Latour-Wissenschaft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Producing philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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