Meillassoux’s Motivation and the Pure Space of Speculation

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

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

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

Where does Meillassoux stand?

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

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

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

Hold me closer, tiny actor

You have indeed brought us to new territory, and in good Latourian fashion, by translating my little methodological concerns about how Latour relates to the rest of sociology into a much more interesting discussion about how Latour himself thinks. I really like your final formulation: "Bruno Latour is the thinker of scale: it's what makes him always on the edge of the qualitative and the qualitative … and also … able to pay minute attention to the long connections of processes that allow them to pass into each other." Everything that follows might be thought of as a gloss on that remark.

First of all, let me say that I understand better now what you were getting at by questioning my interest in interests. What you're intrigued by, if I understand you correctly, is that for Latour, interests are not just human/social — he rejects the sociological/scientistic vision that separates off our petty human manueverings, "the dynamics of social groups" as you put it, from what is really happening in nature. If everything has interests, in other words, then interest is no longer an anthropocentric concept: but there's still good reason to retain it, because it gets at how everything can interact, be associated or dissociated with each other. I think Latour can seem like a strange bedfellow for anti-correlationist philosophers like Meillassoux, because one of the immediately striking things about him is that he's always talking about things as if they were human: like he never gave up the animistic universe that supposedly got exterminated during the "disenchantment of the world." But Latour does this, I think you're implying, not to assert the primacy of the human but rather to assert the primacy of the social (which includes nonhumans) over the philosophical: as you put it so excellently in discussing BL's relationship to Derrida, "Latour is saying that nothing is singular (irreducible) because it always needs others … [T]he misunderstanding comes in to affirm the fact that a thing needs others."

So we come to measurement. Again, it could be confusing that Latour is so interested in this, because it seems like such a fundamentally human concept: only humans measure things. (Probably there are anthropologists out there who argue that chimpanzees or something have systems of measurement, but you know what I mean: strict, formalized measurements, the kind that requires counting and standardized tools.) But as with "translation," he wants to take "measurement" out of the realm of the human and turn it into an ontological principle, a way that objects relate to one another, and in fact even "need" each other (because one can't act without a sense of how big or small one is). This is the metaphysical part of Latour's project (which he and Harman have both called "empirical metaphysics"); the "empirical" part comes from his attention to the ways humans — and here he's a conventional sociologist — actually do scale and measure, which he sees as dependent on a prior measurement or adequation, and thus questionable. I hope what I'm saying will become clearer as you continue reading this post.
For Latour, interests arise out of actors measuring themselves against one another, scaling each other up or down. Here's how he puts it in Irreductions 1.3.1:

All entelechies may measure and be the measure of other entelechies … Nevertheless, certain forces constantly try to measure rather than be measured and to translate rather than be translated. They wish to act rather than be acted upon. They wish to be stronger than others.

I have said ‘certain’ rather than ‘all’ as in Nietzsche’s bellicose myth. Most actants are too far apart or too indifferent to rise to the challenge, too undisciplined or devious to follow for long those that speak in their name, and too happy and proud to take command of others. In this work I speak only of those weaknesses that want to increase their strength. The irreducible others have need of poets rather than philosophers. (167)

We can see that Latour is skittish about coming too close to Nietzsche's "will to power" here (and I notice that you also contrasted him with Nietzsche; care to elaborate on that?). Again, while we get this weirdly anthropocentric language ("they wish to act," "indifferent," "undisciplined," "devious," "happy," "proud"), what Latour is trying to say, I think, is that "will" is just one way of looking at what entelechies do. In fact, for Latour, only certain kinds of entelechies — scientific networks being, of course, the prime instance — possess this "will" to "measure rather than be measured" and "act rather than be acted upon." So this seemingly anthropocentric move, giving characters and physiognomies to nonhuman actants, works against another, more common anthropocentric move (associated with Nietzsche), of psychologizing the natural so that it has a "will to power" and a desire to destroy. (I have to say though, I don't know about Latour's chivalrous offer of the irreducible, strength-indifferent entities to the "poets": seems to me poets are as bellicose and power-willing as anyone. Cf. Harold Bloom, for starters.)
This brings us back to sociology, and the micro-macro issue you asked about, because there is another type of entelechy, besides science, that Latour sees as wanting to dominate and measure everything else, and that is what are sometimes referred to in sociology as "macro-actors": institutions, corporations, governments, etc. Contrary to your flattering assumption, I don't actually have a particularly good handle on the micro-macro question: I know it was a major disciplinary concern in the eighties, because sociologists of different traditions were worried that they couldn't even talk to each other, let alone synthesize their findings into some sort of grand synoptic picture of the social world. (Jeffrey Alexander et al's The Micro-Macro Link, published in 1987, would be the locus classicus for this debate, I believe.) As for whether "whether Latour indeed addresses it," he does so explicitly in a 1981 article coauthored by Michel Callon called "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them To Do So." There, he and Callon make an impassioned argument for a single methodology to describe micro- and macro-actors (which, they insist, should not be used synonymously with "individuals" and "institutions"). "Too often sociologists — just like politicians or the man in the street — change their framework of analysis depending on whether they are tackling a macro-actor or a micro-actor," Latour and Callon say. "…[N]o sociologists at present examine macro-actors and micro-actors using the same tools and the same arguments." In effect, they are reconceiving the micro-macro problem as a problem of measurement: it's not that there are different "levels" which demand different modes of analysis (as in physics), but that we need common "tools" and "arguments" in order to be able to pass from one kind of actor to another. And for these authors, the consequences of the assumption that there really are different levels of society in need of explanation are grievous:

It seems to us that sociologists are too often on the wrong foot. Either, believing that macro-actors really do exist, they anticipate the actors' strength by helping them to grow more vigorous [here, I believe, he's referring to Marxian, Weberian, and other "big systems" analysis]. Or else they deny their existence, once they really do exist, and will not even allow us the right to study them [referring to ethnomethodologists and symbolic interactionists]. These two alternate but symmetrical errors stem from the same presupposition: the acceptance as a given fact that actors can be of different or of equal size. As soon as we reject this presupposition, we are once again faced with Hobbes' paradox: no actor is bigger than another except by means of a transaction (a translation) which must be examined. (280-281)

For Latour and Callon, macro-actors are not at all things of an entirely different kind or size or even complexity than micro-actors: they are, rather, "micro-actors seated on top of many (leaky) black boxes" (286). In other words, they have made many assumptions and simplifications in order to attain dominance, and these can always be challenged. (They go on to illustrate this with a bravura, though rather depressing, example of how Renault undermined Electricity of France in the early 70s to keep them from developing a viable electric car.) The point is important methodologically but also politically, because it keeps us away from the despairing feeling (which Latour associates elsewhere — cf. Irreductions 1.4.6, 2.1.10, and Interlude VI — with Hegelianism and Marxism, and which I must admit I myself associate with Fredric Jameson) that there are vast systems and structures and forces of which we ourselves are only a tiny part: in other words, that there is a macro to our micro. But Callon and Latour are very emphatic here that the macro-actor is only a network of "devious" micro-actors, and that they are in many ways simpler and easier to study than micro-actors. In one of the most charming descriptions of technological modernity I've ever read, the authors state: "A tiny actor becomes a macro-actor, just like in the French nursery rhyme: 'The cat knocks over the pot, the pot knocks over the table, the table knocks over the room, the room knocks over the house, the house knocks over the street, the street knocks over Paris: Paris, Paris, Paris has fallen!'" (296). This rhyme is particularly apropos because, for Callon and Latour, it is the sociologist's role to step in early and say, "Wait a minute, how does a table knock over a room?" — thus arresting the whole process, or at least redirecting it.
I'm going to try to sum up, because this is getting too long. Entelechies can only scale each other up or down by enlisting an incredible number of micro-actors — and ANT seeks to follow these enlistments in order to question, and thus adjust, the scales. It's in this way that measurement is, for Latour, both an ontological fact — as he says in the passage you adduced last time: "What is neither reducible nor irreducible has to be tested, counted, and measured. There is no other way" (1.1.3) — and a revisable human practice.