We Have Never Been Blogging

Meillassoux’s Motivation and the Pure Space of Speculation

2010-03-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick post regarding a problem that Mike raises of Meillassoux’s motivation and “what Meillassoux’s derailing has to do with politics.” I think the answer is that it has nothing to do with politics and I would go as far as to say that speculative realism is a thoroughly apolitical enterprise (and de-politicizing continental philosophy is, in a sense, the theme of post-continental philosophy).

As far as I can see Meillassoux is trying to get at the ‘real’ in the same way Badiou or Deleuze are trying to get at it. And his hopes rest with mathematics – always a kind of pure potential for philosophy since it is unencumbered by the various ‘mixtures’ we are supposed to be avoiding. If you run through Kant or Hegel or Husserl you will find the word ‘pure’ posited at any moment when one is said to be coming to the question proper. Heidegger even has a word for the non-pure: the ‘mere’ and he attaches it to anything he doesn’t like. Philosophy is at the point, in the post-continental form, of a kind of immanence or intra-philosophical discourse with itself although occasionally there are overtures to the natural or mathematical sciences (arguably one could say it has always been this way so I would add that we are in a particularly self-conscious state of this). I suppose we can even see post-continental thinking as trying to regain something of a ‘lost time’ when philosophy was committed to a rigour that perhaps lost its way sometime in the post-Heideggerian landscape (I would suggest that this is more a case of a deflation of rationalism and modernist goals and that the rigour was simply ‘different’). Having undergone a kind of wayward time philosophy is coming home to its relentless pursuit of ‘thinking’ and what exactly good thinking is – and looks like (looking, seeing and the visible are all themes to be found in Badiou and Henry for example, and it is all rather Platonic in tone). In another way it a reclamation of what is usually derived as ‘representationlist’ forms of thinking. The representation is being reintegrated into the philosophical project.

And the ancestral realm comes to be a kind of ‘pure’ space where representation is necessary in order for one to make sense. Even better it is understand vicariously with mathematical representation that brings the arche-fossil to its fullness as an indicator. The ancestral realm is a pure space of speculation.

The first rejoinder

2010-03-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Paul was writing his last post at the same time as I was writing mine--what's even more interesting is we were almost writing about the same things: what motivates Meillassoux, ultimately, to redescribe or "revise" (as he says at one point) the history of philosophy. My allusion to Derrida, picking up off of Paul's, was to suggest that while for him (Derrida), this derailing of the consistency of correlationism would be in order to politicize the latter (in a philosophical/extra-philosophical act which is nothing less than tarrying with the aporias through which politics/history is inscribed in philosophy), it is still unclear to me what Meillassoux's derailing has to do with politics. Therefore, from the Derridian perspective (certainly an extreme one), it is an eminently philosophical act of rewriting the history of philosophy that we see here (and there's nothing wrong with that of course). But occasionally that only makes things more confusing, especially as Meillassoux certainly has some sort of "state of things" in mind that he is engaging, and which I think is certainly also political--as much as it is religious. This might simply mean that Meillassoux has a different conception of politics/history in general and its relation to philosophy (such that the history of philosophy doesn't always reappear primarily as a political or even historical issue), but I think what we're also recognizing here (and I think Evan registers it too) is that something seems very (intra-)philosophic about this attempt. That's not a fault at all (it has become even more easy to call philosophy into question by talking about it in this Derridian way--but I want to do here what it allows us, which is to really stick with what is weird about philosophic operations and that history which even the Deleuzian maneuver of calling it, precisely, "Oedipal," might dispense with too quickly). In fact Meillassoux's effort is puzzling precisely because he wants to bring back something of this properly philosophic character, and it is "the state of things" that actually isn't quite ready to accommodate it.

And yet that state of things precisely is ready to accommodate this, in certain ways, because the narrative he gives is so compelling and hits home what many feel to be problematic right now. But I think your sense, Paul, that this narrative has to almost return in spirit and in content to the tumultuous era immediately after Kant--and I'm actually quite inclined to agree with you (and I think many many people in the reviews of the book I am reading are registering something similar in talking about Meillassoux's "Hegelianism")--makes it clear that philosophy has been accommodating this state of things for some time. In short, if Meillassoux is confronting us with the "repressed" of recent philosophy, which is some manner has to involve proper philosophizing itself--and I think both our accounts verge on saying something like this (even though Heidegger wasn't quite fond of psychoanalysis, I take your comment saying there's something Heideggerian about the way things proceed to in fact gesture towards this repression)--then you are hinting that there is another repression (secondary repression--which Freud called, precisely, revision): repressed in the repression is also that this was philosophically problematic once before. I think this is a fascinating response to what is Meillassoux's general contention, it seems: that correlationism was "weak" when it was adopted, then proceeded to get "stronger," as I sketched last time. Wasn't it "strong" in some sense also when it was adopted? Not in the sense that it completely involved de-absolutizing the absolute, or absolutizing the correlation (the precise sense in which Meillassoux means "strong"), but in some other way we--or indeed the post-Kantians themselves--might articulate? And doesn't Meillassoux somewhat concede this point in saying that "every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant of correlationism?" (5) What appears to be an expansive claim is also the recognition that, if we properly see that certain philosophies to not wholly "disavow" naive realism, they can be seen to at least be dealing with, if not escaping, correlationism? This of course with the caveat that a sort of general blase acceptance of naive realism can be fundamentally constitutive for many of the philosophies that assert the inaccessibility of the in-itself. As Meillassoux says, this is actually what is involved in the postmodern's indifference in the face of science, which is a sort of acceptance that actually makes thought recuse itself. What you might be saying, in some deep sense, is that pulling apart this sort of blase acceptance from a more significant, though seemingly inapparent, affirmation of naive realism (or simply realism), is what is precisely possible now: it is this that the postmodern situation, or the intensification of correlationism, provokes us to do.

But now I want to move on to my promised explication of that first correlationist "rejoinder" to the problem of the arche-fossil. It intrigues me because it treats of space--which is why Brassier will come to it in his (well articulated) criticisms of the problematization itself of the fossil and the ancestral--and for that reason I think it probably intrigues you, too, Paul. The argument proceeds by identifying the problem of the arche-fossil with what is indeed a variant of a "familiar and inconsequential anti-idealist argument" (18): the old one most easily applied to Berkeley, where if no one is around to see a tree, and esse est percipi, the tree ceases to exist unless we have some God that keeps it in being. In other words, the rejoinder would proceed by "trivializing the problem," reducing it to this one (18).

Now, remember what the arche-fossil is supposed to do: it is supposed to be a "material substrate" that indicates to scientists the existence of an ancestral reality, or one that is anterior to every recognized form of life on earth (10). What this is to open up--and the linkages between the two might become problematic--is that there is a being which is not just not given to thought, but also remains completely outside any way that it could be given to thought, though (and this is what is crucial) it still can be thought (precisely by thought going outside of itself). What this opens up is the truly dazzling (from the transcendental perspective, 27) possibility that science thinks not only these beings, but also the emergence of the givenness itself--in other words can account for both.

The rejoinder cuts off the latter question about emergence completely (or approaches it in a weird way) by saying that what is not given to thought is precisely what phenomenology accounts for. "The lacunary nature of the given has never been a problem for correlationism. One only has to think of Husserl's 'givenness-by-adumbrations:' a cube is never perceived according to all its faces at once; it always retains something non-given at the heart of its givenness" (19). being partial to phenomenology, of course, this is what I have always loved about it: I can't get enough of houses with five unperceived sides (or six if the roof is normal) towards which I nevertheless constantly orient myself. But the rejoinder can go even further: "Generally speaking, even the most elementary theory of perception will insist on the fact that the sensible apprehension of an object always occurs against the backdrop of the un-apprehended, whether it be with regard to the object's spatiality or its temporality" (19). What has happened, Meillassoux points out, is that we have confused the being-not-given of the fossil with something commensurable with not-givenness in precisely a correlationist sense: but what is not-given in an ancestral sense--in the case of the arche-fossil--is supposed to be different than the merely "lacunary" within the otherwise given. This is why the argument boils down to a rejection of a mere anti-idealist challenge, when the challenge brought by the fossil is actually much deeper: a conflation of the ancestral with the un-witnessed, which of course (the correlationist says) does not cease to be when it is not perceived. Perception itself (in a phenomenological account or even the most basic and sensible one) involves precisely accounting for the being of what is unwitnessed.

But then Meillassoux takes another step in his reasoning--the one that really interests me. So far, I've presented his account just in relation to the general givenness of a being: the conflation of the unwitnessed with the ancestral is with respect to the nature of the givenness in question. But Meillassoux goes on to say that this mistaken correlationist rejoinder involves some effort to correct what is seen as the privileging of "temporal seniority" in the challenge of the fossil (18). The conflation with the unwitnessed with the non-givenness of the fossil proceeds by asserting that "spatial distance would raise exactly the same difficulty… An event occurring in an immensely distant galaxy, beyond the reach of every possible observation, would in effect provide the spatial analogue for the event occurring prior to terrestrial life" (18). Supposedly, the conflation would then involve trying to argue from this distant event, saying that "'distance' and 'ancientness' are both vague" (18): "above all, we would immediately notice that the question of the relative proximity the object under consideration becomes irrelevant to the force of the argument once the scope of the latter has been extended to space" (19). We don't know where what is proximate begins and where what is distant ends, and the same can be said about the recent and the ancestral. The conflation proceeds, in other words, by seeing what is not-ancestral as relative to our position (thus the appearance of "recent," when the ancestral qua ancestral has no opposing term of this sort)--and this proceeds to make the problem for correlationism an intra-correlationist problem. But again, why this has to proceed so thoroughly via space is interesting. It seems to be because to think of the spatial event beyond our observation, this would mean conceding that givenness as such may be in existence, when the whole point of the fossil is to think beyond the given but the emergence of the given itself. The latter cannot be thought--Meillassoux says--if we can't think that it may occur while there is no givenness existing. Certainly this is correct, and it is what keeps Meillassoux away from any pseudo-idealist philosophy, but I just keep thinking about why time remains the way that we have to think this:

The reason why the traditional objection from the un-witnessed occurrence--it being a matter of indifference whether the latter is spatial or temporal--poses no danger to correlationism is because this objection bears upon an event occurring when there is already givenness. Indeed, this is precisely why the objection can be spatial as well as temporal. For when I speak of an event that is distant in space, this event cannot but be contemporaneous with the conscious presently envisaging it. Consequently, an objection bearing on something that is unperceived in space necessarily invokes an event and a consciousness which are considered as synchronic. This is why the event that is un-witnessed in space is essential recuperable as one mode of lacunary givenness among others--it is recuperable as an in-apparent given which does not endanger the logic of correlation. But the ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence of givenness as such. And this is precisely what the example of the spatially unperceived remains incapable of capturing--only a specific type of temporal reality is capable of capturing it (20-21).

Again, nothing wrong here, just curious about that last statement. It isn't that I can imagine any space that would be capable of capturing it: the spatially ungiven. Rather, what is odd is that the absence of givenness itself is actually not quite so temporal a thing, leading us to wonder why we have to go to such temporal lengths to capture it. For, as Meillassoux says,

Though ancestrality is a temporal notion, its definition does not invoke distance in time, but rather anteriority in time (20).

There's nothing wrong with this, again, since what we're doing is thinking through precisely how the fossil exists in space and time (as intra-worldly) so as to disrupt the correlation. But it just brings up the specificity of the fossil and what it is doing in the argument: it is supposed to call correlationism in question--to be something for which it cannot account. But, like Brassier (and like Harman, in a different way), we can then begin to wonder whether it is perhaps more than sufficient to do the job.

Welcome to this correlationist house!

2010-03-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

We turned to Meillassoux to get a better sense of what Harman will say, but also I think to place Latour--like Harman himself does. First and foremost, I think this means drawing out all the consequences of a more hard-hitting Latourian realism, which at first glance can look like (and Harman says this often) just old-fashioned realism pasted on to a weird logic of scientific practice. Latour does this himself, of course, in We Have Never Been Modern most clearly (developing a whole Constitution that must be overthrown, one of whose components is the Kantian point of view). But like Harman we have to bring this out a little more, and to show how indeed it furnishes the materials for a specific way out of Kantian problems that is different than other ways out--that is, we must see it as one way of overcoming Kant among others, and remains a particularly good one at that. This will allow us to see why Latour in general is so important for Harman in the first place, but again it will also allow us, with Harman, to draw out Latour's realism more than he himself does.

But in order to do that, we need something like a general narrative that shows why the Kantian problem is such a problem all of a sudden--one that could be brought into relation to Latour but which remains a little outside his own way of talking about his problem. This is what Meillassoux gives us, and does so compellingly.

This is why, even if you want to go on to prove your particular favorite philosopher is or is not a correlationist, you find the word "correlationist" handy. For it is one of the many crucial terms that gets put to use in the immense rewriting of the continental tradition that goes on here. In other words, not only does Meillassoux give us something specific designated by correlationism--he gives us a reason why the task for philosophies to come remains to overcome, or at least engage with, the latter (and I think I am agreeing here with what Paul has just said, though I wouldn't quite describe this derailing entirely as Derridian, nor what Hägglund would call Derrida's "politicizing" in that precise way). Because Latour does this, this is why we turn to him now. It is another way of accounting for what Harman remains incredulous about in Prince of Networks: that Latour's work was available in its sophisticated form since 1984: "In that year, Chernenko led the Soviet Union, Reagan was only half-finished in Washington, and ten nations of today’s European Union were either single-party police states or did not yet exist. 1984!" (Prince of Networks, 32). Though he will say this because his narrative is an object-oriented one, the outrage is similar: what the hell were we doing during all this time?

Parts of Meillassoux's narrative are suspicious, of course. Like Brassier and some others (perhaps with more extensive exposure to Latour's brand of science), I remain a little perplexed why science is primarily here as the mathematizer of the universe, though I also think this claim is important for Meillassoux and needs to be looked at (we'll get to it eventually). But we certainly get its drift, and that's what is essential.

The narrative goes like this: science gave us a way to talk about being without thought by mathematizing the former. Philosophy tried to register this. It did so, however, by precisely reacting against what was revolutionary in it, and holding that we could only talk about being insofar as it was bound up with thought. More specifically, philosophy was busy in talking about what is, trying to ignore the scientific achievement (or register it in the most benign ways for philosophy), when Kant came along and said this talk was in vain precisely because of science: what mattered was the way we related to what is. Then squabbles broke out over the form of this relation.

I'd characterize these struggles in the following way, since we're more familiar with this form of the narrative: Phenomenology came along, and developed to the extent that this relation was seen as nonrepresentational or less-than-representational (Heidegger--Harman will eventually take issue with this but we'll come back to it then). Then the relation was seen as antirepresentational, such that it actively disturbed and was disturbed by our attempts to grasp (represent) it. Out of this postmodern situation, we get philosophies that insist upon the possibility that ("always already") something might be beyond this grasp. But at no point was the move of Kant seriously questioned.

Now, this way of putting it isn't Meillassoux's, because ultimately we see that representation has nothing to do with the relation between thought and being insofar as these are seen as always bound up with each other (or correlated). It only has to do with a modification of the correlation:

the correlation between thought and being is not reducible to the correlation between subject and object. In other words, the fact that correlation dominates contemporary philosophy in no way implies the dominance of philosophies of representation. It is possible to criticize the latter in the name of a more originally correlation between thought and being (7-8).

My only point is that with slight modifications to this traditional narrative--setting it back in the framework that Meillassoux has given us, which questions the Kantian innovation (and indeed this is why he opens brilliantly with the precritical distinction of Locke: to set things here)--we can see the achievement of the postmodern (criticism of representation) to be precisely that reassertion of a more original correlation. Thus, Meillassoux goes on to say:

And in fact, critiques of representation have not signalled a break with correlation, i.e. a simple return to dogmatism (8).

The implication is that instead of a break, we're tied up more than ever.

But because representation has nothing to do with correlation, let's just underscore with Meillassoux that this exacerbation is not "simple." Indeed there could be a critique of representation--or critique of critique of representation (as the case may be)--that calls into question the correlation. Some might say Derrida fits precisely here (maybe, maybe). And I imagine you could fit others in too--like Heidegger himself. The person put to postmodern ends that you probably could never fit in here would be Foucault, who is antirepresentationalist first and foremost and wouldn't give a damn about the great outdoors even if he could.

The point however is that contemporary philosophies that base themselves on a critique of representation have, however, not signaled a break with correlation, despite the fact that they might. What is keeping them from doing this? Meanwhile, why the hell did we get into this situation to begin with?

We already see from the narrative that the second question is the answer to the first. What keeps us from breaking with correlation is inadequate understanding as to why it was adopted in the first place. Now, unlike Harman, Meillassoux will contend that understanding this also means seeing what the trajectory through correlationism gives us, rather than getting clear about what the alternatives were and could be: I'd say personally (but I think with Meillassoux in some sense) that it gives us a better understanding of representation, which is why I cast it in these terms, and opens up a thinking about aporias that might or might not be crucial to the project of thinking those alternatives (maybe, maybe). But Harman's object-oriented insistence (and we'll come to it and give it its due when we pick up that part of PoN) is also important, because it underscores what is Meillassoux's ultimate point: that breaking with correlationism is completely possible, provided that we begin to think about what postmodern thought tends to keep under wraps. This is, quite simply, the reason the correlation was adopted in the first place.

And so we come to the arche-fossil, for it is the sense of this that is avoided in the adoption and in some sense brings about the avoidance. But in fact I think I will come back to that in another post. Suffice it to say here that the arche-fossil is the material support ("support" is such a weird way to talk about it, and like Martin Hägglund I'm interested in this) that allows scientists to date ancestral reality--reality that is seemingly anterior to any possible human-world correlation. In the face of this object, thought adopts the correlation because what would be required--Meillassoux thinks--to make sense of this reality would be what it interprets as metaphysical. In other words, I think we can claim, using what Meillassoux says, that the most immediate reason for adopting the correlation is because we don't want to hypostatize the correlate (11). But this is actually not a real answer to anything (it is only the immediate reason) since this happens after we've already gone towards the correlate qua correlate. Why this is seen as a metaphysical assumption in the first place is the crucial issue, and if we can demonstrate that this isn't a correct assumption (or that it only remains an assumption), we can see there is no reason not to get thought outside itself and admit the "irremediably realist" sense of the statement about the arche-fossil. But because we have to go to the necessity of contingency and Hume's problem in order to see all that, let me instead just focus on one remaining thing.

I said the reason the correlation was adopted was kept under wraps by postmodern thought. But this is not because focusing upon representation bolsters correlation (though we might imagine some sort of feedback loop here). No: the "cover-up" corresponds to a process of absolutizing the correlation, characteristic of a move from "weak" to "strong" correlationism. Indeed, this does not have anything to do with representation, but is a statement about the capability of thought itself (which is why it is an absolutization). As Meillassoux says, quite powerfully, this involves a significant shift:

This shift, from the unknowability of the thing-in-itself to its unthinkability, indicates that thought has reached the stage where it legitimates by its own development the fact that being has become so opaque for it that thought supposes the latter to be capable of transgressing the most elementary principles of the logos (44).

And it is because this is the case that we get a narrative about the religionizing of reason where I put in, above, a narrative about representation. The different ways of conceiving the correlation involve developing more ways of strengthening it. But we can get into that in another post. This one can just add to the many reviews and summaries of the argument of After Finitude that are already out there (perhaps the most thorough is here), hopefully adding something by showing a little bit how the parts of the argument are connected (especially the long excursus on the necessity of contingency)--as well as relevant for those looking at Latour.

But let me just end all this by saying how unbelievably lucky I feel to read all this great stuff (and have so many people be interested in what we all have to say--even Harman himself, who has been so nice as to link to this blog a few times as we've been going through his work). Both Prince of Networks and After Finitude are amazing, amazing philosophical works, and the whole speculative realist enterprise in general that is taking them up (along with the work of Brassier and others we will read) is just full of so much energy and razor-sharp argumentation and hard-hitting rhetoric… these people are bringing a whole new form of philosophy into existence despite all the individual differences (and there are many), working extremely hard and pushing into really new territory unfazed… it's just really exciting to be reading it all.

Where does Meillassoux stand?

2010-03-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

It is a rare work of continental philosophy that slaps you with a bunch of empirical statements as positive evidence. Nonetheless as a statement of thinking and After Finitude is something of a provisional text pointing to a system to come, it is difficult to ascertain what Meillassoux’s thematic or contextual position is. Where is it, one might ask, that Meillassoux stands? And following on from this...does it matter where he stands? Since in many ways speculative realism orbits around the ancestral argument as a kind of shared ‘example’ of what it means to be speculatively realist then I think it does – at least when we are discussing a revolution from within the continental tradition. And speculative realism is a revolution from within. In proper Deleuzian fashion [“the history of philosophy...is philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex” – Negotiations] speculative realism is out to slay some masters, and start anew. I think that After Finitude itself is a book that wants to slay the powerful effect of the ancestral argument (the argument that has made hairs stand on end!). And until we find out what lies in store it is hard to know just how provisional our statements about this provisional book are. We will have to wait, if we read French for the next book, or if you are like me you cannot read French, we must wait until Graham Harman’s book on Meillassoux which will, I think, contain a short excerpt from the new book. But this is to get excited about something to come. What can we say about Meillassoux right now – transitionally?

It seems as we enter the book that Meillassoux will be coming down on the side of science, or at least trying to show how correlationists ought to be honest about how their position undercuts some scientific statements, and perhaps even that mathematics will emerge as a kind of access point to the real but we must remember that we need this move only to access the ancestral real and even then just to make realist statements about the ancestral real! In my own reading of Meillassoux (to be raised at Dundee, but also in a paper to come and the first chapter of the book with zero) this promised engagement with science/the real quickly subsides and we find ourselves operating in the coordinates of German idealism (soft correlationism, subjectivist metaphysics, and strong correlationism). The entire undermining of strong correlationism comes about in a discussion revolving around Kant and contemporaneous reactions to Kant. Even the rescue of the absolute comes about via a discussion of the principle of sufficient reason albeit one that leads to a very important discussion of the fideism that contemporary correlationism has committed itself to. Like Critchley, in his short but important review of AF, I think the real target is phenomenology or post-Heideggerian hermeneutics/language obsession that brought continental thinking into disrepute with their anti-science bias leading to a very public mocking via Sokal that continental thinking is only now starting to emerge from.

I think it is fruitful if we think, for a moment, just what a scientist would make of something like the principle of unreason. Does it matter that scientists and we must remember that we are here trying to reach something like their territory, care about a problem that is only a problem if one is a phenomenologist or Kantian? Or is this just the game of acting out a kind of fantasy where philosophers engage in providing a ground for the sciences (even if it is a rather odd ground...)? This is the kind of thing I find problematic about Meillassoux but this is a very small problem since overall I think that, in strictly philosophical terms, Meillassoux holds a consistent set of beliefs and also knows how to reveal inconsistencies that are revealed at the assumptive level of correlationist thinking. Oddly many correlationist positions, and this holds in a lot of belief systems, are internally consistent. Internal consistency can be seen as a proper criterion with which to judge a philosophical system, but in an almost Heideggerian (!) way Meillassoux delves somewhat deeper than this to upset the apple cart. I’ve heard Derrida’s position described as derailing a train that is heading to its destination just a little too well and perhaps this is how we must see Meillassoux’s critique. Correlationism works just a little too well, a little too consistently, and so we ought to be correspondingly suspicious. Just where is correlationism headed and what kind of madman is in the driver’s seat?

Where realism comes from

2010-03-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

My philosophy cap is back on and I'm ready to delve into some Meillassoux and further comment upon Prince of Networks. But I just want to pause here--if I can pause before I go (certainly a philosophic question if there ever was one)--and suggest something I thought about as I was going through After Finitude: how different are the places from which Meillassoux's realism and Latour's realism come!

To put it a different way: A lot has been said about how the speculative realist turn has come out of the encounter--at long last--of the "philosophy of the continent" (or whatever you want to call something like this tradition) with science. But when you reflect upon just what about science provokes Latour and Meillassoux, you see that this gets complicated. For Latour the provocation is something like the underlying nature of the things that scientific practice and politics deals with--this is his way into realism. The general sector of science that this comes from is, we could say, the rapid growth (and funding) of biology, especially, alongside the increasing "technologizing" of lab work (I hope I cast a wide enough net here, emphasizing the growth of these areas and the attendant mutations they cause in the linkages between science and society, rather than biology or technology itself--whose intricacies could never keep Latour from moving on to other things). For Meillassoux, what provokes is something like the nature of the scientific statement. And this comes of course by radiation dating and more (astro-)physics-based research. If we look at other thinkers, we see certain realist work emerge out of systems theory or complex self-organization.

This registered, you begin to suspect that it is perhaps the expansion of "Science" into distinct areas able to be addressed in completely different ways--because different aspects of it are provoking different kinds of questions--which is perhaps just as important in facilitating these encounters. In other words, a differentiated "science" (what Latour is right to call "research") brings people differently to realism--while lumped up together it leads to quick dismissal or general ambivalence that Meillassoux is able to characterize so well. Perhaps involved also is the registration of a particular risk, too: the risk that--like in some American philosophy departments--this differentiation of science will produce a set of problems (bio-ethics, say--not to mention philosophers of science) only able to be addressed by specialists (and ignored by scientists). The recognition of the diversity of science by the realist stance would then be some way of countering this, by precisely using everything that spoke against the continental tradition (lots of old, imprecise, metaphysically-connected problems)... Among other things...

Detour

2010-02-28T20:44:00.000-08:00

We're taking a detour here. Anticipating the discussion of Meillassoux in Prince of Networks, we're going to focus now on After Finitude. There's still a LOT of the first part of Prince of Networks that we want to get to (I personally want to do several more posts like the one on the dissenter), so expect posts on that to pop up every once and a while in between Meillassoux posts. And we'll be coming back to part two of PoN at some point for a really extensive discussion. Hopefully, we'll then turn that into a launchpad and/or counterpoint to our next wave of reading, which will be all the various realist and speculative thinkers I mentioned a while ago.

Turning to Meillassoux, let me just say that there's a lot in this book I want to cover--not just the ancestrality problem. In that spirit, I'll go over the ancestrality problem soon, when I can be very clear about it all and talk about it in as basic a way as possible, but in my next post (not this one) I'll be turning to that first objection of the correlationist "semiotic character" on page 18-20, and Meillassoux's counterargument--which centers around the difference between the ancestral and the ancient or distant (something I didn't give enough attention in skimming through the book a while ago).

Latour at Princeton

2010-02-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

So Latour is speaking in a couple hours at Princeton in our great department of Architecture. It's an event in a series that is basically an extension of Alejandro Zaera-Polo's really amazing-sounding seminar on the building-envelope (usually thought of as just the facade, but you can see how the hyphen broaches new questions that might be taken up by Latour and the other great architects he will be talking with), which is going on right now (and in which Latour is being read). The session today will be on "Attachments" (click here for the poster). Unfortunately, with the snow, I won't be able to get down to Betts Auditorium. It's okay though, since Evan saw Latour a few days ago at UCLA and will have an account of that soon. But it would have been great to see him on this topic, and especially here, since the visible spread of his work throughout the University can be shoved in the face of the IAS, just across Alexander Street, whose members denied him a position in 1990.

Dissent and Tennis

2010-02-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

To pick up and expand on Mike's excellent post about Latour's dissenter:

What makes the dissenter seem like a critic is that the doubts are so active that everything comes into question: everything and anything is in doubt, because the dissenter actually just wants to prove the Professor wrong no matter what. What's crucial is that this isn't the critical desire: at no point does he want to transcend reality. The dissenter calls into question because he genuinely believes something else is real--in fact that something like the whole state of things is different. But this "state" is finite, and can be wrapped around a specific space--the lab and each object we encounter in it. It is only because of this (or the fact that he has no allies and confronts only in this space--it is the same thing) that each of his doubts attains the status of an "effort at modification," and he can genuinely be a part of a trial of strength.

This is very well put and I agree with all of it except that I think you're wrong to suggest that criticism wants to "transcend reality": as Latour understands it (and I'm basing this in part on remarks he made at a lecture I attended at UCLA the other day, about which more later) criticism actually wants to expose transcendence, to bring us back to reality by unmasking or debunking whatever makes a false claim on the real. But you're exactly right about what the dissenter is doing, and how that's different from critique: rather than obliterating the other side, either by transcending it or accusing it of false transcendence, he's shifting everything around: moving the goalposts, as they say in the UK.

There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the paradox of being against critique, but I think sometimes the whole opposition to critique and criticism comes off as a mere impatience with being detained or delayed. We want to make our points, elaborate our arguments, enter them in the register of posterity, and then maybe sit back and wait for them to be critiqued, or modified, or Aufhebung. It's a kind of back-projection of the history of ideas, or philosophy: if philosophy is a grand succession of important ideas, then we want to take our place in that history, and we'll accept being critiqued as the price of membership. But Latour's early work shows us once and for all that even in science, supposedly the most positive, accumulative, successive intellectual enterprise of them all, this never happens: our precious projects are scrutinized, criticized, picked apart, shoved around, manhandled at every turn!

One of the cherished beliefs of critique, especially immanent critique, is that it can fully grasp its opponent's or predecessor's positions prior to negating them. Let's call this the tennis match view of philosophy: you serve, I return. But the kinds of criticisms Latour sees as really mattering — and it's probably better to call them skepticisms or dissensions than criticisms — all happen prior to the moment of something like a definite position becoming established, as if we had people asking, Why are you putting the net there? or Why use that kind of ball? or Why play tennis in the first place? These seemingly irrelevant and counterproductive questions detour, redirect what we're doing, make us have to say it in another way; and we have to make this adjustment, or modification, in order to continue talking about something real. What Latour dislikes about criticism is not that (like skepticism or dissension) it disrupts things: that's good! What he hates about "criticism" specifically is that it thinks it destroys things, or "overcomes" them, that it magically eliminates its enemy and reveals a real world, as if the thing it redirected never existed, or doesn't continue to exist. That won't get anyone (except maybe a few impressionable and demoralized graduate students) to play their chosen game differently, let alone to play a different game entirely.

This is why I think (as I think Mike does too?) that the dissenter is sort of a hero for Latour (although a quixotic one), and an obvious analogue for the science studies researcher in the laboratory. It's also why I'm coming to think that Latour, whatever he and Harman say, should not really be considered a philosopher, or at least not one philosopher among others. (I'll try to expand on this intuition in a future post, which I promise I'll get to eventually, on Latour's UCLA lecture, "The Compositionist Manifesto.")

It is a boring but great book

2010-02-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

‘’(you'll remember, Paul, you and I recently agreed the first volume of Being and Event is a bit boring, and I'm increasingly interested in what we agreed about).’’

I just wanted to add some words since I really do feel like I have not been blogging here enough.

I suppose in the same way that Latour is both entertaining and a good thinker Badiou is both a bad writer and a good thinker. I guess the real problem would be to encounter a bad thinker who writes well. Philosophy, I think, tends to operate somewhere around the limits of boredom. Sometimes philosophers buck the trend. I suspect very few people are bored when reading Harman’s books (except when he has to talk about Heidegger but we can safely blame Heidegger for this). I do suspect that many people find reading through Being and Event a kind of chore – that is many readers will feel that they must read Badiou to keep up [one read’s Badiou after all…] even if, and here philosophy is a rather odd discipline, one finds the entire process terribly mundane. And all this for a discipline where you might not even get a proper grasp on what is happening in a text until you re-read it [that is re-read something you already know is boring!]. And then there is the math. Math! So what I think we agreed on was something more than that it is ‘merely’ boring, to link us up with Heidegger, since to call a book of philosophy boring is never enough to dismiss it - which is why Harman does not end PoN once he has convinced us that Latour is entertaining and the heavy lifting comes in showing Latour's metaphysical bona fides.

I remember coming across Hegel’s section on death and the negative (in the PofS) for the first time [the famous tarrying with the negative section]. I will never be able to articulate just how intense that moment of reading was for me, but not 3 minutes before coming across this section I was probably yawning and thinking about my next cup of coffee.

The Dissenter

2010-02-20T17:04:00.000-08:00

I had actually forgotten about the incident of the Professor and his dissenter in the crucial pages on trials of strength in Science in Action. I was happy to see Harman reconstruct it (interestingly, Harman capitalizes "dissenter," perhaps to make it a more interesting fight between him and the Professor--unless in the French it is capitalized--while Latour refers to him alternately as "the dissenter" and provocatively as "his dissenter"--meaning the Professor's). He does so for two reasons. First, he wants to give us some flavor of Latour, which is, indeed, something that is hard to convey without ending up sounding like you are describing yet another "French intellectual" (and perhaps Bourdieu's analysis conveys this, in a different way--I'd have to look at it). Harman does this throughout the book by pointing to his "wit," but he here accomplishes it, interestingly, by saying that, in these pages, Latour is not at all "boring" (PoN, 43). The more I think about it, this is a fascinating way to categorize philosophical work, and we use it probably more than we think (you'll remember, Paul, you and I recently agreed the first volume of Being and Event is a bit boring, and I'm increasingly interested in what we agreed about). But Latour isn't just entertaining or not boring: in fact, "there have always been too many boring philosophers, and we are fortunate that Latour is not among them" (43, my italics). That's even more fascinating, if we give this judgment the weight I want to give it (we don't have to bring in Heidegger's extensive--and a bit boring, now that I think about it--analysis of boredom, but it couldn't hurt). Then again, it could be just a matter of personal taste: I assume from his remarks in Guerrilla Metaphysics about Derrida (to the effect of "this isn't a good way to write and moreover I don't get why people salivate over this overwrought language"--the latter being a sentiment I share) that Harman thinks much of recent continental philosophy too could have been much more entertaining than it actually is and was, and, well, I'm betting that puts him in a small group (when so many seem to move towards it because they see this boring stuff as the incarnation of energetic, entertaining philosophy). Then again, he could be referring to lots of Anglo- philosophy, which he criticizes for its repetitiveness later in the book (I'll look at that when we get there). Here too though this sentiment or preference seems to animate Harman's work and even his positions (philosophy has this wonderful way of being author-centered, such that even personal opinions can seem to perform the philosophy if they are taken seriously enough--something Harman himself is attuned to if we look at his presentation of Latour's background early in PoN and his emphasis on moments of personal inspiration, p. 13), so while I don't want to wade in something so personal as taste, I do think it could be relevant to this issue of boredom and we should note it.

The other reason Harman gives us such a long reconstruction of this section of Science in Action is that he wants "to do some justice to the meticulous detail of Latour’s empirical accounts of laboratory life, which must otherwise be excluded from a metaphysical book like this one" (PoN, 37). He particularly wants to show how Latour can actually reconstruct every single thing the Professor does in his lab in order to combat the suspicions of his dissenter, and how Latour can show how at each point the forces are changing, amassing against the dissenter with the recruitment of more and more allies: "What the story shows is that the Dissenter can continue to dispute ad infinitum, but only at the cost of growing isolation and perhaps even mental illness (and here I do not jest)" (PoN, 37). Now, there's an interesting thing here in this figure. After the dissenter exits the lab Latour remarks:

This exit is not the same as the semiotic character [the figure Latour brilliantly isolates as the made-up or semi-made-up "contrary position" in a scientific paper, who comes to pose a counterargument that you have anticipated and refute]. This time it is for good. The dissenter tried to disassociate the Professor from his endorphin, and he failed. Why did he fail? Because the endorphin constructed in the Professor's lab resisted all his efforts at modification (Science in Action, 77).

Harman cues us to this fact: in Latour, reality is what resists. This is what makes the incident more determinative or final ("this time it is for good") than in the lab paper where the semiotic character is defeated. More reality is generated here, set in place. But what is also fascinating is the last sentence--to which Harman's great emphasis on the length of this account of Latour's brought me (I wouldn't have noticed it, or would have only accounted for it abstractly): the fact that the skeptical efforts of the Professor's dissenter are also "efforts at modification." I know what is at stake in a trial of strength is reality, but I guess I never thought that this would be the way that even the skeptic or cynic could be accounted for from the Latourian point of view. Perhaps this is because (weirdly) I feel we could insist that the dissenter is a critical figure, trying to transcend reality, though neither Latour nor Harman says this. The reason they don't say this is because the dissenter precisely isn't a critic: it is the reality of each thing that is at issue. As Harman says, "The Dissenter may be a loathsome pest, but he does have a point: anything can be challenged" (44). What is important to realize is that this is all there is to his point--or perhaps that this is only his point. Remember he was "an extreme case" of the radical 1% that actually would get into the lab and challenge a claim: "as one of the estimated 1% of readers who actively doubt this claim, the Dissenter appears at the laboratory to speak with the Professor in person" (39)

What makes the dissenter seem like a critic is that the doubts are so active that everything comes into question: everything and anything is in doubt, because the dissenter actually just wants to prove the Professor wrong no matter what. What's crucial is that this isn't the critical desire: at no point does he want to transcend reality. The dissenter calls into question because he genuinely believes something else is real--in fact that something like the whole state of things is different. But this "state" is finite, and can be wrapped around a specific space--the lab and each object we encounter in it. It is only because of this (or the fact that he has no allies and confronts only in this space--it is the same thing) that each of his doubts attains the status of an "effort at modification," and he can genuinely be a part of a trial of strength. My takeaway is that this is important to note when we jump from something like the dissenter or skeptic to the critic quite quickly. Latour in his essay on criticism realizes that for the latter position, something else is at stake than just reality in the here and now, as it were.

Immanence again

2010-02-16T11:59:00.000-08:00

I've been talking a lot about Latour and immanence here, but now I'd just like to heed the remark of Harman at the beginning of Prince of Networks:

It would certainly be fruitful to consider Latour’s similarities and differences with fellow non-analytic/non-continental (i.e., basically non-Kantian) thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, William James, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon, Gabriel Tarde, Etienne Souriau, and Latour’s own friend Isabelle Stengers. But when this emerging ‘School X’ is promoted under such misleading titles as ‘process philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of immanence,’ the result is a false sense of beatnik brotherhood (PoN, 6).

Why is it false?

[T]here is a major family quarrel underway on this list over a highly classical problem: the isolation and interbleeding of individual things. On one side are figures like Bergson and Deleuze, for whom a generalized becoming precedes any crystallization into specific entities. On the other side we find authors such as Whitehead and Latour, for whom entities are so highly definite that they vanish instantly with the slightest change in their properties. For the first group, substance is too determinate to be real; for the second, it is too indeterminate to be real (PoN, 6).

That last sentence especially is like breath of fresh air: suddenly, just by reappearing, substance is freed from its conflation with so many operative terms that we find in post-Heideggerian France. In all that talk about identity, difference, and sameness, substance is smuggled in or rather subordinated to the play of those other terms (I'd add, especially in Deleuze). And as we get clear and a bit "classical" about all this, then, what comes out of this are objects and a question about whether certain stances vis-a-vis substance either help or hinder the emergence of objects (though that is not the only way one can see whether a philosophical position is object-oriented).

And at the same time, immanence gets complicated and we have to bracket the term--or really start to find out what we mean by it. I intend to do the latter here as we go through all this, but for now I just wanted to quote this nice bit, which also serves as a sort of setup for PoN--something like the most immediate area or debate that Harman sees his work plopping down into.

One more comment on what Harman seems to be doing with Latour versus what Latour, in "Coming Out" seems to be saying about himself--which will reply a bit to what you were saying, Evan, last time. I don't think there is a conflict or anything (and you're not saying that), but there are interesting sorts of considerations that emerge whenever we take philosophically a thinker who might be doing something else than philosophy. Or, rather, doing say 10 different things besides philosophy--as is the case with Latour and actually with many many people that philosophers are willing to consider having philosophical import: taking someone philosophically involves stating whatever they are doing in philosophical terms first and foremost, or reading into what they say something like a clear position on either established or emerging philosophical issues, and this means massively excluding the other direction in which their work goes. Deleuze was a master of this, and also tried in a sort of unprecedented way to keep the exclusion to a minimum--in what amounted to an effort (and this was the effort of critical theory as well) to expand the extremely, extremely, extremely small canon of philosophical texts. But my point is that this exclusionary operation is also an operation involved in all such philosophical consideration (broadly considered, philosophy that interprets/takes up thinkers), and it justifies itself by pointing to the increasing specificity about the problems it reveals to have always been rumbling underneath (or, as the philosopher might claim, at the heart of) whatever the thinker is saying and wherever he or she is going.

In Harman, this move has the added benefit (remember, exclusion isn't always wrong) of revealing a problem to be there where we didn't even think it was--as I've said above. The ultimate interpretive question for us would be whether we want to then take this as a (I was going to say mere, though I don't wish to demean--as should be clear from all this, I want to instead produce a healthy ambivalence not reducible to skepticism... I'll just say local) contribution to philosophy, or as something that really has all sorts of wide-ranging effects upon how we or anybody else considers Latour. Obviously we don't have to choose, but something like this choice informs our reading a bit, when we suddenly see even Latour's more philosophical statements put in a more metaphysical language, like this:

Unlike a substance, an actant is not distinct from its qualities, since for Latour this would imply an indefensible featureless lump lying beneath its tangible properties (PoN, 17).

It's a great statement--but how did it come to be? Part of the answer is that this is just of the genre metaphysics: it is doubtful that Latour would actually be bothered if what he did "implied" such a lump, though he metaphysician might be (and Harman is--rightly so--whenever Latour does something that indeed implies this). But now the question is--what constitutes that genre? What produces it? What allows it to transcode the work of Latour in this way, such that it attributes a properly metaphysical consequence (to be avoided) to a proposition Latour, even at his most explicit ("I use 'actor,' 'agent,' or 'actant,' without making any assumptions about who they may be or what properties they are endowed with" Pasteurization, note 11), only can somewhat hazily imply in this way (not because the proposition isn't philosophical in precisely this way, but because the proposition would also have to do at least 10 more things besides this)? (By the way, you'd be mistaken--though again you'd be extremely philosophical--to draw from this some notion that we are considering Harman's statements as mere "discourse." What is in question is not the "status" of Harman's work in that sense: I can discuss metaphysics as a genre without implying it is therefore a discourse or even a text--though some years ago we might have argued explicitly that. But we're beyond that point: sorry literature- and theory-bashers.) This is just to say that we have to weigh the import of the resurgence of metaphysics that we find in Harman's work--or actually just ask how it is revived or even whether it is a revival (what were we doing before?)--in order to understand a bit what we're doing to Latour when we begin to take him (or watch him take himself) in this philosophical way.

Then again all this might not be as much fun to weigh as the other resurgence (or first appearance?) in Harman, which is that of the object. But it seems to me we can focus this question by also asking to what extent we need metaphysics (and not just an object-friendly thinker like Latour, who we can interpret metaphysically) to make the object appear. This is a bit backwards, I know, and is symptomatic of a reader who is more confident in talking about what philosophy does than actually doing philosophy, but hey, that's me--and besides I think it really does open up a sort of weird and interesting view on all this, where we do possibly have something to contribute.

Preliminaries

2010-02-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

Philosophers trying to give retrospective accounts of their careers usually do one of two things: either they claim it's all been one big project all along, motivated by one basic idea or set of ideas; or they mark off phases of development where they got interested in something new. But Latour does neither! Instead he tells a story sort of like Descartes' in Discourse on Method, of doggedly trying to follow a single method (which, he reminds us in Reassembling the Social, means "travel") and the sorts of people he's encountered by using this method, and the ways he's pissed them off, forcing him to explain himself. In other words, he says that he has been trying to do one thing all along, but he has been continually waylaid by people confused by his method. The thing he's been trying to do, apparently, is "philosophy." And "Coming Out as a Philosopher," as I read it, is his explanation of everything he's found it necessary to accomplish before beginning to do philosophy.

To summarize quickly for those who haven't read it: in "Coming Out as a Philosopher," Latour claims to have adapted his method of following chains of translations from the Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. He then started using this method, originally developed for exegesis of scripture, on the inscriptions of science and technology. The intention behind this wasn't to debunk or refute science — it just endeavored to show how science constructed itself as real through a long process of trasnlation, with the hope of being able to use the method to show how regimes of enunciation other than science do the same (and thus ultimately refute positivism or naturalism: there's nothing special about science or nature's reality; it's knitted together very well, but so are other modes of existence). This, on Latour's account, is what he was doing in Laboratory Life and Science in Action.

The plan, apparently, was to do this first for science and technology, and then move on to other modes of enunciation (law, religion, etc.). Science, as I understand it, really has no priority for Latour: he's not a philosopher of science, he's a philosopher with an intense interest in scientific method (again like Descartes). But, before he could keep traveling along his merry methodical way... lots of people objected! The science wars broke out! Scientists assumed he was using "society" in order to debunk science/nature (in other words, they accused me of being a social constructionist/anti-realist). So he had to prove he wasn't, not by genuflecting to science and reassuring everyone that it actually is real after all, but by showing "sociology" and "society" to be as ad hoc and constructed as science and nature are. (Fast-forward a little to Reassembling the Social; but this is also what he's doing in early articles like "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan.") And this move, of course, pissed off sociologists (Bourdieu, among others) — although thus far Latour doesn't seem to care too much about that.

OK, well and good. But, at the same time, even as Latour engaged in what are basically high-level methodological debates with scientists (both social and natural), he got an idea for a second project, one which would help explain why everyone got so angry at him to begin with. This is his "anthropology of the moderns" — initiated with We Have Never Been Modern and ultimately including stuff like Iconoclash and some chapters of Pandora's Hope. This is not Latour arguing with anybody (despite the rhetorical pointedness of his style) but rather providing narratives of why there are so many people around who want to argue with him. (And if he engages with philosophers in WHNBM, it's probably because philosophers are the champion arguers in our societies and they influence intellectuals more generally, not because he's really trying to intervene in philosophy.) As opposed to stuff like Science in Action and Reassembling the Social, which are both basically how-to books for social scientists and say nothing about what exists but just about how existence is constructed, We Have Never Been Modern is, if not an anthropology or an ontology, at least a proposal for one. It's asking: how did we get to a place where we think that "science" and "society" are the only things that are real?

In "Coming Out as a Philosopher," all of this previous work — We Have Never Been Modern included, which one might have thought was his "coming out" party back in 1991 — appears as just so much ground-clearing, or preparatory work, for what Latour has in fact really wanted to do all along: use this method of following the actors and so on to describe other regimes of enunciation besides "science" and "society," and thus reveal those other modes of existence that the scientists and the sociologists have claimed don't really exist. And that's what he is now promising to do. We move, as it were, from method to modes: all this time Latour's basically been arguing that a single method can be applied to everything that exists, but he has applied it only to "science" and "society"; now he's finally doing the more properly philosophical work of saying what there is that methods can be applied to.

So, to sum up, as Latour sees it he's had three major intellectual projects going more or less simultaneously:

1. A methodology for "following" the construction of truth via chains of translations
2. An anthropology of the moderns (or, Why does everybody insist on arguing with me?)
3. A secret philosophical system, which he's going to unveil in his next book (An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence)

I'm going to stop there, though I want to talk about how Harman sees what Latour is doing; that will involve looking a little bit at his essay on "The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy" and Prince of Networks. Harman makes the rather different claim that Latour has been doing philosophy all along. My rather broad question is: does it make a difference to how we read Latour — and in particular to how we read him vis-à-vis speculative realism — if we see all the work published up to this point as preliminary to philosophy, versus reading it as philosophy? Or does this not really make a difference at all?

On the active voice in philosophy

2010-02-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

Can I just jump in here real quick and say holy shit, how wonderful is it to actually encounter philosophers who use the active voice?

I think we've been loving this about Latour's more philosophical ramblings and in part talking about it as his mojo (it's really why I love Irreductions). But if we don't get explicit about the things that bring about this mojo, we're just going to be talking in general about mojos everywhere. There's a lot to mojo, yes--I mean we're talking about style, basically, which is never reducible to mere grammar. But the wonderful thing about style (at least for us, who know how to talk about it) is that you can build it up out of these elements, as much as you might also try to capture it all at once with rhetorical terms (I feel mojo for us means something like the old rhetorical term energia--but taken technically that term also doesn't quite do).

So now that we're heading into Harman, another thinker with mojo, I just want to actually state that the active voice contributes to the charm.

There are other thinkers who use it too, of course. Deleuze comes to mind. But the passive voice dominates a lot of recent philosophy.

Part of this is Heidegger's fault--though it is probably not good to assign blame in this way, since no one person can cause any real change in the use of grammar (and I'll qualify things in a second). I don't mind Heidegger's jargon so much as the structure of sentences like these:

Yet that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us (B&T, ¶44, p.268 in M&R translation).

I did indeed just pick this at random, by the way--I basically opened a book of Heidegger and there it was. You can open up to a page of Heidegger, though, and most of the thing will be in the passive voice:

[In] what does the humanness of man consist? In lies in his essence. But whence and how is the essence of man determined? Marx demands that the "human man" be recognized and acknowledged. This he finds in the "community." "Communal" man is, for him, "natural" man. In the "community" the "nature" of man, that is, all of his "natural needs" (food, clothing, reproduction, economic subsistence) are equably guaranteed. Christians see the humanness of man, the humanity of homo, in his delimitation from deity. He is a Christian man as "God's child," who in Christ hears and accepts the claim of the Father on him. Man is not of this world, inasmuch as "world," thought theoretically and platonically, is only a passing passage on to the beyond (Letter on Humanism).

Now, to be fair, Heidegger is never wholly passive--I imagine only really hardcore Heideggerians or maybe Derrida can actually pull that off. And his whole general project restores transitivity to the even passive uses of "is"--as Levinas once nicely put it. And on top of that, there are some really striking moments (the tool-analysis is one of them) where we get Heidegger's active voice:

The kind of being which belongs to such concernful dealings is not one into which we need to put ourselves first. This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the latch. The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us... (B&T, ¶15, p. 96)

That's still not quite as active as it could be--and it is built up in such an unbelievable way (as in the later work, where jugs are jugging etc.) that we might still have recourse to Adorno's jargon book. But then again anything with Heidegger and his language is fraught.

What's more important is that I also be fair in general by qualifying all this scorn for the passive. I'd actually go so far in the opposite direction as to say--and I think I've said this to you on occasion, Evan, as I say it to everybody--precise use of the passive voice (not lazy use, as you'll find in this post) can be invaluable at times, especially in philosophy. Here it often becomes a very essential tool for writing, as it keeps the verb's metaphoricity to a minimum (not to mention its ability to imply causality). The sentence then relates concepts quite clearly.

But, of course, if you start to use the active voice, you quickly understand concepts get even clearer when you are concrete, when you risk causal implications and make something in the sentence do something rather than be assigned something (this is also why Hegel is, at times, amazing to read). Of course, teachers of writing often prohibit the passive voice for this reason: you actually have to think hard about the structure of the sentence with the active voice.

And Latour, who establishes or reestablishes that unbelievable link between rhetoric and realism, seems to understand precisely this. Harman too. I'm making my way towards intimating that the active voice has something to do intrinsically with OOP, of course, where clarity is suddenly defined precisely in terms of the ability to convey that concreteness.

Everybody knows this already though. What they're mistaken in thinking is that this might be something different than what was done long ago in the "language-centered" era of "critique." We can't just rest content with the notion that a philosophy's use of language reflects that philosophy--that the connection I'm drawing here is fully explainable in terms of what the philosophy says even about rhetoric itself. Talking about the active voice (or using rhetorical terms to try and get at it) shows other reasons can validly explain the thing.

This is important to underscore when a certain type of current continental philosophy doesn't claim to care anymore about a dream of some continental (mostly French) philosophy in the middle to late part of the 20th century: that you could change the general form and structure of philosophy by trying to talk about something other than what "there is." The strain I'm referring to interprets precisely this dream to be a statement about the nature of reality, about what there is and how what there is is there. Now, this isn't so much a misinterpretation (as partisans of the older schools would say) as a judgment--and a complex and nuanced one at that. It states that not only were the dreams impractical--if it just said that it would be missing the point--but also the whole effort of dreaming to produce practical effects was weird in the first place. And the judgment is correct, in some sense: what is constantly being bashed as the "language-centered" aspect of a certain continental philosophy of the past is actuality its incredible hope that by merely changing the way we speak, by being wary of "there is," the whole manner of philosophy would change in turn. To believe this, you have to believe that style mattered, that it had practical effects on the ground, over and above believing what Heidegger said about being and the the structure of "there is." Now, for a whole host of reasons, I think it's actually important to remember how the situation would support such a weird position. And it's important not to forget that Deleuze, who is currently being championed as a realist against the "language-centered" philosophies of old, held this position most tenaciously and extremely.

My only point here is that if we are willing to recognize a certain active-voiced turn in philosophy--if I've not so much convinced you of that as restated something that you want to believe about the relation of what the philosophy says to the way it says that--well then we have to ask whether something similar to the "language-centered" era is going on here. This doesn't invalidate anything or undercut anything about the philosophies in question--it just makes us wonder a bit about how philosophy works, how it constitutes its relationship to expression, how it continues to dream.

Latour-Wissenschaft

2010-02-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

Part of the weirdness of Latour, it seems to me, is that he can get away with saying something like this, in "Coming Out as a Philosopher" (his Unseld-Prize acceptance speech):

I have carefully hidden my big project under a screen of apparently disparate types of studies. [...] I have not dispersed myself at all: it is just that, throughout my career, I have simply rather disingenuously [simply rather disingenuously!!-mj] hidden [disingenuously hidden!!-mj] my real intentions.

And then the next moment he can say something like this, about his notion of irreduction as it was featured in the "immutable mobiles" of his work on the Salk institute:

The great surprise came when I had to learn, quite bitterly, that what I had taken as a rather innocent method to study the truth condition of science (exactly as I had taken positively the exegetic method to study the different truth conditions of religious enunciation), was immediately taken by my readers as a debunking of the claims of scientific reason to objectivity.

One moment he's constructing a big system underneath all his microvariations (finding different modes) and then in the next he's coming up with those very microvariations and finding himself assaulted by all sorts of people thinking they have figured that big system out. So its not so much a conflict between what Latour thought he was doing and what he was being accused of, and at the same time it isn't a conflict between what Latour thought he was doing and what he actually was doing (philosophy):

This complete disconnect between what I thought I was doing (a realist description of the scientific networks’ ability to produce objectivity) and what I was accused of doing (a debunking of science’s claim to reach the natural objective world of matters of fact), soon became for me, instead of the irritating misunderstanding it was at first, a fantastic opportunity to study what in the meantime I had defined as a “symmetric anthropology of the moderns.”

The conflict, or conflicting element, is in the fact that others are somehow responsible for misinterpreting him (even if they are here pardoned) when what he was doing was indeed something different than what he thought it was.

Obviously, anyone of Latour's stature interested in sociology has to be fascinated at how this happens--how even when he's not knowing what he's up to he stumbles into conflicts. And all autobiographical accounts wonder at this sort of phenomenon. But my point here is that I'd pay serious money for a Bourdieuvian account of all this, which I think would be just so much clearer. Latour seems never to quite gather things around him in a definite way--and not in a way that backs up what his philosophy is all about. Everything seems like a murky sort of self-reflexivity, one that doesn't even create a real good mess. Even though we're really intensely conscious of how and where we're being perceived:

Please, don’t tell any one, especially in England, or the United States, that such is my overall life project and that I am in effect, a philosopher,--worst of all a philosopher with a system —and now, thanks to you, a philosopher with laurels around his head!

It is a joke, yes, haha, but there are other passages here which say the same thing more seriously (like the passage on Aramis not being translated in German that I just quoted in my last post--and other small little phrases). Maybe I'm not loving the flux as much as I should, or giving enough credit to Latour for writing an intellectual genealogy in only a few pages, to be given in a short acceptance speech. And I don't mean to read the philosopher against his own philosophy--Deleuze was great at showing how dumb this was (see the knockdown "Letter to a Harsh Critic," in Negotiations). But it's only my intention to show that Latour seems to do this himself, and comes up with a weird "coming out" project that probably should strike us as involving a certain type of self-reflexivity that might pale in comparison to the "critical" one.

I don't mean for that to be a final judgment or anything: I mean mostly to provoke some discussion of the role of reflexivity in Latour as compared with Bourdieu (as a way of replying to your amazing Bourdieu posts, but also harking back to some of my earlier comments about Latour being even more praxis oriented than the theorizer of practice). Obviously, with correlationism at least challenged here, things change a bit. And again, it's not really clear how much we should read Latour's conclusions into every one of his statements--that's a particularly philosophical (I wouldn't say "critical," like the philosophers are doing) thing to do (assuming you always have to be consistent, even in your inconsistency, and somehow perform your system), and we shouldn't put so much weight upon it. But Latour's small work still makes us wonder what his autobiography would look like, and wonder if Bourdieu's Sketch of a Self-Analysis does this better.

Actually, let me just add I'd probably, really, want nothing so extreme as either of these thinkers as far as autobiographies go...

Producing philosophy

2010-02-10T11:51:00.000-08:00

So, we're going even slower than promised. But bear with us. I'm going to give very basic narrative of what happens in Latour's acceptance speech for the Unseld prize, "Coming Out as a Philosopher," and what Harman is up to in the short piece "The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy." Let's see what happens.

Basically, we get the sense that Latour realized early on his mode of approach required us to go past its mere application to draw some weird philosophical conclusions. What's interesting is that, reading his works, you would think he would draw these conclusions in order to stay true to the method--that's what "empirical metaphysics" means to us, no? But now, with this essay, something is different: we get the sense that the method was indeed one sort of way of drawing these conclusions--and that it was constructed on the basis of the philosophical axioms rather than the other way around.

But we're also understanding that this allows us to be more precise about what we were trying to stay true to in the method, the approach. These are the modes, which seem to well up in the different ways the method or way of approach is applied.

What I think Harman would say, on the basis of his essay (which doesn't respond directly to this shift in Latour's work), is that these modes are grounded in something else that happens by way of the method, which is that a focus is turned upon objects. What we're true to in the way we're approaching, investigating, constructing networks, messing things up, is staying true to objects, not giving a damn for Kant.

Eventurally, Harman can make sense of Latour's modes. I wonder whether Latour though can actually make sense of OOP in its current form.

Meanwhile, what happened to the method? Once it crystallizes into ANT, is it then a little more disposable? Or does it become more necessary than ever? I particularly liked the sense that we were staying true to a method and what the latter produced in going beyond it and seeing what metaphysics it implied. Now, what happens to the method? I feel a little bit like Latour himself:

I have to mention here, as a parenthesis, that I am somewhat disappointed that none of my fieldwork books are translated into German, especially ARAMIS, OR THE LOVE OF TECHNOLOGY, my favourite work to this day, which might give German readers the idea of me as a philosopher writing essays, thus very French!, but not of what I also wish to be, that is, an empirical philosopher treating philosophical questions through precise ethnographic inquiries— the same is true of my work LA FABRIQUE DU DROIT a study of one of the French supreme courts I take as my most elaborate field work.

Now, of course I know the fieldwork is still there--but I am trying to interpret in a strong way what exactly it means to come out as a philosopher or really begin to emphasize the philosophical aspects in what Latour is doing. In some way, I think this also means that Latour just can't be what he wants to be. He's too good at what he does, which is that fieldwork--at least that's my sense of him. I'd rather have Harman talk about Latour, in other words, than Latour himself.

And this is what is interesting about Harman--he seems to understand how you can really get more out of Latour if you read him with a knowledge of philosophy (even better, with a knowledge of metaphysics). I just want to pause a moment and show how that might be something completely different than what Latour himself does, which is try and make his work produce philosophy, or be philosophy.

Update 2

2010-01-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

Allright, everyone--here's a quick update. Evan's finished traveling, Mike's finished doing some stuff that needed to be done, and Paul is at the ready. We'll be a little slower, probably, than last year though: everyone's got a lot of work to do, and we'll be fitting in the reading more and more in our spare time. Thanks to everyone who has commented on the blog though so far, or even seen this and thought we were up to something good--I (Mike, though I know I speak for Evan too) can't tell you how great it feels to know at least something you're doing might be helpful, intriguing, or just comment- or even note-worthy.

The next couple weeks we'll be finishing up Latour, reflecting on Latour coming out as a philosopher and moving into Harman's cases for the relevance of Latour for philosophy.

Then it's Prince of Networks. We originally were going to do the whole of Harman, and I had the sweet idea of reading Harman backwards--something I always wanted to do with an interesting thinker, as it sort of is an easy way to destabilize the increasingly arrowlike (thinking of Husserl's diagram) shape that intellectual development is perceived as taking, and blast things into constellations and regions of uneven development (which is great with Harman anyway, since he is much more honest than others about the discontinuity, the jumpstarts and lightning strikes involved in philosophic thinking, as much as he also--as I've emphasized on my own little blog--attempts to historicize his own thought and provide narratives for it). But we don't have time--we want to get to Brassier someday, so we're just going to stick with PoN, and perhaps make some references to the Harman we've already read independently.

Then we'll be jumping headlong into SR (or whatever the people involved care at this point to call this general area of work) with Meillassoux and After Finitude. Some Badiou might pop up as well.

After that, we're revisiting ANT with John Law's After Method (so many afters! you can see the pressures to push things past [post?] the post- or postal [as Derrida might quip] generation preceding [post-ceding?]).

Then we're Nihil Unbound.

Beneath contempt, beyond critique: Bourdieu on Latour

2010-01-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

Having given a couple of posts over to Latour's critiques of Bourdieu, it's now time to do the reverse. (This actually means going backward in time, since Bourdieu's discussion of his junior took place in his final course of lectures at the Collége de France in 2001, while Latour, as far as I can tell, was mostly silent on the subject of Bourdieu until the publication of Reassembling the Social in 2005, three years after Bourdieu's death.)

Bourdieu devotes one of his last works to the sociology of science because, as he explains in a foreword, he believes that "the world of science is threatened by a serious regression." In Bourdieu's view, the historically acquired autonomy of science is being encroached upon by neoliberal political and economic forces, a state of affairs leading him to this portentuous pronouncement: "in short, science is in danger, and for that reason it is becoming dangerous" (vii). Science is thus more in need than ever of the critical reflexivity provided by the social sciences, in order to help prevent the gains in autonomy that are the legacy of the past several centuries of modernization from being pushed back or erased.

Perhaps all of this is true, perhaps not, but either way, how does science studies fit into this ominous master narrative? Sadly Bourdieu is not entirely clear on this matter (though other critical sociologists, like Steve Fuller, are ready with a number of suggestions). The rhetorical purpose of Science of Science and Reflexivity, then, like that of so many of Bourdieu's later works, is concretely political, an attack on the neoliberal establishment's erosion of the field's autonomy more than a disinterested contribution to the field itself. But he does take the opportunity to express his opinions on science studies and related trends, and those opinions — while not coherently connected to his larger point about the "danger" of the scientific field as currently constituted — are far from favorable.

The first serious invocation of Latour in the book is in the introduction, where Bourdieu borrows the rhetoric of science studies in an oddly ambiguous way: in opposing the "logicism" of philosophers of science, he writes that "[i]t seems to me to be an exemplary manifestation of the typically scholastic tendency to describe not science being done, science in the making, but science already done, a finished product from which one extracts the laws according to which it is supposedly done" (2-3). And then: "Sociologists have, to varying degrees, opened up the Pandora's box of the laboratory" (3). In the space of two pages, Bourdieu has invoked two of Latour's titles, Science in Action and Pandora's Hope (published in 1999, right before Bourdieu's lectures were delivered, though otherwise unmentioned in the text). Thus one would be forgiven for thinking, on the basis of this introduction, that Bourdieu was largely sympathetic to science studies. As we'll soon see, this is not really the case, but as long as we keep things vague we can hold on to the feeling of mutual agreement for a little longer: "The realistic and often disenchanted vision that sociologists have … formed of the realities of the scientific world has led them to put forward relativistic, even nihilistic theories which are the very opposite of the official representation. There is nothing inevitable about this conclusion, and one can, in my view, combine a realistic vision of the scientific world with a realist theory of knowledge" (3). A "realistic vision" and a "realist theory" — this is sounding an awful lot like Latour, isn't it?

But the illusion of Bourdieu's amenability to science studies is quickly dispelled by his hostile remarks on Latour in "The state of the question," his first lecture, which runs down what he considers to be the tenable positions in the sociology of science (with a little typical grousing about the perpetuation of "false problems" by those who insist on taking positions other than the three logically possible ones). These positions include a Mertonian structural-functionalism (which studies citations, "reward systems," and other purely "social" aspects of the world of science), a Kuhnian "discontinuist" history of scientific paradigms, and the "strong programme" of the Edinburgh and Bath schools. Bourdieu specifies, somewhat confusingly, that there are only "three positions" (6), and then follows his discussions of the aforementioned three with a fourth section, headed "A well-kept open secret," which considers the work of Karin Knorr-Cetina, G. Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay, and Latour and Woolgar. Here Bourdieu's curious, and uncharacteristic, coyness about the status of science studies continues: does the work considered here constitute a "real" position? Does an empirical investigation of the laboratory (a methodological trend which, as far as I can tell, Bourdieu is wholly in support of) really lead to a new perspective on "science in the making," distinct from Merton's, Kuhn's and David Bloor's? If it's not even a coherent position, can it still be critiqued, or does it just have to be dismissed out of hand? Bourdieu, for once, seems hesitant, not quite comfortable doing either (although he ultimately comes a lot closer to the latter option, as we shall see). As a matter of fact, Bourdieu seems to miss a lot of the real issues surrounding the sociology of science, forgetting about realism and objects and so on and assimilating all would-be occupiers of this mysterious fourth position to the terms of his own problematic, that is, the determination of motivations:

One would therefore be tempted to ratify the — it seems to me, fairly indisputable — conclusion reached by Gilbert and Mulkay, or Peter Medawar, if it were not most often associated with a philosophy of action (and a cynical vision of practice) which is fully developed in most of the writings devoted to "laboratory life" … The simultaneously scientific and social "strategies" of the scientific habitus are envisaged and treated as conscious, not to say cynical, stratagems, oriented towards the glory of the researcher. (25)

What is that strange sensation — déjà vu, or is it irony? Bourdieu accuses Knorr-Cetina, in particular, of cynicism, using much the same terms that have been leveled at his own demonstrations of the "logic of practice." (The difference which makes the difference, for Bourdieu, is that between "conscious" and "unconscious": for Bourdieu, strategy can be used to account for individual decisions provided it is assumed to be mostly unconscious and incorporated, the product of an interaction between a habitus and a field. But from the perspective of scientific realism, of course, this distinction is pretty much moot: either we're saying that scientists' decisions are cynically motivated or they're unknowingly cynically motivated; either way we're rejecting the idea that they're motivated by the search for truth.)

But it's obvious that Bourdieu's principal target in his hedged polemic against science studies is Latour:

…I must now turn, to conclude, to a branch of the socio-philosophy of science that has developed mainly in France, but which has enjoyed some success on the campuses of English-speaking universities: I mean the works of Latour and Woolgar and, in particular, Laboratory Life, which gives an enlarged image of all the aberrations of the new sociology of science … This current is very strongly marked by the historical conditions, so that I fear I shall find it difficult to distinguish, as I have for the previous currents, the analysis of the theses in question from the analysis of their social conditions of production. (26)

In other words, Latour — and let's note, with one eye on the ambiguous remarks from the book's introduction cited above, the early Latour, the Latour of Laboratory Life — is taken as symptomatic of a historical moment. His popularity is inseparable, in Bourdieu's analysis, from trends in postmodern philosophy of the 70s and 80s (a short excursus mentions Derrida and Foucault) and their miraculous success on American and British campuses. And Bourdieu's critique — or rather, refusal to critique — of his theory is tied to his (Bourdieu's) principled disapproval of "socio-philosophy," of the liminal, interdisciplinary space that Latour occupies. (In this respect, it's very close to Bourdieu's charges against Derrida in the postscript to Distinction.)

Bourdieu later refers to "the sociology of science occupies a very special position in sociology, on the ill-defined border between sociology and philosophy, so that it is possible there to avoid a real break with philosophy and with all the social profits associated with being able to call oneself a philosopher in certain markets … Socially constituted dispositions towards audacity and facile radicalism which, in scientific fields more capable of imposing their controls and censorship, would have had to be tempered and sublimated, have found there a terrain on which they can express themselves without any mask or constraint" (31). This all points back to Bourdieu's complicated personal history with the discipline of philosophy (summarized in the 1985 interview "'Fieldwork in Philosophy'") more than it does forward to Latour and science studies, although it's undeniable that, from the strict disciplinary perspective Bourdieu ostensibly espouses, Latour is guilty of playing the philosopher to sociologists and the sociologist to philosophers.

None of it, however amounts to an actual critique of Latour, or science studies, or really anything (except maybe interdisciplinarity as an academic phenomenon). I would like to ascribe it to the pedagogical imperatives of the lecture format, or the fact that this text was composed quite late in a heroically busy working life, but in "A well-kept open secret" Bourdieu is mostly content to summarize and describe Latour's work and then sit back with an air of satisfaction, as if the enterprise were so patently absurd he doesn't even need to poke holes in it. If there is a charge, it's of semiotic bias, or "textism," based on the fact that (again, in early work like Laboratory Life and The Pasteurization of France ) Latour reduces all scientific practice and phenomena to inscriptions and texts: "The semiological vision of the world which induces them to emphasize the traces and signs leads them to that paradigmatic form of the scholastic bias, textism, which constitutes social reality as text … Science is then just a discourse or a fiction among others, but one capable of exerting a 'truth effect' produced, like all other literary effects, through textual characteristics such as the tense of verbs, the structure of utterances, modalities, etc." (28). This is not a particularly sophisticated accusation: it sounds, indeed, like nothing so much as the angry voices of reactionary anti-deconstructionists circa the early 1970s. (A little more constructively, Bourdieu also takes Latour to task for neglecting prosopography, a useful word I had to look up: it means the collective biography of historical groups or populations.) Again, Bourdieu performs a sort of drive-by execution of The Pasteurization of France, accusing it, like Knorr-Cetina's work, of advancing "a naively Machiavellian view of scientists' strategies" (28) — very odd, since it seems to me that the portrait of Pasteur in that book comes closer to glorifying him as a selfless savoir of mankind than demonizing him as a Machiavellian schemer. And, again opening up his own Pandora's box of déjà vu, Bourdieu claims that "Latour treats Pasteur as a kind of semiological entity who acts historically, and who acts as any capitalist would act" (29) — what, meaning he's motivated by a quest for acquisition of symbolic capital? Sound like anyone (or everyone) else we know?

The last shot fired across Bourdieu's bow is the weakest and least directed. Again it amounts to little more than a brisk summary — this time of "Where are the Missing Masses?" — followed by an incredulous sneer. This was particularly disappointing for me, because I really think a good-faith Bourdieuvian critique of Latour's proposal to treat nonhuman objects sociologically would be valuable, and would perhaps help supply a lot of what many critical sociologists (Fuller, for example) consider a missing normative dimension in ANT. But Bourdieu reads the essay only as an empty gesture of audacity ("He proposes to do nothing less than challenge the distinction between human agents (or forces) and non-human agents"; "the most astonishing example is that of the door and the automatic door closer…", 29 — sacre bleu!), a fake radicalism designed only to capture the academic public's attention: Latour is only, as Bourdieu puts it a little earlier, "playing on words or letting words play … mov[ing] to apparently radical propositions (calculated to make big waves, especially on American campuses dominated by the logical-positivist vision)" (26). "Radical propositions … calculated to make big waves" — isn't Bourdieu reducing Latour the same way he claims Latour reduced Pasteur? And where is the scholarly "principle of charity" that Bourdieu elsewhere invokes so piously?

Anyway, it's quite true that Latour is trying to get our attention — and why not? What remains of Bourdieu's objection to science studies if we give up the strict academic corporatism (a place for every discipline and every discipline in its place) that underpins it? Ultimately Bourdieu's remarks on science studies reflect his distrust of Latour's publicity much more than they do a real opposition to his theory. I think this is truly unfortunate, and might well have changed had Science of Science and Reflexivity not been one of its author's last works. (Bourdieu was sometimes slow to engage with intellectual trends, and quick to attack or explain them away, that later had significant impact on his thought: I believe this to be the case with feminism and psychoanalysis, for instance.) As it stands, the text of "A well-kept open secret" amounts to a decent preliminary introduction to the (early) work of science studies for those oriented toward critical sociology, but little more — certainly not a serious critique.

So I'm not even sure why Bourdieu feels he has to apologize for it, as he oddly — and again, very uncharacteristically — does in a final parenthetical postscript:

I cannot help feeling some unease at what I have just done. On the one hand, I would not want to give this work [i.e. Latour's, not sociology of science as a whole] the importance it gives itself and even risk helping to give it value by pushing the critical analysis beyond what this kind of text deserves … But, on the other hand, I have in mind a very fine article by Jane Tompkins (1988), who describes the logic of "righteous wrath," the "sentiment of supreme righteousness" of the hero of a Western who, having been "unduly victimized," may be led to "do the villains things which a short while ago only the villains did"… (30)
This meditation would be a bit more convincing if Bourdieu had just subjected Latour to a devastating critique (which of course he is capable of: I want to emphasize, for the benefit of anybody who might be reading this who's not familiar with the rest of Bourdieu's work, that this lecture is him in diminished form — he's really much more interesting and intelligent a critic when he's on top of his game, and the general Latourian/Harmanian animus against critique shouldn't lead us to forget the value of truly incisive, stringent critique). As I hope I've made clear above, Bourdieu barely touches the substance of Latour's arguments: he takes them either to be depressingly familiar (just more postmodern "textism"/deconstruction) or patently absurd (door closers! come on!). But the "unease" Bourdieu describes here gets a little more interesting as it goes on:

…And Jane Tompkins points out that this legitimate fury may lead one to feel justified in attacking not only the faults and failings of a text but the most personal properties of the person. Nor will I conceal the fact that behind the "discourse of importance" (an essential part of which is devoted to asserting the importance of the discourse — I'm referring to the analysis I made of the rhetoric of Althusser and Balibar …), its incantatory and self-legimitating formulae (one is "radical," "counterintuitive," "new"), its peremptory tone (designed to overwhelm), I was pointing to the dispositions statistically associated with a particular social origin (it is certain that dispositions toward arrogance, bluff, even imposture, the quest for the effect of radicality, etc., are not equally distributed among researchers depending on their social origin, their sex, or more precisely their sex and their social origin). (31)

Again, this is odd because Bourdieu has not attacked any of Latour's (or anyone else's) "personal properties"; he is exculpating himself from a crime he doesn't seem to have actually committed. But he quite slyly manages to commit it, at least by imputation, here: he's saying that Latour's social origin is the key explanatory factor for the development of his sociological theory, the way to account for its otherwise inexplicable "arrogance," "imposture," "radicality" and overall sense of "importance." (The citation of the article on Althusser — which I haven't read — is also interesting, as in a certain sense Bourdieu himself stands to Althusser as Latour does to Bourdieu.) This line of thinking is, of course, totally consistent with Bourdieu's own standards of what constitutes a good sociological explanation: one must always take into account the class position and disposition of agents in a given field, of course — he's been saying this tirelessly since Distinction. And while his offhand and oblique references to Latour's heritage don't amount to a full-fledged sociological analysis, of course (any more than his "sketch for a self-analysis," included at the end of the book and later published in expanded form as a volume in its own right), it does at least suggest what might emerge from a Bourdieuvian perspective on the propositions of actor-network theory, one that might, by doing more than simply dismissing and denouncing, actually constitute a real critique. Could there, for instance, be a sort of "social capital" of objects? Mightn't objects too be said to have a variety of "social origins" — some are artisanally crafted rather than mass-produced, say, or extensively safety-tested rather than rushed on to the market — which endow them with properties that function as a kind of habitus, a predetermined power to act, while the various markets in which they circulate and human uses to which they are put could be likened to fields? This is only the vaguest of gestures towards reconciling Bourdieu's conceptual vocabulary with Latour's, but my point is I think it absolutely could be done, with potentially amazing results: and it would happen only when one side or another began to really critique, rather than criticize, the other.

Agents —> Actors: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 2

2010-01-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

In my last post I talked about habitus, and about how Latour tries to refashion the concept in a less structural way: it's not a "structuring structure" any more, it's now a collection of "plug-ins" acquired (and lost or phased out) over time. While this is a Bourdieuvian concept Latour seems happy to keep, there are plenty of others he criticizes or simply jettisons: the idea of "fields," for instance, and of "capital," to name two of the most famous. There are of course large practical consequences that follow from these theoretical refusals: Latour takes the concept of habitus very far from its roots as a refinement of Althusser's "ideology" (this is my interpretation, not necessarily sanctioned by Bourdieu) and, thus, seemingly, from the political sphere. Because one of the reasons Bourdieu makes use of habitus so extensively is that he's committed to the idea of a critical sociology that can effect epistemological breaks, and that can thus produce the conditions for both personal autonomy and collective political action. And doing away with "capital," similarly, makes it quite quite a bit harder to talk about "capitalism" (though it should be noted that Bourdieu himself rarely used this word either).

So what about Latour and Bourdieu and politics? Latour's not silent on this matter; in fact much of the last third of Reassembling the Social is devoted to defending ANT against accusations of political complicity and quietism, and showing how sociology can still be politically efficacious while refusing a "critical edge." But to stick for now to his critique of Bourdieu, a passage from the little Socratic dialogue Latour includes as an "interlude" in RTS should serve to indicate what he thinks is wrong with Bourdieu's politics:

[Professor]: Now you have to tell me what is so politically great about transforming those you have studied into hapless, "actless" placeholders for hidden functions that you, and you only, can see and detect?
[Student]: Hmm, you have a way of turning things upside down. Now I am not so sure. If actors become aware of what is imposed on them, if they become more conscious, more reflexive, then is their consciousness not raised somewhat? They can now take their fate into their own hands. They become more enlightened, no? If so, I would say that now, and in part thanks to me, they are more active now, more complete actors.
P: Bravo, bravissimo! So an actor for you is some fully determined agent, plus a placeholder for a function, plus a bit of perturbation, plus some consciousness provided by enlightened social scientists? Horrible, simply horrible. And you want to apply ANT to these people! After you have reduced them from actors to placeholders, you want to add insult to injury and generously bring these poor blokes the reflexivity they had before and that you have taken away by treating them in a structuralist way! Magnificent! They were actors before you come in with your 'explanation.' Don't tell me that it's your study that might make them so. Great job, Student! Bourdieu could not have done better.
S: You might not like Bourdieu very much, but at least he was a real scientist, and even better, he was politically relevant. As far as I can tell your ANT is neither. (154-155)

The student has put his finger on two important, but separate, issues: first, whether Bourdieu is more of a "real scientist" than Latour; and second, whether he is more politically relevant. I think Latour has a very convincing argument about the first; I'm much less sure about the second. I'll try to do justice to both charges in what follows, though if I focus more on the former it's because I feel less conflicted about it myself.

In a way the critique of Bourdieu that Latour advances is a pretty old, familiar one, often made against structuralism (and Marxism) of various kinds. For Bourdieu and his student disciple in the passage above (Latour claims), the agent is just an effect of structure: the agent/object is just a hollowed out, empty place where something happens. Where Bourdieu differs from straight structuralism — and particularly from Althusser — is in his insistence that, through reflexivity, through careful and scientific description of structural determinations, one can widen and extend this empty place of action (or at least make its real dimensions known, and he says somewhere that it is "not that large"), and thus make genuine autonomy — political, moral, aesthetic, whatever — possible. In other words, we are not absolutely determined by the economy (which for Bourdieu, of course, includes the "symbolic" as well as the material economy), but we are much much more determined than we think: and our only hope of establishing the parameters of this determination, and breaking out of them, is reflexive social science. Thus, one might say there is a certain disinterest in what the object actually is in Bourdieu: he's much more interested in articulating baroque contextual frames than in pinning down exactly what's happening in the center. (See also the remark by Hélène Mialet, in her review of Science of Science, that Bourdieu repeatedly conflates the "empirical" with the "statistical": "Bourdieu, it seems, bases his arguments on his métier as a sociologist, which enables him to refine established concepts and to apply them to another 'field.' This experience is what seems to count for him as empirical," 617-618.)

For Latour, on the other hand, a proper scientific object is full, well-defined, and unpredictable, much more so than the structures that surround it: the object is not what is given by structures but what makes networks (which are called structures if we zoom out far enough) by virtue of its activities. He totally rejects the predictive and generalizing aspects of Bourdieu's sociology: the idea that we could extrapolate from data to make large a priori claims about the social world is anathema to him. (It's significant, I think, that Latour almost never uses statistics in his work, though he talks about them sometimes as forms of metrology.) Instead, he wants to be as specific as possible about what occurs in that tiny space that Bourdieu left for action; and, contra Bourdieu, he insists it can be filled in pretty exactly, without need for any margin of freedom or undecidability (I'm beginning to think that there's no real interest in moral autonomy in Latour's thought, despite his occasional rhetorical invocations of it).

We shouldn't think, then, that Latour refuses the bad news of Bourdieu's quasi-structuralism for a return to the old autonomous moral subject. But he also refuses to get all that depressed about it: an advantage of his anti-Kantianism is he doesn't have to share the eternal disillusionment of sociologists like Bourdieu (and his disciple Luc Boltanski) who have to run up against the obstacles that society places in the way of real moral freedom over and over and over. Action, for Latour, has never been a heroic overcoming of determination but is always a "slight surprise," which is why it has to be empirically, not theoretically, accounted for. This is why I don't think we should be too convinced by the moralizing tone of passages like the one I quoted above, where Latour seems to display a (quasi-ethnomethodological) ethical qualm about "critical sociology." It might bother Latour that sociologists like Bourdieu think they know better about the social than the people they study, but his objection to the method doesn't come down to only this: he also just thinks it's bad science! He "respects" his actors, certainly, but not for their moral autonomy: he respects them because one simply cannot predict what they'll do without following them; that is, he respects them for their empirical singularity. He respects them, that is, until he's managed to adequately describe them: after that, they're on their own.

It seems to me that many of the relevant differences here might be registered by the shift from Bourdieu's "agent" to Latour's "actor." An agent, as the legal sense of the word implies, is given the power to act by someone or something else: the important thing is it's been invested with power. An actor, on the other hand, plays a part for a while, interacts with other actors. The emphasis thus shifts, when we move from talking about "agents" to talking about "actors," from talking about whence the objects get their power to what they do with it. But we're also talking temporally: Latour's actors are temporary in a way Bourdieu's agents aren't.

Thus it seems to me Latour has very nearly reversed Bourdieu's theory of action: we've passed from a tiny space of indeterminacy and freedom in the center of an enormous determining social structure to a tiny point of empirical traceability in the center of a huge unformatted mess. For Latour — and he makes this fully clear only in Reassembling the Social, I think — the object or actor is not only affected by other actors it is directly engaging with but also impinged upon from the outside, from things that emerge from what he calls the "plasma," or the vast areas in between networks.

I'll stop there, for now… Next and last, I'll consider Bourdieu's critique of Latour in Science of Science and Reflexivity.

Creature of habitus: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 1

2010-01-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

Hi guys. Back from my road trip and returning to active duty. I definitely want to weigh in on the plasma/secularism question, but in the meantime here is the first of a few posts I started preparing before the holidays, on Latour and Pierre Bourdieu.

The subject of Latour's relation to Bourdieu is so complicated that I'm going to have to split it up over several posts. Before I get started, I'll quickly indicate what I think the complications are. There are basically four: (1) Bourdieu was arguably the central figure in French sociology from the early 1960s until his death in 2002 and Latour is, from what I understand, frequently seen to be his successor in this role; (2) Latour is heavily critical of Bourdieu in Reassembling the Social; (3) Bourdieu, for his part, attacked Latour and science studies in one of his last books, Science of Science and Reflexivity; and finally (4) Bourdieu has been a very strong influence on me personally, basically serving as my entry point into the world of sociology and social theory — so for me to accept Latour's pretty much wholesale dismissal of "critical sociology" requires a good deal of rethinking and unlearning on my part, a process which is still taking its way. (And this is interesting, actually, because one of the points of disagreement between Bourdieu and Latour is, essentially, about the way learning works, and how permanent and conscious it is — more about this in a moment.) So we have (1) what sociology thinks of Bourdieu and Latour, (2) what Latour thinks of Bourdieu, (3) what Bourdieu thinks of Latour, and (4) what I think of both of them, and whether they admit of being combined — that's a lot to cover. I'll do my best.

In this first post I'll have nothing to say about (3) — Bourdieu's Latour — and I'll focus on (2), with (1) and (4) perhaps bleeding in at the edges.

According to the index of Reassembling the Social, there are ten direct references to Bourdieu, though he's present by implication in many other passages — whenever Latour starts referring to "critical sociology" or "reflexivity," for example. In fact, despite the general spirit of opposition, a number of the citations of Bourdieu's work are rather admiring, though nearly all of these refer to Bourdieu's 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice (cf. 101, 169, 175). Thus it seems fairly easy to see that the Bourdieu that Latour values is the close examiner of local interactions and the thinker of habitus, not the analyst of fields and capital that emerges in Bourdieu's work from Distinction on. This is a Bourdieu that Latour can plausibly associate with interactionism and ethnomethodology, a "micro" or "local" Bourdieu, as opposed to the "macro" or "global" Bourdieu we get with the subsequent development of field theory. This is consistent with Latour's general resistance, all throughout Reassembling the Social, to "contexts" or "frameworks" of any kind: it makes sense that he would like the "genetic" Bourdieu that is attentive to the tiniest behavioral tics and traces, but not the "structural" Bourdieu that uses all this data to build new versions of the class structure to correlate with this behavior. That is, Latour doesn't want to know, or claim to know, what the outside of the network consists of; he doesn't want to "fill in the blanks" as he puts it somewhere.

So one could imagine many of Bourdieu's analyses of social causation of seemingly natural human behavior adapted to actor-network theory — in a sense he's all about breaking up the nature-society divide, after all — but not the claim that such causation forms a rational structure or system. The point here is, Latour likes habitus, and he makes advances on the concept in the latter part of his chapter "Second Move: Redistributing the Local." For instance, here's Latour at his most Bourdieuvian (in thought, if not in style):

How many circulating clichés do we have to absorb before having the competence to utter an opinion about a film, a companion, a situation, a political stance? If you began to probe the origin of each of your idiosyncrasies, would you not be able to deploy, here again, the same star-like shape [i.e., a network] that would force you to visit many places, people, times, events that you had largely forgotten? That tone of voice, this unusual expression, this gesture of the hand, this gait, this posture, aren't these traceable as well? And then there is the question of your inner feelings. Have they not been given to you? Doesn't reading novels help you know how to love? How would you know which group you pertain to without ceaselessly downloading some of the cultural clichés that all the others are bombarding you with? (209)

Again, though it's a little more lyrical in tone, this could be taken from Distinction, Bourdieu's massive "social critique of the judgment of taste." So far it sounds as though Latour is merely recapitulating Bourdieu's own meditations on habitus: we incorporate into our bodies something from outside, which then gets reproduced as seemingly spontaneous and context-specific action (judging a film, taking a political stance, loving a person, et al.). But where Bourdieu always insists on the habitus as a "structuring structure" — that is, not so much habits or skills as a way of seeing the world ("principles of vision and division," is the way he frequently puts it) — Latour characteristically wants to keep each habit or competence discrete. That word "downloading" should tip us off that something different is going on here: and in fact Latour's (admittedly, somewhat sketchy) rethinking of habitus is built around the internet-era idea of "plug-ins," "borrowing this marvelous metaphor from our new life on the Web":

When you reach some site in cyberspace, it often happens that you see nothing on the screen. But then a friendly warning suggests that you "might not have the right plug-ins" and that you should "download" a bit of software which, once installed on your system, will allow you to activate what you were unable to see before. What is so telling about the metaphor of the plug-in is that competence doesn't come in bulk any longer but literally in bits and bytes … Being a fully competent actor now comes in discreet [sic] pellets or, to borrow from cyberspace, patches and applets, whose precise origin can be "Googled" before they are downloaded and saved one by one. (207)

Rather than just somehow absorbing a principle of vision and division and then unconsciously letting it dictate the way we respond to any given situation (the way Bourdieu argues that class habitus, preeminently, does), Latour proposes that we grab very specific competences that will only come in handy in a very few situations, and then either use them or not. Also, where Bourdieu would insist that a habitus, once acquired, can only be altered or replaced by stringent conditioning, Latour rather suggests a "use it or lose it" proposition: we have to "ceaselessly download" competences or we forget them. In sum, Latour has a more volitional and specific idea of how habitus works: it's not a mysterious creature that gets inside you and bursts out of you just when you think you're all alone (in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology Bourdieu compares it to the creature in Alien), but a guest you willingly invite inside (more vampire than alien?), or, better, a party favor you take home, but are always at the risk of misplacing. The difference from Bourdieu gets underlined here: "If you take each of the rubrics as the mere 'expression' of some dark social force, then their efficacy disappears. But if you remember that there is nothing beyond and beneath, that there is no rear-world of the social, then is it not fair to say that they make up a part of your own cherished intimacy?" (209)

So, to finish this up in the spirit of Latour — and very much not in the spirit of Bourdieu — with a personal reminiscence. I spent basically a year reading through Bourdieu's work (and, as you've reported elsewhere, it really takes about a year of serious reading to get fully comfortable with a theorist). I gained a tremendous amount from it: it gave me an amazing sense of the field of theory, as well as providing numerous stylistic and conceptual tools I could put to work, and it even affected my political and moral opinions. In a real sense, then, it changed the way I think. On Bourdieu's view, I significantly altered my habitus by reading him: I made a series of epistemological breaks with my old, pre-Bourdieuvian self and ended up with new "principles of vision and division" that governed how I saw and thought about everything.

The trouble was, it also made me deeply unhappy in a lot of ways. (I can't lay all of this at Bourdieu's doorstep: last year was a tough one for a number of reasons, but certainly reading him was a major part of it, and the only one that's relevant here.) I felt, as I think many graduate students feel when immersing themselves in a single theorist's work, taken over or subjected t0 Bourdieu's thought more than I wanted to be. The influence was too powerful, too total. And beginning to read Latour seriously has been part of a larger project of attempting to extricate myself from Bourdieu a little, or eliminate some of what Bourdieu had managed to incorporate into me (along the lines of the logic of the pharmakon: the cure for too much social theory is… more social theory!). But I also haven't wanted to lose what I gained from reading Bourdieu and being, in some sense, "taken over" by him. On Latour's view — and this is the great thing about it, I think — I don't have to make yet another epistemological break and throw over Bourdieu for Latour, reflexive critical sociology for ANT (however much the rhetorical antagonism toward "the sociology of the social" throughout RTS might make that seem to be the case). In fact, on his view, I never acquired a Bourdieuvian habitus in the first place: I just subscribed to so many Bourdieuvian "plug-ins" that I was tricked into thinking that he really had taken me over and changed the whole way I see the world. So what I can do now, if I want, is download some new plug-ins from Latour, which may or may not be compatible with those previously acquired from Bourdieu — and if they're not and I find Latour's more useful, I can delete the old plug-ins. Not only this, but if I don't keep "ceaselessly downloading" Bourdieu's plug-ins — by rereading him, and talking about him, and putting his ideas to work — then they will stop acting on and in me whether I voluntarily delete them or not. And this seems true: what's surprising to me now is how much cognitive work I have to do to access Bourdieuvian concepts that at one time I could barely manage to think outside of. Depending on how you look at it, then, this whole question of "theoretical influence" has become either much less terrifying or much more daunting: because you don't have to worry so much about being "taken over," but you do need to do a lot more maintenance work.

OK, so that's habitus. I'll move from here into a post on structure and agency, and then finish by considering Bourdieu's critique of Latour.

macro-physics! - Latour and plasma

2009-12-30T12:25:00.000-08:00

I wanted to respond off-the-cuff because Mike, in his usual sharp manner, raises exactly the thematic concerns that have been bothering me lately. My concerns are currently circulating around intentionality, Harmanesque broad intentionality at that, transcendentalism/autonomy/subjecthood, and arising from Harman’s response to my reading of the vicarious causation essay the possibility of a hermeneutics of objects. All this has been buttressed for me by an attempt to engage with Žižek which has more or less confirmed to me that Žižek most clearly represents all that object oriented thinking rejects. So I must admit it is a little bitter-sweet to discover that Latour has already beaten me to the punch (at least in extending the range of hermeneutics) with the following quote:
“Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.”

Mike is right to wager that I’d find myself at odds with this, but this all depends on how Latour is using the word hermeneutics. If it is meant, and I suspect this is not the case, that Latour means the art of interpretation is a ‘property’ (and this is an awkward use of the word property) of the world then we might be treading in dangerous waters - from the charge of anthropocentricism to the Kantian limitation that one is here speaking about something beyond the phenomenal realm of experience. It is more likely that Latour means to draw out the classical (and indeed sacred...another subtle Latourian theme) meaning of hermeneutics as ἑρμηνεύω or translate. Re-working the quote along these lines one could then state that ‘Translation is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.” This line would, in turn, be classically Latourian – perhaps even mundanely so.

Moving to the conceptual I find it difficult to understand what hermeneutics as a property of the world could possibly mean. This remains, at least for me, the leap of faith moment from the phenomeno[al]logical onto some immanent plane that I admit I cannot yet picture (and ought we to picture it or not?). Latour in his paper on philosophy admits that he harbours a secret desire to piece together a philosophical system and Harman has already argued that something metaphysical is in place in Latour. Mike notes that one of the strengths of Latour is precisely his willingness to admit metaphysical consequences into his work. If the plasma is anything to go by Latour is deeply metaphysical.

The plasma, as Mike points out, is something entailed by Latourian analysis (if I have him right here). Since ANT works on the premise of networks across an immanent or flat plane then one is left with the metaphysical problem that not all actors are always active (perhaps literally or perhaps they are not active in the phenomenal realm of experience – hence the transcendent aspect) and if this is the case one must deduce something like a plasma in order to account for this fact [arising from the ANT mode of analysis (entailed by it as such)]. This Mike sees as a kind of deficiency in the general mode of micro-analysis, the natural home of ANT and the social sciences generally, and opens up the necessary for a macro-analysis (macro-physics!). Of course this all smacks of metaphysical broadening, abstraction and associated un-Latourian nastiness and not the good old messiness we seek.
Yet the plasma is simply that which is “...not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified” which is not a radically new improvement upon the Hegelian ‘for us’ schema (the plasma is that which is not yet for self-consciousness but will be at some point in the sweep of things) or, alas, Heideggerian equipmental usage (the plasma is the background of things not yet in use). Yet we do have some ways to opt-out here: we can consider the unformatted as having Harmanesque lives of their own, with their own intentionality that is available, at some points but not always, for some human disclosure. The necessity of the plasma also nicely ties in with Harman’s real objects which are logically entailed by his analysis rather than encountered in (phenomenal) experience.

Of course this all works at a deeply conceptual (even metaphysical level) and I suspect that despite this being the natural territory of the philosopher it might require a Heideggerian leap on the part of the social scientist.

Updates and plasma

2009-12-30T08:35:00.000-08:00

It should be clear already from the little hiatus in posting that we're taking a little break for the holidays. We'll resume in earnest in a couple weeks--finishing up some Latour concerns, and then moving on to Graham Harman and Ray Brassier, and a couple others--though some sporadic thoughts might pop up here in the meantime.

One of those is the following, and I'll also just use it to also welcome Paul to the blog. On page 245 of Reassembling the Social, Latour says the following:

Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.

I wonder if this has any relation to what Paul is working on. I suspect he'd be at odds with what Latour means by this, since it appears in his discussion of "plasma"--the problematic notion I have been trying to see as required by (or, since I think ANT isn't doomed by this small point, merely as a consequence of) the "immanence" of Latourian analysis with respect to its networks (Latour has a long passage at the end of WHNBM asserting immanence--in the sense it is being used there--is also transcendent, but I think that actually only confirms my point). Latour needs plasma not just metphysically but because his mode of analysis requires it (as is only fitting for a mode of analysis that--refreshingly--isn't afraid to draw tough metaphysical conclusions from what it is doing). It is a name not just for the "unformatted" but also for the "unaccountable" that can nevertheless be counted by the micro-level ANT analysis:

I call this background plasma, namely that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified [...] This does not mean that the solid architecture of society is crumbling behind, that the Great Leviathan has feet of clay, but that society and the Leviathan circulate inside such narrow canals that in order to be activated they have to rely on an unaccounted number of ingredients coming from the plasma around them. So far I have insisted too much on continuity, which is achieved through traceable connections that have always to be considered against a much vaster backdrop of discontinuities (244-45).

The plasma is the name for the nature of the background against which the agents that ANT traces emerge. Latour has acted as if networks go everywhere through their continuity, as if "everything is connected" and waiting for ANT to discover it. It is because he wants to avoid the "all-connectedness" that Latour introduces this backdrop of discontinuities. But in a strange way, Latour also specifies the nature of that background to be what ensures the fluidity--the possible breakup--of any punctuated actor. It is its nature to be small and micro-, however vast its unformattedness--and this is what really makes it plasma.

I'll get into this in more detail in another post, but Latour is saying all this because he wants to try and stop the tendency to search elsewhere for big, undefined powers which will explain a particular event--even (or perhaps especially) when it is necessary to look elsewhere to show the backdrop against which your analysis takes place. That is, even when you are doing something like ANT, and refusing to attribute causes to "the social," even then "action doesn't add up," as Latour nicely puts it (243). So the question revolves around how, if network doesn't touch everything, it still has massive holes such that it doesn't account for everything (and in fact, this is in part what allows actors to emerge into your account, besides the fact they are in the network). So plasma is the solution to the question about the nature of these holes:

If it is true, as ANT claims, that the social landscape possesses such a flat ‘networky’ topography and that the ingredients making up society travel inside tiny conduits, what is in between the meshes of such a circuitry? (242).

And supposedly plasma allows us to stop referring to these outsides on this level--on the level of what provides the immense background for our network:

Once we recognize the extent of this plasma, we may relocate to the right place the two opposite intuitions of positivist and interpretative sociologies: yes, we have to turn our attention to the outside to make sense of any course of action; and yes, there is an indefinite flexibility in the interpretations of those courses. But the outside is not made of social stuff—just the opposite—and interpretation is not a characteristic of individualized human agents—just the opposite.

To interpret some behavior we have to add something, but this does not mean that we have to look for a social framework. Of course, sociologists were right to look for some ‘outside’, except this one does not resemble at all what they expected since it is entirely devoid of any trace of calibrated social inhabitant. They were right to look for ‘something hidden behind’, but it’s neither behind nor especially hidden. It’s in between and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown. It resembles a vast hinterland providing the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled, much like the countryside for an urban dweller, much like the missing masses for a cosmologist trying to balance out the weight of the universe.

To interpret some behavior we have indeed to be prepared for many different versions, but this doesn’t mean that we have to turn to local interactions. At many points in this book I have criticized phenomenologists, and perhaps also humanists, for believing that face-to-face interactions, individual agents, and purposeful persons provided a more realist and lively locus than what they called the vain abstractions of society. Although they were right in insisting on uncertainties, they have misplaced their sources. It’s not that purposeful humans, intentional persons, and individual souls are the only interpretative agents in a world of matters of fact devoid of any meaning by itself. What is meant by interpretations, flexibility, and fluidity is simply a way to register the vast outside to which every course of action has to appeal in order to be carried out. This is not true for just human actions, but for every activity. Hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself. The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms (244-45).

I've quoted so much (and in there is the quote I started with) because I don't want to explicate it all in full now, but just situate the little remark that I thought would bear upon some of Paul's concerns and, in a different way, I knew would bear upon mine.

And now just one more sporadic thought: Sartre and Latour. I'm reading Sartre's excellent Critique of Dialectical Reason and it strikes me that some notions of collectivity explored there might have something to do with what Latour is getting at. I know OOO and Sartre can be brought together because of the work of Eleanor Kaufman, whose forthcoming book on the incorporeal (the topic of her Gauss Seminar lectures in the Spring of 2009, which I was lucky enough to get off my lazy ass, go over to the East Pyne building, and see) should make that clear (and for the record I think she ends up more on the OOO side of things, interestingly, than the SR side of things... even with her use of Deleuze... She does this by seriously correcting the overemphasis on Merleau-Ponty in recent years--who is always too easily appropriated by Heideggerians, or too easily made into a target by postmodern theory like Irigaray or Derrida--by bringing back Sartre's weird phenomenology in all the right ways...). But then there is the notion of the collective--whose "seriality" in the Critique might have less to do with what Latour is getting at on the face of it, but perhaps in a deeper way makes his position (trying to find some sort of "group" of different composition than in either classical Marxism or in sociology) close to Latour in an interesting way:

[...T]he dependence of the worker who comes to sell his labor power cannot under any circumstance signify that this worker has fallen into an abstract existence. Quite the contrary, the reality of the market, no matter how inexorable its laws may be, and even in its concrete appearance, rests on the reality of alienated individuals and on their separation. It is necessary to take up the study of collectives again from the beginning and to demonstrate that these objects, far from being characterized by the direct unity of a consensus, represent perspectives of flight. This is because, upon the basis of given conditions, the direct relations between persons depend upon other particular relations, and these on still others, and so on in succession, because there is an objective constraint in concrete relations. It is not the presence of others but their absence which establishes this constraint; it is not their union but their separation. For us the reality of the collective object rests on recurrence. It demonstrates that the totalisation is never achieved and that the totality exists at best only in the form of a detotalised totality. As such these collectives exist. They are revealed immediately in action and in perception. In each one of them we shall always find a concrete materiality (a movement, the head office, a building, a word, etc.) which supports and manifests a flight which eats it away. I need only open my window: I see a church, a bank, a cafe – three collectives. This thousand-franc bill is another; still another is the newspaper I have just bought... (Preface, "The Problem of Mediations").

It's not really a matter of reconciling (it's interesting how much philosophical time is spent doing that) than recognizing the significance of Latour's contribution to notions of not just the being of objects (I included the above because a desire to include them--though with an obviously completely different ontological assumption than anything in Latour--is there) but also the shape of group action. And while I think Latour goes precisely in the opposite direction as Latour (never towards totalization--this is why he must force an immanence instead) I just wanted to register that--I know you Evan have been feeling this perhaps more than I have.

The Parekhization of Los Angeles

2009-12-17T06:59:00.000-08:00

Sitting in my old hometown, reading in the paper about the dirty water in my new hometown, I'm struck by how closely this situation resembles that of nineteenth-century Paris. Here the list of actants includes Dr. Pankaj Parekh, the Environmental Protection Agency, bromates, residents of Silver Lake (right near where I live), arsenic, manganese, Gambia and Liberia (where Parekh got his start), little plastic balls (similar to those McDonald's uses in their playpits!), thirty-year-old safety regulations, perchlorate ("an unregulated rocket fuel additive"), trichloroethylene ("a degreaser used in manufacturing"), perchloroethylene ("a dry-cleaning solvent"), military contractors, private water suppliers, the National Cancer Institute, and the Mulch and Soil Council ("'This could have a chilling effect on gardening'"). (How's that for a litany?) All saying different things, all wanting something slightly different, all connected to one another at some points but not at others. Only a Louis can save us now.

Some first thoughts

2009-12-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

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.

Latour and McLuhan

2009-12-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

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.

Intention is not structured like a language...

2009-12-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

...or, why I'm obsessed with this problem of what I call "immanence." It's cause I think it might be what produces, in a more general way than the ontological issues themselves, a big, big hangup for people when they hit SR and, having been so hit over the head with Derrida and the anti-phenomenological tradition, can't understand how you can actually work beyond correlationism: how do you designate an object and not be epistemologically (as it were) bound up with that designation? It's important to register that Meillassoux is also one of these people. In short, how can you talk about the state of an object without imposing, through the language you're using to describe it, the form of your intention? We can use Kripke to solve this, and Harman has recourse to him. But he also has recourse to other arguments (some negative like the Kripke one--there's a great strange one I'm not recalling now--and some involving a restructuring of intentionality itself), which are just sound--and once you hear them, you see what a weird inversion Continental Philosophy has taken prior to OOP, such that Harman comes along and sets it back on its feet. The problem (the inversion) is we've so thoroughly bound up intentionality with the structure of naming (focused it is on presence and absence of a referent), say, and thereby language, that we have reached the point where it seems as if the reverse relation holds, and each time you use language you intend (and then, only then, through language!), and somehow push this intention onto what you're saying (thus, we end up at Badiou and his odd way of circumventing this, which I see a really negative rather than rich in an object-oriented way--though the negative has serious merit to it, I think). Maybe this is the wrong way to get at the problem, but, regardless it's Latour too that ends up having an unsatisfactory approach at times to the issue, despite his own realist tendencies and indeed post-correlational (probably a really bad term for it) thought, something like the Deleuzian approach (plasma!). So I'm trying to track the tendencies regarding this in a wider frame (of course, less rigorous) than perhaps the SR people would do, with the help of Jameson and his ambivalence regarding anti-substantialist work, setting the stage for Harman. Maybe I'm going in the wrong direction: I'll get more detailed about it soon and we'll see (it's a matter of what language/structuralism did for anti-phenomenological philosophy here), but here I just wanted to mark certain things before we really get there.

Movie Break

2009-12-10T19:53:00.000-08:00

I've been very much enjoying the sections in Reassembling the Social (harking back to "Where are the Missing Masses?" and its seat belts and door closers) where Latour calls attention to the literal "framing" of the social world by material things by describing what it would be like if those things didn't exist. E.g., on page 194-195 where he talks about how lecturing would be impossible without an architect having designed a lecture hall for that purpose: "Fathom for one minute all that allows you to interact with your students without being interfered with too much by the noise of the street or the crowds outside in the corridor waiting to be let in for another class. If you doubt the transporting power of all those humble mediators in making this a local place, open the doors and the windows and see if you can still teach anything … [I]f you are not thoroughly 'framed' by other agencies brought silently on the scene, neither you nor your students can even concentrate for a minute on what is being 'locally' achieved. In other words, what would happen if inter-subjectivity was obtained for good by removing, one after another, all traces of inter-objectivity?"

It's a funny fantasy Latour entertains from time to time: what if all of the objects we take for granted suddenly disappeared, or stopped working, and we were back at the baboon stage of having only social tools — i.e. our bodies, and what we can manage to incorporate within them — at our disposal? What would happen to the (supposedly purely human) social world then? It's sort of his version of a dystopic vision, I guess (which makes it an interesting counterbalance to our recent discussion of utopia). Anyway, just want to mark it, and say that it reminds me of this scene from, of all things, Kentucky Fried Movie:

And one more, demonstrating even more vividly the fragility of the technological frameworks we tend to take for granted:

rotating kitchen from Zeger Reyers on Vimeo.

Playing catch-up

2009-12-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

One of the great extended metaphors in Reassembling the Social is travel. I'll just highlight this by picking some of the great quotes from the introduction, but it runs through the book because Latour is constantly focused on asking sociologists how far they can go if they just suspend the social as an adjective, as glue, as the explanation, ending point, determining instance, or what have you. This tends to pitch the book at the right level, in a way that I find very refreshing and something unlike the rest of Latour's work.

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!

Getting Nowhere Fast

2009-12-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

I believe we've agreed to let our Great Utopia Debate rest for a little while and move on to other things, but I just wanted to briefly mark another significant appearance of Erewhon in Latour's corpus, on pages 166-167 of Reassembling the Social:

As we have already witnessed on many occasions, there is often a wide gap between the correct intuitions of social sciences and the odd solutions they provide. This is once again the case: they have tended to confuse the projection of the Phantom Public with the pre-eminence of society. It's true that both have only a virtual existence but not in the same way. The first is a constant appeal to resume the impossible feat of politics, while the second is nothing but a way to dissimulate the task of composition by doing as if it was already completed: society is there, above our heads. So, when inquirers begin to look away from local sites because obviously the key of the interactions is not to be found there — which is true enough — they believe they have to turn their attention toward the "framework" inside of which interactions are supposed to be nested — and here things go terribly wrong. Starting with the right impulse — let's get away from local interactions! — they end up, to borrow from Samuel Butler's famous title, in Erewhon.

Could we substitute "humanities" for "social sciences" here, I wonder? Maybe that's a little hasty, but don't we also tend to run toward the social "framework" way too fast, precisely because we'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")? But notice that the problem is not so much the direction, or the movement, towards utopia but the speed of the travel, something you acknowledge at the beginning of your last and post. It's not that it's bad to connect the social to something more than the empirical, to possible worlds or political change; that it's our job to do this is a "correct intuition," and something worth saving, Latour says. It's that we want to get there so badly that we forget to trace the network that could eventually lead us there. It's not necessarily that we shouldn't want to get to utopia/Erewhon/nowhere, then: it's that we shouldn't expect to get there so fast.

Always low prices

2009-12-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

It's a small price to pay, but it's still the wrong price, and that makes me question the economy--though, of course, you're right to get skeptical about such "accelerations" (great word) to the general. The benefit of ANT as Latour uses it is for me--if I can add something to your great post on this, or rephrase it a bit--not so much in that it makes us slow down in these instances and get more specific about what we're referring to (though it does that), but also allows us to think in a non-accelerating mode generally, where we are no longer tempted to specify the determining instance, as if that would knock the argument down. Or, to use your language (and video game collection--awesome), it allows us to get off the elevator entirely--and not just take the stairs, but, say, fly out the window if we want to get to another floor. In that spirit, I'll revisit what I said in the utopia posts, and actually bring in the article/introduction to Pandora's Hope, "Do You Believe in Reality?"

First, clarification. "It’s hard for me to see optimism as inseparable from utopia." I knew putting it that way would get me in trouble--it was a dumb and unclear way to write (certainly philosophical terrain, there!). I simply meant it is hard for me to see utopainism in the same way that BL sees it. And this I said was as optimism. In other words, I was saying that utopia is, at its core, optimism--for BL. For me, they're more separable (in a way I'll get to in a sec).

Now, my point is that Latour can use this utopia-optimism connection or co-implication (the latter word being what I should have used instead of "inseparability") to both critique utopia as a representation (as you succinctly put it) and also salvage utopia by offering an alternative to optimism--which I called realism. It really isn't a stretch here, I think, to "blur[] realism as a philosophical position together with realism as a political style or strategy," as you said, since I think this the point of everything Latour is doing, no--as long as we agree that the blurring produces a transformation akin to the one I said happens with rhetoric: producing a new rhetoric by rejecting "the" (modern, postmodern) political as constitutive of politics, or by seeing politicians (finally!) as political. And from this, I try to extract a sort of pragmatism, which I think is perhaps just another more dignified way to characterize that sort of "stupidity" I was getting at earlier--Latour's motivation to keep himself from being intelligent, as he puts it occasionally--and showing that it ironically (and laudably) remains something like the impractical element of a realism, but in a new way (so we have something like the realism-pragmatism of a Putnam inverted). So I don't think that's entirely a digression so much as a (badly connected) statement of Latour's version of utopianism and what I like about it, that ends up setting the scene for what follows.

Now, I don't mean this to be a knockdown argument, despite what I say at the end (more on this in a sec). I am just tying things together, trying to show how Latour is able to cut across all the very settled distinctions and come up with something new. One could say, though, that I'm precisely undoing his composition of the collective, his symmetry, either to show how it works or to critique (a vague, vague word here--I'll be returning to this in post on steamy critique) it. So when I return to utopia, and say that there are many types of utopia, perhaps, and some of them are not necessarily optimistic, you say that: "It seems to me he’s fully on board with both of them — and would maybe even refuse to accept your distinction and argue they’re basically the same thing." I think that's right, but it's really a question of how such a move is possible. I'm not saying the existence of many utopias is really something that isn't accounted for in Latour: you can't argue against him on that front, ever, since he doesn't reduce (and I have to say, as an intellectual exercise, it's wonderful to try and think of the person you're writing about as never reducing anything, but adding more always--but more on that in conclusion). I'm arguing that this refusal of a distinction--everybody in the Aramis!--takes a certain direction, and I'm tracing that direction. The direction is towards lending a "purity of the feeling or the love" to utopia, that, I say, "seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization." By this I don't mean that utopia is a more complicated thing than Latour makes it out to be, and that this invalidates what he has to say tout court, but that Latour is proceeding to characterize utopia in a specific way--and in a way that basically is asymmetrical.

It's important to recall that symmetry isn't between the humanities and the sciences, but between objects and society. And I think it's Latour here that forgets this, ultimately, in some way, because he doesn't make the utopian into more of a social thing than it supposedly is, but instead proceeds to invest it with sociality from the fact of its being studied by the humanities, as I argue.

This isn't really anyone's fault--it is studied by the humanities after all. Nevertheless, the connection seems a bit more external than usual. Perhaps, though, one should shift terminology and say that it isn't entirely a knock at the humanities that is going on here. Maybe that's an acceleration, saying that Latour really has that object in mind (represented) when he's talking about utopia. But then why are you, and him, so quick to agree with me here?

...Yes, I agree, it [BL's anti-Copernican revolution] does go against much of the humanities as they are currently constituted and rationalized. (Somebody who knocks out Kant, Hegel and Heidegger all at one go isn't leaving much left to prop up the philosophical aspirations of our English and Comp. Lit. departments.) But I don't think it follows from this that Latour is anti-humanities, any more than the introduction of objects into actor-network theory makes him an anti-humanist, and the fact that he wants to enlist the humanities doesn't mean he sees them only as a means and not an end. It just means he's refusing to see the humanities as what they so often agree to see themselves as: the opposite of technology, the opposite of science.

I'd agree with the end of this. Though I don't think I ever called Latour an anti-humanist or anti-humanities. I take this sort of putting me in a particular box (pro-anti, which in my first post I tried to show broke down in a great way in Latour and in your discussion of him), however, as symptomatic of what is going on. For I also take your statement here (well put: elsewhere Latour speaks of the end of the means) to mean that there's something going against the humanities and how they think of themselves in what Latour says (ultimately) about reinvesting technology with love, or, as you put it, "by praising them [the humanities] only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action." But how did we agree that the motivating of action is of a certain type--the type of recalling us to the passions, say, such that we can show how technology is invested with love? Observation? Hardly, though Latour's approach actually (unlike so many other approaches) allows that to happen. Making it into a matter of "what they often" (often does a lot of work here, as it does in Latour in instances where the humanities comes up--that's my point in a nutshell I guess) "see themselves as." It's a matter of locating the box before it's opened or closed, as it were. Latour has a lot to say about this in Reassembling the Social, but I think the process is a lot more negative than perhaps he would like to admit (and he admits it is negative, at stages), at least when it comes to the humanities. I see Law and the more sociologically-oriented people correcting this, though they sacrifice many of the metaphysical payoffs of Latour that I praised earlier. But it's a matter of tracing how this happens--that's all I'm up to.

So perhaps it would be better, then, to say that there isn't so much a knock at the humanities going on (and that's all it is, nothing wholly anti-humanities... or at least it's only anti- in the way that he is anti-science which we once discussed, which also means being pro it... maybe you are referencing that) when this sort of utopian characterization is occurring, so much as a notion that utopia and other such objects that we study don't fiddle with its objects in the way the sciences do--a characterization that, it seems to me, is just "agreed upon" in too many ways--ways that the sciences are not entirely "agreed upon," mostly because Latour works with them in more detail (and there's nothing wrong about that!: like I said, Latour's approach makes possible the opening up of the humanities box in such a way that the location of it in Latour can be shifted!). That's really, I guess, what underlies a lot of that connection between the preface and the discussion of utopia and optimism, and why I want to register the many sorts of utopias: it's just that the "basically they're all the same" is moving towards a particular notion of sameness--I'm not saying they're each to be respected in their wonderful own uniqueness, or that, indeed, they aren't all basically the same. It's that there are more means--more morephisms to it all (and I think Latour might like this point of view, in the end). I should have quoted "Do You Believe in Reality?" (here I finally get to it) which was in the back of my mind here when I say that to him, its the sciences that tinker, fiddle. Latour says the following:

If anything, and here we can be rightly accused of a slight lack of asymmetry "science students" [Latour uses the perforative term scientists give to the science studies people at conferences] fight the humanists who are trying to invent a human world purged of nonhumans much more than we combat the epistemologist who are trying to purify the sciences of any contamination by the social (Pandora's Hope, 18-19).

So far, so good. I for one am totally fine with that. But then, Latour asks why this is so:

Why? Because scientists spend only a fraction of their time purifying their sciences and, frankly, do not give a damn about the philosophers of science coming to their rescue, while the humanist spend all their time on and take very seriously the as of freeing the human subjects from the dangers of objectification and reification. Good scientists enlist in the science wars only in their spare time or when they are retired or have run out of grant money, but the others are up in arms day and night and even get granting agencies to join in their battle. This is what makes us so angry about the suspicion of our scientist colleagues. They don't seem to be able to differentiate friends from foes anymore (19).

Again, we end up in the pro-anti pit, and I'm not quite sure how we really got there. It's true, scientists don't purify their sciences. And it's definitely true that philosophers of science as well as sociologists (the word reification tips me off to this as the other object here) free things from objectification. But there's the underlying sense of some sort of inductive-deductive divide going on beneath the purification-hybridization divide, or an empirical-critical divide that I find weird. It's not that the language of purification isn't to be taken seriously--in fact, I like that Latour is as precise as possible here--it's just the addition of that "fraction of their time" seems to align things in a particular way. This way is such that when we get to the more soft humanities, say, this seems to make the only option some sort of full on meaningless critical purification from an aesthetic level, or, if we do spend time hybridizing, postmodernism: which Latour admits hybridizes, but works on the completely wrong plane, and so doesn't touch objects at all.

In short, there's an engagement with the object in the sciences that is a sort of fiddling, a shaping, which there isn't over where utopia is studied. And there's something true to that--certainly the account of postmodernism is correct in its general thrust. But see how abstract we're getting? Meanwhile, this all thoroughly justifies "a slight lack of asymmetry." The symmetry itself justifies, here, its asymmetry. That's probably right, you gotta bring the asymmetry in line with the symmetry to begin with--but that presupposes some sort of asymmetry to begin with, some sense that we all agree to think about things in this way, and what if, what if, that weren't the case always? Sociology is our hope here: it can show we agree differently, perhaps, in a way that allows us to fiddle. Or that the asymmetry Latour talks about is not immanent to the asymmetry that is actually at work... granted we do see with him some asymmetry, some "two-culture" divide which can be profitably see in terms of his more rigorous Great Divide. Mainly, it's interesting to see the "two-cultures" divided up so thoroughly in Latour between the natural sciences and the social sciences, when for Snow (originator of the odious phrase), it meant between scientists and poets--that might be what's at the heart of my "critique" as you call it.

One more point in closing, though, implicit way back in my first point above about acceleration. We can work in Latour's spirit, but it doesn't have to entail adopting Latour's position. I think you'll agree that the only way to really read someone is to read generously, or sympathetically (to use an older vocabulary), but the problem with Latour (and what I've been calling philosophies of immanence--Deleuze and Derrida too) is that one can get pulled into his whole system by way of this, through just this sort of move (what I've called locating the black box--and which gets refined very very nicely in Reassembling the Social, though I'd say nothing really changes there as far as what I'm saying and as far as I can see). The point I'm making clumsily is that while we might agree about non-acceleration (getting off the elevator), this in turn can into way to lump others into groups that do accelerate too quickly--which is why I'm trying to distance deceleration from a position that sees in it something like rigor (from this standpoint, deceleration is acceleration in a different way). But this is of course because Latour draws the right consequences from all this, in a way people more inclined to just treat his ideas generously (humanities readers especially, and who are much more content with a Derrida or even Deleuze) might miss--and it is with this that I think you are rightly trying to sympathize with: the fact that such a spirit requires the adoption of serious metaphysical and methodological assumptions, which others might not share. But then we can pass from this move--which, again, I think is made in the most logical way, and I really agree with Harman (and you, I think) that it's the best, most challenging aspect of Latour, a sort of "put up or shut up"-ness that we actually rarely see--to something like the sense that this symmetry (for that's what the metaphysical consequence is) is the limit or (better) horizon to which we and others are always striving towards, even if we don't strive towards it (symmetry as conclusion and as method, or what we stick to). Put more bluntly, it's the sort of move that allows us to be asymmetrical at the same time as we try to be symmetrical, in the way that Latour admits he is above. The utopia post was my way of mapping this asymmetry--not so much its possibility as its structure or trajectory.

Why? Because that "grouping" it's what I see also in Latour's statements about "materialist materialism" or "realist realism," which are playful but also radically operating according to the logic of the "we never have been:" I, Bruno Latour, am more of a realist than all the realists because I have never been a realist in their sense, for example. Utopia works the same way: I am a utopian in the sense that no one has ever been. That is the sense in which I used the phrase "real utopia" at the end of my post--I should have marked it more clearly, and I was going to go back and do it (as well as add the "Do You Believe" comment) but I had to run down to Princeton yesterday: what I was parodically proposing was a utopian utopia, and opposing to Latour's realist utopia, or another sort of utopian utopia, which all other utopias have, by being utopias, never been. Modernity, to take the hugest example of this, is a weird thing, for Latour, is it not? I am a modern nonmodern, producing a critique that will undo the whole system (I'll dig around for that quote and stick it here, though I'll be returning to it in my post on "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"). Quite abstract, not unlike the sense that the humanities spend all their time purifying.

Now, what's great about Latour, as I've said here, is that this isn't the final state of the game. He, unlike all other philosophers of immanence--and I can't underscore how huge this is--allows us to get more specific (and even gets us excited about it, by saying that the prices of doing so will be low!), and so that's why I'm not, here, defending the humanities from the big bad anti-humanities Latour.

What I'm really after here, I guess, is symmetry. For me it's weird how it can merge, somewhat inevitably, with that presupposed asymmetry which Latour knows (one accuses him of it "rightly," he said) he's operating with. And for me that brings back all the big problems of representation within this non-representational system: how is it really working there? What's in Latour's head? I think you too work this way, and that's why we have a bit more sophisticated sense of how to use Latour.

But I'll close by just saying something I cut from that last utopia post, which I was going to end with. Latour says:

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

I said a lot about this, but then, at the end, I stressed that Latour goes on to be symmetrical as usual, and then said the following:

You once remarked (I continued) that his obsession with symmetry is surprising, given that Latour is all about the asymmetrical and hybrid. But I'll close by saying that I think he has to maintain this symmetry in order to undo the asymmetries according to the sort of self-cancelling non-modern/modern perspective that he inhabits in WHNBM… and so occasionally we can actually note asymmetries that escape.

And I left it on the symmetry in the preface, immediately following the quote on the humanists:

I have sought to show technicians that they cannot even conceive of a technological object without taking into account the mass of human beings with all their passions and politics and pitiful calculations, and that by becoming good sociologists and good humanists they can become better engineers and better-informed decisionmakers (viii).

Latour and Utopia: A Response

2009-12-08T09:36:00.001-08:00

First off, I'd just like to commend you on the scope and daring of your double post on Latour and Utopia. In what follows I'm going to put myself into the role of Latour's defender against your charges, partly because I believe you're being a bit unfair and partly because I just think it'll make things more interesting. But I'd like to stress that I think it's a very intelligent immanent critique and my main goal in responding to it is not to refute it but simply to understand it better.

To save a little time, I'll skip to the excellent summary you give at the top of the second of your two posts, detailing why you think I think Latour is "utopian," at least in a certain sense:

Latour loves technology not as a completely open possibility that is in reality only a black box onto which we project our desires, but as an open box, actually existing technology … such that all the stress is laid upon both "could" and "exist" in the above quote … [H]e's like a utopian about the present, not about the future.

This is a fair extrapolation from my sketchy remark, in my original post on Aramis, that Latour may be a more utopian thinker than he at first appears — as is your characterization of Latour as a "utopian realist," though this perhaps risks blurring realism as a philosophical position together with realism as a political style or strategy. Still, what you seem to be suggesting, and if you are I agree, is that Latour is interested in utopia, and affirms it, as a motive for action (to invoke that old utopian humanist Kenneth Burke for a moment): he doesn't care about utopia as representation, as the cloud cover that reflects the light of our consciousness back at us, but he does care about it, maybe even privileges it, as a generator of action or interests (which, you'll recall, is where we began). You go off on an interesting digression on this is as a kind of "utopian pragmatism," presumably in contrast to the more Hegelian utopianism of someone like Jameson, but I want to table the issue of pragmatism for now (it seems as though Latour sometimes embraces this label, sometimes distances himself from it: in this way it lines up with "actor-network theory" and "realism" quite nicely). I also would just agree with your remarks about "the general sanity of Latour's politics" and your application of his ideas to the Copenhagen talks, and accept your recapitulation of my remarks about the links between 60s utopian thinking and Latour's love of technology. Thus far, I think, we're basically in agreement about Latour's position. In fact, I'm not sure I see a problem until you introduce "the problem":

Here's the problem, though. Essentially, Latour wants to take something of this utopianism, the aspect that wasn't (according to him) technocratic, and keep it as the love, or refigure love with it in mind. And he wants to do so as much as he reforms utopianism into realist-utopianism, making it clear that the technocrat ironically cannot have love for technology. But we then see Latour confuse utopianism proper and something like 1960's optimism, which I'd align with that arrogance--or rather, theoretical expansiveness--of the Levi-Strauss type… Now, optimism/expansiveness and utopia certainly ran together in the sense that the 60's was truly the great age of modern utopias, total visions of not only different social structures or ways of doing things, but also nonce sorts of solutions that would make the world indeed, do better, go faster, see clearly, etc. … But ultimately, as you can see from many of my parentheses, it's hard for me to see in the optimism something completely inseparable from utopia--to the point that is really is utopia's core.

First, a point of clarification. I want to make sure I’m understanding you right (and I apologize, as always, for my slowness on philosophical terrain). Are you saying that Latour is confusing the historical moment of utopian “optimism” (associated with the historical past, i.e. the 60s) with the concept of utopianism itself (always oriented toward the future or, in your reading of Latour, toward the present)? Or are you yourself (consciously) conflating utopia and optimism? In other words, on the most mundane sentence-parsing level, do you mean “it’s hard for me to see optimism as inseparable from utopia,” i.e. you don’t agree that they are inseparable, or “it’s hard for me to see anything in the optimism that could be separated from utopia,” i.e. for you they can’t be separated either? Are you agreeing or disagreeing with what you see as Latour’s confusion of optimism and utopia?

I still don't get it when you move from there into your very useful and interesting distinction between different kinds of utopia:

[F]or me, there are many different types of utopianism. There would be the literary/aesthetic utopia on the one hand, which can't wait to fiddle with the technology, and then the more social-planning type of utopianism that is found in the human sciences--the less humanist and more functionalist/formal Corbu sort of attitude … Latour lumps together all these utopias (as everyone else does), omitting a lot of the more creative aspects, and thereby sees a certain flat treatment of technology as symptomatic of all of them (it's in the same way that Marxism--here now alongside Latour!--often condemns utopias and utopian thinking).

You're probably right that people too often collapse these two forms of utopia together, and maybe Latour is guilty of this as well. But where in Aramis do you see Latour critiquing, or condemning, either literary/aesthetic or social-planning utopias? It seems to me he’s fully on board with both of them — and would maybe even refuse to accept your distinction and argue they’re basically the same thing (see all the talk about “composing the collective” in the second half of Reassembling the Social).

Where we part company, I think, is in assessing Latour's attitude toward the humanities, which I think you read as much more hostile and "patronizing" than I do. You say:

we get a sense that it is the humanities that both want to plan through utopia or critique through it, and aren't really interested in the technology which will bring it about, as well as feel feelings purely, and so instead of getting interested in technology, [we humanists] get interested in the feelings that come from utopia.

I certainly know the attitude you're talking about, but I'm not at all sure it's Latour's. Indeed, I’m not quite sure where you’re getting the idea that Latour is criticizing the humanities. The general tone of Aramis, perhaps more than any of his other books, is one of rapprochement between the humanities (poetry, fiction, history, religion, et al.) and the sciences. Certainly I agree with you if what you’re saying is that Latour/Norbert is trying to recruit humanists to the same side as the technology that they customarily leave to technocrats (who, BL shows brilliantly, don’t understand it any better than the humanists do). And this entails attacking certain positions and ideas that it would be easy to identify with humanism, or the humanities, tout court. But I really don't think it's tenable to paint Latour as having any animus toward the humanities, even if he gets annoyed with some of their rhetoric and their pretensions to autonomy.

Yet it's clear you do think Latour is making such a critique, or at least reflecting some of its ideological aspects, and I want to know more about why you think so. You quote him as saying (in, N.B., one of the few statements in the book he attributes directly to himself, without overt "shifting," quoting, or personification):

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

And then you comment:

There is the sense that this dissolution produces something like the investment of the non-utopian with the utopian, or the present with all the great impulse (read, pathos, drama, anything but fact) behind the utopian. But doesn't that presume that the utopian is primarily optimism? That grandness of scale? The sort of wide-ranging judgment or ability to pronounce (this is good, this is bad, what feeling!), that is is so quick to turn around upon the sciences, become pessimistic, and say (Heidegger is our hero, after all, as Latour continually remarks) that science doesn't think?

But again, I'm not sure I understand your distinction you want to preserve (or not preserve?) between “utopia” and “optimism,” if it’s not a distinction between utopia as abstract concept and optimism as concrete historical particular (e.g., the optimism of the 60s). You may have just ascended to a Hegelian level that my intellectual elevator doesn’t go up to. But I want to try to get there, even if I have to take the stairs!

And speaking of elevation, you finish with a discussion of

the real status of the concept of utopia in [Aramis] (elevated and denigrated at the same time, just like the humanities) … [U]topia is something to be entertained insofar as it is allied with optimism, or with the sorts of invention that produces great ideas--Norbert with similar elevation/denigration uses the word "genius" about the initial formulator of the idea of continuous transport--but one can't really take utopian optimism seriously unless one becomes a realist and applies it to the "present"--and thereby teaches the humanities (as well as the sciences, but at least they tinker with things, unlike media studies) a lesson. In other words, all I'm saying is that a real (and not realist) utopian vision might be unthinkable from such a perspective--the perspective that would use "utopia" in the following sense: "An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon" (viii).

So, my question for you is, what is a real utopian vision? What is the reality that the humanities lay claim to, or at least have in their sights, that Latour is missing? I understand you as saying that you think Latour "elevates and denigrates" utopianism, poetry, genius — and, by extension, the work of the humanities — by praising them only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action, and not as things in themselves. Though he doesn't stress it, he may be as anti-Kantian in this, his inaesthetic devotion to teleology, as he is in his refusal of the Copernican Revolution — and yes, I agree, it does go against much of the humanities as they are currently constituted and rationalized. (Somebody who knocks out Kant, Hegel and Heidegger all at one go isn't leaving much left to prop up the philosophical aspirations of our English and Comp. Lit. departments.) But I don't think it follows from this that Latour is anti-humanities, any more than the introduction of objects into actor-network theory makes him an anti-humanist, and the fact that he wants to enlist the humanities doesn't mean he sees them only as a means and not an end. It just means he's refusing to see the humanities as what they so often agree to see themselves as: the opposite of technology, the opposite of science. (And, as Latour often points out, it's a very unequal opposite, much less socially respected, much less widely believed in, much less handsomely funded, than the hegemonic sciences.) And if that means he also has to deflate our discipline's pretensions to being a "real utopia" — precisely in order to show us how we can be a part of the realist utopian work of "composing the collective" — then I think he thinks it's a small price to pay.

Latour and Utopia, part 2

2009-12-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

Now, my last post on this topic just was outlining the general position of Latour via technology as it intersected with this issue of utopia, following your lead. I put a bit of pressure on some of your words, trying to tease out the sense of that sentence in which you said, rightly, "what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist," and then were able to also draw out how this is the case because (or rather only because) Latour isn't a technocrat: Latour loves technology not as a completely open possibility that is in reality only a black box onto which we project our desires, but as an open box, actually existing technology (to use the old phrase in a weird sense), such that all the stress is laid upon both "could" and "exist" in the above quote. I said he's like a utopian about the present, not about the future. Accordingly, such temporal schema like this get dissolved or rethought through the implied metaphysics, and so to talk like this quickly becomes inaccurate. It might be better, then, to say, as I did at the end of the post, that Latour is a utopian realist.

But let's be clearer about this: to be utopian about reality, to look for possibilities within what could exist, or become only more real than it already is, means also to rethink what it means to be pragmatic--another word I used last time. Now, you wouldn't really think this necessary, as pragmatism and certain aspects of realism have indeed been aligned philosophically--though fundamentally it is more a matter of tone, perhaps, than anything else (and the tone of the pragmatists, above all) since at bottom the two systems/schools are mostly incompatible. More important, though, is the aesthetic (or, let's say, the felt process guiding concept-formation/organization) that both of these philosophies project, and which allows them to rejoin (and their overgeneralized label, alongside that tone, is one way that they do this) a more general and indeed political sphere in which they seem to be, not just allies, but twins: realism produces pragmatism with respect to the issue at hand, and vice versa.

But Latour changes this all around. Not only does he make us rethink the basis of the differences between the two positions, by making a new sort of realism--and a more robust and accurate realism (some of the requirements of realism being not really requirements at all, as Harman, for one, has pointed out in his nice talk about materialism)--such that we can say, philosophically, that all previous realisms aren't really realisms, or are insufficient realisms, and then go on to conclude the link to pragmatism proves philosophically possible or impossible again on this new basis. No. He also makes possible a brand new pragmatism by way of this really robust realism, and in the widest most everyday sense. No longer is one pragmatic by focusing only on what is most necessary, cutting away everything that might be interesting but not bear on the situation. Pragmatism loses its (indeed Anglo-American, and oddly religious in ethic) connection with prudence, a connection that makes it come along to shut down questions, deem them irrelevant, cut all sorts of lines of thought off--or urge us to sit content with what we've got in a pseudo-Kantian way (I speak in general terms, as philosophically the positions become more nuanced and aimed precisely at cutting away such aesthetic associations, even though the associations seem to inform this very process of shearing off). Politically, it no longer means sticking with the immediate, with the practical, with the doable. Rather, Latour's pragmatism is often impractical, though it is always aimed at being realist, and indeed doing, changing, modifying, rather than hoping some intellectual trickle-down effect will take care of things. Most radically, it makes pragmatism have some hope to it--rather than narrow this latter category into some overgeneral category of "belief," which I think (but this is just me) isn't so much out to respect belief as to render it, through that respect, "mere belief." Rather than messing around with an impoverished sense of belief and the problems it produces, Latour offers us a new form of belief (which, however, might have some very old content, as you pointed out by mentioning his religiosity).

Needless to say, I find this really promising. It's the part of the extension, making a mess of things, that I like: the one thing you don't want to do, ever, for Latour, is clean up the mess under the guise of being pragmatic, since being realist about the network makes you even more pragmatic than what you'd achieve by ceasing to follow it (by "getting down," after all this work, "to the real issues"). I might take a moment here also to note something that I don't think we've sufficiently recognized: the general sanity of Latour's politics in, at least, the short term. Latour wants to really make sense of serious issues that confront us, and which others seem to have no way to address. The stupidity of the scientists mucking about with global warming data right before the huge Copenhagen conference is only possible if they don't share a Latourian point of view about the issues--this seems to go without saying. But the reactions to it--incredulity that the scientists would want to make their case in the most stark terms possible--are only possible for the same reasons. The prudishness with which we approach science is, in such situations, quite unbelievable, and the sort of Feyerabendian sort of reduction (science = ideology, to the point that we should teach it alongside creationism) that we're tempted to make in reaction shows a similarly unbelievable determination to keep such issues away from basic political considerations. So all those things on the newspaper--and the general shift of science from the physics model which dominated the 19th and 20th centuries towards the biological, of which each is a symptom revealing how this trend will continue perhaps even into the 22nd century--are, I think it's important to say, the right issues. But, if I now can move past this, still more important than any of Latour's particular political positions, is the restoration of some real content to "the political" though this symmetrical determination to make sense of all such news items--after it has been so utterly drained (and reified into that "the") by the postmodern appropriations of the tired old self-other dynamics in Schmitt. I outlined all this in a previous post with respect to how real politics changes our notion of rhetoric and language, but here I just wanted to show how it also was at the core of this utopian pragmatism.

But now, back to the issue of utopia proper, and its relation to technology in Aramis. I brought us back to the issue of love and pathos--passion of all kinds--via what you said:

And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management.

There is not only politics in the fact that the technocratic approach kills off technology as such. There is pathos, irony, peripeteia. For in saying that technology is not really the technocratic or the crude, pulpy SF (if you do want to see only misunderstanding in that genre, rather than, even there in the pulps, a rich history of tinkering and handicraft) black box, neither are we just talking about whether technology is a black box or not, and whether technocracy treats it as one or the other. We're talking about, indeed, the quality of that love of technology that Latour also is saying cannot really be technocratic, and which itself has, for him, something to do with utopianism as a version of this technocratism and as a version of this love. In other words, we're back at what you said in the beginning: utopianism prior to being a realism of Latour's sort is not just the technocratic sort of hope, but the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, that abounded in the sixties is bound up with technology:

In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis [the project] seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism [...I skip over the Habermas comment, namely that utopianism is often anti-technological like Habermas: to have Habermas as your utopian is setting the bar unbelievably low, no?, and I thought I said enough about how the notion of fantasy in utopia takes care of the anti-technological stance and makes it only pseudo-anti-technology] in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

So I read your remark here backwards: it's that, once we've got how utopianism pervaded technology and engineering, how do we read it back into Latour's (nostalgic) sense of what Aramis stands for?

Here's the problem, though. Essentially, Latour wants to take something of this utopianism, the aspect that wasn't (according to him) technocratic, and keep it as the love, or refigure love with it in mind. And he wants to do so as much as he reforms utopianism into realist-utopianism, making it clear that the technocrat ironically cannot have love for technology. But we then see Latour confuse utopianism proper and something like 1960's optimism, which I'd align with that arrogance--or rather, theoretical expansiveness--of the Levi-Strauss type (and whose archetypal form is generated by the politico-intellectual figure that Sartre crystallized for so many). Now, optimism/expansiveness and utopia certainly ran together in the sense that the 60's was truly the great age of modern utopias, total visions of not only different social structures or ways of doing things, but also nonce sorts of solutions that would make the world indeed, do better, go faster, see clearly, etc. (despite the fact Latour says we can't). But ultimately, as you can see from many of my parentheses, it's hard for me to see in the optimism something completely inseparable from utopia--to the point that is really is utopia's core.

For I can't really believe in two connections here that Latour makes. I have trouble seeing utopia as anything so perverse as the technocracy that takes technology as an object without love: certainly it's hard for me to see in SF utopianism, or even in fantasy (the amazing 60's-70's revival of LOTR), anything like full on

technocratic thinking that treats technology as a full black box, however much there is a sort of engagement with technology. This may be because, for me, there are many different types of utopianism. There would be the literary/aesthetic utopia on the one hand, which can't wait to fiddle with the technology, and then the more social-planning type of utopianism that is found in the human sciences--the less humanist and more functionalist/formal Corbu sort of attitude: though there is a lot of planning in the literary, it is never as pure (i.e. empty) as architecture or social-science/politics generally, either because the latter is tied to praxis more than theory (as Jameson perhaps too forgivingly explains it), or because it is just generally formal/practical about society (as I'd venture).

That's one expliantion: Latour lumps together all these utopias (as everyone else does), omitting a lot of the more creative aspects, and thereby sees a certain flat treatment of technology as symptomatic of all of them (it's in the same way that Marxism--here now alongside Latour!--often condemns utopias and utopian thinking). But--and here is the second point--then there is that sense that utopia is a sort of pure love through its big thinking about the technological object which comes to that technology from the outside to invest it with meaning. It is, then, the purity of the feeling or the love that seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization. So in both cases, we get a sense that it is the humanities that both want to plan through utopia or critique through it, and aren't really interested in the technology which will bring it about, as well as feel feelings purely, and so instead of getting interested in technology, get interested in the feelings that come from utopia. Thus it is the deeper tie of pathos with the humanities that I find odd, because this is what explains that sense you rightly feel that Latour is nostalgic for the grandness of scale in theory of old (Sartre, Levi-Strauss, etc.)--but also explains my sense that this is not at all a nostalgia for any proper utopianism. In other words, it is love that is tied with the humanities in general, which then produces the conflation of utopia with optimism, or the mistaking of the latter for the former in Latour (as I'd put it: Norbert/Latour likes the former or is genuinely nostaligic more for it than the latter).

Let me be a bit more precise. We can turn to the earliest mention of utopia in the book to see everything I'm getting at. It's in the Preface:

Samuel Butler tells the story of a stranger passing through the land of Erewhon who is thrown into prison because he owns a watch. Outraged at the verdict, he gradually discovers that draconian measures forbid the introduction of machinery. According to the inhabitants of Erewhon, a cataclysmic process of Darwinian evolution might allow a simple timepiece to give birth to monsters that would rule over humans. The inhabitants are not technologically backward; but they have voluntarily destroyed all advanced machines and have kept none but the simplest tools, the only ones compatible with the purity of their mores (Aramis, vii).

Now, here's the upshot:

Butler's Nowhere world is not a utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats.

By publishing this book, I would like to bring that isolation to an end (vii-viii).

Very nice. Utopia is dissolved into the present, in the realist manner that I am describing above. But then, there comes this, the aim of the book:

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

There is the sense that this dissolution produces something like the investment of the non-utopian with the utopian, or the present with all the great impulse (read, pathos, drama, anything but fact) behind the utopian. But doesn't that presume that the utopian is primarily optimism? That grandness of scale? The sort of wide-ranging judgment or ability to pronounce (this is good, this is bad, what feeling!), that is is so quick to turn around upon the sciences, become pessimistic, and say (Heidegger is our hero, after all, as Latour continually remarks) that science doesn't think?

I find in these lines about humanists something equally patronizing, don't you? And for me, it actually sort of undercuts the whole waffling back and forth that we have traced above which produces the realist-utopian stance that Latour offers, because it makes the book out to be something like an elaborate hoax as far as love is supposedly also joined together with Latour's new utopianism, or is productive of its most veritably realist aspects. Are we, in describing Aramis this way, really talking about pathos? Or are we simply talking about the stereotype of pathos--i.e. the fact that it is studied by the humanities and not the sciences? We are reinvesting technology merely with what the humanists would like to see in it--poetry, no?

Now I don't think Latour is entirely up to that, since restoring the human to the humanities is one of the major goals of his project (see WHNBM on the anthro-), and indeed this sort of pathos is also shared by the scientists themselves at work (Latour wants to account for how they sometimes care about the project in the same way, or at least as much, as a humanist cares about a poem--though, I think, it can then be said that the portrayal of humanities-pathos is indeed really the scientist's image of humanities-pathos). Regardless, this sort of ultra-skepticism about Latour does press him hard on the issue, and shows, I think, the real status of the concept of utopia in the work (elevated and denigrated at the same time, just like the humanities). Or, it rather reveals the brilliance of Latour's actual case-studies might outdo his general sense of their purpose (the philosophy that informs them would be inferior to the actual study--or rather perhaps only the ANT theory considered less philosophically and more as a guide for research would be an adequate characterization of what goes on in the cases): utopia is something to be entertained insofar as it is allied with optimism, or with the sorts of invention that produces great ideas--Norbert with similar elevation/denigration uses the word "genius" about the initial formulator of the idea of continuous transport--but one can't really take utopian optimism seriously unless one becomes a realist and applies it to the "present"--and thereby teaches the humanities (as well as the sciences, but at least they tinker with things, unlike media studies) a lesson. In other words, all I'm saying is that a real (and not realist) utopian vision might be unthinkable from such a perspective--the perspective that would use "utopia" in the following sense:

An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon (viii).

Latour and Utopia, part 1

2009-12-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

You thought your response to Aramis was like the RATP... Nevertheless, even though I end up even more belated in getting to it, I want to really consider the book--which I have to say I enjoyed the most out of everything we have read so far, even more than the mind-blowing Irreductions--and to your discussion of utopia and Aramis, since I find it to be dealing with a lot of issues of temperament and critical posture (through Koch and the issue of manifestation) that we're tracking now.

I've been seriously interested utopian thinking lately, as a sort of an arrested moment in the speculative dialectic that is not quite negative like the Benjamin/Adorno constellation: it is a moment of reflection that not only suspends what is into an alternative assemblage though which the concept (totality) can be grasped, but also gets the speculative wheels in motion and envisages, through disruption, other possible arrangements of reality itself--a preview of what the speculative, leaping over towards the Real, produces/reaches, as it were (in a way that brings the Hegelian and colloquial sense of the word "speculative" together, which I find promising... though certain SR people find it then carries too much of a whimsical, imprecise, un-rigorous air: philosophy must be difficult, remember?). My recent interest in Jameson and Marxism generally is really based on Jameson's investigations of the utopian along these lines (and of course on postmodernity and theory, to which utopia is a sort of refreshing/risky/fraught alternative), which he makes through his lifelong engagement with science fiction (now collected and presented in Archaeologies of the Future)--not so much his work on modernism, which, like you (I think, but you also have beef with his take on Bourdieu), I think is a bit more sketchy.

Now, what's interesting about utopia is it seems to go entirely against what Latour says in Irreductions--that statement that has continually haunted me:

We will never do any better. We will never be able to go any faster. We will never see any more clearly (231).

But you're right to also note that there is a respect for utopianism in Aramis. So where does Latour fall here? I want to return to your comments and note, as it were, the back and forth, pro-utopia and anti-utopia. You say,

In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis [the project] seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism — which one often associates with an anti-technological stance, like the one Norbert attributes to Habermas on page 280 — in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

Here you've already hit on the essential connection (or disjunction) for me, to which I'll return in a second post, between 60's theory/arrogance/optimism and 60's utopianism--as well as rightly allied utopia to an anti-technological move, though you could also say that this is the more sort of semi-reactionary, ultra-creative, and Fantasy element in what is the thoroughly SF-like technological insistence/realism of utopias (producing the immense plans, cities, detail that we find even and especially in More all the way down as well), as Jameson does (see "The Great Schism," in Archaeologies). But I want to follow what you then say:

This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour's technocratism, his own "love of technology," which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about.

The technology that could exist... so we can indeed do things faster, better... there are possibilities in technology! But then you (rightly) go on:

He's not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for.

So it's not that we're envisioning different futures, say, through technological invention, but actually talking about the new potentials of technology that already exists! We can't do things better, after all! But, you then say precisely that,

From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself.

...And you're exactly right! Because Latour is like a utopian, but of the present, as it were. How? Because while we can envision new uses of technology, or new social structures possible through these technologies, we have too many of those uses already available to us, for Latour, to actually go and envision anything radically different, radically better than them. This is the confusing sort of shift in Latour: we can't do it better, because better is already what is possible with what we've got! So we need not get utopian in any sense of envisioning a radical disruption with the present system... we need merely get political, pragmatic, with what we have.

But it's important to note that this doesn't immediately come from some sort of distrust in the imaginative. It rather comes from a very interesting reversal of the role of technology that you're pointing out: we don't use technology to envision new social change--we actually bring about that change with existing technologies.

No longer is technology something empty, on which we can project all the visions we have for futures--it can't remain the sort of black box though which unheard of communicative possibilities are realized (Le Guin's ansible, to take an over-cited example), or through which everyone can have affordable shelter (Fuller's synergetic, geodesic domes--although these are often built)... though people in the humanities (except philosophers and maybe social scientists...) perhaps never have thought technology is really as empty as that (certainly media studies doesn't--see part 2). Regardless, technology now is a set of possibilities (and media studies perhaps understands this in more detail than Latour--as I'll get to in another post on Latour and McLuhan) which are there, and through which the future possibilities are indeed realized. As Latour never tires of saying, rehearsing a line he got from a commentary on Deleuze's philosophy (and which is indeed all over Deleuze), the actual always outstrips the virtuality of the virtual: thus the virtual possibilities of the technology we have are not somewhere other than technology... they are just in the technology as the technology becomes more real!

Thus, it's technocracy that kills technology (because, for Latour, it doesn't really love technology). This is why you go on to say the following:

And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management.

But now we're at pathos, and this puts a wrinkle in things, to which I'll return (via 60's optimism) in a sequel to this post. For now, I just wanted to outline this sort of utopian-realism, or realistic-utopia of Latour.

Punctualization: Law and Greimas

2009-12-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

There's a great little summary of Actor Network Theory by John Law published in a journal called Systems Practice (which henceforth will be my name for anything I'm up to at the moment: ordering a pizza = systems practice), titled "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network." I want to turn to it not only because we are turning to Reassembling the Social, but also because he gives us another way to think of the black box, which links things to certain problems the SR and OOP people are trying to figure out. Latour in Science in Action basically has two operations for the black box--that of opening it and closing it. But Law says that this box--or actant--can also be described as a "punctualization" of the network which supports it, or of those transformations or translations of the actant that opening the box makes it possible to trace and retrace. The terminological shift here cues up a host of basic issues that Latour often seems to want to pass by--which is understandable, because bringing them up distracts us from tracing and retracing--but which for me are quite crucial. Law sums these issues up explicitly in a question: "Why is it that the networks which make up the actor come to be deleted, or concealed from view?" (385). In other words, the issue is one of manifestation--and I use this word because it is that of Greimas, who we will turn to in a moment. The box suddenly is less functional, all of a sudden, and becomes more or less apparent. Obviously in an open box you see more--and this is why Latour uses this figure. But your focus is then on what's inside (the other actants), and not on the status, as it were, of that box and how it has altered. Thus Law's question seems to me important.

We sketched out punctualization above, but here's Law's full description of it:

All phenomena are the effect or the product of heterogeneous networks. But in practice we do not cope with endless network ramification. Indeed, much of the time we are not even in a position to detect network complexities. So what is happening? The answer is that if a network acts as a single block, then it disappears, to be replaced by the action itself and the seemingly simple author of that action. At the same time, the way in which the effect is generated is also effaced: for the time being it is neither visible, nor relevant. So it is that something much simpler--a working television, a well-managed bank or a healthy body--comes, for a time, to mask the networks that produce it.

Actor network theorists sometimes talk of such precarious simplificatory effects as punctualizations, and they certainly index an important feature of the networks of the social. Thus, I noted earlier that I refuse an analytical distinction between the macro- and the microsocial. On the other hand, I also noted that some network patterns run wide and deep--that they are much more generally performed than others. Here is the connection: network patterns that are widely performed are often those that can be punctualized. This is because they are network packages--routines--that can, if precariously, be more or less taken for granted in the process of heterogeneous engineering (385).

This is a lot more sociological in orientation, perhaps, than anything in Latour: we don't find much mention of "routines" in quite this way, and we certainly don't get much deconcealing, revealing in Latour, though there is some detective work in Aramis (tellingly, though, it ends up as a detective story without a murderer).

Why? Latour would rather focus on what this deconcealing gives you, to which you are, after you have opened the box or de-punctualized the punctuated, immanent.

This goes back to particular problems having to deal with power and force that I raised last time: Latour sometimes traces actants on the level of power, and other times decomposes them into forces--which makes them actants proper. If there is a bit of confusion, it is for the reason that Law here gives us in these sociological terms: sometimes actants wield a lot of resources (other actants), and so can mobilize them all quicker, such that we see them as punctuations. His example is a corporation or a government: we will suddenly be referring to these actants, rather than to the doers that, according to another view, make these things up.

Now, what is crucial is that for Law, we are right to refer to the actant in this way, or at least are somewhat right. We are recognizing, through our punctuation of the network, that there is a network of such a size behind the actant.

Now, this is for the reasons Latour also gives--and we note how he couches this less in the sphere of routines: the actant is shaping reality itself by recruiting allies. But this takes on a whole new meaning when aligned to what Law is saying: when we talk about powers, or about closed boxes, or about punctuated networks--all three here mean the same thing--we are talking about an actant that has so shaped reality that in referring to it that it seems natural it would be sustained by so many forces, so many of what is inside the box, or the wide and deep network itself. Or rather, that seeming naturalness which allows us to skip over the network in referring to the punctuated is precisely the amount of reality it has achieved through the network.

So, when Latour is talking about powers, or punctuated networks, he is referring to reality as any of us do. That is, it isn't as if he has to switch gears and enter the level of forces only in order to refer to the networks, or actually go about depunctualizing the punctuated in order to refer to that network that is punctuated--though he would encourage us all the time to do so.

But what Latour always stresses is that the situation is the same in reverse: when he refers to forces, he's referring to reality as any of us do, as well. And this is what, I think, confuses me occasionally, because it skips over this whole level where the problem of manifestation is actually opposed to the immanence to the network that ANT gives you.

And it is opposed. We're only making clear here that this opposition is not total. The question then becomes: what is the precise relationship of that manifestation of the network to its immanence with respect to the theorist?

This, however, was long ago answered by A.J. Greimas--who I turn to because, of course, he was fundamental in the development of ANT though not (as far as I've seen) very much discussed (Latour adapts and cites often, but, like Law, never quite explicates or interprets--either because it is all to patently Greimassian, or because we don't want to rehearse the differences)--whose opposition this is, in effect. I say "in effect" because the notion of immanence in this sense was originally formulated by Louis Hjelmslev, in his dense Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, though it has since acquired many valences which may be relevant (mostly through Deleuze). Hjelmslev was saying essentially that an immanent linguistics (glossematics) would not define itself with respect to transcendent elements like physiology or psychology: it would disregard the possibility that the only phonemes produced, say, could be those the human body was shaped to make, and would therefore remain founded only on its own properly linguistic presuppositions, remaining, always, close to them. It's important to note that while this is a structuralist move, this produces a slightly different sense of structure than that of Saussure and (in a certain sense) Lévi-Strauss: structure is here not a word for something like a synchronic logic governing certain elements, but is rather a system that generates these elements out of itself--something more self-consistent. It's no mistake that Hejlmslev was thus able to posit different and more subtle layers of signification with which structuralist analysis then could proceed (indeed, without Hjelmslev, we don't get anything like the discourse of Benveniste): his notion of structure forced him to stop applying the same old categories over and over, and move on to the generation of new terms, out of the old.

Now, Greimas takes over this term and interestingly opposes it to manifestation by saying each is the other's contrary (in the logical sense: that is, they are not in a relationship of contradiction). But what is immanent and what manifests? For Greimas, the structure itself: the immanent level is the one where the deep structures of language lie, and remain self-defined (like the semiotic square itself, which inter-defines its elements), and the manifest is the surface layer, where language moves towards its articulation and encounters the constraints of medium. Obviously, this is a bit weird, given what Hjelmslev meant by "immanence." But this is how Greimas believes we should take the term: "the terms manifestation vs. immanence are borrowed from Hjelmslev, but they can be compared profitably with the categories surface vs. deep in linguistics, manifest vs. latent in psychoanalysis, phenomenal vs. noumenal in philosophy, etc." as he says in "Towards a Theory of Modalities," (in On Meaning, 125) but also many times more elsewhere. One sees that transcendence, to which Hjelmslev opposed immanence, has to become something more like expression itself: thus, manifestation involves not moving beyond what is self-defined, but something more like the subjection of the "structural trunk" to the "specific requirements of the linguistic substance through which it [the trunk] is expressed" ("Elements of a Narrative Grammar," in On Meaning, 64), or the production of closure (as Greimas calls it), the lopping off of the pure possibilities of the deep structure.

So when one moves backwards, from the manifest to the immanent, as we are doing in ANT, what is one doing? The short answer returns us to square (or, rather, box) one, since obviously to move in the other direction than closure would be... opening. But because, as we saw, the manifest and the immanent are contrary, and not contradictory, this move backward can be seen as a more gradual return to the deep structure, the elementary units, out of which the more complicated manifested units are made.

Except in Latour this move back is not towards a deeper structure--and this problematizes everything once more, and confuses the stability of our opposition of the deep and fundamental and the simple qua immanent to the transcending that manifests. Latour tries to clarify all this at the end of We Have Never Been Modern, where he talks about immanent transcendence--one can think of this as his rewriting of Greimas. I'll try and work out this situation in another post. Nevertheless, I wanted to show that the old Greimassian distinction has some relevance, in that it provides the framework in which to think of this punctualization of the network: if we conceive of the relation between punctualized and the network as relation of the manifest to the immanent, or punctualization as the manifestation as the immanent, and conceive this relation correctly, we end up with a less outright contradictory opposition which needs to be overcome. This means that when we become immanent with the network, or de-punctualize the punctualization, we are engaged in an operation that isn't overcoming a massive gap so much as bringing the two levels into a relationship of contrariness. This rehearses, then, on a more technical level, what we were getting at before when we said talking about powers is, in a way, also acknowledging the size of their forces without specifying them.

One way to think about what Latour then does with this Greimassian situation--if I can just sketch out what happens through the massive reversal the desire to open produces--is to look at all of this coming to bear on the famous narrative grammar, and say that Latour narrativizes the deep structures, rather than the other way around. That is, Greimas thought the simplicity and minimal character of the deep structure tended towards narrativization (or the generation of combinations that had to be cut off in closure), and that we always could see, as it were, these simpler structures behind the manifestation (which is what makes possible his amazing narrative grammar). Thus, in Greimas, the actant itself is a simplification or concentration of a complicated textual surface, full of various actors. Latour--and Harman--reverse this: we see the actors (which can also be thought of as accidents or properties of objects) narrativize actants, which are much more complicated, or which do not become more simple. However, we are still, in this maneuver, becoming immanent--the network is self-articulating and self-consistent in these particular ways.

One way to describe many of my objections to Latour is not that manifestation has to work the other way (I like this about both Latour and, even more, about Harman), but that this reversal should turn the relationship of contrariness into a relationship of contradiction (or rather, there should be some similar sort of closure for his type of opening up). This, however, goes against (or maybe it merely refines? I think it refines) my point saying that the great thing about Latour is moving away from a logic of otherness and towards a logic of more.

(On that last point, I will show in my next post on "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means" that Latour himself isn't always so interested in this move, and is quite happy to talk about otherness--further complicating all of this! I think Harman will be clarifying it a bit though for all of us.)

One Author May Hide Another: Kenneth Koch and Latour

2009-12-01T21:23:00.000-08:00

Since we are now beginning to occupy ourselves with the literariness of Latour's theory — or, at least, its potential applications to literature — I thought I'd respond to your excellent posts on realism and fables with a few musings on a genre that, on first glance, might seem a less perfect match for Latour: that is, poetry. (BL himself laments that he doesn't know more about the subject here, though he did do his thesis on Saint-John Perse.) But speaking as a poetry scholar, I think ANT has great possibilities in this area, though as always one has to be careful about bringing things over from one discipline to another too quickly without making the necessary adjustments.

It may just be a personal thing, but one writer who keeps coming to mind as I read Latour is not a philosopher or a sociologist, or even a literary critic, but the poet Kenneth Koch (on whom I wrote my masters' thesis in 2002, and who I know you've written on as well). Some of this may be circumstantial: the two have a little bit of common ground in French classicism, and they have some enemies in common: Latour's wicked mockery of critical intellectuals in essays like "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" bring to mind Koch's Nietzsche-on-nitrous-oxide masterpiece "Fresh Air" (which memorably skewered the New Critic-approved academic poets of the 50s as "the men with their eyes on the myth / and the Missus and the midterms"). But the kinship is really more of a temperamental or even philosophical one, I think. One moment in Latour that really brought Koch to mind is this passage from his recent essay "Can We Have Our Materialism Back, Please?" (2007):

"What is so promising about extricating material materialism from its idealist counterpart … is that it accounts for the surprise and opacity that are so typical of techniques-as-things and that techniques-as-objects, drawn in the res extensa mode, completely hide. The exploded-view principle of description makes it possible to overcome one of the main aspects of bringing an artifact into existence: opacity. In other words, it draws the object as if it were open to inspection and mastery while it hides the elementary mode of existence of technical artifacts … Parts hide one another; and when the artifact is completed the activity that fit them together disappears entirely. Mastery, prediction, clarity, and functionality are very local and tentative achievements that are not themselves obtained inside the digital or paper world of res extensa — even though it would be impossible to carry them forward without working upon and with technical drawings and models. But again, it is not the same thing to work upon a model — mathematical, analogical, digital — as it is for a technical assemblage to be a model. As every engineer knows, scaling up (or scaling down, in the case of miniaturization and industrialization) is a tough, surprising adventure filled with twists and detours. (141, my emphasis)

This passage is, of course, pretty interesting in itself, and maybe once we move into the more philosophically-oriented part of our reading we'll return to it in order to help us get clear on how a Latourian materialism differs from other forms. But for now, I'm just going to exploit a little verbal felicity for my own purposes. What caused the Koch/Latour connection to really click for me was that one line — "Parts hide one another" — which oddly echoes one of Koch's best and most representative poems, "One Train May Hide Another." (I encourage you to read the whole thing before going on with this post; the link includes a recording of Koch reading aloud as well.) On one level, the similarity is simply fortuitous, but I think there's more to be gained by comparing them at greater length. Latour's passage is all about how reality resists, overflows, undermines and rubs up against the models that engineers use to depict and account for it: exactly the sort of thing he details at such extraordinary length in Aramis. Similarly, Koch's poem shows how reality resists the synoptic vision we believe we have of it at any given moment. Because "it is not the same thing to work upon a model … as it is for a technical assemblage to be a model," the things we model continue to surprise us the more time we spend with them, the more operations we try to perform with them. "Assemblage" is in fact a great word for the entities Koch enumerates in this poem (and many others): not exactly natural kinds, not exactly alogical disjecta or symbolic fragments, but always a gathering of things yoked together into what seems, at first, like just one thing.

The basic idea of Koch's poem, unfolded at comical length, is that a little time and contemplation inevitably multiplies the actors involved in any given encounter with an object (or, as Latour prefers to put it, a "thing"). The movement traced again and again and again in "One Train" is the same movement that the engineers encounter when they spend a little time with the thing they are trying to bring into existence — a movement that, come to think of it, sounds surprisingly like the process of writing a poem: "In a poem, one line may hide another line, / As at a crossing, one train may hide another train." The poem itself, appropriately for a work about temporal succession, is paratactic: that is, it appears to lack a governing logic, to be just one thing after another. It makes its rapid transitions in a variety of ways: occasionally it proceeds from line to line, or idea to idea, via metaphor ("So always standing in front of something the other / As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas"); sometimes by narrative metonymy (the mother hides her daughter, that daughter hides her own daughter, "[t]hey are in / A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag…"), sometimes by seemingly random disjunction ("One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb / May hide a number of other tombs"). As in social research as conceived by actor network theory, we must follow Koch as he wend his way through assemblages in order to grasp the poem's socio-logic: we can't simply impose a genre on it (even a very broad one, like "lyric") and then track its shifting fidelities or deviations from this model. Or rather, we could do this, but we would end up with the kind of bad criticism that so often reduces, rather than adds to, a poem's specific reality: for instance, a reading that finds "One Train May Hide Another" to be yet another exemplar of the instability of the speaking subject in postmodern poetics (how many more times is that particular res extensa — excuse me, res cogitans — model going to be imposed on contemporary poetry? Don't the poetics people know that even the literary theorists have moved on by now?)

But I digress. Some lines even bring Latour's work directly to mind, particularly (for some reason) 
The Pasteurization of France: "in the laboratory / One invention may hide another invention," of
course, but also "one person's reputation may hide / The reputation of another," which recalls how
the way Pasteur's name comes to stand for the whole hygienist movement; "One injustice may hide
another — one colonial may hide another" reminds me of the discussion of macroparasites
(colonialists) and microparasites (bacteria). Other lines just evoke the flavor of Latour generally: 
"one memory / Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, / The eternal reverse
succession of contemplated entities," for instance; or "[o]ne idea may hide another: Life is simple /
Hide Life is incredibly complex," which is a pretty good two-line summary of the Latourian theory
of translation, as I understand it.
If "One Train…" has a moral (and Koch, for all his hijinks, is ultimately something of a
didactic poet), it is, I would suggest, the same one that governs Latour's "empirical
metaphysics": Koch, like Latour, recommends a kind of ethics of hesitation ("when you
read / Wait until you have read the next line — / Then it is safe to go on reading") that
supplies our one way of trying to get a handle on the dizzying multiplicity of the
gatherings we find in all material things, as well as in "the social" in general. To get a
thicker, denser, more accurate description of the things we have in view, we have to slow
ourselves down. As Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social: "I want to break the habit
of linking the notions of 'society,' 'social factor,' and 'social explanation' with a sudden
acceleration in the description … 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 … There's no
question ANT prefers to travel slowly, on small roads, on foot, and by paying the full
cost of any displacement out of its own pocket" (22-23). "It can be important / To have
waited at least a moment to see what was already there": this could be the actor-network
theorist's, as well as the poet's, motto.

Fables

2009-11-30T12:57:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that there are so many fables in Latour--especially in Pandora's Hope, though We Have Never Been Modern is indeed one big fable. "Do You Believe in Reality?" sketches out the problem of skepticism over the years along these fabular lines, and "A Politics Freed from Science" sketches out in mythical terms the relation of politics to science and scientists:

By unwinding the adventures of Reason, we can imagine how it was before it turned into an unlivable chimera, a monstrous Big Animal whose unrest horrifies the masters even today. Needless to say, this is an attempt at archaeology-fiction: the invention of a mythical time when political truth-saying would have been fully understood, a world that was later lost through the accumulation of mistakes and degeneration (237).

The essay in other words seeks to see how reason worked in politics (through a reading of the Gorgias) in order to politicize science--since scientists would make politics external to science precisely by claiming reason isn't political. Reason, in other words, is not expert knowledge.

In true Nietzschian fashion (I am tagging this as I go: someday we can return to all these #Nietzsche-s), there's a lot of Socrates-bashing along these lines:

To see a political project through, with the crowd, for the crowd, in spite of the crowd, is so stunningly difficult that Socrates flees from it. But instead of conceding defeat and acknowledging the specificity of politics, he destroys the means of practicing it, in a sort of scorched-earth policy the blackened wreckage of which is still visible today. And the torch that set the public buildings ablaze is said to be that of Reason! (239)

The utterly non-Nietzschian thing here is that this does not describe war, but rather the state of peace and politics (which is why, by the way, Latour refuses to see the science wars as a war, and not as a political crisis for the sciences, which I think is an unbelievably brilliant move, killing off the "two cultures" bullshit--which, remember, is C.P. Snow's depressingly British, moralistic formulation--for good). Nietzsche was, after all, quite apolitical--unless you stretch him or modify him (sorry, Nietzschians).

Regardless, Latour goes on to outline a political reason that "cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge" (239), and reconstructing the original Body Politic by "simply taking positively the long list of negative remarks of Plato" (237). What's really interesting is that this all involves a reversal of the role of rhetoric (which, however, does not land him in an English department dripping with postmodern extensions of Sapir-Whorf)--something evident of course from Science in Action onward but something we haven't quite really remarked upon yet (except in terms of fiction). Socrates makes politics into rhetoric, and then his whole philosophical effort turns around deciding "what sort of knowledge rhetoric is" (239). Latour turns this around not by celebrating rhetoric and mobilizing it against Socrates' knowledge (a la Derrida in Dissemination--and everywhere else). Rather, he thinks rhetoric is first and foremost political, and therefore its relationship to knowledge (Socrates' focus) has less weight than its ability to shape reality:

The nonprofessional nature of the knowledge of the people by the people turning the whole into an ordered cosmos and not a "disorderly shambles" [Latour quotes Plato] becomes, through a subtle shift, the right of a few rhetoricians to win over real experts if they know nothing (240).

Latour is fine with this, even though that shift is the shift of the Gorgias as a whole, i.e. a shift made by Plato following Socrates, and altering the remarks of Callicles--Latour's hero--and others. He's so fine, he goes on to say the following, in an unbelievably refreshing reconsideration of Sophism, which does not just valorize it (Derrida again), but also makes the Sophist's point differently:

What the Sophists meant was that no expert can win in the public agora because of the specific conditions of felicity that reign there (240).

But then comes Socrates, who changes this around by divorcing rhetoric from the political:

After Socrates' translation, this sensible argument becomes the following absurd one: any expert will be defeated by an ignorant person who knows only rhetoric (240).

You have to read the whole thing to see how great this argument is, but one thing I want to take away from it all is that rhetoric is returned out of language to the sphere of politics. When so much literary theory is based on the linguistic turn itself, this makes possible some notion that language, after all, is not that primary, and that perhaps theory can be something other than the assertion of the primacy of language or language-substitutes (traces)--with the corollary that if language isn't primary all of theory collapses (as some theorists now feel, as they come under attack from Latour-like realists). Nor does this mean that we have to return to some notion of reference, as pro-theory people (who see it developing along a suspiciously straight line) might assume, and which leads me to think that perhaps most theory (this is the entire aim of de Man's work) is not even an effort to deal with the primacy of language so much as the effort to keep the referent suspended (something structuralist poetics did much better than any Foucauldian theory of discourses)… and that maybe a new consideration of the role of language is actually made possible by this Latourian position, beyond postmodernism.

Anyway, rhetoric is returned to politics, and thereby reason is never allowed to become apolitical, in this vast sort of alternate history Latour sketches out by reading the Gorgias against its author and main protagonist. And this fable, this counter-dialectic (in all senses), shows both the real state of politics and the real role of reason, by narrating how a specialized form of it "was kidnapped for a political purpose it could not possibly fulfill," (258), and turned, now, into the banner under which anti-political politics of science can mobilize.

In other words, the fable ends up as policy. But how did this happen? Like in "Do You Believe in Reality?" and We Have Never Been Modern, these fables--which suspiciously look like histories of ideas--are turned into those powers or punctuations (as Law calls them) which need to be undone by ANT. I guess Latour is thinking that as long as he's dealing with powers (with Constitutions), he might as well explicitly mark his own narratives as accounts of powers, not forces--that way they can be analyzed by ANT when the time comes. In other words, these fables (which so often deal with big terms--like realism, materialism, research, science, critique) shouldn't be taken as networks themselves, but power-sketches, organizations of the punctuations--a nice inversion of the task of real rhetoric, which would then be ANT itself, coming along to undo and make specific all of the fabular.

But that's not the whole story. For in the case of something like Aramis, or Pasteur--which, while they are novelized (or at least the story of the first is), are also case studies (and Aramis is indeed a true fiction, as Latour says in his intro)--we have something like these fables not working only in this sort of punctuated sphere. They are, rather, narratives that easily slip into ANT itself. How? Precisely through what you were noting a long time ago, Evan, and I too noticed: allegory--the weird way that pasteurization and now even the Aramis project itself works exactly like a network, before ANT gets to it and messes it up (shows it to be much larger, etc.).

Now, my question here about the fables--which is, in a way, a sort of basic question of how to take these sort of more general essays and works by Latour (like WHNBM itself)--is not just one of trying to figure out what plane Latour is working on, the punctuated plane or the plane of the network itself. I'll leave it to Reassembling the Social to try and work on this more precisely, make it more specific. I'll also be putting up little entries that actually work out this concept of punctuation (or the operative shift from powers to forces and back again, which indeed ANT can account for--I think it is its most interesting concept).

Rather, I'm trying also to weigh what Latour's way of looking at things is concretely giving us in terms of ways into problems via his particular concepts. On this point, I think it is important to pay attention to the phenomenology of reading Latour, as it were--or what I'd prefer to call just the feeling of the concepts at work here. As we move into philosophical characterizations of Latour, through Harman, we are inevitably going to be more focused on the system itself, the coherence of the concepts and their interrelatedness: this (metaphysics) is all right, but its also not where we're at home, as literary critics. Where we're at home is, I think, in this sphere of feeling… feeling the contours as it were, of the notions, testing them out, using them, touching them in a way that philosophy--if you'll pardon my turning a conflict of the faculties into a conflict of the senses--can only try and get at by seeing (or characterizing as "aesthetic"), however much it tries to become pragmatic or turn the philosopher himself into a phronemos. This no doubt gives us a bit of an edge (which a more rhetorically minded philosophy like Harman's is itself somewhat regaining) in seeing these concepts as somewhat useless insofar as they are not also seen to relate to this experience of deploying them somewhat against the grain, or applying them to new cases or areas in which they might not (if you just viewed them in terms of system) really be seen as pertinent (in the semiological/structuralist sense of this word that I love--though pertinence also constitutes scientificity for Greimas and these same semiologists, let's not forget).

In short, this sort of (literary critical--and I stress both of these words as we move into essays on critique, though perhaps we might describe literary criticism more as analysis and reading, and thereby evade much of the anti-critical talk) sense of how concepts work allows us to see how they at times don't work, or work according to tendencies that are somewhat weird. Here--just to bring this all to a conclusion--we get the odd resemblance of these fables to something like a history of ideas… which is something that, if you view it in the terms of the philosophy/theory itself, you won't be able to see--since you'd rather be making sense of this precisely in terms of that system (ANT).

What I'm saying is that there is something in Latour--in this allegory-fable connection--that seems like it's too familiar for a system that claims to do what it is claiming to do. This, I'll say again, is something typical of philosophies of immanence, but doesn't just reduce to something like an incongruity between the "doctrine" and the "performance," which is then quickly made into a (bogus) refutation. It is an aspect of the way that Latour is opening up problems, and I just want to mark it here… as my sort of contribution to an account of how reading Latour feels (phenomenology of reading Latour).

Curved minds

2009-11-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

Graham Harman says, in response to my last post: "I’m never convinced by the notion of Latour as a devious strategizer or rhetorician." Fair enough: it's a bit too Sokalian, and makes him sound too much like a sophist (in the colloquial, derogatory sense). But I happened to come across a passage just now in Latour's article "What If We Talked Politics A Little?" (2003) that obliquely addresses this very issue (I love it when that happens):

We have to be careful here so as not to draw the hasty conclusion that it is enough to be devious in order to utter political talk accurately. Unquestionably, politics is imposture; we are well aware that the virtue of autonomy can be secured only at the price of a fundamental vice, betrayal, both there and back; we acknowledged that lying — as opposed to the supposedly easy truth of faithful transfer of information — is an integral part of the work of composition; we know that expecting a spokesperson to "tell the truth," to be "authentic," amounts to killing the process of transubstantiation. However, this does not, for all that, mean that to be a good politician it is enough to lie, to be a phoney. That would be too easy. The Prince of Twisted Words would simply have replaced the White Knight of Transparency … One can walk skew, think curved, cut across, be sly, without necessarily drawing the political circle. It is not because they all differ equally from the straight line that all acts of envelopment are similar. "Curved minds" are clearly distinct from one another, even if they are all an object of ridicule for "straight minds." (153)

So perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that Latour is devious, but always in the service of enveloping something, of drawing a political circle, of catching something in his net. And in this he's not far off from the devious politicians who, as he sees it, are always so despised.

Phenomenology of Reading Latour

2009-11-24T14:37:00.000-08:00

As per your suggestion a little while ago, here are some scattered notes on what it's like (for me) to read Latour.

I'll start by jumping off from something you wrote to me (in an e-mail): "he actually is quite a great article-writer... usually I find that you can oppose article-writers to book-writers, but he's great at both!" I think this is true, although I've got to say that so far I give a slight edge to his books: Latour is such an ambitious theorist, always wanting to lay down the maximum bet and shake things up as much as possible (sometimes at the risk of caricaturing others' positions, as you point out in your most recent post), that I think he does better with a little room to stretch out and indulge his theatrics, rather than being forced, for reasons of space, to keep one line of argument going from beginning to end. Another way of putting it would be to say that, like Norbert in Aramis, Latour's method is to make as much of a mess as possible, and then see what's required in order to clean it up — an approach that seems crazy until you realize how closely it reflects the socio-logic of how actors actually make sense of the world. So I guess what I'm saying is that in the articles he sometimes doesn't have enough time to make a mess and clean it up.

You also mention that reading Latour gets you "talking more in terms of strategy rather than about ideas": "Something about how you get a little more frank and unashamed while reading this stuff has to be communicated to people..." Again, I totally agree, and this is something I get from Bourdieu as well: the sense of non-stop devious strategizing (which in Bourdieu, of course, is also thematized) is, once you get used to it, actually very useful as a model, a manner you can imitate, at least to a certain extent, to make your own arguments (which obviously don't need to be the same kinds as the ones Bourdieu or Latour make).

But Latour is such a rhetorical writer that it can even be slightly off-putting, not to mention confusing, because he's also got such a rhetorical view of life. (In this, he's like Nietzsche, who keeps coming up, which perhaps shouldn't be so surprising: as I recall reading somewhere — maybe Harman's book? — he's one of Latour's biggest unacknowledged influences.) In other words, Latour is always trying to convince you that everything in the world is trying to convince everything else: as if reality is in fact made up of innumerable little Bruno Latours. He pays nearly everything the compliment of assuming it's as clever as he is. (He does make some exceptions, usually for other sociologists.) I realize this sense on my part contradicts some of what you said towards the end of your last post about BL's positive valuation of a certain kind of "stupidity," or "forgetting," that goes along with being on the inside of a network. If we're on the inside, and we can just forget what we're doing and sort of go limp, then there's no real need to strategize and rhetoricize all the time. We don't really need "the logic of practice" to explain how anything happens. And there does seem to be a general shift in Latour's work away from a Bourdieusian assumption that everything is infinitely clever (which we find in Pasteurization of France and Science in Action) towards an assumption that everything is kind of stupidly enthusiastic.

But this is rather vague, so I'll finish with a specific passage that I think illustrates many of the hallmarks of Latour's style pretty well. It's from "Where are the Missing Masses?" (1992), which I believe we both read a couple of weeks ago:

The most interesting (and saddest) lesson of the note posted on the door at La Villette is that people are not circumspect, disciplined, and watchful, especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130 (I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white; no one else seems to bother, except the mourning families). Well, that is exactly the point of the note: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed." In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman — that is, machines and gods. This note indicates how desperate its anonymous frozen authors were (I have never been able to trace and honor them as they deserved). They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans; this failed, the door was always left open. Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal, that is, to a nonhuman who regularly and conveniently does the job in place of unfaithful humans; to our shame, we must confess that it also failed after a while, the door was again left open. How poignant their line of thought! They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is, there was, and ever will be. If human and nonhuman have failed, certainly God will not deceive them.
(166-167)

What's going on in this passage? Let's taxonomize:

1. Humor. This is probably one of the first things that strikes readers of Latour: he's very funny, and not afraid to make jokes about pretty much anything, at any point of his argument. (Graham Harman says somewhere that he initially got interested in Latour because he was the only funny person in Continental philosophy.) Here the jokes are at the expense of French drivers (they don't obey the speed limit), the authors of the note ("How poignant their line of thought!" — treating them as if they themselves weren't making a joke), and Latour himself as a scholar (he regrets being unable to properly cite the authors of the note). And the improbably specific details ("French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130," and then, a little later in the sentence, "the mourning families") are also funny.

2. Symmetry. These kinds of parallel constructions are so characteristic of Latour as to be almost an obsession: "In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman…"; "They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans… Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal…" One of the odd things about Latour is that, for a thinker so committed to asymmetries and hybrids and quasi-objects, he divvies up and juxtaposes and dichotomizes like Derrida never gave dualisms a bad name. Often his symmetrical formulations are ironic, i.e. he's caricaturing what some other person or group thinks (the moderns, the epistemologists, the technologists, et al.), but he's still clearly addicted to them. And I should say, I don't think this is a problem; that is, I don't think he's really a dualistic thinker, or at least not at all a rigid or limited one. In Latour these pairs ("epistemological couples," in Bachelard's parlance) are always getting pulled apart and recombined and mapped on to others (and not simply reversed, as in dialectic). But stop him at nearly any point and he's always working with a clear-cut distinction.

3. Sacred/theological language. This is another persistent verbal habit of Latour's: it pops up as early as Irreductions and plays a big role in the rhetorical vocabularies of both We Have Never Been Modern and Aramis. One way to deal with this would be simply to read it under the heading of (1), that is, as a joke — and sometimes Latour does use sacred language as a joke, or for merely hyperbolic or blasphemous effect. But knowing that he's a practicing Catholic puts an interesting spin on his continual recourse to a religious idiom. I don't quite know what to say about it here, but I'd just like to add a little more to the passage I quoted above:

I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this February day, the door was open. Do not accuse God, though, because the note did not make a direct appeal; God is not accessible without mediators — the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well — so instead of asking for a direct miracle (God holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel, as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison) they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough. (167)

Who is Latour reassuring here? On one level he seems to still be joking: who would possibly think to "accuse God" of leaving a door open? And again, he's hyperbolically specific: that "as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison" is obviously an unnecessary flourish, and a bit of a goof on Latour's own multidisciplinary scholarly authority (oh, you're a theologian now?). But even without knowing anything about Latour's own beliefs, the last three sentences are charged with a sort of melancholy resignation: "instead of asking for a direct miracle … they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough." Of course, the whole point of Latour's article is that much of what we think of as autonomous human morality is in fact preordained by clever engineers, who make it practically impossible not to wear a safety belt, or exceed the speed limit on a residential street, or leave a door open. As you'd expect from him, he seems for the most part to see this as a good thing, as well as a technological marvel, and he would like sociologists, technologists, and moralists all to see that what they talk about is so densely intertwined. But that final caveat — "In our secular times, this is no longer enough" — suggests a somewhat darker (almost Heideggerian?) picture of the "missing masses," a sort of nostalgia for a (probably imaginary) past in which humans really did make moral decisions, in which autonomy was real and society did not make so many of the crucial choices for human beings ahead of time.

Of course, I could be way over-reading (an occupational hazard), and Latour's "secular times" is just total sarcasm: he does cast doubt on the very idea of secularization in We Have Never Been Modern and numerous other places. But it's the sort of troubling ambiguity that he opens up, again and again, through his use of sacred language, and also, for different reasons and to a different degree, through his use of the language of politics.

But I'll stop here, having made a mess and not cleaned it up. Suffice it to say that the more one thinks about Latour's style, the more fascinating a rhetorical case study it becomes. And I haven't gotten to his own writings on style (of matters of concern and so on). I'm sure this is a subject we'll both have a lot more to say about as we go on.

Morephisms: or, forget otherness!

2009-11-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

I promise a more substantial post on Aramis, replying to your great presentation. But I want now to begin our consideration of Latour's many essays (which we'll be doing this week) and consider Latour's interesting reading of Rick Powers and great reading of Alan Turing, "Powers of the Facsimile: a Turing Test on Science and Literature," because it really has to do with this issue of stupidity/forgetting as I see it--through an interesting detour through the distinction construction/deconstruction which I consider fundamental (because it brings out the difference between a logic of moreness and a logic of alterity), and which this essay picks up.

Now, Latour basically is interested in "Powers of the Facsimile" to make the case for Richard Powers as the novelist of Latour's realism--a realist novelist in a new sense, a novelist of matters of concern, not just matters of fact (which an inadequate Zola-esque realism would, instead, deal with).

Unfortunately, in one of those weird over-polemical moments in Latour, Latour makes it out as if no literary critic has ever really seen this in Powers--or in fact in novels generally... indeed that literary critics don't have the right tools at all to see this. He is considering in particular the inability for reviewers of Powers' work (who magically turn into literary critics and then into all literary criticism) to see that Powers is not just writing about science in literature, but also showing how matters of science become research, and how it is full of objects of concern. This problem allegedly focuses itself in Powers' use of characters, who develop only insofar as they are channels for these matters, and it is here that actually the reviewers (and/or critics) miss the realism the most:

Reviewers often accuse Powers of being a “brainy” writer whose characterization suffers from an obsession with putting semiotic legs on mere ideas and facts drawn from science and technology. But one of the main problems explored by his novels is exactly the problem of the progressive emergence of individuals: Powers asks what it is for a character to exist at all, when so much of existence depends upon the things one is attached to – the most important connection being to the biological basis of life itself, which is the theme of The Gold Bug Variations (1991). By accusing Powers of simply “clothing ideas with flesh,” critics imply that they know what it is to be an idea, what it is to be a character, what it is to possess a “realistic” psychology, what it is to play the role of a “fact” on the stage of the narrative, what it is to be an episode in a narrative, whereas all of those features are explicitly and relentlessly questioned by the novels they are reviewing … It’s as if critics believe that Agatha Christie has provided the definitive realistic view of the world … or that “water boils at 100° Celsius” is the paramount example of a scientific statement"... But Powers takes science and technology much more “realistically.” Consider, for instance, the strand of Plowing the Dark that takes place in a Bill Gates-like digital factory, and is entirely devoted to exploring what it takes to produce a realistic-looking image out of calculations, and whether this is an intelligent idea or, on the contrary, a dangerous sin … meanwhile, in the other intertwined plot, a young English teacher has to survive for months after being kidnapped in Lebanon by an Islamic terrorist group. So, as usual, what critics see as a weakness – “M. Powers, why do you give us so many ideas when we want flesh and blood characters?” – is actually the subject of the novel: “what will happen to you if you dare to produce flesh and blood realistic characters out of ideas, signs, symbols, calculations, you reckless makers of facsimiles?” And in parallel: “What will happen to you if you are kidnapped, blindfolded, and left for months without any signs, symbols, pixels, images?” In addition, the very objection that critics raise about Powers’s characters (“are they brains with legs?”) is actually the argument that divides most of the characters in the novel, since the protagonists argue amongst themselves about whether or not the calculated image is really just calculation, or something else that escapes calculation.
-"Powers of the Facsimile," 94-95

I don't bring this up because we're literary critics so much as to note the supposition--sometimes occuring in Latour--that other disciplines just don't get at what Latour is doing, or only do so inadequately. Here, it is as if literary critics have never read and understood Greimas, or have never considered characters as shady sorts of complexes rather than full on psychologies. Meanwhile the problems of plot brought up by Wayne Booth, and the masterful consideration of Defoe by Ian Watt, as antiquated perhaps and theoretically unsophisticated (unscientific--in Greimas' sense) as they are, both deal with such issues. So it's this sort of position Latour can always inhabit--at one moment he recognizes all sorts of good things in various other disciplines can be integrated into his project, and at another he can say that because they're modern, or because what they do doesn't presuppose the entire shift that focusing on nature-cultures brings about, what Latour is getting at is wholly new.

This doesn't seem to me to be a big deal--except that it seems typically philosophical, which is something I don't usually expect from Latour since what he's up to usually appears so very different in its form. I'll put differently: Ultimately, what reviewers I think object to in Powers is his taking his de-priveliging of character in the psychological, anthropomorphic sense to the nth degree. However, when Powers does this full-on, in his recent The Echo Maker, he precisely gets the National Book Association award and is a finalist for the Pulitzer... so go figure. Meanwhile narratology has long picked up this issue of the over-anthropomorphization of characters, even when they're made into actants. So, the situation is complicated. Latour comes along and oversimplifies it--as anyone who confronted such a situation would. But he also does so in a typically philosophical way: he wants to presume we all read like 19th century readers of Dickens, or present-day readers of Harry Potter, in order to demystify that fact. This leaves us with the sense that, yet again, we're getting an essay on the "aesthetic dimension" of a philosophy, or the review of a piece which best exemplifies this work--a task which has to say all the considerations before it appears take the function of art in the wrong way.

Regardless, we begin to see the connection between taking things as mattes of concern and understanding characters as less anthropomorphic. It is first and foremost a change in the role of the human in general, along the lines Latour sketches at the end of We Have Never Been Modern: anthropomorphism is just one sort of morphism. However, we must also apply this back to other things--and here is where Latour does something interesting. For he's outlining how, concretely, we can begin to treat things as matters of concern by refusing to confine them in one sort of morphism--like we have done with the human:

What is constant in RP [Richard Powers], and so important for our investigation, is the morphism structure that he employs and that the above passage [of Powers'] instantiates pretty well. I call (x)-morphism the matrix of transformative metaphors where (x) can be replaced by all sort of particular instances, or layers of discourse: anthropo-, techno-, ideo-, psycho-, logo- morphisms, etc. For instance, in the example of the reading of Yeats’s poem [in a scene in Powers], words are compared to gadgets, to toys, to machines, to factories (a technomorphism) which is also crossed with a biomorphism (the evolutionary theory implied by “female mammal’s” reproductive success) and a phusimorphism (expenditure of energy). Now, bad writers – of novels as well as of academic articles – take those morphisms to be stable, so that when they do anthropomorphism they take what they believe we know about humans – a sort of Simenon’s or Agatha Christie’s typical psychology – and bring it to bear on, for instance, a robot (most science fiction never goes further than this sort of “animation,” or projection trick).
-"Powers of..." 7

I've been reading some SF lately and I don't really find the last comment convincing (it seems to me another polemical instance), but the point in general is great. Because these morphisms as Latour says in his more recent work on ANT, extend reality to the matters of fact. And this is something different than presupposing a whole change in our Constitution in order to get at these matters (something less local, or more totalizing). It is showing how our various descriptions of events can begin to pull out the shape of a thing from its hard, objective edges, make it pliable, in a more discrete and particular act--turn it into silly putty. I think Latour goes on to say that this is the virtue of the best literature in general--and that smacks of the aesthetic approach mentioned before. But this smaller point, I think, we can extract from the general presentation and really appreciate--largely because both you and I know more concretely how metaphoric language in particular has a tendency to do this. That is (just to sum up) I think Latour's point is not based on the viability of the aesthetics he's outlining in this paper, so much as his real familiarity with what happens in the shaping process in trials of strength... and we literary critics too have some familiarity with something like that, in a way that can't so easily be rejected by Latour or chalked up to our having some wrong Constitution and thus wrong aesthetics.

So, morphisms extend reality to matters of fact, making them into matters of concern--over and above any sort of explicit adoption of a modern Constitution (though they imply this adoption, or work to bring it about). Latour goes on to say that this is also present in the best writing on science and technology (and here he's on much surer footing--you can tell in the essay itself). He reads the fascinating Alan Turing's famous "Computing Machinery" essay, familiar to students of philosophy of mind in particular--though Latour would, just like he did with literary ~~reviewers~~ critics, say they haven't read it for its morphisms either (and thus haven't really read it). In this, he's a bit more correct--but because philosophers proceed in a very different way than literary critics--and I can speak confidently here since I have some (but perhaps only some) familiarity in philosophy of mind. In the various classes, the issues Turing brings up get presented to you in snippets--perhaps in Jaegwon Kim's great summaries in his excellent overview/intro Philosophy of Mind. Then, if you're interested (as I was), you actually pick up "Computing Machinery,"--and are completely blown away at just how much is cut out. This isn't anything bad, really--philosophy proceeds by reducing and refining problems and explanations, Occam's razor-like (even the SR people, who try to resist this, do it--it's just how things proceed). But it cuts out all the morphisms, which end up making the computer, the mind, pianos, piles of neutrons, and all sorts of things come together in amazing ways to bring out the reality of the confrontation between mind and this technology, or the functions involved in both (not able to be reduced, now, to any sort of functionalism):

The whole question of what an automaton is, what it means to generate something – a later obsession of Turing in his work on “biomorphs” –, what it means to produce an idea, what it means to probe agency and its limits, are all explored in one single paragraph that goes from the machine in general, to the piano, then to the atomic pile, then to the human mind, then to animals, then to the computer… Lady Lovelace thinks that agencies can be mobilized like the finger-keys of a piano although, even for the piano this is no simple feat as any pianist knows: you inject an input, it does something, and then “drop[s] into quiescence.” But this is not the sort of agency that Turing’s machine have, he argues: it is more like that of an atomic pile.
-"Powers of..." 18

So, in short, this sort of writing, or this sort of way of putting these problems, extends reality to the objects. I might play on words here and say that not only are these morphisms, but that they are morephisms: they give more reality to things, or turn objects into things (or are the objects becoming things).

This is important, and brings me to that sort of detour/distinction I mentioned earlier. For in the middle of the essay, Latour says the following about Powers:

Am I wrong in thinking that such a parsing of competences, layers after layers, competence after competence, is unheard of in literature? Instead of giving us a despairing feel for the infinite distance between words and things, Powers gives us – gives me at least – an incredible confidence in the capacity of description: if someone is able to make us see engineers making us feel the turning of the knob in a drawer of a non-existent reproduction of the existing painting by the no longer existing painter of a no longer existing hotel room in Arles [...], then every thing can be carried in language! All the usual resources of criticism, fiction, and illusion which usually go into chic commentaries of Escher-like ‘abyme’ effects, are here all telescoped by Powers to provide more reality, not less. Constructivism is made to be the exact opposite of deconstruction while, at the same time, using many of the same resources. But the way they are nested in one another is entirely different. “Telescoped” is actually a good metaphor: the more elements nested the better the view, whereas in the logic of critical deconstruction the more elements the more delayed the grasp should be. That is the major difference between deconstruction and what I have called elsewhere the promise of constructivism.
-"Powers of..." 12-13

I tried early on to characterize the difference between deconstruction and Latour in these terms. But I also have tried to say that the difference is one between this insistence on more, and this insistence on the delayed-grasp. Or, rather, I've insisted really on the distinction between more and other--and Latour's innovation (which someone like Harman picks up on) being in allowing us to pass beyond the logics of the latter (logics of otherness).

But now, I just want to be as clear as possible about this, because deconstruction is often seen as an proposing an ontology open to otherness (in the manner of Lacan, perhaps), but also of always more otherness, of infinite otherness: the other, in Derrida, is never simply an other (as it might be in Levinas), but always more other than any other. The other is always more other than an other. Thus, we see how the more (to reify this concept in order to compare it to the other), is actually already addressed by deconstruction. But, as Latour points out quite clearly here, it is still subordinated to a logic of otherness, which turns it into moreness that doesn't add, but undermines (along the lines I outlined early on). Latour allows us to break out of this and finally liberate moreness from otherness, and--moreover--understand all the relationships that were previously thought in terms of otherness (my relation to another person, or to a thing, say) in terms of this new moreness (I have allies, and they give me more reality; or I relate to things, and we form a more-real collective). Harman, I think, will get even more sophisticated about how this moreness needs to work, as it were, but for now, I just want to emphasize that finally we can get rid of that agonizing logic of alterity that weighs over so much theory in the humanities. And perhaps this might allow us to restore some sort of real concreteness to alterity itself--though I don't think Latour would like to look back here--in the way that the Lacanians do through some of the most dire and drastic measures (mathemes, etc.). If morphism is suddenly something that adds reality to the thing, language in particular is in the service of making things more real--and no longer do we have to really keep saying literature undermines, overturns, undoes, etc. etc., as some theorists (de Man, etc. etc.) would have liked us to believe (but their readings themselves--and their familiarity with this shaping which I mentioned above--we can see could never really bring about).

And this brings me back, in closing, to your last post. I should have been more clear in my original post to which you responded, that stupidity all connects to reinvesting our understanding of technology with love/passion, as you nicely pointed out in your post--and thus that I am really less "worried" about stupidity/forgetfulness as I might have sounded (my point is less about whether Latour is advocating it than whether it is a way to characterize our relation to networks). But I do think you were able to draw the ethical line clearer than I did as regarded the uses to which stupidity/forgetfulness is put, when you say the following:

So it's not that Latour likes, or advocates, forgetting or stupidity (which, unless I'm misreading you, is something you're a bit worried about). But he does think that forgetting and stupidity are so inevitable, omnipresent, and equally shared that it's just not a good rhetorical strategy to accuse others of it. There's clearly an ethical dimension to this way of looking at arguments...

You insist rightly on the difference between stupidity qua being swept up in a network (stupidity as limitation of our abilities, the finitude of the network, as enthusiasm, as the unreasonable reason of scientific research/discovery) and stupidity qua thinking of technology/discovery "as the historians of technologists do," or thinking it is less omnipresent than it is, precisely in order to disconnect science from politics (or design/dreams from the possible worlds that the thing is designed for), in turn to reconnect them in a shoddy oily way. The former attitude is seeing stupidity as the basis for relationships in collectives--that is, as something different than familiarity, something less rational and much more forgetful because it is also excited (thus I used Forest Gump). Thus it is something like a virtue in the investigator--a way to (paradoxically) characterize his knowledge of the network: no longer is a researcher closer to the work on the basis of how familar he is with it, or how close he is to the primary sources, native informants, etc. etc.. Familiarity is replaced with forgetting: out knowledge of the networks is better insofar as it is stupid and excited--crying, full of passion like the passion of the scientists we follow. Thus at the end of Aramis, Norbert doesn't retreat to his other sociologists--as if the subjects he studied didn't matter--but returns to them, not without some just stupid, unexplainable fondness.

In short, stupidity or forgetfulness is a way to characterize the relationships between the actors in a different way than through "misunderstandings"--mostly because the latter involves something like the undermining, through its sort of inevitability. "Misunderstanding" is right, but it needs to move over a little towards this excited sort of state in order to add reality. I was thinking of this because after reading Latour for a while, you see the sorts of critiques that you mention (Gray, etc.) as of even less worth than the accusations of the people involved in the projects. In other words, these critiques, which do not at all add reality to the object, but take it away, don't just refuse to add reality in some sort of intellectual sense... they really don't have any active stake in the object that they are dealing with. But this sort active stake is not really--we see now--one of having more or less familiarity or knowledge of the network (a sort of "being-in" the group involved), but of being stupid in the right way, of not knowing--of misunderstanding, yes, but in a sort of forgetful way that adds more shapes, that has more morphisms, rather than less.

This, ultimately, is the basis of a rejection of shoddy critique--I'd say. And I'm claiming here that it involves, perhaps, less a problem in critique as such (as many of the SR people think it does, and which gets directed towards literature, among other humanities department, perhaps more than it needs to be) than with the logic of otherness which makes us think of moreness on the basis of its sort of undermining project... and which the morephisms of Latour can replace. This is just a hunch, but it's how I'd address a lot of what is going on. Forget the other!

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

2009-11-22T08:45:00.000-08:00

I wanted to call attention to two recent texts I've read on the internet (both found via Graham Harman) that your "forgetting/stupidity" post put me in mind of. The first is a blog post which has created a bit of a furor in the SR community, comparing Harman's mode of philosophizing to a Ponzi scheme, essentially claiming that it's just playing on people's willingness to invest in a new philosophical movement without regard for "securing the assets," as it were (i.e. making sure the philosophy on offer is coherent). And the other is this review of Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth and Žižek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by the conservative political philosopher John Gray in the Independent, in which he basically claims that their critique of capitalism and proposed return to "the communist hypothesis" is itself conditioned by the decline of historical memory under late capitalism, because they've clearly forgotten all about totalitarianism. (How's that for dialectic?)

I just wanted to point out that both are good examples of what Norbert in Aramis derides as "crude sociology." In both cases, the authors produce a dense, oily substance that has its uses, but that is perhaps too effective, not specific or refined enough, for the particular critical purpose they're using it for. That is, do we need SR to reflect the structure of financialization in order to criticize its philosophical claims as excessive? Do we need contemporary communism to have literally "forgotten history" in order to disagree with its visions of what is to be done? As Latour would surely point out, these are perfectly symmetrical strategies taken up by the right and by the left. It's not ideology, or stupidity, that's clouding anybody's judgment here: if anything, it's the knee-jerk habit of accusing one's opponent of being blinded by ideology, or being stupid, or having "forgotten history." And it is assuming, as Norbert steadfastly refuses to assume, that you yourself could have "done better."

So it's not that Latour likes, or advocates, forgetting or stupidity (which, unless I'm misreading you, is something you're a bit worried about). But he does think that forgetting and stupidity are so inevitable, omnipresent, and equally shared that it's just not a good rhetorical strategy to accuse others of it. There's clearly an ethical dimension to this way of looking at arguments, and it may help account for Latour's differences and similarities with Nietzsche (a fascinating topic which I hope we can talk about more at some point), who does actually think that, under certain circumstances, forgetting history is a good thing.

Forgetting/stupidity

2009-11-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

It just struck me, looking over some articles and reflecting on Aramis, that indeed there it is better to start with Latour as a sociologist rather than as something else... as a philosopher (which is pretty much how I started grasping him), say, or as what I want to consider now: Latour as historian. Obviously history has a lot to do with the the ANT-Science-Studies-Latour project in general. But ultimately--as you, Evan, have reminded me in the past--the use of the black box is there to close off certain historical avenues and keep the field being investigated tightly bound to the movements and relationships of the actual actors (by opening other closed boxes others only peeped into). But in this sort of arrangement, you do end up with something more sociological, ultimately, than any history--don't you? Early on in Aramis, Latour says the following, as Aramis' network is being reconstructed (or constructed):

Our interviewees no longer even manage to recall who might have come up with the dream of PRT. They can't tell you what institutions were behind its development.[...] Of course, a historian of technology outght to work back toward that origin and replace it with groups, interests, intentions, events, opinions. [...] She would reposition Aramis "in its historical framework;" she would etermine its place in the entire history of guided-transportation-systems. She would go further and further back in time. But then she would lose sight of Aramis, that particular event, that fiction seeking to come true. Since every study has to limit its scope, why not encompass it within the boundaries proposed by the interviewees themselves?
-Aramis, 18-19

But there's also some connection here, I'd like to suggest, between something Latour says in the introduction to Pandora's Hope:

"But is science cumulative?" he continued with some anxiety, as if he did not want to be won over too fast.
"I guess so," I replied, "although I am less positive on this one, since the sciences also forget so much, so much of their past and so much of their bygone research programs [...]"
-"Do You Believe In Reality?" 1-2.

Don't we hear what Latour is saying in Aramis in another key? The lost networks can't in other words, be thought in any way as something like lost history. The "forgetting" here is not the same thing as the "forgetting of history," with all its sort of massive, catastrophic weight. This is what I find weirdest in Latour--the sort of realigning of affects that focusing on networks allows us. I'm going to come back to this in another post replying to your wonderful review of Aramis and its stress on the passions of research--something Latour, in a little two page blurb "From the World of Science to the World of Research," and at the end of Aramis itself ("The whole thing should have been a research project," 287) makes clear should be distinguished from the passion for science (though both, of course, are wrapped up in problems of the nonexistent modernity).

For now, I just wanted to note how forgetting here takes a sort of different form. In a Nietzschian way, it becomes both easier and harder to forget--essentially because its not so taboo. Obviously, this is nowhere near the sort of total, extremely active forgetting we have in Nietzsche--but fundamentally forgetting, even ignorance for Latour becomes... okay, because we're concerned only with action at a distance. So back in Aramis, something like the ignorant non-questioning merges with a more practical it-being-out-of-the-question:

For all of them [researchers], PRTs are beyond discussion: everyone wanted them; they had to be developed. There is no disagreement on this point. No engineer leaves open the possibility of mechanical uncoupling of cars. It's out of the question.
-Aramis, 19.

And somehow this has to be matched by a counter-stupidity that is just as okay. I was preparing another post, and I came across this quote I had forgotten:

"Always assume people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you're studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point when the thing is irresistible, when what you really want, yourself, is to take out your checkbook so you can, I don't know…"
"Buy a share in the Chunnel?"
"That's it, or even shares in the Concorde."
"Even in La Villette?"
"Which one, the first scandal or the second?"
"The second."
"Oh, the La Villette museum. I don't know; it's a disaster, after all, why not, it had to be tried. Never say it's stupid. Say: if I were in their shoes, I'd have done the same thing."
-Aramis, 36.

The pupil tests Norbert, and we're off having a different (I guess one could say, differently stupid [if you take this in the best sense] willing-to-forget) regard for history--which brings me back to my first point:

"Even in that business of the sniffer planes?"
"Of course, silly boy, you would have bought into it, and not because you're naive; on the contrary, precisely because you're a clever fellow. It's like the Galileo affair. You have to get inside it until you're sure: that one is guilty; he should be exiled, and even, yes, even fried a little, the tips of his toes at least. Otherwise, if you thick differently, you're a little snot. You play the sly one at the expense of history. You play the wise old owl."
-Aramis, 36-7.

That brings me round to innovation and utopia... two topics that will take up your last post.

Everybody's Autonomy

2009-11-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

I've now delayed my post on Aramis for so long that I'm beginning to feel like the RATP. (Rim shot!)

Anyway, I doubt that I can do justice to such a strange and provocative book in one entry, so I will just offer some scattered comments, and we can go on from there. First, I want to do a little ad hoc taxonomy of its structure, which Latour actually makes pretty easy: certainly the differentiation between sections and subsections is much clearer than any of the divisions within the Aramis project itself. To wit, the elements of Aramis (the text) are:

1. the tale of Norbert (a sociologist and obvious stand-in for Latour, possibly named for Norbert Wiener) and the narrator (a young engineer doing an internship);
2. interviews with engineers and administrators involved in various stages of the Aramis project;
3. documents pertaining to the case;
4. speculative interludes on the nature of technological projects, many of them explicating or applying concepts that crop up in other ANT literature;
5. prosopopoeiae written in the voice of Aramis, the unfinished train line, itself (and occasionally other entities as well)

To make my life a little simpler I'm not going to deal with (4) or (5) at all right now, even though those are some of the richer passages in the text, and may be some of the most interesting to return to once we get into Harman and speculative realism. Please feel free to adduce some of those passages in your response: it's not at all that I'm not interested in them, it's just that I feel they are marked off as properly separate from the "story" of Aramis, which is what I want to start with.

Towards the end of the book, Norbert says:

I'd actually like to do a book in which there's no metalanguage, no master language, where you wouldn't know which is the strongest, the sociological theory or the documents or the interviews or the literature or the fiction, where all these genres and regimes would be at the same level, each one interpreting the others without anybody being able to say which is judging what. (298)

Is Aramis that book? I'm not sure that it is, completely. Certainly the narrative passages aspire to that state, and Latour brilliantly realizes it by making extended use of the dialogue form in the conversations between Norbert and the unnamed engineer. (I know Latour doesn't like this word, but the look is truly, and literally, "dialectical.") And as Norbert never tires of pointing out, the explanations offered by the various interviewees are very nearly as sophisticated and convincing as any of those advanced by the sociologists, making the text as a whole a true contest between "genres and regimes … each one interpreting the others." (Of course this is what Actor Network Theory would claim is always going on; it's just that usually Latour doesn't sacrifice the "friendly tour guide" persona of his first person voice. This movement into dialogism makes for a much more disturbing, chaotic text.) But in the speculative passages (4), he pushes back against these tendencies, marshaling all of the conceptual forces of ANT against the actors — which is why these sections, though full of great insights and formulations in themselves, ultimately don't seem so convincing as a "refined sociology" of Aramis.

But perhaps that's the point. In one way, Aramis is yet another handbook, yet another methodological tract, like Science in Action or Reassembling the Social. Yet instead of showing how perfectly ANT (or science studies or refined sociology or whatever Latour wants to call his method) accounts for the phenomena it's supposed to account for, Aramis takes the somewhat perverse tack of showing how confused the sociologist can get by his objects. Ultimately this is the moral of the book: one must love research, which entails loving its cul de sacs, breakdowns, and unexpected branchings as much as its eureka moments and positive successes. This is the error the actors make, that Norbert chides them for in his big Hercule Poirot speech in the epilogue:
“Oh, you do love science! … But you still don’t love research. Its uncertainties, its whirlwinds, its mixed character, its setbacks, its negotiations, its compromises — you turn all that over to politicians, journalists, union leaders, sociologists, writers, and literary critics: to me and people like me. Research, for you, is the tub of the Danaides: it’s discussion leading nowhere, it’s a dancer in a tutu, it’s democracy. But technological research is the exact opposite of science, the exact opposite of technology.” (291)

A great moment, one that actually moved me a little (I have a thing about research). And one that connects in a pleasing way to the two other themes in Aramis that I wanted to mention: utopia and autonomy.

One interesting motif in the book is the frequent allusion to 60s utopianism, often by the interviewees: e.g., M. Liévin: “‘It was fashionable at the time — Personal Rapid Transit, PRT. Everyone was excited about it … around the sixties. The Kennedy era. Private cars were on the way out — that’s what everyone was saying’” (15); or, later, M. Henne: “‘Before 1975, there was a period of innovation — new cities, all sorts of wild gimmicks. After 1975, it was all over; security was the only thing that counted…’” (47); or M. Cohen: “‘It’s also a question of the times, you know. I have trouble imagining an industrialist today who’d say, ‘We don’t have a medium-distance ultrasound link-up? Okay, let’s go for it — we’ll invent one. There’s no motor on the market? Never mind, we’ll develop one.’ And it was all like that. Today, everybody sticks to his own job. People don’t take so many risks’” (54); or M. Girard: “‘I went back upstream, as it were, back to the somewhat utopian thinking of the 1960s … we need something like cars that join together, trains that split apart’” (136); or M. Coquelot: “‘It’s a project from the culture of the Sixties, transporting people in a private Escape instead of in public conveyances… Now, obviously, we’re culturally out of phase…’” (155). In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism — which one often associates with an anti-technological stance, like the one Norbert attributes to Habermas on page 280 — in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour's technocratism, his own "love of technology," which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about. He's not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for. From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself. And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management. And while many of the explanations given by the actors are as good as any a sociologist could come up with, some are a lot less enlightened — e.g. M. Chalvan: “‘Cars belong to individuals; everyone looks out for them. But Aramis would have been collective property. The first time anything went wrong, people would have blown the whole thing up’” (71): a rare appearance of straight-up ideology in Latour’s work. [Cf. also "The Fear of Mob Rule" in "Do You Believe In Reality?"]
Which brings me to the second question, the question of autonomy. This is not a concept that I would normally associate with Latour, given that his network ontology seems to make the question of autonomy not even really worth asking: if everything — human and nonhuman — is constantly negotiating with everything else, as Irreductions would have us think, then in what sense could autonomy even matter? If human minds aren't privileged, if Kant was wrong, then autonomy is pretty much a non-issue, right? But Aramis proves to be (among many other things, of course) a sustained meditation on autonomy, although it gets in through the weird allegorical back door (or "hidden staircase," as Norbert likes to say) of the operation of the Aramis cars themselves.

From quite early on, we are encouraged to think of the Aramis system as akin to the networks that Latour, in his other work, sees everywhere: M. Soulas, president of the RATP, says: “‘It wasn’t a line like a subway, but more like a bloodstream: it was supposed to irrigate, like veins and arteries. Obviously the idea doesn’t make sense if the system becomes a linear circuit — that is, if it ceases to be a network’” (9). But one of the big questions becomes, how does one keep the elements circulating within this network from destroying one another other, or the passengers they carry? The enormous technological difficulties of programming the cars to be autonomous and ensuring that the system is fail-safe is one of the major challenges faced by the Aramis team: “‘The big challenge with Aramis is that the cars are autonomous; they don’t touch each other, yet they work together as if they were part of a train. They have nonmaterial couplings — nothing but calculations. So you can imagine how autonomous they are. Every car has to know who it is…’” (54) Everyone has to know who they are, and where others are; they don't touch each other, yet they work together as if they were part of a greater whole. This is the social, as Latour sees it, and autonomy turns out to be a more important concept for it than I had previously thought. In one of the book's wilder passages, he transposes this concern for autonomy into a theological register in another odd prosopopeia, a dialogue between a Catholic priest and someone named "Lamoureux" who compares the Aramis cars to Leibnizian monads: “…they’ll be connected by a vinculum substantiale. Nothing material will link them together to keep them on the right path. They’ll have to make independent decisions, check themselves, connect and disconnect, in conformity with the laws of the world system to be sure, but freely, without touching each other and without being the slaves of any automated mechanisms…’” (63-64)

But it isn't Latour alone imposing this anthropomorphic autonomy on Aramis: the actors themselves do it constantly as well. The social scientists who conduct a study of the project's public image conclude that “Aramis has to be perceived as the prelude to a new philosophy of transportation, addressed to responsible adults” (186). [One might argue that it's the autonomy of the riders that's in question here, but as in other areas of social life, one has to grant the autonomy of others — in this case, train cars — as well as maintaining and asserting one's own.] The engineers in charge of Phase 3B describe the fixed sectors of traditional guided-transportation systems as being “‘like a cop who takes away all the flexibility from trains and subways in exchange for a considerable margin of security'" and “‘MATRA comes up with a radical solution … It involves doing without the sacrosanct fixed sectors, in exchange for increased intelligence on the part of the cars’” (208, my emphasis). Maybe Latour owes more to la pensée '68 than we thought! The great social struggles of the (long) 60s, the quests for civil liberties and freedom from police surveillance and oppression, are recapitulated in the attempt to imagine a true transportation network, one that requires a radical — and perhaps impossible — degree of intelligence and autonomy on the part of its constituent actors.

I'll leave it here, having barely scratched the surface of this marvelous, hilarious, frustrating, unpredictable book. I welcome your thoughts, whether or not they're a direct response to what I've written here. Let's see if we can link up and act as a train.

Evil Twins

2009-11-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

(Note: I've added a conclusion).

I've been trying to find something like the anti-Latour lately, his arch-nemesis. There's good reason to believe it's Mike Davis.

That is, at least on the sort of public-intellectual level--where this bears on politics. We've already established the more scholarly anti-Latours: Foucault and (I'll add here) Carlo Ginzburg, Weber, maybe adding Jameson. But as these discussions tend to focus more on what results from method, though you've already brought this into the question of politics by talking about the despairing focus on "the system" and indeed the "conflict" view of history.

Here, however, I want to just focus on the bare-bones, flat-out, public-intellectual political statements (the whole incendiary work of the necessary condemnations, expressions of solidarity, warnings etc. etc.), of the nature of that closing remark in "Irreductions:"

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).

I want to contrast the sort of sentiment behind this remark (for it still remains too philosophical) with Davis' political statements in Ecology of Fear. Davis' position is, I think, laudable and somewhat similar to that of Latour's: he's focused on how the environmental community-action groups throughout Southern California have lost their focus by 1) splitting up and losing their allies in the pursuit of 2) holier-than-thou all-out ecological defense against the perversity of growth as such. What slips through this approach is the particularly Southern Californian urban growth-technique of sprawl, which overflows into nature so long as the development companies assure the people and the local governments (through a truly cynical process) that X acres of hillside--that is, the nice-looking but tract-housing-resistant parts of the land--will be "preserved" as "open-space" (the old attempt by business interests to secure the commons in 18th century England and 19th century Russia has now turned into its opposite: they now dole out free communal space in order to dissolve any commons). Sprawl takes these local battles and uses them against any larger anti-development movement, because the pro-environment people are always also against larger government intervention (who they see as providing worse-quality housing solutions)--they'd rather retain the populist position than actually oppose the forces involved.

This sort of impasse, Davis argues, has been resolved symbolically by imagining Los Angeles as a disaster-city. Always about to fall into the ocean, or burn up in flames, or be invaded by the Japanese (in WWII and after), LA and its environs is thought and managed as a site of the apocalypse: disaster, whether sprawl or nukes
(see the picture of a great sci-fi novel Davis references, and which I contrast to the Latour quote above), will have to come sometime--underneath the sheen there is the molten lava ready to erupt again out of La Brea, and there's no way to avoid this. Fatalism is dialed up and made into an aesthetic. Impasse is made only into the motion of tectonic plates.

Of course, on the more scholarly level, Davis' position here might also be that other Southern California resident's--namely that of Adorno. And so perhaps the opposite of Politics of Nature is really Minima Moralia. But I want to stick with Davis because he's more consciously Benjaminian or Simmel- or Ginzburg-like--that is, he digs up more and more bits of culture in order to do this, producing his little semi-convincing microhistories and registers of the symbolic. Here we return to the methodological level--which I think Adorno even in Minima Moralia can't quite duplicate, always pulled away from the particular as he is into the more abstract and principled level (thus he thinks all disaster really on the basis of one event--the Holocaust--and this in terms of an ultimate ethical injustice made concrete).

Regardless, everything reaches a climax in Davis' chapter on the Malibu fires. He here contrasts the handling of these fires--immense spending in order to save a few rich-people's homes, which are built basically as tinderboxes and placed in the most vulnerable locations--to the handling of inner city fires, which are actually (if not as frequent) much more damaging (in terms of lives, not property). The discrepancy is appalling. But Davis links this to that sort of fatalism: no one asks the state to come in and say people can't build their houses in the middle of chaparral on a hard-to-reach hill overlooking Zuma. People just give in and see it as destined to happen, because the politics are too complex.

Now, it's Davis' solution that seems absolutely anti-Latourian to me. For it isn't to analyze all the relationships and forces once more, and bring us back from this symbolic level to the actual impasses. It isn't to offer new strategies, however many political problems Davis isolates and however many recommendations Davis makes. It is, in a final chapter, to "move beyond Blade Runner," the arche-dystopia of LA, which, in the light of all this dispersed disaster, now looks a bit foolish. It isn't megacorporations that destroy LA, it is large corporations working in small but constant ways to make resistance weary, to grind it down in dispersed conflicts over land se, all the while working the politicians. The danger isn't that LA will become Bangkok, overcommercial and overindustrialized, but that Southern California as a whole will become Orange County--over-residential.

In short, the solution is to imagine a more accurate dystopian future. Latour would most definitely laugh at this: it's redolent of the scare-tactics of the Bush administration (terror level orange!), which really just were there to keep us complacent in the present. My point? Latour's remark about the nuke has to be taken against such a background, a background where the only solutions people have regarding the politics of nature (where weird sorts of eco-human relationships like the ozone hole proliferate) are dystopian or utopian (but only the latter in, again, a negative sense--and not many have the guts anymore even to think of these). It isn't a fatalism that characterizes this comment about a particular relationship of force--I think--but a need to provoke precisely a closer analysis that brings us back to the most immediate and non-symbolic problems. The problem, for Latour, is never going to be solved by linking the imagination to the present in the way Davis does: imagining a better dystopia doesn't do anything. It just expends energy in trying to attribute powers to forces, to say that impasses are due to groups with irreconcilable interests. As you have shown, Evan--this is the upshot of the emphasis on misunderstanding in Latour--people are always understanding each other in Latour. There's too much understanding, never too little.

So we don't need to go looking for all the bits of reality that show us, really, how the situation gives us a different dystopia than the one we really are imagining, in the way my parenthesis above argues for a linkage to the 18 Century battle over the commons. I meant that as a sort of illustration (maybe in a sort of Zizekian manner), but some might take it as a real causal attribution: what we're seeing on the hillsides of California just is the actual inverse of a process that happened earlier in the very same system or network. For Latour, this is as implausible as it is for me--who should really just be trying to give some thickness to the phenomenon in such gestures (Zizek- or Jameson- or Sartre-like). But such attribution makes up most of Davis' book. Davis = point out new symbolic locations to find violence that is political, to solidify the connection between politics and the symbolic; posit solutions that are better linkages between those two levels. Latour = follow networks to produce analyses of real locations, pare down the amount of symbols on the presupposition that everything is from the start political and so doesn't need my "revealing" of it as political to be, indeed, political. Visibility then becomes freed from this hermeneutic revealing--and we rethink what all the traditional political rhetoric of openness, of things being in plain sight, can now actually mean.

I'll conclude things here, with a question that really all this opens up: Doesn't this really provide a new, and better, critique of the Cultural Studies-type enterprise, of which the urban studies sort of extension (as if interpretive schools were little phone-lines and we can stand at the switchboard, linking them all or disconnecting them at whim) is the basis of the more sophisticated aspects of Davis' work? At recent conferences, we've seen the critique put in terms of Jonathan Culler's new book, The Literary in Theory: namely, that such multiplication of interpretation forgets the objects that we should be actually interpreting. It's intriguing that this theoretical problem then gets read on to Cultural Studies, as if it were just another symptom of the fate of High Theory--a classic de Manian move of which we should be extremely suspect (since theory only seems to expand in force when, as I've said before, it is a quite limited and frail adventure). Latour offers us a way out: it's all multiplication of interpretation that is the problem--insofar as this happens where there isn't a network. The Davis project is at fault not only because it involves "the comfortable old pursuits of image-counting and thematics" (Jameson, speaking not of this school of criticism but of all criticism in 1979, though I find it as relevant today--"Modernism and Its Repressed"), but also because these methodological failures are indeed comfortable and old. Interpretation doesn't do anything new, doesn't give us any new connections, when it tries to simply multiply them before checking whether they are real or not. Or rather, by multiplying them precisely to show that all the problems can lie on an ideological level, comfortably welded to an infrastructure that will change with the changes in representations. Latour isn't against imagining new aesthetics--that's clear. He's just against the sort of co-optation of that artistic function by critics, which makes the latter think that if we imagine better dystopias, we're actually getting somewhere. One could say he posits an absolute difference between the aesthetic and critical act, restoring to the former its creative function, and lancing off any of its sort of negative valences that come from the out-of-steam latter. He might then have little to say about satires (unless by the scope of their vision they give us interesting new networks--perhaps Swift then falls in there, or the satiric aspects of More). However, he certainly has a lot more to say about why literature and art doesn't have to merely represent or symptomatize some sort of imaginary in order to be effective.

The virtue of networks

2009-11-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

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...