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.
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