Monday, September 26, 2011

Reading Latour 13: ANT and Politics

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Comments on “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social Be Reassembled?” pp. 247-262.

I would dearly love to pick up from my post on ANT and Literary Studies and generalize to culture in general, drawing, of course, on my remarks about graffiti and music as well. The idea would be to recast memes as rigid intermediaries constituted as, shall we say, semiotic codes. The individual code items, then, could be combined into various ‘texts’—in the extended meaning of that term—which function as mediators between individuals and the groups of which they are members. But I must leave that generalization as an exercise for the reader. Were I to embark upon it I’m afraid I might never find my way back out and thus would never be able to finish these notes.

Not a useful result.

Laws and Explanations

So, to the final chapter of Reassembling the Social. And we’re going to get there by taking a look at the concluding paragraph of the penultimate chapter (p. 246):
The laws of the social world may exist, but they occupy a very different position from what the tradition had first thought. They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardize, they coordinate, they have to be explained.
That last sentence came as something of a rude shock after Latour’s earlier proscription of explanation. Here’s a passage (p. 137) I quoted in Reading Latour 10: Description & Graffiti:
Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.
But I stopped reading too soon. That passage continues with this line (and of course more): “There is an exception, however, if it refers to a fairly stable state of affairs where some actors do indeed play the role of fully determined—and thus of fully ‘explained’ intermediaries—but in this case we are back to simpler pre-relativist cases.”

That is, we’re back at the sociology of the social, which is about stabilized social worlds, not worlds in flux, for which Actor-Network Theory has been devised. It’s those worlds in flux where description must be paramount, for how can there be laws if there is no stability? Well, I think there may be an approach to that question, but I’m going to set it aside.

I take it that Latour’s point about “laws of the social world” is that, when we’re dealing with a stabilized world, that stability itself must be explained. Those are the explanations Latour seeks. The laws stating the regularities of a stabilized world are the products of something—forces, structures—Latour fails to name (as far as I can determine).

But his final chapter is not about those worlds. It’s about the world still in flux.

In Motion, Politics

Latour’s central point is simply that, where there is social stability, where the sociology of the social is the appropriate conceptual instrument, there can be no meaningful politics. There can be no change, only circulation of agents and actants according to a fixed pattern of intermediaries (250): “To put it bluntly: if there is a society, then no politics is possible.”

Politics, real before-the-end-of-history politics, implies change, hence (p. 252):
Is it not obvious then that only a skein of weak ties, of constructed, artificial assignable, accountable, and surprising connections is the only way to begin contemplating any kind of fight? With respect to the Total, there is nothing to do except to genuflect before it, or worse, to dream of occupying the place of complete power. I think it would be much safer to claim that action is possible only in a territory that has been opened up, flattened down, and cut down to size in a place where formats, structures, globalization, and totalities circulate inside tiny conduits, and where for each of their applications they need to rely on masses of hidden potentialities. If this is not possible, then there is no politics. No battle has ever been won without resorting to new combinations and surprising events.
And that, I submit, is what I’ve found in graffiti culture and society. Graffiti artifacts may go back 40 or 50 years, but the people who assemble about and through them, their gropings and groupings are very much in flux. There is political sentiment there, but a politics, no.

But I’ll point you to William Upski Wimsatt, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs (Akashic Books 2010). Wimsatt is an experience youth organizer who grew up as a graffiti writer in Chicago and is steeped in hip-hop culture. “Upski” is a nickname from his graffiti days, derived from “to get up,” that is, to write graffiti on a wall. What that title’s about, that’s a convoluted story that runs on for several pages (pp. 13-20). Suffice it to say that “bomb” has nothing to do with explosives. It’s graffiti slang for paint the walls with a glorious vengeance and with style! And not bombing the suburbs is about growing up and crafting a serious political movement capable of changing the course of history. I kid you not.

[Been down so long, looks like up to me, no?]

But THAT, that cannot be done in a world that’s fixed in place. That can only be in a world that’s still fluid. That’s the world Latour seeks to describe.

Some Concluding Passages

At this point I’m declaring this reading to be all but over. There’s much more to be said about Reassembling the Social, but I’m not up to saying it, not here and now. I won’t say this reading got me where I needed to go, but I like where it DID get me. Which is one of those many places I didn’t know about, but which feels nonetheless almost like home. Almost. But not quite. It’s more like a homestead.

Some final passages from the book, p. 254:
Whereas the tradition distinguished the common good (a moralist concern) and the common world (naturally given), I proposed replacing ‘the politics of nature’ by the progressive composition of one common world.
And now Latour’s written ‘An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”’ and that’s where I’m going. I’m a compositionist through and through (e.g. that’s what speculative engineering is about), and I’ve got lots to compose.

p. 257:
Rather, each discipline is at once extending the range of entities at work in the world and actively participating in transforming some of them into faithful and stable intermediaries.
And Latour runs through a litany of examples from economics, sociology, psychology, geographers, linguists, etc.

p. 258:
This does not mean those disciplines are fictions, inventing their subject matter out of thin air. It means that they are, as the name nicely indicates, disciplines: each has chosen to deploy some sort of mediator and favored some type of stabilization, thus populating the world with different types of well-drilled and fully formatted inhabitants.
Again, what matters is not that the accounts are constructed, but how well they are constructed. Each discipline has its standards differentiating better constructions from poorer ones.

p. 259:
This is where politics again enters the scene if we care to define it as the intuitions that associations are not enough, that they should also be composed in order to design one common world. For better or worse, sociology, contrary to its sister anthropology, can never be content with a plurality of metaphysics; it also needs to tackle the ontological question of the unity of this common world.
Just WTF! is that, the unity of this common world? You can be sure it’s NOT a successor to Otto Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, for that was the product of an era that slipped into the deep past when Fukuyama somewhat quixotically declared an end to history. For that’s a world composed about a distinction between nature and society, and that distinction’s gone.

Just what happened to that distinction, and why it’s going going gone, that discussion is not quite fully present in this book. It IS here, here and there, enough that you can pick it up if you’re alert to the signs. But Latour’s reasoning is not here fully deployed.

Here’s Latour rounding third base and heading home (p. 262):
. . . if you really think that the future common world can be better composed by using nature and society as the ultimate meta-language, then ANT is useless. It might become interesting only if what was called in the recent past ‘the West’ decides to rethinking how it should present itself to the resort fo the world that is soon to become more powerful. After having registered the sudden new weakness of the former West and trying to imagine how it could survive a bit longer in the future to maintain its place in the sun, we have to establish connections with the others that cannot possibly be held in the nature/society collections. Or, to use another ambiguous term, we must might have to engage in cosmopolitics.

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