It is a boring but great book

‘’(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

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.

On the active voice in philosophy

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.

macro-physics! - Latour and plasma

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.

Some first thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Latour and Utopia: A Response

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.

The virtue of networks

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

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

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

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

It seems to me that the black box has great possibilities for historicist work. Because it does away, once and for all, with the “archaeological” metaphors that Foucault et al. espouse. The working assumption, for the New Historicists (and also, I think, Jameson), is always that the actors knew more — even if only unconsciously — than we do; and in order to understand them, we need to reconstruct that knowledge. So we’re always playing catch-up; and this is part of why it’s so easy to criticize, even dismiss, historicist work: well, if you just knew a bit more about X then your interpretation would be better. Your failure to take Y into account invalidates your whole argument. You don’t seem to have realized that Z is a condition of everything you say.

But we can say, with Latour: yes, the actors knew lots of things we didn’t, consciously or unconsciously; but much of what they knew took the form of black boxes which they never thought, or perhaps were unable, to open.

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

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

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

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

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

I said something about Heidegger...

...in the last post: namely that, if we take Latour's statement in We Have Never Been Modern about how "it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting" (WHNBM 76; Latour's emphasis), we might think time gets spatialized, and this would mean some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour would be overlooked. Now, these commonalities weren't necessarily in terms of an interpretation of time as nonspatialized, either. It is clear that while Heidegger holds something like this (crudely put, spatiality has its "end" in time--though we should also point out that time ultimately has its "end" in the destining of being, though Heidegger, rightly, would not see in this history any return to spacing... enter Derrida) because Latour holds that time and space are mere "frameworks" we use to describe the relations of force between actants (as I made clear last time, but here's just another quote to remind you: "If time depends on associations, associations don't depend on time," 141), it can't be on the issue of any "interpretation of time" that they might agree.

So what's the commonality? A commitment to subordinating time ultimately to something like practice--seeing time generated practically or through the practical. Now, I don't mean to say something stupid like, for Heidegger, time is a result of Dasein's projections, etc. This should be clear from my parenthesis above (time is historical). By "practical," I mean something different--namely that the emphasis falls on how it is always more like a framework than a form. So while the two systems are distinguished clearly--roughly we can say something like Heidegger takes time to be real and Latour doesn't (he takes trials of strength as real)--nevertheless both want to undo time as representable and make it into something like the contours of any and all action. (John Protevi in his Political Physics has a compelling chapter on this--"Philosophy and Leisure"--ultimately dealing with how philosophy has to be a difficult activity for Heidegger... and of course not just for Heidegger).

In other words, the similarity is in the sort of meta-level (that is, on the edge of the concepts and the systems, which are indeed formally incompatible on the issue of time) "critique of representation" (as Jameson aptly calls it--and we'll get more on this as he is supposedly writing a book on Heidegger) that I mentioned in the last post:

Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces).

I'm now just trying to say how this is indeed "less temporal"--in terms of time as representable unrepresentable, or form (Kant, of course)--but also "more temporal" than we might think--in that we find the position of Latour being similar to the position of Heidegger when it comes to de-representing time, among other things... that is, by bringing a practical emphasis--only most visible in Heidegger's privileging of phronesis over sophia--to bear on their conceptions.

I'll be clearer. I'm saying that on the issue of time, we can see a meta-level tendency to claim the following in both Latour and Heidegger:

There are not two problems of representation, just one (WHNBM, 143).

And this is because representation is dependent (if I can put it way too simply) on what reality does, rather than what it is--such that what it does is what it is. This might sound odd if one has a superficial understanding of Heidegger as "the thinker of being," but really it is only through the emphasis on doing that Heidegger recovers that question of is-ing (and this is what makes what he does something other than ontology as it has always been done). Now, if reality is, on the other hand, simply what it is, it becomes able to be represented (grasped) in two ways, not one: first, reality is delegated (the discussion of the figural and non-figural in "Where are the Missing Masses," is a great concrete discussion of this, anticipating for us various concerns of Aramis, though I'm obviously saying it underlies everything that Latour is getting at--and we've already talked about it at length in discussions of "translation"), and then reality is doubled over (as it were), folded to produce something other than delegation--something that indeed defines itself as non-delegation, an image or a non-reality (representation in another sense). This is why we can look inside the book (for characters) and outside it (at its "material conditions of production"--history of the book stuff): though Latour in his own readings (of the excellent Rick Powers) will emphasize the first, he is able to go "outside" the text with ease and in such a way that we could imagine him also looking at the production of the book "object" in the same way.

However, we might also look to WHNBM's concern with a "Constitution" as the main site of such a "critique of representation," for Latour uses the term precisely to stress the "delegating" aspect of representation. Latour is saying that a Constitution's purpose is to guarantee representation ("a constitution is judged by the guarantees it offers," 139) or allow delegation. But the Modern Constitution precisely sought to represent in such a way that it produced representation in another sense than delegation, so as to draw a line between what could be represented and what could not. He says the aim of the book is to allow amend this Constitution to allow the representation of things. But this undoes the second sense of representation, because no longer do questions of representation--qua what can be represented and what cannot, or representation in explicit opposition to representation qua delegation--have to come up: everything is delegated. Reality is a series of tubes--I mean, networks. No doubling over, no folding, no surfaces:

Technological networks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way. The work of relative universalization remains an easy-to-grasp category that relationism can follow in a thoroughgoing way. Every branching, every alignment, every connection can be documented, since it generates tracers, and every one of them has a cost. It can be extended almost everywhere; it can be spread out in time as well as in space, yet without filling time and space (118, my emphasis).

There is no filling because we only have one problem of representation, not two. This is why delegation is really only transcendence that lacks a contrary: "I call this transcendence that lacks a contrary 'delegation'" (129).

I hope I've outlined the connection between Heidegger and Latour, then. For me, the sort of Heideggerian commonality is most apparent in thinking of science in action, which is of course all over Latour. I just wanted to bring this out in what appears to be the most abstract part of the work--time--though it's present right there in the title (we have never been). The sort of closing off of old theories, which I talked about in the last post, lends to scientific knowledge a way of developing that is practical, that turns it into an activity--and of course opposes any sort of Popperian logic.

I'm also connecting things to my earlier posts that resisted taking Latour as a sociologist. For while sociology has a lot to do with this sort of "praxis, not theory" emphasis, if we see Latour's "Heideggerian" preference for the practical producing his critique of representation, then one way of putting my objections or qualifications to the post of yours on "Translation--or How Everybody Wins" was that perhaps Latour is a crappy sociologist. In other words, I'm just trying to defend sociology here. To that end, it was absolutely correct to see in Pasteurization the most sustained engagement with human actors in Latour's career, perhaps, and therefore the most strictly sociological part of his work. But still, while he's got an analysis of "how everybody wins," aren't there better, more sophisticated sociological accounts of that same phenomenon precisely because there we have, indeed, some knowledge of what is going on? That is, less of a stress on practice (isn't the "sense that everybody wins" less practical than Latour's sense of it)? In other words, might we not have a better understanding of such group dynamics in sociology because Latour is more interested in making that "everybody" include all the practical actors (microbes too!), more than in actually outlining the dynamics of this particular phenomenon--where everyone can get what they want, even if they misunderstand each other? In other words, it's your genius to see how this strictly sociological notion was at work in Latour. But I'm saying that precisely means there has got to be a more accurate account within sociology--one that wouldn't be so focused on objects, yes, but would be able to analyze more various human groups (consider this the elaboration of my point about "small groups" in Latour). Latour would see in this precisely a purification--it is his insight to see that this "variability" I'm attributing to the sociological analysis is actually only hardening the divisions that really need to be dissolved (between humans and things).

Which means, fundamentally, I'm skeptical about Latour's claim that we can just extract certain things from the modern Constitution, and get rid of the rest with little loss (Latour, rightly, would never say that this would happen completely without loss). Latour, I think, is absolutely right to want to cut across so many existing boundaries, and his ability to do so really makes his remarks persuasive. But doesn't there have to be a point at which we sacrifice accurate analysis brought about by specialization for something less accurate but more relevant? Latour would undoubtedly say yes--and then bolster this claim by saying basically we try to be relevant all the time without being accurate at all. Science is really and truly experimental before it is accurate--thus, why not experiment some more? This will make Alan Turing his hero in the "Critique" essay, and I like that. But I wonder whether, ultimately, we can't do things differently. Indeed, can't we envision a form of accurate analysis, brought about even by specialization, that is indeed moving in a better direction? If this sounds too Popperian, I apologize. But doesn't Latour's claim cash in on 1) an antimodern or postmodern critique of specialization (though Latour is perhaps the only person--besides Bourdieu--to enjoin us to really follow bureaucratic compartmentalization rather than dismiss it) and 2) a sense that scientific practice is no different than practical activity--as I explained above. No doubt, Latour would claim that this would be true, if the world itself wasn't one in which a person in a lab could actually alter something way across the globe (by curing a disease, say), in which micro-actors knock down or infinitely empower macro-actors. But... what if the world really wasn't that way?

I'm not saying that so much out of belief that the world isn't precisely that one which Latour sees in his newspaper at the beginning of the book. I'm just forced into this sort of position--which renders things pretty moot--because of the immensity of the structure of Latour's argument. I would say that this is, for me, the only real massive argument against him in this book, and is what makes his other works much more suggestive and much more helpful for me: here, either you get on the same page with him, or you act in your own way, which he claims is also amenable to his project. This certainly marks the triumph of a way of arguing that only seeks to add reality (which is good!), but it most definitely means the death of any sense that there may be more and less viable methods and procedures, or differing ways of getting at something (which may be bad).

Maybe I can put this differently by saying that Latour isn't satisfied if he just convinces us that he has a better description of the way things work. For we might actually be willing to grant, even from within sociology, say, that his analysis is better or more full than the sociological one if it described things more accurately. That is, we might willingly dissolve even our knowledge if we were convinced that he had a better grasp on things--that is, in such a situation where there has to be some sacrifice of "accuracy" for "relevance:" if relevance is in the end more accurate than accuracy, doesn't it make sense to switch sides? But I'm not sure Latour wants that. He wants to transform what knowledge we have into something different, which presupposes not even the relevancy of his case but something else--a notion that being modern has always been being nonmodern. It is in this deep sense--that we have to not only see things in the right way but do them in the right way, that I've been trying to align with Heidegger: it is this that makes the Heideggerian approach (and the Derridian deconstruction) so impoverished when it comes to issues of method, since the issue is always, above seeing things the right way (phenomenology itself) doing them. And it is this that is really involved in the critique of representation, and constitutes that sort of immanence that Jameson critiques in postmodern thinkers, and that Latour tries to combat head on, as it were--by making delegation precisely transcendence, and insisting that we follow them, step by step, "locally" despite their local-global character--but (in my view) can't quite overcome. I might say, anticipating Latour's remarks on critique to which we will soon turn ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"), that perhaps this is what happens when arguments (see the whole beginning of Science in Action on rhetoric) are seen first as acts, as pure persuasion (no representation qua depiction, figuration, fiction), and ultimately as things that stage a Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung or polemic (in the sense of polemos--the stress on war as you first brought up in the "Translation" post), and then turned around and said to be absolutely non-polemical, anti-polemical, weaknesses. But that's another issue (though it bears on there being no real represented "inside" to something like Galatea 2.2 or The Echo Maker--though that is, of course, an issue these novels themselves interrogate [especially the first], which is why Latour likes them so much).

I'll conclude, though, by saying that perhaps this does lean too hard on the notion that at some point, in amending our Constitution, we have to sacrifice accuracy. This comes too close, of course, to saying that Latour is anti-science, when his position gains its strength from precisely it's pro-scientific-(but anti-science? how to describe that)-realism. I'd say that it is in this sense that we can say the network notion of reality is better than the notion of Heidegger--though not because Heidegger isn't a realist (it will be Harman's contention that he is precisely this), and not because (despite popular opinion) Heidegger is flat out anti-science (it's more complicated than this). There's another post waiting here, going back to the (to me, compelling) advantages of the technological network enumerated in the Latour quote above, but I need to gather my thoughts in order to articulate it.

"A slimming treatment:" time in WHNBM

At the end of my last post I brought up small groups, and said that Latour, at least in the early work, seemed to privilege them:

Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab?

This is actually a bit unfair, as it is put--and I'll try and correct things below. Nevertheless, I see We Have Never Been Modern as Latour's great effort to try and undo such a privilege.

How? In Latour's earlier work the lab was that sort of lens in which the the world is inverted. There, forces which shaped man were allowed to proliferate. This very process of proliferation then produce new shapes (if I can use that wonderful term from "Irreductions"), some of which the scientist allowed (though this implies no domination by any abstract powers) further proliferation. At a certain point, people got it in their heads that there was no scaling going on--that all these relations of force and the generation of shapes didn't exist, and what one was getting in this operation was the truth of something humans had never really approached in the first place, never manipulated over and over, that was never just the large made small.

Now, the lens will be a certain arrangement of this nature-culture which he calls modernity, and that process of scaling the construction of a Great Divide according to the articles of a modern Constitution. All of which makes sense: Latour is generalizing his conclusions even beyond the philosophical generalizations that, in "Irreductions," were still either products of field work or philosophical and personal insight (remember the first "pseudoautobiographical" interlude in "Irreductions" where Latour pulls over his car and sees the sky, and chants the three basic theses of that text: "Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else."). In other words, he is trying to articulate his viewpoint on the widest empirical grounds (something that is not philosophically possible, and so could not be done in "Irreductions"), so that they no longer have to take their authority from where they originated.

So it is surprising to see the title of the essay deny something that we basically took to be a fact: that we have been modern. Nevertheless, if one understands what Latour is getting at, particularly with respect to time, such a statement makes perfect sense.

Indeed, everything involves knowing that time, for Latour, is merely "the distant consequences of actors" ("Irreductions," 1.2.5.1; 165), or thus a result of the state of the relations of forces between actors:

"Time does not pass. Times are what are at stake between forces" (165; 1.2.5.2).

Or, as he says in We Have Never Been Modern itself:

We have never moved either forward or backward. We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting (76--Latour's emphasis).

It'd be a huge mistake to think that this means time is spatialized for Latour: some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour (which we will point out soon) would be thereby erased. However, I could understand the temptation. If, as Latour says, "the connections among beings alone make time" (77), aren't these connections being made in a particular place, and thus a space? Some of Latour's statements come close to saying precisely this:

In other words, everything happens only once, and at one place ("Irreductions," 1.2.1; 162).

But what this means is only that space, like time, is dependent upon what an actant does:

We do not know where an actant is to be found. The definition of its location is a primordial struggle, during which many get lost. We can only say that some locate and others are located (1.2.3.1; 164).

Thus:

Space and time do not frame entelechies. They only become frameworks of description for those actants that have submitted, locally and provisionally, to the hegemony of another (1.2.6;165).

How, then, have we ended up thinking that something just comes before another? Time is being-shaped-by-a-force, as is clear from these quotes. Thus, a particular force, arranging things in vast amounts, would have to impose upon us the framework of the irreversibility of time, since if time is only the result of what actants do, or if "each entitity is an event" (WHNBM, 81), then (or therefore) "time becomes reversible" (73). Such a reversible time is actually quite easy to think, provided that we pay attention to what actants do and see in them the creation of what Latour calls hybrids or the proliferation of quasi-objects:

I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years (75).

So whence this irreversibility?

The notion of an irreversible arrow--progress or decadence--stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain. Irreversibility in the course of time is itself due to the transcendence of the sciences and technologies. [...] It is a classificatory device for dissimulating the inadmissible origin of the natural and social entities from the work of mediation. [...] Just as they eliminate the ins and outs of all the hybrids, so the moderns interpret the heterogenous rearrangements as systematic totalities in which everything would hold together. Modernizing progress is thinkable only on the condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow, of which the moderns declare themselves the avant-garde and the antimoderns the rearguard while the premoderns are left on the sidline of complete stagnation (73).

In other words, modernism (or modernity) is the result of progress being imposed upon us, which is merely a result of that systematic exclusion of hybrids (here, the hybridization of reversible time, where each "instant" can be next to any other in the way that my genes can be right next to the drill in my hand) that so much of what the book details:

Modernism--like its anti-and post-modern correlaries--was only the provisional result of a selection made by a small number of agents in the name of all (76).

Or, to put it in the terms of "Irreductions" (which I find clearer), the creation of power out of force (through the extension of a network, i.e. by only expanding force, but thereby representing actors). At this point, it should be clear what Latour means by his title, and why he says it: We have never been modern because the relations of force have never produced progress or irreversibility. It's only because we've allowed power to come into the picture (and thus allowed actors to represent others in more than one sense) that we think we are modern (Latour can largely be summed up by the following phrase: "There are not two problems of representation, just one," 143).

I have dwelt on this, however, not only because I want to explain the title. I also think that it is this resistance to the notion of progress that keeps asserting itself, subtly, throughout the book's attempt to account for modernity's production of and disavowal of quasi-objects by separating purification and mediation. Of course--to recap--this production and disavowal takes place because, Latour claims, moderns (or those who think themselves modern) don't see the work of purification as a particular case of mediation--the core argument of the book, I think. This means that moderns adhere to that Constitution which I have already mentioned, or see nature as distinct from culture and proceed to put acts that alter nature on one side of the "Great Divide" and acts that alter society on the other. They don't see that this separation is really only another way of linking nature and culture, or, better, creating more networks of natures-cultures, mediating or translating or passing forces (take your pick among these metaphors). In short, attributing something to a power, keeping the world divided up between culture and nature, rather than trying to look for hybrids, or those things that already are moving between nature and culture (Boyle's air-pump)--this is only allowing us to produce more quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects). If we want to more accurately alter this production, purification should be practiced as what it is---a case of this mediation.

But, back to progress and time. What Latour allows us to think is not only how various hybrids get overlooked--how we don't end up researching Boyle's pump but "classes" and "gentrification" and "extroversion" instead--but also how we confuse the history of science with history ("the history of science should not be confused with history," he says, 93). By this I mean the sort of separation that is created not just between true and false science but a very common practice that is included in this wide-ranging distinction. I mean the sort of division--and Latour acknowledges this throughout his discussion of the symmetrical asymmetries in the chapter on relativism, and, as I'm arguing, implicitly throughout the book--between something like working theories and closed theories. This, of course, goes back to his discussions of the black box in Science in Action. But now everything is shot through with very sophisticated notions of temporality, and a massive argument trying to base things precisely on all practices, not just scientific ones--and so we see how modernity itself involves this black-boxing. For at stake is not just an individual theory, but whole "paradigms," or "epistemes," or (even more precisely), "structures of feeling" (all these notions being similar). In other words, the notion rejected here is not that science works with facts, but that there are epistemological breaks, total changes in perspectives that close off not just outdated series of facts, but whole sets of "knowledge"-producing outlooks and techniques--all in the name of progress (Latour says throughout the book that the one thing modernity can't be is outdated: as we see above, it has to be avant-garde).

This gets discussed perhaps most openly in the beginning of the reconsideration of anthropology in the chapter on relativism, where Latour supplements David Bloor's principle of symmetry. Latour is recalling, in the following quote, the principle's advantages, but importantly--for us--starts by paraphrasing Canguilhem:

Only what breaks for ever with ideology is [for Canguilhem] scientific. It is difficult indeed to pursue the ins and outs of quasi-objects while following such a principle. Once they have passed into the hands of such epistemologists, they will be pulled out by the roots. Objects alone will remain, excised from the entire network that gave them meaning. [...] For such epistemologists, "Whiggish" history is not a mistake to be overcome but a duty to be carried out with the utmost rigor. The history of science should not be confused with history. The false is what makes the true stand out. What Racine did for the Sun King under the lofty name of the historian, Canguilhem does for Darwin under the equally usurped label of historian of science.

The principle of symmetry, on the contrary, reestablished historicity, and--we might as well say it--elementary justice. David Bloor is Canguilhem's opposite number, just as Serres is Bachelard's. "The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth," writes the latter as he breaks with epistemology. [...] For Serres, as for actual historians of science, Diderot, Darwin, Malthus and Spencer have to be explained according to the same principles and the same causes; if you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes. [...] If you claim to debunk parapsychology, can you use the same factors for psychology? [...] If you analyze Pasteur's successes, do the same terms allow you to account for his failures? (93).

Now, let's keep this in our heads, and quickly recall that in my last post, I had something to say about your statement in your post on macro- and micro- actors that for Latour,

the macro-actor is only a network of "devious" micro-actors, and that they are in many ways simpler and easier to study than micro-actors.

There was a general suspicion on my part of the emphasis on the micro- and the local. I might here correcting one mistake that I made in this characterization: I didn't emphasize that this emphasis on the local is what I found odd, not the local itself, since Latour himself doesn't think that anything is either strictly local or strictly global (I forgot whole sections of WHNBM that critiques this notion: see p. 4.9-4.12). In other words, I find odd the way the word local gets used even after Latour's critique of the local/global is registered (see the use of "locally and provisionally" in "Irreductions" 1.2.6 above). Now, recalling all this (and stating it all again more accurately), let's also recall that despite all this, taking your statement in these large terms, I emphatically agreed that

it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler.

Now, given these remarks about the principle of symmetry, and the general effort to reject any sort of notion of epistemological break, with all of Latour's notions about time still in mind--I think I can elaborate on how another form of simplicity is generated by the Latourian analysis.

For Latour continues, after he asks about those errors of Pasteur that he documented so well:

Above all, the first principle of symmetry proposes a slimming treatment for the explanations of errors. It had become so easy to account for deviation! Society, beliefs, ideology, symbols, the unconscious, madness--everything was so readily available that explanations were becoming obese. But truths? When we lost our facile recourse to epistemological breaks, we soon realized, we who study the sciences, that most of our explanations were not much. Asymmetry organized them all, and simply added insult to injury. Everything changes if the staunch discipline of the principle of symmetry forces us to retain only the causes that could serve both truth and falsehood, belief and knowledge, science and parascience. Those who had weighed the winners with one scale and the losers with another, while shouting "vae victis!" (woe to the vanquished), like Brennus, made discrepancy incomprehensible until now. When the balance of symmetry is reestablished with precision, the discrepancy that allows us to understand why some win and others lose stands out all the more sharply (93-4).

Of course, Latour will go on to complicate this--he calls for another principle of symmetry to go beyond the first (and not only explain truth and falsehood in social terms, but in natural-social terms). But I'm generally saying the sort of critique of modern temporality is here in ovum, and indeed cuts through the ways that modernity is able to multiply explanations rather than simplify them.

For what happens is that all those black boxes come undone, as I said above. All of time becomes reversible, and there are no longer theories that get more concrete and "settled" because they are "historical" than newer or more "open" ones (since what is new is not always open). In short, Latour is solving the huge dillema of historicism that characterizes so much humanities research which bases itself on a scientific model. If I want to write about the 18th century (and I do), I surely can't talk about sentiment as if it still had some relevance. And if I did, it'd be awkward. Theory (in literary studies) has largely been the way out of this problem, by getting behind this awkwardness (and fetishizing it as "crisis"--cf. de Man): I can make an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it. It is this that I think people are talking about when they confusedly call theory "ahistorical." Nevertheless, theory is only taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences--or so I imagine Latour saying. Regardless, it is allowing the "opening" of "settled" knowledge precisely by grounding ever more thoroughly the notion that there are "open" and "settled" knowledges.

This we can see by the other historicists doing the same thing (as you nicely described in your "New Historicism" post), but by multiplying their explanations as to why the "settled" knowledge became settled.

What I'm trying to show is that both procedures are done away with if we stop that sort of black-boxing which is the modern look at temporality: instead of looking for ideology (Feyerabend looks perhaps the most foolish from a Latourian point of view), or really trying to either settle or open the knowledge, we slim down things by making time reversible, or stop seeing time as some process of accumulating--anything at all (here, knowledge or error).

Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces). This means, then, that we have to see our networks as made of collectives, not just as nature on the one hand and society on the other.

The resulting simplification is then huge: if we admit that purification is mediation, instead of critiquing endlessly (and Latour ends the book by saying that it is in the interest of critique simply to keep going, never amending the Constitution), we will find simpler connections between actors--for they will no longer appear as powers, but in all sorts of hybrids right in front of our faces. I've tried to show, however, the less visible and perhaps more complicated way in which this also involves historical actors, supplementing your post on New Historicism, which rightly stressed the production of new historical actors--here I just try to show when they then are... which is not in any modern time.

On the issue of groups, and doing more justice to Latour on this issue--I've done a bit here to correct that but I'll come back to it more directly (via Heidegger, who I didn't get to here) in another post... I fear this general presentation of WHNBM has gone on too long!