Latour and McLuhan

With all the object-oriented fun going on at the DAC conference (as Grant has informed me: an interesting invocation of Harman via Katherine Hayles [author of How We Became Posthuman, which--Grant again informs me--is really good], whose turn to psychology and attention after this and her use of Latour was, for me, quite welcome), I thought I'd finally get to the post on Latour and McLuhan that I have been promising for some time. I see them as opposed, though not entirely opposed, via this remark from a great article (in Theory, Culture and Society) "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means:"

We readily understand how the notion of ‘technical mediation’ is rather inadequate to encompass this triple folding of places, times and agents. The term mediation always runs the risk that its message could be inverted and that one could turn whatever makes it impossible to transfer a meaning, a cause or a force into precisely what merely carries a force, a cause or a meaning. If we are not careful, we would reduce technologies to the role of instruments that ‘merely’ give a more durable shape to schemes, forms, and relations which are already present in another form and in other materials. To return to an example which has been very useful to me: traffic calming devices are not ‘sleeping policemen’ simply made of concrete instead of flesh and bone. If I consider calming devices as mediators properly speaking, it is precisely because they are not simple intermediaries which fulfil a function. What they exactly do, what they suggest, no one knows, and that is why their introduction in the countryside or in towns, initiated for the innocent sake of function, always ends up inaugurating a complicated history, overflowing with disputes, to the point of ending up either at the State Council or at the hospital. We never tame technologies, not because we lack sufficiently powerful masters, not because technologies, once they have become ‘autonomous’, function according to their own impulse, not because, as Heidegger claims, they are the forgetting of Being in the form of mastery, but because they are a true form of mediation. Far from ignoring being-as-being in favour of pure domination, of pure hailing, the mediation of technology experiments with what must be called being-as-another (250).

This obviously brings back the language of otherness which I thought Latour had done some good in dropping--but that's because morality (not ethics, interestingly, and somewhat refreshingly--since we've been getting mired in more and more ethical literary criticism over the past decade or so) is the focus of the essay: Latour wants to square what he's up to with some of these considerations, and also show how technology isn't simply amoral or moral. This, let me just note, is a very McLuhan-like thing to do:

In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Or, "The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value." Again, "Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good. If the TV tube fires the right ammunition at the right people it is good. I am not being perverse. There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

This, of course, is McLuhan in the unbelievably weird classic "The Medium is the Message" (in Understanding Media, p. 11). Where, then, does Latour intervene? Latour wants to say this notion of media is too focused on use, on technical extension of human power. This has, in the past, been the way to make a straight line right to that old bogey "technological determinism." Latour doesn't do this, but he, like others who are equally willing to point out that "that's not what McLuhan is saying" doesn't spell out any reason why this straight line is drawn too quickly (another acceleration there). In fact, Latour goes quite some way in saying that the medium can become a cause, a force in itself--as you see above. Latour might be innovative, though, on this point in redrawing the lines of this old determinism-or-not squabble, not unlike Raymond Williams, whose consideration of McLuhan in the excellent Television: Technology and Cultural Form focuses less on determinism at the level of the instrument than on the level of society and the ability for the medium to be a social medium (which sounds a lot like Latour, and actually is in many surprising ways one can find in Williams' theory of communication--where the individual speaks fully socially only if the others/allies can step into his place, in a sort of relay fashion--but also proceeds along more Marxist lines that Latour,
of course, would wish to avoid).

But perhaps the reason why McLuhan isn't a technological determinist can be seen better, and in a more detailed fashion, if we drop all this, and bring ourselves to the history of media studies as recounted by our own Mark Hansen (in another issue of Theory, Culture, and Society)--a field that Latour seems to not be as familiar with as the sociology of technology (and in the above assuming, as I've tried to draw attention to before, that this field is either on board with his project or can just be integrated into it). There Hansen rightly points out the two main tensions in this field: technical evolution conceived formally (as technical history) and the more embodied sort of conception of technology as prosthetics or augmentations. The former would make us leap into the area of the non-human and technical directly, it seems, while the former have to deal more with use. The determinist McLuhan is seen in terms of the former (which aligns him with Kittler, the biggest and most sophisticated proponent of such historical technics), though non-determinist McLuhan is the latter. It's more like the formal move (medium is the message) that McLuhan continually makes to argue his position and clear out some space for his work is at odds--fundamentally--with where he wants to go and indeed is focused upon (and which is more profitably investigated by media studies people rather than communications scientists).

Now, Latour, in my mind, is really determined to address only one of these traditions, and just strikes out in the other direction himself. He addresses the first tradition (history/evolution of technology) and moves more towards the user-aspect of technology. But he does the latter not so much by focusing on use itself than changing the ontology of the technical object, and this actually makes his contribution fall more in the former category! We can see this in Aramis, where the real enemy is Darwin crudely seen in technology. This I think means, for all his spiel on use above, that Latour is most opposed to the sort of Leroi-Gourhanian project which is at the heart of Bernard Stiegler--and which might be said to be the poststructuralist extention of the Kittler dynamic (which Kittler himself might be able to be rescued from)--and the Latourian intervention is welcome here (I think Grant comes to some similar conclusion in his post on Stiegler). Technical objects don't evolve like this, or interrupt our evolution in this negative way only. They, gaining and losing degrees of reality, form collectives with us, and bolster our humanity (considered as a morphism or, to impose my language again, morephism). But this leaves the realm of actual use--actual dynamics, which tend to be investigations of a feel, and remain more affective than anything in Latour--a little more empty than embodied media-studies of the non-determinist/formal McLuhanian type, at least for me: it rather makes the more basic ontological point which is opposed to that one which Stiegler (and perhaps also Martin Hägglund) might make.

So despite what he says above, I think Latour's more on the side of McLuhan than we might think, but interested in making an point about technical evolution which makes him think he's opposed to the McLuhan tradition--when he's more opposed to something like Kittler. As media studies takes over Kittler and brings him back to the more embodied McLuhan area (as it has been over the last decade), they end up near Latour... however, they don't share his ontology, I think, nor do they really need to in order to make their work, well, work. And so one has to ask the question that I brought up last time: does one need the Latour ontology in order to bring about the transformation beyond the modern? In a similar way, this is like asking whether sociology of science (producing books like The Leviathan and the Air Pump) needs his Constitution. It's certainly the logical next step, and produces really only a making explicit what is already there (though I wonder whether it produces only this): the use of media as an intermediary. Whether media studies should follow Latour in taking it (and ANT, as I noticed, via a nice link on Levi Bryant's blog, that this person has), in order to address Kittler and the Stiegler-ian, poststructuralist, posthuman tendency, is a question, since this might be the only truly modernizing (or rather postmodernizing) aspect of the media studies project which is less advanced, as it were, than Latour: the analysis of using technology in Latour for me remains less sophisticated than what goes on in media studies--while of course Aramis remains a bit more brilliant, losing all those Foucauldian discourse-dependent aspects we find in Kittler. Perhaps, though, instead of Latour, Harman remains an option (and he's interested in restoring phenomenological feeling or a feel, let's just note, to our experience of objects, without the carnality of earlier philosophies and indeed phenomenologies, as well as the pseudo-phenomenology of philosophies of the virtual), and we could reconstruct the interactions of technical objects with themselves, and reproduce a posthuman history on that (related, but perhaps more precise) basis.

Latour and Utopia: A Response

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're probably right that people too often collapse these two forms of utopia together, and maybe Latour is guilty of this as well. But where in Aramis do you see Latour critiquing, or condemning, either literary/aesthetic or social-planning utopias? It seems to me he’s fully on board with both of them — and would maybe even refuse to accept your distinction and argue they’re basically the same thing (see all the talk about “composing the collective” in the second half of Reassembling the Social).

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

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

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

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

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

And then you comment:

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

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

And speaking of elevation, you finish with a discussion of

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

So, my question for you is, what is a real utopian vision? What is the reality that the humanities lay claim to, or at least have in their sights, that Latour is missing? I understand you as saying that you think Latour "elevates and denigrates" utopianism, poetry, genius — and, by extension, the work of the humanities — by praising them only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action, and not as things in themselves. Though he doesn't stress it, he may be as anti-Kantian in this, his inaesthetic devotion to teleology, as he is in his refusal of the Copernican Revolution — and yes, I agree, it does go against much of the humanities as they are currently constituted and rationalized. (Somebody who knocks out Kant, Hegel and Heidegger all at one go isn't leaving much left to prop up the philosophical aspirations of our English and Comp. Lit. departments.) But I don't think it follows from this that Latour is anti-humanities, any more than the introduction of objects into actor-network theory makes him an anti-humanist, and the fact that he wants to enlist the humanities doesn't mean he sees them only as a means and not an end. It just means he's refusing to see the humanities as what they so often agree to see themselves as: the opposite of technology, the opposite of science. (And, as Latour often points out, it's a very unequal opposite, much less socially respected, much less widely believed in, much less handsomely funded, than the hegemonic sciences.) And if that means he also has to deflate our discipline's pretensions to being a "real utopia" — precisely in order to show us how we can be a part of the realist utopian work of "composing the collective" — then I think he thinks it's a small price to pay.

Latour and Utopia, part 2

Now, my last post on this topic just was outlining the general position of Latour via technology as it intersected with this issue of utopia, following your lead. I put a bit of pressure on some of your words, trying to tease out the sense of that sentence in which you said, rightly, "what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist," and then were able to also draw out how this is the case because (or rather only because) Latour isn't a technocrat: Latour loves technology not as a completely open possibility that is in reality only a black box onto which we project our desires, but as an open box, actually existing technology (to use the old phrase in a weird sense), such that all the stress is laid upon both "could" and "exist" in the above quote. I said he's like a utopian about the present, not about the future. Accordingly, such temporal schema like this get dissolved or rethought through the implied metaphysics, and so to talk like this quickly becomes inaccurate. It might be better, then, to say, as I did at the end of the post, that Latour is a utopian realist.

But let's be clearer about this: to be utopian about reality, to look for possibilities within what could exist, or become only more real than it already is, means also to rethink what it means to be pragmatic--another word I used last time. Now, you wouldn't really think this necessary, as pragmatism and certain aspects of realism have indeed been aligned philosophically--though fundamentally it is more a matter of tone, perhaps, than anything else (and the tone of the pragmatists, above all) since at bottom the two systems/schools are mostly incompatible. More important, though, is the aesthetic (or, let's say, the felt process guiding concept-formation/organization) that both of these philosophies project, and which allows them to rejoin (and their overgeneralized label, alongside that tone, is one way that they do this) a more general and indeed political sphere in which they seem to be, not just allies, but twins: realism produces pragmatism with respect to the issue at hand, and vice versa.

But Latour changes this all around. Not only does he make us rethink the basis of the differences between the two positions, by making a new sort of realism--and a more robust and accurate realism (some of the requirements of realism being not really requirements at all, as Harman, for one, has pointed out in his nice talk about materialism)--such that we can say, philosophically, that all previous realisms aren't really realisms, or are insufficient realisms, and then go on to conclude the link to pragmatism proves philosophically possible or impossible again on this new basis. No. He also makes possible a brand new pragmatism by way of this really robust realism, and in the widest most everyday sense. No longer is one pragmatic by focusing only on what is most necessary, cutting away everything that might be interesting but not bear on the situation. Pragmatism loses its (indeed Anglo-American, and oddly religious in ethic) connection with prudence, a connection that makes it come along to shut down questions, deem them irrelevant, cut all sorts of lines of thought off--or urge us to sit content with what we've got in a pseudo-Kantian way (I speak in general terms, as philosophically the positions become more nuanced and aimed precisely at cutting away such aesthetic associations, even though the associations seem to inform this very process of shearing off). Politically, it no longer means sticking with the immediate, with the practical, with the doable. Rather, Latour's pragmatism is often impractical, though it is always aimed at being realist, and indeed doing, changing, modifying, rather than hoping some intellectual trickle-down effect will take care of things. Most radically, it makes pragmatism have some hope to it--rather than narrow this latter category into some overgeneral category of "belief," which I think (but this is just me) isn't so much out to respect belief as to render it, through that respect, "mere belief." Rather than messing around with an impoverished sense of belief and the problems it produces, Latour offers us a new form of belief (which, however, might have some very old content, as you pointed out by mentioning his religiosity).

Needless to say, I find this really promising. It's the part of the extension, making a mess of things, that I like: the one thing you don't want to do, ever, for Latour, is clean up the mess under the guise of being pragmatic, since being realist about the network makes you even more pragmatic than what you'd achieve by ceasing to follow it (by "getting down," after all this work, "to the real issues"). I might take a moment here also to note something that I don't think we've sufficiently recognized: the general sanity of Latour's politics in, at least, the short term. Latour wants to really make sense of serious issues that confront us, and which others seem to have no way to address. The stupidity of the scientists mucking about with global warming data right before the huge Copenhagen conference is only possible if they don't share a Latourian point of view about the issues--this seems to go without saying. But the reactions to it--incredulity that the scientists would want to make their case in the most stark terms possible--are only possible for the same reasons. The prudishness with which we approach science is, in such situations, quite unbelievable, and the sort of Feyerabendian sort of reduction (science = ideology, to the point that we should teach it alongside creationism) that we're tempted to make in reaction shows a similarly unbelievable determination to keep such issues away from basic political considerations. So all those things on the newspaper--and the general shift of science from the physics model which dominated the 19th and 20th centuries towards the biological, of which each is a symptom revealing how this trend will continue perhaps even into the 22nd century--are, I think it's important to say, the right issues. But, if I now can move past this, still more important than any of Latour's particular political positions, is the restoration of some real content to "the political" though this symmetrical determination to make sense of all such news items--after it has been so utterly drained (and reified into that "the") by the postmodern appropriations of the tired old self-other dynamics in Schmitt. I outlined all this in a previous post with respect to how real politics changes our notion of rhetoric and language, but here I just wanted to show how it also was at the core of this utopian pragmatism.

But now, back to the issue of utopia proper, and its relation to technology in Aramis. I brought us back to the issue of love and pathos--passion of all kinds--via what you said:

And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management.

There is not only politics in the fact that the technocratic approach kills off technology as such. There is pathos, irony, peripeteia. For in saying that technology is not really the technocratic or the crude, pulpy SF (if you do want to see only misunderstanding in that genre, rather than, even there in the pulps, a rich history of tinkering and handicraft) black box, neither are we just talking about whether technology is a black box or not, and whether technocracy treats it as one or the other. We're talking about, indeed, the quality of that love of technology that Latour also is saying cannot really be technocratic, and which itself has, for him, something to do with utopianism as a version of this technocratism and as a version of this love. In other words, we're back at what you said in the beginning: utopianism prior to being a realism of Latour's sort is not just the technocratic sort of hope, but the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, that abounded in the sixties is bound up with technology:

In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis [the project] seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism [...I skip over the Habermas comment, namely that utopianism is often anti-technological like Habermas: to have Habermas as your utopian is setting the bar unbelievably low, no?, and I thought I said enough about how the notion of fantasy in utopia takes care of the anti-technological stance and makes it only pseudo-anti-technology] in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

So I read your remark here backwards: it's that, once we've got how utopianism pervaded technology and engineering, how do we read it back into Latour's (nostalgic) sense of what Aramis stands for?

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

For I can't really believe in two connections here that Latour makes. I have trouble seeing utopia as anything so perverse as the technocracy that takes technology as an object without love: certainly it's hard for me to see in SF utopianism, or even in fantasy (the amazing 60's-70's revival of LOTR), anything like full on

technocratic thinking that treats technology as a full black box, however much there is a sort of engagement with technology. This may be because, for me, there are many different types of utopianism. There would be the literary/aesthetic utopia on the one hand, which can't wait to fiddle with the technology, and then the more social-planning type of utopianism that is found in the human sciences--the less humanist and more functionalist/formal Corbu sort of attitude: though there is a lot of planning in the literary, it is never as pure (i.e. empty) as architecture or social-science/politics generally, either because the latter is tied to praxis more than theory (as Jameson perhaps too forgivingly explains it), or because it is just generally formal/practical about society (as I'd venture).

That's one expliantion: Latour lumps together all these utopias (as everyone else does), omitting a lot of the more creative aspects, and thereby sees a certain flat treatment of technology as symptomatic of all of them (it's in the same way that Marxism--here now alongside Latour!--often condemns utopias and utopian thinking). But--and here is the second point--then there is that sense that utopia is a sort of pure love through its big thinking about the technological object which comes to that technology from the outside to invest it with meaning. It is, then, the purity of the feeling or the love that seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization. So in both cases, we get a sense that it is the humanities that both want to plan through utopia or critique through it, and aren't really interested in the technology which will bring it about, as well as feel feelings purely, and so instead of getting interested in technology, get interested in the feelings that come from utopia. Thus it is the deeper tie of pathos with the humanities that I find odd, because this is what explains that sense you rightly feel that Latour is nostalgic for the grandness of scale in theory of old (Sartre, Levi-Strauss, etc.)--but also explains my sense that this is not at all a nostalgia for any proper utopianism. In other words, it is love that is tied with the humanities in general, which then produces the conflation of utopia with optimism, or the mistaking of the latter for the former in Latour (as I'd put it: Norbert/Latour likes the former or is genuinely nostaligic more for it than the latter).

Let me be a bit more precise. We can turn to the earliest mention of utopia in the book to see everything I'm getting at. It's in the Preface:

Samuel Butler tells the story of a stranger passing through the land of Erewhon who is thrown into prison because he owns a watch. Outraged at the verdict, he gradually discovers that draconian measures forbid the introduction of machinery. According to the inhabitants of Erewhon, a cataclysmic process of Darwinian evolution might allow a simple timepiece to give birth to monsters that would rule over humans. The inhabitants are not technologically backward; but they have voluntarily destroyed all advanced machines and have kept none but the simplest tools, the only ones compatible with the purity of their mores (Aramis, vii).

Now, here's the upshot:

Butler's Nowhere world is not a utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats.


By publishing this book, I would like to bring that isolation to an end (vii-viii).

Very nice. Utopia is dissolved into the present, in the realist manner that I am describing above. But then, there comes this, the aim of the book:

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

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

I find in these lines about humanists something equally patronizing, don't you? And for me, it actually sort of undercuts the whole waffling back and forth that we have traced above which produces the realist-utopian stance that Latour offers, because it makes the book out to be something like an elaborate hoax as far as love is supposedly also joined together with Latour's new utopianism, or is productive of its most veritably realist aspects. Are we, in describing Aramis this way, really talking about pathos? Or are we simply talking about the stereotype of pathos--i.e. the fact that it is studied by the humanities and not the sciences? We are reinvesting technology merely with what the humanists would like to see in it--poetry, no?

Now I don't think Latour is entirely up to that, since restoring the human to the humanities is one of the major goals of his project (see WHNBM on the anthro-), and indeed this sort of pathos is also shared by the scientists themselves at work (Latour wants to account for how they sometimes care about the project in the same way, or at least as much, as a humanist cares about a poem--though, I think, it can then be said that the portrayal of humanities-pathos is indeed really the scientist's image of humanities-pathos). Regardless, this sort of ultra-skepticism about Latour does press him hard on the issue, and shows, I think, the real status of the concept of utopia in the work (elevated and denigrated at the same time, just like the humanities). Or, it rather reveals the brilliance of Latour's actual case-studies might outdo his general sense of their purpose (the philosophy that informs them would be inferior to the actual study--or rather perhaps only the ANT theory considered less philosophically and more as a guide for research would be an adequate characterization of what goes on in the cases): utopia is something to be entertained insofar as it is allied with optimism, or with the sorts of invention that produces great ideas--Norbert with similar elevation/denigration uses the word "genius" about the initial formulator of the idea of continuous transport--but one can't really take utopian optimism seriously unless one becomes a realist and applies it to the "present"--and thereby teaches the humanities (as well as the sciences, but at least they tinker with things, unlike media studies) a lesson. In other words, all I'm saying is that a real (and not realist) utopian vision might be unthinkable from such a perspective--the perspective that would use "utopia" in the following sense:

An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon (viii).