ON THE EXISTENCE OF BRUNO LATOUR’S MODES:
FROM PLURALIST ONTOLOGY TO ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM
by Terence Blake
Abstract: In this article I take a critical look at the origins
and sources of Bruno Latour's pluralism as it is expressed in his
book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, and compare it to other
similar projects (Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Badiou). I consider
the accusations of reductionism and of relativism, and demonstrate
that Latour's «empirical metaphysics» is not an ontological
reductionism but a pluralist ontology recognising the existence of
a plurality of entities and of types of entities. Nor is it an
epistemological relativism but an ontological pluralism affirming
the existence of a plurality of types of existence. These two
strands, pluralist ontology and ontological pluralism, mutually
reinforce each other to produce at least the outlines of a robust
pluralist realism.
FOREWORD: CRITIQUE AND DIPLOMACY, STRATEGY AND ALLUSION
“Where do you criticize from? Don’t you see that criticizing is
still knowing, knowing better? That the critical relation still
falls within the sphere of knowledge. of “realization” and thus of
the assumption of power? Critique must be drifted out of. Better
still: Drifting is in itself the end of all critique. The desire
underlying and informing institutions composes set-ups which are
energetic investments in the body, in language.” (Lyotard, 1972,
cited from DRIFTWORKS, Semiotext(e), 1984).
“Lawrence criticised French literature for being incurably
intellectual, ideological and idealist, essentially critical,
critical of life rather than creative of life... We can only
assemble among assemblages” (Deleuze and Parnet, DIALOGUES, 49-50
& 53, published in French in 1977).
I read Latour with many French texts resonating in my mind, texts
from the period just before and just after May ’68. There are many
such texts dating from this epoch and later that seem to have
formed the pre-individual conceptual soup from which Latour draws
to elaborate his own process of intellectual individuation. One
line of argument in those texts was the critique of “critique” as
the triumph of negativity and conformism disguised as lucidity, of
intellectual laziness disguised as sophistication, of metadiscourse and abstraction disguised as perspicuity. Critique was
said to be the new avatar of transcendence, a way to avoid
engaging with life and concrete experience. Critical thought,
though necessary, was seen as insufficient, and potentially
destructive of thought and life if given primacy. What was needed
was creative life, seen as an empirical concrete art of
composition and assemblage.
It is interesting to note that Paul Feyerabend was talking in much
the same vein at roughly the same time, criticizing Popper’s
critical rationalism for the primacy it gave to critique. An
important difference was that Feyerabend did not limit his
discussion to the shortcomings of various academic accounts of the
practice of science. He was willing to pose the general question
of the nature and value of science. Latour affirms that properly
understood his analyses do not undermine science but explain why
it is as reliable as it is. What he undermines, or so he says, is
a persistent deformation, a phantasm concerning the nature and
function of science. This is only half true. His idea is that
critique has become so democratised that anyone can apply its
techniques to cast doubt on solid science, such as evolutionary
biology or the study of climate change, in favour of positions
that have no real research behind them (creationism, climate
denialism) and whose defence reposes on just these critical
techniques and nothing else. While I globally agree, I think
questioning of the critical attitude goes too far and brands more
general critical examination of the sciences as irrational.
Latour’s thesis is not new, Feyerabend (who Latour never seems to
refer to, preferring to imply that he was not influenced by the
illustrious epistemological predecessors of science studies)
declared that his aim was not to make critique easier but a lot
more difficult. Yet he also maintained that more general questions
on the cognitive status and on the value of scientific results are
a necessary part of a democratic education and of an elightened
participation in society.
Latour’s works emerge from this creative context of ideas, that we
may group together under the rubric of “post-structuralism”, or
more generally of epistemological and ontological pluralism. Yet
he does not easily acknowledge this source, except in the vaguest
terms. Words, concepts, images that he seems to present as his own
derive from this background. The question one can pose is why does
he not fully acknowledge his immediate predecessors. On his own
theory of mediation this influence is both inevitable and
desirable, for to “multiply the mediators” is supposed to
strengthen a position rather than weaken it. Sometimes I think
that Latour is a Machiavellic master manipulator, a cunning
diplomat deploying a rhetorical strategy to become the stereotype
of the Great French Philosopher; sometimes I think that he is a
master of the allusiveness that is necessary to enrich one’s style
with enough transindividual vibrancy to really be able to say
something both contentful and new.
I do not know how to resolve my dilemma, which comes from having
read many texts that he has surely read and hearing their
resonances in his own words. This impression of “déjà vu” combines
with other worries about the explicit content of his views that I
find I both approve and feel dissatisfied with, that I summarise
by saying “he’s on the right track, but he doesn’t go far enough”.
In many ways I find Bruno Latour’s system is an advance on Alain
Badiou’s philosophy with its four truth procedures, where Latour
discerns fifteen modes of veridiction, which are also modes of
existence. Yet behind the talk of an open plurality of truthrégimes and their specific mediations and institutions there are
signs of conceptual and institutional conservatism and of
authoritarian legitimation of the status quo.
I share Latour’s desire for philosophers to indulge in more
“empirical research”, conceived broadly. My concern is that
sometimes he slides between this more general sense of empiricism,
where a philosopher like Deleuze can be considered to do
(conceptual, affective, perceptual, political, and even religious)
empirical fieldwork and a more limited sense in which Latour has
done fieldwork but not Deleuze, nor Badiou, Lyotard and Serres. My
quarrel is with the diplomatic caricature of himself that Latour
secretes, consciously or not, and that interferes with the part of
his message that I like and wish to help publicise.
ON ACADEMIC REGRESSION IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
We are living through a period of intellectual regression in the
realm of Continental Philosophy, a regression that proclaims
itself to be a decisive progress beyond the merely negative and
critical philosophies of the recent past. Yet the philosophies of
Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard cannot be summed up in the
image of pure critique. Their critical dissolution of the dogmatic
residues contained in even the most innovative philosophies they
had encountered did not leave us in a powerless void of negativity
and paralysis. Their “deconstruction” went all the way down,
deconstructing even the notion of critique and liberating the
possibility of new assemblages and new processes of
subjectivation.
Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour’s
compositionism is the direct application of post-structuralist
thought, that he is very familiar with. His talk, containing
overtones of scientistic bravado, about his “empirical” research
is very misleading, as his system is parasitic on these
philosophical predecessors. He is however a good populariser of
difficult ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we
do not accept his own contextualisation of his research. Latour is
very much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Serres and
the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is his
continuation of this pluralist lineage that gives his work its
superiority over Badiou’s system, not any primacy of the empirical
over the philosophical.
Beyond the critique of the new figures of transcendence and
ontotheology these thinkers gave concrete sketches of how to see
the world in terms of a very different sort of ontology based on
immanence – a pluralist diachronic ontology. The recent promotion
of philosophical successors to this constellation of thinkers of
immanence, such as Badiou and Zizek, has not led to any real
progress but to a labour of travestying the past (one has only to
look at Badiou’s DELEUZE and Zizek’s ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES) and
to a return to such intellectual deadends as Lacanian
psychoanalysis (especially understood synchronically, as Badiou
understands everything, as a speculative system). But even these
regressive philosophers remain in dialogue, however one-sided and
unjust, with their illustrious predecessors, and strive to
confront them at the level of conceptual richness that
characterised their work.
The next step was to keep up the general aura of having “gone
beyond” the older supposedly negative thinkers but to radically
simplify the conceptual level, presenting easy summary
presentations of the new thought while conveniently forgetting the
conceptual paths followed. This step was taken by the epigoni:
Meillassoux, who still retains an elevated style and at least an
intention of conceptual rigour; and its pop variant in Graham
Harman’s adaptation for the masses. For example, in THE THIRD
TABLE Graham Harman gives a popularised version his theoretical
position in the form of a flawed reading of, and an unsatisfying
response to, Sir Arthur Eddington’s famous paradox of the two
tables. Unfortunately, Harman shows himself incapable of grasping
the anti-reductionistic import of Eddington’s argument and
proposes an abstract philosophical dualism to replace Eddington’s
pluralist vision of scientific research. Harman claims that his
account escapes the reductionism that he mistakenly attributes to
Eddington’s view, despite reducing the objects of common sense,
science, and the humanities to the status of “utter shams”. It is
implied that the theoretical justification for this unsatisfying
presentation is to be found elsewhere in Harman’s works, but this
is not the case.
However, it is Badiou’s philosophy that expresses in its purest
and most general form the new paradigm that articulates explicitly
what is elsewhere just blithely presupposed as a form of thought
too evident to even be aware of. The next step in consolidating
the regression that Badiou’s philosophy, however innovative,
represents (a regression that Badiou’s thought does not initiate
but rather registers and legitimates) corresponds to the far less
ambitious productions of the object-oriented ontologists. I say
far less “ambitious” in the sense of conceptual ambition, because
their ambition is if possible even greater than that of Badiou,
but it is of a different order than the conceptual. They are the
marketised version of the Badiou-Zizek constellation, and so the
extremely politicised tone has been discreetly dissolved to leave
a more demagogic packaging to the stale ideas that OOO trumpets
ambitiously as the new construction after so much critique. The
attempts by this new generation of phiosophers to elaborate a
thought capable of guiding us in the new historical conjuncture
that we are entering without being able to produce the concepts
necessary to describe it are far from original. Faced with the
inadequacy of these variants of Badiou’s ontological hypothesis
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem describes the need for a “new conjecture”. He
examines various attempts to go beyond the metaphysical
problematic secreted unconsciously by the trend towards
speculative capitalism, of which Badiou’s metaphysics is the
explicitation and the most accomplished form. MBK envisions such
movements as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology as
containing nothing new capable of leading us out of the Badiousian
predicament.
It is normal that in this context François Laruelle’s philosophy
is at last coming into its own. It could not attain full
visibility and be understood on its own terms while the work of
Deleuze and Derrida were in progress, as his critiques of that
work were only half-true, based on giving it an ultimately
uncharitable reading as remaining within the norms of sufficient
philosophy, but other readings are possible. This was not the
appropriate background to show up the singularity and the
penetration of his ideas. Laruelle pursued over the decades his
unwavering commitment to immanence, and this project shines forth
now against the background of the regression that Badiou-ZizekMeillassoux and the OOOxians represent.
Paul Feyerabend gives us a sketch of a different sort of ontology
than that of the Badiou-Zizek-epigoni carrousel, an ontology that
is itself subject to the process of research instead of lording it
over the sciences, the arts, love, and political struggle. Bruno
Latour goes in this direction, that of a diachronic ontology, and
expresses the fairly obvious demand that religion be included
among the various “truth-procedures” or modes of existence that
are also, as Mehdi Belhaj Kacem points out, modes of “prehension”
(using Whitehead’s term). François Laruelle made use of science to
rid philosophy of its synchronic pretentions, and has now opened
philosophy onto the whole field of prehensions, including religion
(gnosticism and mysticism), art (photography), literature
(science-fiction), politics (democracy), psychoanalysis (nonanalysis). Bernard Stiegler underlines the catastrophe visible
inside Plato’s own works of the replacement of the preceding
traditional diachronic cosmology by a new tyranny of thought and
action based on the establishment of a synchronic ontology.
I make use of the Feyerabendian concept of abundance to resume the
features of a diachronic ontology that makes a place for realism
AND historicity, for speculation AND revisability. “Withdrawal” is
an artefact, the pessimistic consequence of employing a simplified
set of abstractions to describe the different modes of existence,
spatialising them and so producing and promoting a synchronic
ontology which can neither account for change nor even do justice
to the many elements and aspects of the world. Feyerabend
distinguished the way of the scientist, or more generally the way
of research, from the way of the philosopher. Consequently he was
very wary of academic philosophy, its abstractions, its jargon,
and its dualisms. This led him to be very attentive to the life of
the ordinary person and to defend common sense reality from
academic philosophers who would teach us that the abundance of the
concrete world is an illusion, a “sham”, and that only their
philosophical abstractions are real.
All this talk about diachronic ontology and processes of
individuation raises the question of non-academic prehensions of
the world, that we may summarize following Feyerabend and Laruelle
under the term “gnosis”. How much gnosis does one actually see in
academic talk about gnosticism? Paul Feyerabend praised the
gnostics for being able to put into question not just aspects of
the world but also criticise in their globality both our
understanding of the world and also the world itself. Feyerabend’s
whole thought from his anarchism, his defence of counterinduction, to his sketches of an ontology capable of underwriting
his pluralist methodology and politics of democratic relativism,
bears the mark of his affinities with Gnosticism. If Gnosticism is
the opposite of an external doctrine to be administered by a
hierarchical institution based on ontological stupidity and
blindness (as much of the academy has become) then it is to be put
more in relation with processes of psychic and collective
individuation (as Jung has argued). Feyerabend’s style embodies
“gnosis” in
talk of the
diachronic,
synchronic,
this sense, and one would wish to see , for example,
hermetic Deleuze be itself more hermetic (gnostic,
individuating) and less academic (dogmatic,
alienating).
The question then is not to be in the academy or not. There is no
right place to be, as Lyotard remarked, just a right way of being:
a good conductor of intensities whether inside or outside the
academy. We cannot say that artists exemplify a creativity that is
lacking in academic philosophy. Even philosophy professors can be
non-philosophers, or better non-standard philosophers, innovating
outside the conceptual hegemonies imposed by tradition. Even
artists can be careerist pimps. There is no absolute criterion,
and even our vocabulary can betray our thought. I would like to
talk in terms of non-academics and ask “Does your path of energies
take you closer to the sources of immanence?” I would like to
talk, as Laruelle does, of “thought-power” on the analogy with
labour-power, but all that is academic jargon if it is not tied to
the lived experience it tries to convey. Feyerabend, a university
professor, condemned the academy, its language and its cliques. He
did not talk or teach or think like the vast majority of his
colleagues. Yet he claimed to have always had “complete freedom”
to do things his way. Being in the academy or not administratively
speaking is not the criterion. But being inside the collective
phantasm that it secretes and sustains, and voluntarily
perpetuating that phantasm or doing something else is a criterion
HOW TO READ LATOUR (1): Polytheism of Values
One cannot help noticing a certain vagueness and conceptual
tension in Latour’s use of the term “Moderns”, and of what role
his appeal to a notion of “values” plays in his project:
preliminary survey to open up the field of inquiry or rhetorical
reduction to serve the purposes of his own agenda. The question is
thus posed of how we may best read this book, and Latour’s work in
general.
Style and vocabulary are important to Latour’s message, as are
argumentative and rhetorical strategy. This implies that we do not
read Latour through the literalism and the narrow rationalism of
“double-click” spectacles. Double-click is the name for a mode (of
discourse and of existence) that reduces existence to information
treated as unmediated and transparent access to reality. In
opposition to the claim of double-click rationality to be the only
trustworthy access to reality, since it takes itself to be the
only mode of existence, Latour argues that there are in fact many
modes of existence. Each of these modes generates its own
information and subjects it to multiple transformations, and each
embodies different values. The rise to hegemony of double-click
rationality corresponds to what Max Weber called the process of
rationalization, which brought with it the reduction of the many
modes of existence to one, and thus the “disenchantement” of the
world.
(Note: Latour lays out fifteen modes of existence and of
“veridiction”, but unlike Badiou and his magic number of four
“truth-procedures” Latour is open to the possibility of adding
others. In this regard we can see Badiou as still practicing a
priori philosophy, where Latour true to his word is intent on
practicing an empirical metaphysics).
One can note that Latour’s choice of theoretical vocabulary is
voluntarily simple, and one motive for this choice is the desire
to avoid the misleading associations and connotations that adhere
to the more technical words of the philosophical tradition.
However, I agree with Deleuze that it is often the books that make
the choice of a non-technical vocabulary that are the most
difficult. We have seen in the last post that Latour’s use of the
word “modern” conceals many problems, as does his choice of the
word “values”, and I have argued that his text on his own account
must not be taken at face-value (“face-value) is another name for
double-click, the omnipresent enemy of the recognition of the
plurality of modes).
I think that this creates a situation that is a challenge for any
consequent pluralism. Latour’s book is written not as just a
monist double-click treatise about a pluralism of modes of
existence but as itself an enactment of such pluralism, and is to
be read accordingly. Its aim is, after the double-click
disenchantment of the world, to reenchant the world by investing
it with a polytheism of values. It requires that we read it with
polytheistic awareness. Certainly we can and must read it for
information, but we must also be awake to its strategies and
conjunctural alliances. We must appreciate its fictioning of
beings and of conceptual personae, and we must approach it with
religious care to respond to the living spirit underlying its
potentially dead letter. We must relate to it in terms of the
psychic construction, or individuation, that it exemplifies and
renders possible.
This polytheism of reading is in line with my own approach to
understanding and interpretation. I personally don’t believe in
direct access to a text (or to anything else), nor does Latour. I
read a text with everything I’ve got. Certainly it is important to
take note of the vocabulary and of the distinctions foregrounded
by the author, but I argue that they must be read against this
polytheistic background.
HOW TO READ LATOUR (2): Against Straight Reading
We are often confronted with the demand that we read a writer
“first” in their own terms, and then in a later phase propose
hypotheses for interpreting the text. This is a naïve empiricist
methodological principle based on the idea that we must first seek
direct unmediated “raw” data, and then elaborate hypotheses to
explain that data. This principle is based on an impossibility,
the myth of information untransformed by theoretical
interpretation, and is in no way applicable to the process of
research. Latour himself condemns it under the name of “Double
Click”, the myth of transport of information without
transformation. This is a basic principle of Latour’s research
from the very beginning – we have only to recall that Latour
started out in Biblical exegesis.
There is no “blank-slate” reading, just registering what Latour
says in his own terms. Can we then read Latour with constant
reference to the known facts concerning the domains he discusses?
This would be yet another positivist reduction of his text, as
Latour does not claim to be giving a report on the results of
empirical research: “it is not in the mode of knowledge that I
claim to be working” (AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, 481).
Latour’s text is not an exercise in “speaking straight” (DoubleClick), but in “speaking well” (plurimodal diplomacy). As such it
requires something other than “reading straight”: a plurimodal or
polytheist reading.
Latour calls the approach employed in his text “plurimodal”,
“diplomatic”, or “relationist”. His text is constructed on the
fable of an anthropologist who wishes to reconstitute the value
system of modern Western societies. She is careful to avoid the
naïve error of “believing what the West says about itself” (28),
taking a truly anthropological approach, understanding that
“modernism’s accounts of itself may have no relation to what has
actually happened to it” (28). Her investigation involves living
among her informants and participating in their daily activities
without being credulous. She understands that this is the only way
to discover the value system of her informants, “who account for
this system in terms to which she must avoid giving too much
weight”.
The “surprising” discovery of this fictitious investigator is that
not only do the accounts given by the moderns of each mode of
existence that she isolates not correspond to their actual
practice, but that they are very often shocked by the more
adequate accounts that she comes up with based on her
investigations. They tend to deny that her accounts are accurate,
preferring to believe quite naïvely in their own utterly
unrealistic accounts, and she must exercise much diplomacy to get
her findings accepted. The pervasiveness of this denegation and
naïveté are in large part responsible for the difficulty of the
investigation.
I think this fable of the anthropological investigator is a good
model of the sort of reading that is appropriate to AN INQUIRY
INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE. The reader of Latour’s work must live
with it without giving too much weight to its own self-account,
and be alert to possible instances of denegation and of naïveté
(whether authentic or feigned) in the very construction of the
project within the text. Bernard Stiegler gives us (in “Bernard
Stiegler's Pharmacy: A Conversation”, Configurations Volume 18,
Number 3, Fall 2010) very useful advice in reading Latour’s
texts:
“Right now I have a stylistic difficulty with Latour. If you will,
for me, Latour -- who I think is a very interesting person -- is
in a bad relation with philosophy ... he is in a state of
philosophical denial ... I always have the impression, because of
this denial, that there is a certain blindness, a certain naïveté
even, in Latour’s reasoning process, a certain cynicism”.
This gives us a fruitful set of criteria for reading Latour: be on
the lookout for occurrences of philosophical denial, of blindness,
of naïveté, and of cynicism. It is clear that Stiegler thinks that
because of his philosophical denegation Latour is still stuck to
some extent in naïve empiricism. In effect,Latour’s work embodies
a double empiricism: an empiricism of networks, that one has just
to trace and follow, and also one of modes of existence that one
has to describe and prevent from imposing their felicity
conditions on another mode.
We can observe the conjoined presence of blindness, naïveté and
cynicism in the beginning chapters of Latour’s new book:
1) Blindness: Latour conflates a philosophical definition of the
Moderns (those who believe in Science’s radical separation from
Politics and in the dynamic of progress brought about by that
separation) with an empirical socio-economic defintion (the
technologically advanced societies of Europe and the United
States). He passes from one sense to the other without seeming to
notice, creating a certain degree of vagueness and of conceptual
confusion in his declarations;
2) Naïveté: Latour’s analyses taken as real-life political
prescriptions are naïve in that they ignore important socioeconomic realities of class, power, institutions, and cultural .
3) Cynical: Latour is not very reliable in enouncing all the
stakes of his analyses, and is often pursuing several agendas at
once. His style is an intervention in a field of forces, allies
and enemies, not all of which are made explicit, and whose
characterization often depends more on strategic convenience and
rhetorical positioning than on straight-talking referential prose.
Does all this invalidate what Latour has to say? Not at all,
Latour’s “blindness” is counterbalanced by a new insight into
materiality. Stiegler praises Latour for posing important
questions and for bringing a concern with “things” into
philosophy:
“I find that he is extremely intelligent and he often raises
pertinent questions, but, moreover, he is interested in objects
and things and this interests me ... I think that the thing, the
banal “thingness” of the thing, is something extremely important
that philosophy has a tendency to reject. I therefore regret that
in Derrida’s work, the critique of logocentrism does not lead in
the end to a reconsideration of things. Here, Latour is very
interesting”.
This reaction of Stiegler’s highlights an impression that one may
have in reading Latour of real novelty embedded in disingenuous
narration. The avoidance of traditional philosophical jargon is no
doubt a useful heuristic procedure for extracting us from
sedimented presuppositions. But it has the disadvantage of
exaggerating the novelty of the analyses and of cloaking important
conceptual affinities and precedents. It cannot be put forward as
an obligatory methodic principle, but may be of use when
considered as just one heuristic amongst many. The conclusion for
reading Latour is that we should both go with the actual network
of concepts elaborated by Latour and at the same time interpret
that network in terms of a plurality of perspectives or modes
insofar as they are pertinent to the matters at hand. Exegesis is
not straight reading nor free association, but pragmatic
pertinence.
SITUATING LATOUR’S ENUNCIATIONS: META-LANGUAGE OR NEWSPEAK
Bruno Latour’s book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE purports to
describe the felicity conditions of a plurality of modes of
existence and of their corresponding modes of veridiction. So it
is reasonable to raise the question of the situation of
enunciation instituted in the book, and of the status of Latour’s
own speech acts. In the passage from certainty to trust the
enunciative modality changes:
“But when one has to appeal to trust, the interlocutory situation
is entirely different: one has to share the concern for a fragile
and delicate institution, encumbered with terribly material and
mundane elements-- oil lobbies, peer evaluation, the constraints
of model-making, typos in thousand-page-long reports, research
contracts, computer bugs, and so on” (3).
Latour’s own discourse seems to allude to a possible scientific
status, by the constant evocation of an “anthropology of the
Moderns”, yet much of what he says is philosophical in form and
content, containing idiosyncratic speculation whose evidential
support is not readily apparent . The lack of clarity over the
object of the inquiry (the “Moderns” and their “values”) and over
the potential audience for its results adds to the puzzlement over
the status of his discourse. In the conclusion Latour states:
“Thus while I have spoken all along of an inquiry and even of a
questionnaire, it is not in the mode of knowledge that I claim to
be working. The term “inquiry” has to be taken in a plurimodal
sense whose object is to preserve the diversity of modes. Can we
call this approach “empirical philosophy”? I am not sure, given
how indifferent philosophy has become to the tasks of description.
Experimental metaphysics? Cosmopolitics? Comparative anthropology?
Practical ontology? ... To situate this reprise of the rationalist
adventure, but to mark clearly that it will not take place under
the auspices of Double Click, I have entrusted it to the term
diplomacy”.
So it is not in the mode of knowledge, yet empirical. In the
beginning of the book Latour appeals to his status as a
practitioner of science studies, and we know he has published
books on a case study of technology and of law. His book on
religious enunciation REJOICING is not based on a case study but
on his own (experiential? philosophical?) impressions of what such
utterance is all about. “Plurimodal”, including the mode of
knowledge but not limited to it, seems an apt description, but so
does “meta-modal”, if we want to capture the idea that it is not
political diplomacy that is at play, but ontological diplomacy.
The scene of this diplomacy is vague too: the investigator must
show diplomacy with her informers and strive to obtain their
assent for her redescriptions of their practices and institutions,
diplomacy again in the negotiations between the different modes of
existence, and yet again in the negotiations between the Moderns
and the “others”.
Despite an effort to locate and free us from category mistakes
when one mode of existence is confused with or impinges on
another, Latour himself mixes philosophical considerations and
empirical claims in a confusing way. The result is a vagueness or
“muddiness” that complcates his argument and gives an illusion of
concreteness. There emerges from all this an impression of
authority, yet the bibliography to support his claims is lacking.
There is an attempt to exploit the trust the reader may have in
Latour’s previous work on revisioning of science and have it
accorded to claims about other domains, institutions, and modes of
existence where no such work is cited. The objections that the
text envisions come from naive straw men who are trapped in the
snares of subject-object, the bifurcation nature-society, the
impossible quest for unmediated certainty, or of double-click
literalism. There is so much renaming that one has trouble
formulating objections that have not been rendered impossible by
the new terminology. An interesting case is the fate of the word
“transcendence”, which becomes split in two: there is a “bad”
transcendence and a “good” transcendence, which is defined so as
to be synonymous with immanence (“immanence, for AIME, is
synonymous with good transcendence”). This is in line with a
return to a more consensual (“diplomatic”) posture and an attempt
to avoid “provocation”, at least at the level of terminology.
Already Latour had renamed his position from “social
constructivism” to “constructivism”. Now we have him renouncing
constructivism in favour of compositionism, and the return of
values, institutions, and even (“good”) transcendence. There are
no boundaries between domains, but one may not mix different modes
of existence, under penalty of “category mistake”. Yet one may
ask: are all such crossings sterile errors? If this ontology is
diachronic, with modes of existence evolving, mutating, coming
into being and disappearing, can such crossings sometimes be
productive? The terminology of category mistakes, though necessary
for eliminating “bad” mixtures, may eliminate too much (what about
the possibility of “good” mixtures and tend towards stasis. Once
we have our map of values and modes that characterise us are we
just going to agree to be different from our others, or are we
going to swap and mix with them? It is strange to police the
proliferation of hybrids at the object level with the stern
warnings against categorial confusion at the meta-level.
On the question of “Values”, I think that Latour effectuates an
illegitimate transition at the beginning of the book from
experience to value in his presentation of his project. Then he
gives the value thus located a new content (“new account”). So the
defence of the values of the moderns is a strange tension of
conservative and revisionary moves.
Latour’s “felicity conditions” are to be distinguished from the
values he posits, being rather the criteria determining that some
value has been respected or attained, or not. Reducing science to
the value of “objectivity” as Latour does in the introduction, or
religion to conversion, is a dubious move.The idea that each mode
of existence embodies a “value” that can be isolated out is a
rhetorical reduction. It is rhetorical because it consists in
persuasively re-defining the experience underlying a mode of
existence while giving the appearance of simply re-stating that
experience; it is a reduction in that something of the complexity
of that experience is lost. Wanting us to give up the “belief in
beliefs” in favour of a belief in values seems little gain, but
tends towards denying any cognitive dimension to values. There is
also the inter-textual aspect. Latour relies heavily on a fuzzy
set of allusions to previous French philosophers. In particular
much of his pluralism has a Deleuzian ring, just as his
declaration of the end of the modernist master narrative of
Emancipation is a Lyotardian concept. In Deleuze’s terms value is
always a term for the conformist codification of practices and of
modes of existence, and it is rather singular evaluations that
allow us to construct our modes of existence without succombing to
transcendence in the sense of a higher objective court of appeal.
Latour seems to be trying to revamp the terminology to produce
more conservative conclusions than such thinkers worked towards;
There is a whole strand of re-defining the terms of his
predecessors rather than confronting them that goes in the same
direction; His re-defining of “deconstruction” into purely
negative critical thought is an important example. His wiping out
of two generations of predecessors is of a piece with his
considering only straw man objectors. Noone wants to be a dualist
still believing in subect-object or the bifurcation of Nature and
Society, noone wants to believe in the unmediated access to the
real or in the uniitary autonomous subject. But the victory over
(i.e. the deconstruction of) these concepts in favour of (it was
not just negative) multiplicities of heterogeneous elements
arranged in immanent networks – this was not Latour’s contribution
but that of his immediate predecessors. So I think that looking
very warily at a seemingly innocent word such as “value” is
important to understand Latour’s project in a wider intellectual
context than that which he himself indicates explicitly. An
unreliable narrator of the necessity of trust is not to be taken
at face value.
THE DEMOCRACY OF TRUST AND THE VALUE OF “PROT-”
At the beginning of AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE Bruno
Latour recounts an anecdote to illustrate the new situation we
find ourselves in today, at the end of the “modernist
parenthesis”:
“They’re sitting around a table, some fifteen French
industrialists responsible for sustainable development in various
companies, facing a professor of climatology, a researcher from
the Collège de France. It’s the fall of 2010; a battle is raging
about whether the current climate disturbances are of human origin
or not. One of the industrialists asks the professor a question I
find a little cavalier: “But why should we believe you, any more
than the others?” I’m astonished. Why does he put them on the same
footing, as if it were a simple difference of opinion between this
climate specialist and those who are called climate skeptics...?”
Latour wonders if the scientist will respond with a summary of the
indisputable data leading to certain knowledge, but the response
is a summary of “the large number of researchers involved in
climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the
articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast
network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites,
and computers that ensure the flow of information... the pitfalls
of the models that are needed to correct the data as well as the
series of doubts that have had to be addressed on each of these
points”.
No appeal to indubitable data or to certain knowledge, but to
trust in the institution of science: “He sees no higher court of
appeals”.
Latour recounts being shocked by the sceptical question of the
industrialist, surprised at the lack of appeal to the certainty of
expert knowledge, and favorably impressed by the scientist’s
account of the research process and by his recourse to trust in
the institution. He sees a shift in philosophy of science, in
epistemology, in ontology, in this appeal to trust instead of to
certainty and to the institution instead of to unmediated access.
There is some complacence here as Latour finds that scientists
have shifted from their Cartesian dogmatism and certainty to a
Jamesian (and by implication Latourian) pragmatism. By implication
it is really Latour who won the “Science Wars”.
Yet Latour does not really explain why this change in behaviour
has taken place. “The modernist parenthesis is at an end” is a
rather vague explanatory hypothesis, itself in need of
explanation. One problem is that the notion of modernism is
defined in a variety of ways, such that its extension is quite
vague. One definition of the moderns is: those for whom others
have beliefs whereas they have knowledge. On this definition the
modernist parenthesis goes back to Plato, or even to Moses. More
often it is limited to Europe ASR (After the Scientific
Revolution).
Latour’s explanation for the change in metaphysics that
characterises the change of epoch is the gravity of the ecological
crises that beset us. The value of Certainty leads to
inflexibility, whereas the times require flexibility and fluidity
under the value of Trust. But this notion of the epoch is
ambiguous between an internal and an external version. Have the
scientists themselves due to new research findings discovered that
they must abandon their dogmatic rigidity and authoritarian
tendencies? Or has the rise of a less credulous and less
deferential attitude in all domains led scientists to revise their
epistemology and their rhetorical strategies?
In the anecdote recounted by Latour we have a scientist being
subjected to a cavalier question by an industrialist who has
chosen to relay, according to Latour, the sort of objections that
the climate sceptics use. The scientist replies philosophically,
but why? One industrialist is easily snobbed and dismissed (unless
he represents Big Money needed by the scientists or his
colleagues). But many objections made in all sorts of venues from
the TV to the classroom, from philosophical journals to SF novels
may have played their part in tempering the expert’s attitude.
This is the development of what Steve Fuller calls “protscience“,
the urge towards a democratisation of science impelled by a sort
of protestant revolution conducted by the users of science. This
movement has had negative effects, such as making room for the
naive or cynical climate sceptics and for the intelligent
designers. But it has also had the positive effect of demanding
more concrete explanations, of the type the climate expert gives
in the anecdote, than just the assertion “Science says it is so”.
What I am arguing is that where Latour sees the sign of a new
epoch in the scientist’s response, we can also see its sign in the
industrialist’s question. No contradiction with Latour’s project,
but a slight shift of emphasis. We may follow the lead provided
Steve Fuller, who describes the rise of an attitude that is
sceptical of the certainty of science without falling into the
opposition between trust and denialism. This is what he calls
protscience, and he hypothesises that it may be responsible for
the contemporary passage from the appeal to the absolute authority
of the expert to the call for reasoned and provisional trust in
the scientific community. Perhaps he should integrate into each
mode its own “PROT-”, so that we would have not just protscience
but also protlaw, protanalysis, proteconomy and even protreligion
(gnostics, hermeticists, alchemists included). Protanalysis is
covered already by the integration of Tobie Nathan's
ethnopsychiatry. Protreligion would lead to combining MET and REL
as submodes under a more embracing supermode, that one could call
IND (or process of individuation).
LATOUR AND BADIOU
The parallel between Latour’s and Badiou’s ontologies is important
to keep in mind as I think that it fruitfully illuminates both
projects. One of the tasks with reading Latour is to re-establish
a philosophical context without dragging his work back into a set
of presuppositions that he is trying to escape. An examination of
Latour’s conceptual debts to post-structuralist thinkers
demonstrates that Latour’s book is both more speculative and less
empirical than advertised, but the comparison with Badiou shows
that there is a fundamental difference in their approaches. Badiou
is still doing a priori philosophy and has shown himself incapable
of expanding the number of truth procedures that he posits (for
example, to include religion), while there is no real reason
inside his system not to envisage other such procedures. We can
conclude that Latour’s way of taking up the notions of ontology
and of truth, and of pluralising them in terms of an open list of
modes of veridiction and of existence, is empirical in spirit.
Further, Latour’s system proposes much more of a diachronic
ontology (Latour’s “being-as-other”, including both alterity and
alteration) from the very beginning, whereas Badiou’s ontology is
synchronic at the level of Being, with a diachronic supplement in
the notion of the event.
Contrary to Badiou, Latour does not reactivate a foundational
style, rather he does everything to avoid such a thing.Badiou’s
philosophy is foundational in a very classical sense, and I think
his idea that “mathematics is ontology” is a regressive move.
Despite his explicit claims, Badiou’s difference with the later
Wittgenstein is not so much that of his rejection of the
“linguistic turn” as that of his failure to effectuate the
diachronic turn or the abandon of the idea of foundations. For
Wittgenstein mathematics is a constantly evolving patchwork, and
set theory is not at all the foundational instance that it is for
Badiou. Wittgenstein was also quite intent on separating religious
experience from the type of existence investigated by the
sciences, and on separating psychological experience from
psychoanalysis, which he regarded as an invasive mythology. So
Latour is far closer to Wittgenstein than he is to Badiou.
For Badiou mathematics is ontology, and there is no other: there
is only one mode of existence. His is a pluralism of content,
everything is multiplicity of multiplicities. Latour proposes a
pluralism of modes of existence and not just of content, and so
for him ontology is itself multiple. The modes are a little like
regional ontologies, only they do not exist as regions inside some
totalising space, but are qualitatively incommensurable. In that
respect he is closer to Wittgenstein than to Badiou.
LATOUR AND STIEGLER: Ideology and Modes of Existence
Reading Bruno Latour and Geof Bowker’s discussion of the different
approaches to science in France and in the English-speaking world,
one can begin to situate the contribution of Latour’s new book to
discussions that are traversed by the Anglophone/Continental
divide. Each side sees the other as ignoring crucial problems, so
rather than choose sides Bowker and Latour attempt a symmetric
account of the difference. Their observations correspond to my own
experience of the differences of approach, which sometimes has
produced difficulties of communication with French philosophers
over the 30 years I have been living here in France, and also some
frustration at the differing but equally limiting presuppostions
on both sides.
This set of differences is something I noticed from the beginning
when I arrived in France in 1980. One element is that the notions
of theory-ladenness and incommensurability, which had led to
intense discussions in Anglophone philosophy of science in the 60s
and 70s, had been accepted as evident since the beginning of the
20th Century. However, this strong anti-empricist orientation did
not lead to any questioning of the epistemological status of
science, nor to its relativisation in terms of outside,
psychological and social, influences. This also explains why
Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend are typically treated as more or less
the same, separated only by minor theoretical nuances. For the
French epistemologists, science is essentially a theoretical
rather than empirical enterprise. However, this does not
relativise science, which is simply posited as rational par
excellence.
This rejoins my own observation that French philosophical
formulations often sound radical when read in an Anglophone
context, but have their scope limited in France by shared implicit
presuppositions. Similarly, many radical Anglophone pronouncements
seem obvious to the French, as they subtract out any deep
questioning of scientific rationality.
Bernard Stiegler, who is not cited in Latour and Bowker’s text,
falls into the asymmetry imposed by this dichotomy. He does not
tackle critically the notion of science, yet his restoration of
the centrality of the concept of ideology in his recent book
PHARMACOLOGIE DU FRONT NATIONAL leaves him in an ambiguous
situation with respect to science. Sometimes Stiegler praises
science for its critical rationality, for its ability to question
and revise even its most basic assumptions and most entrenched
interpretations. Sometimes he finds ideological assumptions
embedded in proposed scientific paradigms e.g. neo-liberal
economics (but never in the hard sciences), embodying a dogmatic
process of rationalisation. His recent references to a “Darwinian”
notion of controversy (where rival interpretations compete until
the best interpretation survives) tend towards enshrining a monist
principle where the plurality of interpretations in a domain are
provisionally entertained in view of ultimate convergence on a
single winner.
Bruno Latour does not make use of the notion of “ideology” in his
theoretical meta-language, no doublt considering it to be too
molar or macro-conceptual, covering too many different sorts of
cases to be a useful theoretical term. Latour uses instead the
notion of illegitimate crossings between different forms of
enunciation/modes of existence. These are closely equivalent to
the long chains of transindividuation that Bernard Stiegler
evokes. One could transform Stiegler’s theoretical vocabulary
slightly and talk in terms of modes of transindividuation. This
would have the advantage of emphasising that the modes of
existence are not synchronic universals, but contingent,
diachronic contingent formations. This diachronicity is allowed
for but is not very well articulated in Latour’s system.
When one mode of existence imposes its own felicity conditions on
another, the resulting category mistake produces illegitimate
translations that travesty the meaning of the utterances, and give
an inadequate account of the existence corresponding entities. So
the past and present of a mode is deformed, and its capacity for
fruitful innovation is wiped out. In Oldspeak we could say that
this imposition or infringement produces “ideological”
deformations of the different modes of existence, where the
difference between the experience of a mode on the one hand and
the accounts given by its practitioners and adherents. Such
monological translation creates problems and at the same time
removes any possibility of resolving them.
In each case of “crossing” or of encounter between different
modes, one has to discern the different modes present in the
situation and analyse their functioning. It is important to see if
there are hegemonic crossings, where one mode imposes its
conditions on the others, or rather compositional crossings, where
each mode functions according to its own conditions in a
diplomatically satisfying common assemblage. Yet even Latour does
not allow for the possibility of heuristically positive
interferences between modes e.g. the role of Newton’s religious
beliefs in his scientific constructions. Stiegler in his recent
seminars emphasises the need for “transgression”, and so the
question becomes are all transgressive crossings necessarily
sterie?
EMPIRICISM VS HERMENEUTICS (1): READING LATOUR RELIGIOUSLY
Does Bruno Latour have two philosophies, as he claims recently, or
just one? Is this a empirical or “double-click” question? Or is it
a hermeneutical question? does it depend on our interpretation,
which may be different than the one Latour gives of his own work?
Perhaps it is even religious? Latour himself declares
“Groping, contradictory exegesis: this is religion itself.
Etymology attests to this: religion is the relationship among or,
better still, the relativism of interpretations; the certainty
that one obtains truth only through a new path of alterations,
inventions, deviations that make it possible to obtain, or not,
against rote reiteration and wear and tear, the faithful renewal
of what has been said” (AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, 313).
This is good advice on how to read his book: avoid the weak
reproductive reading of “rote reiteration”, and read critically
and creatively to engage in the “faithful renewal” of what Latour
has written. Reading is interpretation and not repetition, and
such interpretation is necessarily plurimodal. Hermeneutics is
thus essential to Latour’s thought, and to reading his books. In
the list of authors that constitute his hermeneutic horizon, I
would not include in pride of place such official hermeneutic
authors as Dilthey, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Rather precedence should
be given to Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Deleuze.
Bad advice would begin by telling people not to read in terms of
their preferred modes of existence, but rather according to one’s
own favoured mode. This is the monist or monotheist mode of
reading that judges everything in terms of its one supreme value.
Reading, I have argued, is interpretation, it cannot be contained
within the borders of one domain. Reading is tied to pluralism and
intensity, it “takes into account the fact that a border indicates
less a dividing line between two homogeneous sets than an
intensification of crossborder traffic between foreign elements”
(AIME, 30).
Some good work of exegesis has been done on Latour’s work in view
of the intensification of our reading experience. I do not see
critical discussion as condemned to remain at the level of mere
generalities, expressing emotional reactions of rejection or
appropriation. A good hermeneutic reading certainly involves not
just linear rote summary but global framing, wandering
trajectories, and plurimodal intensities, including critical
intensity (something that Latour is full of, despite his
inveighing against “critique”).
One possible conclusion that one could draw from the book is that
of the need for “religious studies”, on the model of science
studies, to complete or transform the perspectives of this
preliminary report. Unfortunately, there is nothing in AN INQUIRY
INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, or any other of Latour’s texts, to show
that he has done any field work on the subject of religion, of
anything approaching the tenor and rigour of the work he has done
for Science and Law and Technology. That is a very serious
shortcoming of AIME. Doing religious studies is not the same thing
as speaking religiously, nor is speaking religiously necessarily
speaking about God. The “religious” is a mode of veridiction, not
a special content or an obligatory name. It directs our attention
(to the nearest and the neighbour). If I read Latour’s book with
attention, as neighbour, with all I’ve got, then I am reading it
religiously whether I speak of God or not.
This raises the question of the cognitive dimension of religion as
Latour’s professed view seems to favour a form of reductionist
demarcationism which is in contradiction with the pluralism he
espouses. There are serious problems with Latour’s use of the
information/transformation dichotomy, his demarcation of science
from religion, and the resulting referential neutralisation of
religion. His views on religion are worrisome because they are
utterly unempirical, ie they are not based on any concrete
research with the diverse populations of believers, but on his own
experiences, readings, and reflexions. Yet in REJOICING, and even
more so in AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE he relies on the
authority given him by his studies on science, technology and law
to insinuate that his views on religion are part of an empirical
“anthropological” investigation.
A comparison with the ideas of Paul Feyerabend is illuminating.
Feyerabend recognises an apparent qualitative difference between
religious traditions and straight referential traditions such as
science, in that religion explicitly includes a performative (or
transformative) aspect, but not in such a way as to replace or
exclude the referential cognitive aspect. So the difference in
kind is that religious traditions are more complete than (most)
secular traditions, in that they include both a performative and a
cognitive dimension. A second difference is that in fact, but
unbeknownst to them and so only in repressed and truncated form,
secular traditions have this performative aspect too.
Latour’s account of religion seems open to the the accusation of
formalism, of establishing a preserve for a merely “generic”
religion with no creedal content. It is also protectionist, where
Feyerabend’s views are transversalist and non-demarcationist,
favorising a symmetrical account arguing that both religion and
science have a cognitive dimension, and that both of them are
performative, i.e. that the cognitive/performative distinction is
not pertinent for demarcating science and religion. Not only is
there no absolute conceptual distinction, there is also
historically a constant practice of interference and of heuristic
interaction. Religion has “interfered” positively with science
throughout its history, and not just negatively as a popular
positivist myth would have us believe.
The distinction in terms of different “felicity conditions” is not
at all new, and was advanced by post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of
religion over 40 years ago. It is a protectionist,
territorialising, conservative move, unworthy of the rest of
Latour’s pluralist ontology. It is too sharp a distinction, and
its normative force has a potentially negative effect on the
conduct of science. Such a demarcationist approach is
methodologically illegitimate (it is normative and not “agnostic”,
as Latour’s method requires). It is also both purificatory (an
approach that Latour condemns in his critique of modernity) and
unrealistic, and so would have had disastrous consequences for
scientific progress if it had been applied by the actors whose
intuitions and comportment are supposed to be described in
Latour’s account.
The most that Latour can do is to create a protected reserve with
its own felicity conditions for some sort of “generic” religion.
There is something very diluted about a shared régime of
religiosity that does not foreground the actual beliefs and
objections, the creeds and the controversies that matter to actual
religious observance, which are not mere differences of opinion
but incommensurable rifts within the religious “truth régime”.
Either the particular identity of his religious obedience is
dissolved, or Latour is committing the fallacy of homogeneity by
his generic partitioning of the truth régimes. He is thus
condemned by his non-cognitivist approach to religion both to
embrace the empirical transversality and diversity of religious
experience(pluralism) and to turn it against the established
creedal boundaries, and so to invalidate actual religious
affiliation and institutional identity by voiding them of all
cognitive content (formalism).
EMPIRICISM vs HERMENEUTICS (2): Latour's “two philosophies”
AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE purports to be the sequel to WE
HAVE NEVER BEEN MODERN, published 20 years earlier. Where that
book’s emphasis was mainly negative, as the title shows,
deconstructing the false identity that was mistakenly supposed to
characterise us, this new book is positive in its aim to present
what we have been and still are. In the last post we saw that the
book is a hermeneutic treatise, both exemplifying a
reinterpretation of the Moderns, purporting to replace the
erroneous interpretation that has been coextensive with the modern
epoch, and calling for interpretation in its turn. This
hermeneutic dimension is confirmed by the “origin story” that
Latour recounts about the beginnings of his project in his Roman
Catholic youth and in his apprenticeship in Biblical exegesis:
“the systematic destruction by exegesis of all dogmatic
certitudes, far from weakening the truth value that the successive
glosses played out over and over, made it possible at last to
raise the question of religious truth. But only on condition of
acknowledging that there was an itinerary of veridiction with its
own felicity conditions” (BIOGRAPHY OF AN INVESTIGATION, 3).
So in Latour’s intellectual biography religion and hermeneutics
come first, and the study of science comes later to confirm this
idea of a non-empirical itinerary of veridiction, incommensurable
with the ideal of pure unmediated contact with the real:
“Imagine my amazement when I discovered, in Guillemin’s laboratory
in 1975, located in a splendid Louis Kahn building overlooking the
Pacific Ocean, that scientific work bore a strange resemblance to
the exegesis I had left behind in Burgundy” (BIOGRAPHY OF AN
INVESTIGATION, 5).
Yet the book whose genesis is thus related proceeds in a different
order, no longer biographical but pedagogical. Strangely it
foregrounds a claim to be a treatise of “empirical philosophy”,
purporting to give a more adequate account of our experience:
“Only experience will tell us whether this hybrid apparatus using
new techniques of reading, writing, and collective inquiry
facilitates or complicates the work of empirical
philosophy that it seeks to launch” (AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF
EXISTENCE, xx-xxi).
In the first two chapters Latour begins with science and the
discovery of its dependance on equipment and networks, proceeds to
Law as an example of another type of veridiction and then
introduces religion as a confirming instance, comporting yet
another itinerary of veridiction. This sequence of science-lawreligion occurs twice, first in Chapter One and then again in
Chapter Two. Far from being a simple empirical account of Latour’s
intellectual evolution, it is a rational reconstruction designed
to establish the idea that Latour’s work has passed from one
philosophy (actor-network theory) to another (modes of existence
project), and that the reasons for the passage are empirical.
The book itself abounds in “empirical” vocabulary, distinguishing
the experience and values of the Moderns from the accounts given
of their experience. Latour proposes to remain “faithful” to the
experience but to give more adequate accounts. He enshrines this
empirical commitment as a methodological principle giving rise to
a set of “specific tests” of the adequacy of his account: “The
first is factual and empirical: have we been faithful to the
field by supplying proofs of our claims?” (65). The passage from
Chapter One with its networks to Chapter Two with its prepositions
corresponding to different modes seems to correspond to this
passage from one philosophy to another.
This discrepancy between biography and rational reconstruction is
reinforced if we take into account the Deleuzian background and
resonances of Latour’s vocabulary. In his analyses of Spinoza and
the construction of a plane of immanence Deleuze associates
inextricably a quantitative pluralism of heterogeneous elements
with a qualitative pluralism of their composition in modes of
existence. For example here in a seminar from December 9th 1980:
“Les deux critères de l’éthique, en d’autres termes, la
distinction quantitative des existants, et l’opposition
qualitative des modes d’existence, la polarisation qualitative des
modes d’existence, vont être les deux manières dont les existants
sont dans l’être. Ca va être les liens de l’Éthique avec
l’Ontologie”. (“The two criteria of ethics, in other words, the
quantitative distinction of existents, and the qualitative
opposition of modes of existence, the qualitative polarisation of
modes of existence, are going to be the two manners in which
existents are in being. That will be the relation between the
Ethics and Ontology”, my translation).
So from the point of view of the philosophical background to
Latour’s thought there seems to be no reason to conceive of his
evolution as containing two distinct philosophies. The
heterogeneous networks and the differing modes of existence are
inseparable for Deleuze, and Latour traces his involvement with
Deleuze’s thought back to his doctoral thesis:
“In a thesis defended in 1985 ... I had developed that argument in
an analysis of
Mark’s gospel and of “Saint” Péguy.... A bit of Derrida and LéviStrauss plus a large dose of Deleuze helped give the argument the
contemporary sheen that neither Péguy nor Bultmann, of course,
could have provided” (BIOGRAPHY, 3).
LATOUR, WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE PRIMACY OF THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT
Bruno Latour’s religious outlook is central to AN INQUIRY INTO
MODES OF EXISTENCE, and his discovery of different modes of
enunciation (and thus of existence) goes back to his
apprenticeship in Biblical exegesis. Indeed religious enunciation
appears as a model for the rest: “there are few institutions more
obsessed with the distinction between truth and falsity than the
religious institution. And yet we also understand that it would be
erroneous to claim to judge religious veridiction according to the
entirely distinct modes of law or science” (45). Religion needs to
be judged by its own specific interpretative key.
In religion we see most clearly and most intensely the concern
with being “faithful” to a message that requires constant
“innovation” in order to be preserved and transmitted anew:
“It is entirely possible, our anthropologist tells herself, that
the relation found here between value and institution is a unique
case. Only in the religious domain--and perhaps only in the
history of the Christian churches--would we find such a series of
betrayals, inventions, reforms, new starts, elaborations, all
concentrated and judged on the basis of the principal question of
whether one is remaining faithful or not to the initial message.
But her own idea (the origin of her eureka moment) is that the
situation is perhaps the same for all the Moderns’ institutions”
(55).
There is a substantial overlap here with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
views on different “forms of life” in relation to the question of
the status of the religious as mode of enunciation and of
existence. Wittgenstein began his PHILOSOPHICAL REMARKS with an
appeal to the “spirit” in which he wished it to be read: “This
book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit.
This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast
stream of European and American civilization in which all of us
stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in
building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in
striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what
structure” (Foreword, 1930). This spirit is not at all “Modern”,
in that it is not exclusively devoted to following the “onwards
movement” of modernization, yet it is not against that movement
either: it is not anti-modern, but rather what Bruno Latour calls
“amodern”:
“How will we call this retrospective discovery that we have never
been modern? Post-modern? No since this would imply a belief that
we have been what we have never been. I propose to call it
amodern” (Postmodern? No Simply Amodern. Steps Towards an
Anthropology of Science. An essay Review).
Wittgenstein then proceeds to an invocation of God (“I would like
to say ‘This book is written to the glory of God’, but nowadays
that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly
understood. It means the book is written in good will, and in so
far as it is not so written, but out of vanity, etc., the author
would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of these
impurities further than he himself is free of them”).
Wittgenstein’s views on religion are complex, but he did not see
religion as a matter of fact, or a question of belief. He saw it
as dealing with matters of concern, a deepened attitude to life
involving the whole person, embodying the conversion from the bad
will of vanity or egoism to the good will of “doing the will of
God”.
Bruno Latour begins his book AN ENQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE
with an epigraph: “Si scires donum dei” (“If thou didst know the
gift of God”). This is from The Gospel according to John, Chapter
4, verse 10, where Jesus asks for water from a Samaritan woman and
promises the water of everlasting life. The whole incident is
relevant to Latour’s system of modes existence. Jesus asks for
literal water (mode of existence DC, double click) and declares
that he can give “living water” (mode of existence REL,
religious). He convinces her he is a prophet by showing that he
knows intimate details of her life (DC), but he proposes a
different sort of knowledge, adoration of the Father “in spirit
and in truth”. In Latourian terms Jesus’s words must be understood
in a different “interpretative key”, what Wittgenstein calls a
different “spirit”, than the dead letter of double-click’s mode of
veridiction.
Indeed, Latour does not hesitate to conceive his whole ontological
project, his pluralism of modes of existence, in religious terms,
as a Pentecostal pluralism, a form of speaking in tongues. His
conceptual persona, an anthropological investigatress studying the
modes of existence of the Moderns
“purports to be speaking while obeying all the felicity conditions
of each mode, while expressing herself in as many languages as
there are modes. In other words, she is hoping for another
Pentecost miracle: everyone would understand in his or her own
tongue and would judge truth and falsity according to his or her
own felicity conditions. Fidelity to the field comes at this
price” (58).
The repeated references to the idea of an “empirical philosophy”
must themselves be understood in the right interpretative key.
Latour seems to be appealing to the same sort of authority as that
of the empirical sciences, but this is just a convenient
rhetorical mask. He defines such reference to uninterpreted facts
as “first wave empiricism” and makes clear that such a philosophy
is not even adequate to the sciences that it takes as the model to
impose on all enunciation. In the expression “empirical
philosophy” he can only mean “second wave empiricism” keyed to the
plurality of modes of existence and respectful of the multiple
interpretative keys. There is something strangely circular about
this idea of “fidelity to the field”, and so it is not surprising
that Latour makes no real discoveries of unsuspected régimes of
enunciation, but lifts each readily recognizable domain to the
régime of enunciation that characterises it most essentially. The
procedure amounts to a form of what Willard Van Orman Quine
called “semantic ascent”, and the régimes of enunciation thus
“found” (and their corresponding modes of existence) are the
empirical correlates of a prior hermeneutic decision.
RYLE AND LATOUR: ON CATEGORY MISTAKES
At the beginning of Chapter Two of AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF
EXISTENCE Bruno Latour recounts an anecdote based on Gilbert
Ryle’s introduction of the notion of category mistake in THE
CONCEPT OF MIND (1949): “The canonical example involves a foreign
visitor going through the buildings of the Sorbonne, one after
another; at the end of the day, he complains that he “hasn’t seen
the University of the Sorbonne.” His request had been
misunderstood: he wanted to see an institution, but he had been
shown buildings . . . For he had sought in one entity an entirely
different entity from what the first could show him” (AN INQUIRY
INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, 48-49).
Latour’s initial comment on this story is a little surprising, as
he supposes that the visitor’s request would have been satisfied
if he had been introduced to the rector, to the faculty assembly,
or to the university’s attorney, but this supposition is itself
based on a category mistake, since Latour is here confusing the
University as an institution with particular members or
representatives of that institution. Latour then proceeds to
explain: “His interlocutors had misheard the key in which what he
was requesting could be judged true or false, satisfactory or
unsatisfactory” (49). Ryle’s name is not cited, but this remark is
faithful to Ryle’s analysis of category mistakes as based on a
misapplication of concepts consisting in allocating them to the
wrong logical type.
Latour’s explanation follows from the introduction, in Chapter
One, of his thesis concerning “the pluralism of modes and thus the
plurality of keys by means of which their truth or falsity is
judged” (18). The context he gives is that of Austin’s theory of
speech acts:
“But the difficulty is not so great, after all, if we turn to the
work done by J. L. Austin and his successors on “speech acts.” The
notions of felicity and infelicity conditions, now solidly
established in our intellectual traditions, make it possible to
contrast very different types of veridiction without reducing them
to a single model” (18).
If we look up the expression”category mistake” on the site
associated with the book, we find this entry:
“The expression is valuable in beginning to separate the different
modes: it supposes that we question a situation in a key which we
soon realize is not the right one and in which it will be
pointless to persist. Better simply to change key. The phrase is
attributed to (Ryle, 1949 [200]), who wanted to counter the
Bifurcation of soul and body; his example is of a visitor wishing
to visit the University of Oxford, who complains after seeing a
large number of buildings that he has still not seen the
University”.
It is interesting to compare Latour’s account with the original
version, which is a little clearer:
“A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is
shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums,
scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks
‘But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the
Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists
experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in
which reside and work the members of your University.’
It has then to be explained to him that the University is not
another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the
colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The
University is just the way in which all that he has already seen
is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is
understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his
innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church,
the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to
speak, that is, as if ‘the University’ stood for an extra member
of the class of which these other units are members. He was
mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that
to which the other institutions belong” (THE CONCEPT OF MIND, 6).
This mistake of allocating a term to the wrong category is an
error in logical grammar. Latour seems to want to echo this
analysis when he chooses the term “preposition” to designate the
interpretive key necessary to situate a set of utterances in their
appropriate category, to understand them according to the correct
régime of enunciation, and to follow their particular trajectory
of veridiction:
“To designate these different trajectories, I have chosen the term
preposition, using it in
its most literal, grammatical sense, to mark a position-taking
that comes before a proposition is stated, determining how the
proposition is to be grasped and thus constituting its
interpretive key”.
This use of “preposition” is in fact metaphorical, and not at all
“literal” (word added by the translator) nor “grammatical” (the
grammatical category of preposition is not at all engaged), but
etymological and morphological: “preposition” is analysed into
pre-position. Here again Latour is guilty of a category mistake. A
further example of this non-literal use of the term “preposition”
comes in Chapter Six when Latour discusses the difference between
his project and critical thought as exemplified in Derrida’s
deconstruction: “And it is finally Derrida, the Zeno of
“differance,” who was right always to preface the notion of
construction with the preposition “de”: constructivism is always
in fact de-construction” (156). This is a grammatical error, we
are not properly talking about a preposition but about the prefix
“de-”. Thus the author finds himself once more enmeshed in the
very error that his manual is warning against.
LATOUR’S PLURALISM 2.O: CAN WE PLURALISE THE PLURALISTS?
Pluralism becomes interesting when it is not just an
acknowledgement of a plurality of closed and finished totalities
but when it sees each totality as open and porous, whose
unification is an ongoing process, and constituted as well of open
and porous subpluralities. One of the consequences of this way of
thinking is that totalities are not consituted by one sole
synthesis, but by several different and conflicting operations of
synthesis that may draw the boundaries in different ways. Another
is that the subpluralities are in interaction inside a totality
and between totalities. So I would distinguish a “structuralist”
pluralism emphasising macroscopic wholes and closure, and a
“poststructuralist” pluralism that completes this picture with a
swarm of underlying interferences and interactions and
hybridisations.
This means that pluralists in this sense are ready to analyse
innovations in terms of transformation, transfer, translation,
transport, transversality, etc and to break down all identities
into multiplicitous components. The problem is that they only
rarely incorporate these insights into their style of work.
Deleuze and Guattari, with their idea of the rhizome and with
their slogan “pluralism is not just something you talk about it’s
something you do” (my words), made important gestures in this
direction. But more can and should be done.
When these pluralists explain that closed totalities are
hallucinatory or fantasmatic pseudo-entities (ie the opposite of
Luhmann’s notion of “operational closure”, which characterises
what I am calling structuralist pluralism)) with quantum tunnels
and relativistic wormholes underlying and undermining their macrostructure, then they should not act like they were the only
pluralists in the world. No, Latour’s system is not born from some
philosophical tabula rasa and he is wrong not to engage with past
and present pluralists, and when he talks about Souriau and modes
of existence he is doing misdirection in my eyes. He is wrong to
talk about pluralism without discussing people like Laruelle and
Stiegler and Deleuze and Feyerabend and Badiou, who sometimes
confirm sometimes contradict his analyses, and sometimes just
plain go further along that path than he does. etc etc.
Latour wishes to avoid “fundamentalism” in questions of religion
and also of science and politics. He defines this fundamentalism
as “the refusal of controversies” (i.e.the refusal of discussions
where there is no pre-given arbiter) and “the attempted exercise
of hegemony of one mode of existence over the others” (interview
“L’universel, il faut le faire” in CRITIQUE, Nov. 2012, p 953).
This dogmatic domination is what many pluralists have fought under
the name of reductionism. Reduction lies in treating religion as a
matter of belief, and as submitted to the same truth-régime as
referential domains like science. Latour is quite explicit that
for him, and I think for many other religious people, religion is
not a question of belief at all, not a question of reference to
the physical world, but one of performative invocation and
transformative message. One can find examples of this noncognitivist approach to religion in the movement of
demythologisation, but also in Dreyfus and Kelly’s ALL THINGS
SHINING, and in post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion.
Slavoj Zizek propounds this sort of approach as the premise of a
possible emancipatory use of religion. It may be a minority
position compared to the number of fundamentalists, but it is not
negligeable, and Latour is not a lone voice crying in the
wilderness.
From this point of view fundamentalism as the insistence on
defining religion as a matter of belief in factual propositions
about the world is a deformation of religion. This
“transformative” or “performative” understanding of religion has
something good and something bad to it. The bad part is that it
looks suspiciously like trying to have your cake and eat it too,
making seeming claims about the world and then dancing back and
saying that you are in fact doing something else entirely, making
your propositions immune to criticism. But the good part is that
it preserves an important use for religious language, defending it
against its positivistic elimination as mere superstition. I must
admit that I am not indifferent to this language if it is used
“poetically”, that is to say to express deep or transformative
experiences. But I would argue here that the religious person
would have to accept that this poetic and transformative language
is becoming in itself more pluralist. The brute fact of finding
that one is moved by certain words and images and rituals that are
closely tied to profound experiences and insights becomes a little
suspicious when it conveniently conforms to a pre-constituted
faith, let us say Catholicism in Latour’s case. Given the
empirical diversity of the “varieties of religious experience”, to
use William James’ expression, this is too convenient by far!
Many people make use of “religious” language, widely interpreted,
outside all instituted religious denominations. Such language
occurs in the context of the practice of yoga or meditation, of
analysis or of the martial arts, in songs and films and comic
books. It is employed even by those who consider themselves to be
total atheists. This is why one can consider that there is more to
religion than the making of referential claims about the physical
universe, and that fundamentalism is a reductionist approach to
religion. This heuristic (or “gnostic”) use of religious language
and images is more common than one might think. It corresponds to
what Bernard Stiegler (and Gilbert Simondon, and Carl Jung) calls
individuation.
In the discussion of the cognitive status of religion it is
difficult to maintain a balanced perspective. An interesting
attempt is made in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s Heideggerian
treatment of both polytheism and monotheism as useful contemporary
ways of understanding the world and ourselves in ALL THINGS
SHINING. Their account of religious language is “existential” and
so situates religion as having a certain sort of cognitive
function, but still maintains it as incommensurable with the type
of referential cognition which characterises natural science.
Religion is seen as incarnating a type of understanding of the
world that is radically different from, and so unable to
contradict or be contradicted by, or even enter into conflict
with, the natural sciences. It is at this price of the referential
neutralisation of religion that they can employ it positively to
fulfil their program: to lure back the shining things, to lure
back the gods, “to find meaning in a secular age”.
Similarly, both Bruno Latour and Paul Feyerabend give accounts of
religion that, in related but different ways, remove it from its
customary opposition with secularism. For Latour religion is one
“régime of enunciation” or “mode of existence” among others, with
its own “conditions of felicity”, aimed at transformation rather
than information. Feyerabend extends Latour’s view of religious
traditions as different in kind from secular traditions, by
nevertheless insisting that as raw materials they can be of use in
secular traditions such as the sciences or may even be employed to
correct (or at least to relativise)the one-sidedness of these
traditions. This is where Feyerabend goes further than Latour.
Latour “protects” religion from the accusation of, for example,
scientific insufficiency or political violence. These sorts of
accusations amount to criteria of the demarcation of religion
from, and its subordination to, some other instance (very often
science) supposed to be free from violence and cognitively more
reliable. Latour makes this sort of move impossible by claiming
that religion is so different that it is “not even
incommensurable” with referential régimes such as science:
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGIONGB.pdf.
Feyerabend recognises a possible qualitative difference between
religion and straight referential traditions in that it includes a
performative aspect, but not, he argues to the detriment of a
referential cognitive aspect. So the apparent difference in kind
is due to the greater completeness of religious traditions as
compared to (most) secular traditions. He is willing to add that
in fact, but unbeknownst to them and so in truncated form, secular
traditions have this performative aspect too.
Feyerabend is classically deconstructive here, accepting initially
a binary demarcation (science/religion) to go on to re-valorise
the weaker term (in rationalist discussions this is often
religion), to then efface the demarcation and leave a more complex
and more ambiguous situation (complexity and ambiguity being terms
that Feyerabend uses to describe his own “deconstructive” strategy
– Feyerabend explicitly compares his arguments to deconstruction,
though he declares that he prefers “Nestroy, who was a great,
popular and funny deconstructeur, while Derrida, for all his good
intentions, can’t even tell a good story”). Latour is certainly
funnier and more popular in style than Derrida, but I find that
there is something protectionist about his humour.
LATOUR, FEYERABEND, DELEUZE: CORRECTING A REVISIONIST HISTORY
Bruno Latour is complicit in the effacing or the downplaying of
the ideas and influence of the previous generation of Continental
philosophers (and I include Feyerabend in this category, alongside
Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault) and their role in
inspiring, or even often anticipating, his own ideas. He gives the
same biased view of philosophical history as Meillassoux and OOO
in which correlationism and the flight from realism continued
through most of the last half of the 20th Century, and in which
the "new" realists bring us what was lacking in deconstruction and
poststructuralism, and so take a decisive step forward. Rather
than acknowledging a very real, and in fact massive, debt to
Feyerabend, Deleuze, et al., he misrepresents and denigrates their
contributions, and prefers to reach even further back to Tarde,
James, Whitehead, and Souriau to mystify those who are too young
or too credulous to detect the Orwellian rewriting of the recent
past that he often engages in.
In a recent interview (2012), discussing his own methodology,
Latour affirms “this a thing that I learned from the “scientists”
I studied, i.e. that: “Anything goes as long as it leads to what
you want to find”. Just as in a laboratory you have instruments of
all sorts, including the most archaic and the most contemporary,
because that is what is necessary in production, I myself have
learnt a lot from “true” scientists, hard scientists, i.e. total
indifference to questions of method” (page 123, my translation).
This is very exactly what Feyerabend proposes in AGAINST METHOD
(already in the essay version published in 1971), and Latour seems
to be guilty of a little “creative forgetting” here. He continues
for two and a half pages (!) on the same theme, applying this
notion it to his own work, and concludes, once again echoing
Feyerabend without deigning to cite him: “So, how do you produce
objects that resist what is said of them?, well, anything goes”
(126).
Contrary to the repeated attempts (with which Latour himself is
complicit) to associate Feyerabend with a naive espousal of chaos
and anarchy, Feyerabend emphasised that we need both tenacity and
proliferation, rules and their heuristic suspension, order and
chaos, speculation and testability. He condemned the “naive
anarchism” of no rules, he disliked chaos but claimed to have made
creative use of it in certain contexts, and he rejected the
dogmatism of the traditional anarchists along with their
scientism. Feyerabend wanted more responsibility, not less, and
proposed that all those concerned, in citizen assemblies, should
decide on what ontologies, theories, methods to apply – and not
just the experts.
Feyerabend’s anarchism is “epistemological” precisely because he
wants to get away from the need to posit a dogmatic “anarchist”
method. Feyerabend explains that he did propose such a dogmatic
anarchism for science in the early 60s, but then the encounter
with the needs of the practicing scientist, and later the
encounter with the needs of the more diverse population of
students that were enrolled after more democratic education
policies were adopted in the US (at the end of the 60s), led him
to reject even the most open set of rules as long as they were
meant to be applied universally instead of as rules of thumb. This
is similar to Latour's evolution from the methodological anarchism
that he espouses above to his later concerns with democractic
assemblages.
Aside from the need to diffuse a smokescreen around certain key
but disturbing influences, such as Feyerabend and Deleuze, whose
explicit acknowledgement could get him into trouble in his search
for a consensual surface, we cannot ignore Latour's rhetorical, or
"diplomatic", strategy of adapting his presentation to the
auditory. To the English-speaking world familiar with Feyerabend’s
epistemology he makes a political critique, accusing him of
"anarchism" (ignoring that Feyerabend’s later name for his
position was “democratic relativism”). To a French politicist
interviewer he comes out with a defence of exactly the sort of
epistemological anarchism (“anything goes”) that Feyerabend
defended decades before Latour. Feyerabend himself does not take
credit for this idea, stating that he heard Popper defending it in
the 1940s. Latour does not mention this point, preferring in the
interview to affirm that Popper makes no real contribution to the
study of science, but is a political thinker hiding behind an
epistemological mask.
On the whole question of methodological anarchism versus
epistemological anarchism Feyerabend is quite clear that Popper
was advocating methodological anarchism, the idea that there was
no fixed method for science other than what worked or was
appropriate in a specific case, in the 40s. Already Feyerabend
agreed, but thought it was a banality, as his friends in the Kraft
Circle took this methodological anarchism for granted. The
problem, as Feyerabend later came to realise, was that this
methodological anarchism is basically incompatible with taking
science as a preconstituted object, and so he argued that Popper’s
more specific methodological suggestions were a case of circular
reasoning. Popper, he claimed, presupposes the very instances of
good science (eg Newton, Maxwell, Einstein) that his criteria are
supposed to neutrally select out. In fact the criteria are
generalisations made from a partisan set of pre-decided instances,
and not the other way around. This is the difference, at least in
Feyerabend’s work, between methodological anarchism applied inside
the pre-constituted and pre-demarcated sciences, and Feyerabend’s
epistemological anarchism (circa 1966) which puts that demarcation
totally up for grabs and argues for all sorts of transversal
composites as necessary for what we commonly think of as
scientific progress.
Contrary to Latour's attempts to depict Feyerabend, and the whole
of the post-'68 generation, as caught in negativity and critique,
it must be emphasised that Latour’s starting point was in
religious exegesis, and it is he who has expressed sadness at the
disappearance of this mode of existence. Feyerabend’s starting
point was aesthetic (opera and theatre) and scientific, and at the
end of his life he expressed the satisfaction that he “was never
hindered in anything”, and that he had finally come to the
maturity of being capable of loving another person (Grazia). In
his autobiography Feyerabend describes in a concrete and personal
way his progressive steps towards such love, whereas Latour talks
about an abstract phenomenon of “conversion” as an all-or-none
point-like experience in his book on religion, REJOICING. So I
think that Latour is the more abstract thinker, and the true
disappointed nostalgic. He is caught in the contradiction of
pretending to be a descriptive anthropologist of the modern and
yet including in his empirical description, out of nostalgia, a
mode of existence that he claims has disappeared.
On the technical side of his epistemology, Latour is often guilty
of making naïve empiricist statements and moves despite his
seeming sophistication in other passages. His attempted
universalising of so-called “empirical” observations, are far more
theory-laden and value-laden than he is often willing to take into
account. This is one of my major criticisms of AN INQUIRY INTO
MODES OF EXISTENCE: the whole project is formulated in naïve
empiricist terms, despite his meta-theoretical reflections on a
“second empiricism”. This gets him caught in a set of pragmatic
contradictions that Feyerabend never fell into.
Another disturbing feature of Latour's proclamations is his
emphasis of the key advance his system makes in overcoming the
subject/object dichotomy. This claim to radical progress over the
recent past is ludicrous to anyone who knows the even slightest
bit about the philosophies of Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, and
Foucault. However, it may be of use to consider the absurdity of
this claim in relation to the development of post-positivist
epistemology. Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism does not
presuppose subjects facing objects. From the very beginning in the
early 50s Feyerabend was influenced by Wittgenstein, and
considered scientific statements as part of non-subjective
language-games. He was also influenced by Popper, who later
summarised his position in 1967 in a paper called “Epistemology
Without a Knowing Subject”. The whole Popperian tradition
elaborated such an epistemology outside the subject-object faceoff, as did the Quinean and the Wittgensteinian traditions in
their own ways.
The subject-object face-off just has nothing to do with this whole
decades long evolution of Anglophone epistemology, and Latour
shows either his ignorance or his incomprehension of the treatment
of these questions in the English-speaking world. Whatever his
other faults, Popper broke decisively with this epistemology of
the knowing subject and Latour cannot wish it away to create a
void between himself and Whitehead. Feyerabend in the essay
version of AGAINST METHOD (1971) was already presenting the
subject as a collective assemblage entangled with other
assemblages, a relay station for the passage of various forces,
influences, processes and events. This analysis is blindingly
obvious in his treatment of the Homeric cosmology in the book
AGAINST METHOD of 1975, where he declares that a more contemporary
version of this type of cosmology, that he endorses, can be traced
back to Ernst Mach.
Wittgenstein was a reader of William James and was influenced by
him for his philosophy of psychology and his philosophy of
religion, and there are strong pragmatic aspects to his general
perspective. One of his big ideas was the folly of trying to think
“outside language games”. Another was a deepening of the notion of
philosophical grammar. (Feyerabend mentions how he derived his
idea of incommensurability and theory change from the reading of
the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS and he first expounded it in 1952
to a group of Wittgensteinians, who were unmoved, finding it
rather obvious). I think that Latour is indebted to this positive
legacy of Wittgenstein’s, and that talking about Ryle and Austin
is yet another piece of misdirection Also Wittgenstein is a key
reference for David Bloor and the strong programme of the
sociology of knowledge, and so Latour is playing down his debt to
the guiding figure of a programme that he learnt from and then
rivalised with.
Why did Deleuze famously condemn Wittgenstein’s “legacy”? We must
remember that in LOGIC OF SENSE Deleuze is quite eulogious of
Wittgenstein for the idea of meaning as use, that he cited
Wittgenstein's critique of Freud's mythology as a precursor of the
ideas developped in ANTI-OEDIPUS, and that in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS
the important idea of “incorporeal transformations” is discussed
in relation to the tradition of “linguistic” philosophy initiated
by Wittgenstein. So Deleuze, as usual when evaluating a movement
of thought, approved of the creation of concepts in this tradition
but disapproved of the conservatism of meaning and the policing of
language. Feyerabend, who admits to having been decisively
influenced by Wittgenstein, has exactly the same attitude to the
conformism of some of his successors. Latour, despite his
conceptual innovations, is in danger of elaborating a new police
of meaning in his will to establish the "felicity conditions" of
the various modes of existence and to forbid illegitimate
crossings.
Latour cannot claim to be establishing empirically what previous
philosophers such as Feyerabend were only able to advance as
speculation. He cannot affirm that Feyerabend does not examine the
specific ways in which science produces knowledge. This is false,
the whole point of the historical case study of Galileo and of his
detailed studies of Bohr, are to indicate what procedures did in
fact work to advance physics. True Feyerabend does not do
laboratory studies, but noone ever said that laboratory studies
are all there is to studying science; Latour’s philosophy of
science is woefully derivative: his historico-semiotic study of
Pasteur contributes no new epistemological ideas, and confirms
Feyerabend's ideas derived from the study of Galileo. And it is
woefully incomplete: he is doing intra-paradigmatic analyses of
networks in LABORATORY LIFE, and is unable to deal with the actual
content of scientific theories except by taking a Feyerabendian
turn (see preceding remark on the Pasteur studies). So the
looking-at-specific-ways-science-produces-knowledge criterion does
not distinguish Feyerabend from Latour either. The only criterion
that does is the “laboratory studies” criterion, but it is of
limited value, and is not rich enough to deal with paradigm
change; Latour does talk about paradigm-change in relation to
Pasteur, but this is precisely NOT a laboratory study, but a
historical case study of the same type that Feyerabend conducted
on Galileo.
It would be erroneous to maintain that Feyerabend's case study of
Galileo just leads him to conclude that “anything goes”. This is
not at all true, and he proposes specific methods that Galileo
used. His conclusions are by no means purely negative. Latour does
not engage with Feyerabend's actual views and arguments but with
an empty cliché far removed from his actual texts.
The criticism of Feyerabend as an amusing Dadaist is a case in
point. It is no acute remark of Latour’s, but is a crucial point
advanced by Feyerabend himself. He describes himself as closer to
the Dadaists. This is part of Feyerabend’s critique of political
anarchism as being scientistic, dogmatic, indifferent to concrete
human lives, based on resentment, and it is Feyerabend who accuses
anarchism of dogmatic flattening. He declares that the problem
with naive anarchism is that it leaves the hegemonic reality in
place (including the subject-object bifurcation) and so is part
of the same problem rather than the solution. Latour is merely
parasiting Feyerabend’s own ideas here, relabeling them, and
turning them against a fictitious Feyerabend who never existed.
Does Feyerabend leave all forms of knowledge undifferentiated from
each other? No, this is Latour’s problem in his actor-network
phase, which many have recognised to be one of the most
reductionist ontologies of science, and Latour says as much in his
new book. He says that the actor-network analysis always reduced
everything to the same sort of explanation in terms of networks,
and needs to be supplemented and pluralised by his new theory of
modes of existence. Feyerabend too fell into that sort of
undifferentiated theorising in the early 60s, expounding a sort of
radicalised Popperian universal pluralist methodology covering
art, science, religion, myth etc. But he broke with that at the
end of the 60s, thanks to his Machian and Wittgensteinian
inheritance.
Feyerabend spent much time analysing the typological distinctions
between different sorts of cosmologies. He distinguished between
cosmology A type traditions (e.g. Homer and Mach) and cosmology B
type (Xenophanes and Popper). In CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE he
distinguishes between Homeric, Judaic, and Rationalist traditions
and inside science itself Einsteinian and Bohrian traditions. His
typology is different from Latour’s but he is emphatic that we do
need a typology. Latour does not differentiate inside science, as
he assigns it all to the one mode, that of reference. But
reference for Feyerabend is too abstract and globalising a
category, and he considers it a retrospective product of science
in the making. Latour talks about studying science in the making,
but this notion of reference does not distinguish between
intraparadigmatic science where reference makes sense, and interparadigmatic science where reference is constructed post hoc.
Curiously, Deleuze and Guattari, who elaborate their own typology
of modes of existence in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, share with Latour
this characterisation of science as reducible to the mode of
reference. In this they seem to gloss over the difference that
they made in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS between royal science and nomad
science. The later forgetting of this distinction and the sharp
demarcation that they make between science and philosophy, on the
basis of the criterion of belonging to the mode of existence of
reference, is excessive. If reference is constituted post hoc then
it cannot serve to identify science in the making (i.e. pro hoc)
but only science made.
On this point it is Latour who makes a better move in an article
in French on Pasteur (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/fr/node/232). He
refers to the actors in the history of fermentation (Pasteur,
yeasts, lactic acid etc.) as “conceptual personas”. He is clearly
making use of the Deleuzoguattarianian concept without respecting
the demarcation that they set up between philosophy and science.
Curiously this reference is omitted in the English translation,
thus rendering it once again more difficult to locate the
Deleuzian influences on Latour’s ideas.
LATOUR AND WHITEHEAD: A PRAGMATIC ALLIANCE
Is Whitehead a key influence on the formation of Latour's thought?
The question can be posed because, despite Latour's increasing
number of references to Whitehead's work and and to his importance
as a philosopher, the essential ideas of his project seem to
predate his engagement with Whitehead's work and concepts. In a
seminar (at approximately 31 mins) devoted to IRREDUCTIONS Latour
tells us that he had no real knowledge of Whitehead at the time of
writing this treatise, but that he became a Whiteheadian only
later, through his discussions with Isabelle Stengers.
I am not at all hostile to drawing a connection Latour and
Whitehead. When I was very young (15-17) I read Whitehead with
much pleasure, although I probably didn’t understand very much.
Later I read Feyerabend, who became for a while my favorite
philosopher. I am convinced that there are important similarities
between Feyerabend’s ideas and Whitehead’s, but I don’t think that
there was any influence, more’s the pity. So while I am willing to
acknowledge a resemblance between Latour and Whitehead, I am
dubious about the post hoc stories of influence that he recounts.
I am willing to go so far as to admit that Latour is best
understood against a Whiteheadian backdrop, but I find that he is
rewriting his past on the basis of his present, and thus
falsifying a little.
More generally I don’t think one should confuse the order of
rational reconstruction (rhetorical order) with the order of
discovery (heuristic order). Similarity (e.g. between Latour and
Whitehead), or even eulogistic referencing, is not the same as
influence. At the beginning of this blog, I discuss ALL THINGS
SHINING, which I maintain is a pluralist treatise on modes of
existence. Under the influence of Shaviro’s book on Whitehead,
which contrasts very sharply the problematic of Heidegger and that
of Whitehead, I undertook to rewrite the ontological basis of ATS.
I did so because I thought that such a pluralist endeavour is best
understood in Whiteheadian terms, rather than, as they themselves
understand it, in Heideggerian terms. I wrote several posts in
this line, but I eventually abandoned it because I realised that
Dreyfus and Kelly had managed to “bend” Heidegger in a pluralist
pragmatist direction, compatible with Whitehead. I realised that
thanks to their real innovations the differences between Heidegger
and Whitehead on a classical reading of the two philosophers was
no longer an interesting question.
I bought into this sort of dichotomy over 3 years ago (in my case
the dichotomy between Heidegger and Whitehead as ontological
precursors to ALL THINGS SHINING), but I abandoned it very quickly
as being too simplistic and ultimately futile. Latour is French
and came to intellectual maturity without having read the great
classics of of the pragmatist tradition. During the 60s many
important thinkers (Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Edgar
Morin, Kostas Axelos and many others) had abandoned the subjectobject bifurcation and epistemologies of demarcation, and came to
espouse various forms of semiotics and of enunciative linguistics.
The origins of Latour's ideas are best understood in the light of
this milieu. Every page of Latour is redolent of Greimas and
Serres and Deleuze and Foucault and Lyotard.
I do not think that Latour’s “public statements” of influence are
to be taken at face value, but are more to be seen in the
perspective of provisional alliance than in terms of filiation.
Conceptual resemblance does not constitute proof of filiation (my
example of Feyerabend o illustrates that). The most substantial
textual convergence between Latour and Whitehead is in an article
where he reformulates the findings of THE PASTEURIZATION OF FRANCE
post hoc in Whiteheadian terms. Latour’s philosophy of science at
the time of THE PASTEURIZATION OF FRANCE and IRREDUCTIONS (1984)
is a transcription of the Deleuzian and Foucauldian Nietzsche
reworked by Greimasian semiotics. Even on this point the idea of
applying semiotics not just to texts but to things is a
Nietzschean inspired one. since for Nietzsche all things as will
to power interpret and evalue the world. Latour has declared that
at the time he was not acquainted with Tarde, Whitehead, or
William James, and so was obliged to make do with the conceptual
resources available to him.
In a paper drawing the philosophical conclusions from his study of
Pasteur, and intent on overcoming the opposition between realism
and constructivism, he declares that it is the reading of
Whitehead that permitted him to overcome this opposition: “Before
reading Whitehead, I could not extricate myself from this dilemma”
(13). Here Latour is referring to an event in his personal
intellectual history, reading Whitehead, which was necessary for
him to arrive at a solution.
However, the original French version does not contain this
sentence, but a slightly different one: “Avant Whitehead, nous ne
pouvions nous sortir de ce dilemme” (10) . “Before Whitehead, we
couldn’t get out of this dilemma.” Here there is no reference to
Latour’s reading but to intellectual history. Whitehead is said to
have created the conditions for leaving the dichotomy behind.
Latour may have found the solution directly in Whitehead or in a
later thinker, the biographical question is left open.
Strangely, an earlier account of the same work does not mention
Whitehead at all, but attributes the role of guide to exiting the
dichotomy to the semiotician Greimas: “This freedom in selecting
actors and redistributing properties among them is crucial to
understanding scientific practice, and, to my knowledge, no other
discipline possesses that freedom. All the others have to start
from a “natural” division between human and nonhuman properties”
(3).
My conclusion is not however that the “real” debt is to Greimas
and that the more recent references to Whitehead are a mere
pedagogical or diplomatic device. Nor do I conclude that Greimas
allowed him to get close to an insight that only the decisive
influence of Whitehead crystallised into a “real” solution. That
would be a pre-Latourian naïveté. Latour himself provides the more
appropriate conclusion:
There are mediators all the way down, and adding sources will
only add more mediations, none of them being reducible to mere
“document”or”information.”
Deleuze, Greimas, Derrida, Whitehead, William James, etc. are all
“mediators” permitting Latour to express his ideas now from one
angle now from another, first to one public and then to another.
There is a deep resemblance between the systems of Latour and
Whitehead but I think that the terminological borrowings do not
reflect a major debt . Latour's more recent discussions of the
need to overcome the bifurcation of Nature are a weak point in his
argumentation. They critique a straw man, a naïve empiricism,
while not managing to hide Latour's own the naïve empiricist
presuppositions. If this is a major influence of Whitehead on
Latour it’s a bad one, but I think it’s mainly window dressing and
anxiety of influence.
Latour read Deleuze long before he read Whitehead, and the
critique of the bifurcation of Nature is everywhere in Deleuze,
e.g. the first few pages of ANTI-OEDIPUS, which Latour read before
undertaking the work leading to the writing of LABORATORY LIFE.
IRREDUCTIONS is a direct transposition of Deleuze’s NIETZSCHE,
“network” is the “rhizome”, everything is “assemblages”,
“constructivism” is from A THOUSAND PLATEAUX, “modes of existence”
from Deleuze's writings on Spinoza and Nietzsche. The
terminological and conceptual resemblances are massive, and very
prior to Latour's encounter with Whitehead. I don't think one
should downplay the convergence with Whitehead, but I don’t think
the reading of Whitehead was a more important formative influence
than the study of Deleuze.
FROM SEMIOTICS TO ONTOLOGY
1) RELIGION AND THE ENUNCIATIVE TURN: The origins of Latour's
hypothesis of multiple régimes of truth go back to his work on
Biblical exegesis, as he declares repeatedly. The principle
theoretical influences there seem to be Bultmann and Péguy. This
is where Latour came to a "positive and constructive" reading of
Bultmann's chains of translation" ("Coming out as a Philosopher").
Far from coming to a sceptical conclusion about religion, Latour
concludes that the long chain of mediations is the condition of
the truth of religious enunciation. This is a singular bifurcation
point: Latour conceives of religion as a specific régime of
enunciation, a move which many have made. He argues that "belief"
is not a pertinent category for this régime, nor is reference,
which he will assign to factual knowledge. Yet despite abandoning
belief, knowledge, reference and facts as non-pertinent, he
retains the notion of "truth", and regards religious expressions
as belonging not just to a specific régime of enunciation, but to
a régime of truth or of "veridiction". This may be where Latour
became interested in Greimas's semiotics. I think that this
separation of truth and reference created a gap in Latour's system
that Greimasian semiotics did not really fill, and that this is a
big part of the reason for the later move to Whitehead. Seeing
things as themselves enunciations in the mode of reproduction
allowed Latour to semiotise everything without reducing everything
to language.
2) SCIENCE AND THE SEMIOTIC TURN: Latour's beginning engagement
with science, including LABORATORY LIFE and right up to
IRREDUCTIONS, is best understood against a background composed of
Deleuze-Serres-Lyotard-Foucault-Derrida and a sort of generalised
Nietzscheanism and anti-Hegelianism. The engagement with networks
of reference was facilitated by the Greimasian paradigm of
semiotics that allowed Latour to treat human's and non-humans on
the same plane. This permitted him to view the historicity of
knowledge as at the same time a historicity of facts. This is the
phase that Latour calls "historico-semiotic" and "socio-semiotic"
("Biography of an Investigation").
3) MATERIAL ENTITIES AND THE ONTOLOGICAL TURN: Latour's
discussions with Isabelle Stengers led to an "epiphany" in 1987.
Constantly in danger of falling into a form of semiotic
reductionism, Latour seized on Whitehead's descriptions of the
"risk" of involved in persisting in being, even by rocks. This is
where Latour's semiotic pluralism becomes veritably an ontological
pluralism, and the contribution of Whitehead's thought was
decisive. In one sense the contribution is minor, the addition of
a fifth mode (the mode of reproduction) after the four first modes
that Latour had already isolated (religion, reference, technology,
and double-click). At the same time this Whiteheadian encounter
led to a real bifurcation on Latour's intellectual path, that has
grown wider ever since. His first reaction was to write up the
modes he had discovered in a little text called "Petite
philosophie de l'énonciation" ("Little philosophy of enunciation",
written according to Latour in 1988 but published in 1998). It is
interesting to note that the title still gives key place to the
semiotic register of régimes of enunciation, but that this is the
seed of the project that will give rise to AN INQUIRY INTO MODES
OF EXISTENCE which features in the title the ontological register.
METHOD: ONTOLOGICAL ASCENT AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCENT
Latour’s movement is initially phenomenological. He attempts to
get away from the abstraction of the subject-object division and
to come back to both historical and individual experience. Only
then can he rise to more “cosmological” concerns. In the case of
the beings of metamorphosis (Chapter 7) he begins with a
historical survey of the West's treatment of superstition, the
"irrational" belief in magical forces, occult powers, and
invisible beings. Noting the rampant psychologization of our
society, its massive use of psychotropic drugs, and its
fascination with the fantastic in books, films, and tv series, he
sees a contradiction between our anxious avoidance and persistent
denial of the literal existence of these metamorphic beings on the
one hand, and our readiness to expose ourselves to them in
situations that treat them as mere "subjective" phenomena on the
other.
To come to grips with their ontological status outside this
protective framing in terms of subjectivization, Latour turns to
a description of the "original experience" that permits us to
define their mode of existence, which he takes to be the
phenomenon of emotion and moods. Rejecting the premise of this
subjectivization, that treats emotions as mere "inner" phenomena,
he remarks that our experience is of something from outside us.
Rather than being confined to our interiority, emotions, on
Latour's hypothesis, are key elements in the networks that produce
this interiority. These "psychogenic" networks include many sorts
of material elements such as drugs and the pharmaceutical
industry, books, shows, films and the entertainment industry,
family arrangements, and therapeutic arrangements.
We may note that Latour's description of the "original experience"
of emotion presents it as always embedded in an imaginative or
fantasy context. He uses a language of energies, forces, powers,
metamorphoses and transmutations. He invokes the experience of
dreams, the "subtle atmosphere of...moods", the depictions of
mythology and the manifestations of ritual. This whole chapter is
a defence of psyche against the reductions of psychologization.
Rational psychology, including Freudian psychoanalysis, is
presented as a compendium of self-misunderstandings.
Latour argues towards the end of this chapter that we may consider
that psychogenic metamorphosis is only one part of the metamorphic
mode of existence, to which he attributes universal extension:
“Everything can, everything must, become something else” (203). In
doing so, he elevates it to a cosmogenic principle on a par with
[rep], the persistence in being. However this universality is only
a speculative “hypothesis” inspired by the cosmological status
that other collectives give to these beings. At the end he
descends once again to modern subjectivity, our experience of
emotions, and our interaction with invisible existents.
Latour calls his project “empirical metaphysics” and I see this
same movement of descent, elevation, and redescent everywhere in
the book. Starting off from some historical and social
generalities he descends to the “original experience”
(empiricism), the privileged or paradigmatic example. Doing the
phenomenology of this lets him extract the form of veridiction
(with its felicity conditions) appropriate to the beings involved
and lets him rise to the determination of their mode of existence.
This ontological determination lets him descend again to
experience, but this time finding the beings in question all
through experience, and not just confined to the paradigm case he
began with.
In theory, the phenomenology of the original experience has
primacy, yet the book as philosophy is a speculative
reconceptualisation of experience. So the tidy methodological
sequence from experience to speculation and back to experience
seems, at least some of the time, to be a fable hiding a quite
different sequence where the speculation, guided by prior
commitments, selects and characterises the experience that it will
later, in the fable, claim merely to describe and to generalise.
Latour's talk of “empiricism”serves to blur or to cover over these
methodological problems rather than resolving them.
COMPARISON WITH FEYERABEND
In an interview (2012), discussing his own methodology, Latour
affirms:
“this a thing that I learned from the “scientists” I studied,
i.e. that: “Anything goes as long as it leads to what you want to
find”. Just as in a laboratory you have instruments of all sorts,
including the most archaic and the most contemporary, because that
is what is necessary in production, I myself have learnt a lot
from “true” scientists, hard scientists, i.e. total indifference
to questions of method” (page 123, my translation).
This is very exactly what Feyerabend proposes in AGAINST METHOD
(already in the essay version published in 1971). Latour continues
in the same vein for two and a half pages, applying this notion of
epistemological anarchism to his own work, and concludes: “So, how
do you produce objects that resist what is said of them?, well,
anything goes” (126).
As in the case of Feyerabend's philosophy, epistemological
anarchism is explicitly tied to a thesis of realism: the goal is
to produce objects that "resist what is said of them". This
anarchism is “epistemological” precisely because Feyerabend wants
to get away from the need to posit a dogmatic “anarchist” method
that has to be applied in every case. He explains that he did
propose such a dogmatic anarchism for science in the early 60s,
but then the encounter with the needs of the practicing scientist,
and later the encounter with the needs of the more diverse
population of students that were enrolled after more democratic
education policies were adopted in the US (at the end of the 60s),
led him to reject even the most open set of rules as long as they
were supposed to be applied dogmatically as fixed, universal, and
binding principles, instead of heuristically as variable, local,
suggestions or rules of thumb. This is similar to Latour’s
intellectual evolution from the methodological anarchism that he
espouses above to his later concerns with composing democractic
assemblages.
This evolution from methodological anarchism to democratic
pluralism parallels the progression in Feyerabend’s work from his
Popperian methodological anarchism applied inside the preconstituted and pre-demarcated sciences to his epistemological
anarchism (circa 1966) which puts that demarcation totally up for
grabs and argues for all sorts of transversal composites as
necessary for what we commonly think of as scientific progress,
and on to his democratic relativism as diplomatic guard rail for a
pluralist free society.
Latour tells us that this epistemological anarchist phase of his
work, that can be seen in his actor-network phase were in danger
of entrenching a hyper-reductionist approach. He argues that the
actor-network analysis always reduces everything to the same sort
of explanation in terms of networks, and needs to be supplemented
and pluralised by his new theory of modes of existence. Feyerabend
too fell into that sort of undifferentiated theorising in the
early 60s, expounding a sort of radicalised Popperian universal
pluralist methodology covering art, science, religion, myth etc.
But he broke with that at the end of the 60s, thanks to his
Machian, Hegelian, and Wittgensteinian inheritance.
Feyerabend spent much time analysing the typological distinctions
between different sorts of traditions and cosmologies. For
example, in his last (unfinished) book CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE he
distinguishes between Homeric, Judaic, and Rationalist traditions,
and inside science itself between Einsteinian and Bohrian
traditions. His typology is different from Latour’s but he is
emphatic that we do need a typology to distinguish between
different modes of existence, and between different forms of
knowledge.
THE SPECTRE OF RELATIVISM
"We are witnessing today the struggle for intellectual hegemony -for who will occupy the universal place of the “public
intellectual” -- between postmodern-deconstructionist cultural
studies and the cognitivist popularizers of “hard” sciences"
(Zizek, “Lacan Between Cultural Studies And Cognitivism”).
Zizek proposes his own regressive solution to escape from this
dichotomy: an imaginary Lacanism (that could be called "Lacan-Z")
put together retrospectively to outflank both constructivism and
cognitivism. The position elaborated in Zizek’s texts amounts to
the combination of a poststructuralist approach (there is no metalanguage, the big Other does not exist) and of a regressive
Freudo-Lacanian recoding of such ideas. Zizek takes deconstructive
and pluralist arguments and then retranscribes them backwards into
what he calls “Lacanese”. But this Lacan never existed, it is the
necessary mask for Zizek’s own ideas, a heuristic fantasy.
Zizek wavers between poststructuralist pluralism and a monist
reductionism founded on his idiosyncratic reading of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Despite the grand declarations, Zizek does not
accomplish any break with and going beyond poststructuralism,
rather his work represents its continuation . Unless one accepts
his caricature of poststructuralism as an accurate description, in
which case it is no big thing to go beyond it.
This strategy of unavowed parasitic feeding on and
misrepresentation of pluralist thought (when Zizek talks about
postmodern, deconstructionist, or poststructuralist thought he is
targeting the pluralist thought of Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, and
Derrida) is no invention of Zizek's. Deleuze and Guattari argue
convincingly that Lacan’s thought is a compromise formation
between the monism of his predecessor Freud and various pluralist
insights that he integrated to correct or to pluralise the system
partially. So, like Freud, Lacan feeds on, without giving proper
recognition to, the “other image of thought” that Deleuze
explicitly links with the names of Nietzsche, William James, and
Whitehead.
Discussing "pluralism" or the "pluralist" in general can be in
itself a conceptually regressive gesture, creating the danger of
conflating the pluralist with the relativist, or confusing
pluralism with social constructionism. As these latter positions
are relatively easy to refute, such conflations and confusions
have a strategic rhetorical advantage: one can seem by hardhitting arguments to refute a whole gamut of positions and to be
in the theoretical avant-garde, without giving oneself the trouble
to work through any really existing specific pluralist
elaborations in detail. One may bray loudly about our fallibility
and the need and importance of empirical tests to ensure our
agreement with the real, without ever having confronted a real
pluralist position to test one's arguments. As one has talked
about noone in particular specific quotations contradicting the
stereotyped analysis can be ignored, declared irrelavant,
interpreted as saying the opposite of what they do indeed say,
etc.
Thus to distinguish pluralism from its relativist shadow, we need
to elaborate the concept of a realist pluralism both in abstract
terms and also in relation to a concrete example of a pluralist
thinker. The concrete example that we have been examining in this
article is the pluralist metaphysics of Bruno Latour as it is
expounded AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE. To conclude I wish
to examine Latour’s contribution to an ontological (or realist)
pluralism.
# # #
LATOUR ON INVISIBLE ENTITIES: Relativist Tolerance or Ontological
Pluralism?
Let us examine how Latour deals with the problem of superstition
in his ontological treatise AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE.
The general framework of the book is materialist in the sense that
the various modes of existence are embedded in material networks,
and that Latour regards the various relations that define and
constitute these modes of existence as themselves material,
existing with the same degree of material reality as the elements
that are related. Latour poses a basic ontological principle that
what is generated within and transits along these networks is not
reducible to them. To take an epistemological example, knowledge
is produced inside the material networks of reference but cannot
be identified with them. To identify knowledge and its networks
(i.e., in the case of science, laboratories, instruments,
inscriptions, scientists themselves, and computer simulations,
etc.) would be to commit a category mistake (naive reductionism).
To separate off knowledge as existing in some other non-material
realm would be another category mistake (Platonist idealism). The
same can be said for the other "modes of existence" that Latour
describes, on the principle that if all is material networks, what
is produced and transits in these networks can be qualitatively
very different.
It is important to note that these distinctions have nothing to do
with "belief", but with an empirical and conceptual analysis of
the various material networks. For Latour the people occupying a
certain domain of practices may be totally mistaken not only in
particular beliefs, but also globally in the type of existence
that they attribute to the entities they deal with. For Latour
there is no question of ontological tolerance being extended to
every worldview, some are just plain wrong. This is the realist
principle underlying his ontology. For example, fundamentalist
Christians, in Latour's terms, are mistaken, they get the world
wrong. The same can be said (and Latour says it often) about
climate change denialists (they are wrong about science, they are
wrong about climate change, the politics that they advocate would
have disastrous consequences). Latour's pluralism is no wishywashy tolerant relativism, but a doctrine of combat.
Over and over again Latour emphasis the fallibility of our beliefs
and the need for objective tests. When he talks about
"interpretive keys" characterising each mode of existence, this is
not beautiful soul relativism proclaiming "to each his belief".
The key is a criterion that ensures that the claims and the
practices can be put to the test, to be validated or rejected as
compatible with the ongoing engagement with reality that each mode
embodies. The keys and the networks are the criteria that ensure
that we are not infallible, each in his or her own world, and that
we are not reducible to our system of beliefs.
In Chapter 7 Latour applies this ontological pluralism to the
"irrational superstitions" that are thought to characterise
traditional societies. Enlightened modernity and its view of
reason has been self-consciously constituted in terms of a battle
against the superstitious belief in invisible beings and occult
powers. The previous chapters of AN ENQUIRY INTO MODES OF
EXISTENCE have shown that the Moderns are mistaken about the
nature and composition of the visible world. For Latour there is
no single“visible world”, the very idea is the result of a
category mistake. Visibility is constructed and maintained in
diverse material networks, and means different things in different
contexts, mobilising different equipment and standards.
According to Latour, we are not as homogeneously reasonable as we
suppose. A suspicious symptom from our history is the overwhelming
violence that has accompanied the spread of Reason in the world, a
sign that we are anxious and frightened about the entities that we
nonetheless assert to be devoid of existence.The accusation made
by the moderns against other cultures is that of their
“irrationality” in their attribution of real existence to
invisible beings. Not existing in the objective world, these
beings in the eyes of the moderns can only be projections of the
human psyche, the true locus of their existence. The only mode of
existence that they can have is that of illusions and phantasms.
These beings can only be explained in terms of the psychology of
the inner world of subjectivity.
Applying his method Latour must search for material networks that
are psychogenic, i.e. engaged in the production and maintenance of
psyches and subjectivities. The moderns that we are may have no
positive institution for welcoming invisible beings, but we have
an abundance of psycho-techniques and psycho-entertainment to
stimulate, care for, or amuse ourselves. Our naïve, folkpsychology, belief is that we do not produce our psyches but
rather that we possess them. The self is supposed to be
autonomous, independent of networks for its existence. There is no
meaning in the external world that is not projected by means of
our internal representations.
In this ontological investigation into spirits, subjectivities and
psychic entities, traditional psychoanalysis cannot help us:
according to Latour what is “repressed” is not just a part of the
inner psyche that we project onto the outside world, confusing
inner representations with outer entities. More fundamentally,
what defines us is the ontological repression of the psychogenic
networks that endow us with a psyche.
Our error is to attempt to think outside networks, to pay
attention only to the “visible” products and to forget the
invisible infrastructures. In consequence, we no longer know how
(or where) to situate the subject and its "contents". Certainly
not inside, as interiority is not a given, it is manufactured. Our
problem is one of attention, we do not notice the networks that
engender the psyche. So we must return to the “original
experience” of this mode of existence: emotion. Emotion is a form
of crisis and transit, where our interiority is in the grip of
what feels like an outside force. It invades us, takes possession
of us for a certain time and carries us away, transforming our
reactions, and then leaves us changed for better or worse.
The modern self is a contradictory relation between the belief in
an autonomous authentic indvidual subject alone in an objective
world devoid of meaning, and the swarm of entities that are
actually necessary to its fabrication and continual modifications.
Caught in the repressive process of avoidance of these outside
forces and of denial of their existence, the moderns have produced
a vast array of therapeutic arrangements authorising their
acknowledgement as inner facts susceptible to various forms of
manipulation.
Latour affirms that an ethnopsychiatric approach to therapeutic
situations gives us the best insight into the existence of these
invisible beings and into the skill needed in dealing with them.
We already have such a skill constructed over our many contacts
with these invisible beings. We know how to deviate and deflect
their forces to other targets and gain their energy for going on
in life. These beings can transform us, alientaing or inspring us
in uncanny ways. They metamorphose themselves too, so this is why
they are “invisible”, they do not have the persistence of the
beings of reproduction, they do not belong to their régime of
visibility and of stability. They do not inhabit the same
networks. But they are real nonetheless.
Thus in Latour's system and in Tobie Nathan's practice these
invisible beings are quite real, although perhaps not in the way
that those who consciously believe in their existence may suppose.
Their scope is not just therapeutic but ontological, foregrounding
by means of their own proprties of metamorphosis and invisibility
the alteration that characterises the form of ontological
pluralism that Latour advocates, which he calls "being-as-other".
Latour acknowledges the existence of invisible beings, of forces,
powers, divinities and demons that do not take us as unified
persons; he emphasises the importance of psychic processes, of
incorporeal metamorphoses, transformations, transmutations and
becomings that oblige us to take being as alteration and
repetition as difference. This is the language of affects and
intensities that was developped by both Deleuze and Lyotard, but
Latour does not give them ontological primacy, as Deleuze and
Lyotard did at a certain moment. They constitute one mode of
existence amongs many, and the pluriverse does not repose on this
mode alone. Latour also breaks away the jargon-filled FreudoMarxist conceptual field that complicated this ontology and
burdened it with a heavy-handed academic style. By renewing our
theoretical vocabulary and references Latour has freed us from
antiquated connotations and other dogmatic residues of the last
century’s philosophical combats.
AGAINST THE OBJECTAL REDUCTION: LATOUR'S PLURALIST ONTOLOGY
Bruno Latour’s AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE provides us with
a host of categories other than object for describing what exists.
In particular, the dynamic aspect of matter is described in
Chapter 7 under the category MET or “the beings of metamorphosis”.
Most of the chapter is focused on psychic entities, but at the end
he remarks that these beings “precede the human, infinitely”
(203). It is clear that calling all existents “objects” is already
a reduction, and we need a more plural vocabulary.
On the question of the stability of objects, Latour has revealed
that he found this problem particularly difficult. It was only
after a conversation with Isabelle Stengers about Whitehead that
he had an illumination that this stability was not universal, nor
was it necessarily tied to humans. He conceived that it belonged
to a specific mode of existence REP or reproduction, that ensures
the persistence of beings.
Latour’s movement is to get away from the abstraction of the
subject-object division and to come back to both historical and
individual experience. On the basis of an ontological analysis of
the phenomenology, he can then widen the import to more
“cosmological” concerns. He makes it clear towards the end of the
chapter we may consider that psychogenic metamorphosis is only one
part of the metamorphic mode of existence: “Everything can,
everything must, become something else” (203). In doing so, he
elevates it to a cosmogenic principle on a par with reproduction.
On this model the beings of reproduction are prior to the
bifurcation of subject and object, and so prior to, but at the
basis of, the constitution of objects stricto sensu by means of
human categorisation. The interplay between persistence and
alteration, or reproduction and metamorphosis, is the “musical”
substrate for all other modes of existence which modulate this
rhythmic composition of process and stability: “they form the
basso continuo without which no music would be audible” (204).
However this universality is only a speculative “hypothesis”
inspired by the cosmological status that other collectives give to
these beings. At the end he descends once again to modern
subjectivity, our experience of emotions, and our interaction with
invisible existents.
Latour calls his project “empirical metaphysics” and I see this
same movement of descent, elevation, and redescent everywhere in
the book. Starting off from some historical and social
generalities he descends to the “original experience”
(empiricism), the privileged or paradigmatic example. Doing the
phenomenology of this lets him extract the form of veridiction
(with its felicity conditions) appropriate to the beings involved
and lets him rise to the determination of their mode of existence.
This ontological determination lets him descend again to
experience, but this time finding the beings in question present
all through experience, and not just confined to the paradigm case
he began with.
ONTOLOGICAL PLURALISM IS NOT RELATIVISM: THREE THESES
1) Against tolerance: Latour’s pluralism argues against climate
change denialism
On this very interesting question one should read the numerous
discussions of climate change denialism by Latour, who very
intelligently outflanks the deniers, and shows that they have no
research to back up their claims, that they are not credible
“others” whose point of view is to be respected. Latour's
pluralist ontology is not a universal relativism, as this very
example proves. The Gifford lectures (Facing Gaia: Six lectures on
the political theology of nature) were very clear on this point.
Also AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE opens on this question and
establishes Latour's rejection of such sceptical and relativist
ploys as based on a totally inadequate view of science. There is
no equivalence of value between the scientific view and pseudoscientific propaganda.
2) Against “belief”: Latour's pluralism rejects fundamentalism as
erroneous
It is important to note that the distinctions that Latour makes
between the different modes of existence have nothing to do with
“belief”, but are based on an empirical and conceptual analysis of
the various material networks that sustain them. For Latour the
people occupying a certain domain of practices may be totally
mistaken not only in particular beliefs, but also globally in the
type of existence that they attribute to the entities they deal
with. Such is the case of the Christian fundamentalist. There is
no question of ontological tolerance being extended to every
worldview and to every belief, some are just plain wrong. This is
the realist principle underlying Latour's pluralist ontology.
Fundamentalist Christians, in Latour’s terms, are mistaken over
many things, not just about their own religion: their
preoccupation with belief as the defining feature of religion is
wrong, their actual beliefs are false, their idea of reference to
the world is wrong, and so Latour concludes that they get the
world wrong. As we have seen, the same can be said (and Latour
says it often) about climate change denialists (they are wrong
about science, they are wrong about climate change, they are wrong
in the politics that they advocate, which would lead to disaster
Latour’s pluralism is no wishy-washy tolerant relativism, but a
doctrine of combat.
3) AGAINST EPISTEMIC IMMUNITY: Latour's pluralism argues for the
fallibilism of our knowledge claims
Latour's pluralist ontology emphasises the fallibility of our
beliefs and the need for objective tests. When he talks about
“interpretive keys” characterising each mode of existence, this is
not beautiful soul relativism proclaiming “to each his belief”.
Applying the wrong interpretive key is a category mistake, i.e. an
ontological error that results in false claims about the world.
The key is a criterion that ensures that the claims and the
practices can be put to the test of experience, and so to be
validated or rejected as compatible or not with the ongoing
engagement with reality that each mode embodies. Our ontological
error is to attempt to think outside material networks and to
ignore the need for the appropriate interpretative key. We tend to
pay attention only to certain detached propositions and to reified
products, and to forget the modes of existence and the material
infrastructures. The keys and the networks are the criteria that
ensure that it makes sense to try to get the world right, taking
into account that our beliefs are not infallible, each in his or
her own world, and that we ourselves are not reducible to our
system of beliefs.