Getting Nowhere Fast

I believe we've agreed to let our Great Utopia Debate rest for a little while and move on to other things, but I just wanted to briefly mark another significant appearance of Erewhon in Latour's corpus, on pages 166-167 of Reassembling the Social:

As we have already witnessed on many occasions, there is often a wide gap between the correct intuitions of social sciences and the odd solutions they provide. This is once again the case: they have tended to confuse the projection of the Phantom Public with the pre-eminence of society. It's true that both have only a virtual existence but not in the same way. The first is a constant appeal to resume the impossible feat of politics, while the second is nothing but a way to dissimulate the task of composition by doing as if it was already completed: society is there, above our heads. So, when inquirers begin to look away from local sites because obviously the key of the interactions is not to be found there — which is true enough — they believe they have to turn their attention toward the "framework" inside of which interactions are supposed to be nested — and here things go terribly wrong. Starting with the right impulse — let's get away from local interactions! — they end up, to borrow from Samuel Butler's famous title, in Erewhon.

Could we substitute "humanities" for "social sciences" here, I wonder? Maybe that's a little hasty, but don't we also tend to run toward the social "framework" way too fast, precisely because we're afraid of getting mired in the local (i.e. the textual — remember the self-conscious concern in the 70s, which overlaps with deconstruction, to get "beyond formalism")? But notice that the problem is not so much the direction, or the movement, towards utopia but the speed of the travel, something you acknowledge at the beginning of your last and post. It's not that it's bad to connect the social to something more than the empirical, to possible worlds or political change; that it's our job to do this is a "correct intuition," and something worth saving, Latour says. It's that we want to get there so badly that we forget to trace the network that could eventually lead us there. It's not necessarily that we shouldn't want to get to utopia/Erewhon/nowhere, then: it's that we shouldn't expect to get there so fast.

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).

Latour and Utopia: A Response

First off, I'd just like to commend you on the scope and daring of your double post on Latour and Utopia. In what follows I'm going to put myself into the role of Latour's defender against your charges, partly because I believe you're being a bit unfair and partly because I just think it'll make things more interesting. But I'd like to stress that I think it's a very intelligent immanent critique and my main goal in responding to it is not to refute it but simply to understand it better.

To save a little time, I'll skip to the excellent summary you give at the top of the second of your two posts, detailing why you think I think Latour is "utopian," at least in a certain sense:

Latour loves technology not as a completely open possibility that is in reality only a black box onto which we project our desires, but as an open box, actually existing technology … such that all the stress is laid upon both "could" and "exist" in the above quote … [H]e's like a utopian about the present, not about the future.

This is a fair extrapolation from my sketchy remark, in my original post on Aramis, that Latour may be a more utopian thinker than he at first appears — as is your characterization of Latour as a "utopian realist," though this perhaps risks blurring realism as a philosophical position together with realism as a political style or strategy. Still, what you seem to be suggesting, and if you are I agree, is that Latour is interested in utopia, and affirms it, as a motive for action (to invoke that old utopian humanist Kenneth Burke for a moment): he doesn't care about utopia as representation, as the cloud cover that reflects the light of our consciousness back at us, but he does care about it, maybe even privileges it, as a generator of action or interests (which, you'll recall, is where we began). You go off on an interesting digression on this is as a kind of "utopian pragmatism," presumably in contrast to the more Hegelian utopianism of someone like Jameson, but I want to table the issue of pragmatism for now (it seems as though Latour sometimes embraces this label, sometimes distances himself from it: in this way it lines up with "actor-network theory" and "realism" quite nicely). I also would just agree with your remarks about "the general sanity of Latour's politics" and your application of his ideas to the Copenhagen talks, and accept your recapitulation of my remarks about the links between 60s utopian thinking and Latour's love of technology. Thus far, I think, we're basically in agreement about Latour's position. In fact, I'm not sure I see a problem until you introduce "the problem":

Here's the problem, though. Essentially, Latour wants to take something of this utopianism, the aspect that wasn't (according to him) technocratic, and keep it as the love, or refigure love with it in mind. And he wants to do so as much as he reforms utopianism into realist-utopianism, making it clear that the technocrat ironically cannot have love for technology. But we then see Latour confuse utopianism proper and something like 1960's optimism, which I'd align with that arrogance--or rather, theoretical expansiveness--of the Levi-Strauss type… Now, optimism/expansiveness and utopia certainly ran together in the sense that the 60's was truly the great age of modern utopias, total visions of not only different social structures or ways of doing things, but also nonce sorts of solutions that would make the world indeed, do better, go faster, see clearly, etc. … But ultimately, as you can see from many of my parentheses, it's hard for me to see in the optimism something completely inseparable from utopia--to the point that is really is utopia's core.

First, a point of clarification. I want to make sure I’m understanding you right (and I apologize, as always, for my slowness on philosophical terrain). Are you saying that Latour is confusing the historical moment of utopian “optimism” (associated with the historical past, i.e. the 60s) with the concept of utopianism itself (always oriented toward the future or, in your reading of Latour, toward the present)? Or are you yourself (consciously) conflating utopia and optimism? In other words, on the most mundane sentence-parsing level, do you mean “it’s hard for me to see optimism as inseparable from utopia,” i.e. you don’t agree that they are inseparable, or “it’s hard for me to see anything in the optimism that could be separated from utopia,” i.e. for you they can’t be separated either? Are you agreeing or disagreeing with what you see as Latour’s confusion of optimism and utopia?

I still don't get it when you move from there into your very useful and interesting distinction between different kinds of utopia:

[F]or me, there are many different types of utopianism. There would be the literary/aesthetic utopia on the one hand, which can't wait to fiddle with the technology, and then the more social-planning type of utopianism that is found in the human sciences--the less humanist and more functionalist/formal Corbu sort of attitude … Latour lumps together all these utopias (as everyone else does), omitting a lot of the more creative aspects, and thereby sees a certain flat treatment of technology as symptomatic of all of them (it's in the same way that Marxism--here now alongside Latour!--often condemns utopias and utopian thinking).

You're probably right that people too often collapse these two forms of utopia together, and maybe Latour is guilty of this as well. But where in Aramis do you see Latour critiquing, or condemning, either literary/aesthetic or social-planning utopias? 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 (see all the talk about “composing the collective” in the second half of Reassembling the Social).

Where we part company, I think, is in assessing Latour's attitude toward the humanities, which I think you read as much more hostile and "patronizing" than I do. You say:

we get a sense that it is the humanities that both want to plan through utopia or critique through it, and aren't really interested in the technology which will bring it about, as well as feel feelings purely, and so instead of getting interested in technology, [we humanists] get interested in the feelings that come from utopia.

I certainly know the attitude you're talking about, but I'm not at all sure it's Latour's. Indeed, I’m not quite sure where you’re getting the idea that Latour is criticizing the humanities. The general tone of Aramis, perhaps more than any of his other books, is one of rapprochement between the humanities (poetry, fiction, history, religion, et al.) and the sciences. Certainly I agree with you if what you’re saying is that Latour/Norbert is trying to recruit humanists to the same side as the technology that they customarily leave to technocrats (who, BL shows brilliantly, don’t understand it any better than the humanists do). And this entails attacking certain positions and ideas that it would be easy to identify with humanism, or the humanities, tout court. But I really don't think it's tenable to paint Latour as having any animus toward the humanities, even if he gets annoyed with some of their rhetoric and their pretensions to autonomy.

Yet it's clear you do think Latour is making such a critique, or at least reflecting some of its ideological aspects, and I want to know more about why you think so. You quote him as saying (in, N.B., one of the few statements in the book he attributes directly to himself, without overt "shifting," quoting, or personification):

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).

And then you comment:

There is the sense that this dissolution produces something like the investment of the non-utopian with the utopian, or the present with all the great impulse (read, pathos, drama, anything but fact) behind the utopian. But doesn't that presume that the utopian is primarily optimism? That grandness of scale? The sort of wide-ranging judgment or ability to pronounce (this is good, this is bad, what feeling!), that is is so quick to turn around upon the sciences, become pessimistic, and say (Heidegger is our hero, after all, as Latour continually remarks) that science doesn't think?

But again, I'm not sure I understand your distinction you want to preserve (or not preserve?) between “utopia” and “optimism,” if it’s not a distinction between utopia as abstract concept and optimism as concrete historical particular (e.g., the optimism of the 60s). You may have just ascended to a Hegelian level that my intellectual elevator doesn’t go up to. But I want to try to get there, even if I have to take the stairs!

And speaking of elevation, you finish with a discussion of

the real status of the concept of utopia in [Aramis] (elevated and denigrated at the same time, just like the humanities) … [U]topia is something to be entertained insofar as it is allied with optimism, or with the sorts of invention that produces great ideas--Norbert with similar elevation/denigration uses the word "genius" about the initial formulator of the idea of continuous transport--but one can't really take utopian optimism seriously unless one becomes a realist and applies it to the "present"--and thereby teaches the humanities (as well as the sciences, but at least they tinker with things, unlike media studies) a lesson. In other words, all I'm saying is that a real (and not realist) utopian vision might be unthinkable from such a perspective--the perspective that would use "utopia" in the following sense: "An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon" (viii).

So, my question for you is, what is a real utopian vision? What is the reality that the humanities lay claim to, or at least have in their sights, that Latour is missing? I understand you as saying that you think Latour "elevates and denigrates" utopianism, poetry, genius — and, by extension, the work of the humanities — by praising them only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action, and not as things in themselves. Though he doesn't stress it, he may be as anti-Kantian in this, his inaesthetic devotion to teleology, as he is in his refusal of the Copernican Revolution — and yes, I agree, it 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. (And, as Latour often points out, it's a very unequal opposite, much less socially respected, much less widely believed in, much less handsomely funded, than the hegemonic sciences.) And if that means he also has to deflate our discipline's pretensions to being a "real utopia" — precisely in order to show us how we can be a part of the realist utopian work of "composing the collective" — then I think he thinks it's a small price to pay.