Latour at Princeton

So Latour is speaking in a couple hours at Princeton in our great department of Architecture. It's an event in a series that is basically an extension of Alejandro Zaera-Polo's really amazing-sounding seminar on the building-envelope (usually thought of as just the facade, but you can see how the hyphen broaches new questions that might be taken up by Latour and the other great architects he will be talking with), which is going on right now (and in which Latour is being read). The session today will be on "Attachments" (click here for the poster). Unfortunately, with the snow, I won't be able to get down to Betts Auditorium. It's okay though, since Evan saw Latour a few days ago at UCLA and will have an account of that soon. But it would have been great to see him on this topic, and especially here, since the visible spread of his work throughout the University can be shoved in the face of the IAS, just across Alexander Street, whose members denied him a position in 1990.

Update 2

Allright, everyone--here's a quick update. Evan's finished traveling, Mike's finished doing some stuff that needed to be done, and Paul is at the ready. We'll be a little slower, probably, than last year though: everyone's got a lot of work to do, and we'll be fitting in the reading more and more in our spare time. Thanks to everyone who has commented on the blog though so far, or even seen this and thought we were up to something good--I (Mike, though I know I speak for Evan too) can't tell you how great it feels to know at least something you're doing might be helpful, intriguing, or just comment- or even note-worthy.

The next couple weeks we'll be finishing up Latour, reflecting on Latour coming out as a philosopher and moving into Harman's cases for the relevance of Latour for philosophy.

Then it's Prince of Networks. We originally were going to do the whole of Harman, and I had the sweet idea of reading Harman backwards--something I always wanted to do with an interesting thinker, as it sort of is an easy way to destabilize the increasingly arrowlike (thinking of Husserl's diagram) shape that intellectual development is perceived as taking, and blast things into constellations and regions of uneven development (which is great with Harman anyway, since he is much more honest than others about the discontinuity, the jumpstarts and lightning strikes involved in philosophic thinking, as much as he also--as I've emphasized on my own little blog--attempts to historicize his own thought and provide narratives for it). But we don't have time--we want to get to Brassier someday, so we're just going to stick with PoN, and perhaps make some references to the Harman we've already read independently.

Then we'll be jumping headlong into SR (or whatever the people involved care at this point to call this general area of work) with Meillassoux and After Finitude. Some Badiou might pop up as well.

After that, we're revisiting ANT with John Law's After Method (so many afters! you can see the pressures to push things past [post?] the post- or postal [as Derrida might quip] generation preceding [post-ceding?]).

Then we're Nihil Unbound.

Chrestomathy

Because, as I mentioned in my introductory post, I admire Latour as a phrasemaker and rhetorician as much as I do him as a thinker, I wanted to give a little unannotated list of my favorite lines from Pasteurization of France that haven't already come up in conversation. I'll probably continue this practice as we go along — the man's just so quotable!

From Guerre et Paix de microbes:

“I use history as a brain scientist uses a rat, cutting through it in order to follow the mechanisms that may allow me to understand at once the content of a science and its context.” (12)

“It is not given to everybody to become a century, any more than it is to have one’s name on the principal street of every town and village in France, or to prevent people from spitting, to persuade them to dig drains, to get vaccinated, or to create serotherapy.” (14)

“Since anything might cause illness, it was necessary to act upon everything at once, but to act everywhere is to act nowhere.” (20-21)

“[P]olitics is made not with politics but with something else.” (56)

“‘Pasteur’ or ‘bacteriology’ are names given to crowds. Trying to write the history of these phantasmagorias or trying to make one the product of the other would be like writing the history of France on the basis of the popular press filled with crime, sex, or aristocratic weddings.” (60)

“‘Chance favors only well-prepared laboratories.’” (84) [This one is actually Pasteur himself.]

“For me, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that anyone should regard as incomprehensible the nevertheless simple way by which we make it comprehensible.” (90)

“All the attempts to classify or distinguish these entities [hygiene, science, and medicine] have no interest in themselves; they merely indicate the number of freeways that were converging on this enormous cloverleaf exchange.” (137)

“…the ‘symbolic and cultural dimensions,’ the bone that those who have given up the good fare of reality are content to gnaw…” (146)

“I had to give back to the sciences the crowd of heterogeneous allies which make up their troops and of which they are merely the much-decorated high command whose function is always uncertain.” (147)

From Irreductions:

1.1.5.4: “Nothing is known — only realized.” (159)

1.1.14.1: “Order is extracted not from disorder but from orders …
“We always make the same mistake … We are always lamenting decadence and the dissolution of morals. Bad luck! Attila speaks Greek and Latin; punks dress with the same care as Coco Chanel; plague bacteria have strategies as subtle as those of IBM; the Azande falsify their beliefs with the gusto of a Popper. No matter how far we go, there are always forms; within each fish there are ponds full of fish.” (161)

1.2.5.4: “The freest of all democracies reigns between instants.” (165)

1.4.4: “I am willing to talk about ‘logic,’ but only if it is seen as a branch of public works or civil engineering.” (171)

2.1.3.2: “Only teachers claim to be able to extract one sentence from another by means of ‘pure, formal deduction.’ They know in advance the conclusion of the argument they claim to be unfolding. Organized arguments learned slowly and in disorder are unfolded by them at high speed, one after another, concealing what went on backstage behind the blackboard, the tumultuous history that led this proposition to be linked to that one. They offer that which contains in potentia all the consequences for the worship of their pupils, who fervently believe that they have deduced one thing from another.” (177)

2.1.7.1: “In theory, theories exist. In practice, they do not.” (178)

2.4.6: “‘[L]ogic’ is a branch of public works. We can no more drive a car on the subway than we can doubt the laws of Newton. The reasons are the same in each case: distant points have been linked by paths that were narrow at first and then were broadened and properly paved. By now nothing short of revolution or natural cataclysm would lead those who use these paths to suggest another route to the traveler.” (185)

2.5.5: “…Why … is this trade of thought, unlike all others, held to be nonmanual? Because otherwise it would have to give up the privilege of going outside its networks. It would no longer be able to extend itself above the simple practice of tradesmen. Everyone prefers to set intellectuals apart (even if only to ridicule them) rather than to recognize that they work. Even if the believers do not benefit themselves from these free trips, they do not wish others to be deprived of the privilege of hovering outside time and space.” (187)

3.3.6: “We always misunderstand the strength of the strong. Though people attribute it to the purity of an actant, it is invariably due to a tiered array of weaknesses.” (201)

3.4.7: “The meaning of the ‘social’ continually shrinks — it has now been reduced to the level of ‘social’ problems. It is what is left when everything else has been divided up among the powerful; whatever is neither economic, technical, legal, nor anything else is left to it. Do we really expect to bind everything together with this impoverished version of the social? Like a mayonnaise that does not take, it is bound to fail. The ‘social’ — its actors, its groups, and its strategies — is too closely identified with human beings to pay heed to the feckless impurity and immorality of alliances." (205)

3.5.1: “What can we compare with the weaknesses that make up a force? A macramé. Is there a knot that links men to men, neurons to neurons, or sheets of iron to sheets of iron? No. The rope of this Gordian knot has not yet been woven. But every day we see before our very eyes a macramé of strings of different colors, materials, origins, and lengths, from which we hang our most cherished goods.” (206)

3.6.6: “Worlds probably look more like Rome than a computer.” (211)

4.1.3: “…Be strong maybe, but potent never. Kill me, but do not expect me to wish for death and kneel before power. To force I will add nothing.” (213)

4.7.1: “[T]here are not two ways of learning — one academic, human, rational, or modern, and the other popular, natural, disorganized, or ancient. There is only one way. We can always learn in the same way, without short cuts, foresight, or ever leaving the networks that we build. We make each mistake as many times as is necessary to move from one point to another.
“We will never do any better. We will never be able to go any faster. We will never see any more clearly.” (231)

More to come!

Present!

This seems like a useful exercise. I will hopefully get more directed and succinct as we move on to the actual texts, but here's a provisional attempt at self-definition.

I would say our common ground is an interest in academic literary criticism and its history, and also in the ways that literary criticism has been inflected, affected and contested by various other disciplines and styles of thinking and writing. For you, that means primarily philosophy (and, within philosophy, phenomenology and deconstruction); for me, so far, it means sociology and history. And I think both of us are attracted to Latour (correct me if I’m wrong) not just as a theorist to absorb for our own use, but as someone who might help us get a purchase on what actually happens when literary criticism interacts with other disciplines and traditions in this way. In other words, Latour offers us something on a meta-theoretical level: he tries to explain the way science and technology secure allies and translate interests from other fields in order to create some new, solid and durable “reality.” And over the course of time literary criticism has also found new allies, and translated interests, and had its interests translated in return. So Latour might help us understand how this has happened, and how it might continue to happen in the future. (Perhaps this is what you mean by “taking criticism in a new direction”; the question is whether Latour’s work can provide that direction or just help us describe it.)

But other theories — like, say, Foucault’s — could help us understand interdisciplinarity, and still others — like Jameson’s — could help us understand the effect of social environment on criticism. What Latour adds is this interest in solidity and durability — a practical emphasis we’d be less likely to find in, say, Foucault or the New Historicists, who do sometimes speak as if it were only human beliefs and ideologies that kept reality in place (making them “correlationists,” to use Quentin Meillassoux’s term, I hope correctly).* So it seems to me that Latour’s method would be most useful to describe those critical movements and tendencies that have themselves been most durable and influential: e.g., Aristotelianism, the New Criticism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc. Latour allows us to think that these movements might be durable for a reason — that is, there is indeed some reality to them — without us necessarily having to choose one superior reality to explain all the others.

What I am hoping for from Latour is a way of reading sociologically — “externally,” in your terms — without falling into materialist reductionism on one side or correlationist idealism on the other. That is, I don’t want to see things like value judgments or interpretations as mere reflections of social conditions, but I also don’t want to see them as free acts of subjectivity that heroically transcend their historical context. I want to see how critics and schools of criticism have interacted, and why some triumph over others, without reaching for the familiar explanations derived from Kant and Marx. In other words, I don't feel like I need Latour to help me construct interpretations or make judgments, but I may need him to help me see why some judgments and interpretations have lasted, while others have fallen by the wayside.

Also, I must admit that I’m seduced by Latour’s prose style: so straightforward and so rhetorically ambitious at the same time, and with such great examples (many of which I hope to catalogue here). I can’t help but hope a little of that mojo will rub off on me.

*This interest in durability is also found in Pierre Bourdieu, my own previous theoretical hero, but he attributes everything lasting to the habitus: a durable set of dispositions inculcated in the body. This, not some "reality," is what leads us to view the world in the same way over and over again, as well as accounting for the incredible homogeneity among class fractions. All of which makes him, I would say, a realist w/r/t the physical world (the body is indisputably there, and gets impressed upon/marked up by powerful forces) and something like a correlationist w/r/t the social world (the world is nothing but will and representation). He accepts, in other words, the Enlightenment split between nature and society that Latour does away with in We Have Never Been Modern: he just doesn’t have anything much to say about the “natural” side. But we can return to this issue later, maybe.

Where I'm coming from

I thought it would be good to go over where I'm coming from and what I hope, generally, to get out of reading Latour and the others on our reading list.

Like you, Evan, I'm coming from literary criticism. I have a bit of background in philosophy but I'm mostly out to look for what can be useful for interpretation. This includes certain aspects intrinsic to interpretation like techniques or methods, but also extrinsic ones (if I can displace the old New Critical distinction, and use it not to apply to poems but to interpretation itself) like where to situate the critical act.

I generally like to work on the intrinsic, or reform interpretation and criticism from the inside. So I have a tendency to think the situation of the critic in terms of the act of criticism. In this, I follow Derrida, who, as you know, is important to me. But I also recognize a limit to this approach--and see Derrida as fraught when it comes to situating reading. In fact, I'd go so far as to say he is interesting to me as the culmination of a tradition of attempts to reform interpretation from the inside, from within--among other things. So I turn to Latour (and sociology and historicism in general, but here Latour) for a different take on where interpretation takes place. It is his achievement, I think, to try and find a new axis along which interpretation can happen, that thereby pushes it in a new direction intrinsically. I agree with him--what I have read of him already--fundamentally that criticism has to take a new turn in which it "adds reality to the object," as he says.

This might take certain aspects of what he is doing and push it back into the old disciplines, yes (what he complains about at the beginning of We Have Never Been Modern). But I think the project of taking criticism in a new direction has to proceed slowly, or rather through many changes in very diverse practices which we often do not perceive--and not the quick adoption of a new "theory" in literary theory's sense of this word (to which Latour's work assuredly does not amount), which ends up preserving all the old practices. In short, while I might be looking more for the possible effects of Latour's work on how we conceive criticism (and not so much at the work itself, as it were--though of course I'll take issue with it on its own terms), I'm definitely not looking for anything like Latourian literary criticism. I am looking for the right ways to "add reality to the object." And different ways--a task which entails looking at the history of criticism (and the alternative histories critics envisioned that directed their critical work), as well as reading Latour back through the long tradition of criticism.

Regarding Speculative Realism (of course, too simple a label for many diverse and interesting thoughts), I'd say similar things, though in general my interests tend just to be philosophical. My philosophical background has been in philosophy of mind and phenomenology, and am primarily interested in the new movement as it grows out of and contests the phenomenological tradition. Latour is interesting to me too from that perspective, via Harman. Of course I see this as related to (but distinct from) my first reason for reading him.

I mentioned that I have read some Latour before, but not as much as you, Evan. Just a few essays and We Have Never Been Modern. So I'm excited to go through the whole list. I'm more familiar with Harman's work, though it has been a while since I've read Tool Being and I had to read Prince of Networks too quickly during the summer.

Welcome!

This is the blog of our little Latour and Speculative Realism reading group. We'll be reading The Pasteurization of France, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, Aramis or the Love of Technology, Pandora's Hope, The Politics of Nature, Reassembling the Social, and many more essays and books by Latour. We will also be looking at the work of Graham Harman, reading Tool-Being, Guerrilla Metaphysics, Prince of Networks, and several of his essays. If we have time, we will read some phenomenologists, read others (Byrant, Brassier, Hamilton Grant, Meillassoux) who have ties to the Speculative Realist movement, and read some Actor Network Theorists.