Fables

It's interesting that there are so many fables in Latour--especially in Pandora's Hope, though We Have Never Been Modern is indeed one big fable. "Do You Believe in Reality?" sketches out the problem of skepticism over the years along these fabular lines, and "A Politics Freed from Science" sketches out in mythical terms the relation of politics to science and scientists:

By unwinding the adventures of Reason, we can imagine how it was before it turned into an unlivable chimera, a monstrous Big Animal whose unrest horrifies the masters even today. Needless to say, this is an attempt at archaeology-fiction: the invention of a mythical time when political truth-saying would have been fully understood, a world that was later lost through the accumulation of mistakes and degeneration (237).

The essay in other words seeks to see how reason worked in politics (through a reading of the Gorgias) in order to politicize science--since scientists would make politics external to science precisely by claiming reason isn't political. Reason, in other words, is not expert knowledge.

In true Nietzschian fashion (I am tagging this as I go: someday we can return to all these #Nietzsche-s), there's a lot of Socrates-bashing along these lines:

To see a political project through, with the crowd, for the crowd, in spite of the crowd, is so stunningly difficult that Socrates flees from it. But instead of conceding defeat and acknowledging the specificity of politics, he destroys the means of practicing it, in a sort of scorched-earth policy the blackened wreckage of which is still visible today. And the torch that set the public buildings ablaze is said to be that of Reason! (239)

The utterly non-Nietzschian thing here is that this does not describe war, but rather the state of peace and politics (which is why, by the way, Latour refuses to see the science wars as a war, and not as a political crisis for the sciences, which I think is an unbelievably brilliant move, killing off the "two cultures" bullshit--which, remember, is C.P. Snow's depressingly British, moralistic formulation--for good). Nietzsche was, after all, quite apolitical--unless you stretch him or modify him (sorry, Nietzschians).

Regardless, Latour goes on to outline a political reason that "cannot possibly be the object of professional knowledge" (239), and reconstructing the original Body Politic by "simply taking positively the long list of negative remarks of Plato" (237). What's really interesting is that this all involves a reversal of the role of rhetoric (which, however, does not land him in an English department dripping with postmodern extensions of Sapir-Whorf)--something evident of course from Science in Action onward but something we haven't quite really remarked upon yet (except in terms of fiction). Socrates makes politics into rhetoric, and then his whole philosophical effort turns around deciding "what sort of knowledge rhetoric is" (239). Latour turns this around not by celebrating rhetoric and mobilizing it against Socrates' knowledge (a la Derrida in Dissemination--and everywhere else). Rather, he thinks rhetoric is first and foremost political, and therefore its relationship to knowledge (Socrates' focus) has less weight than its ability to shape reality:

The nonprofessional nature of the knowledge of the people by the people turning the whole into an ordered cosmos and not a "disorderly shambles" [Latour quotes Plato] becomes, through a subtle shift, the right of a few rhetoricians to win over real experts if they know nothing (240).

Latour is fine with this, even though that shift is the shift of the Gorgias as a whole, i.e. a shift made by Plato following Socrates, and altering the remarks of Callicles--Latour's hero--and others. He's so fine, he goes on to say the following, in an unbelievably refreshing reconsideration of Sophism, which does not just valorize it (Derrida again), but also makes the Sophist's point differently:

What the Sophists meant was that no expert can win in the public agora because of the specific conditions of felicity that reign there (240).

But then comes Socrates, who changes this around by divorcing rhetoric from the political:

After Socrates' translation, this sensible argument becomes the following absurd one: any expert will be defeated by an ignorant person who knows only rhetoric (240).

You have to read the whole thing to see how great this argument is, but one thing I want to take away from it all is that rhetoric is returned out of language to the sphere of politics. When so much literary theory is based on the linguistic turn itself, this makes possible some notion that language, after all, is not that primary, and that perhaps theory can be something other than the assertion of the primacy of language or language-substitutes (traces)--with the corollary that if language isn't primary all of theory collapses (as some theorists now feel, as they come under attack from Latour-like realists). Nor does this mean that we have to return to some notion of reference, as pro-theory people (who see it developing along a suspiciously straight line) might assume, and which leads me to think that perhaps most theory (this is the entire aim of de Man's work) is not even an effort to deal with the primacy of language so much as the effort to keep the referent suspended (something structuralist poetics did much better than any Foucauldian theory of discourses)… and that maybe a new consideration of the role of language is actually made possible by this Latourian position, beyond postmodernism.

Anyway, rhetoric is returned to politics, and thereby reason is never allowed to become apolitical, in this vast sort of alternate history Latour sketches out by reading the Gorgias against its author and main protagonist. And this fable, this counter-dialectic (in all senses), shows both the real state of politics and the real role of reason, by narrating how a specialized form of it "was kidnapped for a political purpose it could not possibly fulfill," (258), and turned, now, into the banner under which anti-political politics of science can mobilize.

In other words, the fable ends up as policy. But how did this happen? Like in "Do You Believe in Reality?" and We Have Never Been Modern, these fables--which suspiciously look like histories of ideas--are turned into those powers or punctuations (as Law calls them) which need to be undone by ANT. I guess Latour is thinking that as long as he's dealing with powers (with Constitutions), he might as well explicitly mark his own narratives as accounts of powers, not forces--that way they can be analyzed by ANT when the time comes. In other words, these fables (which so often deal with big terms--like realism, materialism, research, science, critique) shouldn't be taken as networks themselves, but power-sketches, organizations of the punctuations--a nice inversion of the task of real rhetoric, which would then be ANT itself, coming along to undo and make specific all of the fabular.

But that's not the whole story. For in the case of something like Aramis, or Pasteur--which, while they are novelized (or at least the story of the first is), are also case studies (and Aramis is indeed a true fiction, as Latour says in his intro)--we have something like these fables not working only in this sort of punctuated sphere. They are, rather, narratives that easily slip into ANT itself. How? Precisely through what you were noting a long time ago, Evan, and I too noticed: allegory--the weird way that pasteurization and now even the Aramis project itself works exactly like a network, before ANT gets to it and messes it up (shows it to be much larger, etc.).

Now, my question here about the fables--which is, in a way, a sort of basic question of how to take these sort of more general essays and works by Latour (like WHNBM itself)--is not just one of trying to figure out what plane Latour is working on, the punctuated plane or the plane of the network itself. I'll leave it to Reassembling the Social to try and work on this more precisely, make it more specific. I'll also be putting up little entries that actually work out this concept of punctuation (or the operative shift from powers to forces and back again, which indeed ANT can account for--I think it is its most interesting concept).

Rather, I'm trying also to weigh what Latour's way of looking at things is concretely giving us in terms of ways into problems via his particular concepts. On this point, I think it is important to pay attention to the phenomenology of reading Latour, as it were--or what I'd prefer to call just the feeling of the concepts at work here. As we move into philosophical characterizations of Latour, through Harman, we are inevitably going to be more focused on the system itself, the coherence of the concepts and their interrelatedness: this (metaphysics) is all right, but its also not where we're at home, as literary critics. Where we're at home is, I think, in this sphere of feeling… feeling the contours as it were, of the notions, testing them out, using them, touching them in a way that philosophy--if you'll pardon my turning a conflict of the faculties into a conflict of the senses--can only try and get at by seeing (or characterizing as "aesthetic"), however much it tries to become pragmatic or turn the philosopher himself into a phronemos. This no doubt gives us a bit of an edge (which a more rhetorically minded philosophy like Harman's is itself somewhat regaining) in seeing these concepts as somewhat useless insofar as they are not also seen to relate to this experience of deploying them somewhat against the grain, or applying them to new cases or areas in which they might not (if you just viewed them in terms of system) really be seen as pertinent (in the semiological/structuralist sense of this word that I love--though pertinence also constitutes scientificity for Greimas and these same semiologists, let's not forget).

In short, this sort of (literary critical--and I stress both of these words as we move into essays on critique, though perhaps we might describe literary criticism more as analysis and reading, and thereby evade much of the anti-critical talk) sense of how concepts work allows us to see how they at times don't work, or work according to tendencies that are somewhat weird. Here--just to bring this all to a conclusion--we get the odd resemblance of these fables to something like a history of ideas… which is something that, if you view it in the terms of the philosophy/theory itself, you won't be able to see--since you'd rather be making sense of this precisely in terms of that system (ANT).

What I'm saying is that there is something in Latour--in this allegory-fable connection--that seems like it's too familiar for a system that claims to do what it is claiming to do. This, I'll say again, is something typical of philosophies of immanence, but doesn't just reduce to something like an incongruity between the "doctrine" and the "performance," which is then quickly made into a (bogus) refutation. It is an aspect of the way that Latour is opening up problems, and I just want to mark it here… as my sort of contribution to an account of how reading Latour feels (phenomenology of reading Latour).

The virtue of networks

I'm going to drop the meta-critique that I've been developing over the last week, especially as we'll be getting into Aramis, which is just so freaking awesome that it'd be a shame to read what I've been saying recently into it. But I hoped merely to show, especially in my last post, that We Have Never Been Modern is so expansive, despite its quite manageable size, that "it made me do it," as we like to say. This is because the argument--again, more than in "Irreductions," surprisingly--really does make a case for a different practice of scholarship in general, and is so totalizing and productive of closure that it proves the correctness of the saying that "the totality is not what we end at, but what we begin with" (i.e. it ends up negating itself insofar as its wholeness imposes itself upon us). You say in your last post, rightly (I'd say, with Jameson, whose saying that was--sorry to keep annoying you by trying to reconcile you guys), that we don't always have to do this (see his handy "Three Names of the Dialectic," or even the older "Architecture and Ideology"--where the description is a bit thicker--which argues such closure also needs to be supplemented with the local insights, springing up like some weird fungus on the big structure). In other words, we can take the small bits (the transformation of the notion of the black-box) too. But I'd still say that the aim of the book is to provide some grand alternative to interdisciplinarity by a brilliant destruction of the idea of "humanism"--the keystone that gives most current debates about the conflict of the faculties their, indeed, conflicting (but also stupidly irresolvable) shape.

Or rather than "destruction," some sort of process by which the idea is just made irrelevant (ladder-kicking). And this is where your nice discussion of the black-box comes in. For you supplement my too-temporal account with an incisive sense of its functionality, which obviously comes from an increasing skill in deploying the concept (or rather just using, since the other Foucauldian word seems to avoid any handiness and skill and indeed some sense of direction in a characteristic way: what I like about Latour is always his counter-emphasis, despite his rhetoric of war and force, on tinkering when it comes time to describe this sort of phenomenon--which is so much more bodily or rather [if I can tinker with that other word of his I'm finding so helpful] shapely).

What I like in what you said is the emphasis on not razors but boxes--the sort of redefinition of simplicity in unproblematic, un-angsty terms (unlike Occam). There's something to be said for the role of affect (qua affect) in Latour along these lines (and you've mentioned it in your posts), for he keeps railing against that perverse modern tendency to try and shore up despair as a sort of comfort that allows you to stay inactive (Jameson rails against irony in a similar way in Archaeologies and indeed throughout Postmodernism). Regardless, it's this redefinition of simplicity (as "proliferative simplicity," as you say) that brings me to the virtue of the network I wanted to get to last time.

Your comment on what the black-box opens up is extremely helpful here:

It seems to me that the black box has great possibilities for historicist work. Because it does away, once and for all, with the “archaeological” metaphors that Foucault et al. espouse. The working assumption, for the New Historicists (and also, I think, Jameson), is always that the actors knew more — even if only unconsciously — than we do; and in order to understand them, we need to reconstruct that knowledge. So we’re always playing catch-up; and this is part of why it’s so easy to criticize, even dismiss, historicist work: well, if you just knew a bit more about X then your interpretation would be better. Your failure to take Y into account invalidates your whole argument. You don’t seem to have realized that Z is a condition of everything you say.

But we can say, with Latour: yes, the actors knew lots of things we didn’t, consciously or unconsciously; but much of what they knew took the form of black boxes which they never thought, or perhaps were unable, to open.

That's perfect--and nicely puts a finger on that bullshit that sometimes passes for argument in English departments. Or rather, not argument, but as you say, whole methodological presuppositions that we'd rather keep in place and not question in order to score a small point and undermines the reality of the thing we're trying to get at rather than (to use the one phrase I've praised in Latour from the get-go) adds to the reality of it.

For if we can say, yes, let's just open their black boxes, but not say that this involves descending into some unconscious--if we can say "we don’t need the black boxes in the same way the actors did," the whole tenor of the work changes and we're more concerned with the connections the the thing we're dealing with makes. These connections, though, are not abstract--though we can always black box whatever we need to. The fun of the black box, as you say (and it does sound like a toy when I mention it this way--I'm tinkering again), is that we can actually get rid of this "abstract" and "concrete" dialectical language (it's this that actually is at the heart of progressivism: the dialectic is simply a machine for generating that return to the point at which you started, but with a fuller sense of what's going on). There are no abstract facts, just boxed ones. So boxing is, as you stress (and I didn't), easy--not fraught with some sense that it involves a subtraction from what we can get out of the thing, a loss. The loss is registered differently: as you rightly say, "we can always skip some steps."

The network that gets generated then unproblematically maps out the area in question, by first and foremost always reducing the number of potential ("powerful") actors (making the actors actual, "forceful"). That's perhaps a better way of putting the sense that Latour is getting at the real. But of course it doesn't stop there: the reduction of the amount of potential actors when seen in a situation allows for the multiplication of actual ones along different and perhaps unexpected lines. I'd stress that it doesn't have to be so unexpected, really, since the work of analysis isn't about revealing anything new anymore. Or at least the new isn't defined as something radically other, which gives the sense of progression (and that confusing situation where sometimes, as literary scholars, we somehow have to also make the case at some point that our interpretation is like a discovery).

The weird thing is that suddenly we're left with a situation where "make connections!" becomes the same thing as "always simplify!" And Latour asks us why that should ever have made us feel guilty. That's the virtue of the network notion of things, where in Heidegger (if I can just fold this back into what I was trying to get at towards the end of the last post), such connections are tortuously made by unfolding a more primary original term (leaving us with so much revealing and derevealing and light and darkness that we're just quite tired of standing anywhere near the clearing). I've been somewhat hesitant to affirm the sort of notion that just following these things gives you an adequate analysis (this seemed too close to Derrida to me, who is neat to read when he does this but ultimately doesn't give you any better sense of what the situation he's describing is about--it's usually just a fun ride). But you're right to try and make me remember in the last post that Latour isn't just following some preestablished sort of text: there's a subtle selection operation involving opening and closing boxes, but without the anxiety of loss, in order to construct networks (deconstruction becomes construction, he says in WHNBM) which we can then follow... and that's important. It indeed brings us back to the virtues in the structural narratology of Propp (that Greimas made more precise): we can summarize episodes and look at how they function, either by opening them up or by linking them to something else--we can close and distant read at the same time, as it were. Too often this is seen as a sort of "classifying" project in analyses of structuralism. Rather, it's closer to the "structuralist activity" that Barthes described--giving a better, fuller account by identifying relevant units of whatever size (which a regular analysis in terms of regular categories would miss). It's not out of place here to recall the "mono-individual" of Lévi-Strauss, an individual that is his own species, and the sense that categorization involves degrees of semiotic force, rather than anything so static as a label. It's in a similar way that the notion of degrees of reality works together with ANT to describe a situation, perhaps. Maybe we should read "identify units" for "follow," wherever Latour talks about "following the networks" (your incisive remarks about the differences between Latour and New Historicism here are relevant--identify new actors, don't rummage through the trashcan of history only to say you discovered something new!).

Maybe just to frame another question in closing, recalling my remarks above about experience: in general, the anxiety-producing aspect of the paradoxical modern stance is nice because it personalizes such response or knowledge--it shows that moving from the position of subjective knowledge to the objective involves a sort of process where the individual point (my reading) must be socially ratified (Kant). Marxism and Latour would critique this, but not in the same way--the former would keep things tied to experience to depersonalize individual knowledge (class consciousness and claims that we never encounter an unread artwork--cf. Political Unconscious, "metacommentary," etc.), while the latter would... well, what? Against this backdrop (which includes affect) where do Latour's experiences come in here? I imagine that once you start from the social science position, where all knowledge is already out there as positive, and doesn't so much involve the paradoxes of subjectivity (as experienced--these paradoxes are accounted for, not without massive effort of course, through the procedures and the conceptual framework, the view of sociology and its understanding of dynamics), then there's no need to depersonalize the individual, to show that this sort of marking of the subjective as subjective is pointless, since what's at work is a social process in which your contribution is only a description of the ratifying itself. You just plug yourself into the process of the ongoing description of reality. From the standpoint of the analyst, then, there's less of a problem of viewpoint (as there is in reading, where I have to have my take on things), so then when we can begin to critique sociology in the way Latour does, we don't have to reconnect it with experience--especially by ramming the description/criticism through that one-way time of modernity's historicism (Jameson). This paradoxically makes anecdote equally easy and simple and un-angsty to enter into... this is just a sketch of a problem, but I thought it might be neat to begin to think about such areas, since Aramis is so amazing in this respect, but also because Latour is always there with his paper (WHNBM), or getting into his car, conversing with laser printers, and walking through doors ("Where are the Missing Masses")--and indeed the anthropology of the sciences (talk about problems of viewpoint! the observer hidden behind all that lab equipment) is really the origin of the work...

I said something about Heidegger...

...in the last post: namely that, if we take Latour's statement in We Have Never Been Modern about how "it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting" (WHNBM 76; Latour's emphasis), we might think time gets spatialized, and this would mean some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour would be overlooked. Now, these commonalities weren't necessarily in terms of an interpretation of time as nonspatialized, either. It is clear that while Heidegger holds something like this (crudely put, spatiality has its "end" in time--though we should also point out that time ultimately has its "end" in the destining of being, though Heidegger, rightly, would not see in this history any return to spacing... enter Derrida) because Latour holds that time and space are mere "frameworks" we use to describe the relations of force between actants (as I made clear last time, but here's just another quote to remind you: "If time depends on associations, associations don't depend on time," 141), it can't be on the issue of any "interpretation of time" that they might agree.

So what's the commonality? A commitment to subordinating time ultimately to something like practice--seeing time generated practically or through the practical. Now, I don't mean to say something stupid like, for Heidegger, time is a result of Dasein's projections, etc. This should be clear from my parenthesis above (time is historical). By "practical," I mean something different--namely that the emphasis falls on how it is always more like a framework than a form. So while the two systems are distinguished clearly--roughly we can say something like Heidegger takes time to be real and Latour doesn't (he takes trials of strength as real)--nevertheless both want to undo time as representable and make it into something like the contours of any and all action. (John Protevi in his Political Physics has a compelling chapter on this--"Philosophy and Leisure"--ultimately dealing with how philosophy has to be a difficult activity for Heidegger... and of course not just for Heidegger).

In other words, the similarity is in the sort of meta-level (that is, on the edge of the concepts and the systems, which are indeed formally incompatible on the issue of time) "critique of representation" (as Jameson aptly calls it--and we'll get more on this as he is supposedly writing a book on Heidegger) that I mentioned in the last post:

Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces).

I'm now just trying to say how this is indeed "less temporal"--in terms of time as representable unrepresentable, or form (Kant, of course)--but also "more temporal" than we might think--in that we find the position of Latour being similar to the position of Heidegger when it comes to de-representing time, among other things... that is, by bringing a practical emphasis--only most visible in Heidegger's privileging of phronesis over sophia--to bear on their conceptions.

I'll be clearer. I'm saying that on the issue of time, we can see a meta-level tendency to claim the following in both Latour and Heidegger:

There are not two problems of representation, just one (WHNBM, 143).

And this is because representation is dependent (if I can put it way too simply) on what reality does, rather than what it is--such that what it does is what it is. This might sound odd if one has a superficial understanding of Heidegger as "the thinker of being," but really it is only through the emphasis on doing that Heidegger recovers that question of is-ing (and this is what makes what he does something other than ontology as it has always been done). Now, if reality is, on the other hand, simply what it is, it becomes able to be represented (grasped) in two ways, not one: first, reality is delegated (the discussion of the figural and non-figural in "Where are the Missing Masses," is a great concrete discussion of this, anticipating for us various concerns of Aramis, though I'm obviously saying it underlies everything that Latour is getting at--and we've already talked about it at length in discussions of "translation"), and then reality is doubled over (as it were), folded to produce something other than delegation--something that indeed defines itself as non-delegation, an image or a non-reality (representation in another sense). This is why we can look inside the book (for characters) and outside it (at its "material conditions of production"--history of the book stuff): though Latour in his own readings (of the excellent Rick Powers) will emphasize the first, he is able to go "outside" the text with ease and in such a way that we could imagine him also looking at the production of the book "object" in the same way.

However, we might also look to WHNBM's concern with a "Constitution" as the main site of such a "critique of representation," for Latour uses the term precisely to stress the "delegating" aspect of representation. Latour is saying that a Constitution's purpose is to guarantee representation ("a constitution is judged by the guarantees it offers," 139) or allow delegation. But the Modern Constitution precisely sought to represent in such a way that it produced representation in another sense than delegation, so as to draw a line between what could be represented and what could not. He says the aim of the book is to allow amend this Constitution to allow the representation of things. But this undoes the second sense of representation, because no longer do questions of representation--qua what can be represented and what cannot, or representation in explicit opposition to representation qua delegation--have to come up: everything is delegated. Reality is a series of tubes--I mean, networks. No doubling over, no folding, no surfaces:

Technological networks, as the name indicates, are nets thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even though they embrace surfaces without covering them, and extend a very long way. The work of relative universalization remains an easy-to-grasp category that relationism can follow in a thoroughgoing way. Every branching, every alignment, every connection can be documented, since it generates tracers, and every one of them has a cost. It can be extended almost everywhere; it can be spread out in time as well as in space, yet without filling time and space (118, my emphasis).

There is no filling because we only have one problem of representation, not two. This is why delegation is really only transcendence that lacks a contrary: "I call this transcendence that lacks a contrary 'delegation'" (129).

I hope I've outlined the connection between Heidegger and Latour, then. For me, the sort of Heideggerian commonality is most apparent in thinking of science in action, which is of course all over Latour. I just wanted to bring this out in what appears to be the most abstract part of the work--time--though it's present right there in the title (we have never been). The sort of closing off of old theories, which I talked about in the last post, lends to scientific knowledge a way of developing that is practical, that turns it into an activity--and of course opposes any sort of Popperian logic.

I'm also connecting things to my earlier posts that resisted taking Latour as a sociologist. For while sociology has a lot to do with this sort of "praxis, not theory" emphasis, if we see Latour's "Heideggerian" preference for the practical producing his critique of representation, then one way of putting my objections or qualifications to the post of yours on "Translation--or How Everybody Wins" was that perhaps Latour is a crappy sociologist. In other words, I'm just trying to defend sociology here. To that end, it was absolutely correct to see in Pasteurization the most sustained engagement with human actors in Latour's career, perhaps, and therefore the most strictly sociological part of his work. But still, while he's got an analysis of "how everybody wins," aren't there better, more sophisticated sociological accounts of that same phenomenon precisely because there we have, indeed, some knowledge of what is going on? That is, less of a stress on practice (isn't the "sense that everybody wins" less practical than Latour's sense of it)? In other words, might we not have a better understanding of such group dynamics in sociology because Latour is more interested in making that "everybody" include all the practical actors (microbes too!), more than in actually outlining the dynamics of this particular phenomenon--where everyone can get what they want, even if they misunderstand each other? In other words, it's your genius to see how this strictly sociological notion was at work in Latour. But I'm saying that precisely means there has got to be a more accurate account within sociology--one that wouldn't be so focused on objects, yes, but would be able to analyze more various human groups (consider this the elaboration of my point about "small groups" in Latour). Latour would see in this precisely a purification--it is his insight to see that this "variability" I'm attributing to the sociological analysis is actually only hardening the divisions that really need to be dissolved (between humans and things).

Which means, fundamentally, I'm skeptical about Latour's claim that we can just extract certain things from the modern Constitution, and get rid of the rest with little loss (Latour, rightly, would never say that this would happen completely without loss). Latour, I think, is absolutely right to want to cut across so many existing boundaries, and his ability to do so really makes his remarks persuasive. But doesn't there have to be a point at which we sacrifice accurate analysis brought about by specialization for something less accurate but more relevant? Latour would undoubtedly say yes--and then bolster this claim by saying basically we try to be relevant all the time without being accurate at all. Science is really and truly experimental before it is accurate--thus, why not experiment some more? This will make Alan Turing his hero in the "Critique" essay, and I like that. But I wonder whether, ultimately, we can't do things differently. Indeed, can't we envision a form of accurate analysis, brought about even by specialization, that is indeed moving in a better direction? If this sounds too Popperian, I apologize. But doesn't Latour's claim cash in on 1) an antimodern or postmodern critique of specialization (though Latour is perhaps the only person--besides Bourdieu--to enjoin us to really follow bureaucratic compartmentalization rather than dismiss it) and 2) a sense that scientific practice is no different than practical activity--as I explained above. No doubt, Latour would claim that this would be true, if the world itself wasn't one in which a person in a lab could actually alter something way across the globe (by curing a disease, say), in which micro-actors knock down or infinitely empower macro-actors. But... what if the world really wasn't that way?

I'm not saying that so much out of belief that the world isn't precisely that one which Latour sees in his newspaper at the beginning of the book. I'm just forced into this sort of position--which renders things pretty moot--because of the immensity of the structure of Latour's argument. I would say that this is, for me, the only real massive argument against him in this book, and is what makes his other works much more suggestive and much more helpful for me: here, either you get on the same page with him, or you act in your own way, which he claims is also amenable to his project. This certainly marks the triumph of a way of arguing that only seeks to add reality (which is good!), but it most definitely means the death of any sense that there may be more and less viable methods and procedures, or differing ways of getting at something (which may be bad).

Maybe I can put this differently by saying that Latour isn't satisfied if he just convinces us that he has a better description of the way things work. For we might actually be willing to grant, even from within sociology, say, that his analysis is better or more full than the sociological one if it described things more accurately. That is, we might willingly dissolve even our knowledge if we were convinced that he had a better grasp on things--that is, in such a situation where there has to be some sacrifice of "accuracy" for "relevance:" if relevance is in the end more accurate than accuracy, doesn't it make sense to switch sides? But I'm not sure Latour wants that. He wants to transform what knowledge we have into something different, which presupposes not even the relevancy of his case but something else--a notion that being modern has always been being nonmodern. It is in this deep sense--that we have to not only see things in the right way but do them in the right way, that I've been trying to align with Heidegger: it is this that makes the Heideggerian approach (and the Derridian deconstruction) so impoverished when it comes to issues of method, since the issue is always, above seeing things the right way (phenomenology itself) doing them. And it is this that is really involved in the critique of representation, and constitutes that sort of immanence that Jameson critiques in postmodern thinkers, and that Latour tries to combat head on, as it were--by making delegation precisely transcendence, and insisting that we follow them, step by step, "locally" despite their local-global character--but (in my view) can't quite overcome. I might say, anticipating Latour's remarks on critique to which we will soon turn ("Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"), that perhaps this is what happens when arguments (see the whole beginning of Science in Action on rhetoric) are seen first as acts, as pure persuasion (no representation qua depiction, figuration, fiction), and ultimately as things that stage a Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung or polemic (in the sense of polemos--the stress on war as you first brought up in the "Translation" post), and then turned around and said to be absolutely non-polemical, anti-polemical, weaknesses. But that's another issue (though it bears on there being no real represented "inside" to something like Galatea 2.2 or The Echo Maker--though that is, of course, an issue these novels themselves interrogate [especially the first], which is why Latour likes them so much).

I'll conclude, though, by saying that perhaps this does lean too hard on the notion that at some point, in amending our Constitution, we have to sacrifice accuracy. This comes too close, of course, to saying that Latour is anti-science, when his position gains its strength from precisely it's pro-scientific-(but anti-science? how to describe that)-realism. I'd say that it is in this sense that we can say the network notion of reality is better than the notion of Heidegger--though not because Heidegger isn't a realist (it will be Harman's contention that he is precisely this), and not because (despite popular opinion) Heidegger is flat out anti-science (it's more complicated than this). There's another post waiting here, going back to the (to me, compelling) advantages of the technological network enumerated in the Latour quote above, but I need to gather my thoughts in order to articulate it.

"A slimming treatment:" time in WHNBM

At the end of my last post I brought up small groups, and said that Latour, at least in the early work, seemed to privilege them:

Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab?

This is actually a bit unfair, as it is put--and I'll try and correct things below. Nevertheless, I see We Have Never Been Modern as Latour's great effort to try and undo such a privilege.

How? In Latour's earlier work the lab was that sort of lens in which the the world is inverted. There, forces which shaped man were allowed to proliferate. This very process of proliferation then produce new shapes (if I can use that wonderful term from "Irreductions"), some of which the scientist allowed (though this implies no domination by any abstract powers) further proliferation. At a certain point, people got it in their heads that there was no scaling going on--that all these relations of force and the generation of shapes didn't exist, and what one was getting in this operation was the truth of something humans had never really approached in the first place, never manipulated over and over, that was never just the large made small.

Now, the lens will be a certain arrangement of this nature-culture which he calls modernity, and that process of scaling the construction of a Great Divide according to the articles of a modern Constitution. All of which makes sense: Latour is generalizing his conclusions even beyond the philosophical generalizations that, in "Irreductions," were still either products of field work or philosophical and personal insight (remember the first "pseudoautobiographical" interlude in "Irreductions" where Latour pulls over his car and sees the sky, and chants the three basic theses of that text: "Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else."). In other words, he is trying to articulate his viewpoint on the widest empirical grounds (something that is not philosophically possible, and so could not be done in "Irreductions"), so that they no longer have to take their authority from where they originated.

So it is surprising to see the title of the essay deny something that we basically took to be a fact: that we have been modern. Nevertheless, if one understands what Latour is getting at, particularly with respect to time, such a statement makes perfect sense.

Indeed, everything involves knowing that time, for Latour, is merely "the distant consequences of actors" ("Irreductions," 1.2.5.1; 165), or thus a result of the state of the relations of forces between actors:

"Time does not pass. Times are what are at stake between forces" (165; 1.2.5.2).

Or, as he says in We Have Never Been Modern itself:

We have never moved either forward or backward. We have always actively sorted out elements belonging to different times. We can still sort. It is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting (76--Latour's emphasis).

It'd be a huge mistake to think that this means time is spatialized for Latour: some of the most significant commonalities between Heidegger and Latour (which we will point out soon) would be thereby erased. However, I could understand the temptation. If, as Latour says, "the connections among beings alone make time" (77), aren't these connections being made in a particular place, and thus a space? Some of Latour's statements come close to saying precisely this:

In other words, everything happens only once, and at one place ("Irreductions," 1.2.1; 162).

But what this means is only that space, like time, is dependent upon what an actant does:

We do not know where an actant is to be found. The definition of its location is a primordial struggle, during which many get lost. We can only say that some locate and others are located (1.2.3.1; 164).

Thus:

Space and time do not frame entelechies. They only become frameworks of description for those actants that have submitted, locally and provisionally, to the hegemony of another (1.2.6;165).

How, then, have we ended up thinking that something just comes before another? Time is being-shaped-by-a-force, as is clear from these quotes. Thus, a particular force, arranging things in vast amounts, would have to impose upon us the framework of the irreversibility of time, since if time is only the result of what actants do, or if "each entitity is an event" (WHNBM, 81), then (or therefore) "time becomes reversible" (73). Such a reversible time is actually quite easy to think, provided that we pay attention to what actants do and see in them the creation of what Latour calls hybrids or the proliferation of quasi-objects:

I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert "of contrasts" because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time. Some of my genes are 500 million years old, others 3 million, others 100,000 years, and my habits range in age from a few days to several thousand years (75).

So whence this irreversibility?

The notion of an irreversible arrow--progress or decadence--stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain. Irreversibility in the course of time is itself due to the transcendence of the sciences and technologies. [...] It is a classificatory device for dissimulating the inadmissible origin of the natural and social entities from the work of mediation. [...] Just as they eliminate the ins and outs of all the hybrids, so the moderns interpret the heterogenous rearrangements as systematic totalities in which everything would hold together. Modernizing progress is thinkable only on the condition that all the elements that are contemporary according to the calendar belong to the same time. For this to be the case, these elements have to form a complete and recognizable cohort. Then, and only then, time forms a continuous and progressive flow, of which the moderns declare themselves the avant-garde and the antimoderns the rearguard while the premoderns are left on the sidline of complete stagnation (73).

In other words, modernism (or modernity) is the result of progress being imposed upon us, which is merely a result of that systematic exclusion of hybrids (here, the hybridization of reversible time, where each "instant" can be next to any other in the way that my genes can be right next to the drill in my hand) that so much of what the book details:

Modernism--like its anti-and post-modern correlaries--was only the provisional result of a selection made by a small number of agents in the name of all (76).

Or, to put it in the terms of "Irreductions" (which I find clearer), the creation of power out of force (through the extension of a network, i.e. by only expanding force, but thereby representing actors). At this point, it should be clear what Latour means by his title, and why he says it: We have never been modern because the relations of force have never produced progress or irreversibility. It's only because we've allowed power to come into the picture (and thus allowed actors to represent others in more than one sense) that we think we are modern (Latour can largely be summed up by the following phrase: "There are not two problems of representation, just one," 143).

I have dwelt on this, however, not only because I want to explain the title. I also think that it is this resistance to the notion of progress that keeps asserting itself, subtly, throughout the book's attempt to account for modernity's production of and disavowal of quasi-objects by separating purification and mediation. Of course--to recap--this production and disavowal takes place because, Latour claims, moderns (or those who think themselves modern) don't see the work of purification as a particular case of mediation--the core argument of the book, I think. This means that moderns adhere to that Constitution which I have already mentioned, or see nature as distinct from culture and proceed to put acts that alter nature on one side of the "Great Divide" and acts that alter society on the other. They don't see that this separation is really only another way of linking nature and culture, or, better, creating more networks of natures-cultures, mediating or translating or passing forces (take your pick among these metaphors). In short, attributing something to a power, keeping the world divided up between culture and nature, rather than trying to look for hybrids, or those things that already are moving between nature and culture (Boyle's air-pump)--this is only allowing us to produce more quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects). If we want to more accurately alter this production, purification should be practiced as what it is---a case of this mediation.

But, back to progress and time. What Latour allows us to think is not only how various hybrids get overlooked--how we don't end up researching Boyle's pump but "classes" and "gentrification" and "extroversion" instead--but also how we confuse the history of science with history ("the history of science should not be confused with history," he says, 93). By this I mean the sort of separation that is created not just between true and false science but a very common practice that is included in this wide-ranging distinction. I mean the sort of division--and Latour acknowledges this throughout his discussion of the symmetrical asymmetries in the chapter on relativism, and, as I'm arguing, implicitly throughout the book--between something like working theories and closed theories. This, of course, goes back to his discussions of the black box in Science in Action. But now everything is shot through with very sophisticated notions of temporality, and a massive argument trying to base things precisely on all practices, not just scientific ones--and so we see how modernity itself involves this black-boxing. For at stake is not just an individual theory, but whole "paradigms," or "epistemes," or (even more precisely), "structures of feeling" (all these notions being similar). In other words, the notion rejected here is not that science works with facts, but that there are epistemological breaks, total changes in perspectives that close off not just outdated series of facts, but whole sets of "knowledge"-producing outlooks and techniques--all in the name of progress (Latour says throughout the book that the one thing modernity can't be is outdated: as we see above, it has to be avant-garde).

This gets discussed perhaps most openly in the beginning of the reconsideration of anthropology in the chapter on relativism, where Latour supplements David Bloor's principle of symmetry. Latour is recalling, in the following quote, the principle's advantages, but importantly--for us--starts by paraphrasing Canguilhem:

Only what breaks for ever with ideology is [for Canguilhem] scientific. It is difficult indeed to pursue the ins and outs of quasi-objects while following such a principle. Once they have passed into the hands of such epistemologists, they will be pulled out by the roots. Objects alone will remain, excised from the entire network that gave them meaning. [...] For such epistemologists, "Whiggish" history is not a mistake to be overcome but a duty to be carried out with the utmost rigor. The history of science should not be confused with history. The false is what makes the true stand out. What Racine did for the Sun King under the lofty name of the historian, Canguilhem does for Darwin under the equally usurped label of historian of science.

The principle of symmetry, on the contrary, reestablished historicity, and--we might as well say it--elementary justice. David Bloor is Canguilhem's opposite number, just as Serres is Bachelard's. "The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth," writes the latter as he breaks with epistemology. [...] For Serres, as for actual historians of science, Diderot, Darwin, Malthus and Spencer have to be explained according to the same principles and the same causes; if you want to account for the belief in flying saucers, make sure your explanations can be used, symmetrically, for black holes. [...] If you claim to debunk parapsychology, can you use the same factors for psychology? [...] If you analyze Pasteur's successes, do the same terms allow you to account for his failures? (93).

Now, let's keep this in our heads, and quickly recall that in my last post, I had something to say about your statement in your post on macro- and micro- actors that for Latour,

the macro-actor is only a network of "devious" micro-actors, and that they are in many ways simpler and easier to study than micro-actors.

There was a general suspicion on my part of the emphasis on the micro- and the local. I might here correcting one mistake that I made in this characterization: I didn't emphasize that this emphasis on the local is what I found odd, not the local itself, since Latour himself doesn't think that anything is either strictly local or strictly global (I forgot whole sections of WHNBM that critiques this notion: see p. 4.9-4.12). In other words, I find odd the way the word local gets used even after Latour's critique of the local/global is registered (see the use of "locally and provisionally" in "Irreductions" 1.2.6 above). Now, recalling all this (and stating it all again more accurately), let's also recall that despite all this, taking your statement in these large terms, I emphatically agreed that

it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler.

Now, given these remarks about the principle of symmetry, and the general effort to reject any sort of notion of epistemological break, with all of Latour's notions about time still in mind--I think I can elaborate on how another form of simplicity is generated by the Latourian analysis.

For Latour continues, after he asks about those errors of Pasteur that he documented so well:

Above all, the first principle of symmetry proposes a slimming treatment for the explanations of errors. It had become so easy to account for deviation! Society, beliefs, ideology, symbols, the unconscious, madness--everything was so readily available that explanations were becoming obese. But truths? When we lost our facile recourse to epistemological breaks, we soon realized, we who study the sciences, that most of our explanations were not much. Asymmetry organized them all, and simply added insult to injury. Everything changes if the staunch discipline of the principle of symmetry forces us to retain only the causes that could serve both truth and falsehood, belief and knowledge, science and parascience. Those who had weighed the winners with one scale and the losers with another, while shouting "vae victis!" (woe to the vanquished), like Brennus, made discrepancy incomprehensible until now. When the balance of symmetry is reestablished with precision, the discrepancy that allows us to understand why some win and others lose stands out all the more sharply (93-4).

Of course, Latour will go on to complicate this--he calls for another principle of symmetry to go beyond the first (and not only explain truth and falsehood in social terms, but in natural-social terms). But I'm generally saying the sort of critique of modern temporality is here in ovum, and indeed cuts through the ways that modernity is able to multiply explanations rather than simplify them.

For what happens is that all those black boxes come undone, as I said above. All of time becomes reversible, and there are no longer theories that get more concrete and "settled" because they are "historical" than newer or more "open" ones (since what is new is not always open). In short, Latour is solving the huge dillema of historicism that characterizes so much humanities research which bases itself on a scientific model. If I want to write about the 18th century (and I do), I surely can't talk about sentiment as if it still had some relevance. And if I did, it'd be awkward. Theory (in literary studies) has largely been the way out of this problem, by getting behind this awkwardness (and fetishizing it as "crisis"--cf. de Man): I can make an idea "open" by somehow plucking it out of time and playing with it. It is this that I think people are talking about when they confusedly call theory "ahistorical." Nevertheless, theory is only taking its cue from a notion of modernity defined by the sciences--or so I imagine Latour saying. Regardless, it is allowing the "opening" of "settled" knowledge precisely by grounding ever more thoroughly the notion that there are "open" and "settled" knowledges.

This we can see by the other historicists doing the same thing (as you nicely described in your "New Historicism" post), but by multiplying their explanations as to why the "settled" knowledge became settled.

What I'm trying to show is that both procedures are done away with if we stop that sort of black-boxing which is the modern look at temporality: instead of looking for ideology (Feyerabend looks perhaps the most foolish from a Latourian point of view), or really trying to either settle or open the knowledge, we slim down things by making time reversible, or stop seeing time as some process of accumulating--anything at all (here, knowledge or error).

Another (less temporal) way of putting this is seeing only one form of representation taking place, as we hinted above. There are no representations "inside" the objects that we are looking at. When it comes to art, this gets complicated: there is no inside to the work. We can therefore do history of the book right alongside character analysis, just in the same way that we look at the scientific "facts" as scaling practices that occur in/through the lab. And it is really this that is the main thesis of We Have Never Been Modern: any reconsideration of time and history will involve conceiving of the "sorting" which produces time differently, and in such a way that there is only one sort of representation (the relations of forces). This means, then, that we have to see our networks as made of collectives, not just as nature on the one hand and society on the other.

The resulting simplification is then huge: if we admit that purification is mediation, instead of critiquing endlessly (and Latour ends the book by saying that it is in the interest of critique simply to keep going, never amending the Constitution), we will find simpler connections between actors--for they will no longer appear as powers, but in all sorts of hybrids right in front of our faces. I've tried to show, however, the less visible and perhaps more complicated way in which this also involves historical actors, supplementing your post on New Historicism, which rightly stressed the production of new historical actors--here I just try to show when they then are... which is not in any modern time.

On the issue of groups, and doing more justice to Latour on this issue--I've done a bit here to correct that but I'll come back to it more directly (via Heidegger, who I didn't get to here) in another post... I fear this general presentation of WHNBM has gone on too long!

"2-3% GNP--that is not much"

That's an excellent post--you link together how measurement is an ontological fact as well as a human practice, as you say at the end.

I'll just make a quick response in order to perhaps speed up the conversation. We're doing big posts, which are good, but take a lot of work! I'll also be able to get in a few remarks on "Irreductions" before we head into the reading for this week--though our weeks, of course, will overlap, and "Irreductions" was for me such an unbelievable, eye-opening ride (much more than WHNBM) that I probably will be harping on it for some time. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow me to do full justice to the excellence of that post. But we'll have opportunity to go back and cite previous remarks, and I'm sure it will get its due that way.

I'm interested in the two payoffs that you outline, the "methodological" and the "political" payoffs. You rightly show how the first is tied to the second in the way that (as I just recalled) the facts are linked to practice, or in the way that metaphysics can be empirical ("infraphysics" is the other great Latourian word for this). Or, the way that the use of one set of tools produces an analysis that allows you to open more black boxes (rather than lock them up), and even simplify the explanation (more on this in a second). But I'm wondering about the second "political" payoff. You rightly say that the use of the same tools--the symmetrical rejection of macro and micro actors, and the focus simply on actors--keeps us away from the despairing feeling of being only a small part in something too large, a sort of more global "level" that we'll only be able to change minutely, if at all. This is right because it rejects the Marxist (and Hegelian) overemphasis on the part-whole relationship, and does so precisely from the Latourian standpoint of scale: we understand that such part-whole relationships (and their generation of levels) really may be just attempts to scale up what is really less important, and overlook the places where the tiny actor knocks down the macro actor.

I don't have any beef with that. My beef is with another "political" move that Latour does over and above this sort of demystification of the part-whole, which moves in the opposite direction. This is the move of insisting that if we scale down the macro actor (or the actor that appears more macro than it is), it will become richer. Granted, whenever Latour couples this with the notion that we are, in the same moment, moving from analysis of powers to an analysis of forces, the claim is a bit (but perhaps only a bit) more solid. But isn't there a sort of equally political payoff to the following claim, which he emphasizes twice (by my count) in "Irreductions?"

Sometimes people talk of "nature" when referring to the crowd of slaves and subjugated actants that have been reduced to silence, or when speaking about the commands given by a class of researchers who, in turn, march to the tune of a handful of "great thinkers." But it is most unlikely that the forces are really like this. After all, only two to three percent of the GNP of a few countries circulates inside the sparse and fragile networks of "science." We might as well try to reduce all the journeys in the world to airline networks (4.6.4; p. 229).

Or more simply:

Two to three percent of the GNP of a few industrial nations, two thirds of which is spent on industry and for military purposes--that is not much (4.2.1; p. 216).

"That is not much," sort of says it all. The claim has its opposite: there is much more elsewhere, once we open the black boxes.

This is the general merit of the notion of the black box in general, I think--to turn to Science in Action. What we have is a sort of displacement of the logic of same/other, which ends up becoming so unbelievably constraining if you have used it too often. Such a logic becomes, instead, same/more-than-the-same. Where there is elsewhere, where there is the otherwise, there is more. We'll see that it is Graham Harman's genius to insist on this continually--though he certainly developed the notion before he really read a lot of Latour (through a reading of the tool-analysis). Suddenly, we're talking about how little we can grasp, and actually how that is not a problem (this is the basis for the speculative move). We simply go beyond and grab it--what we don't do is start reducing it, or, in this case, totalize it, and simply look for what goes in and what goes out. There are no Big Others anymore, and we don't have to insist on the unrepresentability of the otherwise--just simply that our representation of it will be inadequate. This change in tone is, to me, and to the rest of those following the anxiety-ridden tradition of Continental Philosophy, a huge relief.

But along with that comes a tendency to say that reduction in general is bad. And, to put all my cards on the table, I see too much continuity between Latour and the postmoderns (including Derrida) in this area to take him seriously when he couples this with a new (and welcome) realism. For what we get is not only the idea that the local is more important than the large totality, and the idea that the real is more important than representation, but the notion that as we get more local or smaller, we approach the real. The stress on variable ontology here--that the real has a more or less aspect to it (see WHNBM p. 86, fig. 3.4)--is nice, but it's too neat to get him out of this general rejection of abstraction and reduction. For isn't the problem sometimes not that we're constantly reducing, but that we can't reduce in an adequate way? I follow Frances Ferguson, and to an extent Derrida (who, more than other postmoderns, broaches this issue), and indeed to an extent Jameson (who I am seeing is much more amenable to this idea and I originally thought him to be) in insisting on this. To that extent, the problem of levels is again crucial, and the differentiation of tools--rather than the use of the same ones--becomes important (that is, it's not just a matter of handling things more rationally).

Nevertheless, I think it is to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how the creation of larger categories can be reductive in the sense of scaling down the problem (or black-boxing it). And it is really to his credit that Latour is the only one pointing out how, if we don't reduce things, our explanation might be simpler (I am always for simplicity in a discipline that, perhaps even more than others--because it is internal to the process of confronting the object itself in reading it--produces "interpretations" merely by problematizing texts that aren't problematic). This all makes us think more about how irreduction can go against even some of our best efforts not to reduce things--and, more than that, produces studies that actually demonstrate this (we end up with something like what Ian Hacking says is a singular virtue of experimentation--the creation of phenomena--and its in this particular sense that I think we end up with an "experimental metaphysics"). I don't really think that my objection here is incompatible with such a focus on the proliferation of hybrids (what I'm calling reduction might be slightly different than purification). But, as I said, when we start going in this other political direction, we end up saying things like the following:

Do they turn toward nature? What could this mean? Look at them! They lean over their writing and talk to one another inside their laboratories. Look at them! Their only principle of reality is one that they have determined themselves. Look at them! The "external" referents they created exist only inside their world (4.3.5; 219).

Which I take to be similar to what you say in that last post:

The "empirical" part comes from his attention to the ways humans — and here he's a conventional sociologist — actually do scale and measure, which he sees as dependent on a prior measurement or adequation, and thus questionable.

That's okay, but the notion behind that might be that the form of questionability is, precisely, at this level (if I can be a bit of a dialectician, and look at Latour from precisely the angle he doesn't want to be looked at--though not by attributing him any reduction). Ultimately, for me, this ends up producing statements like this (which Zizek, for one, takes as the postmodern (!) critical (!) statement par excellence):

Every totalization, even if it is critical, helps totalitarianism (We Have Never Been Modern, 125).

There's certainly good sense in saying this is because "a system that is total and sleek does not get divided up" (WHNBM, 125)--certainly more sense than in the critical postmodern project, which would see totalization merely in those real idealities that are philosophemes, discursive regimes, etc. etc. Indeed, as I lead us into the book we're considering this week, I'm not saying that if you catch Latour being modern or postmodern, his project is invalidated--he himself, though he can't find "words ugly enough to designate this intellectual movement" (WHNBM, 61), would still save a lot of what they do (WHNBM, 134). But I'm just wondering about the viability of the general tendency behind this "other" political move.

And I'm wondering, generally, about its politics. We shouldn't forget that "Irreductions" ends on, not an apocalyptic, but a post-apocalyptic note:

I will not yield to them; I will not believe in "the sciences" beforehand; and neither, afterwards, will I despair of knowledge when one of the relationships of force to which the laboratories have contributed explodes above France ("Irreductions," 4.7.11; 236).

And that this seems to follow (how, exactly, I'm still working out--it might be good to take up WHNBM on this point), from an ("agnostic") conviction that:

Those who think that they can do better and work more quickly will always do worse because they will forget to share their only means of knowing and testing. They will believe that they have done enough when they have "diffused" reasons, codes, and results. In fact, all of these wither once they are removed from the scorned networks that keep them strong (4.7.11; 235).

That's some serious realism. It's so realist, we might seek a more forceful word: "common sense" might be better, as if that influential early 18th century Scottish school has come back with a vengeance. Latour, of course, goes to Spinoza and Machiavelli. Regardless, the following is at the same pitch:

Listen, it is very simple. We will never do better than those who have simply to convince themselves about trifling matters, have everything they need to hand, and are properly fed, well lit, and appropriately taught. How many mistakes do they make before they start to give up the tiniest prejudice? Tens, hundreds, thousands? So how many wars will it take to convince five billion men and women? Ten? A hundred? Unless, that is, the multitudes can think more quickly and clearly than those in the laboratory (4.7.10; 235).

I'll stop here, but let me just say that we see in the last remark maybe a prejudice of Latour himself, at least in the earlier work. Latour seems to me to be pulled always towards what we never have called influential small groups--however much these groups in turn end up spilling into society, or contracting around one of their more prominent individuals. Don't we get the impression, reading his work, that the collectives that lend us the most to study are about the size of a lab? That's all well and good from one standpoint, which sees the analysis as an analysis of what is actually there--and (rightly) doesn't want to see in the process of following these actors' networks (if I can say that) anything like the process of imputing to them some supra-historical agency, or an effort to turn labs into the driving force behind our (modern) time. But then again... And how would we actually articulate this sort of objection or even mere observation?