technical images and linear text

With thesis bound – or at least at the bindery – and blog once again in working order, I’ve come back around to thinking about new things. Specifically, Latour, and actor-network theory, and this peculiar beast which, as Bruno himself puts it, we have to call ‘[philosophy, sociology, history, ethnography, etc.] … of science and technology.” I’ve known for years that I would be excited about Latour once I started reading him, but since I wanted to focus on diving blindly into my own odd and solipsistic interpretation of Deleuze, I decided to hold off. Now of course beginning a program in ‘Science and Technology Studies’ – and don’t ask me why they altered the usual signification of this acronym ‘STS’ – I’ve been compelled to read him, and have subsequently flown off in a fit of philosophical glee. Amazon, consequently, has gotten a lot of business from me in the past few weeks.

It’s frankly difficult sometimes to listen to seminar discussions about his books, because everyone wants to be critical. It’s such a pleasure to be a critic – again, as the man himself points out. And while I don’t begrudge my colleagues their unflagging critique in the least, I tend to get in A Mood when I really like philosophers whose work I’ve just started reading, and I’m not ready to critique them for a long time. Or at least I like to be very cautious in my critique, taking into account the most charitable and careful of interpretations, avoiding crude generalizations as far as possible, and so forth… My attitude is that, constructed though ye philosophers’ canon may be, and especially contentious in these days, most of the big figures are there because they’re considerably smarter than us. Or perhaps they’ve just mobilized a great deal more allies than their less successful peers, but frankly I think one point of the ANT approach is that this redefinition does not subvert the effect of a cognitive explanation like ‘they’re smarter:’ allies or intelligence (itself an ally within the network by which oneself is constituted), these philosophers have a place in the canon for a reason, and it’s only very rarely that this can be ‘explained away’ with reference to considerations apart from the rhetorical and explanatory power of their respective philosophies. But I digress. The only point of said digression is that one must be careful with one’s critique (lest it run out of steam).

The real point of this post is that I’ve been pondering Latour, ANT, and the question of its quite tentative ‘realism’ (as opposed to its avowed ‘constructivism’) and trying to work out how it relates to de Landa’s so-called ‘assemblage theory,’ and, by extension, to Deleuze (even as Deleuze himself is rather deeply buried beneath de Landa’s so-called ‘reconstruction’). Inspired by a lovely little post on larval subjects about Latour and the ‘trials of strength’ by which he claims an object proves itself to be ‘real,’ I thought I’d throw out a few ideas on here. Incidentally, I was also inspired to check out The Pasteurization of France by this post – thank ye inexistent Deity for Google Books! – and I’m experiencing an irrational excitement about reading a book by Latour organized a la Tractatus.

It’s curious to me that there hasn’t been more comment on this relationship though, given the fact that the theory of assemblages and that of actor-networks seem very similar in many important respects, and given the popularity of both Latour and de Landa in this brewing philosophical circle of realists.

But is Latour a realist? It seems we can offer two equally obvious and wholly contradictory answers to this question.

Clearly, on the one hand, he is not a realist. After all, he writes about the construction of facts and of things and of objects, indeed even of the accursed social construction of these, at least until the pesky term was finally redacted from his book’s title for the confusion it inspired. And as everyone knows (here the Deleuzian hairs on the back of our collective neck should be standing up), constructivism and realism are opposing tendencies in philosophy and sociology!  de Landa would thus appear to be rather far from Latour, with his explicitly realist conception of society, one in which “the existence of institutional organizations, interpersonal networks and many other social entities is treated as conception-independent.” He goes on to contrast such an approach with that of the accursed ones: “This realist solution is diametrically opposed to the idealist one espoused by phenomenologically influenced sociologists, the so-called ’social constructivists’” (new philosophy of society, 2). The ‘phenomenologically influenced’ comment is of course meant to single out Berger and Luckmann (with whom I’m only marginally familiar and have no interest in defending here), and so this is by no means a direct jab at Latour. But certainly it’s part of a good prima facie case for their occupying opposite ends of the ‘political spectrum’ when it comes to ontological positions. (A piece of Graham Harman’s called de Landa the ‘upside-down Latour,’ and presumably the opposite would hold true as well.)

But things are less clear when we try to evaluate Latour in terms of the explicit criteria de Landa himself puts forth for realism. From the beginning it is described as a “commitment to the mind-independent existence of reality,” and an assertion that social entities are autonomous “from the conceptions we have of them” (NPOS, 1 – incidentally, a rather infelicitous acronym if there ever was one).  This is certainly a respectable definition of realism. And by these criteria Latour is just as certainly a realist. On the second point it is absolutely clear – social networks are in no way ‘dependent’ on cognitive factors, whether our ‘conceptions,’ our intentions, or any other such notions; on the first point it is perhaps less obvious, but I think that Latour is equally a realist in this sense.

Which brings me back to Levi’s post, where I begain. Reality is that which resists. An equally serviceable notion of the real, with an equally serviceable realism to accompany it. I savour the difference between Latour’s definition of reality and de Landa’s of realism.  These are completely different kinds of definition (at the risk of being trite, this kind of tension between definitions is what would lead a Derrida to argue that any final, solid signification attached to the term ‘real’ is interminably deferred). The one is explicitly, stolidly philosophical and ontological, the other wholly strategic, sociological, and anontological. (Sometimes, coining a word really is the quickest way to get your point across.) Yet at its core the idea of reality as resistance to trials of strength does indeed support the response of Latour’s belief in a mind-independent reality. Ultimately I think the first of my two contradictory answers can summon the fewest allies to its cause. The solution to the dilemma is that de Landa, as ontologically-oriented and materialistic philosopher, begins with the real; Latour, as sociologically-oriented philosopher, begins by bracketing any ontology or materialism which he might happen to possess. Why? And what am I talking about?

Simply put, the real is Latour’s explanandum. Where de Landa’s project is to ground sociology in a realist ontology, Latour’s (at least in the bulk of his work I’ve read so far) is to determine the conditions of our access to such domains as reality, truth, Nature, and so on. Does this not make it obvious why Latour – realist or otherwise – cannot begin by staking out an ontological position? What brings this out for me is the discussion of Nature in Science in Action. Nature is appealed to by good, realist scientists as the final cause by which scientific disputes are settled. One may summon all the allies one wishes in service of one’s hypothesis, but they are all irrelevant once Nature has spoken. Natura mit uns: when nature is with us, nothing else really matters – especially none of these accursed social factors! One may easily substitute ‘reality’ for Nature at any point in this ramble. Yet the beauty of Latour’s argument is that the scientists’ objection, good realists though they may be, becomes almost hysterical. Can they not recall, looking backward at their grand discovery, the time when Nature herself was in question? The time when one could not appeal to her as the arbiter of one’s dispute? In this sense one cannot conduct history or sociology or even philosophy of science by taking for granted a mind-independent Nature or reality as the cause of one’s knowledge. The question is precisely how a mind comes to knowledge of said reality.

How does Latour answer this question? In part by these trials of strength. And so in his rough-and-ready definition of the real, what resists? Reality – it seems precisely this mind-independent reality of which de Landa speaks, and which he decries the constructivists for ignoring.  What is a trial of strength but a mind, or better an actor, pressing up against the real? So what if it occurs by the mediation of a network of other actors – techniques, technicians, technologies… – this does not detract from the reality of the real. Reality is something which is constructed; leaving aside Latour’s fetish for laboratories, we can recognize it under construction everywhere. But for this it is no less real! The persistence of the realism / constructivism opposition boggles my mind. Certainly we are comfortable with the reality of physical constructions, yet to demonstrate the construction of ideas is almost inevitably construed as robbing them of their reality. (And here we may refer to Latour’s lament in ‘Why has the critique run out of steam?’) Yet I am running out of steam. How to wrap this up?

As a philosopher one can, and should, ground one’s ontology in reality. It seems to me that no other kind of ontology deserves the name. To deny realism is to deny any real ontology, anyway. (Ha, ha.) Yet when one’s concern is to determine the conditions of our access to such mind-independent domains, when one wishes to write a history or a sociology of science, one simply cannot begin with ontology. This, it seems, is why Latour is so tricky on the question of realism. To begin with an avowed realism would destroy his critical project, render it an inane parody of the worst internalist histories. Pasteur’s microbes became an accepted fact because they were really there; TRF(H) became Pyro-Glu-His-Pro-NH2 because that’s what it always really was, &c. To start with the real, then, as the saying goes, would be to assume what he wanted to explain.

I would just like to note that at this point in the text, my composition was interrupted by a fire alarm, and then nearly a half hour of watching firemen walk in and out of my building.

To conclude, I think this resolution shows why Latour and de Landa’s projects are far from incompatible, and why their ontologies – of course explicit in de Landa’s case and tacit in Latour’s – are probably more than superficially similar: Latour’s constructionist analyses do not preclude his being a realist, and it seems that just like de Landa (and unlike the ’social constructionist’ bugbears) he’s interested in the real construction of the social (rather, of course, than vice versa). Without a real, there would be nothing to push back, nothing to resist our trials of strength. So Latour, finally, is a realist, at least in the sense that matters. (He calls this being a realist with respect to ‘matters of concern’ rather than ‘fact,’ but that’s a distinction that eludes me for the moment and which can be unpacked later.) Thus we can go on to interpret the basic affinities between assemblage theory and actor-network theory in this light.

I’ll end with a provocation for those fellow realists who may be reading this. I count myself amongst you, to be sure, but we must subject ourselves nevertheless to some critique. (Because we know the critiques of most anti-realists aren’t to be taken very seriously!)  To play the quasi-deconstructive skeptic, is the gesture of avowed ‘realism’ not one of the typical Anglo-American, analytical ‘ism’-tricks which makes a gesture of apparent simplicity and common sense, but which simultaneously conceals a great deal which is far from certain or settled?  ’I am a realist.’ Well, this is all well and good, but still, what do we know of reality? How do we know it? Shouldn’t we dig deeper into the construction of these very difficult terms, ‘reality’ and ‘knowing?’ Those who are at pains to call themselves realists often seem to overestimate how settled and certain the so-called real actually is. Some others emphasize the formation and individuation of the phenomenal real by a subterranean play of something (virtual) – a laudable and often necessary gesture, but a similarly tricky one, and one which always courts the Platonic privileging of a ‘world behind the scenes.’ Latour’s emphasis is evidently on the actual manifestations of the real within our phenomenal ‘reach’ (inscriptions, interventions, productions, and so forth). To settle these finer points of ontology is a task beyond my powers, and in any case beyond the scope of this posting. These points are only brought forward to suggest one part of Latour’s value for me and the value of so-called STS in general: to point out how tenuous and contestable, how dependent on a whole network of production, our knowledge of reality is – beginning first of all with science, that most privileged contemporary domain of reality-access.

Certainly to be a realist is to claim an independent existence for the world beyond our mediated and fallible knowledge thereof, and ’tis a worthy exercise indeed. But not one suited to every purpose.

That’s enough for now – the question of Deleuze’s role in all this will have to wait for another time.