The virtue of networks

I'm going to drop the meta-critique that I've been developing over the last week, especially as we'll be getting into Aramis, which is just so freaking awesome that it'd be a shame to read what I've been saying recently into it. But I hoped merely to show, especially in my last post, that We Have Never Been Modern is so expansive, despite its quite manageable size, that "it made me do it," as we like to say. This is because the argument--again, more than in "Irreductions," surprisingly--really does make a case for a different practice of scholarship in general, and is so totalizing and productive of closure that it proves the correctness of the saying that "the totality is not what we end at, but what we begin with" (i.e. it ends up negating itself insofar as its wholeness imposes itself upon us). You say in your last post, rightly (I'd say, with Jameson, whose saying that was--sorry to keep annoying you by trying to reconcile you guys), that we don't always have to do this (see his handy "Three Names of the Dialectic," or even the older "Architecture and Ideology"--where the description is a bit thicker--which argues such closure also needs to be supplemented with the local insights, springing up like some weird fungus on the big structure). In other words, we can take the small bits (the transformation of the notion of the black-box) too. But I'd still say that the aim of the book is to provide some grand alternative to interdisciplinarity by a brilliant destruction of the idea of "humanism"--the keystone that gives most current debates about the conflict of the faculties their, indeed, conflicting (but also stupidly irresolvable) shape.

Or rather than "destruction," some sort of process by which the idea is just made irrelevant (ladder-kicking). And this is where your nice discussion of the black-box comes in. For you supplement my too-temporal account with an incisive sense of its functionality, which obviously comes from an increasing skill in deploying the concept (or rather just using, since the other Foucauldian word seems to avoid any handiness and skill and indeed some sense of direction in a characteristic way: what I like about Latour is always his counter-emphasis, despite his rhetoric of war and force, on tinkering when it comes time to describe this sort of phenomenon--which is so much more bodily or rather [if I can tinker with that other word of his I'm finding so helpful] shapely).

What I like in what you said is the emphasis on not razors but boxes--the sort of redefinition of simplicity in unproblematic, un-angsty terms (unlike Occam). There's something to be said for the role of affect (qua affect) in Latour along these lines (and you've mentioned it in your posts), for he keeps railing against that perverse modern tendency to try and shore up despair as a sort of comfort that allows you to stay inactive (Jameson rails against irony in a similar way in Archaeologies and indeed throughout Postmodernism). Regardless, it's this redefinition of simplicity (as "proliferative simplicity," as you say) that brings me to the virtue of the network I wanted to get to last time.

Your comment on what the black-box opens up is extremely helpful here:

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.

That's perfect--and nicely puts a finger on that bullshit that sometimes passes for argument in English departments. Or rather, not argument, but as you say, whole methodological presuppositions that we'd rather keep in place and not question in order to score a small point and undermines the reality of the thing we're trying to get at rather than (to use the one phrase I've praised in Latour from the get-go) adds to the reality of it.

For if we can say, yes, let's just open their black boxes, but not say that this involves descending into some unconscious--if we can say "we don’t need the black boxes in the same way the actors did," the whole tenor of the work changes and we're more concerned with the connections the the thing we're dealing with makes. These connections, though, are not abstract--though we can always black box whatever we need to. The fun of the black box, as you say (and it does sound like a toy when I mention it this way--I'm tinkering again), is that we can actually get rid of this "abstract" and "concrete" dialectical language (it's this that actually is at the heart of progressivism: the dialectic is simply a machine for generating that return to the point at which you started, but with a fuller sense of what's going on). There are no abstract facts, just boxed ones. So boxing is, as you stress (and I didn't), easy--not fraught with some sense that it involves a subtraction from what we can get out of the thing, a loss. The loss is registered differently: as you rightly say, "we can always skip some steps."

The network that gets generated then unproblematically maps out the area in question, by first and foremost always reducing the number of potential ("powerful") actors (making the actors actual, "forceful"). That's perhaps a better way of putting the sense that Latour is getting at the real. But of course it doesn't stop there: the reduction of the amount of potential actors when seen in a situation allows for the multiplication of actual ones along different and perhaps unexpected lines. I'd stress that it doesn't have to be so unexpected, really, since the work of analysis isn't about revealing anything new anymore. Or at least the new isn't defined as something radically other, which gives the sense of progression (and that confusing situation where sometimes, as literary scholars, we somehow have to also make the case at some point that our interpretation is like a discovery).

The weird thing is that suddenly we're left with a situation where "make connections!" becomes the same thing as "always simplify!" And Latour asks us why that should ever have made us feel guilty. That's the virtue of the network notion of things, where in Heidegger (if I can just fold this back into what I was trying to get at towards the end of the last post), such connections are tortuously made by unfolding a more primary original term (leaving us with so much revealing and derevealing and light and darkness that we're just quite tired of standing anywhere near the clearing). I've been somewhat hesitant to affirm the sort of notion that just following these things gives you an adequate analysis (this seemed too close to Derrida to me, who is neat to read when he does this but ultimately doesn't give you any better sense of what the situation he's describing is about--it's usually just a fun ride). But you're right to try and make me remember in the last post that Latour isn't just following some preestablished sort of text: there's a subtle selection operation involving opening and closing boxes, but without the anxiety of loss, in order to construct networks (deconstruction becomes construction, he says in WHNBM) which we can then follow... and that's important. It indeed brings us back to the virtues in the structural narratology of Propp (that Greimas made more precise): we can summarize episodes and look at how they function, either by opening them up or by linking them to something else--we can close and distant read at the same time, as it were. Too often this is seen as a sort of "classifying" project in analyses of structuralism. Rather, it's closer to the "structuralist activity" that Barthes described--giving a better, fuller account by identifying relevant units of whatever size (which a regular analysis in terms of regular categories would miss). It's not out of place here to recall the "mono-individual" of Lévi-Strauss, an individual that is his own species, and the sense that categorization involves degrees of semiotic force, rather than anything so static as a label. It's in a similar way that the notion of degrees of reality works together with ANT to describe a situation, perhaps. Maybe we should read "identify units" for "follow," wherever Latour talks about "following the networks" (your incisive remarks about the differences between Latour and New Historicism here are relevant--identify new actors, don't rummage through the trashcan of history only to say you discovered something new!).

Maybe just to frame another question in closing, recalling my remarks above about experience: in general, the anxiety-producing aspect of the paradoxical modern stance is nice because it personalizes such response or knowledge--it shows that moving from the position of subjective knowledge to the objective involves a sort of process where the individual point (my reading) must be socially ratified (Kant). Marxism and Latour would critique this, but not in the same way--the former would keep things tied to experience to depersonalize individual knowledge (class consciousness and claims that we never encounter an unread artwork--cf. Political Unconscious, "metacommentary," etc.), while the latter would... well, what? Against this backdrop (which includes affect) where do Latour's experiences come in here? I imagine that once you start from the social science position, where all knowledge is already out there as positive, and doesn't so much involve the paradoxes of subjectivity (as experienced--these paradoxes are accounted for, not without massive effort of course, through the procedures and the conceptual framework, the view of sociology and its understanding of dynamics), then there's no need to depersonalize the individual, to show that this sort of marking of the subjective as subjective is pointless, since what's at work is a social process in which your contribution is only a description of the ratifying itself. You just plug yourself into the process of the ongoing description of reality. From the standpoint of the analyst, then, there's less of a problem of viewpoint (as there is in reading, where I have to have my take on things), so then when we can begin to critique sociology in the way Latour does, we don't have to reconnect it with experience--especially by ramming the description/criticism through that one-way time of modernity's historicism (Jameson). This paradoxically makes anecdote equally easy and simple and un-angsty to enter into... this is just a sketch of a problem, but I thought it might be neat to begin to think about such areas, since Aramis is so amazing in this respect, but also because Latour is always there with his paper (WHNBM), or getting into his car, conversing with laser printers, and walking through doors ("Where are the Missing Masses")--and indeed the anthropology of the sciences (talk about problems of viewpoint! the observer hidden behind all that lab equipment) is really the origin of the work...