Phenomenology of Reading Latour

As per your suggestion a little while ago, here are some scattered notes on what it's like (for me) to read Latour.

I'll start by jumping off from something you wrote to me (in an e-mail): "he actually is quite a great article-writer... usually I find that you can oppose article-writers to book-writers, but he's great at both!" I think this is true, although I've got to say that so far I give a slight edge to his books: Latour is such an ambitious theorist, always wanting to lay down the maximum bet and shake things up as much as possible (sometimes at the risk of caricaturing others' positions, as you point out in your most recent post), that I think he does better with a little room to stretch out and indulge his theatrics, rather than being forced, for reasons of space, to keep one line of argument going from beginning to end. Another way of putting it would be to say that, like Norbert in Aramis, Latour's method is to make as much of a mess as possible, and then see what's required in order to clean it up — an approach that seems crazy until you realize how closely it reflects the socio-logic of how actors actually make sense of the world. So I guess what I'm saying is that in the articles he sometimes doesn't have enough time to make a mess and clean it up.

You also mention that reading Latour gets you "talking more in terms of strategy rather than about ideas": "Something about how you get a little more frank and unashamed while reading this stuff has to be communicated to people..." Again, I totally agree, and this is something I get from Bourdieu as well: the sense of non-stop devious strategizing (which in Bourdieu, of course, is also thematized) is, once you get used to it, actually very useful as a model, a manner you can imitate, at least to a certain extent, to make your own arguments (which obviously don't need to be the same kinds as the ones Bourdieu or Latour make).

But Latour is such a rhetorical writer that it can even be slightly off-putting, not to mention confusing, because he's also got such a rhetorical view of life. (In this, he's like Nietzsche, who keeps coming up, which perhaps shouldn't be so surprising: as I recall reading somewhere — maybe Harman's book? — he's one of Latour's biggest unacknowledged influences.) In other words, Latour is always trying to convince you that everything in the world is trying to convince everything else: as if reality is in fact made up of innumerable little Bruno Latours. He pays nearly everything the compliment of assuming it's as clever as he is. (He does make some exceptions, usually for other sociologists.) I realize this sense on my part contradicts some of what you said towards the end of your last post about BL's positive valuation of a certain kind of "stupidity," or "forgetting," that goes along with being on the inside of a network. If we're on the inside, and we can just forget what we're doing and sort of go limp, then there's no real need to strategize and rhetoricize all the time. We don't really need "the logic of practice" to explain how anything happens. And there does seem to be a general shift in Latour's work away from a Bourdieusian assumption that everything is infinitely clever (which we find in Pasteurization of France and Science in Action) towards an assumption that everything is kind of stupidly enthusiastic.

But this is rather vague, so I'll finish with a specific passage that I think illustrates many of the hallmarks of Latour's style pretty well. It's from "Where are the Missing Masses?" (1992), which I believe we both read a couple of weeks ago:

The most interesting (and saddest) lesson of the note posted on the door at La Villette is that people are not circumspect, disciplined, and watchful, especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130 (I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white; no one else seems to bother, except the mourning families). Well, that is exactly the point of the note: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed." In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman — that is, machines and gods. This note indicates how desperate its anonymous frozen authors were (I have never been able to trace and honor them as they deserved). They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans; this failed, the door was always left open. Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal, that is, to a nonhuman who regularly and conveniently does the job in place of unfaithful humans; to our shame, we must confess that it also failed after a while, the door was again left open. How poignant their line of thought! They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is, there was, and ever will be. If human and nonhuman have failed, certainly God will not deceive them.
(166-167)

What's going on in this passage? Let's taxonomize:

1. Humor. This is probably one of the first things that strikes readers of Latour: he's very funny, and not afraid to make jokes about pretty much anything, at any point of his argument. (Graham Harman says somewhere that he initially got interested in Latour because he was the only funny person in Continental philosophy.) Here the jokes are at the expense of French drivers (they don't obey the speed limit), the authors of the note ("How poignant their line of thought!" — treating them as if they themselves weren't making a joke), and Latour himself as a scholar (he regrets being unable to properly cite the authors of the note). And the improbably specific details ("French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130," and then, a little later in the sentence, "the mourning families") are also funny.

2. Symmetry. These kinds of parallel constructions are so characteristic of Latour as to be almost an obsession: "In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman…"; "They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans… Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal…" One of the odd things about Latour is that, for a thinker so committed to asymmetries and hybrids and quasi-objects, he divvies up and juxtaposes and dichotomizes like Derrida never gave dualisms a bad name. Often his symmetrical formulations are ironic, i.e. he's caricaturing what some other person or group thinks (the moderns, the epistemologists, the technologists, et al.), but he's still clearly addicted to them. And I should say, I don't think this is a problem; that is, I don't think he's really a dualistic thinker, or at least not at all a rigid or limited one. In Latour these pairs ("epistemological couples," in Bachelard's parlance) are always getting pulled apart and recombined and mapped on to others (and not simply reversed, as in dialectic). But stop him at nearly any point and he's always working with a clear-cut distinction.

3. Sacred/theological language. This is another persistent verbal habit of Latour's: it pops up as early as Irreductions and plays a big role in the rhetorical vocabularies of both We Have Never Been Modern and Aramis. One way to deal with this would be simply to read it under the heading of (1), that is, as a joke — and sometimes Latour does use sacred language as a joke, or for merely hyperbolic or blasphemous effect. But knowing that he's a practicing Catholic puts an interesting spin on his continual recourse to a religious idiom. I don't quite know what to say about it here, but I'd just like to add a little more to the passage I quoted above:

I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this February day, the door was open. Do not accuse God, though, because the note did not make a direct appeal; God is not accessible without mediators — the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well — so instead of asking for a direct miracle (God holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel, as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison) they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough. (167)

Who is Latour reassuring here? On one level he seems to still be joking: who would possibly think to "accuse God" of leaving a door open? And again, he's hyperbolically specific: that "as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison" is obviously an unnecessary flourish, and a bit of a goof on Latour's own multidisciplinary scholarly authority (oh, you're a theologian now?). But even without knowing anything about Latour's own beliefs, the last three sentences are charged with a sort of melancholy resignation: "instead of asking for a direct miracle … they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough." Of course, the whole point of Latour's article is that much of what we think of as autonomous human morality is in fact preordained by clever engineers, who make it practically impossible not to wear a safety belt, or exceed the speed limit on a residential street, or leave a door open. As you'd expect from him, he seems for the most part to see this as a good thing, as well as a technological marvel, and he would like sociologists, technologists, and moralists all to see that what they talk about is so densely intertwined. But that final caveat — "In our secular times, this is no longer enough" — suggests a somewhat darker (almost Heideggerian?) picture of the "missing masses," a sort of nostalgia for a (probably imaginary) past in which humans really did make moral decisions, in which autonomy was real and society did not make so many of the crucial choices for human beings ahead of time.

Of course, I could be way over-reading (an occupational hazard), and Latour's "secular times" is just total sarcasm: he does cast doubt on the very idea of secularization in We Have Never Been Modern and numerous other places. But it's the sort of troubling ambiguity that he opens up, again and again, through his use of sacred language, and also, for different reasons and to a different degree, through his use of the language of politics.

But I'll stop here, having made a mess and not cleaned it up. Suffice it to say that the more one thinks about Latour's style, the more fascinating a rhetorical case study it becomes. And I haven't gotten to his own writings on style (of matters of concern and so on). I'm sure this is a subject we'll both have a lot more to say about as we go on.

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.

Forgetting/stupidity

It just struck me, looking over some articles and reflecting on Aramis, that indeed there it is better to start with Latour as a sociologist rather than as something else... as a philosopher (which is pretty much how I started grasping him), say, or as what I want to consider now: Latour as historian. Obviously history has a lot to do with the the ANT-Science-Studies-Latour project in general. But ultimately--as you, Evan, have reminded me in the past--the use of the black box is there to close off certain historical avenues and keep the field being investigated tightly bound to the movements and relationships of the actual actors (by opening other closed boxes others only peeped into). But in this sort of arrangement, you do end up with something more sociological, ultimately, than any history--don't you? Early on in Aramis, Latour says the following, as Aramis' network is being reconstructed (or constructed):

Our interviewees no longer even manage to recall who might have come up with the dream of PRT. They can't tell you what institutions were behind its development.[...] Of course, a historian of technology outght to work back toward that origin and replace it with groups, interests, intentions, events, opinions. [...] She would reposition Aramis "in its historical framework;" she would etermine its place in the entire history of guided-transportation-systems. She would go further and further back in time. But then she would lose sight of Aramis, that particular event, that fiction seeking to come true. Since every study has to limit its scope, why not encompass it within the boundaries proposed by the interviewees themselves?
-Aramis, 18-19

But there's also some connection here, I'd like to suggest, between something Latour says in the introduction to Pandora's Hope:

"But is science cumulative?" he continued with some anxiety, as if he did not want to be won over too fast.
"I guess so," I replied, "although I am less positive on this one, since the sciences also forget so much, so much of their past and so much of their bygone research programs [...]"
-"Do You Believe In Reality?" 1-2.

Don't we hear what Latour is saying in Aramis in another key? The lost networks can't in other words, be thought in any way as something like lost history. The "forgetting" here is not the same thing as the "forgetting of history," with all its sort of massive, catastrophic weight. This is what I find weirdest in Latour--the sort of realigning of affects that focusing on networks allows us. I'm going to come back to this in another post replying to your wonderful review of Aramis and its stress on the passions of research--something Latour, in a little two page blurb "From the World of Science to the World of Research," and at the end of Aramis itself ("The whole thing should have been a research project," 287) makes clear should be distinguished from the passion for science (though both, of course, are wrapped up in problems of the nonexistent modernity).

For now, I just wanted to note how forgetting here takes a sort of different form. In a Nietzschian way, it becomes both easier and harder to forget--essentially because its not so taboo. Obviously, this is nowhere near the sort of total, extremely active forgetting we have in Nietzsche--but fundamentally forgetting, even ignorance for Latour becomes... okay, because we're concerned only with action at a distance. So back in Aramis, something like the ignorant non-questioning merges with a more practical it-being-out-of-the-question:

For all of them [researchers], PRTs are beyond discussion: everyone wanted them; they had to be developed. There is no disagreement on this point. No engineer leaves open the possibility of mechanical uncoupling of cars. It's out of the question.
-Aramis, 19.

And somehow this has to be matched by a counter-stupidity that is just as okay. I was preparing another post, and I came across this quote I had forgotten:

"Always assume people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you're studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point when the thing is irresistible, when what you really want, yourself, is to take out your checkbook so you can, I don't know…"
"Buy a share in the Chunnel?"
"That's it, or even shares in the Concorde."
"Even in La Villette?"
"Which one, the first scandal or the second?"
"The second."
"Oh, the La Villette museum. I don't know; it's a disaster, after all, why not, it had to be tried. Never say it's stupid. Say: if I were in their shoes, I'd have done the same thing."
-Aramis, 36.

The pupil tests Norbert, and we're off having a different (I guess one could say, differently stupid [if you take this in the best sense] willing-to-forget) regard for history--which brings me back to my first point:

"Even in that business of the sniffer planes?"
"Of course, silly boy, you would have bought into it, and not because you're naive; on the contrary, precisely because you're a clever fellow. It's like the Galileo affair. You have to get inside it until you're sure: that one is guilty; he should be exiled, and even, yes, even fried a little, the tips of his toes at least. Otherwise, if you thick differently, you're a little snot. You play the sly one at the expense of history. You play the wise old owl."
-Aramis, 36-7.

That brings me round to innovation and utopia... two topics that will take up your last post.