Latour, Diplomacy and Anarchism

There is a giant, bright red, stompy, irritable elephant at the centre of Latour's concept of diplomacy (or his version of it, anyway).  Here's how he defines diplomacy:

The present investigation is presented as a diplomatic enterprise in the sense that there is no outside arbiter - survival of the fittest, universal reason, state, law, laws of nature etc. In this case, for want of a "referee" acceptable to all, we must "retake language" and, with the aid of a minimal number of forms, organize identification and bring negotiable and non-negotiable positions into contact with each other.

In other words, we must henceforth be 'diplomats' because we no longer have 'nature' to appeal to as a sovereign that could decide disagreements for us.  Okay, but diplomacy is the practical response to the absence of a deciding sovereign.  What is the condition of having no sovereign to appeal to itself?  Anarchy.  So, whither anarchism?

Anarchism is a word conspicuous by its absence from Latour's entire corpus.  There are only a few mentions, all of them dismissive.  This is from a 1993 interview:

I think deep down, Feyerabend rendered a disservice to the history and philosophy of science. I don't take very seriously political anarchism, and I don't take very seriously anarchism in science because it is completely reactionary. Again, it is a debunking strategy, and all debunking makes people believe in the thing being debunked. The attitude of unveiling and denouncing the falseness of the scientific method always reinforces the argument of the scientist, so I think Feyerabend has been rather counterproductive. His is a constant negative argument that the true method is not there, which makes you believe it is important to find the true method. 

This denouncing presupposes the existence and importance of what is at stake, and I think Feyerabend has been fighting a nonexistent element from the beginning--in exactly the same way as political anarchism or Dadaism. It is very chic but finally not very interesting. Feyerabend is a critical mind and all critical minds are disappointed. Deep down they believe very seriously in rationality, and they have been disappointed--something has not happened as they believe it should have. Maybe they believed something in their childhood, never got it, and were consequently disappointed.

In Pandora’s Hope (p.298) he dismisses anarchism because despite “its beautiful slogan ‘neither god nor master’” […] it has always had one master, man!”  But that's about it for Latour on anarchism.  And this is hugely ironic because Latour's post-natural world is as anarchic an imaginarium as was ever conceived!  I think that this needs to be redressed.

One thing hampering Latour's diplomacy metaphor is that it is not anarchic enough.  It does not recognise quite how anarchic the world it is supposed to mediate has become.  If diplomacy is modelled after interstate diplomacy then it is conceptually inadequate because such diplomacy is premised upon sovereignty.  While there may be no sovereign 'above' the state diplomat there are sovereigns 'behind' each one.  There is anarchy but only 'outside' the state, in the domain of the international.  A very partial, limited state of anarchy - nothing like that chao-scape which Latour sets in front of us Earthlings.

Latour's political philosophy deliberately transcends the state, seeing it as one set of points along many political trajectories.  Okay, so he doesn't urge us to burn the state to the ground, far from it but it does become just one flawed institution among many.  'Latour the Anarchist' may be an ironic figure but he's far from an absurd one.

So, Latour's diplomats cannot be state representatives.  There is no more a sovereign 'behind' than there is one 'above.'  This is generalised anarchy.  There is no one to 'report back to.'  No sovereign to appeal to anywhere.  It is anarchy in the most pure sense.  Indeed, it is far more anarchist than the classical anarchists like Proudhon for whom Man was the sovereign from which all questions could answered and upon which all politics could be assembled.

The anarchy of the international is partial because it presupposes the National.  Classical anarchism's anarchy is partial too because it presupposes Man or Nature.  Latour's anarchy is total.  Can 'diplomacy' make sense of such a world?

Monbiot's Dilemma

George Monbiot: The day my inner anarchist lost out to the bourgeois me

A very enjoyable and well written story, however it seems to me that George and his friends were never anarchists in anything more than name to begin with.  George's anarchism didn't 'give way' to his bourgeois liberalism.  To be an anarchist means to take responsibility for oneself all the duties and otherwise performed by the state -- to stop recognising such authority but also to stop relying on such authorities.  These so called anarchists didn't do these things.  They were actually pacifist liberals; they thought they could do away with violence (or even confrontation) and simply reason with whoever they came into conflict with.  Turns out that doesn't work, so they needed the police to step in.

There can be no such thing as a pacifist anarchist.  Or, rather, a pacifist anarchist probably isn't going to live very long.  Or, a pacifist anarchist can only survive in a world of pacifists.  You can be a pacifist if you get other people to protect you (if you accept statist liberalism -- free of violence or the threat of violence because you get others to do it for you).  But without that 'outsourcing' you either have to grow a spine and do it yourself or pretend that good intentions and reason can overcome all divisions and obstacles (quite a delusion).

The moral of the story, I think, is that you can recognise that people such as this traveller have been abused, excluded, disenfranchised and still be faced with a very real problem with regard to how to deal with them.  Explaining how they are the way they are (by social factors not genetic predisposition or theological 'evil') tells us nothing about how to deal with them as they are.  They are no less a problem, despite all the explanation.  The old hippyish liberalism which would have everyone just being a bit nicer to each other comes crashing down the moment such bourgeois pretensions actually meet anyone genuinely downtrodden and disenfranchised and realises that some of these people would rather kick you in the head and steal your phone than listen to your self-involved bourgeois psycho-babble, which is literally meaningless to them.

Recognising that there are bad, broken people in the world who no amount of care or reasoning can reach doesn't mean that 'there are just evil people in the world who were born evil and that's that'.  That's a totally false deduction.  It means that, despite having a clear idea of how and why people turn out like this, we have no magic wand to wave to make people nice and friendly and non-violent.  Only a totally different upbringing is likely to do that.  And it's a bit late for grown men, who know only bitterness and violence and whose very personality is built from that world.

Nobody is 'born evil'.  Criminals are made, not born.  But that doesn't help us much when confronted with real, non-abstract, criminals, right there, in our faces, stealing our stuff and threatening to break our bodies.  It's not that the abstract ideas about what causes criminality are wrong or that they're not 'real', it's that they don't help us much in immediate situations.  In fact these ideas about criminality in the abstract are real and are important but they do not in themselves give us a course of action.  Why?  Well, because they won't stop people who don't share our ideas stealing from and attacking us.  If we are pacifist liberals we can pretend that we do no violence (because we've outsourced our violence to others).  But 'anarchists' very quickly realise that violence can't be so easily set aside -- that if it isn't outsourced it can't just be ignored, not without disregarding one's own safety and well-being.

It's all very well to have grown up avoiding confrontation and abhorring violence (I know I have) but that world can only exist because it is protected from the less fortunate, more violent worlds of others.  That's George's dilemma -- how to step outside the protections that liberal society have granted, given that one of these is protection from the violence of criminals.  (And, of course, quite often that very apparatus of 'protection' is the source of violence, but that doesn't change the fact that most of us rely on it for protection most of the time.)