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.

Beneath contempt, beyond critique: Bourdieu on Latour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agents —> Actors: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creature of habitus: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Phenomenology of Reading Latour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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