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).

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

I wanted to call attention to two recent texts I've read on the internet (both found via Graham Harman) that your "forgetting/stupidity" post put me in mind of. The first is a blog post which has created a bit of a furor in the SR community, comparing Harman's mode of philosophizing to a Ponzi scheme, essentially claiming that it's just playing on people's willingness to invest in a new philosophical movement without regard for "securing the assets," as it were (i.e. making sure the philosophy on offer is coherent). And the other is this review of Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth and Žižek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by the conservative political philosopher John Gray in the Independent, in which he basically claims that their critique of capitalism and proposed return to "the communist hypothesis" is itself conditioned by the decline of historical memory under late capitalism, because they've clearly forgotten all about totalitarianism. (How's that for dialectic?)

I just wanted to point out that both are good examples of what Norbert in Aramis derides as "crude sociology." In both cases, the authors produce a dense, oily substance that has its uses, but that is perhaps too effective, not specific or refined enough, for the particular critical purpose they're using it for. That is, do we need SR to reflect the structure of financialization in order to criticize its philosophical claims as excessive? Do we need contemporary communism to have literally "forgotten history" in order to disagree with its visions of what is to be done? As Latour would surely point out, these are perfectly symmetrical strategies taken up by the right and by the left. It's not ideology, or stupidity, that's clouding anybody's judgment here: if anything, it's the knee-jerk habit of accusing one's opponent of being blinded by ideology, or being stupid, or having "forgotten history." And it is assuming, as Norbert steadfastly refuses to assume, that you yourself could have "done better."

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, and it may help account for Latour's differences and similarities with Nietzsche (a fascinating topic which I hope we can talk about more at some point), who does actually think that, under certain circumstances, forgetting history is a good thing.

Hold me closer, tiny actor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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