...in the last post: namely that, if we take Latour's statement in We Have Never Been Modern about how "it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting" (WHNBM 76; Latour's emphasis), we might think time gets spatialized, and this would mean some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour would be overlooked. Now, these commonalities weren't necessarily in terms of an interpretation of time as nonspatialized, either. It is clear that while Heidegger holds something like this (crudely put, spatiality has its "end" in time--though we should also point out that time ultimately has its "end" in the destining of being, though Heidegger, rightly, would not see in this history any return to spacing... enter Derrida) because Latour holds that time and space are mere "frameworks" we use to describe the relations of force between actants (as I made clear last time, but here's just another quote to remind you: "If time depends on associations, associations don't depend on time," 141), it can't be on the issue of any "interpretation of time" that they might agree.
So what's the commonality? A commitment to subordinating time ultimately to something like practice--seeing time generated practically or through the practical. Now, I don't mean to say something stupid like, for Heidegger, time is a result of Dasein's projections, etc. This should be clear from my parenthesis above (time is historical). By "practical," I mean something different--namely that the emphasis falls on how it is always more like a framework than a form. So while the two systems are distinguished clearly--roughly we can say something like Heidegger takes time to be real and Latour doesn't (he takes trials of strength as real)--nevertheless both want to undo time as representable and make it into something like the contours of any and all action. (John Protevi in his Political Physics has a compelling chapter on this--"Philosophy and Leisure"--ultimately dealing with how philosophy has to be a difficult activity for Heidegger... and of course not just for Heidegger).
In other words, the similarity is in the sort of meta-level (that is, on the edge of the concepts and the systems, which are indeed formally incompatible on the issue of time) "critique of representation" (as Jameson aptly calls it--and we'll get more on this as he is supposedly writing a book on Heidegger) that I mentioned in the last post:
Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces).
I'm now just trying to say how this is indeed "less temporal"--in terms of time as representable unrepresentable, or form (Kant, of course)--but also "more temporal" than we might think--in that we find the position of Latour being similar to the position of Heidegger when it comes to de-representing time, among other things... that is, by bringing a practical emphasis--only most visible in Heidegger's privileging of phronesis over sophia--to bear on their conceptions.
I'll be clearer. I'm saying that on the issue of time, we can see a meta-level tendency to claim the following in both Latour and Heidegger:
There are not two problems of representation, just one (WHNBM, 143).
And this is because representation is dependent (if I can put it way too simply) on what reality does, rather than what it is--such that what it does is what it is. This might sound odd if one has a superficial understanding of Heidegger as "the thinker of being," but really it is only through the emphasis on doing that Heidegger recovers that question of is-ing (and this is what makes what he does something other than ontology as it has always been done). Now, if reality is, on the other hand, simply what it is, it becomes able to be represented (grasped) in two ways, not one: first, reality is delegated (the discussion of the figural and non-figural in "Where are the Missing Masses," is a great concrete discussion of this, anticipating for us various concerns of Aramis, though I'm obviously saying it underlies everything that Latour is getting at--and we've already talked about it at length in discussions of "translation"), and then reality is doubled over (as it were), folded to produce something other than delegation--something that indeed defines itself as non-delegation, an image or a non-reality (representation in another sense). This is why we can look inside the book (for characters) and outside it (at its "material conditions of production"--history of the book stuff): though Latour in his own readings (of the excellent Rick Powers) will emphasize the first, he is able to go "outside" the text with ease and in such a way that we could imagine him also looking at the production of the book "object" in the same way.
However, we might also look to WHNBM's concern with a "Constitution" as the main site of such a "critique of representation," for Latour uses the term precisely to stress the "delegating" aspect of representation. Latour is saying that a Constitution's purpose is to guarantee representation ("a constitution is judged by the guarantees it offers," 139) or allow delegation. But the Modern Constitution precisely sought to represent in such a way that it produced representation in another sense than delegation, so as to draw a line between what could be represented and what could not. He says the aim of the book is to allow amend this Constitution to allow the representation of things. But this undoes the second sense of representation, because no longer do questions of representation--qua what can be represented and what cannot, or representation in explicit opposition to representation qua delegation--have to come up: everything is delegated. Reality is a series of tubes--I mean, networks. No doubling over, no folding, no surfaces:
Technological networks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way. The work of relative universalization remains an easy-to-grasp category that relationism can follow in a thoroughgoing way. Every branching, every alignment, every connection can be documented, since it generates tracers, and every one of them has a cost. It can be extended almost everywhere; it can be spread out in time as well as in space, yet without filling time and space (118, my emphasis).
There is no filling because we only have one problem of representation, not two. This is why delegation is really only transcendence that lacks a contrary: "I call this transcendence that lacks a contrary 'delegation'" (129).
I hope I've outlined the connection between Heidegger and Latour, then. For me, the sort of Heideggerian commonality is most apparent in thinking of science in action, which is of course all over Latour. I just wanted to bring this out in what appears to be the most abstract part of the work--time--though it's present right there in the title (we have never been). The sort of closing off of old theories, which I talked about in the last post, lends to scientific knowledge a way of developing that is practical, that turns it into an activity--and of course opposes any sort of Popperian logic.
I'm also connecting things to my earlier posts that resisted taking Latour as a sociologist. For while sociology has a lot to do with this sort of "praxis, not theory" emphasis, if we see Latour's "Heideggerian" preference for the practical producing his critique of representation, then one way of putting my objections or qualifications to the post of yours on "Translation--or How Everybody Wins" was that perhaps Latour is a crappy sociologist. In other words, I'm just trying to defend sociology here. To that end, it was absolutely correct to see in Pasteurization the most sustained engagement with human actors in Latour's career, perhaps, and therefore the most strictly sociological part of his work. But still, while he's got an analysis of "how everybody wins," aren't there better, more sophisticated sociological accounts of that same phenomenon precisely because there we have, indeed, some knowledge of what is going on? That is, less of a stress on practice (isn't the "sense that everybody wins" less practical than Latour's sense of it)? In other words, might we not have a better understanding of such group dynamics in sociology because Latour is more interested in making that "everybody" include all the practical actors (microbes too!), more than in actually outlining the dynamics of this particular phenomenon--where everyone can get what they want, even if they misunderstand each other? In other words, it's your genius to see how this strictly sociological notion was at work in Latour. But I'm saying that precisely means there has got to be a more accurate account within sociology--one that wouldn't be so focused on objects, yes, but would be able to analyze more various human groups (consider this the elaboration of my point about "small groups" in Latour). Latour would see in this precisely a purification--it is his insight to see that this "variability" I'm attributing to the sociological analysis is actually only hardening the divisions that really need to be dissolved (between humans and things).
Which means, fundamentally, I'm skeptical about Latour's claim that we can just extract certain things from the modern Constitution, and get rid of the rest with little loss (Latour, rightly, would never say that this would happen completely without loss). Latour, I think, is absolutely right to want to cut across so many existing boundaries, and his ability to do so really makes his remarks persuasive. But doesn't there have to be a point at which we sacrifice accurate analysis brought about by specialization for something less accurate but more relevant? Latour would undoubtedly say yes--and then bolster this claim by saying basically we try to be relevant all the time without being accurate at all. Science is really and truly experimental before it is accurate--thus, why not experiment some more? This will make Alan Turing his hero in the "Critique" essay, and I like that. But I wonder whether, ultimately, we can't do things differently. Indeed, can't we envision a form of accurate analysis, brought about even by specialization, that is indeed moving in a better direction? If this sounds too Popperian, I apologize. But doesn't Latour's claim cash in on 1) an antimodern or postmodern critique of specialization (though Latour is perhaps the only person--besides Bourdieu--to enjoin us to really follow bureaucratic compartmentalization rather than dismiss it) and 2) a sense that scientific practice is no different than practical activity--as I explained above. No doubt, Latour would claim that this would be true, if the world itself wasn't one in which a person in a lab could actually alter something way across the globe (by curing a disease, say), in which micro-actors knock down or infinitely empower macro-actors. But... what if the world really wasn't that way?
I'm not saying that so much out of belief that the world isn't precisely that one which Latour sees in his newspaper at the beginning of the book. I'm just forced into this sort of position--which renders things pretty moot--because of the immensity of the structure of Latour's argument. I would say that this is, for me, the only real massive argument against him in this book, and is what makes his other works much more suggestive and much more helpful for me: here, either you get on the same page with him, or you act in your own way, which he claims is also amenable to his project. This certainly marks the triumph of a way of arguing that only seeks to add reality (which is good!), but it most definitely means the death of any sense that there may be more and less viable methods and procedures, or differing ways of getting at something (which may be bad).
Maybe I can put this differently by saying that Latour isn't satisfied if he just convinces us that he has a better description of the way things work. For we might actually be willing to grant, even from within sociology, say, that his analysis is better or more full than the sociological one if it described things more accurately. That is, we might willingly dissolve even our knowledge if we were convinced that he had a better grasp on things--that is, in such a situation where there has to be some sacrifice of "accuracy" for "relevance:" if relevance is in the end more accurate than accuracy, doesn't it make sense to switch sides? But I'm not sure Latour wants that. He wants to transform what knowledge we have into something different, which presupposes not even the relevancy of his case but something else--a notion that being modern has always been being nonmodern. It is in this deep sense--that we have to not only see things in the right way but do them in the right way, that I've been trying to align with Heidegger: it is this that makes the Heideggerian approach (and the Derridian deconstruction) so impoverished when it comes to issues of method, since the issue is always, above seeing things the right way (phenomenology itself) doing them. And it is this that is really involved in the critique of representation, and constitutes that sort of immanence that Jameson critiques in postmodern thinkers, and that Latour tries to combat head on, as it were--by making delegation precisely transcendence, and insisting that we follow them, step by step, "locally" despite their local-global character--but (in my view) can't quite overcome. I might say, anticipating Latour's remarks on critique to which we will soon turn ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"), that perhaps this is what happens when arguments (see the whole beginning of Science in Action on rhetoric) are seen first as acts, as pure persuasion (no representation qua depiction, figuration, fiction), and ultimately as things that stage a Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung or polemic (in the sense of polemos--the stress on war as you first brought up in the "Translation" post), and then turned around and said to be absolutely non-polemical, anti-polemical, weaknesses. But that's another issue (though it bears on there being no real represented "inside" to something like Galatea 2.2 or The Echo Maker--though that is, of course, an issue these novels themselves interrogate [especially the first], which is why Latour likes them so much).
I'll conclude, though, by saying that perhaps this does lean too hard on the notion that at some point, in amending our Constitution, we have to sacrifice accuracy. This comes too close, of course, to saying that Latour is anti-science, when his position gains its strength from precisely it's pro-scientific-(but anti-science? how to describe that)-realism. I'd say that it is in this sense that we can say the network notion of reality is better than the notion of Heidegger--though not because Heidegger isn't a realist (it will be Harman's contention that he is precisely this), and not because (despite popular opinion) Heidegger is flat out anti-science (it's more complicated than this). There's another post waiting here, going back to the (to me, compelling) advantages of the technological network enumerated in the Latour quote above, but I need to gather my thoughts in order to articulate it.
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Friday, November 6, 2009
I said something about Heidegger...
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Tuesday, November 3, 2009
"A slimming treatment:" time in WHNBM
At the end of my last post I brought up small groups, and said that Latour, at least in the early work, seemed to privilege them:
Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab?
This is actually a bit unfair, as it is put--and I'll try and correct things below. Nevertheless, I see We Have Never Been Modern as Latour's great effort to try and undo such a privilege.
How? In Latour's earlier work the lab was that sort of lens in which the the world is inverted. There, forces which shaped man were allowed to proliferate. This very process of proliferation then produce new shapes (if I can use that wonderful term from "Irreductions"), some of which the scientist allowed (though this implies no domination by any abstract powers) further proliferation. At a certain point, people got it in their heads that there was no scaling going on--that all these relations of force and the generation of shapes didn't exist, and what one was getting in this operation was the truth of something humans had never really approached in the first place, never manipulated over and over, that was never just the large made small.
Now, the lens will be a certain arrangement of this nature-culture which he calls modernity, and that process of scaling the construction of a Great Divide according to the articles of a modern Constitution. All of which makes sense: Latour is generalizing his conclusions even beyond the philosophical generalizations that, in "Irreductions," were still either products of field work or philosophical and personal insight (remember the first "pseudoautobiographical" interlude in "Irreductions" where Latour pulls over his car and sees the sky, and chants the three basic theses of that text: "Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else."). In other words, he is trying to articulate his viewpoint on the widest empirical grounds (something that is not philosophically possible, and so could not be done in "Irreductions"), so that they no longer have to take their authority from where they originated.
So it is surprising to see the title of the essay deny something that we basically took to be a fact: that we have been modern. Nevertheless, if one understands what Latour is getting at, particularly with respect to time, such a statement makes perfect sense.
Indeed, everything involves knowing that time, for Latour, is merely "the distant consequences of actors" ("Irreductions," 1.2.5.1; 165), or thus a result of the state of the relations of forces between actors:
"Time does not pass. Times are what are at stake between forces" (165; 1.2.5.2).
Or, as he says in We Have Never Been Modern itself:
We have never moved either forward or backward. We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting (76--Latour's emphasis).
It'd be a huge mistake to think that this means time is spatialized for Latour: some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour (which we will point out soon) would be thereby erased. However, I could understand the temptation. If, as Latour says, "the connections among beings alone make time" (77), aren't these connections being made in a particular place, and thus a space? Some of Latour's statements come close to saying precisely this:
In other words, everything happens only once, and at one place ("Irreductions," 1.2.1; 162).
But what this means is only that space, like time, is dependent upon what an actant does:
We do not know where an actant is to be found. The definition of its location is a primordial struggle, during which many get lost. We can only say that some locate and others are located (1.2.3.1; 164).
Thus:
Space and time do not frame entelechies. They only become frameworks of description for those actants that have submitted, locally and provisionally, to the hegemony of another (1.2.6;165).
How, then, have we ended up thinking that something just comes before another? Time is being-shaped-by-a-force, as is clear from these quotes. Thus, a particular force, arranging things in vast amounts, would have to impose upon us the framework of the irreversibility of time, since if time is only the result of what actants do, or if "each entitity is an event" (WHNBM, 81), then (or therefore) "time becomes reversible" (73). Such a reversible time is actually quite easy to think, provided that we pay attention to what actants do and see in them the creation of what Latour calls hybrids or the proliferation of quasi-objects:
I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years (75).
So whence this irreversibility?
The notion of an irreversible arrow--progress or decadence--stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain. Irreversibility in the course of time is itself due to the transcendence of the sciences and technologies. [...] It is a classificatory device for dissimulating the inadmissible origin of the natural and social entities from the work of mediation. [...] Just as they eliminate the ins and outs of all the hybrids, so the moderns interpret the heterogenous rearrangements as systematic totalities in which everything would hold together. Modernizing progress is thinkable only on the condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow, of which the moderns declare themselves the avant-garde and the antimoderns the rearguard while the premoderns are left on the sidline of complete stagnation (73).
In other words, modernism (or modernity) is the result of progress being imposed upon us, which is merely a result of that systematic exclusion of hybrids (here, the hybridization of reversible time, where each "instant" can be next to any other in the way that my genes can be right next to the drill in my hand) that so much of what the book details:
Modernism--like its anti-and post-modern correlaries--was only the provisional result of a selection made by a small number of agents in the name of all (76).
Or, to put it in the terms of "Irreductions" (which I find clearer), the creation of power out of force (through the extension of a network, i.e. by only expanding force, but thereby representing actors). At this point, it should be clear what Latour means by his title, and why he says it: We have never been modern because the relations of force have never produced progress or irreversibility. It's only because we've allowed power to come into the picture (and thus allowed actors to represent others in more than one sense) that we think we are modern (Latour can largely be summed up by the following phrase: "There are not two problems of representation, just one," 143).
I have dwelt on this, however, not only because I want to explain the title. I also think that it is this resistance to the notion of progress that keeps asserting itself, subtly, throughout the book's attempt to account for modernity's production of and disavowal of quasi-objects by separating purification and mediation. Of course--to recap--this production and disavowal takes place because, Latour claims, moderns (or those who think themselves modern) don't see the work of purification as a particular case of mediation--the core argument of the book, I think. This means that moderns adhere to that Constitution which I have already mentioned, or see nature as distinct from culture and proceed to put acts that alter nature on one side of the "Great Divide" and acts that alter society on the other. They don't see that this separation is really only another way of linking nature and culture, or, better, creating more networks of natures-cultures, mediating or translating or passing forces (take your pick among these metaphors). In short, attributing something to a power, keeping the world divided up between culture and nature, rather than trying to look for hybrids, or those things that already are moving between nature and culture (Boyle's air-pump)--this is only allowing us to produce more quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects). If we want to more accurately alter this production, purification should be practiced as what it is---a case of this mediation.
But, back to progress and time. What Latour allows us to think is not only how various hybrids get overlooked--how we don't end up researching Boyle's pump but "classes" and "gentrification" and "extroversion" instead--but also how we confuse the history of science with history ("the history of science should not be confused with history," he says, 93). By this I mean the sort of separation that is created not just between true and false science but a very common practice that is included in this wide-ranging distinction. I mean the sort of division--and Latour acknowledges this throughout his discussion of the symmetrical asymmetries in the chapter on relativism, and, as I'm arguing, implicitly throughout the book--between something like working theories and closed theories. This, of course, goes back to his discussions of the black box in Science in Action. But now everything is shot through with very sophisticated notions of temporality, and a massive argument trying to base things precisely on all practices, not just scientific ones--and so we see how modernity itself involves this black-boxing. For at stake is not just an individual theory, but whole "paradigms," or "epistemes," or (even more precisely), "structures of feeling" (all these notions being similar). In other words, the notion rejected here is not that science works with facts, but that there are epistemological breaks, total changes in perspectives that close off not just outdated series of facts, but whole sets of "knowledge"-producing outlooks and techniques--all in the name of progress (Latour says throughout the book that the one thing modernity can't be is outdated: as we see above, it has to be avant-garde).
This gets discussed perhaps most openly in the beginning of the reconsideration of anthropology in the chapter on relativism, where Latour supplements David Bloor's principle of symmetry. Latour is recalling, in the following quote, the principle's advantages, but importantly--for us--starts by paraphrasing Canguilhem:
Only what breaks for ever with ideology is [for Canguilhem] scientific. It is difficult indeed to pursue the ins and outs of quasi-objects while following such a principle. Once they have passed into the hands of such epistemologists, they will be pulled out by the roots. Objects alone will remain, excised from the entire network that gave them meaning. [...] For such epistemologists, "Whiggish" history is not a mistake to be overcome but a duty to be carried out with the utmost rigor. The history of science should not be confused with history. The false is what makes the true stand out. What Racine did for the Sun King under the lofty name of the historian, Canguilhem does for Darwin under the equally usurped label of historian of science.
The principle of symmetry, on the contrary, reestablished historicity, and--we might as well say it--elementary justice. David Bloor is Canguilhem's opposite number, just as Serres is Bachelard's. "The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth," writes the latter as he breaks with epistemology. [...] For Serres, as for actual historians of science, Diderot, Darwin, Malthus and Spencer have to be explained according to the same principles and the same causes; if you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes. [...] If you claim to debunk parapsychology, can you use the same factors for psychology? [...] If you analyze Pasteur's successes, do the same terms allow you to account for his failures? (93).
Now, let's keep this in our heads, and quickly recall that in my last post, I had something to say about your statement in your post on macro- and micro- actors that for Latour,
the macro-actor is only a network of "devious" micro-actors, and that they are in many ways simpler and easier to study than micro-actors.
There was a general suspicion on my part of the emphasis on the micro- and the local. I might here correcting one mistake that I made in this characterization: I didn't emphasize that this emphasis on the local is what I found odd, not the local itself, since Latour himself doesn't think that anything is either strictly local or strictly global (I forgot whole sections of WHNBM that critiques this notion: see p. 4.9-4.12). In other words, I find odd the way the word local gets used even after Latour's critique of the local/global is registered (see the use of "locally and provisionally" in "Irreductions" 1.2.6 above). Now, recalling all this (and stating it all again more accurately), let's also recall that despite all this, taking your statement in these large terms, I emphatically agreed that
it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler.
Now, given these remarks about the principle of symmetry, and the general effort to reject any sort of notion of epistemological break, with all of Latour's notions about time still in mind--I think I can elaborate on how another form of simplicity is generated by the Latourian analysis.
For Latour continues, after he asks about those errors of Pasteur that he documented so well:
Above all, the first principle of symmetry proposes a slimming treatment for the explanations of errors. It had become so easy to account for deviation! Society, beliefs, ideology, symbols, the unconscious, madness--everything was so readily available that explanations were becoming obese. But truths? When we lost our facile recourse to epistemological breaks, we soon realized, we who study the sciences, that most of our explanations were not much. Asymmetry organized them all, and simply added insult to injury. Everything changes if the staunch discipline of the principle of symmetry forces us to retain only the causes that could serve both truth and falsehood, belief and knowledge, science and parascience. Those who had weighed the winners with one scale and the losers with another, while shouting "vae victis!" (woe to the vanquished), like Brennus, made discrepancy incomprehensible until now. When the balance of symmetry is reestablished with precision, the discrepancy that allows us to understand why some win and others lose stands out all the more sharply (93-4).
Of course, Latour will go on to complicate this--he calls for another principle of symmetry to go beyond the first (and not only explain truth and falsehood in social terms, but in natural-social terms). But I'm generally saying the sort of critique of modern temporality is here in ovum, and indeed cuts through the ways that modernity is able to multiply explanations rather than simplify them.
For what happens is that all those black boxes come undone, as I said above. All of time becomes reversible, and there are no longer theories that get more concrete and "settled" because they are "historical" than newer or more "open" ones (since what is new is not always open). In short, Latour is solving the huge dillema of historicism that characterizes so much humanities research which bases itself on a scientific model. If I want to write about the 18th century (and I do), I surely can't talk about sentiment as if it still had some relevance. And if I did, it'd be awkward. Theory (in literary studies) has largely been the way out of this problem, by getting behind this awkwardness (and fetishizing it as "crisis"--cf. de Man): I can make an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it. It is this that I think people are talking about when they confusedly call theory "ahistorical." Nevertheless, theory is only taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences--or so I imagine Latour saying. Regardless, it is allowing the "opening" of "settled" knowledge precisely by grounding ever more thoroughly the notion that there are "open" and "settled" knowledges.
This we can see by the other historicists doing the same thing (as you nicely described in your "New Historicism" post), but by multiplying their explanations as to why the "settled" knowledge became settled.
What I'm trying to show is that both procedures are done away with if we stop that sort of black-boxing which is the modern look at temporality: instead of looking for ideology (Feyerabend looks perhaps the most foolish from a Latourian point of view), or really trying to either settle or open the knowledge, we slim down things by making time reversible, or stop seeing time as some process of accumulating--anything at all (here, knowledge or error).
Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces). This means, then, that we have to see our networks as made of collectives, not just as nature on the one hand and society on the other.
The resulting simplification is then huge: if we admit that purification is mediation, instead of critiquing endlessly (and Latour ends the book by saying that it is in the interest of critique simply to keep going, never amending the Constitution), we will find simpler connections between actors--for they will no longer appear as powers, but in all sorts of hybrids right in front of our faces. I've tried to show, however, the less visible and perhaps more complicated way in which this also involves historical actors, supplementing your post on New Historicism, which rightly stressed the production of new historical actors--here I just try to show when they then are... which is not in any modern time.
On the issue of groups, and doing more justice to Latour on this issue--I've done a bit here to correct that but I'll come back to it more directly (via Heidegger, who I didn't get to here) in another post... I fear this general presentation of WHNBM has gone on too long!
Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab?
This is actually a bit unfair, as it is put--and I'll try and correct things below. Nevertheless, I see We Have Never Been Modern as Latour's great effort to try and undo such a privilege.
How? In Latour's earlier work the lab was that sort of lens in which the the world is inverted. There, forces which shaped man were allowed to proliferate. This very process of proliferation then produce new shapes (if I can use that wonderful term from "Irreductions"), some of which the scientist allowed (though this implies no domination by any abstract powers) further proliferation. At a certain point, people got it in their heads that there was no scaling going on--that all these relations of force and the generation of shapes didn't exist, and what one was getting in this operation was the truth of something humans had never really approached in the first place, never manipulated over and over, that was never just the large made small.
Now, the lens will be a certain arrangement of this nature-culture which he calls modernity, and that process of scaling the construction of a Great Divide according to the articles of a modern Constitution. All of which makes sense: Latour is generalizing his conclusions even beyond the philosophical generalizations that, in "Irreductions," were still either products of field work or philosophical and personal insight (remember the first "pseudoautobiographical" interlude in "Irreductions" where Latour pulls over his car and sees the sky, and chants the three basic theses of that text: "Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else."). In other words, he is trying to articulate his viewpoint on the widest empirical grounds (something that is not philosophically possible, and so could not be done in "Irreductions"), so that they no longer have to take their authority from where they originated.
So it is surprising to see the title of the essay deny something that we basically took to be a fact: that we have been modern. Nevertheless, if one understands what Latour is getting at, particularly with respect to time, such a statement makes perfect sense.
Indeed, everything involves knowing that time, for Latour, is merely "the distant consequences of actors" ("Irreductions," 1.2.5.1; 165), or thus a result of the state of the relations of forces between actors:
"Time does not pass. Times are what are at stake between forces" (165; 1.2.5.2).
Or, as he says in We Have Never Been Modern itself:
We have never moved either forward or backward. We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting (76--Latour's emphasis).
It'd be a huge mistake to think that this means time is spatialized for Latour: some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour (which we will point out soon) would be thereby erased. However, I could understand the temptation. If, as Latour says, "the connections among beings alone make time" (77), aren't these connections being made in a particular place, and thus a space? Some of Latour's statements come close to saying precisely this:
In other words, everything happens only once, and at one place ("Irreductions," 1.2.1; 162).
But what this means is only that space, like time, is dependent upon what an actant does:
We do not know where an actant is to be found. The definition of its location is a primordial struggle, during which many get lost. We can only say that some locate and others are located (1.2.3.1; 164).
Thus:
Space and time do not frame entelechies. They only become frameworks of description for those actants that have submitted, locally and provisionally, to the hegemony of another (1.2.6;165).
How, then, have we ended up thinking that something just comes before another? Time is being-shaped-by-a-force, as is clear from these quotes. Thus, a particular force, arranging things in vast amounts, would have to impose upon us the framework of the irreversibility of time, since if time is only the result of what actants do, or if "each entitity is an event" (WHNBM, 81), then (or therefore) "time becomes reversible" (73). Such a reversible time is actually quite easy to think, provided that we pay attention to what actants do and see in them the creation of what Latour calls hybrids or the proliferation of quasi-objects:
I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years (75).
So whence this irreversibility?
The notion of an irreversible arrow--progress or decadence--stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain. Irreversibility in the course of time is itself due to the transcendence of the sciences and technologies. [...] It is a classificatory device for dissimulating the inadmissible origin of the natural and social entities from the work of mediation. [...] Just as they eliminate the ins and outs of all the hybrids, so the moderns interpret the heterogenous rearrangements as systematic totalities in which everything would hold together. Modernizing progress is thinkable only on the condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow, of which the moderns declare themselves the avant-garde and the antimoderns the rearguard while the premoderns are left on the sidline of complete stagnation (73).
In other words, modernism (or modernity) is the result of progress being imposed upon us, which is merely a result of that systematic exclusion of hybrids (here, the hybridization of reversible time, where each "instant" can be next to any other in the way that my genes can be right next to the drill in my hand) that so much of what the book details:
Modernism--like its anti-and post-modern correlaries--was only the provisional result of a selection made by a small number of agents in the name of all (76).
Or, to put it in the terms of "Irreductions" (which I find clearer), the creation of power out of force (through the extension of a network, i.e. by only expanding force, but thereby representing actors). At this point, it should be clear what Latour means by his title, and why he says it: We have never been modern because the relations of force have never produced progress or irreversibility. It's only because we've allowed power to come into the picture (and thus allowed actors to represent others in more than one sense) that we think we are modern (Latour can largely be summed up by the following phrase: "There are not two problems of representation, just one," 143).
I have dwelt on this, however, not only because I want to explain the title. I also think that it is this resistance to the notion of progress that keeps asserting itself, subtly, throughout the book's attempt to account for modernity's production of and disavowal of quasi-objects by separating purification and mediation. Of course--to recap--this production and disavowal takes place because, Latour claims, moderns (or those who think themselves modern) don't see the work of purification as a particular case of mediation--the core argument of the book, I think. This means that moderns adhere to that Constitution which I have already mentioned, or see nature as distinct from culture and proceed to put acts that alter nature on one side of the "Great Divide" and acts that alter society on the other. They don't see that this separation is really only another way of linking nature and culture, or, better, creating more networks of natures-cultures, mediating or translating or passing forces (take your pick among these metaphors). In short, attributing something to a power, keeping the world divided up between culture and nature, rather than trying to look for hybrids, or those things that already are moving between nature and culture (Boyle's air-pump)--this is only allowing us to produce more quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects). If we want to more accurately alter this production, purification should be practiced as what it is---a case of this mediation.
But, back to progress and time. What Latour allows us to think is not only how various hybrids get overlooked--how we don't end up researching Boyle's pump but "classes" and "gentrification" and "extroversion" instead--but also how we confuse the history of science with history ("the history of science should not be confused with history," he says, 93). By this I mean the sort of separation that is created not just between true and false science but a very common practice that is included in this wide-ranging distinction. I mean the sort of division--and Latour acknowledges this throughout his discussion of the symmetrical asymmetries in the chapter on relativism, and, as I'm arguing, implicitly throughout the book--between something like working theories and closed theories. This, of course, goes back to his discussions of the black box in Science in Action. But now everything is shot through with very sophisticated notions of temporality, and a massive argument trying to base things precisely on all practices, not just scientific ones--and so we see how modernity itself involves this black-boxing. For at stake is not just an individual theory, but whole "paradigms," or "epistemes," or (even more precisely), "structures of feeling" (all these notions being similar). In other words, the notion rejected here is not that science works with facts, but that there are epistemological breaks, total changes in perspectives that close off not just outdated series of facts, but whole sets of "knowledge"-producing outlooks and techniques--all in the name of progress (Latour says throughout the book that the one thing modernity can't be is outdated: as we see above, it has to be avant-garde).
This gets discussed perhaps most openly in the beginning of the reconsideration of anthropology in the chapter on relativism, where Latour supplements David Bloor's principle of symmetry. Latour is recalling, in the following quote, the principle's advantages, but importantly--for us--starts by paraphrasing Canguilhem:
Only what breaks for ever with ideology is [for Canguilhem] scientific. It is difficult indeed to pursue the ins and outs of quasi-objects while following such a principle. Once they have passed into the hands of such epistemologists, they will be pulled out by the roots. Objects alone will remain, excised from the entire network that gave them meaning. [...] For such epistemologists, "Whiggish" history is not a mistake to be overcome but a duty to be carried out with the utmost rigor. The history of science should not be confused with history. The false is what makes the true stand out. What Racine did for the Sun King under the lofty name of the historian, Canguilhem does for Darwin under the equally usurped label of historian of science.
The principle of symmetry, on the contrary, reestablished historicity, and--we might as well say it--elementary justice. David Bloor is Canguilhem's opposite number, just as Serres is Bachelard's. "The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth," writes the latter as he breaks with epistemology. [...] For Serres, as for actual historians of science, Diderot, Darwin, Malthus and Spencer have to be explained according to the same principles and the same causes; if you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes. [...] If you claim to debunk parapsychology, can you use the same factors for psychology? [...] If you analyze Pasteur's successes, do the same terms allow you to account for his failures? (93).
Now, let's keep this in our heads, and quickly recall that in my last post, I had something to say about your statement in your post on macro- and micro- actors that for Latour,
the macro-actor is only a network of "devious" micro-actors, and that they are in many ways simpler and easier to study than micro-actors.
There was a general suspicion on my part of the emphasis on the micro- and the local. I might here correcting one mistake that I made in this characterization: I didn't emphasize that this emphasis on the local is what I found odd, not the local itself, since Latour himself doesn't think that anything is either strictly local or strictly global (I forgot whole sections of WHNBM that critiques this notion: see p. 4.9-4.12). In other words, I find odd the way the word local gets used even after Latour's critique of the local/global is registered (see the use of "locally and provisionally" in "Irreductions" 1.2.6 above). Now, recalling all this (and stating it all again more accurately), let's also recall that despite all this, taking your statement in these large terms, I emphatically agreed that
it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler.
Now, given these remarks about the principle of symmetry, and the general effort to reject any sort of notion of epistemological break, with all of Latour's notions about time still in mind--I think I can elaborate on how another form of simplicity is generated by the Latourian analysis.
For Latour continues, after he asks about those errors of Pasteur that he documented so well:
Above all, the first principle of symmetry proposes a slimming treatment for the explanations of errors. It had become so easy to account for deviation! Society, beliefs, ideology, symbols, the unconscious, madness--everything was so readily available that explanations were becoming obese. But truths? When we lost our facile recourse to epistemological breaks, we soon realized, we who study the sciences, that most of our explanations were not much. Asymmetry organized them all, and simply added insult to injury. Everything changes if the staunch discipline of the principle of symmetry forces us to retain only the causes that could serve both truth and falsehood, belief and knowledge, science and parascience. Those who had weighed the winners with one scale and the losers with another, while shouting "vae victis!" (woe to the vanquished), like Brennus, made discrepancy incomprehensible until now. When the balance of symmetry is reestablished with precision, the discrepancy that allows us to understand why some win and others lose stands out all the more sharply (93-4).
Of course, Latour will go on to complicate this--he calls for another principle of symmetry to go beyond the first (and not only explain truth and falsehood in social terms, but in natural-social terms). But I'm generally saying the sort of critique of modern temporality is here in ovum, and indeed cuts through the ways that modernity is able to multiply explanations rather than simplify them.
For what happens is that all those black boxes come undone, as I said above. All of time becomes reversible, and there are no longer theories that get more concrete and "settled" because they are "historical" than newer or more "open" ones (since what is new is not always open). In short, Latour is solving the huge dillema of historicism that characterizes so much humanities research which bases itself on a scientific model. If I want to write about the 18th century (and I do), I surely can't talk about sentiment as if it still had some relevance. And if I did, it'd be awkward. Theory (in literary studies) has largely been the way out of this problem, by getting behind this awkwardness (and fetishizing it as "crisis"--cf. de Man): I can make an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it. It is this that I think people are talking about when they confusedly call theory "ahistorical." Nevertheless, theory is only taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences--or so I imagine Latour saying. Regardless, it is allowing the "opening" of "settled" knowledge precisely by grounding ever more thoroughly the notion that there are "open" and "settled" knowledges.
This we can see by the other historicists doing the same thing (as you nicely described in your "New Historicism" post), but by multiplying their explanations as to why the "settled" knowledge became settled.
What I'm trying to show is that both procedures are done away with if we stop that sort of black-boxing which is the modern look at temporality: instead of looking for ideology (Feyerabend looks perhaps the most foolish from a Latourian point of view), or really trying to either settle or open the knowledge, we slim down things by making time reversible, or stop seeing time as some process of accumulating--anything at all (here, knowledge or error).
Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces). This means, then, that we have to see our networks as made of collectives, not just as nature on the one hand and society on the other.
The resulting simplification is then huge: if we admit that purification is mediation, instead of critiquing endlessly (and Latour ends the book by saying that it is in the interest of critique simply to keep going, never amending the Constitution), we will find simpler connections between actors--for they will no longer appear as powers, but in all sorts of hybrids right in front of our faces. I've tried to show, however, the less visible and perhaps more complicated way in which this also involves historical actors, supplementing your post on New Historicism, which rightly stressed the production of new historical actors--here I just try to show when they then are... which is not in any modern time.
On the issue of groups, and doing more justice to Latour on this issue--I've done a bit here to correct that but I'll come back to it more directly (via Heidegger, who I didn't get to here) in another post... I fear this general presentation of WHNBM has gone on too long!