Latour and Utopia, part 2

Now, my last post on this topic just was outlining the general position of Latour via technology as it intersected with this issue of utopia, following your lead. I put a bit of pressure on some of your words, trying to tease out the sense of that sentence in which you said, rightly, "what Latour loves above all is the technology that could exist," and then were able to also draw out how this is the case because (or rather only because) Latour isn't a technocrat: Latour loves technology not as a completely open possibility that is in reality only a black box onto which we project our desires, but as an open box, actually existing technology (to use the old phrase in a weird sense), such that all the stress is laid upon both "could" and "exist" in the above quote. I said he's like a utopian about the present, not about the future. Accordingly, such temporal schema like this get dissolved or rethought through the implied metaphysics, and so to talk like this quickly becomes inaccurate. It might be better, then, to say, as I did at the end of the post, that Latour is a utopian realist.

But let's be clearer about this: to be utopian about reality, to look for possibilities within what could exist, or become only more real than it already is, means also to rethink what it means to be pragmatic--another word I used last time. Now, you wouldn't really think this necessary, as pragmatism and certain aspects of realism have indeed been aligned philosophically--though fundamentally it is more a matter of tone, perhaps, than anything else (and the tone of the pragmatists, above all) since at bottom the two systems/schools are mostly incompatible. More important, though, is the aesthetic (or, let's say, the felt process guiding concept-formation/organization) that both of these philosophies project, and which allows them to rejoin (and their overgeneralized label, alongside that tone, is one way that they do this) a more general and indeed political sphere in which they seem to be, not just allies, but twins: realism produces pragmatism with respect to the issue at hand, and vice versa.

But Latour changes this all around. Not only does he make us rethink the basis of the differences between the two positions, by making a new sort of realism--and a more robust and accurate realism (some of the requirements of realism being not really requirements at all, as Harman, for one, has pointed out in his nice talk about materialism)--such that we can say, philosophically, that all previous realisms aren't really realisms, or are insufficient realisms, and then go on to conclude the link to pragmatism proves philosophically possible or impossible again on this new basis. No. He also makes possible a brand new pragmatism by way of this really robust realism, and in the widest most everyday sense. No longer is one pragmatic by focusing only on what is most necessary, cutting away everything that might be interesting but not bear on the situation. Pragmatism loses its (indeed Anglo-American, and oddly religious in ethic) connection with prudence, a connection that makes it come along to shut down questions, deem them irrelevant, cut all sorts of lines of thought off--or urge us to sit content with what we've got in a pseudo-Kantian way (I speak in general terms, as philosophically the positions become more nuanced and aimed precisely at cutting away such aesthetic associations, even though the associations seem to inform this very process of shearing off). Politically, it no longer means sticking with the immediate, with the practical, with the doable. Rather, Latour's pragmatism is often impractical, though it is always aimed at being realist, and indeed doing, changing, modifying, rather than hoping some intellectual trickle-down effect will take care of things. Most radically, it makes pragmatism have some hope to it--rather than narrow this latter category into some overgeneral category of "belief," which I think (but this is just me) isn't so much out to respect belief as to render it, through that respect, "mere belief." Rather than messing around with an impoverished sense of belief and the problems it produces, Latour offers us a new form of belief (which, however, might have some very old content, as you pointed out by mentioning his religiosity).

Needless to say, I find this really promising. It's the part of the extension, making a mess of things, that I like: the one thing you don't want to do, ever, for Latour, is clean up the mess under the guise of being pragmatic, since being realist about the network makes you even more pragmatic than what you'd achieve by ceasing to follow it (by "getting down," after all this work, "to the real issues"). I might take a moment here also to note something that I don't think we've sufficiently recognized: the general sanity of Latour's politics in, at least, the short term. Latour wants to really make sense of serious issues that confront us, and which others seem to have no way to address. The stupidity of the scientists mucking about with global warming data right before the huge Copenhagen conference is only possible if they don't share a Latourian point of view about the issues--this seems to go without saying. But the reactions to it--incredulity that the scientists would want to make their case in the most stark terms possible--are only possible for the same reasons. The prudishness with which we approach science is, in such situations, quite unbelievable, and the sort of Feyerabendian sort of reduction (science = ideology, to the point that we should teach it alongside creationism) that we're tempted to make in reaction shows a similarly unbelievable determination to keep such issues away from basic political considerations. So all those things on the newspaper--and the general shift of science from the physics model which dominated the 19th and 20th centuries towards the biological, of which each is a symptom revealing how this trend will continue perhaps even into the 22nd century--are, I think it's important to say, the right issues. But, if I now can move past this, still more important than any of Latour's particular political positions, is the restoration of some real content to "the political" though this symmetrical determination to make sense of all such news items--after it has been so utterly drained (and reified into that "the") by the postmodern appropriations of the tired old self-other dynamics in Schmitt. I outlined all this in a previous post with respect to how real politics changes our notion of rhetoric and language, but here I just wanted to show how it also was at the core of this utopian pragmatism.

But now, back to the issue of utopia proper, and its relation to technology in Aramis. I brought us back to the issue of love and pathos--passion of all kinds--via what you said:

And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management.

There is not only politics in the fact that the technocratic approach kills off technology as such. There is pathos, irony, peripeteia. For in saying that technology is not really the technocratic or the crude, pulpy SF (if you do want to see only misunderstanding in that genre, rather than, even there in the pulps, a rich history of tinkering and handicraft) black box, neither are we just talking about whether technology is a black box or not, and whether technocracy treats it as one or the other. We're talking about, indeed, the quality of that love of technology that Latour also is saying cannot really be technocratic, and which itself has, for him, something to do with utopianism as a version of this technocratism and as a version of this love. In other words, we're back at what you said in the beginning: utopianism prior to being a realism of Latour's sort is not just the technocratic sort of hope, but the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, that abounded in the sixties is bound up with technology:

In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis [the project] seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism [...I skip over the Habermas comment, namely that utopianism is often anti-technological like Habermas: to have Habermas as your utopian is setting the bar unbelievably low, no?, and I thought I said enough about how the notion of fantasy in utopia takes care of the anti-technological stance and makes it only pseudo-anti-technology] in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

So I read your remark here backwards: it's that, once we've got how utopianism pervaded technology and engineering, how do we read it back into Latour's (nostalgic) sense of what Aramis stands for?

Here's the problem, though. Essentially, Latour wants to take something of this utopianism, the aspect that wasn't (according to him) technocratic, and keep it as the love, or refigure love with it in mind. And he wants to do so as much as he reforms utopianism into realist-utopianism, making it clear that the technocrat ironically cannot have love for technology. But we then see Latour confuse utopianism proper and something like 1960's optimism, which I'd align with that arrogance--or rather, theoretical expansiveness--of the Levi-Strauss type (and whose archetypal form is generated by the politico-intellectual figure that Sartre crystallized for so many). Now, optimism/expansiveness and utopia certainly ran together in the sense that the 60's was truly the great age of modern utopias, total visions of not only different social structures or ways of doing things, but also nonce sorts of solutions that would make the world indeed, do better, go faster, see clearly, etc. (despite the fact Latour says we can't). But ultimately, as you can see from many of my parentheses, it's hard for me to see in the optimism something completely inseparable from utopia--to the point that is really is utopia's core.

For I can't really believe in two connections here that Latour makes. I have trouble seeing utopia as anything so perverse as the technocracy that takes technology as an object without love: certainly it's hard for me to see in SF utopianism, or even in fantasy (the amazing 60's-70's revival of LOTR), anything like full on

technocratic thinking that treats technology as a full black box, however much there is a sort of engagement with technology. This may be because, for me, there are many different types of utopianism. There would be the literary/aesthetic utopia on the one hand, which can't wait to fiddle with the technology, and then the more social-planning type of utopianism that is found in the human sciences--the less humanist and more functionalist/formal Corbu sort of attitude: though there is a lot of planning in the literary, it is never as pure (i.e. empty) as architecture or social-science/politics generally, either because the latter is tied to praxis more than theory (as Jameson perhaps too forgivingly explains it), or because it is just generally formal/practical about society (as I'd venture).

That's one expliantion: Latour lumps together all these utopias (as everyone else does), omitting a lot of the more creative aspects, and thereby sees a certain flat treatment of technology as symptomatic of all of them (it's in the same way that Marxism--here now alongside Latour!--often condemns utopias and utopian thinking). But--and here is the second point--then there is that sense that utopia is a sort of pure love through its big thinking about the technological object which comes to that technology from the outside to invest it with meaning. It is, then, the purity of the feeling or the love that seems suspicious--and less utopian, since utopia is always much more tinged with fear or boredom about its realization. So in both cases, we get a sense that it is the humanities that both want to plan through utopia or critique through it, and aren't really interested in the technology which will bring it about, as well as feel feelings purely, and so instead of getting interested in technology, get interested in the feelings that come from utopia. Thus it is the deeper tie of pathos with the humanities that I find odd, because this is what explains that sense you rightly feel that Latour is nostalgic for the grandness of scale in theory of old (Sartre, Levi-Strauss, etc.)--but also explains my sense that this is not at all a nostalgia for any proper utopianism. In other words, it is love that is tied with the humanities in general, which then produces the conflation of utopia with optimism, or the mistaking of the latter for the former in Latour (as I'd put it: Norbert/Latour likes the former or is genuinely nostaligic more for it than the latter).

Let me be a bit more precise. We can turn to the earliest mention of utopia in the book to see everything I'm getting at. It's in the Preface:

Samuel Butler tells the story of a stranger passing through the land of Erewhon who is thrown into prison because he owns a watch. Outraged at the verdict, he gradually discovers that draconian measures forbid the introduction of machinery. According to the inhabitants of Erewhon, a cataclysmic process of Darwinian evolution might allow a simple timepiece to give birth to monsters that would rule over humans. The inhabitants are not technologically backward; but they have voluntarily destroyed all advanced machines and have kept none but the simplest tools, the only ones compatible with the purity of their mores (Aramis, vii).

Now, here's the upshot:

Butler's Nowhere world is not a utopia. It is our own intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats.


By publishing this book, I would like to bring that isolation to an end (vii-viii).

Very nice. Utopia is dissolved into the present, in the realist manner that I am describing above. But then, there comes this, the aim of the book:

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural objects worthy of their attention and respect (viii).

There is the sense that this dissolution produces something like the investment of the non-utopian with the utopian, or the present with all the great impulse (read, pathos, drama, anything but fact) behind the utopian. But doesn't that presume that the utopian is primarily optimism? That grandness of scale? The sort of wide-ranging judgment or ability to pronounce (this is good, this is bad, what feeling!), that is is so quick to turn around upon the sciences, become pessimistic, and say (Heidegger is our hero, after all, as Latour continually remarks) that science doesn't think?

I find in these lines about humanists something equally patronizing, don't you? And for me, it actually sort of undercuts the whole waffling back and forth that we have traced above which produces the realist-utopian stance that Latour offers, because it makes the book out to be something like an elaborate hoax as far as love is supposedly also joined together with Latour's new utopianism, or is productive of its most veritably realist aspects. Are we, in describing Aramis this way, really talking about pathos? Or are we simply talking about the stereotype of pathos--i.e. the fact that it is studied by the humanities and not the sciences? We are reinvesting technology merely with what the humanists would like to see in it--poetry, no?

Now I don't think Latour is entirely up to that, since restoring the human to the humanities is one of the major goals of his project (see WHNBM on the anthro-), and indeed this sort of pathos is also shared by the scientists themselves at work (Latour wants to account for how they sometimes care about the project in the same way, or at least as much, as a humanist cares about a poem--though, I think, it can then be said that the portrayal of humanities-pathos is indeed really the scientist's image of humanities-pathos). Regardless, this sort of ultra-skepticism about Latour does press him hard on the issue, and shows, I think, the real status of the concept of utopia in the work (elevated and denigrated at the same time, just like the humanities). Or, it rather reveals the brilliance of Latour's actual case-studies might outdo his general sense of their purpose (the philosophy that informs them would be inferior to the actual study--or rather perhaps only the ANT theory considered less philosophically and more as a guide for research would be an adequate characterization of what goes on in the cases): utopia is something to be entertained insofar as it is allied with optimism, or with the sorts of invention that produces great ideas--Norbert with similar elevation/denigration uses the word "genius" about the initial formulator of the idea of continuous transport--but one can't really take utopian optimism seriously unless one becomes a realist and applies it to the "present"--and thereby teaches the humanities (as well as the sciences, but at least they tinker with things, unlike media studies) a lesson. In other words, all I'm saying is that a real (and not realist) utopian vision might be unthinkable from such a perspective--the perspective that would use "utopia" in the following sense:

An object that is merely technological is a utopia, as remote as the world of Erewhon (viii).

Latour and Utopia, part 1

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

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

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

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

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

In Latour's multi-layered allegory, one thing Aramis [the project] seems to stand for is the intellectual confidence, even arrogance, of France in the 1960s — a theme that is echoed, in another key, by Norbert's frequent references to figures like Sartre, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss. What's so interesting about this nostalgic theme, however, is that it shows how 60s utopianism — which one often associates with an anti-technological stance, like the one Norbert attributes to Habermas on page 280 — in fact pervaded the sphere of technology and engineering itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And while Norbert, like Latour, is reluctant to attribute the failure of Aramis to leviathan-sized macro-actors ("Are you going to accuse the social system? Capitalism? Napoleonic France? Sinful man, while you’re at it?," 197), there is more than a tinge of pathos in the fact that an innovation that would have helped solve ecological as well as transportational problems was scuttled by technocratic management.

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

Punctualization: Law and Greimas

There's a great little summary of Actor Network Theory by John Law published in a journal called Systems Practice (which henceforth will be my name for anything I'm up to at the moment: ordering a pizza = systems practice), titled "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network." I want to turn to it not only because we are turning to Reassembling the Social, but also because he gives us another way to think of the black box, which links things to certain problems the SR and OOP people are trying to figure out. Latour in Science in Action basically has two operations for the black box--that of opening it and closing it. But Law says that this box--or actant--can also be described as a "punctualization" of the network which supports it, or of those transformations or translations of the actant that opening the box makes it possible to trace and retrace. The terminological shift here cues up a host of basic issues that Latour often seems to want to pass by--which is understandable, because bringing them up distracts us from tracing and retracing--but which for me are quite crucial. Law sums these issues up explicitly in a question: "Why is it that the networks which make up the actor come to be deleted, or concealed from view?" (385). In other words, the issue is one of manifestation--and I use this word because it is that of Greimas, who we will turn to in a moment. The box suddenly is less functional, all of a sudden, and becomes more or less apparent. Obviously in an open box you see more--and this is why Latour uses this figure. But your focus is then on what's inside (the other actants), and not on the status, as it were, of that box and how it has altered. Thus Law's question seems to me important.

We sketched out punctualization above, but here's Law's full description of it:

All phenomena are the effect or the product of heterogeneous networks. But in practice we do not cope with endless network ramification. Indeed, much of the time we are not even in a position to detect network complexities. So what is happening? The answer is that if a network acts as a single block, then it disappears, to be replaced by the action itself and the seemingly simple author of that action. At the same time, the way in which the effect is generated is also effaced: for the time being it is neither visible, nor relevant. So it is that something much simpler--a working television, a well-managed bank or a healthy body--comes, for a time, to mask the networks that produce it.


Actor network theorists sometimes talk of such precarious simplificatory effects as punctualizations, and they certainly index an important feature of the networks of the social. Thus, I noted earlier that I refuse an analytical distinction between the macro- and the microsocial. On the other hand, I also noted that some network patterns run wide and deep--that they are much more generally performed than others. Here is the connection: network patterns that are widely performed are often those that can be punctualized. This is because they are network packages--routines--that can, if precariously, be more or less taken for granted in the process of heterogeneous engineering (385).

This is a lot more sociological in orientation, perhaps, than anything in Latour: we don't find much mention of "routines" in quite this way, and we certainly don't get much deconcealing, revealing in Latour, though there is some detective work in Aramis (tellingly, though, it ends up as a detective story without a murderer).

Why? Latour would rather focus on what this deconcealing gives you, to which you are, after you have opened the box or de-punctualized the punctuated, immanent.

This goes back to particular problems having to deal with power and force that I raised last time: Latour sometimes traces actants on the level of power, and other times decomposes them into forces--which makes them actants proper. If there is a bit of confusion, it is for the reason that Law here gives us in these sociological terms: sometimes actants wield a lot of resources (other actants), and so can mobilize them all quicker, such that we see them as punctuations. His example is a corporation or a government: we will suddenly be referring to these actants, rather than to the doers that, according to another view, make these things up.

Now, what is crucial is that for Law, we are right to refer to the actant in this way, or at least are somewhat right. We are recognizing, through our punctuation of the network, that there is a network of such a size behind the actant.

Now, this is for the reasons Latour also gives--and we note how he couches this less in the sphere of routines: the actant is shaping reality itself by recruiting allies. But this takes on a whole new meaning when aligned to what Law is saying: when we talk about powers, or about closed boxes, or about punctuated networks--all three here mean the same thing--we are talking about an actant that has so shaped reality that in referring to it that it seems natural it would be sustained by so many forces, so many of what is inside the box, or the wide and deep network itself. Or rather, that seeming naturalness which allows us to skip over the network in referring to the punctuated is precisely the amount of reality it has achieved through the network.

So, when Latour is talking about powers, or punctuated networks, he is referring to reality as any of us do. That is, it isn't as if he has to switch gears and enter the level of forces only in order to refer to the networks, or actually go about depunctualizing the punctuated in order to refer to that network that is punctuated--though he would encourage us all the time to do so.

But what Latour always stresses is that the situation is the same in reverse: when he refers to forces, he's referring to reality as any of us do, as well. And this is what, I think, confuses me occasionally, because it skips over this whole level where the problem of manifestation is actually opposed to the immanence to the network that ANT gives you.

And it is opposed. We're only making clear here that this opposition is not total. The question then becomes: what is the precise relationship of that manifestation of the network to its immanence with respect to the theorist?

This, however, was long ago answered by A.J. Greimas--who I turn to because, of course, he was fundamental in the development of ANT though not (as far as I've seen) very much discussed (Latour adapts and cites often, but, like Law, never quite explicates or interprets--either because it is all to patently Greimassian, or because we don't want to rehearse the differences)--whose opposition this is, in effect. I say "in effect" because the notion of immanence in this sense was originally formulated by Louis Hjelmslev, in his dense Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, though it has since acquired many valences which may be relevant (mostly through Deleuze). Hjelmslev was saying essentially that an immanent linguistics (glossematics) would not define itself with respect to transcendent elements like physiology or psychology: it would disregard the possibility that the only phonemes produced, say, could be those the human body was shaped to make, and would therefore remain founded only on its own properly linguistic presuppositions, remaining, always, close to them. It's important to note that while this is a structuralist move, this produces a slightly different sense of structure than that of Saussure and (in a certain sense) Lévi-Strauss: structure is here not a word for something like a synchronic logic governing certain elements, but is rather a system that generates these elements out of itself--something more self-consistent. It's no mistake that Hejlmslev was thus able to posit different and more subtle layers of signification with which structuralist analysis then could proceed (indeed, without Hjelmslev, we don't get anything like the discourse of Benveniste): his notion of structure forced him to stop applying the same old categories over and over, and move on to the generation of new terms, out of the old.

Now, Greimas takes over this term and interestingly opposes it to manifestation by saying each is the other's contrary (in the logical sense: that is, they are not in a relationship of contradiction). But what is immanent and what manifests? For Greimas, the structure itself: the immanent level is the one where the deep structures of language lie, and remain self-defined (like the semiotic square itself, which inter-defines its elements), and the manifest is the surface layer, where language moves towards its articulation and encounters the constraints of medium. Obviously, this is a bit weird, given what Hjelmslev meant by "immanence." But this is how Greimas believes we should take the term: "the terms manifestation vs. immanence are borrowed from Hjelmslev, but they can be compared profitably with the categories surface vs. deep in linguistics, manifest vs. latent in psychoanalysis, phenomenal vs. noumenal in philosophy, etc." as he says in "Towards a Theory of Modalities," (in On Meaning, 125) but also many times more elsewhere. One sees that transcendence, to which Hjelmslev opposed immanence, has to become something more like expression itself: thus, manifestation involves not moving beyond what is self-defined, but something more like the subjection of the "structural trunk" to the "specific requirements of the linguistic substance through which it [the trunk] is expressed" ("Elements of a Narrative Grammar," in On Meaning, 64), or the production of closure (as Greimas calls it), the lopping off of the pure possibilities of the deep structure.

So when one moves backwards, from the manifest to the immanent, as we are doing in ANT, what is one doing? The short answer returns us to square (or, rather, box) one, since obviously to move in the other direction than closure would be... opening. But because, as we saw, the manifest and the immanent are contrary, and not contradictory, this move backward can be seen as a more gradual return to the deep structure, the elementary units, out of which the more complicated manifested units are made.

Except in Latour this move back is not towards a deeper structure--and this problematizes everything once more, and confuses the stability of our opposition of the deep and fundamental and the simple qua immanent to the transcending that manifests. Latour tries to clarify all this at the end of We Have Never Been Modern, where he talks about immanent transcendence--one can think of this as his rewriting of Greimas. I'll try and work out this situation in another post. Nevertheless, I wanted to show that the old Greimassian distinction has some relevance, in that it provides the framework in which to think of this punctualization of the network: if we conceive of the relation between punctualized and the network as relation of the manifest to the immanent, or punctualization as the manifestation as the immanent, and conceive this relation correctly, we end up with a less outright contradictory opposition which needs to be overcome. This means that when we become immanent with the network, or de-punctualize the punctualization, we are engaged in an operation that isn't overcoming a massive gap so much as bringing the two levels into a relationship of contrariness. This rehearses, then, on a more technical level, what we were getting at before when we said talking about powers is, in a way, also acknowledging the size of their forces without specifying them.

One way to think about what Latour then does with this Greimassian situation--if I can just sketch out what happens through the massive reversal the desire to open produces--is to look at all of this coming to bear on the famous narrative grammar, and say that Latour narrativizes the deep structures, rather than the other way around. That is, Greimas thought the simplicity and minimal character of the deep structure tended towards narrativization (or the generation of combinations that had to be cut off in closure), and that we always could see, as it were, these simpler structures behind the manifestation (which is what makes possible his amazing narrative grammar). Thus, in Greimas, the actant itself is a simplification or concentration of a complicated textual surface, full of various actors. Latour--and Harman--reverse this: we see the actors (which can also be thought of as accidents or properties of objects) narrativize actants, which are much more complicated, or which do not become more simple. However, we are still, in this maneuver, becoming immanent--the network is self-articulating and self-consistent in these particular ways.

One way to describe many of my objections to Latour is not that manifestation has to work the other way (I like this about both Latour and, even more, about Harman), but that this reversal should turn the relationship of contrariness into a relationship of contradiction (or rather, there should be some similar sort of closure for his type of opening up). This, however, goes against (or maybe it merely refines? I think it refines) my point saying that the great thing about Latour is moving away from a logic of otherness and towards a logic of more.

(On that last point, I will show in my next post on "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means" that Latour himself isn't always so interested in this move, and is quite happy to talk about otherness--further complicating all of this! I think Harman will be clarifying it a bit though for all of us.)

One Author May Hide Another: Kenneth Koch and Latour

Since we are now beginning to occupy ourselves with the literariness of Latour's theory — or, at least, its potential applications to literature — I thought I'd respond to your excellent posts on realism and fables with a few musings on a genre that, on first glance, might seem a less perfect match for Latour: that is, poetry. (BL himself laments that he doesn't know more about the subject here, though he did do his thesis on Saint-John Perse.) But speaking as a poetry scholar, I think ANT has great possibilities in this area, though as always one has to be careful about bringing things over from one discipline to another too quickly without making the necessary adjustments.

It may just be a personal thing, but one writer who keeps coming to mind as I read Latour is not a philosopher or a sociologist, or even a literary critic, but the poet Kenneth Koch (on whom I wrote my masters' thesis in 2002, and who I know you've written on as well). Some of this may be circumstantial: the two have a little bit of common ground in French classicism, and they have some enemies in common: Latour's wicked mockery of critical intellectuals in essays like "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" bring to mind Koch's Nietzsche-on-nitrous-oxide masterpiece "Fresh Air" (which memorably skewered the New Critic-approved academic poets of the 50s as "the men with their eyes on the myth / and the Missus and the midterms"). But the kinship is really more of a temperamental or even philosophical one, I think. One moment in Latour that really brought Koch to mind is this passage from his recent essay "Can We Have Our Materialism Back, Please?" (2007):

"What is so promising about extricating material materialism from its idealist counterpart … is that it accounts for the surprise and opacity that are so typical of techniques-as-things and that techniques-as-objects, drawn in the res extensa mode, completely hide. The exploded-view principle of description makes it possible to overcome one of the main aspects of bringing an artifact into existence: opacity. In other words, it draws the object as if it were open to inspection and mastery while it hides the elementary mode of existence of technical artifacts … Parts hide one another; and when the artifact is completed the activity that fit them together disappears entirely. Mastery, prediction, clarity, and functionality are very local and tentative achievements that are not themselves obtained inside the digital or paper world of res extensa — even though it would be impossible to carry them forward without working upon and with technical drawings and models. But again, it is not the same thing to work upon a model — mathematical, analogical, digital — as it is for a technical assemblage to be a model. As every engineer knows, scaling up (or scaling down, in the case of miniaturization and industrialization) is a tough, surprising adventure filled with twists and detours. (141, my emphasis)

This passage is, of course, pretty interesting in itself, and maybe once we move into the more philosophically-oriented part of our reading we'll return to it in order to help us get clear on how a Latourian materialism differs from other forms. But for now, I'm just going to exploit a little verbal felicity for my own purposes. What caused the Koch/Latour connection to really click for me was that one line — "Parts hide one another" — which oddly echoes one of Koch's best and most representative poems, "One Train May Hide Another." (I encourage you to read the whole thing before going on with this post; the link includes a recording of Koch reading aloud as well.) On one level, the similarity is simply fortuitous, but I think there's more to be gained by comparing them at greater length. Latour's passage is all about how reality resists, overflows, undermines and rubs up against the models that engineers use to depict and account for it: exactly the sort of thing he details at such extraordinary length in Aramis. Similarly, Koch's poem shows how reality resists the synoptic vision we believe we have of it at any given moment. Because "it is not the same thing to work upon a model … as it is for a technical assemblage to be a model," the things we model continue to surprise us the more time we spend with them, the more operations we try to perform with them. "Assemblage" is in fact a great word for the entities Koch enumerates in this poem (and many others): not exactly natural kinds, not exactly alogical disjecta or symbolic fragments, but always a gathering of things yoked together into what seems, at first, like just one thing.

The basic idea of Koch's poem, unfolded at comical length, is that a little time and contemplation inevitably multiplies the actors involved in any given encounter with an object (or, as Latour prefers to put it, a "thing"). The movement traced again and again and again in "One Train" is the same movement that the engineers encounter when they spend a little time with the thing they are trying to bring into existence — a movement that, come to think of it, sounds surprisingly like the process of writing a poem: "In a poem, one line may hide another line, / As at a crossing, one train may hide another train." The poem itself, appropriately for a work about temporal succession, is paratactic: that is, it appears to lack a governing logic, to be just one thing after another. It makes its rapid transitions in a variety of ways: occasionally it proceeds from line to line, or idea to idea, via metaphor ("So always standing in front of something the other / As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas"); sometimes by narrative metonymy (the mother hides her daughter, that daughter hides her own daughter, "[t]hey are in / A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag…"), sometimes by seemingly random disjunction ("One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia Antica one tomb / May hide a number of other tombs"). As in social research as conceived by actor network theory, we must follow Koch as he wend his way through assemblages in order to grasp the poem's socio-logic: we can't simply impose a genre on it (even a very broad one, like "lyric") and then track its shifting fidelities or deviations from this model. Or rather, we could do this, but we would end up with the kind of bad criticism that so often reduces, rather than adds to, a poem's specific reality: for instance, a reading that finds "One Train May Hide Another" to be yet another exemplar of the instability of the speaking subject in postmodern poetics (how many more times is that particular res extensa — excuse me, res cogitans — model going to be imposed on contemporary poetry? Don't the poetics people know that even the literary theorists have moved on by now?)

But I digress. Some lines even bring Latour's work directly to mind, particularly (for some reason) 
The Pasteurization of France: "in the laboratory / One invention may hide another invention," of
course, but also "one person's reputation may hide / The reputation of another," which recalls how
the way Pasteur's name comes to stand for the whole hygienist movement; "One injustice may hide
another — one colonial may hide another" reminds me of the discussion of macroparasites
(colonialists) and microparasites (bacteria). Other lines just evoke the flavor of Latour generally: 
"one memory / Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about, / The eternal reverse
succession of contemplated entities," for instance; or "[o]ne idea may hide another: Life is simple /
Hide Life is incredibly complex," which is a pretty good two-line summary of the Latourian theory
of translation, as I understand it.
If "One Train…" has a moral (and Koch, for all his hijinks, is ultimately something of a
didactic poet), it is, I would suggest, the same one that governs Latour's "empirical
metaphysics": Koch, like Latour, recommends a kind of ethics of hesitation ("when you
read / Wait until you have read the next line — / Then it is safe to go on reading") that
supplies our one way of trying to get a handle on the dizzying multiplicity of the
gatherings we find in all material things, as well as in "the social" in general. To get a
thicker, denser, more accurate description of the things we have in view, we have to slow
ourselves down. As Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social: "I want to break the habit
of linking the notions of 'society,' 'social factor,' and 'social explanation' with a sudden
acceleration in the description … When you wish to discover the new unexpected actors
that have more recently popped up and which are not yet bona fide members of 'society,'
you have to travel somewhere else and with very different kinds of gear … There's no
question ANT prefers to travel slowly, on small roads, on foot, and by paying the full
cost of any displacement out of its own pocket" (22-23). "It can be important / To have
waited at least a moment to see what was already there": this could be the actor-network
theorist's, as well as the poet's, motto.

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).

Curved minds

Graham Harman says, in response to my last post: "I’m never convinced by the notion of Latour as a devious strategizer or rhetorician." Fair enough: it's a bit too Sokalian, and makes him sound too much like a sophist (in the colloquial, derogatory sense). But I happened to come across a passage just now in Latour's article "What If We Talked Politics A Little?" (2003) that obliquely addresses this very issue (I love it when that happens):

We have to be careful here so as not to draw the hasty conclusion that it is enough to be devious in order to utter political talk accurately. Unquestionably, politics is imposture; we are well aware that the virtue of autonomy can be secured only at the price of a fundamental vice, betrayal, both there and back; we acknowledged that lying — as opposed to the supposedly easy truth of faithful transfer of information — is an integral part of the work of composition; we know that expecting a spokesperson to "tell the truth," to be "authentic," amounts to killing the process of transubstantiation. However, this does not, for all that, mean that to be a good politician it is enough to lie, to be a phoney. That would be too easy. The Prince of Twisted Words would simply have replaced the White Knight of Transparency … One can walk skew, think curved, cut across, be sly, without necessarily drawing the political circle. It is not because they all differ equally from the straight line that all acts of envelopment are similar. "Curved minds" are clearly distinct from one another, even if they are all an object of ridicule for "straight minds." (153)

So perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that Latour is devious, but always in the service of enveloping something, of drawing a political circle, of catching something in his net. And in this he's not far off from the devious politicians who, as he sees it, are always so despised.

Phenomenology of Reading Latour

As per your suggestion a little while ago, here are some scattered notes on what it's like (for me) to read Latour.

I'll start by jumping off from something you wrote to me (in an e-mail): "he actually is quite a great article-writer... usually I find that you can oppose article-writers to book-writers, but he's great at both!" I think this is true, although I've got to say that so far I give a slight edge to his books: Latour is such an ambitious theorist, always wanting to lay down the maximum bet and shake things up as much as possible (sometimes at the risk of caricaturing others' positions, as you point out in your most recent post), that I think he does better with a little room to stretch out and indulge his theatrics, rather than being forced, for reasons of space, to keep one line of argument going from beginning to end. Another way of putting it would be to say that, like Norbert in Aramis, Latour's method is to make as much of a mess as possible, and then see what's required in order to clean it up — an approach that seems crazy until you realize how closely it reflects the socio-logic of how actors actually make sense of the world. So I guess what I'm saying is that in the articles he sometimes doesn't have enough time to make a mess and clean it up.

You also mention that reading Latour gets you "talking more in terms of strategy rather than about ideas": "Something about how you get a little more frank and unashamed while reading this stuff has to be communicated to people..." Again, I totally agree, and this is something I get from Bourdieu as well: the sense of non-stop devious strategizing (which in Bourdieu, of course, is also thematized) is, once you get used to it, actually very useful as a model, a manner you can imitate, at least to a certain extent, to make your own arguments (which obviously don't need to be the same kinds as the ones Bourdieu or Latour make).

But Latour is such a rhetorical writer that it can even be slightly off-putting, not to mention confusing, because he's also got such a rhetorical view of life. (In this, he's like Nietzsche, who keeps coming up, which perhaps shouldn't be so surprising: as I recall reading somewhere — maybe Harman's book? — he's one of Latour's biggest unacknowledged influences.) In other words, Latour is always trying to convince you that everything in the world is trying to convince everything else: as if reality is in fact made up of innumerable little Bruno Latours. He pays nearly everything the compliment of assuming it's as clever as he is. (He does make some exceptions, usually for other sociologists.) I realize this sense on my part contradicts some of what you said towards the end of your last post about BL's positive valuation of a certain kind of "stupidity," or "forgetting," that goes along with being on the inside of a network. If we're on the inside, and we can just forget what we're doing and sort of go limp, then there's no real need to strategize and rhetoricize all the time. We don't really need "the logic of practice" to explain how anything happens. And there does seem to be a general shift in Latour's work away from a Bourdieusian assumption that everything is infinitely clever (which we find in Pasteurization of France and Science in Action) towards an assumption that everything is kind of stupidly enthusiastic.

But this is rather vague, so I'll finish with a specific passage that I think illustrates many of the hallmarks of Latour's style pretty well. It's from "Where are the Missing Masses?" (1992), which I believe we both read a couple of weeks ago:

The most interesting (and saddest) lesson of the note posted on the door at La Villette is that people are not circumspect, disciplined, and watchful, especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130 (I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white; no one else seems to bother, except the mourning families). Well, that is exactly the point of the note: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed." In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman — that is, machines and gods. This note indicates how desperate its anonymous frozen authors were (I have never been able to trace and honor them as they deserved). They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans; this failed, the door was always left open. Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal, that is, to a nonhuman who regularly and conveniently does the job in place of unfaithful humans; to our shame, we must confess that it also failed after a while, the door was again left open. How poignant their line of thought! They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is, there was, and ever will be. If human and nonhuman have failed, certainly God will not deceive them.
(166-167)

What's going on in this passage? Let's taxonomize:

1. Humor. This is probably one of the first things that strikes readers of Latour: he's very funny, and not afraid to make jokes about pretty much anything, at any point of his argument. (Graham Harman says somewhere that he initially got interested in Latour because he was the only funny person in Continental philosophy.) Here the jokes are at the expense of French drivers (they don't obey the speed limit), the authors of the note ("How poignant their line of thought!" — treating them as if they themselves weren't making a joke), and Latour himself as a scholar (he regrets being unable to properly cite the authors of the note). And the improbably specific details ("French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130," and then, a little later in the sentence, "the mourning families") are also funny.

2. Symmetry. These kinds of parallel constructions are so characteristic of Latour as to be almost an obsession: "In our societies there are two systems of appeal: nonhuman and superhuman…"; "They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans… Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal…" One of the odd things about Latour is that, for a thinker so committed to asymmetries and hybrids and quasi-objects, he divvies up and juxtaposes and dichotomizes like Derrida never gave dualisms a bad name. Often his symmetrical formulations are ironic, i.e. he's caricaturing what some other person or group thinks (the moderns, the epistemologists, the technologists, et al.), but he's still clearly addicted to them. And I should say, I don't think this is a problem; that is, I don't think he's really a dualistic thinker, or at least not at all a rigid or limited one. In Latour these pairs ("epistemological couples," in Bachelard's parlance) are always getting pulled apart and recombined and mapped on to others (and not simply reversed, as in dialectic). But stop him at nearly any point and he's always working with a clear-cut distinction.

3. Sacred/theological language. This is another persistent verbal habit of Latour's: it pops up as early as Irreductions and plays a big role in the rhetorical vocabularies of both We Have Never Been Modern and Aramis. One way to deal with this would be simply to read it under the heading of (1), that is, as a joke — and sometimes Latour does use sacred language as a joke, or for merely hyperbolic or blasphemous effect. But knowing that he's a practicing Catholic puts an interesting spin on his continual recourse to a religious idiom. I don't quite know what to say about it here, but I'd just like to add a little more to the passage I quoted above:

I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this February day, the door was open. Do not accuse God, though, because the note did not make a direct appeal; God is not accessible without mediators — the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well — so instead of asking for a direct miracle (God holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel, as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison) they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough. (167)

Who is Latour reassuring here? On one level he seems to still be joking: who would possibly think to "accuse God" of leaving a door open? And again, he's hyperbolically specific: that "as has happened on several occasions, for instance when St. Peter was delivered from his prison" is obviously an unnecessary flourish, and a bit of a goof on Latour's own multidisciplinary scholarly authority (oh, you're a theologian now?). But even without knowing anything about Latour's own beliefs, the last three sentences are charged with a sort of melancholy resignation: "instead of asking for a direct miracle … they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough." Of course, the whole point of Latour's article is that much of what we think of as autonomous human morality is in fact preordained by clever engineers, who make it practically impossible not to wear a safety belt, or exceed the speed limit on a residential street, or leave a door open. As you'd expect from him, he seems for the most part to see this as a good thing, as well as a technological marvel, and he would like sociologists, technologists, and moralists all to see that what they talk about is so densely intertwined. But that final caveat — "In our secular times, this is no longer enough" — suggests a somewhat darker (almost Heideggerian?) picture of the "missing masses," a sort of nostalgia for a (probably imaginary) past in which humans really did make moral decisions, in which autonomy was real and society did not make so many of the crucial choices for human beings ahead of time.

Of course, I could be way over-reading (an occupational hazard), and Latour's "secular times" is just total sarcasm: he does cast doubt on the very idea of secularization in We Have Never Been Modern and numerous other places. But it's the sort of troubling ambiguity that he opens up, again and again, through his use of sacred language, and also, for different reasons and to a different degree, through his use of the language of politics.

But I'll stop here, having made a mess and not cleaned it up. Suffice it to say that the more one thinks about Latour's style, the more fascinating a rhetorical case study it becomes. And I haven't gotten to his own writings on style (of matters of concern and so on). I'm sure this is a subject we'll both have a lot more to say about as we go on.