The Dissenter

I had actually forgotten about the incident of the Professor and his dissenter in the crucial pages on trials of strength in Science in Action. I was happy to see Harman reconstruct it (interestingly, Harman capitalizes "dissenter," perhaps to make it a more interesting fight between him and the Professor--unless in the French it is capitalized--while Latour refers to him alternately as "the dissenter" and provocatively as "his dissenter"--meaning the Professor's). He does so for two reasons. First, he wants to give us some flavor of Latour, which is, indeed, something that is hard to convey without ending up sounding like you are describing yet another "French intellectual" (and perhaps Bourdieu's analysis conveys this, in a different way--I'd have to look at it). Harman does this throughout the book by pointing to his "wit," but he here accomplishes it, interestingly, by saying that, in these pages, Latour is not at all "boring" (PoN, 43). The more I think about it, this is a fascinating way to categorize philosophical work, and we use it probably more than we think (you'll remember, Paul, you and I recently agreed the first volume of Being and Event is a bit boring, and I'm increasingly interested in what we agreed about). But Latour isn't just entertaining or not boring: in fact, "there have always been too many boring philosophers, and we are fortunate that Latour is not among them" (43, my italics). That's even more fascinating, if we give this judgment the weight I want to give it (we don't have to bring in Heidegger's extensive--and a bit boring, now that I think about it--analysis of boredom, but it couldn't hurt). Then again, it could be just a matter of personal taste: I assume from his remarks in Guerrilla Metaphysics about Derrida (to the effect of "this isn't a good way to write and moreover I don't get why people salivate over this overwrought language"--the latter being a sentiment I share) that Harman thinks much of recent continental philosophy too could have been much more entertaining than it actually is and was, and, well, I'm betting that puts him in a small group (when so many seem to move towards it because they see this boring stuff as the incarnation of energetic, entertaining philosophy). Then again, he could be referring to lots of Anglo- philosophy, which he criticizes for its repetitiveness later in the book (I'll look at that when we get there). Here too though this sentiment or preference seems to animate Harman's work and even his positions (philosophy has this wonderful way of being author-centered, such that even personal opinions can seem to perform the philosophy if they are taken seriously enough--something Harman himself is attuned to if we look at his presentation of Latour's background early in PoN and his emphasis on moments of personal inspiration, p. 13), so while I don't want to wade in something so personal as taste, I do think it could be relevant to this issue of boredom and we should note it.

The other reason Harman gives us such a long reconstruction of this section of Science in Action is that he wants "to do some justice to the meticulous detail of Latour’s empirical accounts of laboratory life, which must otherwise be excluded from a metaphysical book like this one" (PoN, 37). He particularly wants to show how Latour can actually reconstruct every single thing the Professor does in his lab in order to combat the suspicions of his dissenter, and how Latour can show how at each point the forces are changing, amassing against the dissenter with the recruitment of more and more allies: "What the story shows is that the Dissenter can continue to dispute ad infinitum, but only at the cost of growing isolation and perhaps even mental illness (and here I do not jest)" (PoN, 37). Now, there's an interesting thing here in this figure. After the dissenter exits the lab Latour remarks:

This exit is not the same as the semiotic character [the figure Latour brilliantly isolates as the made-up or semi-made-up "contrary position" in a scientific paper, who comes to pose a counterargument that you have anticipated and refute]. This time it is for good. The dissenter tried to disassociate the Professor from his endorphin, and he failed. Why did he fail? Because the endorphin constructed in the Professor's lab resisted all his efforts at modification (Science in Action, 77).

Harman cues us to this fact: in Latour, reality is what resists. This is what makes the incident more determinative or final ("this time it is for good") than in the lab paper where the semiotic character is defeated. More reality is generated here, set in place. But what is also fascinating is the last sentence--to which Harman's great emphasis on the length of this account of Latour's brought me (I wouldn't have noticed it, or would have only accounted for it abstractly): the fact that the skeptical efforts of the Professor's dissenter are also "efforts at modification." I know what is at stake in a trial of strength is reality, but I guess I never thought that this would be the way that even the skeptic or cynic could be accounted for from the Latourian point of view. Perhaps this is because (weirdly) I feel we could insist that the dissenter is a critical figure, trying to transcend reality, though neither Latour nor Harman says this. The reason they don't say this is because the dissenter precisely isn't a critic: it is the reality of each thing that is at issue. As Harman says, "The Dissenter may be a loathsome pest, but he does have a point: anything can be challenged" (44). What is important to realize is that this is all there is to his point--or perhaps that this is only his point. Remember he was "an extreme case" of the radical 1% that actually would get into the lab and challenge a claim: "as one of the estimated 1% of readers who actively doubt this claim, the Dissenter appears at the laboratory to speak with the Professor in person" (39)

What makes the dissenter seem like a critic is that the doubts are so active that everything comes into question: everything and anything is in doubt, because the dissenter actually just wants to prove the Professor wrong no matter what. What's crucial is that this isn't the critical desire: at no point does he want to transcend reality. The dissenter calls into question because he genuinely believes something else is real--in fact that something like the whole state of things is different. But this "state" is finite, and can be wrapped around a specific space--the lab and each object we encounter in it. It is only because of this (or the fact that he has no allies and confronts only in this space--it is the same thing) that each of his doubts attains the status of an "effort at modification," and he can genuinely be a part of a trial of strength. My takeaway is that this is important to note when we jump from something like the dissenter or skeptic to the critic quite quickly. Latour in his essay on criticism realizes that for the latter position, something else is at stake than just reality in the here and now, as it were.

On the active voice in philosophy

Can I just jump in here real quick and say holy shit, how wonderful is it to actually encounter philosophers who use the active voice?

I think we've been loving this about Latour's more philosophical ramblings and in part talking about it as his mojo (it's really why I love Irreductions). But if we don't get explicit about the things that bring about this mojo, we're just going to be talking in general about mojos everywhere. There's a lot to mojo, yes--I mean we're talking about style, basically, which is never reducible to mere grammar. But the wonderful thing about style (at least for us, who know how to talk about it) is that you can build it up out of these elements, as much as you might also try to capture it all at once with rhetorical terms (I feel mojo for us means something like the old rhetorical term energia--but taken technically that term also doesn't quite do).

So now that we're heading into Harman, another thinker with mojo, I just want to actually state that the active voice contributes to the charm.

There are other thinkers who use it too, of course. Deleuze comes to mind. But the passive voice dominates a lot of recent philosophy.

Part of this is Heidegger's fault--though it is probably not good to assign blame in this way, since no one person can cause any real change in the use of grammar (and I'll qualify things in a second). I don't mind Heidegger's jargon so much as the structure of sentences like these:

Yet that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us (B&T, ¶44, p.268 in M&R translation).

I did indeed just pick this at random, by the way--I basically opened a book of Heidegger and there it was. You can open up to a page of Heidegger, though, and most of the thing will be in the passive voice:

[In] what does the humanness of man consist? In lies in his essence. But whence and how is the essence of man determined? Marx demands that the "human man" be recognized and acknowledged. This he finds in the "community." "Communal" man is, for him, "natural" man. In the "community" the "nature" of man, that is, all of his "natural needs" (food, clothing, reproduction, economic subsistence) are equably guaranteed. Christians see the humanness of man, the humanity of homo, in his delimitation from deity. He is a Christian man as "God's child," who in Christ  hears and accepts the claim of the Father on him. Man is not of this world, inasmuch as "world," thought theoretically and platonically, is only a passing passage on to the beyond (Letter on Humanism).

Now, to be fair, Heidegger is never wholly passive--I imagine only really hardcore Heideggerians or maybe Derrida can actually pull that off. And his whole general project restores transitivity to the even passive uses of "is"--as Levinas once nicely put it. And on top of that, there are some really striking moments (the tool-analysis is one of them) where we get Heidegger's active voice:

The kind of being which belongs to such concernful dealings is not one into which we need to put ourselves first. This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the latch. The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us... (B&T, ¶15, p. 96)

That's still not quite as active as it could be--and it is built up in such an unbelievable way (as in the later work, where jugs are jugging etc.) that we might still have recourse to Adorno's jargon book. But then again anything with Heidegger and his language is fraught.

What's more important is that I also be fair in general by qualifying all this scorn for the passive.  I'd actually go so far in the opposite direction as to say--and I think I've said this to you on occasion, Evan, as I say it to everybody--precise use of the passive voice (not lazy use, as you'll find in this post) can be invaluable at times, especially in philosophy. Here it often becomes a very essential tool for writing, as it keeps the verb's metaphoricity to a minimum (not to mention its ability to imply causality). The sentence then relates concepts quite clearly.

But, of course, if you start to use the active voice, you quickly understand concepts get even clearer when you are concrete, when you risk causal implications and make something in the sentence do something rather than be assigned something (this is also why Hegel is, at times, amazing to read). Of course, teachers of writing often prohibit the passive voice for this reason: you actually have to think hard about the structure of the sentence with the active voice.

And Latour, who establishes or reestablishes that unbelievable link between rhetoric and realism, seems to understand precisely this. Harman too. I'm making my way towards intimating that the active voice has something to do intrinsically with OOP, of course, where clarity is suddenly defined precisely in terms of the ability to convey that concreteness.

Everybody knows this already though. What they're mistaken in thinking is that this might be something different than what was done long ago in the "language-centered" era of "critique." We can't just rest content with the notion that a philosophy's use of language reflects that philosophy--that the connection I'm drawing here is fully explainable in terms of what the philosophy says even about rhetoric itself. Talking about the active voice (or using rhetorical terms to try and get at it) shows other reasons can validly explain the thing.

This is important to underscore when a certain type of current continental philosophy doesn't claim to care anymore about a dream of some continental (mostly French) philosophy in the middle to late part of the 20th century: that you could change the general form and structure of philosophy by trying to talk about something other than what "there is." The strain I'm referring to interprets precisely this dream to be a statement about the nature of reality, about what there is and how what there is is there. Now, this isn't so much a misinterpretation (as partisans of the older schools would say) as a judgment--and a complex and nuanced one at that. It states that not only were the dreams impractical--if it just said that it would be missing the point--but also the whole effort of dreaming to produce practical effects was weird in the first place. And the judgment is correct, in some sense: what is constantly being bashed as the "language-centered" aspect of a certain continental philosophy of the past is actuality its incredible hope that by merely changing the way we speak, by being wary of "there is," the whole manner of philosophy would change in turn. To believe this, you have to believe that style mattered, that it had practical effects on the ground, over and above believing what Heidegger said about being and the the structure of "there is." Now, for a whole host of reasons, I think it's actually important to remember how the situation would support such a weird position. And it's important not to forget that Deleuze, who is currently being championed as a realist against the "language-centered" philosophies of old, held this position most tenaciously and extremely.

My only point here is that if we are willing to recognize a certain active-voiced turn in philosophy--if I've not so much convinced you of that as restated something that you want to believe about the relation of what the philosophy says to the way it says that--well then we have to ask whether something similar to the "language-centered" era is going on here. This doesn't invalidate anything or undercut anything about the philosophies in question--it just makes us wonder a bit about how philosophy works, how it constitutes its relationship to expression, how it continues to dream.

Always low prices

It's a small price to pay, but it's still the wrong price, and that makes me question the economy--though, of course, you're right to get skeptical about such "accelerations" (great word) to the general. The benefit of ANT as Latour uses it is for me--if I can add something to your great post on this, or rephrase it a bit--not so much in that it makes us slow down in these instances and get more specific about what we're referring to (though it does that), but also allows us to think in a non-accelerating mode generally, where we are no longer tempted to specify the determining instance, as if that would knock the argument down. Or, to use your language (and video game collection--awesome), it allows us to get off the elevator entirely--and not just take the stairs, but, say, fly out the window if we want to get to another floor. In that spirit, I'll revisit what I said in the utopia posts, and actually bring in the article/introduction to Pandora's Hope, "Do You Believe in Reality?"

First, clarification. "It’s hard for me to see optimism as inseparable from utopia." I knew putting it that way would get me in trouble--it was a dumb and unclear way to write (certainly philosophical terrain, there!). I simply meant it is hard for me to see utopainism in the same way that BL sees it. And this I said was as optimism. In other words, I was saying that utopia is, at its core, optimism--for BL. For me, they're more separable (in a way I'll get to in a sec).

Now, my point is that Latour can use this utopia-optimism connection or co-implication (the latter word being what I should have used instead of "inseparability") to both critique utopia as a representation (as you succinctly put it) and also salvage utopia by offering an alternative to optimism--which I called realism. It really isn't a stretch here, I think, to "blur[] realism as a philosophical position together with realism as a political style or strategy," as you said, since I think this the point of everything Latour is doing, no--as long as we agree that the blurring produces a transformation akin to the one I said happens with rhetoric: producing a new rhetoric by rejecting "the" (modern, postmodern) political as constitutive of politics, or by seeing politicians (finally!) as political. And from this, I try to extract a sort of pragmatism, which I think is perhaps just another more dignified way to characterize that sort of "stupidity" I was getting at earlier--Latour's motivation to keep himself from being intelligent, as he puts it occasionally--and showing that it ironically (and laudably) remains something like the impractical element of a realism, but in a new way (so we have something like the realism-pragmatism of a Putnam inverted). So I don't think that's entirely a digression so much as a (badly connected) statement of Latour's version of utopianism and what I like about it, that ends up setting the scene for what follows.

Now, I don't mean this to be a knockdown argument, despite what I say at the end (more on this in a sec). I am just tying things together, trying to show how Latour is able to cut across all the very settled distinctions and come up with something new. One could say, though, that I'm precisely undoing his composition of the collective, his symmetry, either to show how it works or to critique (a vague, vague word here--I'll be returning to this in post on steamy critique) it. So when I return to utopia, and say that there are many types of utopia, perhaps, and some of them are not necessarily optimistic, you say that: "It seems to me he’s fully on board with both of them — and would maybe even refuse to accept your distinction and argue they’re basically the same thing." I think that's right, but it's really a question of how such a move is possible. I'm not saying the existence of many utopias is really something that isn't accounted for in Latour: you can't argue against him on that front, ever, since he doesn't reduce (and I have to say, as an intellectual exercise, it's wonderful to try and think of the person you're writing about as never reducing anything, but adding more always--but more on that in conclusion). I'm arguing that this refusal of a distinction--everybody in the Aramis!--takes a certain direction, and I'm tracing that direction. The direction is towards lending a "purity of the feeling or the love" to utopia, that, I say, "seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization." By this I don't mean that utopia is a more complicated thing than Latour makes it out to be, and that this invalidates what he has to say tout court, but that Latour is proceeding to characterize utopia in a specific way--and in a way that basically is asymmetrical.

It's important to recall that symmetry isn't between the humanities and the sciences, but between objects and society. And I think it's Latour here that forgets this, ultimately, in some way, because he doesn't make the utopian into more of a social thing than it supposedly is, but instead proceeds to invest it with sociality from the fact of its being studied by the humanities, as I argue.

This isn't really anyone's fault--it is studied by the humanities after all. Nevertheless, the connection seems a bit more external than usual. Perhaps, though, one should shift terminology and say that it isn't entirely a knock at the humanities that is going on here. Maybe that's an acceleration, saying that Latour really has that object in mind (represented) when he's talking about utopia. But then why are you, and him, so quick to agree with me here?

...Yes, I agree, it [BL's anti-Copernican revolution] does go against much of the humanities as they are currently constituted and rationalized. (Somebody who knocks out Kant, Hegel and Heidegger all at one go isn't leaving much left to prop up the philosophical aspirations of our English and Comp. Lit. departments.) But I don't think it follows from this that Latour is anti-humanities, any more than the introduction of objects into actor-network theory makes him an anti-humanist, and the fact that he wants to enlist the humanities doesn't mean he sees them only as a means and not an end. It just means he's refusing to see the humanities as what they so often agree to see themselves as: the opposite of technology, the opposite of science.

I'd agree with the end of this. Though I don't think I ever called Latour an anti-humanist or anti-humanities. I take this sort of putting me in a particular box (pro-anti, which in my first post I tried to show broke down in a great way in Latour and in your discussion of him), however, as symptomatic of what is going on. For I also take your statement here (well put: elsewhere Latour speaks of the end of the means) to mean that there's something going against the humanities and how they think of themselves in what Latour says (ultimately) about reinvesting technology with love, or, as you put it, "by praising them [the humanities] only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action." But how did we agree that the motivating of action is of a certain type--the type of recalling us to the passions, say, such that we can show how technology is invested with love? Observation? Hardly, though Latour's approach actually (unlike so many other approaches) allows that to happen. Making it into a matter of "what they often" (often does a lot of work here, as it does in Latour in instances where the humanities comes up--that's my point in a nutshell I guess) "see themselves as." It's a matter of locating the box before it's opened or closed, as it were. Latour has a lot to say about this in Reassembling the Social, but I think the process is a lot more negative than perhaps he would like to admit (and he admits it is negative, at stages), at least when it comes to the humanities. I see Law and the more sociologically-oriented people correcting this, though they sacrifice many of the metaphysical payoffs of Latour that I praised earlier. But it's a matter of tracing how this happens--that's all I'm up to.

So perhaps it would be better, then, to say that there isn't so much a knock at the humanities going on (and that's all it is, nothing wholly anti-humanities... or at least it's only anti- in the way that he is anti-science which we once discussed, which also means being pro it... maybe you are referencing that) when this sort of utopian characterization is occurring, so much as a notion that utopia and other such objects that we study don't fiddle with its objects in the way the sciences do--a characterization that, it seems to me, is just "agreed upon" in too many ways--ways that the sciences are not entirely "agreed upon," mostly because Latour works with them in more detail (and there's nothing wrong about that!: like I said, Latour's approach makes possible the opening up of the humanities box in such a way that the location of it in Latour can be shifted!). That's really, I guess, what underlies a lot of that connection between the preface and the discussion of utopia and optimism, and why I want to register the many sorts of utopias: it's just that the "basically they're all the same" is moving towards a particular notion of sameness--I'm not saying they're each to be respected in their wonderful own uniqueness, or that, indeed, they aren't all basically the same. It's that there are more means--more morephisms to it all (and I think Latour might like this point of view, in the end). I should have quoted "Do You Believe in Reality?" (here I finally get to it) which was in the back of my mind here when I say that to him, its the sciences that tinker, fiddle. Latour says the following:

If anything, and here we can be rightly accused of a slight lack of asymmetry "science students" [Latour uses the perforative term scientists give to the science studies people at conferences] fight the humanists who are trying to invent a human world purged of nonhumans much more than we combat the epistemologist who are trying to purify the sciences of any contamination by the social (Pandora's Hope, 18-19).

So far, so good. I for one am totally fine with that. But then, Latour asks why this is so:

Why? Because scientists spend only a fraction of their time purifying their sciences and, frankly, do not give a damn about the philosophers of science coming to their rescue, while the humanist spend all their time on and take very seriously the as of freeing the human subjects from the dangers of objectification and reification. Good scientists enlist in the science wars only in their spare time or when they are retired or have run out of grant money, but the others are up in arms day and night and even get granting agencies to join in their battle. This is what makes us so angry about the suspicion of our scientist colleagues. They don't seem to be able to differentiate friends from foes anymore (19).

Again, we end up in the pro-anti pit, and I'm not quite sure how we really got there. It's true, scientists don't purify their sciences. And it's definitely true that philosophers of science as well as sociologists (the word reification tips me off to this as the other object here) free things from objectification. But there's the underlying sense of some sort of inductive-deductive divide going on beneath the purification-hybridization divide, or an empirical-critical divide that I find weird. It's not that the language of purification isn't to be taken seriously--in fact, I like that Latour is as precise as possible here--it's just the addition of that "fraction of their time" seems to align things in a particular way. This way is such that when we get to the more soft humanities, say, this seems to make the only option some sort of full on meaningless critical purification from an aesthetic level, or, if we do spend time hybridizing, postmodernism: which Latour admits hybridizes, but works on the completely wrong plane, and so doesn't touch objects at all.

In short, there's an engagement with the object in the sciences that is a sort of fiddling, a shaping, which there isn't over where utopia is studied. And there's something true to that--certainly the account of postmodernism is correct in its general thrust. But see how abstract we're getting? Meanwhile, this all thoroughly justifies "a slight lack of asymmetry." The symmetry itself justifies, here, its asymmetry. That's probably right, you gotta bring the asymmetry in line with the symmetry to begin with--but that presupposes some sort of asymmetry to begin with, some sense that we all agree to think about things in this way, and what if, what if, that weren't the case always? Sociology is our hope here: it can show we agree differently, perhaps, in a way that allows us to fiddle. Or that the asymmetry Latour talks about is not immanent to the asymmetry that is actually at work... granted we do see with him some asymmetry, some "two-culture" divide which can be profitably see in terms of his more rigorous Great Divide. Mainly, it's interesting to see the "two-cultures" divided up so thoroughly in Latour between the natural sciences and the social sciences, when for Snow (originator of the odious phrase), it meant between scientists and poets--that might be what's at the heart of my "critique" as you call it.

One more point in closing, though, implicit way back in my first point above about acceleration. We can work in Latour's spirit, but it doesn't have to entail adopting Latour's position. I think you'll agree that the only way to really read someone is to read generously, or sympathetically (to use an older vocabulary), but the problem with Latour (and what I've been calling philosophies of immanence--Deleuze and Derrida too) is that one can get pulled into his whole system by way of this, through just this sort of move (what I've called locating the black box--and which gets refined very very nicely in Reassembling the Social, though I'd say nothing really changes there as far as what I'm saying and as far as I can see). The point I'm making clumsily is that while we might agree about non-acceleration (getting off the elevator), this in turn can into way to lump others into groups that do accelerate too quickly--which is why I'm trying to distance deceleration from a position that sees in it something like rigor (from this standpoint, deceleration is acceleration in a different way). But this is of course because Latour draws the right consequences from all this, in a way people more inclined to just treat his ideas generously (humanities readers especially, and who are much more content with a Derrida or even Deleuze) might miss--and it is with this that I think you are rightly trying to sympathize with: the fact that such a spirit requires the adoption of serious metaphysical and methodological assumptions, which others might not share. But then we can pass from this move--which, again, I think is made in the most logical way, and I really agree with Harman (and you, I think) that it's the best, most challenging aspect of Latour, a sort of "put up or shut up"-ness that we actually rarely see--to something like the sense that this symmetry (for that's what the metaphysical consequence is) is the limit or (better) horizon to which we and others are always striving towards, even if we don't strive towards it (symmetry as conclusion and as method, or what we stick to). Put more bluntly, it's the sort of move that allows us to be asymmetrical at the same time as we try to be symmetrical, in the way that Latour admits he is above. The utopia post was my way of mapping this asymmetry--not so much its possibility as its structure or trajectory.

Why? Because that "grouping" it's what I see also in Latour's statements about "materialist materialism" or "realist realism," which are playful but also radically operating according to the logic of the "we never have been:" I, Bruno Latour, am more of a realist than all the realists because I have never been a realist in their sense, for example. Utopia works the same way: I am a utopian in the sense that no one has ever been. That is the sense in which I used the phrase "real utopia" at the end of my post--I should have marked it more clearly, and I was going to go back and do it (as well as add the "Do You Believe" comment) but I had to run down to Princeton yesterday: what I was parodically proposing was a utopian utopia, and opposing to Latour's realist utopia, or another sort of utopian utopia, which all other utopias have, by being utopias, never been. Modernity, to take the hugest example of this, is a weird thing, for Latour, is it not? I am a modern nonmodern, producing a critique that will undo the whole system (I'll dig around for that quote and stick it here, though I'll be returning to it in my post on "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"). Quite abstract, not unlike the sense that the humanities spend all their time purifying.

Now, what's great about Latour, as I've said here, is that this isn't the final state of the game. He, unlike all other philosophers of immanence--and I can't underscore how huge this is--allows us to get more specific (and even gets us excited about it, by saying that the prices of doing so will be low!), and so that's why I'm not, here, defending the humanities from the big bad anti-humanities Latour.

What I'm really after here, I guess, is symmetry. For me it's weird how it can merge, somewhat inevitably, with that presupposed asymmetry which Latour knows (one accuses him of it "rightly," he said) he's operating with. And for me that brings back all the big problems of representation within this non-representational system: how is it really working there? What's in Latour's head? I think you too work this way, and that's why we have a bit more sophisticated sense of how to use Latour.

But I'll close by just saying something I cut from that last utopia post, which I was going to end with. Latour says:

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

I said a lot about this, but then, at the end, I stressed that Latour goes on to be symmetrical as usual, and then said the following:

You once remarked (I continued) that his obsession with symmetry is surprising, given that Latour is all about the asymmetrical and hybrid. But I'll close by saying that I think he has to maintain this symmetry in order to undo the asymmetries according to the sort of self-cancelling non-modern/modern perspective that he inhabits in WHNBM… and so occasionally we can actually note asymmetries that escape.
 
And I left it on the symmetry in the preface, immediately following the quote on the humanists:

I have sought to show technicians that they cannot even conceive of a technological object without taking into account the mass of human beings with all their passions and politics and pitiful calculations, and that by becoming good sociologists and good humanists they can become better engineers and better-informed decisionmakers (viii).

Fables

It's interesting that there are so many fables in Latour--especially in Pandora's Hope, though We Have Never Been Modern is indeed one big fable. "Do You Believe in Reality?" sketches out the problem of skepticism over the years along these fabular lines, and "A Politics Freed from Science" sketches out in mythical terms the relation of politics to science and scientists:

By unwinding the adventures of Reason, we can imagine how it was before it turned into an unlivable chimera, a monstrous Big Animal whose unrest horrifies the masters even today. Needless to say, this is an attempt at archaeology-fiction: the invention of a mythical time when political truth-saying would have been fully understood, a world that was later lost through the accumulation of mistakes and degeneration (237).

The essay in other words seeks to see how reason worked in politics (through a reading of the Gorgias) in order to politicize science--since scientists would make politics external to science precisely by claiming reason isn't political. Reason, in other words, is not expert knowledge.

In true Nietzschian fashion (I am tagging this as I go: someday we can return to all these #Nietzsche-s), there's a lot of Socrates-bashing along these lines:

To see a political project through, with the crowd, for the crowd, in spite of the crowd, is so stunningly difficult that Socrates flees from it. But instead of conceding defeat and acknowledging the specificity of politics, he destroys the means of practicing it, in a sort of scorched-earth policy the blackened wreckage of which is still visible today. And the torch that set the public buildings ablaze is said to be that of Reason! (239)

The utterly non-Nietzschian thing here is that this does not describe war, but rather the state of peace and politics (which is why, by the way, Latour refuses to see the science wars as a war, and not as a political crisis for the sciences, which I think is an unbelievably brilliant move, killing off the "two cultures" bullshit--which, remember, is C.P. Snow's depressingly British, moralistic formulation--for good). Nietzsche was, after all, quite apolitical--unless you stretch him or modify him (sorry, Nietzschians).

Regardless, Latour goes on to outline a political reason that "cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge" (239), and reconstructing the original Body Politic by "simply taking positively the long list of negative remarks of Plato" (237). What's really interesting is that this all involves a reversal of the role of rhetoric (which, however, does not land him in an English department dripping with postmodern extensions of Sapir-Whorf)--something evident of course from Science in Action onward but something we haven't quite really remarked upon yet (except in terms of fiction). Socrates makes politics into rhetoric, and then his whole philosophical effort turns around deciding "what sort of knowledge rhetoric is" (239). Latour turns this around not by celebrating rhetoric and mobilizing it against Socrates' knowledge (a la Derrida in Dissemination--and everywhere else). Rather, he thinks rhetoric is first and foremost political, and therefore its relationship to knowledge (Socrates' focus) has less weight than its ability to shape reality:

The nonprofessional nature of the knowledge of the people by the people turning the whole into an ordered cosmos and not a "disorderly shambles" [Latour quotes Plato] becomes, through a subtle shift, the right of a few rhetoricians to win over real experts if they know nothing (240).

Latour is fine with this, even though that shift is the shift of the Gorgias as a whole, i.e. a shift made by Plato following Socrates, and altering the remarks of Callicles--Latour's hero--and others. He's so fine, he goes on to say the following, in an unbelievably refreshing reconsideration of Sophism, which does not just valorize it (Derrida again), but also makes the Sophist's point differently:

What the Sophists meant was that no expert can win in the public agora because of the specific conditions of felicity that reign there (240).

But then comes Socrates, who changes this around by divorcing rhetoric from the political:

After Socrates' translation, this sensible argument becomes the following absurd one: any expert will be defeated by an ignorant person who knows only rhetoric (240).

You have to read the whole thing to see how great this argument is, but one thing I want to take away from it all is that rhetoric is returned out of language to the sphere of politics. When so much literary theory is based on the linguistic turn itself, this makes possible some notion that language, after all, is not that primary, and that perhaps theory can be something other than the assertion of the primacy of language or language-substitutes (traces)--with the corollary that if language isn't primary all of theory collapses (as some theorists now feel, as they come under attack from Latour-like realists). Nor does this mean that we have to return to some notion of reference, as pro-theory people (who see it developing along a suspiciously straight line) might assume, and which leads me to think that perhaps most theory (this is the entire aim of de Man's work) is not even an effort to deal with the primacy of language so much as the effort to keep the referent suspended (something structuralist poetics did much better than any Foucauldian theory of discourses)… and that maybe a new consideration of the role of language is actually made possible by this Latourian position, beyond postmodernism.

Anyway, rhetoric is returned to politics, and thereby reason is never allowed to become apolitical, in this vast sort of alternate history Latour sketches out by reading the Gorgias against its author and main protagonist. And this fable, this counter-dialectic (in all senses), shows both the real state of politics and the real role of reason, by narrating how a specialized form of it "was kidnapped for a political purpose it could not possibly fulfill," (258), and turned, now, into the banner under which anti-political politics of science can mobilize.

In other words, the fable ends up as policy. But how did this happen? Like in "Do You Believe in Reality?" and We Have Never Been Modern, these fables--which suspiciously look like histories of ideas--are turned into those powers or punctuations (as Law calls them) which need to be undone by ANT. I guess Latour is thinking that as long as he's dealing with powers (with Constitutions), he might as well explicitly mark his own narratives as accounts of powers, not forces--that way they can be analyzed by ANT when the time comes. In other words, these fables (which so often deal with big terms--like realism, materialism, research, science, critique) shouldn't be taken as networks themselves, but power-sketches, organizations of the punctuations--a nice inversion of the task of real rhetoric, which would then be ANT itself, coming along to undo and make specific all of the fabular.

But that's not the whole story. For in the case of something like Aramis, or Pasteur--which, while they are novelized (or at least the story of the first is), are also case studies (and Aramis is indeed a true fiction, as Latour says in his intro)--we have something like these fables not working only in this sort of punctuated sphere. They are, rather, narratives that easily slip into ANT itself. How? Precisely through what you were noting a long time ago, Evan, and I too noticed: allegory--the weird way that pasteurization and now even the Aramis project itself works exactly like a network, before ANT gets to it and messes it up (shows it to be much larger, etc.).

Now, my question here about the fables--which is, in a way, a sort of basic question of how to take these sort of more general essays and works by Latour (like WHNBM itself)--is not just one of trying to figure out what plane Latour is working on, the punctuated plane or the plane of the network itself. I'll leave it to Reassembling the Social to try and work on this more precisely, make it more specific. I'll also be putting up little entries that actually work out this concept of punctuation (or the operative shift from powers to forces and back again, which indeed ANT can account for--I think it is its most interesting concept).

Rather, I'm trying also to weigh what Latour's way of looking at things is concretely giving us in terms of ways into problems via his particular concepts. On this point, I think it is important to pay attention to the phenomenology of reading Latour, as it were--or what I'd prefer to call just the feeling of the concepts at work here. As we move into philosophical characterizations of Latour, through Harman, we are inevitably going to be more focused on the system itself, the coherence of the concepts and their interrelatedness: this (metaphysics) is all right, but its also not where we're at home, as literary critics. Where we're at home is, I think, in this sphere of feeling… feeling the contours as it were, of the notions, testing them out, using them, touching them in a way that philosophy--if you'll pardon my turning a conflict of the faculties into a conflict of the senses--can only try and get at by seeing (or characterizing as "aesthetic"), however much it tries to become pragmatic or turn the philosopher himself into a phronemos. This no doubt gives us a bit of an edge (which a more rhetorically minded philosophy like Harman's is itself somewhat regaining) in seeing these concepts as somewhat useless insofar as they are not also seen to relate to this experience of deploying them somewhat against the grain, or applying them to new cases or areas in which they might not (if you just viewed them in terms of system) really be seen as pertinent (in the semiological/structuralist sense of this word that I love--though pertinence also constitutes scientificity for Greimas and these same semiologists, let's not forget).

In short, this sort of (literary critical--and I stress both of these words as we move into essays on critique, though perhaps we might describe literary criticism more as analysis and reading, and thereby evade much of the anti-critical talk) sense of how concepts work allows us to see how they at times don't work, or work according to tendencies that are somewhat weird. Here--just to bring this all to a conclusion--we get the odd resemblance of these fables to something like a history of ideas… which is something that, if you view it in the terms of the philosophy/theory itself, you won't be able to see--since you'd rather be making sense of this precisely in terms of that system (ANT).

What I'm saying is that there is something in Latour--in this allegory-fable connection--that seems like it's too familiar for a system that claims to do what it is claiming to do. This, I'll say again, is something typical of philosophies of immanence, but doesn't just reduce to something like an incongruity between the "doctrine" and the "performance," which is then quickly made into a (bogus) refutation. It is an aspect of the way that Latour is opening up problems, and I just want to mark it here… as my sort of contribution to an account of how reading Latour feels (phenomenology of reading Latour).

Morephisms: or, forget otherness!

I promise a more substantial post on Aramis, replying to your great presentation. But I want now to begin our consideration of Latour's many essays (which we'll be doing this week) and consider Latour's interesting reading of Rick Powers and great reading of Alan Turing, "Powers of the Facsimile: a Turing Test on Science and Literature," because it really has to do with this issue of stupidity/forgetting as I see it--through an interesting detour through the distinction construction/deconstruction which I consider fundamental (because it brings out the difference between a logic of moreness and a logic of alterity), and which this essay picks up.

Now, Latour basically is interested in "Powers of the Facsimile" to make the case for Richard Powers as the novelist of Latour's realism--a realist novelist in a new sense, a novelist of matters of concern, not just matters of fact (which an inadequate Zola-esque realism would, instead, deal with).

Unfortunately, in one of those weird over-polemical moments in Latour, Latour makes it out as if no literary critic has ever really seen this in Powers--or in fact in novels generally... indeed that literary critics don't have the right tools at all to see this. He is considering in particular the inability for reviewers of Powers' work (who magically turn into literary critics and then into all literary criticism) to see that Powers is not just writing about science in literature, but also showing how matters of science become research, and how it is full of objects of concern. This problem allegedly focuses itself in Powers' use of characters, who develop only insofar as they are channels for these matters, and it is here that actually the reviewers (and/or critics) miss the realism the most:

Reviewers often accuse Powers of being a “brainy” writer whose characterization suffers from an obsession with putting semiotic legs on mere ideas and facts drawn from science and technology. But one of the main problems explored by his novels is exactly the problem of the progressive emergence of individuals: Powers asks what it is for a character to exist at all, when so much of existence depends upon the things one is attached to – the most important connection being to the biological basis of life itself, which is the theme of The Gold Bug Variations (1991). By accusing Powers of simply “clothing ideas with flesh,” critics imply that they know what it is to be an idea, what it is to be a character, what it is to possess a “realistic” psychology, what it is to play the role of a “fact” on the stage of the narrative, what it is to be an episode in a narrative, whereas all of those features are explicitly and relentlessly questioned by the novels they are reviewing … It’s as if critics believe that Agatha Christie has provided the definitive realistic view of the world … or that “water boils at 100° Celsius” is the paramount example of a scientific statement"... But Powers takes science and technology much more “realistically.” Consider, for instance, the strand of Plowing the Dark that takes place in a Bill Gates-like digital factory, and is entirely devoted to exploring what it takes to produce a realistic-looking image out of calculations, and whether this is an intelligent idea or, on the contrary, a dangerous sin … meanwhile, in the other intertwined plot, a young English teacher has to survive for months after being kidnapped in Lebanon by an Islamic terrorist group. So, as usual, what critics see as a weakness – “M. Powers, why do you give us so many ideas when we want flesh and blood characters?” – is actually the subject of the novel: “what will happen to you if you dare to produce flesh and blood realistic characters out of ideas, signs, symbols, calculations, you reckless makers of facsimiles?” And in parallel: “What will happen to you if you are kidnapped, blindfolded, and left for months without any signs, symbols, pixels, images?” In addition, the very objection that critics raise about Powers’s characters (“are they brains with legs?”) is actually the argument that divides most of the characters in the novel, since the protagonists argue amongst themselves about whether or not the calculated image is really just calculation, or something else that escapes calculation.
-"Powers of the Facsimile," 94-95

I don't bring this up because we're literary critics so much as to note the supposition--sometimes occuring in Latour--that other disciplines just don't get at what Latour is doing, or only do so inadequately. Here, it is as if literary critics have never read and understood Greimas, or have never considered characters as shady sorts of complexes rather than full on psychologies. Meanwhile the problems of plot brought up by Wayne Booth, and the masterful consideration of Defoe by Ian Watt, as antiquated perhaps and theoretically unsophisticated (unscientific--in Greimas' sense) as they are, both deal with such issues. So it's this sort of position Latour can always inhabit--at one moment he recognizes all sorts of good things in various other disciplines can be integrated into his project, and at another he can say that because they're modern, or because what they do doesn't presuppose the entire shift that focusing on nature-cultures brings about, what Latour is getting at is wholly new.

This doesn't seem to me to be a big deal--except that it seems typically philosophical, which is something I don't usually expect from Latour since what he's up to usually appears so very different in its form. I'll put differently: Ultimately, what reviewers I think object to in Powers is his taking his de-priveliging of character in the psychological, anthropomorphic sense to the nth degree. However, when Powers does this full-on, in his recent The Echo Maker, he precisely gets the National Book Association award and is a finalist for the Pulitzer... so go figure. Meanwhile narratology has long picked up this issue of the over-anthropomorphization of characters, even when they're made into actants. So, the situation is complicated. Latour comes along and oversimplifies it--as anyone who confronted such a situation would. But he also does so in a typically philosophical way: he wants to presume we all read like 19th century readers of Dickens, or present-day readers of Harry Potter, in order to demystify that fact. This leaves us with the sense that, yet again, we're getting an essay on the "aesthetic dimension" of a philosophy, or the review of a piece which best exemplifies this work--a task which has to say all the considerations before it appears take the function of art in the wrong way.

Regardless, we begin to see the connection between taking things as mattes of concern and understanding characters as less anthropomorphic. It is first and foremost a change in the role of the human in general, along the lines Latour sketches at the end of We Have Never Been Modern: anthropomorphism is just one sort of morphism. However, we must also apply this back to other things--and here is where Latour does something interesting. For he's outlining how, concretely, we can begin to treat things as matters of concern by refusing to confine them in one sort of morphism--like we have done with the human:

What is constant in RP [Richard Powers], and so important for our investigation, is the morphism structure that he employs and that the above passage [of Powers'] instantiates pretty well. I call (x)-morphism the matrix of transformative metaphors where (x) can be replaced by all sort of particular instances, or layers of discourse: anthropo-, techno-, ideo-, psycho-, logo- morphisms, etc. For instance, in the example of the reading of Yeats’s poem [in a scene in Powers], words are compared to gadgets, to toys, to machines, to factories (a technomorphism) which is also crossed with a biomorphism (the evolutionary theory implied by “female mammal’s” reproductive success) and a phusimorphism (expenditure of energy). Now, bad writers – of novels as well as of academic articles – take those morphisms to be stable, so that when they do anthropomorphism they take what they believe we know about humans – a sort of Simenon’s or Agatha Christie’s typical psychology – and bring it to bear on, for instance, a robot (most science fiction never goes further than this sort of “animation,” or projection trick).
-"Powers of..." 7

I've been reading some SF lately and I don't really find the last comment convincing (it seems to me another polemical instance), but the point in general is great. Because these morphisms as Latour says in his more recent work on ANT, extend reality to the matters of fact. And this is something different than presupposing a whole change in our Constitution in order to get at these matters (something less local, or more totalizing). It is showing how our various descriptions of events can begin to pull out the shape of a thing from its hard, objective edges, make it pliable, in a more discrete and particular act--turn it into silly putty. I think Latour goes on to say that this is the virtue of the best literature in general--and that smacks of the aesthetic approach mentioned before. But this smaller point, I think, we can extract from the general presentation and really appreciate--largely because both you and I know more concretely how metaphoric language in particular has a tendency to do this. That is (just to sum up) I think Latour's point is not based on the viability of the aesthetics he's outlining in this paper, so much as his real familiarity with what happens in the shaping process in trials of strength... and we literary critics too have some familiarity with something like that, in a way that can't so easily be rejected by Latour or chalked up to our having some wrong Constitution and thus wrong aesthetics.

So, morphisms extend reality to matters of fact, making them into matters of concern--over and above any sort of explicit adoption of a modern Constitution (though they imply this adoption, or work to bring it about). Latour goes on to say that this is also present in the best writing on science and technology (and here he's on much surer footing--you can tell in the essay itself). He reads the fascinating Alan Turing's famous "Computing Machinery" essay, familiar to students of philosophy of mind in particular--though Latour would, just like he did with literary reviewers critics, say they haven't read it for its morphisms either (and thus haven't really read it). In this, he's a bit more correct--but because philosophers proceed in a very different way than literary critics--and I can speak confidently here since I have some (but perhaps only some) familiarity in philosophy of mind. In the various classes, the issues Turing brings up get presented to you in snippets--perhaps in Jaegwon Kim's great summaries in his excellent overview/intro Philosophy of Mind. Then, if you're interested (as I was), you actually pick up "Computing Machinery,"--and are completely blown away at just how much is cut out. This isn't anything bad, really--philosophy proceeds by reducing and refining problems and explanations, Occam's razor-like (even the SR people, who try to resist this, do it--it's just how things proceed). But it cuts out all the morphisms, which end up making the computer, the mind, pianos, piles of neutrons, and all sorts of things come together in amazing ways to bring out the reality of the confrontation between mind and this technology, or the functions involved in both (not able to be reduced, now, to any sort of functionalism):

The whole question of what an automaton is, what it means to generate something – a later obsession of Turing in his work on “biomorphs” –, what it means to produce an idea, what it means to probe agency and its limits, are all explored in one single paragraph that goes from the machine in general, to the piano, then to the atomic pile, then to the human mind, then to animals, then to the computer… Lady Lovelace thinks that agencies can be mobilized like the finger-keys of a piano although, even for the piano this is no simple feat as any pianist knows: you inject an input, it does something, and then “drop[s] into quiescence.” But this is not the sort of agency that Turing’s machine have, he argues: it is more like that of an atomic pile.
-"Powers of..." 18

So, in short, this sort of writing, or this sort of way of putting these problems, extends reality to the objects. I might play on words here and say that not only are these morphisms, but that they are morephisms: they give more reality to things, or turn objects into things (or are the objects becoming things).

This is important, and brings me to that sort of detour/distinction I mentioned earlier. For in the middle of the essay, Latour says the following about Powers:

Am I wrong in thinking that such a parsing of competences, layers after layers, competence after competence, is unheard of in literature? Instead of giving us a despairing feel for the infinite distance between words and things, Powers gives us – gives me at least – an incredible confidence in the capacity of description: if someone is able to make us see engineers making us feel the turning of the knob in a drawer of a non-existent reproduction of the existing painting by the no longer existing painter of a no longer existing hotel room in Arles [...], then every thing can be carried in language! All the usual resources of criticism, fiction, and illusion which usually go into chic commentaries of Escher-like ‘abyme’ effects, are here all telescoped by Powers to provide more reality, not less. Constructivism is made to be the exact opposite of deconstruction while, at the same time, using many of the same resources. But the way they are nested in one another is entirely different. “Telescoped” is actually a good metaphor: the more elements nested the better the view, whereas in the logic of critical deconstruction the more elements the more delayed the grasp should be. That is the major difference between deconstruction and what I have called elsewhere the promise of constructivism.
-"Powers of..." 12-13

I tried early on to characterize the difference between deconstruction and Latour in these terms. But I also have tried to say that the difference is one between this insistence on more, and this insistence on the delayed-grasp. Or, rather, I've insisted really on the distinction between more and other--and Latour's innovation (which someone like Harman picks up on) being in allowing us to pass beyond the logics of the latter (logics of otherness).

But now, I just want to be as clear as possible about this, because deconstruction is often seen as an proposing an ontology open to otherness (in the manner of Lacan, perhaps), but also of always more otherness, of infinite otherness: the other, in Derrida, is never simply an other (as it might be in Levinas), but always more other than any other. The other is always more other than an other. Thus, we see how the more (to reify this concept in order to compare it to the other), is actually already addressed by deconstruction. But, as Latour points out quite clearly here, it is still subordinated to a logic of otherness, which turns it into moreness that doesn't add, but undermines (along the lines I outlined early on). Latour allows us to break out of this and finally liberate moreness from otherness, and--moreover--understand all the relationships that were previously thought in terms of otherness (my relation to another person, or to a thing, say) in terms of this new moreness (I have allies, and they give me more reality; or I relate to things, and we form a more-real collective). Harman, I think, will get even more sophisticated about how this moreness needs to work, as it were, but for now, I just want to emphasize that finally we can get rid of that agonizing logic of alterity that weighs over so much theory in the humanities. And perhaps this might allow us to restore some sort of real concreteness to alterity itself--though I don't think Latour would like to look back here--in the way that the Lacanians do through some of the most dire and drastic measures (mathemes, etc.). If morphism is suddenly something that adds reality to the thing, language in particular is in the service of making things more real--and no longer do we have to really keep saying literature undermines, overturns, undoes, etc. etc., as some theorists (de Man, etc. etc.) would have liked us to believe (but their readings themselves--and their familiarity with this shaping which I mentioned above--we can see could never really bring about).

And this brings me back, in closing, to your last post. I should have been more clear in my original post to which you responded, that stupidity all connects to reinvesting our understanding of technology with love/passion, as you nicely pointed out in your post--and thus that I am really less "worried" about stupidity/forgetfulness as I might have sounded (my point is less about whether Latour is advocating it than whether it is a way to characterize our relation to networks). But I do think you were able to draw the ethical line clearer than I did as regarded the uses to which stupidity/forgetfulness is put, when you say the following:

So it's not that Latour likes, or advocates, forgetting or stupidity (which, unless I'm misreading you, is something you're a bit worried about). But he does think that forgetting and stupidity are so inevitable, omnipresent, and equally shared that it's just not a good rhetorical strategy to accuse others of it. There's clearly an ethical dimension to this way of looking at arguments...

You insist rightly on the difference between stupidity qua being swept up in a network (stupidity as limitation of our abilities, the finitude of the network, as enthusiasm, as the unreasonable reason of scientific research/discovery) and stupidity qua thinking of technology/discovery "as the historians of technologists do," or thinking it is less omnipresent than it is, precisely in order to disconnect science from politics (or design/dreams from the possible worlds that the thing is designed for), in turn to reconnect them in a shoddy oily way. The former attitude is seeing stupidity as the basis for relationships in collectives--that is, as something different than familiarity, something less rational and much more forgetful because it is also excited (thus I used Forest Gump). Thus it is something like a virtue in the investigator--a way to (paradoxically) characterize his knowledge of the network: no longer is a researcher closer to the work on the basis of how familar he is with it, or how close he is to the primary sources, native informants, etc. etc.. Familiarity is replaced with forgetting: out knowledge of the networks is better insofar as it is stupid and excited--crying, full of passion like the passion of the scientists we follow. Thus at the end of Aramis, Norbert doesn't retreat to his other sociologists--as if the subjects he studied didn't matter--but returns to them, not without some just stupid, unexplainable fondness.

In short, stupidity or forgetfulness is a way to characterize the relationships between the actors in a different way than through "misunderstandings"--mostly because the latter involves something like the undermining, through its sort of inevitability. "Misunderstanding" is right, but it needs to move over a little towards this excited sort of state in order to add reality. I was thinking of this because after reading Latour for a while, you see the sorts of critiques that you mention (Gray, etc.) as of even less worth than the accusations of the people involved in the projects. In other words, these critiques, which do not at all add reality to the object, but take it away, don't just refuse to add reality in some sort of intellectual sense... they really don't have any active stake in the object that they are dealing with. But this sort active stake is not really--we see now--one of having more or less familiarity or knowledge of the network (a sort of "being-in" the group involved), but of being stupid in the right way, of not knowing--of misunderstanding, yes, but in a sort of forgetful way that adds more shapes, that has more morphisms, rather than less.

This, ultimately, is the basis of a rejection of shoddy critique--I'd say. And I'm claiming here that it involves, perhaps, less a problem in critique as such (as many of the SR people think it does, and which gets directed towards literature, among other humanities department, perhaps more than it needs to be) than with the logic of otherness which makes us think of moreness on the basis of its sort of undermining project... and which the morephisms of Latour can replace. This is just a hunch, but it's how I'd address a lot of what is going on. Forget the other!

"2-3% GNP--that is not much"

That's an excellent post--you link together how measurement is an ontological fact as well as a human practice, as you say at the end.

I'll just make a quick response in order to perhaps speed up the conversation. We're doing big posts, which are good, but take a lot of work! I'll also be able to get in a few remarks on "Irreductions" before we head into the reading for this week--though our weeks, of course, will overlap, and "Irreductions" was for me such an unbelievable, eye-opening ride (much more than WHNBM) that I probably will be harping on it for some time. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow me to do full justice to the excellence of that post. But we'll have opportunity to go back and cite previous remarks, and I'm sure it will get its due that way.

I'm interested in the two payoffs that you outline, the "methodological" and the "political" payoffs. You rightly show how the first is tied to the second in the way that (as I just recalled) the facts are linked to practice, or in the way that metaphysics can be empirical ("infraphysics" is the other great Latourian word for this). Or, the way that the use of one set of tools produces an analysis that allows you to open more black boxes (rather than lock them up), and even simplify the explanation (more on this in a second). But I'm wondering about the second "political" payoff. You rightly say that the use of the same tools--the symmetrical rejection of macro and micro actors, and the focus simply on actors--keeps us away from the despairing feeling of being only a small part in something too large, a sort of more global "level" that we'll only be able to change minutely, if at all. This is right because it rejects the Marxist (and Hegelian) overemphasis on the part-whole relationship, and does so precisely from the Latourian standpoint of scale: we understand that such part-whole relationships (and their generation of levels) really may be just attempts to scale up what is really less important, and overlook the places where the tiny actor knocks down the macro actor.

I don't have any beef with that. My beef is with another "political" move that Latour does over and above this sort of demystification of the part-whole, which moves in the opposite direction. This is the move of insisting that if we scale down the macro actor (or the actor that appears more macro than it is), it will become richer. Granted, whenever Latour couples this with the notion that we are, in the same moment, moving from analysis of powers to an analysis of forces, the claim is a bit (but perhaps only a bit) more solid. But isn't there a sort of equally political payoff to the following claim, which he emphasizes twice (by my count) in "Irreductions?"

Sometimes people talk of "nature" when referring to the crowd of slaves and subjugated actants that have been reduced to silence, or when speaking about the commands given by a class of researchers who, in turn, march to the tune of a handful of "great thinkers." But it is most unlikely that the forces are really like this. After all, only two to three percent of the GNP of a few countries circulates inside the sparse and fragile networks of "science." We might as well try to reduce all the journeys in the world to airline networks (4.6.4; p. 229).

Or more simply:

Two to three percent of the GNP of a few industrial nations, two thirds of which is spent on industry and for military purposes--that is not much (4.2.1; p. 216).

"That is not much," sort of says it all. The claim has its opposite: there is much more elsewhere, once we open the black boxes.

This is the general merit of the notion of the black box in general, I think--to turn to Science in Action. What we have is a sort of displacement of the logic of same/other, which ends up becoming so unbelievably constraining if you have used it too often. Such a logic becomes, instead, same/more-than-the-same. Where there is elsewhere, where there is the otherwise, there is more. We'll see that it is Graham Harman's genius to insist on this continually--though he certainly developed the notion before he really read a lot of Latour (through a reading of the tool-analysis). Suddenly, we're talking about how little we can grasp, and actually how that is not a problem (this is the basis for the speculative move). We simply go beyond and grab it--what we don't do is start reducing it, or, in this case, totalize it, and simply look for what goes in and what goes out. There are no Big Others anymore, and we don't have to insist on the unrepresentability of the otherwise--just simply that our representation of it will be inadequate. This change in tone is, to me, and to the rest of those following the anxiety-ridden tradition of Continental Philosophy, a huge relief.

But along with that comes a tendency to say that reduction in general is bad. And, to put all my cards on the table, I see too much continuity between Latour and the postmoderns (including Derrida) in this area to take him seriously when he couples this with a new (and welcome) realism. For what we get is not only the idea that the local is more important than the large totality, and the idea that the real is more important than representation, but the notion that as we get more local or smaller, we approach the real. The stress on variable ontology here--that the real has a more or less aspect to it (see WHNBM p. 86, fig. 3.4)--is nice, but it's too neat to get him out of this general rejection of abstraction and reduction. For isn't the problem sometimes not that we're constantly reducing, but that we can't reduce in an adequate way? I follow Frances Ferguson, and to an extent Derrida (who, more than other postmoderns, broaches this issue), and indeed to an extent Jameson (who I am seeing is much more amenable to this idea and I originally thought him to be) in insisting on this. To that extent, the problem of levels is again crucial, and the differentiation of tools--rather than the use of the same ones--becomes important (that is, it's not just a matter of handling things more rationally).

Nevertheless, I think it is to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how the creation of larger categories can be reductive in the sense of scaling down the problem (or black-boxing it). And it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler (I am always for simplicity in a discipline that, perhaps even more than others--because it is internal to the process of confronting the object itself in reading it--produces "interpretations" merely by problematizing texts that aren't problematic). This all makes us think more about how irreduction can go against even some of our best efforts not to reduce things--and, more than that, produces studies that actually demonstrate this (we end up with something like what Ian Hacking says is a singular virtue of experimentation--the creation of phenomena--and its in this particular sense that I think we end up with an "experimental metaphysics"). I don't really think that my objection here is incompatible with such a focus on the proliferation of hybrids (what I'm calling reduction might be slightly different than purification). But, as I said, when we start going in this other political direction, we end up saying things like the following:

Do they turn toward nature? What could this mean? Look at them! They lean over their writing and talk to one another inside their laboratories. Look at them! Their only principle of reality is one that they have determined themselves. Look at them! The "external" referents they created exist only inside their world (4.3.5; 219).

Which I take to be similar to what you say in that last post:

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.

That's okay, but the notion behind that might be that the form of questionability is, precisely, at this level (if I can be a bit of a dialectician, and look at Latour from precisely the angle he doesn't want to be looked at--though not by attributing him any reduction). Ultimately, for me, this ends up producing statements like this (which Zizek, for one, takes as the postmodern (!) critical (!) statement par excellence):

Every totalization, even if it is critical, helps totalitarianism (We Have Never Been Modern, 125).

There's certainly good sense in saying this is because "a system that is total and sleek does not get divided up" (WHNBM, 125)--certainly more sense than in the critical postmodern project, which would see totalization merely in those real idealities that are philosophemes, discursive regimes, etc. etc. Indeed, as I lead us into the book we're considering this week, I'm not saying that if you catch Latour being modern or postmodern, his project is invalidated--he himself, though he can't find "words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement" (WHNBM, 61), would still save a lot of what they do (WHNBM, 134). But I'm just wondering about the viability of the general tendency behind this "other" political move.

And I'm wondering, generally, about its politics. We shouldn't forget that "Irreductions" ends on, not an apocalyptic, but a post-apocalyptic note:

I will not yield to them; I will not believe in "the sciences" beforehand; and neither, afterwards, will I despair of knowledge when one of the relationships of force to which the laboratories have contributed explodes above France ("Irreductions," 4.7.11; 236).

And that this seems to follow (how, exactly, I'm still working out--it might be good to take up WHNBM on this point), from an ("agnostic") conviction that:

Those who think that they can do better and work more quickly will always do worse because they will forget to share their only means of knowing and testing. They will believe that they have done enough when they have "diffused" reasons, codes, and results. In fact, all of these wither once they are removed from the scorned networks that keep them strong (4.7.11; 235).

That's some serious realism. It's so realist, we might seek a more forceful word: "common sense" might be better, as if that influential early 18th century Scottish school has come back with a vengeance. Latour, of course, goes to Spinoza and Machiavelli. Regardless, the following is at the same pitch:

Listen, it is very simple. We will never do better than those who have simply to convince themselves about trifling matters, have everything they need to hand, and are properly fed, well lit, and appropriately taught. How many mistakes do they make before they start to give up the tiniest prejudice? Tens, hundreds, thousands? So how many wars will it take to convince five billion men and women? Ten? A hundred? Unless, that is, the multitudes can think more quickly and clearly than those in the laboratory (4.7.10; 235).

I'll stop here, but let me just say that we see in the last remark maybe a prejudice of Latour himself, at least in the earlier work. Latour seems to me to be pulled always towards what we never have called influential small groups--however much these groups in turn end up spilling into society, or contracting around one of their more prominent individuals. Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab? That's all well and good from one standpoint, which sees the analysis as an analysis of what is actually there--and (rightly) doesn't want to see in the process of following these actors' networks (if I can say that) anything like the process of imputing to them some supra-historical agency, or an effort to turn labs into the driving force behind our (modern) time. But then again... And how would we actually articulate this sort of objection or even mere observation?

Interest and scales

I'll address what you said and then try to take things in a new direction--or perhaps pose the problem a different way. I took a bit of an antagonistic position myself in my response to push you a bit, and perhaps thereby extract something like following sentence, which you did indeed say and actually I think is exactly right:

What he [BL] doesn't like about conflict sociology isn't the emphasis on interests, but the insistence that these interests are only of a few kinds, and that actors always seek to destroy, rather than enlist, those with different interests.

Or maybe even better,

It [interest] actually seems to be one of the few sociological concepts he wants to keep.

I think that's right--I just wanted to stress the fact that this concept does some extrasociological work as well. Mainly because I'm interested in who the hell Latour thinks he is--i.e. what is his actual relationship to the conceptual structures that he uses that come from so many different disciplines. I'm finding right now that it might be more handy just to stop looking for what he's inflecting and just see him as coming totally out of left field--like some mystic of old, who you really just have to take on his own terms.

Thus the stress on objects--not so much because I think objects are important (I might want to see what things look like from an object-oriented point of view, but I'm pretty far from thinking it is my point of view), but because I think for Latour that actually becomes the area where he becomes disconnected to all these other discourses (we might also say, more original). It's here that we have to take him on his own terms the most, and really think through what he's proposing. So while I think you're absolutely right to stress--in Pasteurization especially--the fact that there are a lot of human actors, and thus that Latour is indeed doing some sociological work (I think that's the brilliance of your posts, to actually read Latour against the grain and understand what is going on), I'm trying to see how even here he could be doing his own thing. It's really just a matter of emphasis--thus I wouldn't say we have two different interpretations so much as actually the same interpretation with a different emphasis. For me, this means really asking how attributing interests to microbes makes them have something different than interests--or makes us rethink (to use that stupid formula) interests otherwise--precisely because I agree that what we have here is, as you say, an extension of the concept of interest. When I said that there is a move away from interest, I just meant interest qua interest--doesn't the concept also have to change in itself when it's applied to microbes? If so, what is the work needed to do that? I think I saw it in terms of making interests more real, rather than just saying that "'interests,' for Latour, are 'reality' (or, at least, are real)." In other words, my question to you--and my question to Latour--was really what work the quotes and the copula does here, and whether that entailed some sort of othering of interest. For me, this is sufficient (or I would suggest could be sufficient) to explain what's going on, while you--following Latour (and it's brilliant of you to see that this is the function of his stress on misunderstanding, which has to be so forceful in this book)--have to use the notion that we're all speaking from different places to do it (in other words, in the double move I described, I'm sticking with the first--the decomposition of groups--without going on to the second--considering them as misunderstanding each other). Basically, we end up in the same place, but I'm trying to get there without stress on how we're all in different places--because I think what Latour is saying in this is more than we're just all in different places, but that we're real.

This brings me (finally--I promise I won't go that long any more in responding, since like you I think we shouldn't let the back and forth get too complicated) to the new issue I want to bring up, because this word "real" has to get understood in a new way for Latour. We find such an undrstanding in the opening gesture of "Irreductions," which is to say that nothing is reducible to anything else. It's this, I think, that strikes you as Derridian: the notion that we're all in different places, and thus misunderstanding each other from the get go (and understanding each other), is due to some notion that we're all singular. But, we have to actually go back to the whole phrase, because it's not just that nothing is reducible to anything else, it's that,

Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else (158; 1.1.1, my italics).

That "or irreducible" changes the game, and for me answers the Derrida question (at the end of your post on translation). Because Derrida wouldn't affirm the latter, I think--and furthermore he wouldn't do so in order to stress, as Latour does, the "by itself." In other words, Latour is saying that nothing is singular (irreducible) because it always needs others. Derrida would say everything is singular (irreducible) because it (a thing) needs others. Both, yes, say nothing is reducible to anything else. But such a statement comes from two different concerns. Latour is interested in saying that the misunderstanding comes in to affirm the fact that a thing needs others. While Derrida is interested in undercutting how a thing needs others precisely through misunderstanding--the mis- there still retains its sort of anxiety-ridden, dreary, Lacanian force (lack, lack, lack: it's interesting from this perspective that--getting behind this undercutting, as I'm saying--you have to contrast Latour to a Habermasian full-speech, just like Derrida: what's rightly interesting to the speculative realists/object-oriented philosophers is that, when you take Latour out of the sociological context and bring it towards that of ontology and philosophy, for the first time, you don't have to do this--i.e. talk about presence, absence, etc.).

This is why I became so antagonistic--I wanted to disarticulate that sort of misunderstanding from its force of undercutting. Because the consequences of this are big: it makes Latour a realist and Derrida something else (an idealist, I'd say--though that's another argument). For Latour, that a thing needs others only makes it more real (thus my comments about Marxism etc.), while for Derrida that a thing needs others makes it less real--while affirming, however, it's irreducibility/singularity (which you can pass off as real, as Martin Hägglund does--and people say this resembles the speculative realist position--but which I find sort of a stretch). I hope that makes things somewhat clearer: for Derrida the linkage to others becomes a sort of strategy to undercut the thing, while for Latour, it is precisely what needs to be explained, because it is itself the realest aspect of that thing (and within this position there will be disagreements--Harman takes issue with Latour precisely here, stressing that Latour's position is too "relational," but not at all in order to go in a Derridian--or Hägglundian--direction).

I may, however, have misunderstood your stress on Derrida, but that's where I imagined you were going. Whether it is or not, I think I've brought up something important and got us squarely in the middle of what "Irreductions" is trying to do. I want now to stress another thesis that comes directly after the first, because I see Latour positing it precisely in order to explain the issue at hand:

Everything may be bade [made, that is--MJ] to be the measure of everything else (158; 1.1.4).

This is, for me, and more than any remark about the misunderstanding of "interest" in the still intrasociological sense (if I can recall what I said earlier), where we end up explaining how misunderstandings take place. As I said, I agree that we can still understand this as an extension of interest, but you see now we're getting into the nitty gritty aspects of what that means--and the really Latourian aspect of this for me (or what makes him really original in my eyes) is that what involved is not so much the dynamics of social groups but reality (and I agree you can take this to affirm precisely what you're saying when you say "interests" are "reality"--I'm just working that out).

The thesis (or principle--or whatever), follows from 1.1.2, and is explained in 1.1.3 (which is only the assertion that there exists a relation of consequence between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2):

It is because nothing is, by itself, reducible or irreducible to anything else that there are only trials (of strength, of weakness). What is neither reducible nor irreducible has to be tested, counted, and measured. There is no other way (158; 1.1.3).

But saying that everything may be made to be the measure of everything else gives a thickness to 1.1.3, not only because it leads us to 1.1.5 and from there to reality ("Whatever resists trials is real"), but because it makes clear what is involved in so many scientific instances where interest is present and what is real: that is, the operation of reducing or enlarging something's scale. If I'm making all these connections right (and I'm not sure that I am), what we get where the bacteria has an interest is a situation where one thing is being made to be the measure of another thing, or, to put it in less abstract terms, where one thing is extending (usually we're concerned with extension, but of course it could go the other way around), through a process of generalization (or diminution, bathos), its influence--it's capability to interest (or be interested--Latour shuffles between the active and passive here significantly, something I was going to point out might resist the sociological version of interest--though maybe not Bourdieu's version). And this gives it its reality--through that amazing process of shaping via the trials of strength described in 1.1.6, which is so amazing to see in process: when the old anthrax is a disease and then becomes something that produces a certain substance and then, finally, when it grows, the "cause" of the disease or rather a microbe...

This is what makes the lab so unbelievably important--it is the way that we get from the macro- to the micro- with ease, because we're always concerned with the processes of giving reality a shape (looking at the front lines of the trials of strength--and also just as those trials or tests). The lab simply is, for Latour, a device for scaling--and I think this is, absolutely, his most solid and most fascinating suggestion. Because it understands that the way power is acquired is by this sort of ruse of generalizing (or weakening) forces (or modifying them actually, in reality). And so where there are interests, there is reality, because a sort of scaling operation will be going on--and maybe we are reading things differently because it's this mathematical signification of translation that I see as the primary one: one force will be scaling another, and that will be scaling another, all the way down (and up). Indeed, I'm interested in this because it does seem to solve the macro-micro problem which the notion of interest, when it is not understood that it "is reality" as you say, does seem to introduce. You have much more background in this issue than I am--and I'd like to hear generally 1) what the macro-micro problem is for you and 2) whether Latour indeed addresses it.

To wrap things up, I think I will go so far as to say that Bruno Latour is the thinker of scale: it's what makes him always on the edge of the qualitative and the qualitative (like Nietzsche, not reducing them to a dialectic), and also (unlike Nietzsche) able to pay minute attention to the long connections of processes that allow them to pass into each other. It's also what makes him, for me, different than a Derrida, who is constantly interested in the Blanchot-like task of trying to find a measure without measure (as he and J.L. Nancy constantly say). I hope, here, that I've made all the connections clear--and perhaps also brought us into new territory.

Translation, or How Everybody Wins

Yesterday I finished Latour's magisterial case study of The Pasteurization of France. (I'll be doing a separate post on Irreductions, its more "philosophical" counterpart, and probably a couple of follow-up notes on Pasteurization this week as well.) The title's a somewhat dry English translation of Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des microbes — which is better, both because it creates a closer link with Tolstoy's War and Peace (which Latour uses as a working model for his vision of how the Pasteurian victory over the microbes was accomplished), and because it introduces a theme that is clearly important to Latour. Namely, how essential are agonistic and adversarial metaphors to a sociological understanding of reality? Much of Latour's later work will be built around the theme of war and peace, as even some of his titles (like "War of the Worlds — What About Peace?" and "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?") attest. Clearly Latour finds it difficult to do without the language of war and confrontation — Pasteurization of France is chock-a-block with military metaphors — but he also looks for ways to resist or deflect this violent language (see, he's got me doing it too).

It seems to me that, in Pasteurization, Latour is trying to do an end run around what Randall Collins has called "the conflict tradition" (metonymically, and roughly: Marx, Weber and Talcott Parsons) via semiotics, and in particular the notion of "translation." BL uses this word very frequently in both Pasteurization and Irreductions and it does a tremendous amount of work for him, but seems not to lean on it so heavily in his later work. And I think part of the reason he jettisons "translation" (along with much else of his semiotic vocabulary) is that it's too redolent of linguistics, and brings him too close to the 80s-era discourse of deconstruction. (Mike, I'm sure you're more sensitive to these tropes than I am, so please, let me know what you think of this idea.) Here's how Latour glosses "translation" in a useful footnote on page 253:

The notion of translation has been developed by M. Callon (1986), M. Callon, J. Law and A. Rip, eds. (1986) and B. Latour (1987) and applied to the study of science and technology in order to fuse the notions of interest and research program in a more subtle way. First, translation means drift, betrayal, ambiguity … It thus means that we are starting from an inequivalence between interests or language games and that the aim of the translation is to render two propositions equivalent. Second, translation has a strategic meaning. It defines a stronghold established in such a way that, whatever people do and wherever they go, they have to pass through a contender's position and to help him further his own interests. Third, it has a linguistic sense, so that one's version of the language game translates all the others, replacing them all with "whatever you wish, this is what you really mean."

While conflict sociology tends to see agents pitting their respective interests against another, and thus inevitably producing "winners" and "losers," "haves" and "have-nots," this semiotic sociology is more interested in how interests are converted, how we arrive at a local, temporary sense that "everybody wins." For this to take place, there doesn't necessarily need to be communication — no Habermasian transcendental chitchat need take place; but there does need to be mutual awareness of one another's respective positions. And here we see why "translation," in its most familiar literary sense, might be a good metaphor: a translator doesn't (necessarily) talk to the author she is translating; rather, she reads, reads about, thinks about, takes cognizance of that author and his interests, and finds a way to bring those interests to a new place. Inevitably, there will be "drift" and "betrayal" along the way: by the time the author is translated, he will no longer be saying exactly what he once said. But he has not been defeated, or destroyed, or even (necessarily) deconstructed: he has just been moved.

So, in Latour's account of the Pasteurians and hygienists against the physicians, who were notoriously reluctant to accept bacteriology because it obviated their usual methods and, by emphasizing prevention over cure, threatened to put them out of business, we don't see the doctors holding out against innovation until they are finally ground down, or have a change of heart, and have to give in: instead, we see how their interests are translated, around 1895, by the development of sera which could be inoculated by doctors in their offices, thus finally giving them a crucial role in the bacteriological campaign (129). In so doing, their position has been rendered (partially) equivalent to the Pasteurians; they have "passed through" the Pasteurians' stronghold, thus furthering the bacteriological agenda; and they have been made to speak differently, even mean differently, while still maintaining a continuity of interests ("whatever you wish, this is what you really mean"). Translation in all three senses.

"Translation" thus allows Latour to keep the concept of "interests" in play without letting it take over his analysis completely. Another revealing footnote on page 260 makes clear that when he speaks of “interests” he is not referring to the “interest theory” of David Bloor and Barry Barnes; he's also, implicitly, I think, repudiating the Frankfurt School and Bourdieu. Citing Callon again, Latour states that “‘Interest’ means simply what is placed ‘in between’ some actor and its achievements. I do not suppose that these interests are stable or that groups can be endowed with explicit goals … Interests cannot explain science and society: they are what will be explained once the experiment is over” (260). In other words, "interests" are not what there really are, with all of the rest of society an epiphenomenon of these primary interests (class struggle, struggle for various forms of capital, etc.). Rather, interests are temporary obstacles between one position and another, which are frequently translated in order to bring us to a new place.

Lest this all sound too nicey-nicey, like we all always end up getting everything we want, it should be remembered that "[t]ranslation is by definition always a misunderstanding, since common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent” (65). This caveat explicitly contradicts the essential Marxian view, held by everyone from Marx himself to Adorno to Habermas to Jameson, that real social interests are in fact held in common. (See Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests for the most extensive unfolding of this position, and Raymond Geuss' Idea of a Critical Theory for a good critique of it.) But the idea that interests are ultimately shared makes no sense for Latour, because we cannot all actually be occupying the same place, and interests are what is in between us. This is where I intuitively feel that Latour is actually close to Derrida, but I'll resist the urge to work out why — perhaps Mike has some thoughts on this subject. At any rate, the coffee's running low, and my interest is flagging.