what is actually there--and (rightly) doesn't want to see in the process of following these actors' networks (if I can say that) anything like the process of imputing to them some supra-historical agency, or an effort to turn labs into the driving force behind our (modern) time. But then again... And how would we actually articulate this sort of objection or even mere observation?