Away from 'theory as overlay'; or: On not being a philosopher

I make no claim to be a philosopher, although I philosophise (and maybe that is enough – need one philosophise well?). This reluctance perhaps derives from being Anglophone and thus born of a deeply anti-intellectual culture for which more or less the only legitimate meaning of 'philosopher' is as shorthand for a particular subsection of the academic profession (and not one given much respect).

However, the more philosophical reason for this reluctance is that I find myself ever more an empiricist. I am interested in ideas only if they do not lead away from experience but allow it to be extended or amplified in various ways. This is, I suspect, why I have always found a liking for pragmatism, actor-network theory, and so on.

Above all, I am sceptical – no, that is too polite: I cannot abide – the use of theory as overlay. That is, the situation where an abstract vocabulary becomes so sophisticatedly all-consuming that it does not enable surprising connections but rather precludes them – a universe unto itself. This is Whitehead’s "thought within a groove" – the stuff of the professional.

For example, I find myself unable to share the fascination of so many philosophically-inclined geographers* with the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. It seems to me that their conceptual vocabulary of territories and strata is, if anything, the least useful aspect of their continually transforming, runaway stagecoach of a philosophical project (I mean this as a compliment) for thinking about matters of earth, experience and politics.

By taking practically all of the conventional terms available to actors engaging in geographical/geological practices and making them into unconventional technical terms, there is no longer any easy way of relating the web of abstractions to said practices as such actors themselves describe them.

There is a decoupling at this moment that carves out 'philosophy' as an autonomous space. I cannot abide that space. In this much, I am not a philosopher.

This is not to suggest that words should not be made and remade in abstraction from convention – they should. However, as counterintuitive as it may be, it seems to me that a creative conceptual universe made from the lexicon of geography might be less useful for geography than a conceptual universe made from something else.

This would not be such a problem if the likes of D&G were read more creatively and less, for want of a better word, 'professionally.' There is a remarkable lack of creativity – indeed, often outright piety – in the parsing of these thoughts as though they were to be a system adequate to an object.

Theory as overlay is incapable of astringency, as Isabelle Stengers describes that term:

"[…] the function of scientific thought has less to do with its ‘truth’ than with its astringent effects, the way it stops thought from just turning in self-satisfying circles."

Self-satisfaction is a vice of the intellect.





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*I'm not a geographer either but let's save that for another day.

Empiricism, abandoned; A concrete example of the politics mode; Return to power

One of the most frustrating things with Latour's abandonment of empiricism (in all but the most abstract, philosophical sense) in his works in the past decade (despite the fact that this is the period where he embraces the term most explicitly) is how much more difficult it makes it for him to explain his philosophy - and for us to understand it.  Even anecdotal examples of e.g. the political mode of speech would make it far easier to understand his argument.  Instead he ends up saying the same thing over and over, meandering endlessly, only reaching his conclusion after more or less exhausting his reader.

I'm not asking for 'straight talk,' unembellished, as-the-crow-flies, etc. - I'm just asking for talk that marshals the appropriate resources to get to where it's going without excessive and gratuitous meandering.  Be as direct as possible; no more, no less.  No author has his audience by right - he has to earn their attention.  In the past Latour has been an often brilliant writer but his loss of the empirical has coincided (and I don't think it's a coincidence) with the loss of a large measure of that wit, verve and directness.

Ed Miliband's speech at the Labour Party Conference this year was a good example of politics as Latour describes it (albeit not in its ideal, essential form).  Miliband had been dogged all summer by suggestions in the media that he was a 'weak leader,' that he didn't have the 'full support' of his party and that he couldn't 'connect' with voters.  This speech went a long way towards turning that around.  It contained enough 'red meat' to sate the party faithful in the room but also contained enough populist ideas to appeal to the 'floating voters' and he did enough to distance himself from the left wing of his party (and his family) to at least partially appease centrists/centre-rightists concerned that he might actually be 'red.'  He did a fairly good job of tying this constituencies together (at least according to those who decide the media narrative) and he secured his political position as a result.

The point in relation to Latour's argument is that Miliband did so through rhetoric.  He didn't stand up there in that agora and 'say what he really thinks'; he didn't stand and read a laundry list of the things he'd do, the policies he'd enact in 'straight,' quasi-scientific language.  He intimated, insinuated, explained, joked, grandstanded.  His speech was a compromise between of a vast number of different forces.  Every one of those forces had to be 'betrayed' in order to be represented.  Not one of those constituencies would have been overjoyed at the speech as a whole; not one of those listening would have written that same speech, worded in that same way; and, indeed, if Miliband were to 'say what he really thinks' then undoubtedly the speech would have been very different.

However, the ambiguous, bubbling, swerving 'curve' of his speech was sufficient to draw enough of his constituents along to reaffirm his political status as leader of the Labour Party.  He succeeded in sufficiently representing enough people that he could count on their obedience (in one form or another) again.  That's politics as Latour describes it.  It's intrinsically representative, intrinsically rhetorical.  And, as far as it goes, he has a point.  When people expect 'straight talk' from their politicians they not only expect too much, they misunderstand the politician's vocation.  The only the way a politician can represent and be obeyed is to be afforded the flexibility of rhetoric, the ability to shift positions, to 'betray.'

And with some work we could even extend this idea past its major hangups, past the cosy, cloying liberal democratic language that Latour clings to and see that a king, an autarch must also be sensitive to the needs and wishes of his subjects in order to command their obedience.  Indeed, he has the castles and the money and the power to have them beaten and enslaved but a brutal king runs the risk of rebellion - for he is one and they are many.  If he wants to keep his head on his shoulders he would do well to respect the Circle, too.  All of this is in Machiavelli (and perhaps Hobbes).  It is, in this sense, a realpolitik mode.  It is literally amoral (morality is another mode entirely [mor]).  And if we bear that in mind and strip out some of the Deweyan baggage - turning it from a political [pol] or democratic [dem] mode into a mode of political representation ([rep] is already taken!) - then it starts to look a lot healthier, more 'full cheeked' as Latour says in aime, somewhere.

So, as far as the argument goes it has some saving graces.  However, because it meanders so widely and proceeds so slowly and repetitively it really doesn't go very far.  'Tying constituencies together,' thus representing them, thus establishing their obedience to him is only one of the things that Miliband did well in that speech.  He also demonstrated his competence as a leader.  He reassured sceptical would-be allies that he was 'leadership material,' that, come the next General Election, he could take the platform next to David Cameron and give him 'a run for his money.'  In other words, he reassured unsettled supporters that he could win the election, that he was politically 'potent.'  That doesn't fit in with Latour's narrative at all.  'Alas, a mere detail of habit - the way that the Circle is gradually corrupted by repetition and institution.'  Perhaps, but that doesn't change the fact that there is far more to politics than the Circle.  And the rest is not a remainder, it is not mere detail.

Moreover, it's pretty much impossible, historically speaking, to make the Circle aboriginal of politics.  Dewey was extraordinarily naive on this point, believing that states formed around existing political publics and that the multiplicity of states could be explained by the manner in which 'issues' or 'problems' are spatially limited to particular areas (this argument is in The Public and its Problems).  How can a Frenchman of all people not understand that every polis and every state is born in blood and terror?  There's no territory without terror! - goodness knows, Latour loves etymology enough to know this.  The state doesn't gradually congeal and encrust around an already existing polis, so as to institute it, shield it.  Or, if it does, then this polis bears little resemblance to Lippmann's 'phantom.'

And how can someone who speaks of Gaia every other sentence not see Dewey's naivety vis-à-vis political multiplicity as the result of the spatial finitude of issues?  Okay, Latour would probably argue that Dewey could only have believed what he did in the period 'we thought we were Modern' and that it has since been demonstrated that our state system is inadequate to our Gaia-political moment because issues are now without territorial limit - that, henceforth, politics must be global...  Undoubtedly.  However, it's still astonishingly naive to think that institutions form around issues, that states follow representative politics rather than forming the conditions under which representative politics (with all its carefully, gradually and haphazardly designed limitations) can take place; that just because issues have 'gone global' that institutions not only must follow but will (because, taken at his word, that is what Dewey believed).  Buried within the pseudo-realpolitik (itself hidden within the language of liberal democracy) is the most extraordinary political idealism.

By way of conclusion, then, there are many problems with aime and with the politics mode in particular.  However, I think that it's very important to remember the considerable discursive generosity that Latour is offering with this project.  The 'collaborative' aspect is indeed managed and the website is still very much in development.  However, there are merits to these modes and to the modal system and Latour is not only inviting criticism, he is facilitating it (albeit not with his style of writing, which makes the whole endeavour much more difficult!).  And there are potential remedies.

The main thing that [pol] is lacking a concept of power.  Latour has rejected the very idea of power from the very beginning of his work, however I believe that we are now in a position - now that he has presented us with his magnum opus and effectively said 'have at it' - that a concept of power internal to and consistent with network ontologies can be developed.  That is a topic for a later post...

Yet more on ontological conservatism and the confluence of modes

Terence comments on Levi's comments on my comments on Latour's modes.  (How's that for a referential chain?)

On the 'prohibition of category mistakes arising from illegitimate crossings,' it is not all crossings that are said to be 'bad.'  Far from it - modes are co-dependent.  What use is REF without REP?  Were there nothing of the latter there'd be nothing to 'bring back.'  Likewise, TEC cannot function without beings of REP to hybridise.  In the habit chapter he gives the example that if a microphone goes out during a pastor's sermon then it takes an engineer to fix it and that's a REL/TEC crossing.  Every mode such as REL, LAW, POL, etc. is related to a specific form of HAB and various METs and NETs - these uber-modes.  The prohibition is on crossings that do violence to the modes and seek to erase one or the other of them.  So, there's clearly a conservatism or conservationism inherent in that but it's not crossings that are illegitimate per se, only certain forms of crossing that try to state one mode in terms of another, thereby erasing the former (at least that's my understanding).

That said, he's altering his argument subtly as the book progresses.  In the habit chapter he's now able to say that DC isn't all bad.  It's now the result of well ordered processes; it's an appearance and appearance has its own mode of existence, HAB (a mode itself pluralised by the fact that every other mode instantiates it differently).  Even the appearance of being 'critical' early on in the book vis-a-vis the 'evil genius' of DC was, in fact, just another mode to be asserted positively.  An addition to the pluriverse, not a subtraction from it.

What is this kind of ontological optimism lacking?  It doesn't prevent us from questioning or interrogating modes - indeed, the whole endeavour seeks to lay them bare, to de-habituate them and open them to appreciation (i.e. appreciation meaning an assessment of value).  It isn't 'uncritical' in that sense; it is de-habituating.  It doesn't stop us proposing new modes that transform the other modes by their entry into the ecosystem (indeed, this is highly encouraged).  It doesn't stop us from combining modes in new ways, provided that we do not attempt to define one mode in terms of another.  It doesn't necessarily mean that e.g. an ethnographer working with a church group must be essentially preoccupied with REL.  That group is a confluence of all kinds of modes and cannot even begin to be understood mono-modally.  Fieldwork is essentially polymodal, that much is clear.  Nor does it stop us from extending e.g. the REL mode to situations that are not conventionally 'religious.'  Indeed, as I mentioned before that mode is defined so abstractly that it could apply to almost anything.

However, this ontological optimism does tend to encourage us to 'keep our distance,' to let others just get on with their modal adventures unperturbed; to live and let live, so to speak.  And this brings me back to what I said about chapter 1 with Latour exoticising the other in order to construct it as that which must be absolutely respected - 'respected' to the point where it seems unclear as to how we could even engage with it (a common problem, in fairness).  An anthropology of almost any church group (to rejoin that example) would surely demonstrate that most Believers tend at least as much towards a kind of confluence of REF and DC overlaid with a hazy mysticism of HAB, speckled with flecks of MET, as they are to the translations described by REL.  That Jesus really was the son of God, that there are indisputable moral certainties and that the Bible 'proves' this in a very real and referential sense (pointing to the book to make a point, quoting chapter and verse to prove a point, etc., everything points towards reference!) is fundamental to these forms of life.

The assertion that these are really just crossings (however legitimate) and that REL is the true essence of religion is not a merely descriptive, empirical assertion - it is a proposition, a declaration of value, an appreciation of value.  It is an assertion that the proper form of religion is concentrated around the REL mode with crossings across that mode only serving its practical, institutional needs.  It is a value judgement.  And this is where Latour must depart (and if he does not do so then be deported!) from his self-styled evidentialist empiricism and reveals his true moral-political-philosophical colours.

These are not just neutral descriptions of modes as they really are but the distillation and rearticulation of the values of the Moderns - a kind of saving of the Moderns, an identification of what is valuable in their metaphysics, a flushing out of the poison and a reconstitution of the valuable materials as a carefully designed, rigorously controlled 'menu of values.'  Like a kind of tapas menu (if you permit me the analogy) where some items are necessary (the bread and butter modes) and you're encouraged to try everything but some items are optional.  All items, however, have been carefully crafted from many materials - an appropriately heterogeneous network.  It is a gourmet restaurant, the cuisine is often stunning in its subtly and ingenuity but it can hardly pass its wares off as raw - nor would it want to.  Everything is highly refined and, indeed, this is what makes the whole endeavour valuable; that is the chef's skill.  No mediations, no value.  Essential Latourism.

Long story short, the value menu is propositional, not simply descriptive.  It may be based upon experience both as a concept and in terms of some fieldwork but that doesn't change the fact that its menu items are highly philosophically refined.  Latour's rhetoric (for we really must distinguish it from the substance of his argument, there's no other way to read him) often implies an earthy, concrete empiricism-qua-evidentialism that is promised but never really delivered.  The empiricism-qua-trajectories-of-experience is perfectly valid - he channels some experiences and not others.  No problem there.  But he should be more direct in his representation of his endeavours.  His skill is great but he sometimes tries to pass it off as magic.  This must not be permitted.  A habit, an appearance of the worst sort.

REL isn't 'how religion works' (though I can accept that it may be part of how religion works), it's the part of religion that is asserted to be most valuable, the most appreciated.  A kind of mereological judgement (and therefore critique since judgement connotes critique) - looking into the assemblage, picking out the most valuable part according to your own predispositions and making this the essence of the thing, whether it is functionally essential or not (that is an open question - a lab without REF is surely unthinkable - it'd be a total failure - but the same may not be true of religious groups and REL).

By doing this across a range of domains one ends up with a system of essential values that can be debated with others and their interpretations of what's essential and what's not.  That's the way around the impasse of the rhetoric of description/empiricism vs. the reality of proposition/judgement.  Take them for what they are and then they can be properly debated; indeed, this is the condition of possibility for diplomacy.

The essences are not idealisations.  REL is not the idealisation of religious practice, it is one part of it - a part raised up and honoured by its identification.  The mereological judgement extracts and abstracts this one component and raises it to the level of essence.  Not because that's necessarily how things work but because that's how things work best - or so it is claimed.

If we take this approach to the modes then things open up and are pluralised again.  If we ignore the continual, nagging suggestion that these modes have been rigorously derived from experience of the way things are and simply accept that they are derived from particular, narrow portions of experience that have been abstracted, translated and submitted for debate and scrutiny then, personally, I find little more to object to on this issue as long as we're also able to say that e.g. REL isn't confined to religious practice but is simply typified by it; that religion is the archetypical instantiation of it but does not 'own' it.

If we can assume all of that (a double dislocation) then I don't see what is to stop someone (a) detaching REL from religious practice in observing it in other kinds of situations and (b) insisting that REF is the appropriate mode for exploring fundamental questions of cause and reason, that the piousness of REL is sometimes an appropriate form of translation but it's nothing to base a life around and that religious practice is for the most part a crossing of FIC/HAB with some thoroughly misunderstood MET thrown in for good measure all wrapped up with an often dangerous ribbon of POL and LAW.  That doesn't define any mode in terms of any other; its a perfectly legitimate diplomatic argument.  It doesn't deny the reality of REL, it simply recognises that religious practice is neither determined by that mode nor is that mode exhausted by religious practice.

Apologies to anyone who managed to read all of that.  I'm still working this out as I'm writing it!  There must be a shorter way of making the point but that's all I've got for now.

Latour, fieldwork and philosophy; A defence of (radical) empiricism

Forgive me, kind reader.  I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut this evening and therefore feel compelled to write a little bit like I'm a 'writer.'  Much of what follows is correspondingly pretentious.

What stoked my interest was another post by Terence of Agent Swarm blog fame; this paragraph in particular:

Despite his insinuations to the contrary, Bruno Latour with his compositionism is the direct application of this thought, that he is very familiar with. His talk about his “empirical” research is very misleading and contains overtones of scientistic bravado, as his system is parasitic on these predecessors. He is however a good populariser of good ideas, and his work should be encouraged as long as we do not accept his own contextualisation of his ideas. Latour is vey much an inheritor of Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida and Serres and the intellectual contemporary of Laruelle and Stiegler. It is this that gives his work its superiority over Badiou’s, not any primacy of the empirical over the philosophical.

I don't think that Latour ever claims a 'primacy' for the empirical over the philosophical.  His field studies aren't just about adding a scientific gloss to concepts he's borrowed (or stolen) from others.  I think that misrepresents what he does with his field studies.  I agree unreservedly that he's misleadingly coy about his philosophical influences.  Indeed, he's self-consciously strategic with who he acknowledges and who he doesn't.  He frequently and unabashedly cites Serres and other peers and contemporaries like Haraway, Callon, Greimas, etc. as well as lesser-known old, dead dudes like Whitehead and Souriau.  Indeed, he is happy to heap praise on anyone he considers an ally or fellow traveller.  For some reason other obviously significant precursors like Deleuze, Foucault and Nietzsche are deemed less than allies and are consequently relegated to scattered, almost accidental footnotes and occasional, almost embarrassed comments in interviews.

On this point I'm reminded of Foucault saying that he hardly ever cited Marx because, at the time that he was writing, everyone was citing Marx at every possible opportunity on any subject -- so Foucault elected not to cite him at all despite his obvious influence!  Latour's evasions may be similarly contrarian.  More cynically, they may be designed to allow Latour to present himself as more original than he really is.  Then again, maybe he just thinks that citing names and dates is boring and a waste of time; an academic pleasantry that, due to his fame and notoriety, he is in a position to skip.  I think there's probably an element of truth in all of those explanations.

Regardless, while Latour is clearly "parasitic" on his predecessors (who isn't?) I don't think the title "populariser" quite does him justice -- nor, I repeat, is his 'empiricism' merely about adding a scientific gloss to his inherited ideas.  The most valuable thing about Latour, from my point of view, is the way he joins the empirical and the philosophical -- far from these terms being in competition they, under his penmanship, become profoundly harmonious.  In fact, one of the main criticisms I have of his more recent work is that it is not empirical enough.  He was fastidiously anthropological when it came to science, engineering, law, etc. but largely abandoned the practice when it came to thinking about politics -- little more than offhand anecdotes creep into his political writings.  Consequently, I found his 'Politics of Nature' to be the weakest of all his books -- abstract, verbose and fanciful in a manner disappointingly unlike what came before it.  ('We Have Never Been Modern' was similarly abstract and general but since it wasn't modal in its focus and because it was considerably more concise it worked much better, I think.)

Probably my favourite essay of his, and certainly the best example of the empirical/philosophical complex that I'm talking about, is what I think (from memory) is the second chapter of Pandora's Hope, the essay on 'Circulating Reference'.  Is the story that Latour tells -- that of following some soil scientists and botanists in their journey from the heat, humidity and creepy-crawlies of the Brazilian rainforest through all their scientific translations back to the laboratories, running water and journal articles of cosy old France -- a mere gloss on the philosophical content?  Is it simply an elaborate, science-tinted vehicle for making his point?  I don't think that it is.

Certainly, the fact that these ideas were based on firsthand research and not simply on sitting down and thinking hard about stuff he'd read doesn't necessarily make them 'better' -- but to dismiss the empirical process through which the ideas were derived as indicating nothing more than a loosely shrouded scientism is shortsighted; in fact it misses the point.  Every philosophical idea derives from some kind of practical process -- whether it's trekking through the forests of Bavaria, slouching over a writing desk in a musty Cambridge office, or clumsily wandering about in a laboratory.  Every philosophical utterance is an embodied utterance, an utterance with a backstory, a genesis -- the result of a radically empirical flow of experience (James is another influence that Latour has no shame in citing, which is good since Latour's empiricism is really just an actor-network-ised version of James').

Most philosophers believe that reading, walking and talking to like-minded others constitutes a sufficient process for the productive stewing of ideas.  Latour, contrariwise, has found fieldwork among the different people his philosophies comment on (the practitioners of his various modes of truth) to be considerably more fecund than guessing at the particularities of their lives from a distance.  I don't find it hard to see why.

It isn't a case of 'empirical, therefore scientific, therefore better' -- it's much more interesting than that.  I mean, would the poor guy have spent all those months and years painstakingly note taking, conversation starting and archive trawling just to score a few Brownie points for being 'scientific'?  The interesting point is that, in what I think are his best works, the distinction between the empirical and the philosophical if it doesn't quite disappear then at least becomes considerably blurred.  I think it's much more likely that it is his anthropological process in combination with his philosophical and theological education that has resulted in the ideas he claims as his own (however unpaid his dues may be).  And this, I think, is an object lesson not just for how we interpret his work but also in how we think about thinking in general.

To my mind the really pertinent questions are not 'Why do fieldwork?' but rather 'Why don't more philosophers do fieldwork?'  Why don't more philosophers realise that secondary sources aren't good enough?  Why aren't the social sciences and empirically-inclined humanities given the time of day in philosophical discourse (unlike their Natural brethren)?  Why is intellectual hermeticism still thought to be a valid thought process?  The notion of the cloistered, hermetic genius is an evocative image, though it is one unburdened by any kind of actual existence.  Newton, for one, consciously promoted himself as such an isolated, neutral, disinterested-but-brilliant figure; historians like Simon Schaffer have shown that he, like all great men of letters, was a formidable network-builder.

Frankly, I think the burden of justification is on those who don't look very closely into the lives and issues on which they pass judgement.  It isn't the empiricist who needs to justify himself.

I don't think the epistemic authority deriving from doing empirical research is at all necessary to explain why Latour does such research.  However, I do think that, in many cases, actually going out and talking to people, reading primary sources and producing an original study of a situation does accord an analyst a degree of authority over and above those who simply read books and take others at their word with regard to how things work.  Take the old-school, pre-Bloor and pre-Latour historians and philosophers of science -- all those Whiggish dinosaurs who thought that they could infer all they needed to know about the practice of science from its results, on the one hand, and the casual testimony of its off-duty practitioners, on the other.  Latour and others showed this supposition to be laughably inadequate.  When intensively observed scientists' practices appeared to function quite differently from how they were supposed to according to tradition, dogma and folklore.  When anthropologists actually took the time to watch these tribespeople in action they found that the prevailing explanations proffered by their more naive and doting commentators were wholly inadequate since they were largely oblivious to what stands out as the most remarkable characteristic of scientific research, when observed by an anthropologically trained outsider: that facts are constructed, often astonishingly well.

I'm perfectly happy to say that these empiricists have greater epistemic authority by dint of their efforts, compared the idleness of their rationalist predecessors who merely inferred the details of their subjects from the ideological predispositions to which subjects and observers were all privy and upon which all agreed -- specifically, that Science was all about disinterestedly uncovering Truth and discarding Fiction.

But, and this is the key point for me, this superiority comes not from being grounded in practical experience as opposed to abstract ratiocination -- this classical opposition of empiricism and rationalism is false because it opposes two variants of a common problematic: subjectivism.  On the contrary, I think it can be claimed that the evidentialist ethic enacted by the practice of fieldwork leads to a general qualitative improvement in philosophical discourse because it extends the radically empirical flows of experience, the practical processes that generate the philosophical discourse.  The processes that philosophers generally enact so as to generate their ideas -- sitting, staring, reading, writing, walking, talking to other philosophers -- are not invalidated by this general empirical commitment but they are shown to be relatively disconnected from the world on which they comment in a way that is not necessarily disastrous but is demonstrably unnecessary.

In other words, fieldwork deepens a philosopher's attachment to that on which they commentate morally, socially and epistemically.  It broadens the attachments, the connections, the radical flows, which they both ride and channel.  Doing fieldwork (of whatever kind) allows a thinker to be surprised and perturbed in their trajectory by a greater array of facts, theories and knowledges than they would bump into otherwise.  It pluralises their journey and thus their philosophy -- but, importantly, it does so in a fashion with specific pertinence to what they're thinking about.  It's not about 'broadening horizons' by learning a new language or 'expanding your mind' by dropping acid or some-such.  It's about delving more deeply into the world so as to synthesise and criticise philosophical abstractions from within it rather than above it -- the latter being a fool's errand.

In a sense, every philosopher does 'fieldwork' because every act of ratiocination is an empirical -- i.e. experiential -- phenomenon.  The question is, then, not so much whether to do 'fieldwork' but rather what fieldwork is germane to the topic at hand.  Far too many philosophers think themselves above the humdrum, humid, detail-cluttered world of the merely empirical.  They are all fools.  (It's worth mentioning parenthetically that, from what I know of him, Feyerabend, for one, was no such fool.  Of course if I was being fair I might have to say the same of Kant, who was prolific in all the sciences of his day, and many others besides; but I'm not being fair I'm being polemical, so ... whatever!)

Rationalists -- those who believe that ratiocination is anything but a much variegated element in the flow of experience; that it transcends the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" out of which we all clutchingly piece together a world -- simply abstract from the flows they embody and translate in order to make it seem that their utterances are sui generis -- that their thoughts are more original than they would otherwise seem.  Then again, that is somewhat reminiscent of what Latour does by not stating his influences in full.  Oh well, none are innocent!  Or, as Kurt might say, so it goes.

[Addendum:

In response to the above Terence replies:

Philip of Circling Squares ... seems to be criticising me, despite the fact that I agree with nearly everything he says and have said similar things in various blog posts. I think he is right about what he calls “fieldwork” and I share his desire for philosophers to indulge in more “empirical research” conceived broadly. My quibble is that sometimes Latour slides between this more general sense, where a philosopher like Deleuze can be considered to do (conceptual, affective, perceptual, political, and yes why not? religious) fieldwork and a more limited sense in which Latour has done fieldwork but not Deleuze, Badiou, Lyotard and Serres. My quarrel is with the diplomatic caricature of himself that Latour secretes, consciously or not, and that interferes with the part of his message that I like and wish to help publicise.

I'm sorry if I misunderstood or misrepresented what you were saying. Hopefully the tone was not too objectionable. When I wrote “I’m not being fair I’m being polemical” I meant it! I was dimly aware that your Feyerabendian predilections might actually chime with some of what I was saying, the post I referred to just seemed to be saying something different. My mistake.

I completely agree with the portrayal of Latour as a wily, Machiavellian diplomat rather than the mild, polite, self-consciously constructive diplomat he pretends to be. As I wrote in a follow-up post, he always has to be read as a scheming polemicist rather than a scholarly essayist; everything’s performative with him. A key element of his performance is his citation — or non-citation — of influences. This rhetorical style can be a little annoying at times but it does seem to be intrinsic to his thought — practicing what he preaches, essentially. Bah, philosophers!]