Friday, October 19, 2001

Dope
I had drinks with Alan a couple of nights ago. I was celebrating keeping this site going for threee months, and writing, almost every day, five hundred words on various topics. We talked a bit about what I was trying to do with this site: attract an audience? What kind of audience? In self-critical mode, I said I realized that sometimes I can't get off of a topic. For instance, the war, maybe I keep returning to it, maybe I am getting boring about it. And Alan said, oh, well, I don't usually read the posts that aren't about the war.

Whoah. Okay, Limited Inc. does go on an occasional esoteric bender, and maybe we should just keep doing war stuff. But screw it -- we never promised you a rose garden, reader. Sometimes the itch to talk about Plutarch or Ernst Junger gets to be too much. So yesterday I thought I'd push the envelope and post a complicated discussion of Gabriel Tarde.

Unfortunately, midway through the post, I looked at what I had written and thought -- this sounds like academic philosophy.
Do I want to do academic philosophy? No, clearly no.

So I decided to write about Bruno Latour instead.

The Connection is this: on his site, which is wonderfully stocked with essays, Latour has an essay, in English, entitled Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social.


In this essay, Latour discusses Tarde's turn to Leibnitz. What interests me is what attracts Latour to Tarde. I think the answer is Deleuzian: for Tarde, what metaphysics does best, its function in the culture, is lay out the combinations in which reality will come this time. That is, it forges categories as a way of creating schematic space, and then populates that space with concepts. It isn't that these categories aren't founded in reality -- how could they not be? it isn't that the categories are subjective -- on the level of their creation, subjectivity hasn't, itself, been created, been conceptually molded, so to put the discourse in terms of subjectivity and objectivity is a form of philosophical anachronism; but what metaphysics does well is carve out schematic spaces. The hidden relationship of metaphysics and politics is found in the list -- that ur-text of state power.

That's my intro to this quote from Latour :

"Agency plus influence and imitation, is exactly what has been called... an actor-network. [limitedinc note - ANT, actor network theory, was a sociological school associated with Latour and John Law in the 90s.] The link of the two ideas is essential to understand his theory : it is because he is a reductionist �even of a strange sort� that he does not respect any border between nature and society, and because he does not stop at the border between physics, biology and sociology that he does not believe in explaining the lower levels by the higher levels. Such is the key difficulty : human societies are not specific in the sense that they would be symbolic, or made of individual, or due to the existence of a macro organisations. They seem specific to us for no other reasons that, first, we see them from the inside and, second, that they are composed of few elements compared to any of the other societies we grasp only from the outside.



Let�s get slowly here : to begin with, we have to understand that �society� is a word that can be attributed to any association :



" But this means that every thing is a society and that all things are societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical sequence of its earlier movements, tend to strangely generalise the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of atomic societies ? not to mention societies of stars, solar systems. All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology.��p.58.

Instead of saying, like Durkheim, that we ��should treat social facts as a thing��, Tarde says that ��all things are society��, and any phenomenon is a social fact."

Now that last sentence might set off warning flares for the group that thinks the humanists are pulling some fast and loose stuff with the sciences. This group, led by Paul Gross, is especially worried about the phrase 'social construction'. As in the slogan, social construction of reality. Is Latour a social constructionist, as Gross has accused him of being?

Lingua Franca, in 1994, published a profile of Latour BY David Berreby. It is still a handy guide to a sometimes infuriating thinker. I found these three paragraphs particularly enlightening:

"For instance, the Louis Pasteur who emerges in Latour's The Pasteurization of France (Harvard, 1988) -- a study of how Pasteur succeeded in winning over France to his germ theory of disease -- is a thinker-politician, a skilled manipulator of the g overnment and the press as well as a great researcher. All of his skills are important. "Pasteur went to blind wine tastings to demonstrate his theory of fermentation," Latour says. "That's not just showmanship. That's why he's such a good scientis t."

This egalitarianism is reflected in a favorite Latourian word: "symmetry." To understand symmetry, consider, again, The Pasteurization of France. To say that Pasteur succeeded because his discovery was true about nature, for instance, suggests that "nature," a realm neatly separated from society, can be used to explain the causes of activities within society -- that once some discovery about "nature" is shown to be true, society rearranges itself to conform to this truth. According to Latour, this is asymmetrical, because it suggests that an understanding of nature is somehow more powerful, more dispositive, more fundamental, than an understanding of society. On the other hand, one might discard the idea of truth entirely and argue that Pasteur's s uccess can be explained entirely through the lens of "society" -- that, say, the hygienic regulations that stemmed from Pasteur's work were in fact enacted in order to give those in power a new way to control the lower classes. This explanation, Latour ar gues, is a mirror image of the first. Instead of saying that the truth of nature determines social arrangements, it says that social arrangements determine what is construed as nature's truth.

Both views are equally na�ve, Latour says, because both proceed from the assumption that "nature" and "society" are somehow divisible. The symmetrical way to see Pasteur, Latour argues, is to see the split between nature and society as false. Thus, p art of Pasteur's success was his alliance, in the social world, with hygienists, for whom he provided a good explanation of the diseases they fought. But part of his success was also his alliance, in the natural world, with the microbes themselves, for wh om he became spokesman and interpreter. In other words, Latour rejects neither insight: not the insight into society nor the insight into nature. He simply claims that neither should be used to explain the other. It is a position of radical humility: poi nting out an asymmetry does not require the pointer to stand on some higher theoretical ground. It's a gesture not unlike pointing out that a painting in a hallway is hanging crooked."

In other words, Latour's point is not the social constructionist point, with their wierd intersubjective idealism. His point is that the era of the nature/culture divide is over. This is, indeed, the collapse of an enduring meta-narrative, but not one post-modernists envisioned sapping. What is happening in Latour, what connects his with the thinkers Deleuze first connected together, in a sort of geneology of disjunction, is that they see the exhaustion in the heart of dialectics since Hegel - that exhaustion of the subject and the object. Even at the time, it was a reactionary division, created as a sort of degenerate theology, an endrun around natural science in order to produce some secular version of redemption. Since then, it has become an impediment to thinking. And its last, ridiculous embodiment, in the naive realism of certain physicists, and the narcissism of social constructionists, signals the dialectics collapse. It is a ponzi scheme, now, and the concepts populating it are all greater fool ideas - they can have value only if you can sell them to greater fools, ie, students (for the academically entrenched social constructionists) and taxpayers (for the physicists, with their billion dollar plus laboratories).

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