In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that “modernity” is characterized by a dual dependence on a political discourse from which the laws of politics are exempt, and a scientific discourse from which the laws of science are exempt. Latour’s argument is complicated and was definitely confusing to me at points, so I’m going to attempt to outline his main argument without butchering too much of it before I try to challenge it.
Latour explains that the “modern Constitution” is a set of beliefs taken for granted about the social constructed-ness of nature AND the transcendence of nature, and the social constructed-ness of science AND the transcendence of scientific laws, and the social constructed-ness of society AND the transcendence of society. By “transcendence,” I mean a way in which something is beyond human control or creation – I’m not sure if I’m describing that quality the way that Latour does. The net effect of this Constitution is that modernity is a view that can look at one thing through a scientific (or scientistic) perspective, and then look at something else through a social/humanist perspective. The Constitution makes both perspectives possible and applicable to whatever you want, but the Constitution also stipulates that the categories cannot mix – society and science are incompatible, like oil and water.
What does Latour's treatment of modernity mean for the concept of posthumanism? For one thing, Latour's rejection of modernity allows us to acknowledge and embrace hybrids. I thought that Latour's discussion of hybridity fit nicely with Hayles'. For another thing, Latour's treatment of modernity challenges the concept of the postmodern, which is bound up with the posthuman in that both modernity and humanism assume some fixed essential humanness. Latour writes that the concept of postmodernity is a symptom, not a solution. Postmodernity is made possible and defined a Constitution, the modern constitution, full of paradoxes whose ultimate effect is to allow for anything to be justified. Modernity is interested in dividing things up and keeping them separate: whereas pre-modernity allows for and even demands mixings of society, science, nature and spirituality, modernity is meticulously bent on keeping those categories separate. This interest in dividing things up also extends to the division of eras and cultures and peoples into “pre-modern,” “modern” and “postmodern.” The concept of postmodern, Latour says, is yet another example of the divisions modernity likes to draw. I'm wondering if the concepts of human and posthuman can be looked at in the same way... we've definitely concluded that "posthumanism" runs the risk of presupposing or failing to define some non-existent "humanism." I think that humanism/posthumanism is similar to modernity/postmodernity in that the former is premised on fixed divisions between things, while the latter embraces crossover, mixture, hybridity.
Re: the Daily Show link, I love how the comments on the video are all from people saying how much better the segment would have been had they known more about Second Life.
Latour Book I found this book very challenging—much more so than the rest of Latour’s works that I have read. I really look forward to working through it in class, especially the constitution. There was so much going on, and a lot of the times it was honestly over my head.
I think it’s interesting to find that although Anthropology has come a long way from the “savages” terminology, many still consider the Western society to be separate, modern, and distinct. Indeed, in going along with what Latour discusses, the new terminology that has replaced the archaic civilized/uncivilized terminology is the divide of complex/less complex. This fits in with the post/anti/not modern viewpoint that Latour puts forward, showing that modern societies indeed have so many more connections and webs of meaning, while paradoxically viewing themselves as the society that, unlike the premoderns, have been able to separate humans and nature into separate categories.
I really liked the discussion of the witness within society. Latour draws a strong distinction between the reliability and trust placed on witnesses within the court setting in 1661 (pg 23), and the supposed lack of need for a witness within the world of science—as if Nature only has one thing to say, an inner truth, that will come out regardless of who is there as witness. However, much scientific debate appears contra to this statement.
Furthermore, I was a bit thrown off by the discussion of G-d in the last chapter (pg142). (Although Sev did prepare us for this) All of a sudden the work takes a somewhat religious tone, which seems very out of place compared to the rest of it. It’s even a bit on the verge of proselytizing. ~Samantha
I'm really focused on Latour's thoughts on the symmetry of nonhumans and humans, of political representations and natural forces. Obviously, he argues for a recognition of the hybridity of objects and humans, but in his attempt to, I guess, "purify" both, I'm picking up on a strange preference to objects over humans, which is not symmetrical at all. In a discussion of Boyle's ideas, he explains that hybrids are necessary because "nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are more reliable" (23). In this case, he says, humans, the weaker, "are better of appealing to nonhumans." So what degree of agency does the human have in this relationship? If nonhumans are capable of all positive human actions but not "will and bias" which seem to be negative, why are humans necessary? Or, what is the importance of human will? I understand Latour to be saying that nonhumans need humans to be situated, interpreted and integrated, but this is only from a "social" human perspective, if that makes sense. I guess I'm thinking of this in terms of the mind/body separation we discussed in Hayles. In that case, the mind needs the body only to situate itself with a physical perspective within the world. In this case, what is the object without the human? The human without the object is clearly insufficient.
Initially, I was very confused by Latour’s idea of symmetry because I understood it in the geometric sense: “the mutual relation of parts of something in respect to magnitude and position.” (OED). Which was why, I was happy to come across Latours definition: “what is conserved through transformations’ (in Pandora’s Hope, 182). His adoption of ‘symmetry’ in the physics sense (quantum theory, relativity, etc) allows us to think of symmetries in terms of equal quantities of mutable elements. I'm pretty sure his definition comes directly from the ‘law of conservation of energy,’ one of the greatest foundations in science. Stated one way (from my physics text)
“Natural events may involve a transformation of energy from one form to another; but the total quantity of energy does not change during the transformation.” Energy can take on different forms (often hidden or unrecognizable), but the overall amount of energy stays the same. This law first helped lead to the romantic notion that although energy moves around, it never dissipates and that nature is an inexhaustible store of energy.
This is what most people thought Hemholtz around 1850 published an important stipulation--‘the second law of thermodynamics.’ This law predicted increasing ‘entropy’ (which reminds me of Hayles’s pattern/randomness discussion as well as Latour’s ‘proliferation of hybrids). There are many ways the law can be stated, but basically it says that all bodies in the universe will eventually reach the same temperature as one another (aka heat death or ‘Warmtod’--one of my favorite words). Car engines are a good example. It can't put out more mechanical energy than the amount of energy (chemical) required to put in. Machines can only 'transform energy (they can’t create new energy). While it's still true that energy is conserved, the usable energy on our planet diminishes. We are left with a proliferation of unexpected problems such as the over-abundancy of CO2.
Drawing on symmetry in this sense was definitely helpful in understanding Latour's project of tracing out these hard to detect processes. Instead of energy transformations, his deal with transformations within human and non-human networks. Though the material was extremely challenging, I got the sense that Latour is arguing for a more balanced/symmetrical attention to be paid to non-human entities such as CO2 and the things which proliferate when they are not attended to.
One big question I have is: Is it significant that he uses the language of physics (probably chemistry and other sciences as well) to explain his argument? What are the implications of this adoption? In my superficial investigations I did come across this interesting critique (Stanford philosophical reference guide):
“It is widely agreed that there is a close connection between symmetry and objectivity, the starting point once again being provided by spacetime symmetries: the laws by means of which we describe the evolution of physical systems have an objective validity because they are the same for all observers. The old and natural idea that what is objective should not depend upon the particular perspective under which it is taken into consideration is thus reformulated in the following group-theoretical terms: what is objective is what is invariant with respect to the transformation group of reference frames, or, quoting Hermann Weyl (1952, p. 132), “objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms [of space-time]”.[22] Debs and Redhead (2007) label as “invariantism” the view that “invariance under a specified group of automorphisms is both a necessary and sufficient condition for objectivity” (p. 60) They point out that that there is a natural connection between “invariantism” and structural realism.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/
Since I wrote a general review in my last response, I figured I would use this post to focus on a few questions I have.
I’m really intrigued by his introduction of G-d within the last few seconds of the book. It seems that he’s almost frightened of the current hybrid world, in the sense that he needs to pull in something from outside of all of it in order to restore order. Is there any way to resolve this tension without introducing a deity?
I also am curious about the paradox. It seems that it is displayed so prominently within the constitution. Is there some necessity for it? (This might just be me, but I wasn’t positive if there was a reason for the paradox, or if it is just how things work.)
Latour is still overwhelming. Tried to cut out his more amorphous ideas, to pare down to the parts I understand. These ambiguities include: 1) How he resorts to the necessity of a fundamental God? 2) That for all there may be networks and mutable things interrelated between them (in their own loose and easily redistributed categories), there is a core rhetoric by which we may still communicate, still evaluate, analyze and discuss. But what does this rhetoric come from? Mustn't definitions be in some part immutable? Not everything can be in flux. 3) There's no origin, no end, there is no actual separation between us and the world that we can box into definitions. These are all essentially the same thing, in the way of focusing on the issue of how we contend with the things we used to think, and thinking these things are now wrong. Is he arguing for a new conception of continuity, history, time? Nothing so metaphysical, but in application?
What I do get and what I do sort of jive with is the Copernican Counter-Revolution, where the networks are the center of gravity around which everything else revolves. Latour's black boxes may be infinite in either direction (and this brings up another problem for me, having black boxes at all necessitates some means of talking about them, and how do you talk about anything without pinning something down as a baseline, some sort of absolute?) but that isn't supposed to be the point, especially as what connects the boxes to each other (in and out) are more networks.
I think what really boggles me is that need for the crossed-out God, the need to accept it - whatever it is - and whether any of this theory of no-absolutes is workable without an absolute. Or could we possibly replace that? Biological humans, ending at the skin? We play a part in the network, and we mustn't remove ourselves from it, but can we still be the master synthesizers? The parts who see all the things they are connected to, and thus judge everything in terms of themselves? Or is that going to run into the same problem as the 'removed, academic observer/eye/I'? Can you be a synthesized I, one who retains identity within the human box, but acknowledges one's place in the other boxes, even defines oneself by them? Argh, I'm still frustrated.
I'm a little unclear of the move made in chapter 3, specifically from 3.5-3.7, the move from the 3rd to the 4th stage of the modern repertoire. Time and language seem to be at the core of Latour's argument: I see something significant about the connection between the autonomization of language and the modern conception of the passage of time. Somehow, though I'm not quite sure how, the separation of sign and signifier is related to the separation of the past and future. Both seemed to be rooted in the absence of "Being," something else I don't quite grasp in application. Are we to understand language as the foremost unconscious preparation for a modern conception as the world as divided between nature and society?
Latour’s book points to interesting ideas about society and our illusion of the hybridity with nature and things. This is what he describes as the “modern paradox,” meaning the more society seeks purification and a total separation from nature, the more we get intertwined and entangled with nature. I think this is why Latour uses the terms “quasi-objects/subjects” because the hybridity of objects and subjects don’t produce a complete object or subject, but both are entangled with each other and thus are “quasi” Perhaps? I was not sure if I understood Latour use of these terms. And moreover, Latour asserts, society has always been a hybrid form of nature and culture. This idea of the “Great Divide” between nature and human, subjects and objects, has never been a real and complete separation. The notion proliferation of nature and society/culture/human as separate “networks” is something that has risen from humanity’s notion of what a “modern” world means. As I was rereading a few passages, I was struck by this sentence: “Nature’s very transcendence overwhelms us, or renders it inaccessible” (30). I could not help think that perhaps, because nature is unpredictable this is why it “overwhelms us.” In other words, one feature of human society is to make things predictable, that is, from laws dictating our actions in society to technological objects allowing us to schedule and anticipate events that occur, humans like the feeling of control. And nature is, well it is nature, something that one cannot organize, schedule in blackberry, or give it a (police) ticket when it does something disruptive. This is why the rise of modernity pushed for“purification” away from nature. The illusion that Nature and Society are separate was created, because one thing that technology introduced to the humans was the predictable and mechanical lifestyle, something that nature cannot live up to. Which leads to a denial of “blackboxing” nature and society as one and move towards a notion of two separate black box of networks. I may be totally over analyzing Latour’s point and theoretical claim. And perhaps reading too much into that quote. Lastly, I was bit taken back by Latour’s use of crossed-out God moment. Also abrupt use of morality. How does this fit into his larger argument? I am not sure where he places deity in his claims about nature and society….
I'm sort of struggling through Latour and feeling pretty frustrated, so I'm certainly enjoying reading what others have to say. When I was rereading for this week, I stopped at the line on p 13, "The double separation is what we have to reconstruct: the separation between humans and non-humans on the one hand, and between what happens 'above' and what happens 'below' on the other." This helped me put in words the diagram we spent some time with last week and helped to clear a few things up for me. It also made me think back to Godelier's discussion of the super-human and the sub-human. With Godelier, we started out with this "real world" that split into the imaginary world of the super and sub, which were also divided. Is is possible to align the "imaginary" super and sub humans with Latour's "Work of Purification" and the "real" (which may or may not actually be real) with the "Work of Translation"? I might be totally off base, here, but I couldn't get the super-sub-human thing out of my head and I wondered if there might be a connection.
This work was particularly difficult. Latour presents an intricate and complex argument that is tough to follow and tougher to read critically. I could not get through this without suspending any disbelief- I chose to trust the journey he took us on because otherwise I would have been completely lost. Hopefully after a more thorough discussion I will be in a place where I will be able to think critically....? maybe?
With this being said, I found the diagrams quite a bit more helpful during my second perusal through the work.
Also- it has been very useful to read through everyone's comments. Thank you all!
I was most confused in his discussion of transcendence and delegation. I tried to follow his discussion- about the ways in which the modern world has been disenchanted with that is 'transcendent,' when in fact transcendence has never really left us. I also see his definition of that which is 'delegated'- meaning that which has no contrary like the crossed out God? Thats how I thought of it- something that is modernly considered transcendent (aka unreal in modern terms) but still is useful as a concept in thinking in and about the world... But I'm not really sure how all of this fits in...
There is one passage that I loved and thought to share with you. Its about starting points- "When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage" (129) Perhaps it is useful to think of this linguistically... we all exist as verbs not as nouns. We exist because we ACT on the world. In the same way, nonhumans exist because they have an impact, as well. They PERFORM. This is where it makes sense to think about archaeological objects that are not yet uncovered as being the only real objects- because they don't act on the world... made a lot of sense to me.
One thing that I keep thinking about- I'm not sure if this is the direction we want to take the discussion in, but...- what does it mean to consciouslytry to redirect a discourse that is happening? We have been reading a ton of Foucault, Said, and Asad in Nadia Abu El-Haj's class (yeah Perri!) and the whole notion of mapping geneaologies and illuminating discursive effects is very current in my mind... How is it different to not only reveal this sort of discursive assumption, but to try to actively forge it? Latour is trying to not only tell us how are minds are operating (in 'premodernist,' 'modernist,' or 'postmodernist' fashions that place all significance on the scientific and the social) He is telling us how we SHOULD be thinking- that we should cease to deem the nonhuman invisible. Perhaps something to ponder if not totally useful in understanding what it is that he wants us to think about.......
- The air pump (22) and its applications in Ch. 3 - The third strategy for absorbing the modern Constitution and quasi-objects: the absence of Being (65-67) - The different temporalities (67-69) - The ending paragraph of "Redistribution" -- Latour is definitely making it sound like nonmodernism is unavoidable and must be confronted. Is this part of the moralism which Sev has been asking us to look out for? (145)
It's clear that I feel like the third chapter, "Redistribution" needs further unpacking.
There's much to admire in Latour's theoretical framework, beginning with his dismantling of Hobbes and Boyle, genealogically tracing the mankind's obsession to construct one's immanence. In the end, Latour's model, though, doesn't rise above a utopian theory, albeit of a different kind. By returning to nonmodernity, Latour says that terms like 'transcendence' and 'immanence' will be modified automatically because mediatory networks are immersed in nothing (128). "We do not need to fill in blanks," Latour says. Undertaking a new Constitution in the nonmodern is also too strikingly easy: "it suffices to take into account what the modern Constitution left out, and to sort out the guarantees we wish to keep" (139). Really? Let's go for it, then, since it's so simple. Latour even proposes to re-insert God into the Constitution because in nonmodernity, the "improbable metaphysics" of the moderns which was required to keep the faith in God is no longer valid (142). Again: too easy. Even on the new Parliament, Latour's proposal is disarmingly simple, as it was in the case with the new Constitution: "we simply have to ratify what we have always done" (144). I wanted to take all this as irony or a paradox, but the closing pages make it painfully clear that Latour is being 100% sincere. Much of what Latour offers by way of theory is attractive to me; it seems genuinely new and revolutionary. In the realms of politics and practical reality, his proposals will not work... quixotic at best, and ridiculous at worst.
Latour’s discussion of time was perhaps the most confusing for me. It seems like his sense of the word ‘time’ often shifts in meaning without prior alert (perhaps also his conceptions of 'god,' and 'symmetry.' In the case of 'time' however, Latour first describes time in saying: (73) The notion of an irreversible arrow—progress or decadence—stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain.” Then he says, “The connections among beings alone make time. (77). Is his discussion of reversibility/irreversibility in terms of the moderns who impose their sense of time (progress)? Is it also the same sense he uses when he says"the contemporary is polytemporal?"
Latour's work really came together for me with a sentence at the very end of the work when he discusses natures' representatives:
"Let one of the representatives talk, for instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions; let still another speak in the name of the State, what does it matter, so long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy and satellites."
This reminded me of Latour's discussion in section 1.3 (The Crisis of the Critical Stance) when he explains why it's problematic to view things from only through naturalization, socialization and deconstruction when networks are "simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society." The inclusion of discourse/narration as an integral part of networks really interested me, because I've found that a lot of the works we've read in this class touch upon some of the problems that language itself has in regard to the representation of objects/humans (including Latour himself in the previous reading when he discusses how a monkey doesn't reach for a banana but the monkey plus the stick do) but it's almost been a sidenote. The above passage illustrates specific examples where it's easy to see how the way people talk about things, such as "the voters of New Hampshire," treats them as their own entities and ignores the imbrogilios and networks that they represent. I think these specific examples helped me really grasp what Latour is referring to when he discusses "quasi-objects." I wonder if Latour's "Parliament of Things" will use new sentence constructions to change the emphasis that quasi-objects receive through contemporary discourse...or if it will contain really long sentences like monkey + stick + ......
Sidenote: There's a Bruce Willis movie, "The Surrogates," going into production this month about posthumanism...sort of:
"Story is set in the near future, where humans live in isolation and interact vicariously through surrogate robots who are better-looking versions of themselves. Bruce Willis plays a cop who, through his surrogate, investigates the murders of others’ surrogates. The cop is forced to venture from his own home for the first time in years and unravels a conspiracy." - from Variety
As I mentioned in last class, I really enjoy Latour’s discussion and placement of Postmodernism, which he describes as the ‘ironic despair’ born out of one’s coming face to face with networks-within-networks-within-networks-(…). This is, as Latour states, the result of the collapse of the modernist purification paradigm, and models very well the sort of paralysis of analytic ability we’ve been running into whenever we start picking apart black boxes. Latour’s prescription for this involves backing away from the overloaded interface of analysis, and instead focusing on the interaction between black-boxed constructs. We create these black boxes precisely because the complexity of each acting construct overwhelms analysis, so it makes no sense to focus our attention to undoing the generalizations that allow us to function realistically.
It is interesting to compare these respective postmodern/posthuman principles of engagement to the paradigm proposed by Buddhism (and to a similar extent by its sassy European younger brother Nihilism); where when confronted with the regression of networks in the physical world one attempts to remove one’s self from its ties with the real. I’m not really sure even what a posthuman would say of a Buddhist’s renunciation of worldly ties, since the posthuman sees himself exclusively as a concordant amalgamation of those worldly interaction. Similarly, I can little imagine how a Buddhist would react to a posthuman’s ideological decision to exist entirely within the real. Perhaps this discussion doesn’t really belong in our class, but I find it very interesting to see how different models for existence interact in practice.
I feel like a delinquent for posting this so late….
“…it would appear that the scope of the mobilization of collectives had ended up multiplying hybrids to such an extent that the constitutional framework which both denies and permits their existence could no longer keep them in place. The modern constitution has collapsed under its own weight…” (49)
Latour’s asks that we focus all our energy not on the “black boxes” but on the connections and networks between the black boxes. Interestingly, this creates a completely interdependent system and takes away an individual autonomy. On one hand, we have all learned that there is power and strength in numbers and that a bridge made up of interconnected planks of wood holds up better than one plank of wood bridging a river. Yet these connections simultaneously weaken the individual pieces holding them together, making them powerful and meaningful in relation to the other. My question is whether or not Latour’s system of networks is strong enough to ever really hold together in the way that he describes it. I would propose that there are levels of strength… I don’t fully buy into the fact that each black box is the same shape and weight of the next one.
Another issue that I can’t quite seem to get over is the idea of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. If they are both only “quasi,” then they are filled with elements of the other, meaning that they cannot and should not be thought of as distinct categories. Of course, the idea behind the “quasis” is to be able to talk about something as an object or a subject even though its not. I get lost here because once you “quasi” something, it does not just change in the linguistic sense, but also in the imagination of what it really is.
WHNBM brings up a lot of things into both our context of posthumanism and the general conception of "us" (humans, me and you, etc.) in our world (obviously, into both or these categories and more because of the 2nd half of the constitution that Latour claims modernism ignores - the networks,etc).
Latour works have to debunk a lot of seemingly inherent ideas that exist in the current world - separation of society/subject and object, one universal, true temporality, etc. although he still seeks to create a new constitution to encompass all the parts the moderns cast astray.
I particularly like the way he uses these themes to re-analyze the premodern/modern realtionship as obsolete. If we have never been modern, and instead exist in a spiral, then labeling other societies as premodern and in need of modernization is impossible. This is particularly important in the field of anthropology because of its imperialistic roots. Yet the advantage of Latour is that he is able to hold onto the the strengths within the anthropological model in order to re-evaluate the situation. He finds that there is no concrete past or present.
A new model, a spiral seen in a 2-D field, not a liner model. This was also interesting to me (a re-thinking of time to adhere to natural occurances too - balance, fluctuation, equilibrium, more than simply human actions)
The human is in the center - "we are exchangers and brewers of time" (75), actively sorting elements. We exist in the collective between existence and essence (the longitudinal distinction) while society and nature revolve around. The time we exist within is "beings and their relationships to the networks that construct irreversibilty and reversibility" (77). A morphable present - a polytemporality that can be more of a give and take, something that we can circuit back to.
That is just a jumble of thoughts, but I am still confused and have questions regarding the process of purification/mediation, what do we become exactly (hybrids, nonmoderns,?), and where do the mediators who are freed go in this model (circulating around the longitudinal plane also?).... just some further ideas.
Over the weekend, several events made previously invisible technologies suddenly visible and made me think of Latour. For one thing, my word processor stopped saving things properly, and suddenly I couldn't access documents that I had saved on my laptop and I could only type in the computer lab. The Microsoft word function that I generally accept as a given, as invisible as breathing or blinking, was now visible. It sucked.
Things that Hannah is interested in discussing in six minutes' time: - Latour's critique of dialectics (54-55). He lost me here, but I want to understand what he's arguing and why. - the import-export system and especially the diagram on p. 99
23 comments:
I'll actually post something eventually.
In the meantime, this is relevant/hilarious.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
video/index.jhtml?videoId=165604
&title=avatar-heroes
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour argues that “modernity” is characterized by a dual dependence on a political discourse from which the laws of politics are exempt, and a scientific discourse from which the laws of science are exempt. Latour’s argument is complicated and was definitely confusing to me at points, so I’m going to attempt to outline his main argument without butchering too much of it before I try to challenge it.
Latour explains that the “modern Constitution” is a set of beliefs taken for granted about the social constructed-ness of nature AND the transcendence of nature, and the social constructed-ness of science AND the transcendence of scientific laws, and the social constructed-ness of society AND the transcendence of society. By “transcendence,” I mean a way in which something is beyond human control or creation – I’m not sure if I’m describing that quality the way that Latour does. The net effect of this Constitution is that modernity is a view that can look at one thing through a scientific (or scientistic) perspective, and then look at something else through a social/humanist perspective. The Constitution makes both perspectives possible and applicable to whatever you want, but the Constitution also stipulates that the categories cannot mix –
society and science are incompatible, like oil and water.
What does Latour's treatment of modernity mean for the concept of posthumanism? For one thing, Latour's rejection of modernity allows us to acknowledge and embrace hybrids. I thought that Latour's discussion of hybridity fit nicely with Hayles'. For another thing, Latour's treatment of modernity challenges the concept of the postmodern, which is bound up with the posthuman in that both modernity and humanism assume some fixed essential humanness. Latour writes that the concept of postmodernity is a symptom, not a solution. Postmodernity is made possible and defined a Constitution, the modern constitution, full of paradoxes whose ultimate effect is to allow for anything to be justified. Modernity is interested in dividing things up and keeping them separate: whereas pre-modernity allows for and even demands mixings of society, science, nature and spirituality, modernity is meticulously bent on keeping those categories separate. This interest in dividing things up also extends to the division of eras and cultures and peoples into “pre-modern,” “modern” and “postmodern.” The concept of postmodern, Latour says, is yet another example of the divisions modernity likes to draw. I'm wondering if the concepts of human and posthuman can be looked at in the same way... we've definitely concluded that "posthumanism" runs the risk of presupposing or failing to define some non-existent "humanism." I think that humanism/posthumanism is similar to modernity/postmodernity in that the former is premised on fixed divisions between things, while the latter embraces crossover, mixture, hybridity.
Re: the Daily Show link, I love how the comments on the video are all from people saying how much better the segment would have been had they known more about Second Life.
- Hannah Schmidt
Latour Book
I found this book very challenging—much more so than the rest of Latour’s works that I have read. I really look forward to working through it in class, especially the constitution. There was so much going on, and a lot of the times it was honestly over my head.
I think it’s interesting to find that although Anthropology has come a long way from the “savages” terminology, many still consider the Western society to be separate, modern, and distinct. Indeed, in going along with what Latour discusses, the new terminology that has replaced the archaic civilized/uncivilized terminology is the divide of complex/less complex. This fits in with the post/anti/not modern viewpoint that Latour puts forward, showing that modern societies indeed have so many more connections and webs of meaning, while paradoxically viewing themselves as the society that, unlike the premoderns, have been able to separate humans and nature into separate categories.
I really liked the discussion of the witness within society. Latour draws a strong distinction between the reliability and trust placed on witnesses within the court setting in 1661 (pg 23), and the supposed lack of need for a witness within the world of science—as if Nature only has one thing to say, an inner truth, that will come out regardless of who is there as witness. However, much scientific debate appears contra to this statement.
Furthermore, I was a bit thrown off by the discussion of G-d in the last chapter (pg142). (Although Sev did prepare us for this) All of a sudden the work takes a somewhat religious tone, which seems very out of place compared to the rest of it. It’s even a bit on the verge of proselytizing.
~Samantha
I'm really focused on Latour's thoughts on the symmetry of nonhumans and humans, of political representations and natural forces. Obviously, he argues for a recognition of the hybridity of objects and humans, but in his attempt to, I guess, "purify" both, I'm picking up on a strange preference to objects over humans, which is not symmetrical at all. In a discussion of Boyle's ideas, he explains that hybrids are necessary because "nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are more reliable" (23). In this case, he says, humans, the weaker, "are better of appealing to nonhumans." So what degree of agency does the human have in this relationship? If nonhumans are capable of all positive human actions but not "will and bias" which seem to be negative, why are humans necessary? Or, what is the importance of human will? I understand Latour to be saying that nonhumans need humans to be situated, interpreted and integrated, but this is only from a "social" human perspective, if that makes sense. I guess I'm thinking of this in terms of the mind/body separation we discussed in Hayles. In that case, the mind needs the body only to situate itself with a physical perspective within the world. In this case, what is the object without the human? The human without the object is clearly insufficient.
Initially, I was very confused by Latour’s idea of symmetry because I understood it in the geometric sense: “the mutual relation of parts of something in respect to magnitude and position.” (OED). Which was why, I was happy to come across Latours definition: “what is conserved through transformations’ (in Pandora’s Hope, 182). His adoption of ‘symmetry’ in the physics sense (quantum theory, relativity, etc) allows us to think of symmetries in terms of equal quantities of mutable elements.
I'm pretty sure his definition comes directly from the ‘law of conservation of energy,’ one of the greatest foundations in science. Stated one way (from my physics text)
“Natural events may involve a transformation of energy from one form to another; but the total quantity of energy does not change during the transformation.” Energy can take on different forms (often hidden or unrecognizable), but the overall amount of energy stays the same. This law first helped lead to the romantic notion that although energy moves around, it never dissipates and that nature is an inexhaustible store of energy.
This is what most people thought Hemholtz around 1850 published an important stipulation--‘the second law of thermodynamics.’ This law predicted increasing ‘entropy’ (which reminds me of Hayles’s pattern/randomness discussion as well as Latour’s ‘proliferation of hybrids). There are many ways the law can be stated, but basically it says that all bodies in the universe will eventually reach the same temperature as one another (aka heat death or ‘Warmtod’--one of my favorite words). Car engines are a good example. It can't put out more mechanical energy than the amount of energy (chemical) required to put in. Machines can only 'transform energy (they can’t create new energy). While it's still true that energy is conserved, the usable energy on our planet diminishes. We are left with a proliferation of unexpected problems such as the over-abundancy of CO2.
Drawing on symmetry in this sense was definitely helpful in understanding Latour's project of tracing out these hard to detect processes. Instead of energy transformations, his deal with transformations within human and non-human networks. Though the material was extremely challenging, I got the sense that Latour is arguing for a more balanced/symmetrical attention to be paid to non-human entities such as CO2 and the things which proliferate when they are not attended to.
One big question I have is: Is it significant that he uses the language of physics (probably chemistry and other sciences as well) to explain his argument? What are the implications of this adoption? In my superficial investigations I did come across this interesting critique (Stanford philosophical reference guide):
“It is widely agreed that there is a close connection between symmetry and objectivity, the starting point once again being provided by spacetime symmetries: the laws by means of which we describe the evolution of physical systems have an objective validity because they are the same for all observers. The old and natural idea that what is objective should not depend upon the particular perspective under which it is taken into consideration is thus reformulated in the following group-theoretical terms: what is objective is what is invariant with respect to the transformation group of reference frames, or, quoting Hermann Weyl (1952, p. 132), “objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms [of space-time]”.[22] Debs and Redhead (2007) label as “invariantism” the view that “invariance under a specified group of automorphisms is both a necessary and sufficient condition for objectivity” (p. 60) They point out that that there is a natural connection between “invariantism” and structural realism.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/
Since I wrote a general review in my last response, I figured I would use this post to focus on a few questions I have.
I’m really intrigued by his introduction of G-d within the last few seconds of the book. It seems that he’s almost frightened of the current hybrid world, in the sense that he needs to pull in something from outside of all of it in order to restore order. Is there any way to resolve this tension without introducing a deity?
I also am curious about the paradox. It seems that it is displayed so prominently within the constitution. Is there some necessity for it? (This might just be me, but I wasn’t positive if there was a reason for the paradox, or if it is just how things work.)
~Samantha
Latour is still overwhelming. Tried to cut out his more amorphous ideas, to pare down to the parts I understand. These ambiguities include: 1) How he resorts to the necessity of a fundamental God? 2) That for all there may be networks and mutable things interrelated between them (in their own loose and easily redistributed categories), there is a core rhetoric by which we may still communicate, still evaluate, analyze and discuss. But what does this rhetoric come from? Mustn't definitions be in some part immutable? Not everything can be in flux. 3) There's no origin, no end, there is no actual separation between us and the world that we can box into definitions. These are all essentially the same thing, in the way of focusing on the issue of how we contend with the things we used to think, and thinking these things are now wrong. Is he arguing for a new conception of continuity, history, time? Nothing so metaphysical, but in application?
What I do get and what I do sort of jive with is the Copernican Counter-Revolution, where the networks are the center of gravity around which everything else revolves. Latour's black boxes may be infinite in either direction (and this brings up another problem for me, having black boxes at all necessitates some means of talking about them, and how do you talk about anything without pinning something down as a baseline, some sort of absolute?) but that isn't supposed to be the point, especially as what connects the boxes to each other (in and out) are more networks.
I think what really boggles me is that need for the crossed-out God, the need to accept it - whatever it is - and whether any of this theory of no-absolutes is workable without an absolute. Or could we possibly replace that? Biological humans, ending at the skin? We play a part in the network, and we mustn't remove ourselves from it, but can we still be the master synthesizers? The parts who see all the things they are connected to, and thus judge everything in terms of themselves? Or is that going to run into the same problem as the 'removed, academic observer/eye/I'? Can you be a synthesized I, one who retains identity within the human box, but acknowledges one's place in the other boxes, even defines oneself by them? Argh, I'm still frustrated.
some questions:
I'm a little unclear of the move made in chapter 3, specifically from 3.5-3.7, the move from the 3rd to the 4th stage of the modern repertoire. Time and language seem to be at the core of Latour's argument: I see something significant about the connection between the autonomization of language and the modern conception of the passage of time. Somehow, though I'm not quite sure how, the separation of sign and signifier is related to the separation of the past and future. Both seemed to be rooted in the absence of "Being," something else I don't quite grasp in application. Are we to understand language as the foremost unconscious preparation for a modern conception as the world as divided between nature and society?
Latour’s book points to interesting ideas about society and our illusion of the hybridity with nature and things. This is what he describes as the “modern paradox,” meaning the more society seeks purification and a total separation from nature, the more we get intertwined and entangled with nature. I think this is why Latour uses the terms “quasi-objects/subjects” because the hybridity of objects and subjects don’t produce a complete object or subject, but both are entangled with each other and thus are “quasi” Perhaps? I was not sure if I understood Latour use of these terms.
And moreover, Latour asserts, society has always been a hybrid form of nature and culture. This idea of the “Great Divide” between nature and human, subjects and objects, has never been a real and complete separation. The notion proliferation of nature and society/culture/human as separate “networks” is something that has risen from humanity’s notion of what a “modern” world means.
As I was rereading a few passages, I was struck by this sentence: “Nature’s very transcendence overwhelms us, or renders it inaccessible” (30). I could not help think that perhaps, because nature is unpredictable this is why it “overwhelms us.” In other words, one feature of human society is to make things predictable, that is, from laws dictating our actions in society to technological objects allowing us to schedule and anticipate events that occur, humans like the feeling of control. And nature is, well it is nature, something that one cannot organize, schedule in blackberry, or give it a (police) ticket when it does something disruptive. This is why the rise of modernity pushed for“purification” away from nature. The illusion that Nature and Society are separate was created, because one thing that technology introduced to the humans was the predictable and mechanical lifestyle, something that nature cannot live up to. Which leads to a denial of “blackboxing” nature and society as one and move towards a notion of two separate black box of networks. I may be totally over analyzing Latour’s point and theoretical claim. And perhaps reading too much into that quote. Lastly, I was bit taken back by Latour’s use of crossed-out God moment. Also abrupt use of morality. How does this fit into his larger argument? I am not sure where he places deity in his claims about nature and society….
-Kathryn
I'm sort of struggling through Latour and feeling pretty frustrated, so I'm certainly enjoying reading what others have to say. When I was rereading for this week, I stopped at the line on p 13, "The double separation is what we have to reconstruct: the separation between humans and non-humans on the one hand, and between what happens 'above' and what happens 'below' on the other." This helped me put in words the diagram we spent some time with last week and helped to clear a few things up for me. It also made me think back to Godelier's discussion of the super-human and the sub-human. With Godelier, we started out with this "real world" that split into the imaginary world of the super and sub, which were also divided. Is is possible to align the "imaginary" super and sub humans with Latour's "Work of Purification" and the "real" (which may or may not actually be real) with the "Work of Translation"? I might be totally off base, here, but I couldn't get the super-sub-human thing out of my head and I wondered if there might be a connection.
This work was particularly difficult. Latour presents an intricate and complex argument that is tough to follow and tougher to read critically. I could not get through this without suspending any disbelief- I chose to trust the journey he took us on because otherwise I would have been completely lost. Hopefully after a more thorough discussion I will be
in a place where I will be able to think critically....? maybe?
With this being said, I found the diagrams quite a bit more helpful during my second perusal through the work.
Also- it has been very useful to read through everyone's comments. Thank you all!
I was most confused in his discussion of transcendence and delegation. I tried to follow his discussion- about the ways in which the modern world has been disenchanted with that is 'transcendent,' when in fact transcendence has never really left us. I also see his definition of that which is 'delegated'- meaning that which has no contrary like the crossed out God? Thats how I thought of it- something that is modernly considered transcendent (aka unreal in modern terms) but still is useful as a concept in thinking in and about the world... But I'm not really sure how all of this fits in...
There is one passage that I loved and thought to share with you. Its about starting points- "When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage" (129) Perhaps it is useful to think of this linguistically... we all exist as verbs not as nouns. We exist because we ACT on the world. In the same way, nonhumans exist because they have an impact, as well. They PERFORM. This is where it makes sense to think about archaeological objects that are not yet uncovered as being the only real objects- because they don't act on the world... made a lot of sense to me.
One thing that I keep thinking about- I'm not sure if this is the direction we want to take the discussion in, but...- what does it mean to consciouslytry to redirect a discourse that is happening? We have been reading a ton of Foucault, Said, and Asad in Nadia Abu El-Haj's class (yeah Perri!) and the whole notion of mapping geneaologies and illuminating discursive effects is very current in my mind... How is it different to not only reveal this sort of discursive assumption, but to try to actively forge it? Latour is trying to not only tell us how are minds are operating (in 'premodernist,' 'modernist,' or 'postmodernist' fashions that place all significance on the scientific and the social) He is telling us how we SHOULD be thinking- that we should cease to deem the nonhuman invisible. Perhaps something to ponder if not totally useful in understanding what it is that he wants us to think about.......
MEGAN HOLLAND!!!!!!
woaahh
Topics that Marilla wishes to discuss in class:
- The air pump (22) and its applications in Ch. 3
- The third strategy for absorbing the modern Constitution and quasi-objects: the absence of Being (65-67)
- The different temporalities (67-69)
- The ending paragraph of "Redistribution" -- Latour is definitely making it sound like nonmodernism is unavoidable and must be confronted. Is this part of the moralism which Sev has been asking us to look out for? (145)
It's clear that I feel like the third chapter, "Redistribution" needs further unpacking.
There's much to admire in Latour's theoretical framework, beginning with his dismantling of Hobbes and Boyle, genealogically tracing the mankind's obsession to construct one's immanence. In the end, Latour's model, though, doesn't rise above a utopian theory, albeit of a different kind. By returning to nonmodernity, Latour says that terms like 'transcendence' and 'immanence' will be modified automatically because mediatory networks are immersed in nothing (128). "We do not need to fill in blanks," Latour says. Undertaking a new Constitution in the nonmodern is also too strikingly easy: "it suffices to take into account what the modern Constitution left out, and to sort out the guarantees we wish to keep" (139). Really? Let's go for it, then, since it's so simple. Latour even proposes to re-insert God into the Constitution because in nonmodernity, the "improbable metaphysics" of the moderns which was required to keep the faith in God is no longer valid (142). Again: too easy. Even on the new Parliament, Latour's proposal is disarmingly simple, as it was in the case with the new Constitution: "we simply have to ratify what we have always done" (144). I wanted to take all this as irony or a paradox, but the closing pages make it painfully clear that Latour is being 100% sincere. Much of what Latour offers by way of theory is attractive to me; it seems genuinely new and revolutionary. In the realms of politics and practical reality, his proposals will not work... quixotic at best, and ridiculous at worst.
Latour’s discussion of time was perhaps the most confusing for me. It seems like his sense of the word ‘time’ often shifts in meaning without prior alert (perhaps also his conceptions of 'god,' and 'symmetry.' In the case of 'time' however, Latour first describes time in saying: (73) The notion of an irreversible arrow—progress or decadence—stems from an ordering of quasi-objects, whose proliferation the moderns cannot explain.”
Then he says, “The connections among beings alone make time. (77). Is his discussion of reversibility/irreversibility in terms of the moderns who impose their sense of time (progress)? Is it also
the same sense he uses when he says"the contemporary is polytemporal?"
Latour's work really came together for me with a sentence at the very end of the work when he discusses natures' representatives:
"Let one of the representatives talk, for instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions; let still another speak in the name of the State, what does it matter, so long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object they have all created, the object-discourse-nature-society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy and satellites."
This reminded me of Latour's discussion in section 1.3 (The Crisis of the Critical Stance) when he explains why it's problematic to view things from only through naturalization, socialization and deconstruction when networks are "simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society." The inclusion of discourse/narration as an integral part of networks really interested me, because I've found that a lot of the works we've read in this class touch upon some of the problems that language itself has in regard to the representation of objects/humans (including Latour himself in the previous reading when he discusses how a monkey doesn't reach for a banana but the monkey plus the stick do) but it's almost been a sidenote. The above passage illustrates specific examples where it's easy to see how the way people talk about things, such as "the voters of New Hampshire," treats them as their own entities and ignores the imbrogilios and networks that they represent. I think these specific examples helped me really grasp what Latour is referring to when he discusses "quasi-objects." I wonder if Latour's "Parliament of Things" will use new sentence constructions to change the emphasis that quasi-objects receive through contemporary discourse...or if it will contain really long sentences like monkey + stick + ......
Sidenote: There's a Bruce Willis movie, "The Surrogates," going into production this month about posthumanism...sort of:
"Story is set in the near future, where humans live in isolation and interact vicariously through surrogate robots who are better-looking versions of themselves. Bruce Willis plays a cop who, through his surrogate, investigates the murders of others’ surrogates. The cop is forced to venture from his own home for the first time in years and unravels a conspiracy." - from Variety
As I mentioned in last class, I really enjoy Latour’s discussion and placement of Postmodernism, which he describes as the ‘ironic despair’ born out of one’s coming face to face with networks-within-networks-within-networks-(…). This is, as Latour states, the result of the collapse of the modernist purification paradigm, and models very well the sort of paralysis of analytic ability we’ve been running into whenever we start picking apart black boxes. Latour’s prescription for this involves backing away from the overloaded interface of analysis, and instead focusing on the interaction between black-boxed constructs. We create these black boxes precisely because the complexity of each acting construct overwhelms analysis, so it makes no sense to focus our attention to undoing the generalizations that allow us to function realistically.
It is interesting to compare these respective postmodern/posthuman principles of engagement to the paradigm proposed by Buddhism (and to a similar extent by its sassy European younger brother Nihilism); where when confronted with the regression of networks in the physical world one attempts to remove one’s self from its ties with the real. I’m not really sure even what a posthuman would say of a Buddhist’s renunciation of worldly ties, since the posthuman sees himself exclusively as a concordant amalgamation of those worldly interaction. Similarly, I can little imagine how a Buddhist would react to a posthuman’s ideological decision to exist entirely within the real. Perhaps this discussion doesn’t really belong in our class, but I find it very interesting to see how different models for existence interact in practice.
I feel like a delinquent for posting this so late….
“…it would appear that the scope of the mobilization of collectives had ended up multiplying hybrids to such an extent that the constitutional framework which both denies and permits their existence could no longer keep them in place. The modern constitution has collapsed under its own weight…” (49)
Latour’s asks that we focus all our energy not on the “black boxes” but on the connections and networks between the black boxes. Interestingly, this creates a completely interdependent system and takes away an individual autonomy. On one hand, we have all learned that there is power and strength in numbers and that a bridge made up of interconnected planks of wood holds up better than one plank of wood bridging a river. Yet these connections simultaneously weaken the individual pieces holding them together, making them powerful and meaningful in relation to the other. My question is whether or not Latour’s system of networks is strong enough to ever really hold together in the way that he describes it. I would propose that there are levels of strength… I don’t fully buy into the fact that each black box is the same shape and weight of the next one.
Another issue that I can’t quite seem to get over is the idea of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. If they are both only “quasi,” then they are filled with elements of the other, meaning that they cannot and should not be thought of as distinct categories. Of course, the idea behind the “quasis” is to be able to talk about something as an object or a subject even though its not. I get lost here because once you “quasi” something, it does not just change in the linguistic sense, but also in the imagination of what it really is.
WHNBM brings up a lot of things into both our context of posthumanism and the general conception of "us" (humans, me and you, etc.) in our world (obviously, into both or these categories and more because of the 2nd half of the constitution that Latour claims modernism ignores - the networks,etc).
Latour works have to debunk a lot of seemingly inherent ideas that exist in the current world - separation of society/subject and object, one universal, true temporality, etc. although he still seeks to create a new constitution to encompass all the parts the moderns cast astray.
I particularly like the way he uses these themes to re-analyze the premodern/modern realtionship as obsolete. If we have never been modern, and instead exist in a spiral, then labeling other societies as premodern and in need of modernization is impossible. This is particularly important in the field of anthropology because of its imperialistic roots. Yet the advantage of Latour is that he is able to hold onto the the strengths within the anthropological model in order to re-evaluate the situation. He finds that there is no concrete past or present.
A new model, a spiral seen in a 2-D field, not a liner model. This was also interesting to me (a re-thinking of time to adhere to natural occurances too - balance, fluctuation, equilibrium, more than simply human actions)
The human is in the center - "we are exchangers and brewers of time" (75), actively sorting elements. We exist in the collective between existence and essence (the longitudinal distinction) while society and nature revolve around. The time we exist within is "beings and their relationships to the networks that construct irreversibilty and reversibility" (77). A morphable present - a polytemporality that can be more of a give and take, something that we can circuit back to.
That is just a jumble of thoughts, but I am still confused and have questions regarding the process of purification/mediation, what do we become exactly (hybrids, nonmoderns,?), and where do the mediators who are freed go in this model (circulating around the longitudinal plane also?).... just some further ideas.
o and black boxing - he barely mentions it until the end. should we assume that he has that theory in mind throughout the whole book?....
and don't worry Perri you're not the only delinquent! .....
No, Perri, you're not the only delinquent.
Over the weekend, several events made previously invisible technologies suddenly visible and made me think of Latour. For one thing, my word processor stopped saving things properly, and suddenly I couldn't access documents that I had saved on my laptop and I could only type in the computer lab. The Microsoft word function that I generally accept as a given, as invisible as breathing or blinking, was now visible. It sucked.
Things that Hannah is interested in discussing in six minutes' time:
- Latour's critique of dialectics (54-55). He lost me here, but I want to understand what he's arguing and why.
- the import-export system and especially the diagram on p. 99
- Hannah Schmidt
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