Latour vs. Lefevre and Berlin

An early question of the semester was to consider how Latour would trouble, if not overhaul, the other social rhetoricians who would have mainly banked on what he would call the “sociology of the social” as opposed to the “sociology of associations.” When Latour suggests that “if you still believe groupings exist ‘by themselves,’ for instance the ‘individual,’ just try to remember how much labor had to be done before each of you could ‘take your life into your own hands,’” he seems to be treading close to our previous understanding of the social turn in rhetoric and composition (32). Why should we privilege one author as the author of a text? Is it just ego and tradition and a preference for sole credit that makes us refuse to acknowledge the vast network of collaboration that accounts for a published work? Latour poses considerations that mirror these and others we generated early in the semester: “How many admonitions from parents, teachers, bosses, partners, and colleagues before we learned that we had better be a group of our own (the ego)? And how quickly we forgot that lesson” (32).

However, as Latour begins to outline his five uncertainties (1. no pre-established groups; 2. actions and agency are uncertain and must be newly explored since we cannot attribute either to the social; 3. objects have agency or at least play a role beyond mere symbolic projection; 4. based on the previous three, agencies must never be introduced as matters of fact so much as matters of concern; and 5. as we move to “deployment not critique” and making the “social” first vanish in order to trace a network, we must undertake the writing of “risky accounts” that may often fail), we see that we are far from the comfort zone of Lefevre, Berlin, etc. Likewise, when Latour describes action as that “which is not fully transparent” (perhaps an understatement where the traces and uncertainties head) and that he wishes to “render them visible again” with his “odd expression” actor-network theory, we see that there is much in previous social-epistemic rhetoric that would be made to vanish so that something else—some network, trace, or reassembled association of the social—could become visible again. (44).

For a slightly more specific example, we could glance back at Berlin’s rhetoric. In his “Postmodern Predicament” section, after discussing Scholes’ “Textual Power” and Burke’s terministic screens (all language is ideological, all language “serves as a terministic screen”), Berlin argues that

“no single person is in control of language. Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it. In other words, language is a product of social relations and so is ineluctably involved in power and politics. Language constitutes arenas in which ideological battles are continually fought. The different language practices of different social groups are inscribed with ideological prescriptions, interpretations of experience that reinforce conceptions of what really exists, what is really good, and what is politically possible” (Berlin 92-93).

Latour would seem to agree that “no single person is in control of language,” but he would likely counter Berlin’s follow-up that “language is a product of social relations” and how “ineluctably involved” we can then say language is in “power and politics” (92). Latour might say that language produces the “social relations” and the constructs or figurations of “power and politics” as entities that then inform and shape what we’re trained to look for in language (trained, perhaps, by Berlin). Still, Latour might like the phrase about “interpretations of experience that reinforce conceptions of what really exists” to the extent that this opens the debate about ANT theorists “forgetting ‘power relations’ and ‘social inequalities’” (86).

Lefevre would be even more problematized by a Latourian analysis, as she privileges an a priori understanding of the social. Even as she examines a social perspective of rhetorical invention that seeks to overturn the long history of “composition” being “rooted in radical individualism,” she still suggests that the social act of writing is “one in which individuals interact with society and culture in a distinctive way to create something” and, in so doing, Lefevre seems guilty of the move Latour decries in social theory: the one where social theorists “never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are criticized as being artificial, imaginary, transitional” (Lefevre 121; Latour 28). Lefevre, and inevitably a Marxist such as Berlin, cannot avoid discourse that privileges either the “society” (in which individuals must “create”) or an already existing base and superstructure. Latour would seem to lead both theorists (and their students) to where the controversies arise in assuming a fixed, stable, identifiable notion of “society” or “late multi-national capitalist logic” and then ask that their associations be retraced without these “invisible hands.” Latour would also ask that students further disassemble the traces and previous associations before arriving at a (teacher-pleasing?) conclusion as to how “our society” has constructed inequalities within the judiciary or has only “fixed” racism by burying it deeper into the subsurface. He asks instead that we merely “leave aside all underlying frameworks” as the professor suggests to the Ph.D student in the “interlude” dialogue (156).