Latour and New Historicism

I take your point that, in my first post, I ignored what is surely the most obvious thing to strike almost any reader of Guerre et Paix des microbes: that it discusses nonhuman actors (the microbes) on the same plane, and using the same analytic terms, as it does human ones (the Pasteurians, the hygienists, the physicians, et al). Partly it may be that I’m already used to this bizarre trademark move of Latour’s from his other texts, and I was in fact struck by the fact that, in G&P, he mostly does talk about human agents, with the great exception of the microbes. Leaving aside the possibility that he just hadn’t fully developed his theory of actants yet, I think Latour stays away from multiplying nonhuman actors in this book because he wants to make a strong case for how novel it was for Pasteur to introduce the microbes into political discussions in late nineteenth-century France. In other words, if he focused on how many other actants there are that somebody might have introduced, he would fail to make as strong a case for the effectiveness of the Pasteurian strategy.

(And by the way, I absolutely agree that “this perfect case of Pasteur and his microbes sometimes ends up passing over into an allegory for Latour's irreductions.” There are plenty of times when terms BL uses to discuss Pasteur could equally well apply to himself. E.g. this passage, on Pasteur’s movements: “Wherever we expect him to pursue the development of a science in which he will have some success, Pasteur chooses not to pursue this fundamental research but to step sideways in order to confront some difficult problem that interests more people than the one he has just abandoned… [But at the same time] he was faithful to a single problem, that of distinguishing the agents involved” (69); and a page later, when he speaks of “the transversal strategy that seemed to become ever more imperious as he reached the end of his course … to work on the whole of society” (70). The parallels with Latour's own course through the academic disciplines should speak for itself.)

If you don’t mind, I’d like to delay the discussion of Latour’s role vis-à-vis sociology — and also vis-à-vis Marxism which, I’d like to remind us, is historically partly coextensive with sociology: i.e. there have been many Marxian sociologists, and Marx is frequently taught in sociology departments — until we have a little more evidence; certainly by the time we get to Reassembling the Social I think his views w/r/t various different sociological schools will be clear. I promise I’m not dodging your question, which is actually very close to my own “interests” — just buying myself some time.

Instead, I’ll pick up on your fruitful parenthesis about Latour’s use of narratives — even fictional ones — and the New Historicism. You’re quite right that Latour is “trying to admit new sorts of groups” into sociology, although one could equally say that he’s trying to disqualify others, or at least ignore them (he’s noticeably uninterested in classes, for instance). You say “it's only a narrative that will recover these other ‘groups’” and, a little later (and even better) “we narrativize to reactivate certain groups.” This is exactly right, and what’s going on in Pasteurization does seem very close at times to the New Historicism (or, more accurately probably, to Foucault, whose work lies behind all New Historicist practice). You said that “these new groups are people like the hygienists, who disappear from the accounts of power, the narratives of conflict.” First, a slight caveat: according to Latour, the hygienists weren’t missing from “the accounts of power,” they were recorded as consequences of Pasteur’s discovery: Pasteur discovers microbes, and society is changed by the gradual repercussions of this epochal discovery (what Latour elsewhere criticizes as the “diffusion” model). So Latour is not adding anything to the record, the way New Historicists do, he’s just adjusting relations between objects, granting more autonomy to the hygienists than some previous historians have: “Where would the hygienist movement have gone without Pasteur and his followers? In its own direction. Without the microbe, without vaccine, even without the doctrine of contagion or the variation in virulence, everything that was done could have been done: cleaning up the towns; digging drains; demanding running water, light, air, and heat” (23).

But even if Latour were talking about some group whose role in the Pasteur story had been totally overlooked, I would say he still operates differently from the New Historicists. If the New Historicists (and not only them) would say Let’s recover forgotten actors, then Latour could say, Let’s invent or discover new actors/actants [is there a difference between these? I’m still not sure I’ve got a handle on the distinction] and see if we can extend the networks that we already master by doing so. Even if the narrativizing practices are basically the same, it seems to me that the gesture is still different. Latour is at once less “political” (less interested in politics, or ideology) than the NHs, and more political, in that he is actively constructing new polities of things whereas the NHs just look for more political explanations of what we already know existed. Again, whereas the NHs' supposedly radical recoveries show how things were more firmly fixed than we thought, how literature or culture has been determined from the outset by ideology or power relations, Latour's speculations about networks actually change things a lot more, but they're also more fragile and contingent: easier to argue with. (One of the most effective, but also most frustrating, aspects of grand Foucauldian concepts like epistème, dispositif, etc., is how difficult they are to alter or contradict.)

This difference is totally consonant with what I wanted to say about Latour’s swerve away from traditional sociology: the New Historicists are in fact more “sociological” than Latour in their desire to dig up new “social facts” that previous archaeologists had somehow missed, to make the historical record fuller and more factual than it used to be. Fuller, but less interested (and often, I'd venture to say, less interesting). To me, it seems like giving interests to more actors is precisely what historians and sociologists don’t do: rather, they believe there are just a few interests (economic, neurological, or cultural) and that these determine how all the smaller actors act. So when you say “we see that the sort of move away from ‘interest’ that you describe so well is done precisely to move away from a position that would have to give ‘interests’ to things,” I think we may actually be interpreting differently: I read BL as saying that things, like people, do have interests, in that they start from positions of inequivalence and are translated by other things (such as, but not only, humans). Again, I’m not sure I’m with you when you say that

perhaps we can see the move away from "interest" that you describe as a consequence, not of some opposition to interests held in common, but as an opposition to giving microbes "interests" rather than what they really need — reality.

Because “interests,” for Latour, are “reality” (or, at least, are real): they’re what lie between actors at punctiform instants, making them want to move. So I don’t see a “move away from ‘interest’” at all: rather, I see an extension of it, to things as well as people. The important feature, though, is that, as I quoted last time, “common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent” (65), and all the more so, I would think, when you extend the notions of “community” and “politics” to encompass nature and technology as well as human beings.

I feel like I might confuse the issue by going on, but I just want to make clear that I don't think Latour, at least in this early work, does away with the sociological understanding of the world as "interests." On the contrary, it actually seems to be one of the few sociological concepts he wants to keep (see his disparaging remarks, passim, on "legitimacy," "prestige," "power," etc.). What he 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. That's my sense of things right now, at any rate: I'm sure this will all become much clearer as we read on.

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.