Interest and scales

I'll address what you said and then try to take things in a new direction--or perhaps pose the problem a different way. I took a bit of an antagonistic position myself in my response to push you a bit, and perhaps thereby extract something like following sentence, which you did indeed say and actually I think is exactly right:

What he [BL] doesn't like about conflict sociology isn't the emphasis on interests, but the insistence that these interests are only of a few kinds, and that actors always seek to destroy, rather than enlist, those with different interests.

Or maybe even better,

It [interest] actually seems to be one of the few sociological concepts he wants to keep.

I think that's right--I just wanted to stress the fact that this concept does some extrasociological work as well. Mainly because I'm interested in who the hell Latour thinks he is--i.e. what is his actual relationship to the conceptual structures that he uses that come from so many different disciplines. I'm finding right now that it might be more handy just to stop looking for what he's inflecting and just see him as coming totally out of left field--like some mystic of old, who you really just have to take on his own terms.

Thus the stress on objects--not so much because I think objects are important (I might want to see what things look like from an object-oriented point of view, but I'm pretty far from thinking it is my point of view), but because I think for Latour that actually becomes the area where he becomes disconnected to all these other discourses (we might also say, more original). It's here that we have to take him on his own terms the most, and really think through what he's proposing. So while I think you're absolutely right to stress--in Pasteurization especially--the fact that there are a lot of human actors, and thus that Latour is indeed doing some sociological work (I think that's the brilliance of your posts, to actually read Latour against the grain and understand what is going on), I'm trying to see how even here he could be doing his own thing. It's really just a matter of emphasis--thus I wouldn't say we have two different interpretations so much as actually the same interpretation with a different emphasis. For me, this means really asking how attributing interests to microbes makes them have something different than interests--or makes us rethink (to use that stupid formula) interests otherwise--precisely because I agree that what we have here is, as you say, an extension of the concept of interest. When I said that there is a move away from interest, I just meant interest qua interest--doesn't the concept also have to change in itself when it's applied to microbes? If so, what is the work needed to do that? I think I saw it in terms of making interests more real, rather than just saying that "'interests,' for Latour, are 'reality' (or, at least, are real)." In other words, my question to you--and my question to Latour--was really what work the quotes and the copula does here, and whether that entailed some sort of othering of interest. For me, this is sufficient (or I would suggest could be sufficient) to explain what's going on, while you--following Latour (and it's brilliant of you to see that this is the function of his stress on misunderstanding, which has to be so forceful in this book)--have to use the notion that we're all speaking from different places to do it (in other words, in the double move I described, I'm sticking with the first--the decomposition of groups--without going on to the second--considering them as misunderstanding each other). Basically, we end up in the same place, but I'm trying to get there without stress on how we're all in different places--because I think what Latour is saying in this is more than we're just all in different places, but that we're real.

This brings me (finally--I promise I won't go that long any more in responding, since like you I think we shouldn't let the back and forth get too complicated) to the new issue I want to bring up, because this word "real" has to get understood in a new way for Latour. We find such an undrstanding in the opening gesture of "Irreductions," which is to say that nothing is reducible to anything else. It's this, I think, that strikes you as Derridian: the notion that we're all in different places, and thus misunderstanding each other from the get go (and understanding each other), is due to some notion that we're all singular. But, we have to actually go back to the whole phrase, because it's not just that nothing is reducible to anything else, it's that,

Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else (158; 1.1.1, my italics).

That "or irreducible" changes the game, and for me answers the Derrida question (at the end of your post on translation). Because Derrida wouldn't affirm the latter, I think--and furthermore he wouldn't do so in order to stress, as Latour does, the "by itself." In other words, Latour is saying that nothing is singular (irreducible) because it always needs others. Derrida would say everything is singular (irreducible) because it (a thing) needs others. Both, yes, say nothing is reducible to anything else. But such a statement comes from two different concerns. Latour is interested in saying that the misunderstanding comes in to affirm the fact that a thing needs others. While Derrida is interested in undercutting how a thing needs others precisely through misunderstanding--the mis- there still retains its sort of anxiety-ridden, dreary, Lacanian force (lack, lack, lack: it's interesting from this perspective that--getting behind this undercutting, as I'm saying--you have to contrast Latour to a Habermasian full-speech, just like Derrida: what's rightly interesting to the speculative realists/object-oriented philosophers is that, when you take Latour out of the sociological context and bring it towards that of ontology and philosophy, for the first time, you don't have to do this--i.e. talk about presence, absence, etc.).

This is why I became so antagonistic--I wanted to disarticulate that sort of misunderstanding from its force of undercutting. Because the consequences of this are big: it makes Latour a realist and Derrida something else (an idealist, I'd say--though that's another argument). For Latour, that a thing needs others only makes it more real (thus my comments about Marxism etc.), while for Derrida that a thing needs others makes it less real--while affirming, however, it's irreducibility/singularity (which you can pass off as real, as Martin Hägglund does--and people say this resembles the speculative realist position--but which I find sort of a stretch). I hope that makes things somewhat clearer: for Derrida the linkage to others becomes a sort of strategy to undercut the thing, while for Latour, it is precisely what needs to be explained, because it is itself the realest aspect of that thing (and within this position there will be disagreements--Harman takes issue with Latour precisely here, stressing that Latour's position is too "relational," but not at all in order to go in a Derridian--or Hägglundian--direction).

I may, however, have misunderstood your stress on Derrida, but that's where I imagined you were going. Whether it is or not, I think I've brought up something important and got us squarely in the middle of what "Irreductions" is trying to do. I want now to stress another thesis that comes directly after the first, because I see Latour positing it precisely in order to explain the issue at hand:

Everything may be bade [made, that is--MJ] to be the measure of everything else (158; 1.1.4).

This is, for me, and more than any remark about the misunderstanding of "interest" in the still intrasociological sense (if I can recall what I said earlier), where we end up explaining how misunderstandings take place. As I said, I agree that we can still understand this as an extension of interest, but you see now we're getting into the nitty gritty aspects of what that means--and the really Latourian aspect of this for me (or what makes him really original in my eyes) is that what involved is not so much the dynamics of social groups but reality (and I agree you can take this to affirm precisely what you're saying when you say "interests" are "reality"--I'm just working that out).

The thesis (or principle--or whatever), follows from 1.1.2, and is explained in 1.1.3 (which is only the assertion that there exists a relation of consequence between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2):

It is because nothing is, by itself, reducible or irreducible to anything else that there are only trials (of strength, of weakness). What is neither reducible nor irreducible has to be tested, counted, and measured. There is no other way (158; 1.1.3).

But saying that everything may be made to be the measure of everything else gives a thickness to 1.1.3, not only because it leads us to 1.1.5 and from there to reality ("Whatever resists trials is real"), but because it makes clear what is involved in so many scientific instances where interest is present and what is real: that is, the operation of reducing or enlarging something's scale. If I'm making all these connections right (and I'm not sure that I am), what we get where the bacteria has an interest is a situation where one thing is being made to be the measure of another thing, or, to put it in less abstract terms, where one thing is extending (usually we're concerned with extension, but of course it could go the other way around), through a process of generalization (or diminution, bathos), its influence--it's capability to interest (or be interested--Latour shuffles between the active and passive here significantly, something I was going to point out might resist the sociological version of interest--though maybe not Bourdieu's version). And this gives it its reality--through that amazing process of shaping via the trials of strength described in 1.1.6, which is so amazing to see in process: when the old anthrax is a disease and then becomes something that produces a certain substance and then, finally, when it grows, the "cause" of the disease or rather a microbe...

This is what makes the lab so unbelievably important--it is the way that we get from the macro- to the micro- with ease, because we're always concerned with the processes of giving reality a shape (looking at the front lines of the trials of strength--and also just as those trials or tests). The lab simply is, for Latour, a device for scaling--and I think this is, absolutely, his most solid and most fascinating suggestion. Because it understands that the way power is acquired is by this sort of ruse of generalizing (or weakening) forces (or modifying them actually, in reality). And so where there are interests, there is reality, because a sort of scaling operation will be going on--and maybe we are reading things differently because it's this mathematical signification of translation that I see as the primary one: one force will be scaling another, and that will be scaling another, all the way down (and up). Indeed, I'm interested in this because it does seem to solve the macro-micro problem which the notion of interest, when it is not understood that it "is reality" as you say, does seem to introduce. You have much more background in this issue than I am--and I'd like to hear generally 1) what the macro-micro problem is for you and 2) whether Latour indeed addresses it.

To wrap things up, I think I will go so far as to say that Bruno Latour is the thinker of scale: it's what makes him always on the edge of the qualitative and the qualitative (like Nietzsche, not reducing them to a dialectic), and also (unlike Nietzsche) able to pay minute attention to the long connections of processes that allow them to pass into each other. It's also what makes him, for me, different than a Derrida, who is constantly interested in the Blanchot-like task of trying to find a measure without measure (as he and J.L. Nancy constantly say). I hope, here, that I've made all the connections clear--and perhaps also brought us into new territory.

Translation, or How Everybody Wins

Yesterday I finished Latour's magisterial case study of The Pasteurization of France. (I'll be doing a separate post on Irreductions, its more "philosophical" counterpart, and probably a couple of follow-up notes on Pasteurization this week as well.) The title's a somewhat dry English translation of Pasteur: Guerre et Paix des microbes — which is better, both because it creates a closer link with Tolstoy's War and Peace (which Latour uses as a working model for his vision of how the Pasteurian victory over the microbes was accomplished), and because it introduces a theme that is clearly important to Latour. Namely, how essential are agonistic and adversarial metaphors to a sociological understanding of reality? Much of Latour's later work will be built around the theme of war and peace, as even some of his titles (like "War of the Worlds — What About Peace?" and "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?") attest. Clearly Latour finds it difficult to do without the language of war and confrontation — Pasteurization of France is chock-a-block with military metaphors — but he also looks for ways to resist or deflect this violent language (see, he's got me doing it too).

It seems to me that, in Pasteurization, Latour is trying to do an end run around what Randall Collins has called "the conflict tradition" (metonymically, and roughly: Marx, Weber and Talcott Parsons) via semiotics, and in particular the notion of "translation." BL uses this word very frequently in both Pasteurization and Irreductions and it does a tremendous amount of work for him, but seems not to lean on it so heavily in his later work. And I think part of the reason he jettisons "translation" (along with much else of his semiotic vocabulary) is that it's too redolent of linguistics, and brings him too close to the 80s-era discourse of deconstruction. (Mike, I'm sure you're more sensitive to these tropes than I am, so please, let me know what you think of this idea.) Here's how Latour glosses "translation" in a useful footnote on page 253:

The notion of translation has been developed by M. Callon (1986), M. Callon, J. Law and A. Rip, eds. (1986) and B. Latour (1987) and applied to the study of science and technology in order to fuse the notions of interest and research program in a more subtle way. First, translation means drift, betrayal, ambiguity … It thus means that we are starting from an inequivalence between interests or language games and that the aim of the translation is to render two propositions equivalent. Second, translation has a strategic meaning. It defines a stronghold established in such a way that, whatever people do and wherever they go, they have to pass through a contender's position and to help him further his own interests. Third, it has a linguistic sense, so that one's version of the language game translates all the others, replacing them all with "whatever you wish, this is what you really mean."

While conflict sociology tends to see agents pitting their respective interests against another, and thus inevitably producing "winners" and "losers," "haves" and "have-nots," this semiotic sociology is more interested in how interests are converted, how we arrive at a local, temporary sense that "everybody wins." For this to take place, there doesn't necessarily need to be communication — no Habermasian transcendental chitchat need take place; but there does need to be mutual awareness of one another's respective positions. And here we see why "translation," in its most familiar literary sense, might be a good metaphor: a translator doesn't (necessarily) talk to the author she is translating; rather, she reads, reads about, thinks about, takes cognizance of that author and his interests, and finds a way to bring those interests to a new place. Inevitably, there will be "drift" and "betrayal" along the way: by the time the author is translated, he will no longer be saying exactly what he once said. But he has not been defeated, or destroyed, or even (necessarily) deconstructed: he has just been moved.

So, in Latour's account of the Pasteurians and hygienists against the physicians, who were notoriously reluctant to accept bacteriology because it obviated their usual methods and, by emphasizing prevention over cure, threatened to put them out of business, we don't see the doctors holding out against innovation until they are finally ground down, or have a change of heart, and have to give in: instead, we see how their interests are translated, around 1895, by the development of sera which could be inoculated by doctors in their offices, thus finally giving them a crucial role in the bacteriological campaign (129). In so doing, their position has been rendered (partially) equivalent to the Pasteurians; they have "passed through" the Pasteurians' stronghold, thus furthering the bacteriological agenda; and they have been made to speak differently, even mean differently, while still maintaining a continuity of interests ("whatever you wish, this is what you really mean"). Translation in all three senses.

"Translation" thus allows Latour to keep the concept of "interests" in play without letting it take over his analysis completely. Another revealing footnote on page 260 makes clear that when he speaks of “interests” he is not referring to the “interest theory” of David Bloor and Barry Barnes; he's also, implicitly, I think, repudiating the Frankfurt School and Bourdieu. Citing Callon again, Latour states that “‘Interest’ means simply what is placed ‘in between’ some actor and its achievements. I do not suppose that these interests are stable or that groups can be endowed with explicit goals … Interests cannot explain science and society: they are what will be explained once the experiment is over” (260). In other words, "interests" are not what there really are, with all of the rest of society an epiphenomenon of these primary interests (class struggle, struggle for various forms of capital, etc.). Rather, interests are temporary obstacles between one position and another, which are frequently translated in order to bring us to a new place.

Lest this all sound too nicey-nicey, like we all always end up getting everything we want, it should be remembered that "[t]ranslation is by definition always a misunderstanding, since common interests are in the long term necessarily divergent” (65). This caveat explicitly contradicts the essential Marxian view, held by everyone from Marx himself to Adorno to Habermas to Jameson, that real social interests are in fact held in common. (See Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests for the most extensive unfolding of this position, and Raymond Geuss' Idea of a Critical Theory for a good critique of it.) But the idea that interests are ultimately shared makes no sense for Latour, because we cannot all actually be occupying the same place, and interests are what is in between us. This is where I intuitively feel that Latour is actually close to Derrida, but I'll resist the urge to work out why — perhaps Mike has some thoughts on this subject. At any rate, the coffee's running low, and my interest is flagging.