Agents —> Actors: Latour on Bourdieu Pt. 2

In my last post I talked about habitus, and about how Latour tries to refashion the concept in a less structural way: it's not a "structuring structure" any more, it's now a collection of "plug-ins" acquired (and lost or phased out) over time. While this is a Bourdieuvian concept Latour seems happy to keep, there are plenty of others he criticizes or simply jettisons: the idea of "fields," for instance, and of "capital," to name two of the most famous. There are of course large practical consequences that follow from these theoretical refusals: Latour takes the concept of habitus very far from its roots as a refinement of Althusser's "ideology" (this is my interpretation, not necessarily sanctioned by Bourdieu) and, thus, seemingly, from the political sphere. Because one of the reasons Bourdieu makes use of habitus so extensively is that he's committed to the idea of a critical sociology that can effect epistemological breaks, and that can thus produce the conditions for both personal autonomy and collective political action. And doing away with "capital," similarly, makes it quite quite a bit harder to talk about "capitalism" (though it should be noted that Bourdieu himself rarely used this word either).

So what about Latour and Bourdieu and politics? Latour's not silent on this matter; in fact much of the last third of Reassembling the Social is devoted to defending ANT against accusations of political complicity and quietism, and showing how sociology can still be politically efficacious while refusing a "critical edge." But to stick for now to his critique of Bourdieu, a passage from the little Socratic dialogue Latour includes as an "interlude" in RTS should serve to indicate what he thinks is wrong with Bourdieu's politics:

[Professor]: Now you have to tell me what is so politically great about transforming those you have studied into hapless, "actless" placeholders for hidden functions that you, and you only, can see and detect?
[Student]: Hmm, you have a way of turning things upside down. Now I am not so sure. If actors become aware of what is imposed on them, if they become more conscious, more reflexive, then is their consciousness not raised somewhat? They can now take their fate into their own hands. They become more enlightened, no? If so, I would say that now, and in part thanks to me, they are more active now, more complete actors.
P: Bravo, bravissimo! So an actor for you is some fully determined agent, plus a placeholder for a function, plus a bit of perturbation, plus some consciousness provided by enlightened social scientists? Horrible, simply horrible. And you want to apply ANT to these people! After you have reduced them from actors to placeholders, you want to add insult to injury and generously bring these poor blokes the reflexivity they had before and that you have taken away by treating them in a structuralist way! Magnificent! They were actors before you come in with your 'explanation.' Don't tell me that it's your study that might make them so. Great job, Student! Bourdieu could not have done better.
S: You might not like Bourdieu very much, but at least he was a real scientist, and even better, he was politically relevant. As far as I can tell your ANT is neither. (154-155)

The student has put his finger on two important, but separate, issues: first, whether Bourdieu is more of a "real scientist" than Latour; and second, whether he is more politically relevant. I think Latour has a very convincing argument about the first; I'm much less sure about the second. I'll try to do justice to both charges in what follows, though if I focus more on the former it's because I feel less conflicted about it myself.

In a way the critique of Bourdieu that Latour advances is a pretty old, familiar one, often made against structuralism (and Marxism) of various kinds. For Bourdieu and his student disciple in the passage above (Latour claims), the agent is just an effect of structure: the agent/object is just a hollowed out, empty place where something happens. Where Bourdieu differs from straight structuralism — and particularly from Althusser — is in his insistence that, through reflexivity, through careful and scientific description of structural determinations, one can widen and extend this empty place of action (or at least make its real dimensions known, and he says somewhere that it is "not that large"), and thus make genuine autonomy — political, moral, aesthetic, whatever — possible. In other words, we are not absolutely determined by the economy (which for Bourdieu, of course, includes the "symbolic" as well as the material economy), but we are much much more determined than we think: and our only hope of establishing the parameters of this determination, and breaking out of them, is reflexive social science. Thus, one might say there is a certain disinterest in what the object actually is in Bourdieu: he's much more interested in articulating baroque contextual frames than in pinning down exactly what's happening in the center. (See also the remark by Hélène Mialet, in her review of Science of Science, that Bourdieu repeatedly conflates the "empirical" with the "statistical": "Bourdieu, it seems, bases his arguments on his métier as a sociologist, which enables him to refine established concepts and to apply them to another 'field.' This experience is what seems to count for him as empirical," 617-618.)

For Latour, on the other hand, a proper scientific object is full, well-defined, and unpredictable, much more so than the structures that surround it: the object is not what is given by structures but what makes networks (which are called structures if we zoom out far enough) by virtue of its activities. He totally rejects the predictive and generalizing aspects of Bourdieu's sociology: the idea that we could extrapolate from data to make large a priori claims about the social world is anathema to him. (It's significant, I think, that Latour almost never uses statistics in his work, though he talks about them sometimes as forms of metrology.) Instead, he wants to be as specific as possible about what occurs in that tiny space that Bourdieu left for action; and, contra Bourdieu, he insists it can be filled in pretty exactly, without need for any margin of freedom or undecidability (I'm beginning to think that there's no real interest in moral autonomy in Latour's thought, despite his occasional rhetorical invocations of it).

We shouldn't think, then, that Latour refuses the bad news of Bourdieu's quasi-structuralism for a return to the old autonomous moral subject. But he also refuses to get all that depressed about it: an advantage of his anti-Kantianism is he doesn't have to share the eternal disillusionment of sociologists like Bourdieu (and his disciple Luc Boltanski) who have to run up against the obstacles that society places in the way of real moral freedom over and over and over. Action, for Latour, has never been a heroic overcoming of determination but is always a "slight surprise," which is why it has to be empirically, not theoretically, accounted for. This is why I don't think we should be too convinced by the moralizing tone of passages like the one I quoted above, where Latour seems to display a (quasi-ethnomethodological) ethical qualm about "critical sociology." It might bother Latour that sociologists like Bourdieu think they know better about the social than the people they study, but his objection to the method doesn't come down to only this: he also just thinks it's bad science! He "respects" his actors, certainly, but not for their moral autonomy: he respects them because one simply cannot predict what they'll do without following them; that is, he respects them for their empirical singularity. He respects them, that is, until he's managed to adequately describe them: after that, they're on their own.

It seems to me that many of the relevant differences here might be registered by the shift from Bourdieu's "agent" to Latour's "actor." An agent, as the legal sense of the word implies, is given the power to act by someone or something else: the important thing is it's been invested with power. An actor, on the other hand, plays a part for a while, interacts with other actors. The emphasis thus shifts, when we move from talking about "agents" to talking about "actors," from talking about whence the objects get their power to what they do with it. But we're also talking temporally: Latour's actors are temporary in a way Bourdieu's agents aren't.

Thus it seems to me Latour has very nearly reversed Bourdieu's theory of action: we've passed from a tiny space of indeterminacy and freedom in the center of an enormous determining social structure to a tiny point of empirical traceability in the center of a huge unformatted mess. For Latour — and he makes this fully clear only in Reassembling the Social, I think — the object or actor is not only affected by other actors it is directly engaging with but also impinged upon from the outside, from things that emerge from what he calls the "plasma," or the vast areas in between networks.

I'll stop there, for now… Next and last, I'll consider Bourdieu's critique of Latour in Science of Science and Reflexivity.

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.

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).

Curved minds

Graham Harman says, in response to my last post: "I’m never convinced by the notion of Latour as a devious strategizer or rhetorician." Fair enough: it's a bit too Sokalian, and makes him sound too much like a sophist (in the colloquial, derogatory sense). But I happened to come across a passage just now in Latour's article "What If We Talked Politics A Little?" (2003) that obliquely addresses this very issue (I love it when that happens):

We have to be careful here so as not to draw the hasty conclusion that it is enough to be devious in order to utter political talk accurately. Unquestionably, politics is imposture; we are well aware that the virtue of autonomy can be secured only at the price of a fundamental vice, betrayal, both there and back; we acknowledged that lying — as opposed to the supposedly easy truth of faithful transfer of information — is an integral part of the work of composition; we know that expecting a spokesperson to "tell the truth," to be "authentic," amounts to killing the process of transubstantiation. However, this does not, for all that, mean that to be a good politician it is enough to lie, to be a phoney. That would be too easy. The Prince of Twisted Words would simply have replaced the White Knight of Transparency … One can walk skew, think curved, cut across, be sly, without necessarily drawing the political circle. It is not because they all differ equally from the straight line that all acts of envelopment are similar. "Curved minds" are clearly distinct from one another, even if they are all an object of ridicule for "straight minds." (153)

So perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that Latour is devious, but always in the service of enveloping something, of drawing a political circle, of catching something in his net. And in this he's not far off from the devious politicians who, as he sees it, are always so despised.

Evil Twins

(Note: I've added a conclusion).

I've been trying to find something like the anti-Latour lately, his arch-nemesis. There's good reason to believe it's Mike Davis.

That is, at least on the sort of public-intellectual level--where this bears on politics. We've already established the more scholarly anti-Latours: Foucault and (I'll add here) Carlo Ginzburg, Weber, maybe adding Jameson. But as these discussions tend to focus more on what results from method, though you've already brought this into the question of politics by talking about the despairing focus on "the system" and indeed the "conflict" view of history.

Here, however, I want to just focus on the bare-bones, flat-out, public-intellectual political statements (the whole incendiary work of the necessary condemnations, expressions of solidarity, warnings etc. etc.), of the nature of that closing remark in "Irreductions:"

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).

I want to contrast the sort of sentiment behind this remark (for it still remains too philosophical) with Davis' political statements in Ecology of Fear. Davis' position is, I think, laudable and somewhat similar to that of Latour's: he's focused on how the environmental community-action groups throughout Southern California have lost their focus by 1) splitting up and losing their allies in the pursuit of 2) holier-than-thou all-out ecological defense against the perversity of growth as such. What slips through this approach is the particularly Southern Californian urban growth-technique of sprawl, which overflows into nature so long as the development companies assure the people and the local governments (through a truly cynical process) that X acres of hillside--that is, the nice-looking but tract-housing-resistant parts of the land--will be "preserved" as "open-space" (the old attempt by business interests to secure the commons in 18th century England and 19th century Russia has now turned into its opposite: they now dole out free communal space in order to dissolve any commons). Sprawl takes these local battles and uses them against any larger anti-development movement, because the pro-environment people are always also against larger government intervention (who they see as providing worse-quality housing solutions)--they'd rather retain the populist position than actually oppose the forces involved.

This sort of impasse, Davis argues, has been resolved symbolically by imagining Los Angeles as a disaster-city. Always about to fall into the ocean, or burn up in flames, or be invaded by the Japanese (in WWII and after), LA and its environs is thought and managed as a site of the apocalypse: disaster, whether sprawl or nukes
(see the picture of a great sci-fi novel Davis references, and which I contrast to the Latour quote above), will have to come sometime--underneath the sheen there is the molten lava ready to erupt again out of La Brea, and there's no way to avoid this. Fatalism is dialed up and made into an aesthetic. Impasse is made only into the motion of tectonic plates.

Of course, on the more scholarly level, Davis' position here might also be that other Southern California resident's--namely that of Adorno. And so perhaps the opposite of Politics of Nature is really Minima Moralia. But I want to stick with Davis because he's more consciously Benjaminian or Simmel- or Ginzburg-like--that is, he digs up more and more bits of culture in order to do this, producing his little semi-convincing microhistories and registers of the symbolic. Here we return to the methodological level--which I think Adorno even in Minima Moralia can't quite duplicate, always pulled away from the particular as he is into the more abstract and principled level (thus he thinks all disaster really on the basis of one event--the Holocaust--and this in terms of an ultimate ethical injustice made concrete).

Regardless, everything reaches a climax in Davis' chapter on the Malibu fires. He here contrasts the handling of these fires--immense spending in order to save a few rich-people's homes, which are built basically as tinderboxes and placed in the most vulnerable locations--to the handling of inner city fires, which are actually (if not as frequent) much more damaging (in terms of lives, not property). The discrepancy is appalling. But Davis links this to that sort of fatalism: no one asks the state to come in and say people can't build their houses in the middle of chaparral on a hard-to-reach hill overlooking Zuma. People just give in and see it as destined to happen, because the politics are too complex.

Now, it's Davis' solution that seems absolutely anti-Latourian to me. For it isn't to analyze all the relationships and forces once more, and bring us back from this symbolic level to the actual impasses. It isn't to offer new strategies, however many political problems Davis isolates and however many recommendations Davis makes. It is, in a final chapter, to "move beyond Blade Runner," the arche-dystopia of LA, which, in the light of all this dispersed disaster, now looks a bit foolish. It isn't megacorporations that destroy LA, it is large corporations working in small but constant ways to make resistance weary, to grind it down in dispersed conflicts over land se, all the while working the politicians. The danger isn't that LA will become Bangkok, overcommercial and overindustrialized, but that Southern California as a whole will become Orange County--over-residential.

In short, the solution is to imagine a more accurate dystopian future. Latour would most definitely laugh at this: it's redolent of the scare-tactics of the Bush administration (terror level orange!), which really just were there to keep us complacent in the present. My point? Latour's remark about the nuke has to be taken against such a background, a background where the only solutions people have regarding the politics of nature (where weird sorts of eco-human relationships like the ozone hole proliferate) are dystopian or utopian (but only the latter in, again, a negative sense--and not many have the guts anymore even to think of these). It isn't a fatalism that characterizes this comment about a particular relationship of force--I think--but a need to provoke precisely a closer analysis that brings us back to the most immediate and non-symbolic problems. The problem, for Latour, is never going to be solved by linking the imagination to the present in the way Davis does: imagining a better dystopia doesn't do anything. It just expends energy in trying to attribute powers to forces, to say that impasses are due to groups with irreconcilable interests. As you have shown, Evan--this is the upshot of the emphasis on misunderstanding in Latour--people are always understanding each other in Latour. There's too much understanding, never too little.

So we don't need to go looking for all the bits of reality that show us, really, how the situation gives us a different dystopia than the one we really are imagining, in the way my parenthesis above argues for a linkage to the 18 Century battle over the commons. I meant that as a sort of illustration (maybe in a sort of Zizekian manner), but some might take it as a real causal attribution: what we're seeing on the hillsides of California just is the actual inverse of a process that happened earlier in the very same system or network. For Latour, this is as implausible as it is for me--who should really just be trying to give some thickness to the phenomenon in such gestures (Zizek- or Jameson- or Sartre-like). But such attribution makes up most of Davis' book. Davis = point out new symbolic locations to find violence that is political, to solidify the connection between politics and the symbolic; posit solutions that are better linkages between those two levels. Latour = follow networks to produce analyses of real locations, pare down the amount of symbols on the presupposition that everything is from the start political and so doesn't need my "revealing" of it as political to be, indeed, political. Visibility then becomes freed from this hermeneutic revealing--and we rethink what all the traditional political rhetoric of openness, of things being in plain sight, can now actually mean.

I'll conclude things here, with a question that really all this opens up: Doesn't this really provide a new, and better, critique of the Cultural Studies-type enterprise, of which the urban studies sort of extension (as if interpretive schools were little phone-lines and we can stand at the switchboard, linking them all or disconnecting them at whim) is the basis of the more sophisticated aspects of Davis' work? At recent conferences, we've seen the critique put in terms of Jonathan Culler's new book, The Literary in Theory: namely, that such multiplication of interpretation forgets the objects that we should be actually interpreting. It's intriguing that this theoretical problem then gets read on to Cultural Studies, as if it were just another symptom of the fate of High Theory--a classic de Manian move of which we should be extremely suspect (since theory only seems to expand in force when, as I've said before, it is a quite limited and frail adventure). Latour offers us a way out: it's all multiplication of interpretation that is the problem--insofar as this happens where there isn't a network. The Davis project is at fault not only because it involves "the comfortable old pursuits of image-counting and thematics" (Jameson, speaking not of this school of criticism but of all criticism in 1979, though I find it as relevant today--"Modernism and Its Repressed"), but also because these methodological failures are indeed comfortable and old. Interpretation doesn't do anything new, doesn't give us any new connections, when it tries to simply multiply them before checking whether they are real or not. Or rather, by multiplying them precisely to show that all the problems can lie on an ideological level, comfortably welded to an infrastructure that will change with the changes in representations. Latour isn't against imagining new aesthetics--that's clear. He's just against the sort of co-optation of that artistic function by critics, which makes the latter think that if we imagine better dystopias, we're actually getting somewhere. One could say he posits an absolute difference between the aesthetic and critical act, restoring to the former its creative function, and lancing off any of its sort of negative valences that come from the out-of-steam latter. He might then have little to say about satires (unless by the scope of their vision they give us interesting new networks--perhaps Swift then falls in there, or the satiric aspects of More). However, he certainly has a lot more to say about why literature and art doesn't have to merely represent or symptomatize some sort of imaginary in order to be effective.