Latour and McLuhan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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!