Updates and plasma

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

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

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

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...

...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

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

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!