Latour and McLuhan

With all the object-oriented fun going on at the DAC conference (as Grant has informed me: an interesting invocation of Harman via Katherine Hayles [author of How We Became Posthuman, which--Grant again informs me--is really good], whose turn to psychology and attention after this and her use of Latour was, for me, quite welcome), I thought I'd finally get to the post on Latour and McLuhan that I have been promising for some time. I see them as opposed, though not entirely opposed, via this remark from a great article (in Theory, Culture and Society) "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means:"

We readily understand how the notion of ‘technical mediation’ is rather inadequate to encompass this triple folding of places, times and agents. The term mediation always runs the risk that its message could be inverted and that one could turn whatever makes it impossible to transfer a meaning, a cause or a force into precisely what merely carries a force, a cause or a meaning. If we are not careful, we would reduce technologies to the role of instruments that ‘merely’ give a more durable shape to schemes, forms, and relations which are already present in another form and in other materials. To return to an example which has been very useful to me: traffic calming devices are not ‘sleeping policemen’ simply made of concrete instead of flesh and bone. If I consider calming devices as mediators properly speaking, it is precisely because they are not simple intermediaries which fulfil a function. What they exactly do, what they suggest, no one knows, and that is why their introduction in the countryside or in towns, initiated for the innocent sake of function, always ends up inaugurating a complicated history, overflowing with disputes, to the point of ending up either at the State Council or at the hospital. We never tame technologies, not because we lack sufficiently powerful masters, not because technologies, once they have become ‘autonomous’, function according to their own impulse, not because, as Heidegger claims, they are the forgetting of Being in the form of mastery, but because they are a true form of mediation. Far from ignoring being-as-being in favour of pure domination, of pure hailing, the mediation of technology experiments with what must be called being-as-another (250).

This obviously brings back the language of otherness which I thought Latour had done some good in dropping--but that's because morality (not ethics, interestingly, and somewhat refreshingly--since we've been getting mired in more and more ethical literary criticism over the past decade or so) is the focus of the essay: Latour wants to square what he's up to with some of these considerations, and also show how technology isn't simply amoral or moral. This, let me just note, is a very McLuhan-like thing to do:

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

This, of course, is McLuhan in the unbelievably weird classic "The Medium is the Message" (in Understanding Media, p. 11). Where, then, does Latour intervene? Latour wants to say this notion of media is too focused on use, on technical extension of human power. This has, in the past, been the way to make a straight line right to that old bogey "technological determinism." Latour doesn't do this, but he, like others who are equally willing to point out that "that's not what McLuhan is saying" doesn't spell out any reason why this straight line is drawn too quickly (another acceleration there). In fact, Latour goes quite some way in saying that the medium can become a cause, a force in itself--as you see above. Latour might be innovative, though, on this point in redrawing the lines of this old determinism-or-not squabble, not unlike Raymond Williams, whose consideration of McLuhan in the excellent Television: Technology and Cultural Form focuses less on determinism at the level of the instrument than on the level of society and the ability for the medium to be a social medium (which sounds a lot like Latour, and actually is in many surprising ways one can find in Williams' theory of communication--where the individual speaks fully socially only if the others/allies can step into his place, in a sort of relay fashion--but also proceeds along more Marxist lines that Latour,
of course, would wish to avoid).

But perhaps the reason why McLuhan isn't a technological determinist can be seen better, and in a more detailed fashion, if we drop all this, and bring ourselves to the history of media studies as recounted by our own Mark Hansen (in another issue of Theory, Culture, and Society)--a field that Latour seems to not be as familiar with as the sociology of technology (and in the above assuming, as I've tried to draw attention to before, that this field is either on board with his project or can just be integrated into it). There Hansen rightly points out the two main tensions in this field: technical evolution conceived formally (as technical history) and the more embodied sort of conception of technology as prosthetics or augmentations. The former would make us leap into the area of the non-human and technical directly, it seems, while the former have to deal more with use. The determinist McLuhan is seen in terms of the former (which aligns him with Kittler, the biggest and most sophisticated proponent of such historical technics), though non-determinist McLuhan is the latter. It's more like the formal move (medium is the message) that McLuhan continually makes to argue his position and clear out some space for his work is at odds--fundamentally--with where he wants to go and indeed is focused upon (and which is more profitably investigated by media studies people rather than communications scientists).

Now, Latour, in my mind, is really determined to address only one of these traditions, and just strikes out in the other direction himself. He addresses the first tradition (history/evolution of technology) and moves more towards the user-aspect of technology. But he does the latter not so much by focusing on use itself than changing the ontology of the technical object, and this actually makes his contribution fall more in the former category! We can see this in Aramis, where the real enemy is Darwin crudely seen in technology. This I think means, for all his spiel on use above, that Latour is most opposed to the sort of Leroi-Gourhanian project which is at the heart of Bernard Stiegler--and which might be said to be the poststructuralist extention of the Kittler dynamic (which Kittler himself might be able to be rescued from)--and the Latourian intervention is welcome here (I think Grant comes to some similar conclusion in his post on Stiegler). Technical objects don't evolve like this, or interrupt our evolution in this negative way only. They, gaining and losing degrees of reality, form collectives with us, and bolster our humanity (considered as a morphism or, to impose my language again, morephism). But this leaves the realm of actual use--actual dynamics, which tend to be investigations of a feel, and remain more affective than anything in Latour--a little more empty than embodied media-studies of the non-determinist/formal McLuhanian type, at least for me: it rather makes the more basic ontological point which is opposed to that one which Stiegler (and perhaps also Martin Hägglund) might make.

So despite what he says above, I think Latour's more on the side of McLuhan than we might think, but interested in making an point about technical evolution which makes him think he's opposed to the McLuhan tradition--when he's more opposed to something like Kittler. As media studies takes over Kittler and brings him back to the more embodied McLuhan area (as it has been over the last decade), they end up near Latour... however, they don't share his ontology, I think, nor do they really need to in order to make their work, well, work. And so one has to ask the question that I brought up last time: does one need the Latour ontology in order to bring about the transformation beyond the modern? In a similar way, this is like asking whether sociology of science (producing books like The Leviathan and the Air Pump) needs his Constitution. It's certainly the logical next step, and produces really only a making explicit what is already there (though I wonder whether it produces only this): the use of media as an intermediary. Whether media studies should follow Latour in taking it (and ANT, as I noticed, via a nice link on Levi Bryant's blog, that this person has), in order to address Kittler and the Stiegler-ian, poststructuralist, posthuman tendency, is a question, since this might be the only truly modernizing (or rather postmodernizing) aspect of the media studies project which is less advanced, as it were, than Latour: the analysis of using technology in Latour for me remains less sophisticated than what goes on in media studies--while of course Aramis remains a bit more brilliant, losing all those Foucauldian discourse-dependent aspects we find in Kittler. Perhaps, though, instead of Latour, Harman remains an option (and he's interested in restoring phenomenological feeling or a feel, let's just note, to our experience of objects, without the carnality of earlier philosophies and indeed phenomenologies, as well as the pseudo-phenomenology of philosophies of the virtual), and we could reconstruct the interactions of technical objects with themselves, and reproduce a posthuman history on that (related, but perhaps more precise) basis.