The argument is bare bones and basic, gets its power from its very simple layout, and uses really simple language. Its exposition of the somewhat complicated concepts underlying ANT and Latour's work as a whole takes place through steady qualification, by multiplying more and more simple descriptions. Latour avoids pronouncing, as he does even in that loose work Aramis: he rarely says "collectives aren't this, they're this, this and this..." unless he has first said "here's how we can go about doing the analysis, but here's another way, and look how this object suddenly came to the fore. Now what do we do here, how do we get a handle on this?" That's not the best description, and all his other rhetorical moves are there, but the change I think is somewhat clear here. Most importantly, though, these descriptions give us the sense of what it's like to use the concepts. Make a list, say, of the things you find at the center of the conflict you're reading about in the news, and you'll see that they take a certain shape (if I remember right, this was around like pg. 30ish, talking about groups). Now, compare this to what we might be tempted to do: translate them all into a set of approved players, or rather determinants (this will come back in what I'm going to say below). But see how we end up with a much more rich vocabulary if we just admit these people who describe the conflict for us are indeed describing the real conflict too? ...In this sort of exercise, we get the feel for what's involved more than anything: it's this that I think Latour is trying hardest to give us in this book, and I think he succeeds.
So travel becomes one way to do this: he fundamentally wants the sociologist to go where the actors are, to get out of the office and move:
When you wish to discover the new unexpected actors that have more recently popped up and which are not yet bona fide members of ‘society’, you have to travel somewhere else and with very different kinds of gear (23).
And it's in these terms that he states the more far reaching gambit behind ANT I alluded to above:
If physicists at the beginning of the previous century were able to do away with the common sense solution of an absolutely rigid and indefinitely plastic ether, can sociologists discover new traveling possibilities by abandoning the notion of a social substance as a ‘superfluous hypothesis’? (12)
And it's in these sensuous terms that the whole task needs to be envisioned:
In some ways this book resembles a travel guide through a terrain that is at once completely banal—it’s nothing but the social world we are used to—and completely exotic—we will have to learn how to slow down at each step. If earnest scholars do not find it dignifying to compare an introduction of a science to a travel guide, be they kindly reminded that ‘where to travel’ and ‘what is worth seeing there’ is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of ‘method’ or, even worse, ‘methodology’. The advantage of a travel book approach over a ‘discourse on method’ is that it cannot be confused with the territory on which it simply overlays. A guide can be put to use as well as forgotten, placed in a backpack, stained with grease and coffee, scribbled all over, its pages torn apart to light a fire under a barbecue. In brief, it offers suggestion rather than imposing itself on the reader (17).
What's amazing about all of this is not so much that it provides us vivid imagery (anthropological in origin--remember where Latour started), or even a good analogy (as he goes on to say somewhere, these things break down because ANT gets more complicated). Rather, it's that this restores some thickness to methodology, which in sociology--from what I hear--gets unbelievably abstract. In other words, he deploys some morephisms (what's the grease of sociology? how does it smell?), if I can use my term, to try and morph and shape the whole task of method itself and then revalue (revamp, he says early on) sociology, so it becomes, as he wants to call it, associology.
But with travel comes speed, tempo, which rightly you just insisted upon and showed in a reading of Koch--which, let me just say here, is brilliant: you get so inside the feeling of reading "One Train," as well as Koch's poetry generally, and if anyone is reading this whose not in Lit, you should check Evan's post out (here's another link to it) because it's an excellent example of how our reading takes place alongside doing all this more philosophical stuff, and adds to the latter rather than produces, as philosophers often say it does, some sort of making-literature of the philosophical on the one hand, or imbuing philosophy with some sort of social-critical valence that limits it (more on this mistaken association of literary criticism with critique in a sec, as if the political upshot of our work lie in its method--what we do is more like analysis and has been called such.)
Now, what's crucial to me is that you're marking, with this word, something Latour is constantly talking about: the tendency, when referring to some social cause of phenomena (let's table the issue of the composition of the social for now, though of course Latour says we have to go right to it) to speed up and go to the established categories to explain that phenomena. It's not so much that the categories are wrong (though they are--but this is why I tabled that for now) as Latour is pointing out this urge to explain in general is wrong. Why explain when we really don't know what we need to explain? The whole task of freeing the object, liberating it, giving it autonomy is precisely in recognizing what's going on with that "what." In the last post, you put it like this: "we want to get there," by which you mean the reason behind the what, "so badly that we forget to trace the network that could eventually lead us there." Rather, for Latour, "we shouldn't expect to get there so fast."
I want to throw in one thing though, which really struck me while reading this book, and doesn't throw a wrench in what you are saying or what I am saying about this as just inflect it nicely, make it even a bit more forceful. It's that, for the associologist, while we're not expecting to get there so fast, we're already out there, traveling, in the sense we've already seen. In fact, this is the case for the regular sociologist too, from Latour's perspective. And while we're not trying to get there fast, we're still getting there--as I think you are indeed saying. The problem, in other words, is not just in our wanting to get there: it is in forgetting something more global, like we're all on the way where we want to go anyway.
There is another wrinkle or fold: in getting wherever we're going, in traveling, we're also playing catch up! It's not like we're making great strides ahead of our object--we're behind it, trying to get to it. This is why we think we can get there quickly by speeding up hugely. It's because we're always also speeding up behind the object. Latour puts it like this:
If the sociology of the social works fine with what has been already assembled, it does not work so well to collect anew the participants in what is not—not yet—a sort of social realm. A more extreme way of relating the two schools is to borrow a somewhat tricky parallel from the history of physics and to say that the sociology of the social remains ‘pre-relativist’, while our sociology has to be fully ‘relativist’. In most ordinary cases, for instance situations that change slowly, the pre-relativist framework is perfectly fine and any fixed frame of reference can register action without too much deformation. But as soon as things accelerate, innovations proliferate, and entities are multiplied, one then has an absolutist framework generating data that becomes hopelessly messed up. This is when a relativistic solution has to be devised in order to remain able to move between frames of reference and to regain some sort of commensurability between traces coming from frames traveling at very different speeds and acceleration. Since relativity theory is a well-known example of a major shift in our mental apparatus triggered by very basic questions, it can be used as a nice parallel for the ways in which the sociology of associations reverses and generalizes the sociology of the social (12, my italics).
Part of this is recognizing that the ANT analysis is also causing things to speed up. But Latour puts it all even more simply here:
Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish (12).
So the point is not so much that slowing down creates more rigor--as I tried to say earlier. Because we're out there after whatever we are after, we're trying to catch up to its innovativeness. So ANT tries to weird tactic of trying to speed up behind it--like everyone else is doing--by slowing down. In other words, as I said last time, slowing down is a type of acceleration too. And this is because--and you know this from Bourdieu, what's more important than the analysis is the object: all the reflexiveness in the world won't change the fact that we're tracking something that is still developing and won't be immediately changed by our particular beef with it, whatever that is--the pseudo-politics that Latour thinks sociologists feel themselves participating in doesn't really do anything (and I think Bourdieu has some similar sense--though perhaps Latour wouldn't think they share this in common). If I point out what is wrong with the object, it can still put me in that embarrassing situation where it actually might even account for what I say and make me contradict myself--that this is embarrassing, that it occurs at all in this manner, shows us it's in the lead, calling the shots.
And this is why Latour calls it reassembling: we go through and compose things again, after they're already made, because our slowness is another version of that sort of acceleration after the object, playing catch-up, collecting what it has left behind or tracing the extent and spread of all the dust it kicked up (which means that what I'm calling an object isn't one thing, of course--I'm oversimplifying, and indeed this sort of rhetoric is deceptive because it dissolves the network: nevertheless it is useful because the objects of the other accelerating disciplines like sociology are often one single thing which they want to explain, so I'm just making a contrast). This registered, the whole slowness of ANT then seems to me to get qualified: it is not rigor that's involved so much as an accounting for how we're already all playing catch up. This recognition undoes the assumption that we can only catch up by going faster in terms of overgeneralizing--as you said. Sometimes the turtle wins the race--maybe that's the whole lesson of Bruno Latour, provided that we understand the slowness as a modulation of running towards the finish, and not as any sort of pre-existent temperament.
Latour doesn't always use the term in this way, and it's probably because the object isn't singular in the sense that I said in the parenthesis above. And slowness has also always meant rigor, and it's good for an analysis to sound rigorous and difficult and philosophical (though I really see no necessary reason for this other than politics of the type Latour describes so well), so he uses it that way too. There's a nice combination of the travel and the acceleration morephisms in this quote:
As we are going to see, there is as much difference in the two uses of the word ‘social’ as there is between learning how to drive on an already existing freeway and exploring for the first time the bumpy territory in which a road has been planned against the wishes of many local communities (18).
And then there's this, which leads into the quote you used in the Koch post:
There’s no question that ANT prefers to travel slowly, on small roads, on foot, and by paying the full cost of any displacement out of its own pocket (22-3).
But I like my way of putting it, because it's less insistent on rigor and morality in this way (though Latour would like to have them all connected, as he likes to make everything connected, and as all philosophers--or their groupies (Latour might be his own groupie!)--like to make things connected since old, with their token aesthetics, etc.). So now, in closing, let me just ask how my way of thinking about it makes sense of one situation.
In the study of literature, how does the adoption of this Latourian acceleration/deceleration position look? Or what does it overcome? I'm tempted to address this because you said in the last post the following:
[B]ut don't we [humanities people, but also literary people] also tend to run toward the social "framework" way too fast, precisely because we're afraid of getting mired in the local...?"
Now, in poetry, the new acceleration would take the form of some notion that the production of poetry or literature is primary, and that we can bring ourselves closer to that primariness--not in some aesthetic sense like it's always been done, so that we "appreciate" the poems like the poet does (which does for many people qualify as knowledge of the primary). What would be overcome is a sort of distance between the analyst and production (and I think you can get this much from Bourdieu already--I think I'm just saying what you said to me once in conversation a while ago). And what would happen is that we would understand the dynamics of production, such that as we get closer to it, the complexities of this process end up more complicated, such that the poet might indeed then need us to tell him about it... and the situation of subservience is actually undone, rather than embarrassingly made evident as unidirectional (and it might be this lack of embarrassment that Latour might give us on top of what Bourdieu might). As you get closer to the primary process (to use an overdetermined term--ack!) subservience dissolves, and does more than if you assert your autonomy, your criticality (there's the word) as an analyst. But this is also only because everyone's accelerating (and the embarrassment goes away for this reason--i.e. Bourdieu might not give us this), catching up with the object.
In sociology, though, the situation seems different and worse, and Latour has to overcome a lot to impose his vision there. They catch up quick by using those big terms, by setting up the units that qualify and excluding others. And Latour shows you what the change would involve.
I draw the distinction because I think our references to the framework, as you put it, might accelerate, but accelerate perhaps in a different way--though that's only my sense of things. Certainly we can learn the lesson from Latour that acceleration is going on, and that changes the whole dynamic of how we think of these references in general. But using my understanding of this--and I think Latour's--we might qualify things, or make acceleration a wider, deeper category.
For in postmodern, identity-politics stuff that we deal with in literature (which I don't mean to knock in its entirety and I am quite suspicious of saying is just wrong as an approach in toto, as people occasionally are tempted to do, and indeed philosophers or people who don't like our discipline in general tend to do ["literary," again, is a bad term there]: from the get go I insist on trying to think pragmatically about bullshit work done by idiots and good stuff, which I find is usually harder to object to)... in the postmodern, identity-politics stuff that we deal with, I imagine I have a bit of a different sense of you here of what goes on, because I don't think their references to what goes on in society are at all really akin to the sociological ones that Latour is talking about. So in a way I think they skip the sociological problems of acceleration which involve, as Latour says, issues about disqualifying actors because they don't fit into the right boxes, the limited technical sociological vocabulary in which we need to dissolve all the richness of the play of the world. Nevertheless, this sort of postmodern/identity aspect of things is critical. So there is some sort of problem with this position. But I think it's of this sort: Latour I think describes someone overseeing the sociologist at work, and then finding out what categories they are using, and then using those--that overseer is the critical theorist, for me (though it probably is the poor philosopher of science for Latour). The critical theorist, who generalizes about social frameworks, is not so much in the position of trying to refer to social groups, as actually qualify whatever activity they are looking at as a social group which can be recognized by the sociologists. That's why identity politics, PoCo criticism, etc. seems to me to be aligned with what Latour calls postmodernity: they move all the settled categories around in infinite play more than they actually refer to society by way of these things. Does that make sense? Certainly the Marxists refer to society--but they're only the problem insofar as they remain the only real alternative to the postmodern politicization that goes on, and they're usually getting hammered by the latter. Maybe they're a problem because they remain an ideal form of politicizing for a lot of people, and so maybe its here that the associological intervention would be particularly useful--but that still seems abstract, on a really abstract level. And you're not really referring to these guys anyway, as you say the following after the already quoted:
[W]e're afraid of getting mired in the local (i.e. the textual — remember the self-conscious concern in the 70s, which overlaps with deconstruction, to get "beyond formalism").
It's those deconstructive dudes, or the anti-hermeneutic/anti-Formalist Foucauldians who are the problem, and I see a wide gap between what they're up to and Marxism.
But my main difference, I think, is that I don't see any sort of fear of getting mired in the local qua the textual--we do that all too much! Unless I misunderstood you there (what is the id of the id est? More psychoanalysis--ack! I mean what is "the textual?" The local? Are you saying we're afraid of text?), and you're saying exactly what I'd be willing to say, which is that we're afraid of getting mired in the local of the sociological, in some way, of the social text, and use their categories too much as theoretical shorthand. Latour would help this situation, in a way, because he'd allow us not to want to refer to sociology, to get more technically sociological, in our effort to try and relate things to "the social" or "the political." But this is different than saying that he'd actually help us to refer to society differently than we already do, since the postmodern people aren't doing it--but rather engaged in something like a deconstruction of sociological categories by way of showing exceptions to those categories apply. That's how "the social" is used, I think--it's a different substance altogether than the one in sociology, though perhaps for Latour just as vague, because it is something bigger than even what their categories address... it's like a meta-society of the included and the excluded. Obviously, the more Bourdieuvian analyses or sociology and literature type investigations are not of a part of this--but I wouldn't entirely group them together with the theorists of the anti-formalist type and which make up many of the identity politics crowd, at least in terms of the trajectory of their work--because they deploy a coherent system, rather than try and knock at the sociologists.
This is a bit over-complicated, but I thought maybe there's some distinctions to be made here. Regardless, I'll stop here, after I add that this shows the problem of a general association of literary criticism with what Latour calls critique. The latter is much more socially oriented, yes. But when it is picked up in literature it quickly becomes postmodern, I feel, rather than sociological. It's in this sense that Marxism and even Adorno is wonderful, if you think there is something wrong with the identity politics/postmodern model--and in this sense they (Marxists) actually align with the sociologists, I feel. This is because of the sorts of in-house dynamics, which I feel don't map well to the conflicts between the disciplines in general: literary criticism has its own sorts of trajectories because we all end up tagging these disciplines alongside literary: I'm a sociologist of literature, not a pure sociologist. But that's my sense. And as for critique in general, then, it's the postmodern aspect of Latour's beef with critique (in "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam" and elsewhere: generally, the postmodern tendency to treat society as symbols or codes or texts) that I see bearing on the social-critique people in literature, not the beef with critique in general--though the general move (against Kantian looking for conditions of possibility) might have resonance everywhere (since it is, I feel, so very vague).
But I'll stop there, and play catch-up with my email or something!
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