Latour pt. 1

I wrote a paper on Latour a couple of years ago--and I used Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia for it, so I really enjoyed reading Chad's post. The main text of Latour's that I wrote about is We Have Never Been Modern, which I've referenced a couple of times before and which I think could be a productive text to bring in alongside Reassembling the Social, as I think the former really informs the latter. I had written out a long post comparing the two texts, finding ways "in" to Reassembling through We Have Never, but as I was about to post it, I thought better of it. I've been sitting on it for a couple of days now and I think I'll instead wait until next week--when I'll be facilitating the discussion on the second half of the book--to go ahead with it. I'm not sure if everyone will agree that it's necessary to bring it in, as I do, and I don't want divert *any* attention from the excellent work that Chad has done in directing the trajectory for this week.

I do want to say a bit about it in terms of where Latour himself brings in We Have Never along with something Faith commented on in her great post. Faith talked about the affinities she sees between what Latour is advocating and ethnography, and that speaks to an affinity I see as well and that Latour himself comments on a few times. Anthropology was one of my majors as an undergrad because, as I took courses that were cross-listed between English and Anthro (usually with a focus on Linguistics--my third major--or Folklore Studies), I saw how useful anthropology's use and development of the concept of culture could be in what I myself wanted to do. Latour sees this, as well, I think, and he uses it as a way to get into what ANT can become in terms of an alternative to modernism (including sociology). In Reassembling, he observes that ANT is "nothing but the recasting of the central hopes of social science" and that the latter has suffered from "a sort of confusion of duties... that their job was to define what the social world is made of... the task of politics" (40); and that "some sociologists, tired of the revolutionary period, found a way to shortcut the slow and painful process of composition and decided to sort out by themselves what were the most relevant units of society" (41). Latour goes on to comment on what he sees as the prime significance of this moment:

The simplest way was to get rid of the most extravagant and unpredictable ways in which actors themselves defined their own 'social context'. Social theorists began to play legislator, strongly encouraged in this endeavor by the state that was engaged in the ruthless task of modernizing. In addition, this gesture could pass for proof of scientific creativity as scientists since Kant have had to 'construct their own subject'. Human actors were reduced to mere informants simply answering the questions of the socilologist qua judge, thus supposedly producing a discipline as scientific as chemistry or physics. Without this strong obligation to play the legislating role, sociologists would not have limited the first obvious source of uncertainty, cutting all the links with the explicit and reflexive labor of the actors' own methods.

Here Latour goes on to contrast sociology's "first source of uncertainty" with the approach of anthropology, which did not suffer from this mistake as

Anthropologists, who had to deal with pre-moderns and were not requested as much to imitate natural sciences [I'd disagree with that, but that's another matter], were more fortunate and allowed their actors to deploy a much richer world. In many ways, ANT is simply an attempt to allow the members of contemporary society to have as much leeway in defining themselves as that offered by ethnographers.

Latour then explicitly connects this sentiment to his work in We Have Never, asserting that, "If, as I claim, 'we have never been modern,' sociology could finally become as good as anthropology."

In We Have Never, Latour sets up what he sees as society's tripartition of networks into "facts, power and discourse" which he believes anthropology has successfully negotiated and rightly sees as interconnected, a feat he wishes for ACT. He begins by asserting (on page 7) that

Either the networks my colleagues in science studies and I have traced do not really exist, and the critics are quite right to marginalize them or segment them into three distinct sets: facts, power and discourse; or the networks are as we have described them, and they do cross the borders of the great fiefdoms of criticism: even though they are real, and collective, and discursive.

Rather than taking an approach of naturalization, socialization, or deconstruction, ANT sees networks as being all three: "Is it our fault," Latour asks,"if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?" (ibid).

Latour then credits anthropology with having offered a way through the crisis of the tripartation:

This would be a hopeless dilemma had anthropology not accustomed us to dealing calmly and straightforwardly with the seamless fabric of what I shall call 'nature-culture,' since it is a bit more and a bit less than a culture.... Once she has been sent into the field, even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying. Send her off to study the Arapesh or the Achuar, the Koreans or the Chinese, and you will get a single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build houses and the way they grow yams or manioc or rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology. In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated.

If the analyst is subtle, she will retrace networks that look exactly like the sociotechnical imbroglios that we outline when we pursue microbes, missiles or fuel cells in our own Western societies. We too are afraid that the sky is falling. We too associate the tiny gesture of releasing an aerosol spray with taboos pertaining to the heavens. We too have to take laws, power and morality into account in order to understand what our sciences are telling us about the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.

Yes, but we are not savages; no anthropologist studies us that way, and it is impossible to do with our own culture—or should I say nature-culture?—what can be done elsewhere, with others. Why? Because we are modern. Our fabric is no longer seamless. Analytic continuity has become impossible. For traditional anthropologists, there is not, there cannot be, there should not—an anthropology of the modern world... The ethnosciences can be connected in part to society and to discourse...;science cannot. It is even because they remain incapable of studying themselves in this way that ethnographers are so critical, and so distant, when they go off to the tropics to study others. The critical tripartition protects them because it authorizes them to reestablish continuity among the communities of the premoderns. It is only because they separate at home that ethnographers make so bold as to unify abroad.

Latour goes on to make the move that in order to do such an ethnography of the modern world, the word "modern" itself has to be renegotiated (hence the title of the work). I'll save all of that for next week--I just wanted to bring in the part of We Have Never that I see as relevant to what Latour is discussing in terms of anthropology in this part of Reassmbling.