On the active voice in philosophy

Can I just jump in here real quick and say holy shit, how wonderful is it to actually encounter philosophers who use the active voice?

I think we've been loving this about Latour's more philosophical ramblings and in part talking about it as his mojo (it's really why I love Irreductions). But if we don't get explicit about the things that bring about this mojo, we're just going to be talking in general about mojos everywhere. There's a lot to mojo, yes--I mean we're talking about style, basically, which is never reducible to mere grammar. But the wonderful thing about style (at least for us, who know how to talk about it) is that you can build it up out of these elements, as much as you might also try to capture it all at once with rhetorical terms (I feel mojo for us means something like the old rhetorical term energia--but taken technically that term also doesn't quite do).

So now that we're heading into Harman, another thinker with mojo, I just want to actually state that the active voice contributes to the charm.

There are other thinkers who use it too, of course. Deleuze comes to mind. But the passive voice dominates a lot of recent philosophy.

Part of this is Heidegger's fault--though it is probably not good to assign blame in this way, since no one person can cause any real change in the use of grammar (and I'll qualify things in a second). I don't mind Heidegger's jargon so much as the structure of sentences like these:

Yet that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us (B&T, ¶44, p.268 in M&R translation).

I did indeed just pick this at random, by the way--I basically opened a book of Heidegger and there it was. You can open up to a page of Heidegger, though, and most of the thing will be in the passive voice:

[In] what does the humanness of man consist? In lies in his essence. But whence and how is the essence of man determined? Marx demands that the "human man" be recognized and acknowledged. This he finds in the "community." "Communal" man is, for him, "natural" man. In the "community" the "nature" of man, that is, all of his "natural needs" (food, clothing, reproduction, economic subsistence) are equably guaranteed. Christians see the humanness of man, the humanity of homo, in his delimitation from deity. He is a Christian man as "God's child," who in Christ  hears and accepts the claim of the Father on him. Man is not of this world, inasmuch as "world," thought theoretically and platonically, is only a passing passage on to the beyond (Letter on Humanism).

Now, to be fair, Heidegger is never wholly passive--I imagine only really hardcore Heideggerians or maybe Derrida can actually pull that off. And his whole general project restores transitivity to the even passive uses of "is"--as Levinas once nicely put it. And on top of that, there are some really striking moments (the tool-analysis is one of them) where we get Heidegger's active voice:

The kind of being which belongs to such concernful dealings is not one into which we need to put ourselves first. This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the latch. The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us... (B&T, ¶15, p. 96)

That's still not quite as active as it could be--and it is built up in such an unbelievable way (as in the later work, where jugs are jugging etc.) that we might still have recourse to Adorno's jargon book. But then again anything with Heidegger and his language is fraught.

What's more important is that I also be fair in general by qualifying all this scorn for the passive.  I'd actually go so far in the opposite direction as to say--and I think I've said this to you on occasion, Evan, as I say it to everybody--precise use of the passive voice (not lazy use, as you'll find in this post) can be invaluable at times, especially in philosophy. Here it often becomes a very essential tool for writing, as it keeps the verb's metaphoricity to a minimum (not to mention its ability to imply causality). The sentence then relates concepts quite clearly.

But, of course, if you start to use the active voice, you quickly understand concepts get even clearer when you are concrete, when you risk causal implications and make something in the sentence do something rather than be assigned something (this is also why Hegel is, at times, amazing to read). Of course, teachers of writing often prohibit the passive voice for this reason: you actually have to think hard about the structure of the sentence with the active voice.

And Latour, who establishes or reestablishes that unbelievable link between rhetoric and realism, seems to understand precisely this. Harman too. I'm making my way towards intimating that the active voice has something to do intrinsically with OOP, of course, where clarity is suddenly defined precisely in terms of the ability to convey that concreteness.

Everybody knows this already though. What they're mistaken in thinking is that this might be something different than what was done long ago in the "language-centered" era of "critique." We can't just rest content with the notion that a philosophy's use of language reflects that philosophy--that the connection I'm drawing here is fully explainable in terms of what the philosophy says even about rhetoric itself. Talking about the active voice (or using rhetorical terms to try and get at it) shows other reasons can validly explain the thing.

This is important to underscore when a certain type of current continental philosophy doesn't claim to care anymore about a dream of some continental (mostly French) philosophy in the middle to late part of the 20th century: that you could change the general form and structure of philosophy by trying to talk about something other than what "there is." The strain I'm referring to interprets precisely this dream to be a statement about the nature of reality, about what there is and how what there is is there. Now, this isn't so much a misinterpretation (as partisans of the older schools would say) as a judgment--and a complex and nuanced one at that. It states that not only were the dreams impractical--if it just said that it would be missing the point--but also the whole effort of dreaming to produce practical effects was weird in the first place. And the judgment is correct, in some sense: what is constantly being bashed as the "language-centered" aspect of a certain continental philosophy of the past is actuality its incredible hope that by merely changing the way we speak, by being wary of "there is," the whole manner of philosophy would change in turn. To believe this, you have to believe that style mattered, that it had practical effects on the ground, over and above believing what Heidegger said about being and the the structure of "there is." Now, for a whole host of reasons, I think it's actually important to remember how the situation would support such a weird position. And it's important not to forget that Deleuze, who is currently being championed as a realist against the "language-centered" philosophies of old, held this position most tenaciously and extremely.

My only point here is that if we are willing to recognize a certain active-voiced turn in philosophy--if I've not so much convinced you of that as restated something that you want to believe about the relation of what the philosophy says to the way it says that--well then we have to ask whether something similar to the "language-centered" era is going on here. This doesn't invalidate anything or undercut anything about the philosophies in question--it just makes us wonder a bit about how philosophy works, how it constitutes its relationship to expression, how it continues to dream.

Getting Nowhere Fast

I believe we've agreed to let our Great Utopia Debate rest for a little while and move on to other things, but I just wanted to briefly mark another significant appearance of Erewhon in Latour's corpus, on pages 166-167 of Reassembling the Social:

As we have already witnessed on many occasions, there is often a wide gap between the correct intuitions of social sciences and the odd solutions they provide. This is once again the case: they have tended to confuse the projection of the Phantom Public with the pre-eminence of society. It's true that both have only a virtual existence but not in the same way. The first is a constant appeal to resume the impossible feat of politics, while the second is nothing but a way to dissimulate the task of composition by doing as if it was already completed: society is there, above our heads. So, when inquirers begin to look away from local sites because obviously the key of the interactions is not to be found there — which is true enough — they believe they have to turn their attention toward the "framework" inside of which interactions are supposed to be nested — and here things go terribly wrong. Starting with the right impulse — let's get away from local interactions! — they end up, to borrow from Samuel Butler's famous title, in Erewhon.

Could we substitute "humanities" for "social sciences" here, I wonder? Maybe that's a little hasty, but don't we also tend to run toward the social "framework" way too fast, precisely because we're afraid of getting mired in the local (i.e. the textual — remember the self-conscious concern in the 70s, which overlaps with deconstruction, to get "beyond formalism")? But notice that the problem is not so much the direction, or the movement, towards utopia but the speed of the travel, something you acknowledge at the beginning of your last and post. It's not that it's bad to connect the social to something more than the empirical, to possible worlds or political change; that it's our job to do this is a "correct intuition," and something worth saving, Latour says. It's that we want to get there so badly that we forget to trace the network that could eventually lead us there. It's not necessarily that we shouldn't want to get to utopia/Erewhon/nowhere, then: it's that we shouldn't expect to get there so fast.

Always low prices

It's a small price to pay, but it's still the wrong price, and that makes me question the economy--though, of course, you're right to get skeptical about such "accelerations" (great word) to the general. The benefit of ANT as Latour uses it is for me--if I can add something to your great post on this, or rephrase it a bit--not so much in that it makes us slow down in these instances and get more specific about what we're referring to (though it does that), but also allows us to think in a non-accelerating mode generally, where we are no longer tempted to specify the determining instance, as if that would knock the argument down. Or, to use your language (and video game collection--awesome), it allows us to get off the elevator entirely--and not just take the stairs, but, say, fly out the window if we want to get to another floor. In that spirit, I'll revisit what I said in the utopia posts, and actually bring in the article/introduction to Pandora's Hope, "Do You Believe in Reality?"

First, clarification. "It’s hard for me to see optimism as inseparable from utopia." I knew putting it that way would get me in trouble--it was a dumb and unclear way to write (certainly philosophical terrain, there!). I simply meant it is hard for me to see utopainism in the same way that BL sees it. And this I said was as optimism. In other words, I was saying that utopia is, at its core, optimism--for BL. For me, they're more separable (in a way I'll get to in a sec).

Now, my point is that Latour can use this utopia-optimism connection or co-implication (the latter word being what I should have used instead of "inseparability") to both critique utopia as a representation (as you succinctly put it) and also salvage utopia by offering an alternative to optimism--which I called realism. It really isn't a stretch here, I think, to "blur[] realism as a philosophical position together with realism as a political style or strategy," as you said, since I think this the point of everything Latour is doing, no--as long as we agree that the blurring produces a transformation akin to the one I said happens with rhetoric: producing a new rhetoric by rejecting "the" (modern, postmodern) political as constitutive of politics, or by seeing politicians (finally!) as political. And from this, I try to extract a sort of pragmatism, which I think is perhaps just another more dignified way to characterize that sort of "stupidity" I was getting at earlier--Latour's motivation to keep himself from being intelligent, as he puts it occasionally--and showing that it ironically (and laudably) remains something like the impractical element of a realism, but in a new way (so we have something like the realism-pragmatism of a Putnam inverted). So I don't think that's entirely a digression so much as a (badly connected) statement of Latour's version of utopianism and what I like about it, that ends up setting the scene for what follows.

Now, I don't mean this to be a knockdown argument, despite what I say at the end (more on this in a sec). I am just tying things together, trying to show how Latour is able to cut across all the very settled distinctions and come up with something new. One could say, though, that I'm precisely undoing his composition of the collective, his symmetry, either to show how it works or to critique (a vague, vague word here--I'll be returning to this in post on steamy critique) it. So when I return to utopia, and say that there are many types of utopia, perhaps, and some of them are not necessarily optimistic, you say that: "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." I think that's right, but it's really a question of how such a move is possible. I'm not saying the existence of many utopias is really something that isn't accounted for in Latour: you can't argue against him on that front, ever, since he doesn't reduce (and I have to say, as an intellectual exercise, it's wonderful to try and think of the person you're writing about as never reducing anything, but adding more always--but more on that in conclusion). I'm arguing that this refusal of a distinction--everybody in the Aramis!--takes a certain direction, and I'm tracing that direction. The direction is towards lending a "purity of the feeling or the love" to utopia, that, I say, "seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization." By this I don't mean that utopia is a more complicated thing than Latour makes it out to be, and that this invalidates what he has to say tout court, but that Latour is proceeding to characterize utopia in a specific way--and in a way that basically is asymmetrical.

It's important to recall that symmetry isn't between the humanities and the sciences, but between objects and society. And I think it's Latour here that forgets this, ultimately, in some way, because he doesn't make the utopian into more of a social thing than it supposedly is, but instead proceeds to invest it with sociality from the fact of its being studied by the humanities, as I argue.

This isn't really anyone's fault--it is studied by the humanities after all. Nevertheless, the connection seems a bit more external than usual. Perhaps, though, one should shift terminology and say that it isn't entirely a knock at the humanities that is going on here. Maybe that's an acceleration, saying that Latour really has that object in mind (represented) when he's talking about utopia. But then why are you, and him, so quick to agree with me here?

...Yes, I agree, it [BL's anti-Copernican revolution] 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.

I'd agree with the end of this. Though I don't think I ever called Latour an anti-humanist or anti-humanities. I take this sort of putting me in a particular box (pro-anti, which in my first post I tried to show broke down in a great way in Latour and in your discussion of him), however, as symptomatic of what is going on. For I also take your statement here (well put: elsewhere Latour speaks of the end of the means) to mean that there's something going against the humanities and how they think of themselves in what Latour says (ultimately) about reinvesting technology with love, or, as you put it, "by praising them [the humanities] only for their role in making things happen, for motivating action." But how did we agree that the motivating of action is of a certain type--the type of recalling us to the passions, say, such that we can show how technology is invested with love? Observation? Hardly, though Latour's approach actually (unlike so many other approaches) allows that to happen. Making it into a matter of "what they often" (often does a lot of work here, as it does in Latour in instances where the humanities comes up--that's my point in a nutshell I guess) "see themselves as." It's a matter of locating the box before it's opened or closed, as it were. Latour has a lot to say about this in Reassembling the Social, but I think the process is a lot more negative than perhaps he would like to admit (and he admits it is negative, at stages), at least when it comes to the humanities. I see Law and the more sociologically-oriented people correcting this, though they sacrifice many of the metaphysical payoffs of Latour that I praised earlier. But it's a matter of tracing how this happens--that's all I'm up to.

So perhaps it would be better, then, to say that there isn't so much a knock at the humanities going on (and that's all it is, nothing wholly anti-humanities... or at least it's only anti- in the way that he is anti-science which we once discussed, which also means being pro it... maybe you are referencing that) when this sort of utopian characterization is occurring, so much as a notion that utopia and other such objects that we study don't fiddle with its objects in the way the sciences do--a characterization that, it seems to me, is just "agreed upon" in too many ways--ways that the sciences are not entirely "agreed upon," mostly because Latour works with them in more detail (and there's nothing wrong about that!: like I said, Latour's approach makes possible the opening up of the humanities box in such a way that the location of it in Latour can be shifted!). That's really, I guess, what underlies a lot of that connection between the preface and the discussion of utopia and optimism, and why I want to register the many sorts of utopias: it's just that the "basically they're all the same" is moving towards a particular notion of sameness--I'm not saying they're each to be respected in their wonderful own uniqueness, or that, indeed, they aren't all basically the same. It's that there are more means--more morephisms to it all (and I think Latour might like this point of view, in the end). I should have quoted "Do You Believe in Reality?" (here I finally get to it) which was in the back of my mind here when I say that to him, its the sciences that tinker, fiddle. Latour says the following:

If anything, and here we can be rightly accused of a slight lack of asymmetry "science students" [Latour uses the perforative term scientists give to the science studies people at conferences] fight the humanists who are trying to invent a human world purged of nonhumans much more than we combat the epistemologist who are trying to purify the sciences of any contamination by the social (Pandora's Hope, 18-19).

So far, so good. I for one am totally fine with that. But then, Latour asks why this is so:

Why? Because scientists spend only a fraction of their time purifying their sciences and, frankly, do not give a damn about the philosophers of science coming to their rescue, while the humanist spend all their time on and take very seriously the as of freeing the human subjects from the dangers of objectification and reification. Good scientists enlist in the science wars only in their spare time or when they are retired or have run out of grant money, but the others are up in arms day and night and even get granting agencies to join in their battle. This is what makes us so angry about the suspicion of our scientist colleagues. They don't seem to be able to differentiate friends from foes anymore (19).

Again, we end up in the pro-anti pit, and I'm not quite sure how we really got there. It's true, scientists don't purify their sciences. And it's definitely true that philosophers of science as well as sociologists (the word reification tips me off to this as the other object here) free things from objectification. But there's the underlying sense of some sort of inductive-deductive divide going on beneath the purification-hybridization divide, or an empirical-critical divide that I find weird. It's not that the language of purification isn't to be taken seriously--in fact, I like that Latour is as precise as possible here--it's just the addition of that "fraction of their time" seems to align things in a particular way. This way is such that when we get to the more soft humanities, say, this seems to make the only option some sort of full on meaningless critical purification from an aesthetic level, or, if we do spend time hybridizing, postmodernism: which Latour admits hybridizes, but works on the completely wrong plane, and so doesn't touch objects at all.

In short, there's an engagement with the object in the sciences that is a sort of fiddling, a shaping, which there isn't over where utopia is studied. And there's something true to that--certainly the account of postmodernism is correct in its general thrust. But see how abstract we're getting? Meanwhile, this all thoroughly justifies "a slight lack of asymmetry." The symmetry itself justifies, here, its asymmetry. That's probably right, you gotta bring the asymmetry in line with the symmetry to begin with--but that presupposes some sort of asymmetry to begin with, some sense that we all agree to think about things in this way, and what if, what if, that weren't the case always? Sociology is our hope here: it can show we agree differently, perhaps, in a way that allows us to fiddle. Or that the asymmetry Latour talks about is not immanent to the asymmetry that is actually at work... granted we do see with him some asymmetry, some "two-culture" divide which can be profitably see in terms of his more rigorous Great Divide. Mainly, it's interesting to see the "two-cultures" divided up so thoroughly in Latour between the natural sciences and the social sciences, when for Snow (originator of the odious phrase), it meant between scientists and poets--that might be what's at the heart of my "critique" as you call it.

One more point in closing, though, implicit way back in my first point above about acceleration. We can work in Latour's spirit, but it doesn't have to entail adopting Latour's position. I think you'll agree that the only way to really read someone is to read generously, or sympathetically (to use an older vocabulary), but the problem with Latour (and what I've been calling philosophies of immanence--Deleuze and Derrida too) is that one can get pulled into his whole system by way of this, through just this sort of move (what I've called locating the black box--and which gets refined very very nicely in Reassembling the Social, though I'd say nothing really changes there as far as what I'm saying and as far as I can see). The point I'm making clumsily is that while we might agree about non-acceleration (getting off the elevator), this in turn can into way to lump others into groups that do accelerate too quickly--which is why I'm trying to distance deceleration from a position that sees in it something like rigor (from this standpoint, deceleration is acceleration in a different way). But this is of course because Latour draws the right consequences from all this, in a way people more inclined to just treat his ideas generously (humanities readers especially, and who are much more content with a Derrida or even Deleuze) might miss--and it is with this that I think you are rightly trying to sympathize with: the fact that such a spirit requires the adoption of serious metaphysical and methodological assumptions, which others might not share. But then we can pass from this move--which, again, I think is made in the most logical way, and I really agree with Harman (and you, I think) that it's the best, most challenging aspect of Latour, a sort of "put up or shut up"-ness that we actually rarely see--to something like the sense that this symmetry (for that's what the metaphysical consequence is) is the limit or (better) horizon to which we and others are always striving towards, even if we don't strive towards it (symmetry as conclusion and as method, or what we stick to). Put more bluntly, it's the sort of move that allows us to be asymmetrical at the same time as we try to be symmetrical, in the way that Latour admits he is above. The utopia post was my way of mapping this asymmetry--not so much its possibility as its structure or trajectory.

Why? Because that "grouping" it's what I see also in Latour's statements about "materialist materialism" or "realist realism," which are playful but also radically operating according to the logic of the "we never have been:" I, Bruno Latour, am more of a realist than all the realists because I have never been a realist in their sense, for example. Utopia works the same way: I am a utopian in the sense that no one has ever been. That is the sense in which I used the phrase "real utopia" at the end of my post--I should have marked it more clearly, and I was going to go back and do it (as well as add the "Do You Believe" comment) but I had to run down to Princeton yesterday: what I was parodically proposing was a utopian utopia, and opposing to Latour's realist utopia, or another sort of utopian utopia, which all other utopias have, by being utopias, never been. Modernity, to take the hugest example of this, is a weird thing, for Latour, is it not? I am a modern nonmodern, producing a critique that will undo the whole system (I'll dig around for that quote and stick it here, though I'll be returning to it in my post on "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"). Quite abstract, not unlike the sense that the humanities spend all their time purifying.

Now, what's great about Latour, as I've said here, is that this isn't the final state of the game. He, unlike all other philosophers of immanence--and I can't underscore how huge this is--allows us to get more specific (and even gets us excited about it, by saying that the prices of doing so will be low!), and so that's why I'm not, here, defending the humanities from the big bad anti-humanities Latour.

What I'm really after here, I guess, is symmetry. For me it's weird how it can merge, somewhat inevitably, with that presupposed asymmetry which Latour knows (one accuses him of it "rightly," he said) he's operating with. And for me that brings back all the big problems of representation within this non-representational system: how is it really working there? What's in Latour's head? I think you too work this way, and that's why we have a bit more sophisticated sense of how to use Latour.

But I'll close by just saying something I cut from that last utopia post, which I was going to end with. Latour says:

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).

I said a lot about this, but then, at the end, I stressed that Latour goes on to be symmetrical as usual, and then said the following:

You once remarked (I continued) that his obsession with symmetry is surprising, given that Latour is all about the asymmetrical and hybrid. But I'll close by saying that I think he has to maintain this symmetry in order to undo the asymmetries according to the sort of self-cancelling non-modern/modern perspective that he inhabits in WHNBM… and so occasionally we can actually note asymmetries that escape.
 
And I left it on the symmetry in the preface, immediately following the quote on the humanists:

I have sought to show technicians that they cannot even conceive of a technological object without taking into account the mass of human beings with all their passions and politics and pitiful calculations, and that by becoming good sociologists and good humanists they can become better engineers and better-informed decisionmakers (viii).

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).

Latour and Utopia, part 1

You thought your response to Aramis was like the RATP... Nevertheless, even though I end up even more belated in getting to it, I want to really consider the book--which I have to say I enjoyed the most out of everything we have read so far, even more than the mind-blowing Irreductions--and to your discussion of utopia and Aramis, since I find it to be dealing with a lot of issues of temperament and critical posture (through Koch and the issue of manifestation) that we're tracking now.

I've been seriously interested utopian thinking lately, as a sort of an arrested moment in the speculative dialectic that is not quite negative like the Benjamin/Adorno constellation: it is a moment of reflection that not only suspends what is into an alternative assemblage though which the concept (totality) can be grasped, but also gets the speculative wheels in motion and envisages, through disruption, other possible arrangements of reality itself--a preview of what the speculative, leaping over towards the Real, produces/reaches, as it were (in a way that brings the Hegelian and colloquial sense of the word "speculative" together, which I find promising... though certain SR people find it then carries too much of a whimsical, imprecise, un-rigorous air: philosophy must be difficult, remember?). My recent interest in Jameson and Marxism generally is really based on Jameson's investigations of the utopian along these lines (and of course on postmodernity and theory, to which utopia is a sort of refreshing/risky/fraught alternative), which he makes through his lifelong engagement with science fiction (now collected and presented in Archaeologies of the Future)--not so much his work on modernism, which, like you (I think, but you also have beef with his take on Bourdieu), I think is a bit more sketchy.

Now, what's interesting about utopia is it seems to go entirely against what Latour says in Irreductions--that statement that has continually haunted me:

We will never do any better. We will never be able to go any faster. We will never see any more clearly (231).

But you're right to also note that there is a respect for utopianism in Aramis. So where does Latour fall here? I want to return to your comments and note, as it were, the back and forth, pro-utopia and anti-utopia. You say,

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 — which one often associates with an anti-technological stance, like the one Norbert attributes to Habermas on page 280 — in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

Here you've already hit on the essential connection (or disjunction) for me, to which I'll return in a second post, between 60's theory/arrogance/optimism and 60's utopianism--as well as rightly allied utopia to an anti-technological move, though you could also say that this is the more sort of semi-reactionary, ultra-creative, and Fantasy element in what is the thoroughly SF-like technological insistence/realism of utopias (producing the immense plans, cities, detail that we find even and especially in More all the way down as well), as Jameson does (see "The Great Schism," in Archaeologies). But I want to follow what you then say:

This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour's technocratism, his own "love of technology," which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about.

The technology that could exist... so we can indeed do things faster, better... there are possibilities in technology! But then you (rightly) go on:

He's not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for.

So it's not that we're envisioning different futures, say, through technological invention, but actually talking about the new potentials of technology that already exists! We can't do things better, after all! But, you then say precisely that,

From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself.

...And you're exactly right! Because Latour is like a utopian, but of the present, as it were. How? Because while we can envision new uses of technology, or new social structures possible through these technologies, we have too many of those uses already available to us, for Latour, to actually go and envision anything radically different, radically better than them. This is the confusing sort of shift in Latour: we can't do it better, because better is already what is possible with what we've got! So we need not get utopian in any sense of envisioning a radical disruption with the present system... we need merely get political, pragmatic, with what we have.

But it's important to note that this doesn't immediately come from some sort of distrust in the imaginative. It rather comes from a very interesting reversal of the role of technology that you're pointing out: we don't use technology to envision new social change--we actually bring about that change with existing technologies.

No longer is technology something empty, on which we can project all the visions we have for futures--it can't remain the sort of black box though which unheard of communicative possibilities are realized (Le Guin's ansible, to take an over-cited example), or through which everyone can have affordable shelter (Fuller's synergetic, geodesic domes--although these are often built)... though people in the humanities (except philosophers and maybe social scientists...) perhaps never have thought technology is really as empty as that (certainly media studies doesn't--see part 2). Regardless, technology now is a set of possibilities (and media studies perhaps understands this in more detail than Latour--as I'll get to in another post on Latour and McLuhan) which are there, and through which the future possibilities are indeed realized. As Latour never tires of saying, rehearsing a line he got from a commentary on Deleuze's philosophy (and which is indeed all over Deleuze), the actual always outstrips the virtuality of the virtual: thus the virtual possibilities of the technology we have are not somewhere other than technology... they are just in the technology as the technology becomes more real!

Thus, it's technocracy that kills technology (because, for Latour, it doesn't really love technology). This is why you go on to say the following:

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.

But now we're at pathos, and this puts a wrinkle in things, to which I'll return (via 60's optimism) in a sequel to this post. For now, I just wanted to outline this sort of utopian-realism, or realistic-utopia of Latour.

Everybody's Autonomy

I've now delayed my post on Aramis for so long that I'm beginning to feel like the RATP. (Rim shot!)

Anyway, I doubt that I can do justice to such a strange and provocative book in one entry, so I will just offer some scattered comments, and we can go on from there. First, I want to do a little ad hoc taxonomy of its structure, which Latour actually makes pretty easy: certainly the differentiation between sections and subsections is much clearer than any of the divisions within the Aramis project itself. To wit, the elements of Aramis (the text) are:

1. the tale of Norbert (a sociologist and obvious stand-in for Latour, possibly named for Norbert Wiener) and the narrator (a young engineer doing an internship);
2. interviews with engineers and administrators involved in various stages of the Aramis project;
3. documents pertaining to the case;
4. speculative interludes on the nature of technological projects, many of them explicating or applying concepts that crop up in other ANT literature;
5. prosopopoeiae written in the voice of Aramis, the unfinished train line, itself (and occasionally other entities as well)

To make my life a little simpler I'm not going to deal with (4) or (5) at all right now, even though those are some of the richer passages in the text, and may be some of the most interesting to return to once we get into Harman and speculative realism. Please feel free to adduce some of those passages in your response: it's not at all that I'm not interested in them, it's just that I feel they are marked off as properly separate from the "story" of Aramis, which is what I want to start with.

Towards the end of the book, Norbert says:

I'd actually like to do a book in which there's no metalanguage, no master language, where you wouldn't know which is the strongest, the sociological theory or the documents or the interviews or the literature or the fiction, where all these genres and regimes would be at the same level, each one interpreting the others without anybody being able to say which is judging what. (298)

Is Aramis that book? I'm not sure that it is, completely. Certainly the narrative passages aspire to that state, and Latour brilliantly realizes it by making extended use of the dialogue form in the conversations between Norbert and the unnamed engineer. (I know Latour doesn't like this word, but the look is truly, and literally, "dialectical.") And as Norbert never tires of pointing out, the explanations offered by the various interviewees are very nearly as sophisticated and convincing as any of those advanced by the sociologists, making the text as a whole a true contest between "genres and regimes … each one interpreting the others." (Of course this is what Actor Network Theory would claim is always going on; it's just that usually Latour doesn't sacrifice the "friendly tour guide" persona of his first person voice. This movement into dialogism makes for a much more disturbing, chaotic text.) But in the speculative passages (4), he pushes back against these tendencies, marshaling all of the conceptual forces of ANT against the actors — which is why these sections, though full of great insights and formulations in themselves, ultimately don't seem so convincing as a "refined sociology" of Aramis.

But perhaps that's the point. In one way, Aramis is yet another handbook, yet another methodological tract, like Science in Action or Reassembling the Social. Yet instead of showing how perfectly ANT (or science studies or refined sociology or whatever Latour wants to call his method) accounts for the phenomena it's supposed to account for, Aramis takes the somewhat perverse tack of showing how confused the sociologist can get by his objects. Ultimately this is the moral of the book: one must love research, which entails loving its cul de sacs, breakdowns, and unexpected branchings as much as its eureka moments and positive successes. This is the error the actors make, that Norbert chides them for in his big Hercule Poirot speech in the epilogue:
“Oh, you do love science! … But you still don’t love research. Its uncertainties, its whirlwinds, its mixed character, its setbacks, its negotiations, its compromises — you turn all that over to politicians, journalists, union leaders, sociologists, writers, and literary critics: to me and people like me. Research, for you, is the tub of the Danaides: it’s discussion leading nowhere, it’s a dancer in a tutu, it’s democracy. But technological research is the exact opposite of science, the exact opposite of technology.” (291)

A great moment, one that actually moved me a little (I have a thing about research). And one that connects in a pleasing way to the two other themes in Aramis that I wanted to mention: utopia and autonomy.

One interesting motif in the book is the frequent allusion to 60s utopianism, often by the interviewees: e.g., M. Liévin: “‘It was fashionable at the time — Personal Rapid Transit, PRT. Everyone was excited about it … around the sixties. The Kennedy era. Private cars were on the way out — that’s what everyone was saying’” (15); or, later, M. Henne: “‘Before 1975, there was a period of innovation — new cities, all sorts of wild gimmicks. After 1975, it was all over; security was the only thing that counted…’” (47); or M. Cohen: “‘It’s also a question of the times, you know. I have trouble imagining an industrialist today who’d say, ‘We don’t have a medium-distance ultrasound link-up? Okay, let’s go for it — we’ll invent one. There’s no motor on the market? Never mind, we’ll develop one.’ And it was all like that. Today, everybody sticks to his own job. People don’t take so many risks’” (54); or M. Girard: “‘I went back upstream, as it were, back to the somewhat utopian thinking of the 1960s … we need something like cars that join together, trains that split apart’” (136); or M. Coquelot: “‘It’s a project from the culture of the Sixties, transporting people in a private Escape instead of in public conveyances… Now, obviously, we’re culturally out of phase…’” (155). In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis 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 — which one often associates with an anti-technological stance, like the one Norbert attributes to Habermas on page 280 — in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

This qualifies in an interesting way what some people have seen as Latour's technocratism, his own "love of technology," which is suspect to many intellectuals (chiefly Heideggerians, but not only them). Because what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist, and the social interactions that (can) help to bring it about. He's not an apologist for the neoliberal order or the effects that technological culture has had, but he does insist on the reality of the networks that science and technology have created, and the possibility of using them to different ends than the ones they are currently used for. From this standpoint, he looks like quite a utopian thinker himself. 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. And while many of the explanations given by the actors are as good as any a sociologist could come up with, some are a lot less enlightened — e.g. M. Chalvan: “‘Cars belong to individuals; everyone looks out for them. But Aramis would have been collective property. The first time anything went wrong, people would have blown the whole thing up’” (71): a rare appearance of straight-up ideology in Latour’s work. [Cf. also "The Fear of Mob Rule" in "Do You Believe In Reality?"]
Which brings me to the second question, the question of autonomy. This is not a concept that I would normally associate with Latour, given that his network ontology seems to make the question of autonomy not even really worth asking: if everything — human and nonhuman — is constantly negotiating with everything else, as Irreductions would have us think, then in what sense could autonomy even matter? If human minds aren't privileged, if Kant was wrong, then autonomy is pretty much a non-issue, right? But Aramis proves to be (among many other things, of course) a sustained meditation on autonomy, although it gets in through the weird allegorical back door (or "hidden staircase," as Norbert likes to say) of the operation of the Aramis cars themselves.

From quite early on, we are encouraged to think of the Aramis system as akin to the networks that Latour, in his other work, sees everywhere: M. Soulas, president of the RATP, says: “‘It wasn’t a line like a subway, but more like a bloodstream: it was supposed to irrigate, like veins and arteries. Obviously the idea doesn’t make sense if the system becomes a linear circuit — that is, if it ceases to be a network’” (9). But one of the big questions becomes, how does one keep the elements circulating within this network from destroying one another other, or the passengers they carry? The enormous technological difficulties of programming the cars to be autonomous and ensuring that the system is fail-safe is one of the major challenges faced by the Aramis team: “‘The big challenge with Aramis is that the cars are autonomous; they don’t touch each other, yet they work together as if they were part of a train. They have nonmaterial couplings — nothing but calculations. So you can imagine how autonomous they are. Every car has to know who it is…’” (54) Everyone has to know who they are, and where others are; they don't touch each other, yet they work together as if they were part of a greater whole. This is the social, as Latour sees it, and autonomy turns out to be a more important concept for it than I had previously thought. In one of the book's wilder passages, he transposes this concern for autonomy into a theological register in another odd prosopopeia, a dialogue between a Catholic priest and someone named "Lamoureux" who compares the Aramis cars to Leibnizian monads: “…they’ll be connected by a vinculum substantiale. Nothing material will link them together to keep them on the right path. They’ll have to make independent decisions, check themselves, connect and disconnect, in conformity with the laws of the world system to be sure, but freely, without touching each other and without being the slaves of any automated mechanisms…’” (63-64)

But it isn't Latour alone imposing this anthropomorphic autonomy on Aramis: the actors themselves do it constantly as well. The social scientists who conduct a study of the project's public image conclude that “Aramis has to be perceived as the prelude to a new philosophy of transportation, addressed to responsible adults” (186). [One might argue that it's the autonomy of the riders that's in question here, but as in other areas of social life, one has to grant the autonomy of others — in this case, train cars — as well as maintaining and asserting one's own.] The engineers in charge of Phase 3B describe the fixed sectors of traditional guided-transportation systems as being “‘like a cop who takes away all the flexibility from trains and subways in exchange for a considerable margin of security'" and “‘MATRA comes up with a radical solution … It involves doing without the sacrosanct fixed sectors, in exchange for increased intelligence on the part of the cars’” (208, my emphasis). Maybe Latour owes more to la pensée '68 than we thought! The great social struggles of the (long) 60s, the quests for civil liberties and freedom from police surveillance and oppression, are recapitulated in the attempt to imagine a true transportation network, one that requires a radical — and perhaps impossible — degree of intelligence and autonomy on the part of its constituent actors.

I'll leave it here, having barely scratched the surface of this marvelous, hilarious, frustrating, unpredictable book. I welcome your thoughts, whether or not they're a direct response to what I've written here. Let's see if we can link up and act as a train.