Some first thoughts

At some stage I hope to have something to say on the whole issue of technics from the Heidegger-Stiegler-McLuhan-Latour angle but it seems at the moment something quite difficult and therefore to be wholeheartedly avoided in the dark month of December.

As an introductory note I work broadly within the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition on topics like the ancestral, deep time, space/place, objects, technics, and more and more ‘nature’. I exist in the orbit of object oriented ontology but call my own position an unorthodox phenomenological realism which just means I disown the Husserlian move toward transcendental idealism.

Since I don’t have a strong background in theory, sociology, or much else besides philosophy Latour came to me via the Harman route. I suppose one problem with this mediation is that to me Latour was never pre-philosophical. I look through his work with a philosophical lens slightly miffed by all the in-house chatter about the social sciences and hoping to find Latour with his metaphysics on show somewhere, anywhere. So I suppose one theme of my reading will be: is Latour a metaphysician or not? A second concern will be the extent to which Latour fits into the philosophy of technics (in my own tetrad of thinkers of technics outlined above). Finally I’d like to investigate the weird public space that inhabits Latour’s work in all its gory immanence, promised plasma and Catholic grandness. How deep is Latour’s work? That is more or less what I want to find out.

At this stage I have only fully read ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ and it was not what I expected. My reaction was and remains negative. I want to get to the heart of why WHNBM remains to me a badly argued book. I especially want to do this because I’m immensely enjoying ‘Aramis’. WHNBM is a slightly weird book in that it draws on strange implements to illuminate its message and I think this has the effect of frustrating the reader (quite simply what happening and why is he using such weird examples...maybe he has an easier book etc). Cynics will argue that I was horrified by his section on Heidegger but even here it’s just a short polemical blast without much gain. So I’ll have to leave WHNBM outside in the cold like a dog that’s just chewed up the sofa.

What struck me about the reading of Heidegger in WHNBM is how deeply it related to the later Heidegger ignoring more basic affinities such as the material interconnections one finds in ‘Reassembling the Social.’ I suppose for Latour it is always a question of does this thinker obscure rather than brighten up the basic encounter with things? In Heidegger the ontological difference becomes a giant mediating distance between reader and the things rather than, as is often presumed, one enters the referential totality via an identification of the ‘existence’ of the ontological difference. Accepting that Latour is a fast-paced thinker, almost intent on bypassing every formal rule presented to him, Heidegger can only be a barrier and certainly Heidegger rarely teaches by example (the lectern example is used by both Heidegger and in a broader sense Latour in RAS) whereas Latour argues by example(s): this happens, then this happens, and now do you see how the plane of reality functions? No, let’s keep going...ever put on your seatbelt and notice that... etc.