Tarde’s 'Fragment d’histoire future' and the modal coordination of history and fiction – Reflections on 'Imagining the History of the Future'

Last week, I had the great fortune of attending the Imagining the History of the Future conference, part of the Unsettling Scientific Stories project (based at the universities of York, Newcastle and Aberystwyth). It was a really fantastic three days that introduced me to some fascinating people and has left me with a lot to think about.

For my part, I presented a paper – an exerpt from my thesis – on 'Gabriel Tarde’s Fragment d’histoire future and the milieu-fantôme.' This title is slightly modified from what I originally proposed (and from what appears in the programme). However, the original abstract still gets the gist of it:

Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) was a magistrate, criminologist, sociologist and philosopher. Around the turn of the century, he engaged in a series of polemical exchanges with Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) concerning the remit and purpose of sociology. He also wrote a science fiction novel: Fragment d’histoire future (1896), published in English as Underground Man (1905) with a preface by H.G. Wells. The setting is apocalyptic: The sun has gone out and humanity – or rather a lone inventive pocket of it – has burrowed into the earth’s crust, chasing its enduring inner heat. All other life is extinguished. Written from the perspective of a future historian, Tarde uses this subterranean scenario to conduct a thought experiment that tests out his sociological theories concerning imitation, creativity and 'great men.' Although war and strife are suffered early on, this new civilisation comes to enjoy a golden age, free from the hardships of its surface-dwelling ancestors. Diseases are few; air is “the purest that man has ever breathed”; food is plentifully acquired from the frozen oceans above; the new troglodytes wear “coats of asbestos spangled with mica.” The Malthusian tendencies of population are the only serious problem, held in check by strict controls on marriage. Read in relation to Tarde’s other works, particularly Monadologie et sociologie (1893), Fragment d’histoire future provides an alternative means of approaching the development of the social sciences, their relation to race, class and gender, as well as the not so much ecological as sociological futurology of an eccentric but important fin de siècle thinker.

More precisely, I am interested this book for several reasons: First, in explaining the premises of the story, the narrator describes a "social milieu" entirely separated from the "natural milieu" that was destroyed with the cataclysm. It is this "purification," as he calls it, that constitutes Tarde's thought experiment; that is, he asks what would happen to social relations when all other conditions of life are removed.

Second, this sociological system – or, rather, ontology – involved an open criticism of Durkheim's rather more superorganismic conception. Whereas Tarde understood sociology along the lines of networks of creative imitations, Durkheim thought of society as a totality of collective representations impinging upon and transcending individual agents. Third, just two years later, this led Tarde to ridicule Durkheim et al.'s use of the concept of "milieu" as a kind of explanatory panacea for all phenomena. Durkheim's "milieu-fantôme," as Tarde called it, was therefore to be repudiated, although Tarde continued to use a somewhat different conception of milieu. 

Fourth, Tarde's book can be taken as a kind of witness to its situation – that is, to the time and place to which it accommodated itself. As well as the apocalyptic science-fiction premise, Tarde's technological anticipations give us a strong sense of the common sense of his time, as does his apparent endorsement (however eccentric) of a kind of artistic eugenics (where only the most creative are permitted to reproduce). Moreover, Tarde's development of a social ontology based on ideas of epidemic contagion (he was by no means the only to propound such an ontology but was unusual as regards the extent of his defence of it) creates interesting parallels not only with other sociologists and criminologists but also with post-Pasteurian transformations in bacteriology.

Tarde, then, links together a great many things. Indeed, a rather wide-ranging world can be reconstructed in terms of the networks and milieus that relate to his choices and dispositions – an elite, metropolitan world but nevertheless a significant one for my purposes.

The presentation was, I think, well-received and there were a number of great questions that tested my thinking and gave me ideas as to how to take this further. However, one question in particular, from Hanna-Riikka Roine, has stayed with me (I paraphrase): What was Tarde trying to do with this shift from legal and academic to fictional-speculative writing? What was the purpose or motivation of this segue of genres?

This is not something that I've looked into in detail yet; however, my immediate response was that Tarde was, at this time, involved in a polemical relationship with his intellectual competitors and wished to propagate his ideas to a wider audience. I am quite sure that this is the case; however, it is also a rather unsatisfactory answer and I hope to develop a better one.

The conference closed with a roundtable where participants were invited to submit questions ahead of time. I asked:

Should academics be writing (science) fiction (rather than just writing about it)?

What if fictioning was part of our daily practice - in teaching and researching? (Or is it already?)

— Philip Conway (@PhilipRConway) March 29, 2018

In the discussion itself, in response to a comment by Sarah Dillon on the subject of evidence in relation to historiography, I expanded on these questions a little. In my thesis work I've found a comment from Michael Oakeshott's 1933 book Experience and its Modes to be particularly useful – specifically, that a historian is someone who is obliged to interpret the past in terms of the evidence of that past. In other words, an historian qua historian bears an obligation to evidence.

This leads to a criterion of distinction (or a differentia as Oakeshott calls it in more formal philosophical terms) that differentiates historical from other modes of experience. A fictionist qua fictionist may or may not incorporate historical fact into her text; however, a fiction qua fiction cannot be faulted for its choices in this regard. Rather, the obligations incumbent upon a fiction are to the immersive or transformative effects it may have on its audience – a quite different condition of relevance.

(My thinking on this point is related to both Étienne Souriau and, more recently, Bruno Latour who have described fiction as a 'mode of existence,' as well as to Isabelle Stengers' philosophy of science; however, I will leave their particular propositions for another day.)

To cut a long histoire short, it is in relation to this distinction between history and fiction that my thinking as regards historiography (and, indeed, my practice thereof) is being developed. However, while history and fiction are therefore understood as fundamentally distinct in modal or categorical terms, they are also practically and technically highly interrelated. In the abstract, they share a great many textual and rhetorical techniques and, in the concrete, it may be difficult in certain liminal cases to tell them apart.

So, the basic point that I was (and am) trying to make is that historians, even if they do not write fiction, already venture onto at least some of the same terrain. Likewise, fictionists often have more interesting things to say about the writing of history (or just writing in general) than do professional historiographers (I think this is no coincidence). And so what is needed, I believe, is a more precise understanding of the modal differentiae that both distinguish these practices and, at the same time, allow them to be intellectually and, perhaps, politically coordinated.

I am making this argument here in perhaps more cohesive terms than I managed 'off the cuff.' Indeed, articulating these ideas was quite a challenge, given the diversity of the audience. During the three days, I talked to at least one non-academic sci-fi author, a curator, and academics from half a dozen recognised disciplines and many more subfields and disciplinary interstices.

In response to my mini-monologue, Maxine Gee (a screenwriter and PhD candidate at York) made the completely fair point that many academics are already authors of fiction (sci-fi and otherwise). Amanda Rees added that writing fiction is not at all easy. Mat Paskins commented that while the exploration of the intricate overlaps between history and fiction is all well and good, historians must recognise a fundamental moral obligation to relating the past as it happened, both for the sake of the victims of historical events (such as, to take only the most obvious and oft-cited example, victims of the Holocaust) and also for present-day survivors (such as those gay men for whom the very possibility of a collective future was, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, very much in doubt). Then, towards the end of the session, Kanta Dihal commented that there are many more voices producing (science-)fiction than are usually taken notice of in academic discourse – a lack of diversity being something for which this conference itself could, indeed, be faulted. And, so, rather than writing more fiction, perhaps academics should instead undertake to read more widely.

I would not substantively disagree with any of the above remarks (as I have remembered and reconstructed them). Indeed, they really expand on, in different ways, what I was trying to articulate.

However, I would just add that I think there remain unexplored possibilities at the modal and practical meeting point of fiction and history that I want to explore further. I do not mean to suggest that academics (as a homogenous group) can or should all start writing fiction. Some already do; many would not want to; most would not be much good at it. Nevertheless, I think it is notable that the likes of Tarde's Fragment can still, today, be understood as being a rather eccentric and exceptional expressive and discursive choice.

Writing fiction well is indeed a formidable task, as is any other kind of artistic creation. However, while counterfactuals are a common enough pedagogical (and, to a lesser extent, historiographical) tool, the active coordination of historical and fictional modes of experience (or of existence) remains at the margins. This is not, moreover, to deny the vibrancy of the margins; however, it is to call attention to what may be lost by accepting marginalisation as a given.

As to why the practices of historical and fictional writing are thus, for the most part, estranged, the reasons are fairly obvious: In more or less all of the social sciences (where I am located) and perhaps most of the humanities, scholarship is institutionally rewarded in a manner not only strictly demarcated from the artistic but is, to some extent, defined in opposition to it. This arrangement is tied to political expectations as to what constitutes useful knowledge and how funding regimes, accordingly, are to be distributed. For most academics, writing fiction could only be a pastime; it could not be a serious part of that for which they are employed.

None of this is either surprising or insightful but it remains, I think, relevant.

My thesis asks: What is the history of the concept of environment? I am interested in how this expression, along with its precursors such as milieu and climate, came to be a part of the everyday conceptual landscape. However, I am also interested in answering a second question: What does this history mean for the problems of the present?

Fictions, such as that of Tarde, are a crucial resource for reconstructing this history – that is, for answering the first question. However, could they not also be a starting point for approaching the second?

To be sure, I would not like to align myself with Tarde in any substantive sense. And yet at least some of his problems remain problems that concern us today. Thus, I take his work as presenting a problem of inheritance: What worlds will we make from the always conflicted and often deeply corrupted traces and evidences that we have, with great degrees of preservational prejudice, inherited?

My paper and this post only tease out the outer fringes of this question. However, this conference has given me many more routes to now explore.

Andrew Kipnis on agency, ANT and the limits of ethnography; or, Does ANT have a politics problem?

The fabulous Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory has a new issue out.

Among the articles is Agency between humanism and posthumanism: Latour and his opponents by Andrew Kipnis. It is the latest in a series of interventions in this journal on anthropology and the so-called 'ontological turn.'

It starts out with a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument that, in short, 'agency' as such is not really the important issue. This is rather similar to what I was trying to get at a few posts ago with regard to 'flat ontology.' The disagreements that many people have with ANT have more, I think, to do with its methodological prescriptions than with the philosophical underpinnings – or, at least, the ontological discussion needs to deal with the methodological aspects as well. Kipnis writes:

"The methodological problem that ANT poses for politically critical research is not so much that it considers the agencies of nonhuman entities, or that in “posthumanist” fashion it considers agency to arise in networks rather than to reside in the individualized subjectivities of conscious human actors, but rather that it requires researchers to engage in slow, painstaking, and careful ethnographic research." (53)

Ethnographic methods might be very important and underused in many of the social sciences but there are, quite simply, some questions that cannot be answered through the sorts of detailed, empirical, case study-based research that ANT insists upon.

This is also something that I was attempting to articulate in a paper I wrote a few years ago on ANT and IR, Offshore: Symmetry, Space and Materiality. I argued that offshore tax havens are an excellent example of the kinds of networks that not only cannot be traced in any particular detail in practice (the investigative resources of whole nation states struggle to get past these walls of silence, so what could a mere social scientist do?) but, more than that, their very untraceability is what makes them what they are.

Because ANT “starts from irreducible, incommensurable, unconnected localities” [Latour] it assumes disconnection as an omnipresent status quo, thus foregrounding connection as what is exceptional and, consequently, as what is to be explained. Moreover, it takes for granted that relational events and the traces thereof are accessible to the researcher in a quasi-ethnographic fashion. This is emphatically not true in the case of, for instance, tax havens, which are defined by their secrecy. It is not for nothing that tax havens are argued to be more accurately termed ‘secrecy jurisdictions.’ Take, for instance, the case of tax haven lawyers who utilise trust and confidentiality laws to shield their clients’ assets; their entire purpose is to make these links untraceable; these people are not ‘centres of calculation’ but rather centres of “calculated ambiguity”. One cannot trace these networks since secrecy, non-traceability, is precisely what makes these networks function. They create disconnection and presume connection – precisely the opposite of ANT. 

This is, indeed, the experience of those who try to gauge offshore. A report for the Tax Justice Network compares the “subterranean system” of offshore to a “black hole” since it “is virtually invisible and can be somewhat perilous to observers who venture too close. So, like astronomers, researchers on this topic have necessarily used indirect methods to do their estimates, conducting their measurements from a respectful distance.” Or, as journalist Nicholas Shaxson (who has gotten as close to these networks as anyone) puts it, “[e]ven if you can see part of the structure … you can’t see the whole, you cannot understand it.” Another tax analyst uses the black hole metaphor: “Identifying tax shelter activity can be as difficult as finding objects trapped inside a black hole – their presence is known only through inference.” 

ANT grew up, so to speak, in the information-rich environment of STS. Whether following scientists, engineers, lawyers or psychotherapists, Latour, for one, has always examined actors who were relatively indifferent to their being followed. Thus he can write: “Our slogan ‘follow the agents themselves’ is not for the dogs. To it we sacrifice everything.” This methodological principle can be raised to an absolute without missing out on too much. IR, by contrast, is frequently an information-poor environment. Or, more accurately, it has huge quantities of data to sift through but these are generally traces of traces of traces; too much data, not enough information. Moreover, many of its actors are likely to be quite hostile to the notion of being followed in anything like an ethnographic sense! The mode of inference particular to ANT is basically limited to the ability to join the dots between one material-semiotic trace and another; consequently, it is quite ill-prepared to confront phenomena characterised by untraceability. While IR can learn a lot from ANT’s radical empiricism, for example its insistence that well constructed descriptions are explanations, it cannot swallow this pill whole.

After that point, Kipnis' arguments, for me, go off the rails a little bit. After suggesting that we can grant 'agency' to everything provided that we distinguish between different kinds of agency (okay, fine), he attempts to smuggle some fairly unreconstructed humanism and Marxism back in (reconstructed, I might be able to deal with).

First, he criticises Latour's lack of attention to questions of power and economics.

"[…] the lack of discussion of Capital and Power in his seemingly encyclopedic “Anthropology of the Moderns” makes me cringe. How can capital not be one of the modes of existence for modern humans?" (54)

How 'capital' would work as a mode of existence, I have no idea. This is a criticism of AIME that has cropped up repeatedly, in various ways: 'you've not made [this thing that is very important] a mode of existence, therefore you are devaluing or ignoring it.' Capital would, in the context of AIME, presumably be an ontic rather than ontological entity. In other words, it would be something constituted by a heterogeneous complex of modalities rather than being a kind of being in itself. That doesn't devalue it as a concept (although Latour's disinterest in such concepts is no secret).

Capital, for Kipnis, is:

"an instituted agency that pressures us moderns to make our calculations selfishly."

The ease with which this force of nature is injected into the text so casually, as though it were something that operated independently, autonomously and without mediation, is striking. One needn't undertake only detailed, local, empirical case studies of 'capitalism' (what a task that would be!) in order to recognise the value of the insistence that one look for the mediators by which any given force, no matter how powerful, is assembled, produced and made to act in the world – even as this force exerts pressures that are irreducible to the networks that mediate, stabilise and utilise it. Divested of the excesses of its occasionally fussy and fastidious empiricism, ANT can still help us to understand this much. Perhaps this is the shared task or middle ground that Kipnis is trying to get at but it doesn't come across as such in his writing on this point.

He then rolls out a familiar trope that I also discussed in my previous post on 'flat ontology,' the alleged ignorance of power:

"I find Latour’s relative disinterest in human power relations mirrored in his lack of attention to the concept of power. If I were rewriting his conceptual framework, I would substitute “power” for “felicity/infelicity conditions” as the primary dimension for differentiating types of agents." (54)

Felicity conditions in AIME concern different ways of distinguishing between success and failure. Of course, each mode has a kind of 'power' of its own as each is a different way of acting, of existing. Using 'power' as a differentiating condition would simply be restating what that mode is (hence the concept adds nothing and is superfluous, which is precisely Latour's point about it).

In the end, Kipnis rather undoes his previous good work by making a mess of agency, somehow 'granting it to everything' but then insisting that it differs categorically from power and describing human agency as "that contradictory space we experience whenever we attempt to make a decision about the unknown" (56). Far from offering a minor modification to the ANT take on agency, this completely undoes it since it re-locates human agency in an essential human reflexivity (which sounds a lot like politics, from Latour's point of view) and, presumably, any capacities that human beings have beyond this are not 'human agency' (and so what are they?).

The distinction between agency and power I just find strange.

"Barack Obama or Bill Gates undoubtedly have more power than I do. They get to follow their proclivities or gut instincts across a wider range of contexts than I do and their decisions certainly affect a greater number of people than mine. But this power does not give them more agency than me." (56)

Perhaps it is just me but I find this to be an irredeemably knotted jumble of thoughts. Making agency a qualitative condition of a kind of thing (specifically, humans) and power a quantitative measure (where some 'have' more of it and others less), again, completely demolishes anything that might remain of the ANT-type conception of the world.

The likes of Obama and Gates are only powerful due to their particular locations within various networks of all kinds of actors. Yes, they 'have' power in a sense – when they move or speak, ripples issue out far out of proportion in amplitude to those from you or me – but these networks also 'have' them (the 'possession' of power works both ways). These landscapes are full of asymmetries – as are scientific laboratories or building sites. Power is everywhere, so much so that pointing it out is rather trite and serves to convey nothing more than the author's self-identification as a 'critical thinker.' The well-beaten drum of 'power critique' has less, I think, to do with the urgencies of the world than with the proclivities of the academy but that is perhaps another post.

None of this, I hasten to add, means that ANT doesn't have a problem with politics. The case study-centrism, the ethnographic fundamentalism (perhaps these terms are a bit strong but rather too much than too little…) – these close off many important research questions from examination. The centrality of the case study, particularly when articulated in its somewhat vulgarised form as part of a 'theoretical framework' to be employed by graduate students, has the effect of creating legions of researchers that are tremendously interesting and productive but can all too easily disconnect their matters of research concern from dissensus, conflict and the embeddedness of their own research in wider political processes.

In one sense, this is nothing more than an argument for methodological pluralism (in additional to the ontological pluralism that AIME brings with it), which is usually, in my experience, pushing at an open door with regard to getting people to concur. Institutional acceptance is another issue altogether.

I am not, in this post or previous ones, attempting to pretend that there aren't flaws and limitations in the ANT approach to social science (I, for one, do not intend to employ them in any direct fashion in my own thesis work). I am rather trying to get away from criticisms that are, by now, misplaced clichés and get towards something a bit more productive.

Not quite there yet but hopefully I'm making some progress – and the better parts of this Kipnis article have helped in that regard.

William James on the conciliation of religion and science; also, mathematics and pragmatism

I'm presently reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Like much of James' writing, some of it can be rather pedestrian and ponderous but then certain sections jump out like great glowing epiphanies. I like this section from the end of lecture 5 on "The religion of healthy-mindedness" in particular:

The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. Just as evidently neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal. (99-100)

This brief note on mathematics reminds me of Isabelle Stengers' regular insistence on the importance of the fact that A. N. Whitehead was a mathematician. Far from granting transcendent access-authority to a higher realm of ideas, in this understanding mathematics heightens only one's capacity for perspective-shifting—that is, for pragmatism.

Scientific iterations of 'Anthropocene' and modal incommensurability

Terence Blake writes (by way of introduction to a broader blog critique of Latour's AIME project):

The term “Anthropocene” is a scientific denomination, and so belongs to the mode of scientific knowledge, or “REF” in Latour’s terminology.

I don't think that's fair. 'Anthropocene' is a multi-modal term if ever there was one. This is an interesting video that pertains to that point:



John Tresch in conversation with Jan Zalasiewicz. The latter is very insistent upon the necessity of sticking to a strictly scientific (and, more specifically, geological) vocabulary within the context of his debates with other geologists. There is a very precise mode of discourse that cannot be seen to be influenced by political or moral concerns in any way. For the geologist, it all ultimately comes back to the stratigraphic record itself. That is king. However, Zalasiewicz at no point attempts to push away or close down political or moral iterations of 'Anthropocene.' Indeed, he seems to have many sympathies with these readings.

The distinction of modalities here is an institutional necessity but it does not follow that 'Anthropocene' begins and ends with science.

Terence's broader point concerns something he's taken issue with before: the apparent incommensurability of the modes of existence. When writing my recent article on the subject, I thought long and hard about how to describe the relationship of Latour's modes to one another. I settled on the term 'interimplicatedness'—ugly but precise. The context: "[Latour's] works must be read ‘anthropologically’ – that is to say, in cognisance of the interimplicatedness of every typological strand of ‘the social’ taken altogether [that is, all of the modes]."

'Interdependent' would be too strong, 'interrelated' too bland. Implication seems to me to be the correct choice. To transform one mode is to transform the others. They are not vacuum sealed. However, the question does persist with regards to their purity.

If a mode is akin to a particular kind of rhythm, vibration or tone and if the 'crossing' of modes can result in harmonics and disharmonics then are we to expect a pure harmony (a perfect sine wave) when we overlay modal events of the same kind? Or is there a necessary degree of modulation (a resonant disharmony) between any two existents, even at a strictly ontological level? The latter seems a more palatable. There is, therefore, a question of plurality within modes of existence as well as between them.

To put it another way, if we overlay two existential waveforms on one another and if we then discover subtle disharmonics in evidence, this indicates the historicity of these abstract categories. To paraphrase Nietzsche, only that which has no history can be identified. This intra-modal plurality was not the concern of the Inquiry; nevertheless, it is something that seems to follow from the principal concepts upon which the project was constructed.

Styles of writing, modes of thought and logic versus poetics

By way of response to my previous post on the seminar that she organised, Penny Newell writes (with terrific kindness!):

It's great to read the write-up on your blog Philip, and, having browsed the press release for the Reset Modernity! exhibition, I really see how it all links in to the anomalies series. I feel compelled to say something. One thing I really love about your blog is your ability to say that you simply do not know, or that you might know, at some point, but perhaps not everything, just yet. I actually think this in itself is how I think modernity should be 'reset'. It blows syllogistic logic out of the water, allowing you to speak meaningfully, truthfully, rigorously, with an quality of erudition that I think is truly important, in ways that allow your reader to slow down; allows your ideas to resist the finitude of conclusive statements. Put simply: I can't extract what you say from how you are saying it. Maybe you don't intend this, but it's there (and it's actually, in my opinion, really in keeping with the Stengers piece you sent to me - not that I am calling you out as an 'idiot'... merely that I feel you resist the 'and so' of writing). 

Bit of a tangent, but just yesterday I was reading a piece by Constantino Marmo, referenced in Eco's work on metaphor, entitled, 'Suspicio: A Key Word to the Significance of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism'. It sparked an interest in me as Marmo posits the 13th c. (esp. Albert the Great / Aquinas) as a (mini-)paradigm shift toward subtended various modes of thinking within logic, such that Aristotelian rhetoric and poetics became subsumed within the rationalis scientia; opening the way to reading poetics as and through a methodological modus sciendi. This is fascinating! (though I need to explore in more depth just how much I can make the following claim...) as it seems to me that part of the task of resetting modernity should be to reclaim rhetoric and poetics from logic; or at least to position them alongside it. My open question is: if we do so, what happens? What happens to the task of criticism within the field of poetics, if we consciously, just-so-slightly, nudge logic to one side? Does it reveal that works such as the Poetics are somehow subordinate to the Organon? Does it show that we're trying to be too logical in our readings of those works? What does it say about a whole field of Arts and Humanities, which owes so much of its thinking to thinking substantial things, drawing substantial conclusions, about poetics and rhetoric? I feel (or at least, I try in my work to practice the possibility that), if we shift the positionality of the Poetics, away from logic, it becomes a document that we can just write through, away from the rationalising project of modernity, towards, well, not much ... perhaps just away from an 'and so'. Perhaps just towards a 'perhaps'.

I hadn’t thought about it in that way but I suppose that I do work with a degree of ‘idiocy’ (in the technical sense!). I feel utterly unimpressed by modes of thought that always have a pre-fabricated answer for everything. ‘Well,’ they say with a half-stifled yawn, ‘this is, of course, just a case of [xyz].’ Such boredom infects and infests everything it touches (it’s the boredom of someone who’s already had every idea they’ll ever have...). The most important thing I ever learned was how to be productively and creatively perplexed (rather than merely bored) by things that I didn’t understand. It took me a long time to figure that out. I feel like I’ve been making up for lost time ever since.

Self-certainty is good for defending hilltops; exploring forests is another thing altogether. How this translates into a writing style is tricky. I do give a lot of thought to the relation between style, mood, rhythm, structure and argument. And I do find them to be inseparable. Of course, this is not a new insight. However, acceptance of the mere fact of performativity tells us nothing with regard to how that performance should be carried out. And that is something that doesn’t get thought through enough. (Most academic and intellectual ‘styles’ are just copies of copies of copies.)

Regarding poetics and logic, that all does sound very interesting! I suppose if we want to think about ‘resetting’ some dualistic aspect of modernity then we would have to begin by acknowledging or finding the value of both sides of the equation. We might want to save poetics from the stolid strictures of logic. Okay, but if we are to flood this particular valley we need to adequately re-house both villages. If the modernist settlement makes logic an enemy of poetics then we should have some sympathy for the logicians too! They also have no choice but to act as though logic is exhaustively defined by the abstract, the austere, the ‘whether-you-like-it-or-not.’ To quote one Freeman Lowell, “now, what kind of life is that?”

However, it is not a question of adopting a 'neutral' position. A diplomat will never attempt to arbitrate a dispute as though it could be resolved by technicality. A diplomat is necessarily ‘biased’ (or, better, committed) to one side or the other. However, a diplomat will also sometimes say to their side ‘now hold on, they won’t accept that; no, no, that won’t fly.’ Even militants can be diplomats if they are able to slow down momentarily in this manner. So, to militate for poetics against logic is fine and understandable (goodness knows we are all tired of having our poetic daisies stomped on by jackbooted yawn-stiflers!) but the situation, to my mind, becomes truly interesting (in every sense of that word) when we take on the agency re-distributions necessary to do justice to both sides. It becomes interesting when we start to say ‘now, hang on….’

And, in that respect, I think an historical approach is really crucial. A kind of diplomatic history in the sense of a history of disputes becomes extremely fecund when we are able to recognise ourselves as inheritors of these disputes. We may not share the problems that these disputers were grappling with but we have often inherited their solutions.

So, in other words, we should ask not only what could poetics be if it was not browbeaten by logic but also what could logic be if it was not burdened with having to browbeat poetics? A far harder question, I admit!

'It's not a pathology, it’s a project!—Sociology, anomie and atmosphere'

I'm very much looking forward to speaking at a seminar run by the Performance Research Group at King's College London next Monday (the 16th). The theme of the series is 'the anomalous' and this session in particular is titled 'The Anomaly in Art and Modes of Existence.' I'll be speaking alongside Penny Newell, the organiser. I'll be presenting something drawn from my ongoing interest in the 1972 science fiction film Silent Running. I'm in the slow but gradually progressing process of turning this interest into something concrete.

The presentation will have three parts: first, an illustrated summary of the film; second, a consideration of Émile Durkheim's concept of anomie relative to the themes presented (the main idea I take from the film is that of 'tragic modernism'—where the basic tenets of modernism are fully and naively accepted but lamented as a tragedy); and third, a reconstruction of this concept in dialogue with the AIME project, trying to understand its socio- or geo-political importance with respect to, in a phrase, air-conditioning our collective atmospheres (this then linking back to the film and its beautifully, movingly nuanced illustration of what happens when affective and social atmospheres, no less than oxygenated ones, are stripped away).

The title captures the essential point I'm trying to make: anomie is poorly understood as an anomalous pathology afflicting the social organism, as per Durkheim. Anomie—defined by Durkheim as the destructive de-restriction and derangement (dérèglement) of collective moral-legal bonds—is precisely the objective of the modernist project! To remove all bonds, all obligations with regard to other humans and, crucially and most intensively, to non-humans is precisely the point. They called it 'rationalisation.'

Durkheim cannot see this, or at least he cannot see it fully (his condemnation of economic theory for its anomie-inducing reductionism notwithstanding), because he has already fully and completely accepted the primary consequence of the anomie of the moderns: the fundamental separation of the social and the natural.

Durkheim was actively participating in this anomie-exacerbation (ever the 'rationaliser'). His condemnations were failures since he was reproducing the most fundamental principles of the very ideologies that he was condemning. This, I think, can be demonstrated through a close reading of the film, although I am still figuring out just how to construct this argument (very much a work in progress!).

To what extent the concept of anomie can (or should) be reconstructed is debatable but, I hope, it is at least worth debating. Connecting Durkheim to Latour's work is undoubtedly a provocative move! However, I think it could be a productive one (albeit one that will inevitably raise more questions than I am able to answer at present).

Should 'system' be part of our ontological inheritance?

In response to my last post, Tim Howles writes:

Cf. the question put to BL in his recent interview on 'AIME as system': "The site has been open for two years in French, one in English, and I still don’t see new modes coming in. Isn’t the 'system' here coming to paralyse the inquiry?"

System or 'quasi-system' (a term that I've applied to AIME elsewhere)?

What is the 'quasi' doing for 'object' and 'subject'? Literally speaking, they are 'as if' objects and subjects. More specifically, it renders them not a kind of object or entity, or at least not any entity with an enduring identity, but a point in a trajectory; it implies that the quasi-X is always a becoming-X and always a becoming-with-others. It is a relativisation of subject and object not to each other (à la dialectic) but to a wider pluriverse of existential modalities.

In terms of AIME, it is obvious enough as to why we'd want to keep notions of objectivity and subjectivity as part of our 'inheritance' (albeit deeply modified). The question is really one that I posed right at the end of my article: what are we to inherit and how? What is it in the notion of 'system' that is valuable, despite all the problems with that term?

I think it could be related to the notion of cosmos. Unlike high modernists like Alexander von Humboldt (whose biography I've been reading recently -- but that's an aside), the Latourian cosmos is not at all a pure, perfect state of harmonious nature. It's more Messiaen than Mozart. Harmony, yes, but amidst discord of all sorts. No kosmos without kakosmos -- we'd do well to remember that there is no guarantee of enjoying a cosmos whatsoever; cosmoi are composed.

If a quasi-systematising is an organising, a settling, a becoming-cosmos, then the important question concerns how that systematising is happening. And isn't that what the diplomacy is all about? Progressively composing the common cosmos in the absence of a pre-given sovereign?

Certainly, we shouldn't hold becoming-cosmic or becoming-system to be necessarily superior to whatever the contrary would be -- no composition without decomposition. What a quasi-system permits is an organised conversation about our cherished abstractions. Its realisation is necessarily a stuttering and pragmatic one. However, I think that there is definitely a case for 'system' to be part of what we inherit from the moderns.

I'm trying to think up a joke about Quasimodo but I haven't quite gotten there yet.

quasimodo: "Low Sunday," 1706, Quasimodo Sunday, from Latin quasi modo, first words of introit for the first Sunday after Easter: quasi modo geniti infantes "as newborn babes" (1 Pet. ii:2). The hunchback in Victor Hugo's novel was supposed to have been abandoned as an infant at Notre Dame on this day, hence his name. For first element, see quasi; for second see mode.

Hot off the press: 'Back Down to Earth: Reassembling Latour's Anthropocenic Geopolitics'

After much preamble on this blog over the past few years, my first journal article has just been published online (it will appear in print at a later date as part of a special issue).

Abstract:

The principal intuition of this article is that Bruno Latour’s explicitly or implicitly ‘geopolitical’ works – strewn as they are across many years and innumerable texts – have not yet been coherently assembled in such a way that their critical interrogation relative to contemporary debates in political geography can gainfully proceed. Such a reassembly must consider ‘earlier,’ ‘later’ and whatever other Latours. Although ‘politics’ per se has, in his more recent works, become just one ‘mode of existence’ among others, every aspect of Latour’s thought has political ramifications. Consequently, his works must be read ‘anthropologically’ – that is to say, in cognisance of the interimplicatedness of every typological strand of ‘the social’ taken altogether. In short, this article attempts not only to read Latour’s works more interconnectedly than have other readers, but, furthermore, to read Latour’s ‘geopolitical’ writings in a more joined-up fashion than he has himself written them. To this end, it (1) introduces the major elements of Latour’s political philosophy, highlighting the importance of geopolitical issues and concepts from his early works onwards; (2) précises his 15 ‘modes of existence,’ laying out the philosophical resources that will be subsequently rewoven; (3) examines six key allies with whom he rearticulates first geo (James Lovelock, Peter Sloterdijk) and politics (Walter Lippmann, John Dewey) separately and then geopolitics (Michel Serres, Carl Schmitt) itself; and, finally, (4) details his Anthropocenic geopolitics conceptually by speculatively intertwining the above with his recent Gifford Lectures. The reassembly attempted – or, rather, initiated – herein is, therefore, neither disinterested nor definitive. It is a working through of the possibilities internal to a specific, albeit sprawling, bundle of texts. It presents a reading both constructive and ‘charitable’ – not in order to obviate critical interrogations but in the hope of provoking a more incisive debate concerning Latour’s works in relation to political geography.

If anyone without institutional access wants a copy, this link allows 50 downloads free of charge. (If those with institutional access could download from the normal page, that would be appreciated.) If and when that route is exhausted, just drop me an email (see top right between 'Subscribe' and 'Archive') and I'd be happy to oblige.

Reflections on An Inquiry into Modes of Existence as an experiment in the digital humanities

In the last week of July this year, I had the good fortune of attending the concluding workshops of Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence project. I've written several posts on and deriving from this in the past; however, I've not really reflected on the event itself as an experiment ‒ which is what it was; an experiment in the digital humanities. (See also this by Consuelo Vasquez.)

We were to play a 'Serious Game' ‒ that is, to test, trial and interrogate the 'Report' (i.e. the AIME book) produced by Latour as his 'Anthropology of the Moderns.' However, we were not at liberty to simply set about 'critiquing.' The attendees were divided into several roundtables that worked independently on politics, religion, economy, nature and diplomacy, respectively. Each table was to, first of all, review and synthesise the many contributions submitted to the project website. By the end of the week, we had to collectively write a 'Specbook' containing our indispensable values and requirements that would inform, first, the public seminar to be held the following week in which the chargés d'affaires (Barbara Cassin, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Deborah Danowski, Peter Weibel, Simon Schaffer, Clive Hamilton) would, each in their own way, begin to edge towards 'facing Gaia'; and, secondly, the eventual rewriting of the Report. At the end of each day, there was a plenary session where the groups came together and debated their findings.

At this point I should mention my own struggles ‒ travails, as we say in English... ‒ with having only the most rudimentary grasp of the French language. The roundtable on politics was held primarily in English (and this is were I spent the first part of the week); however, the plenary sessions were almost entirely in French (and with perfect justification since I was the only non-French speaker in attendance!). Although I was greatly aided by the interpretations of Cormac O'Keefe and Stephen Muecke, the most immediate consequences of this linguistic disjuncture were that (a) my head hurt a lot and (b) whenever I opened my mouth I ran the very serious risk of making a fool of myself, having only understood about 10% of what was going on. (Sure enough, that happened. However, I more or less got through the week in one piece!)

But back to the point. The thing that strikes me most about the way all this worked, retrospectively, is the very partial realisation of the 'game' aspect. Certainly, this was never going to be a run-of-the-mill academic workshop since we were playing a 'Serious Game' under quite unconventional conditions. However, it was not quite a 'role playing game' (something like a Model United Nations) either since there was no clearly defined narrative nor prescribed characters. As 'gamers' we were surely playing characters ‒ but those characters were, seemingly, ourselves.

The whole format of the event was consequently approached from an array (perhaps, at times, a disarray) of perspectives. At times it seemed as though every participant had their own idea of what was going on (though this may have been an impression imposed by my aforementioned linguistic marginality). This was liberating inasmuch as it permitted the event to evolve ‒ diverging, converging and improvising ‒ as it progressed. However, this freedom was by no means uncurtailed. The plenary session effectively acted as a 'sovereign voice' that stamped down on this or that, approving or denying certain lines of conjecture.

In other words, it was never completely clear what the rules were but it was occasionally made very clear what they were not. This is how the experiment was able to hang so loosely without falling apart altogether. (Schmitt, and so on...)

These occasionally crossed purposes, and the practical misalignments that resulted, came to a head particularly in the discussions of diplomacy (a roundtable that I participated in towards the end of the week). Every table was under instruction to 'deflate' its subject matter, and to do so both simultaneously and symmetrically. A deflated politics without a correspondingly humilous economy would be neoliberal; a deflated religion without its matching politics would be a cold and aggressive secularism, and so on. The diplomacy table interpreted its remit as covering both anthropology and philosophy. It then, and this was certainly the overwhelming judgement, inflated these institutions to a degree earning the label 'Kantian.' This really didn't go down well. The balloon burst.

Upon reflection, I think that the whole experiment may have worked better if it had been more of a 'role playing game' and, in that sense, more intensively fictionalised. Some attendees (myself included) were, at times, labouring under the misapprehension that we (the attendees) were ourselves 'diplomats.' It seems to me now that we should have thought of ourselves as, at most, attachés. We were doing nothing more than preparing briefing papers based upon our own, partial, naive perspectives (plus the electronic augmentations afforded by the contribution-collecting website), towards a negotiation that would be decidedly 'above our pay-grade.' The 'middle ground' was indeed the issue but it was not we who would go there.

Nevertheless, it was enormously refreshing and exciting to participate in an intellectual exercise that broke the usual conference/workshop format where various researchers assemble, read their pre-written papers, eat, drink and then fly back to wherever it is they came from. If this experiment seeds more creativity in the manners and modes by which ideas get debated and texts get drafted then it will have been a success for that alone.

However, on that point, a final difficulty sticks in my mind in particular: the difficulty of speaking under a condition of the suspension of 'true belief.' In other words, in order to participate in a game one does not act solely on the basis of one's own sense of self but, rather, upon the instructions received, the roles given or taken up. One must speak from a subject position that is not 'oneself' but is already the result of the displacement that necessarily occurs in anticipation of negotiation.

This happened, I think, only fleetingly and inconsistently. The participant to have adopted such a pose most explicitly was the chargé d'affaires Simon Schaffer,   who made a point of embodying a diplomatic persona and thus not 'saying what he really thinks.' While there were many personae flying about the place, I'm not convinced that the specific form of detachment necessary for the diplomatic game was widely achieved ‒ at least not as widely as it could have been. Indeed, some clung to their 'true beliefs' with a passion.

To be 'detached' with regard to any firm, pre-given ground but not, for that reason, 'disinterested' ‒ such discursive techniques are still to a large extent awaiting if not their invention then certainly their adoption.

And this brings me back to my previous remarks: the experiment only partially broke free of the conventions and standards of existing academic discursive formats. At times the 'game' relapsed into something much more closely resembling a conventional 'conference' or 'workshop' than, I think, was intended. The gravitational pull of engrained habits remained too strong and the deterritorialisation effected by the territorialising motions of the 'rules of the game' was too weak precisely because the rules themselves were too weakly specified. Truly leaving the orbit of arbitrary convention would, however counter-intuitively, have required a stronger and more arbitrary imposition of a counter-convention for the purposes of the game. Stronger, more challenging rules, roles and narratives would have meant a greater pull towards dissociating 'true belief' from speech-action and would, therefore, have established a more diplomatic event, a more thoroughly and impressively prepared 'middle ground.'

That said, I count myself very fortunate to have played a part in this experience ‒ perplexed, furrow-faced, pain-brained onlooker though I so often was!

On Law, Nomos and Gaia: Three Questions for Latour’s Legal Geopolitics

On Friday and Saturday last week I had the terrific good fortune of attending a workshop at the University of Hamburg titled 'The Materiality of Law and Global Politics: Inquiries into Bruno Latour’s Sociological Anthropology of Modernity.'

The paper that I presented is available here:



I am still mentally digesting what I learned from the event but it confirmed to me what I had already suspected; specifically, that I want to incorporate the sociology of law into my work in future.

I certainly wasn't able to resolve the 'three questions' that I posed; however, I think that I have a better idea of how to go about addressing them. Examining the relationship between law and geopolitics in their respectively pluralised senses will, I think, be very interesting.

The common ground between secular and religious -- some belated reflections on the religious mode of existence and how it can improve (as)sociology

One of the more challenging chapters in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence is that on religion. I initially found this section to be very frustrating but have come to appreciate it more with time. If I am reading it adequately, and this post should establish whether or not that's the case, it is a line of thought with considerable political importance but also with some major problems in its existing iterations.

Latour's theology must be read, I think, by taking very seriously the claim that his whole project is an exercise in diplomacy -- that is, in building a middle ground between hitherto ontologically irreconcilable groups (in this case those hitherto known as the secular and the religious).

The need for such a mediation exercise is obvious. Many religionists stereotype secularists as cold, uncaring, self-interested, amoral or even actively immoral, interested only in their own pleasure and short-term well-being (this being a relatively mild version). Likewise, for many secularists (particularly of the atheist-humanist variety), the religious are figured as babbling lunatics seething in an ear- and reason-clogging soup of their own violently self-certain and irrational existential dogma (this is a fairly common version).

As a way out of this collective impasse, Latour proposes to transform the concept of religion. His theology is based upon the argument, I think it can be said, that the secular are religious and the religious are secular. That is, it is based upon two argumentative moves that cut across each other.

First, the larger part of his theological writings are dedicated to divesting religion of its vulgar or 'abusive' transcendence; that is, of its claim to 'another world' above or behind the merely manifest one. To the religious Latour says: 'you are also secular'; secular in the sense of the Latin saecularis "worldly, pertaining to a generation or age." The religious are secular because they are of this world; they have no transcendent realm to appeal to as though it were some kind of cosmic supreme court, nor another, higher world to escape to as though this grubby, fallen sphere were not good enough for them (here his Christianity is strikingly and ironically Nietzschean). The only world is this sublunar world; however, crucially, religious experience is found to be reconcilable with this statement; indeed, Latour seems to argue, it is only by reconciling the religious and the worldly that religion-proper can be rediscovered. Transcendence, far from enshrining religious experience, crushes it.

Second, an equally important though less extensively developed portion of his argument follows on from Michel Serres' return of 'religion' to its etymological roots, the word deriving from relegare (to go through again, reprise), religare (to attach) or religiens (careful, opposite of negligens). Serres suggests that religion inherits particularly from the latter: "Whoever has no religion should not be called an atheist or unbeliever, but negligent" (The Natural Contract, p.47-8). To the secular Latour says: 'you are also religious'; religious in the sense of being care-imbued and loving creatures of intimacy and mutual personification. In his Gifford Lectures on natural theology (the Facing Gaia lectures), Latour suggests that coexistence and civilisational persistence on this earthern orb will only be achieved by taking up religion once again, urgently radicalising a radically reconstructed religiosity.

The price that the religious have to pay for this accommodation is relinquishing their other-worldly transcendence. The price that the secular have to pay is losing their (insufficiently) secularised theological concept, Nature. Both must concede the easy, knock-down arguments that they habitually aim at their Other. The mutual gain is a common ground where neither Nature nor God can serve as a unilaterally imposed court of appeal and disputes must be worked out and alliances must be forged in a common manner (or in a manner of becoming-common while remaining plural); that is to say, diplomatically.

This, I think, is a profoundly important argument. However, my initial frustrations haven't entirely dissipated. To put it simply, in reading this ground-building exercise between the secular and the religious I, as one of the godless, get the feeling of reading a letter that is addressed to someone else. I see elements of relevance to my life's experience within it but this seems almost coincidental. In other words, one side of Latour's middle ground seems a smoothly paved plaza while the other is, at best, a dusty, bumpy track.

The way that the theological ideas are presented in AIME seem largely directed towards only one of the groups that are being brought together: the hitherto 'religious.' That is, the text seems overwhelmingly preoccupied with convincing the religious that they are secular and gives short shrift to the equally necessary argument that the secular are also religious. This second element becomes almost subtextual.

The key conceptual and imagistic meeting point that Latour gives the two sides is the equation of love-talk and the religious experience. He explains it thus: When one lover says to their partner 'do you love me?' and the other replies 'of course I do' their relationship is rebuilt anew; if, however, the latter replies 'why are you asking me this? I told you so on the third of November!' they mistake the opening to relational reinforcement for a request for information. This category mistake, for Latour, typifies the misunderstanding of religion. Thus one can say (and this is not an uncommon posit in general) that the religious experience is love.

In his book Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, Latour refers to the lovers' affirmations as a "scale model" of the religious experience (p.118). In this phrase a middle ground is affirmed but, at the same time, also rendered rather uneven. It would be interesting to know on what scale this relationship functions on; 10:1, 20:1, 1000:1? The argument that Latour seems to be furthering here is that formalised religion, when properly enacted, institutionalises, intensifies, extends, links, joins and safeguards the world-, bond- and person-forming experience of love. However, the suggestion of this is therefore that those who play no part in organised religion are somehow less taken by the religious love, less caught up in its mode of existence; which, if the dual move is followed through fully in both directions, should not be the case.

The Inquiry is silent on non-traditional forms of love-instituting, which seems to imply the religionists' prejudice as detailed above -- specifically, that the secular are somehow less loving, caring or interested in those around them. This is, in my opinion, the Inquiry's biggest diplomatic failing. However, it is far from unameliorable.

Latour regularly (and often polemically) quotes Margaret Thatcher's infamous declaration that 'society does not exist.' Of course, the meaning that he takes from the phrase differs somewhat from that of its originator. While for Thatcher this meant that, as she went on to say in the second and less quoted half of that sentence, 'there are only individuals and their families' -- i.e. that any sense of social solidarity between communities or classes is an irrational illusion that must be (and was) crushed --, for Latour the absence of society as an ontologically sui generis form of reality means that sociality must be continually constructed, assembled, composed by materially and modally heterogeneous means (not by 'social bonds' which is, for him, a semantic vacuity).

Society is not a 'there' that can be leaned on, presupposed; it is fragile. It can be (and has been) devastated by the machinations of Thatcherian, neoliberal politics. Thus we would do well to better understand it.

The family, for Latour, is, therefore, not necessarily any more or less sociologically real than the neighbourhood, the nation, the race, the class, and so on. In order to understand what is real in any given scenario we must 'follow the mediators'; that is, abandon nomothetic theorising (searching for abstract laws) and embrace idiographic or casuistic analysis (examining concrete cases).

However, if we understand sociology not only as the study of how the world is held together through heterogeneous associations but, in addition, as the study of how bonds of communal solidarity are achieved then we must surely bring the concept of religion into the picture. I previously wrote about conceiving solidarity as kinship but it could equally, on the basis of the above arguments, be termed religiosity.

A study of social, secular religiosity -- of the loving bonds that hold together not just lovers and churches but communities of all sorts (bonds that are inextricable from but also irreducible to political interest) -- would go a long way towards answering the charge of conservatism that is often levelled at the actor-network version of sociology. It would also complete the second move required to fully reconcile the secular and the religious.

Patrice Maniglier on Diplomacy and AIME

In the new issue (187) of Radical Philosophy there's a review of Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence by Patrice Maniglier (translated by Olivia Lucca Fraser) titled A metaphysical turn?. It's currently available to download for free.

It argues similarly to another piece by Maniglier translated by Stephen Muecke and posted to the AIME website earlier this year. This excerpt from Fictions and Attachments: A Comparative Metaphysics of Art and Commerce muses on and somewhat extends the concept of diplomacy that derives from Isabelle Stengers' work and which lies at the heart of Latour's project (which, by the way, is continuing past its previously advertised end date).

Both pieces are well worth reading.

A metaphysical turn? describes Latour's approach to metaphysics in a similar (but rather more sophisticated) fashion to how I have attempted to describe it recently. Of particular relevance is the concluding comment, which argues that Latour's philosophy:

surmounts both the hypercritical relativism of deconstruction and the rather ostentatious dogmatism in which the new, so-called ‘speculative’, metaphysics basks. (44)

Earlier on he writes that, for Latour:

Being isn’t the Separate (what should be reached) but the Confused (what should be disintricated, contrasted). What ontology has to resolve are not the problems of access, but the problems of equivocation. (40)

This gets at an important contrast with the reading of Latour that derives from Graham Harman. This popular reading, rather point-missingly, wonders whether Latour's work is a 'philosophy of access' or not. What should be becoming clear now is that 'access' is an irrelevant concept to philosophy, as Latour describes and practices it; or, to put it in other words, that 'access' is pertinent to other modes of existence but not to the philosophical mode.

Philosophers have props but no instruments.

Referential truth is none of their direct concern. Their pretensions must thus be duly deflated; the possibility of ontological co-existence is not something that they will bestow on the world, it is something that they themselves must undergo, that they themselves must achieve amongst themselves. Until philosophy itself is thus transformed it can be of no use to the 'planetary negotiations' that we apparently collectively face.

It will be interesting to see which side of philosophical history Harman's forthcoming Prince of Modes will come down on. I suspect that it won't be the same side as Maniglier.

Philosophers: where are your instruments?; or, On the defensive deflation of philosophy

One of the principle tasks that were given to the 'specbook'-writing participants at the final AIME workshops in July was to, in one and the same motion, both defend and deflate the institutions and the values of the Moderns. That is, to identify in these basic and cherished contours of collective life the most indispensable and valuable distributions of agency and then, at the same time, to cut science, politics, religion, economics and so on 'down to size,' to divest them of their excessive, unsustainably explosive pretensions so as to condition the possibility of finding them their proper, diplomatic accommodation amidst other, non-Modern cosmoses.

This had to be a symmetrical and simultaneous deflation—deflate politics and not economics and you've got neoliberalism; deflate science and not religion and you've got theological dogmatism; deflate religion and not politics and you've got a cold and authoritarian secularism, and so on. This work sought not to diminish or denounce any of the involved and invoked terms but, rather, to alleviate the tendency for each form of existence to imperially define the entire world in its own format, thus stoking the flames of war. The objective was not diminution but, rather, coexistence.

Following through the internal logic of AIME, it seems no less necessary that we must also deflate philosophy. This task is suggested by the fact that philosophy is accorded a particular mode of existence, namely [pre].

The deflationary effect can be understood by contrasting philosophy with science [pre·ref]. According to Latour, the sciences achieve their specific form of objectivity through the incremental construction of circulating chains of instrumented references that transport information at the cost of deformations at every stage. To refer is to instrument, there is no other way.

So, philosophers: where are your instruments?

To take up one of Graham Harman's phrases, it should be now clear that philosophy qua [pre] cannot possibly be a "philosophy of access." Philosophy does not access, that is the job of reference. Philosophy can, at best, aid and abet this movement; it can act with, it cannot act for.

For millennia, philosophers have insisted that their art involved the construction of objective knowledge about the abstract conditions of existence, conditions inaccessible to the mere senses and discernible only by the privileged intellect. This, it seems to me, is unequivocally refuted by AIME; a philosophy of access is a contradiction in terms, a category error.

This brings me to a section from The Prince and the Wolf, a transcript of a public conversation between Latour and Harman at the LSE.

Harman
[…] there has to be a point where contact [between objects] happens. And what I worry about is that if we don’t specify that point metaphysically, then it becomes just a kind of ad hoc practical decision, which of course is fine when writing history. You could say: “all right, it seems like the case of Joliot connecting politics and neutrons is interesting but Joliot and the eardrum is not that important, so we can stop there.” And that’s fine for purposes of writing history but not fine for metaphysics.

Latour
Why?

Harman
Why? Because you haven’t explained how the contact occurred.

Latour
But metaphysics is not for explaining. It is the first principle of [Alfred North Whitehead's] Process and Reality. Philosophy is not in the business of explaining anything. Actual occasions explain what happened, not philosophy. If there is one thing which philosophy should not do, it is to try to explain anything. That’s where our disagreement is. Philosophy is not in the business of explaining. This is not at all the same thing. Philosophy is in the business of allowing the explanation to go far enough, to help the explainers to move in the explanatory trajectory but not to provide an explanation. (66-7)

This is the disagreement between Harman and Latour, and it's the difference that Harman does not get to grips with anywhere in his writings on Latour's work (to date). Philosophy, for Latour, no more accesses than it explains. As Latour put it in Reassembling the Social:

As anthropologists have tirelessly shown, actors incessantly engage in the most abstruse metaphysical constructions by redefining all of the elements of the world. Only a researcher trained in the conceptual calisthenics [emphasis added] offered by the philosophical tradition could be quick, strong, daring, and pliable enough to painstakingly register what they have to say. (51)

The value of philosophy here is the same as in AIME's [pre]: it is the lability, agility and sensitivity that it affords the actors who have been trained its art, not the overview it gives on reality or the quasi-scientific loose ends it explanatorily ties up.

To somewhat egocentrically quote myself from a couple of posts ago:

It is here that the philosopher qua intervener enters the fray, not as an architect of the world, urban planner of the galaxy or master of the universe but as an acrobat of thinking, a flexer and folder of thought, a monkish sage—inheritor of long traditions of agility-focused self-development—whose skill involves not the freehand sketching of the beams and struts of the background of things but rather of the rendering-pliant of modes of connection and transformation in service of (or, better: in alliance with) those whose very subsistence is at stake.

This is precisely what I was trying to get at here: that philosophy is a calisthenic rather than explanatory discipline. Metaphysics is calisthenics or it's nothing. [The purpose of its art is conceptual creation in service of a situation, not fundamental explanation in service of the real. [ed. 22/08/14]]

After the example of AIME, if philosophers wish to refer to the objective existence of this or that then they should specify their empirically traceable referential chains. Anything else is Double Click [dc].

This rearticulation of philosophy is intrinsically social in the precise sense that there can no longer be such a thing as a philosopher-hermit—the philosopher is necessarily an associative, allied being; she has no other purpose than to work with others in the rendering-pliant of modes of connection and transformation in concrete, contested cases.

Deflated? Undoubtedly. But also defended[—if, by 'defence,' we mean not fortification but, rather, advocation [ed. 23/08/14]].

This rehousing and repurposing of philosophy—this empiricisation of philosophy in the most profound sense—is, in my humble and weightless opinion, perhaps Latour's most important philosophical contribution. This aspect of his thinking does not begin with his modes of existence project but can be found throughout his works, in varying stages of development (it is rooted in his long-standing commitment to a reformed ethnomethodology). And it is precisely this most crucial of insights that is erased when his work is turned into a series of dry pronouncements on the furniture of the universe—pronouncements that 'of course, might be wrong.'

This is why those who accuse Latour, and those who philosophise like him, of 'correlationism' and of insufficient 'realism' are missing the point. The philosopher, here, simply has no business 'explaining' the unchanging, overarching structure of the universe—if that is what 'realism' means then may it rest in peace.

This empiricised philosophical ethos is not, as I have argued, a matter of engendering 'humility' in philosophical practice; it is a far more pragmatic transformation than that. Humility is too self-denying a psycho-ethical disposition (too 'Christian' in the precise sense that Nietzsche excoriated so epoch-definingly). It is not a matter of limiting or constricting oneself as such—whole universes of beautiful speculation are still possible; it is a matter of undertaking a fundamental reconfiguration of philosophy and of the philosopher's role in the world.

To undertake this defensive deflation, and to thus desist from thinking Absolutely, is not to stop thinking—indeed, it may be to start.

Latour has by no means invented or initiated this progressive reassembly—nor has he undertaken it alone—but his works have massively contributed to the thorough pragmatisation and concomitant pluralisation of philosophy.

So, (Modern) philosophers: where are your instruments? Ovens, tables and balls of wax do not count.

'We Moderns' versus 'The Moderns'; or, The weight of our ancestors

One persistent source of disagreement during the AIME project was the precise meaning of 'Moderns.' This was captured most notably by Annemarie Mol during her presentation for the final seminars (I believe that this will be made available here but does not appear to be there at present) when she refused to speak in the name of any such entity. She asked that we focus instead on localised, specific issues that require no overarching or underlying group identity. To speak of a Big 'We,' it was suggested, is inherently oppressive and dangerous.

(What follows is one way, one attempt to rationalise ex post facto what actually happened during these events. In the midst of them there was an irreducible uncertainty.)

It seems to me that 'Moderns' has been used in at least two ways within AIME.

First, 'We Moderns' (the 'new nous,' as someone put it) are those who were performatively called into being by the project itself. The aim of AIME, it now seems to me (though I claim no authority on such matters!), was to produce a definition of 'Moderns' to which those assembled by the event would be willing to subscribe -- that is, not to self-identify with an already existing 'we' but to create a new ontological identity to which membership is not at all overarching but, rather, voluntary. This usage of 'Moderns' does not, then, indicate an actually or historically existing population. On the contrary, it is precisely because we have never been modern that such a performative creation is necessary.

However, secondly, Annemarie was right to point to a conflation of this performative and highly localised meaning of 'Moderns' with something rather broader and more historical. 'The Moderns' often seems to be used, additionally, as shorthand for 'those-who-though-they-were-modern'; in other words, 'The Moderns' also means the ancestors and kin of those assembled by the project -- a quite different ontological proposition.

Here is where it gets interesting: We (participants) were attempting to take responsibility for our ancestors. Latour, in his opening remarks, emphasised the importance of the fact that the event was taking place in a lecture theatre named after Albert Caquot, a famous French engineer and über-modern. Caquot, of course, echoes the Greek kakos meaning 'bad' or 'evil.' The Moderns, it was suggested, thought that they were building a 'cosmos' (a divine order of existence) but all too often they were establishing a kakosmos (a nasty, broken order).

'We Moderns' (the new nous) and 'The Moderns' (those-who-thought-they-were-modern) converge on this point: We (participants) were obligated, due to our rather ignoble family history, to attempt to formulate a new definition of 'Modern,' a definition to which we would be happy to subscribe -- that was the challenge. We were obligated to perform this act precisely because (a) those-who-thought-they-were-modern were never modern (in the sense that they understood that term) and because (b) we still live in the house that they built.

Here it is important to contrast history with ancestry. To speak of 'ancestors' is to acknowledge a deep debt to and responsibility for those who came before us. To speak of history is, contrariwise, to suggest a broadly impersonal process that we just happen to find ourselves at the end or in the midst of. Ancestry entails an unavoidable familial commitment. History is what has made you; ancestry is, to some degree, what you are.

Here is where I would disagree with Annemarie's refusal to speak the phrase 'We Moderns': we have a responsibility for those who came before us because they still live among, through and around us; we are not free of our ancestors just because they are in the ground. They cannot simply be disavowed; saying 'I am not...' is insufficient.

If a child of disreputable parents were protesting 'but I am not my father, I am not my mother -- I have nothing to do with them' we might have to reply: 'but you still live in their house, they still feed you and put clothes on your back, you still speak their words; you walk like them, you talk like them; you exist through their modes of existence!'

We are children of contemptible predecessors but we still live in the house that they built (when we're in the Amphitheatre Caquot, more or less literally!). They thought that it was a grand, glorious palace; we now know that it was, in many ways, a tumbledown structure built on slavery and brutality. But we live there nevertheless.

We Moderns are unlike The Moderns in one crucial respect: The Moderns believed that they were standing on the shoulders of giants; we fear that we may be standing on the shoulders of tyrants. What we share is the predicament that none of us can dismount; there is no 'down there'; we have, instead, to find a way to modify our precarious situation, to stand a little differently.

We participants of AIME were assembled, first, as descendants of those-who-thought-they-were-modern and, second, as the future ancestors of our own offspring (thanks to Stephen Muecke for this point). The 'We Moderns' invoked by AIME was an opt-in performance of identification. We cannot say that this invitation to subscribe lacked 'informed consent'! Ultimately we failed to produce a definition to which those assembled could all sign up. However, this does not detract from the validity of the effort. An enduring Modern legacy is the pursuit of impossibles...

Permanently opting-out of such identity-challenges might seem superficially progressive and 'right on' but this, I believe, dissolves upon a deeper consideration of the predicament. Such an attitude of 'tune in, drop out, call me when there's something specific to talk about' is quintessentially Modern inasmuch as it implies a supersessive logic of history where we can gesture to a past that makes us but is not us; a past that we can shed like clothing. A logic of ancestry entails a commitment to more thoroughly reconsider the house that our ancestors built, the house in which we have no option but to continue living -- and to gradually renovate, wall by wall, brick by brick.

This is not a conservatism. It is not that we must 'honour' our elders -- far from it! -- but we must recognise that we cannot distance ourselves from them by mere renunciation. The only distance that we can put between ourselves and our less than salubrious predecessors is by differentiation, by becoming otherwise -- and that requires considerable attention to what we are and why we are what we are.

'The progressive composition of the common world'; or, the progressive renovation of our inherited abode. Either way, the important concept here is obligation.

Our burden is not that of the White Men of History. Theirs was not really a 'burden' at all but a gift to be passed on to the underdeveloped 'others,' whether they wanted it or not. Perhaps it is false to say that we are 'standing on the shoulders' of anyone; perhaps it is more like that they are standing on us. We are no longer 'burdened' with the obligation to spread our wisdom freely around a world that is simply open, empty and waiting to be filled by rationality. Instead, the world is now thinkable as being always already meaningful, always already rational but differently rational. Our true burden is finding our place in a world that doesn't need us -- and doing so with full cognisance of our ancestry.

Whatever we choose to name ourselves after we cease to be White Men, we cannot outrun our past. AIME solved nothing but it posed some important questions for what is ahead. A planetary negotiation? Negotiation has an interesting double meaning: the sense of parlay and the sense of navigation. 'Icebergs ahoy!'

To navigate the coming century without shipwreck -- are we not all in the same boat at least in this much?

Clive Hamilton and Toby Tyrell on Gaia

Clive Hamilton made two wonderful contributions to the final AIME colloquia/diplomatic summits held the week before last. Both have now been published on his website. First, Gaia Does Not Negotiate; second, When Earth Juts Through.

The latter begins:

With the arrival of the Anthropocene we must now be suspicious of all ideas developed in the last 10,000 years. That includes James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia which, it turns out, is a child of the Holocene. In his recent book, On Gaia, Toby Tyrell shows that since Lovelock put his idea into the world some 30 years ago our understanding of the Earth system has changed dramatically. 

As Earth scientists have found means of taking a more fine-grained view of Earth history, especially through the analysis of ice-cores, the trajectory of Earth appears much more wild and unpredictable. There is no built-in stabiliser; life does not bring the planet back into equilibrium. Gaia is based on old science.

(I love that first line!) Now, I haven't read Tyrell's book but I think one point needs to be made: while Earth system science has moved on in the past thirty years so has Lovelock's take on Gaia. It is true that the original hypothesis posited the Earth as a homeostatic system but that notion of homeostasis has long since been abandoned. 'Gaia' has evolved. Lovelock now well understands that there is no equilibrium as such, only an indefinitely large range of quasi-stable states within a complex system; strange attractors and so on. This is not the same thing as 'homeostasis.' The possibility of a sudden and massive system state shift in response to a relatively minor degree of perturbation is precisely the point of his more recent works. That is why Gaia is 'vengeful.'

Here is how Lovelock differentiates the hypothesis and the theory in the glossary to Revenge of Gaia (p.208):

Gaia Hypothesis
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis postulated in the early 1970s that life on Earth actively keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary ensemble of organisms. When introduced it was contrary to the conventional wisdom that life adapted to planetary conditions as it and they evolved in their separate ways. We now know that both the hypothesis as originally stated and the conventional wisdom were wrong. The hypothesis evolved into what is now Gaia Theory and the conventional wisdom into Earth System Science.

Gaia Theory
A view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a goal—the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life. It is based on observations and theoretical models; it is fruitful and has made ten successful predictions.

The hypothesis is not the theory and while I am in no position to scientifically defend either this is worth noting.

While, as I say, I've not read Tyrell's book, this interview on his publisher's website makes for interesting reading. Tyrell makes the case, albeit briefly, that Gaia is simply anthropocentric wishful thinking and should be rejected as a scientific idea:

Q: If the Gaia hypothesis is not the reason, then why did the Earth remain habitable for such an enormously long interval of time? 

A: This may relate partly to the weak Anthropic Principle, whereby we logically cannot observe any facts that preclude our own existence. So however infrequent it may be in the universe for a planet to remain continuously habitable over billions of years, we happen to be on just such a planet. According to this way of thinking, Earth may just have been lucky, with no sentient observers having evolved on other planets which were not so lucky, i.e. where conditions became sterile at some point. Another possible explanation for extended habitability in the absence of Gaia is a predominantly inorganic thermostat, such as has been suggested for silicate weathering.

This is a provocative and contestable claim. However, his concluding remarks are if anything more revealing than his central thesis:

Q: Are there any implications for the current era of global change? 

A: Yes, it is suggested that belief in the Gaia hypothesis can lead to excessive complacency about the robustness and resilience of the natural system. Gaia emphasizes stabilising feedbacks and protective mechanisms that keep the environment in check. If Gaia is rejected, however, we are left with a less comforting view of the natural system. Without Gaia it is easier to appreciate that the natural system contains lines of weakness and other susceptibilities. One such line of weakness that has already been demonstrated is the ozone layer depletion by CFC’s. I have argued in the book that there is no over-riding Gaia to protect our planet’s life support system. Maintaining the Earth’s environment is up to us [emphasis added].

Who is the Modern here? I don't think that it's Lovelock... To suggest that Gaia is a 'comforting' theory is to be a few decades out of date. Yes, the original might have encouraged worshipful idleness and Nature-absorbed complacency but that is not at all the image of Gaia that is now presented to us. In Gaia Does Not Negotiate Hamilton quotes Latour who is in turn ventriloquising Gaia:

I am not your Mother, nor your protector. … So figure out the enigma of my presence.

The motherly vision of Gaia as homeostatic über-regulator is surely a holocenic fable that has long passed its sell-by-date. However, while, as I've mentioned recently, Lovelock is a tricky ally to enrol I'm not sure that Tyrell is a better option.

Without Gaia what planetary imagery are we left with? 'Spaceship Earth'? Again?...

"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt"

The hype around Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is rather excessive for a film that isn't due out for several months. However, it's has all the makings of an interesting one. The plot is simple enough: astronauts travel through a wormhole into deep space in order to search for habitable planets. So far so sci-fi; however, there's a hint of desperation to the endeavour that very much speaks to our anthropocenic moment.

As the protagonist, played by Matthew McConaughey, put it:

We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

This is, of course, following on precisely from the sentiment of Gravity, where Sandra Bullock's protagonist fights tooth and nail to return to the life-giving dirt of planet Earth. There can be no more geocentric film than Gravity and Interstellar in its very title revives the imagined possibility of human expansion into 'the final frontier.' However, the ontological shift that these films both presuppose is obvious. Final frontierism is no longer the obvious logical consequence of a rational civilisation benignly rolling out into the endlessly fertile emptiness of existence; it is the final act of the desperate and depraved, a last frantic lunge into the improbable.

Of course, it's unlikely that we will be denied a happy, life-affirming ending. This is a Hollywood blockbuster, after all:

At Comic Con in San Diego last week, Nolan told the audience Interstellar was "about what it is to be human, and what our place is in the universe," adding: "The further that you travel out into the universe, the more you realise it's in [your heart]." Hathaway's astronaut seems to be saying something similar in the trailer: "Maybe we've spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space."

Nothing with that much schmaltz is going to be especially austere with its ultimate estimation of 'the human spirit,' etc. etc. Interestingly, the romantic kitsch is contrasted to the 'hard science' -- yes, there's something for all the family:

If that all sounds a bit gooey, there are hard science facts (or at least theories) at the centre of the movie, which is based on ideas about wormholes posited by the American theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Nolan told Comic Con the conversations between film-maker and scientist were "intense" and even admitted: "It actually made my head hurt a bit. I actually said to Kip, 'Well, I don't want to understand this stuff too much because I have to be able to explain it to the audience.'"

Sit back and prepare to be explained to, kids (but don't worry, mum, there'll be a mushy love story too). And I imagine that at some point something will probably go !!BANG!!, in order to keep dad awake.

Regardless, the trend towards quasi-middle-brow, more-or-less geocentric sci-fi blockbusters is an interesting cultural development. In the past ecological issues cropped up in science fiction as a romantic or aesthetic tragedy -- 'alas, look what we evil all-too-humans have done.' Now we are beginning to see that it is a tragedy that is considerably more existential, mortal -- a tragedy that threatens not the pastoral beauty of a world that is meekly prostrate before our mastery but a thoroughly active and reactive world that may very well be preparing to extinguish us like the pests that we have become.

That is something rather different. To realise that the Earth will never be mastered and that we are simply earthbound organisms with overly high estimations of ourselves -- that is galaxies away from science fiction's past imagined futures.

To what extent Interstellar will follow that ontological detour of course remains to be seen. It seems likely that the power of love will overcome all and we'll all go home either enraptured or nauseated. (Still thinking in terms of AIME, this would be an interesting category mistake: it is as if [rel] could keep us breathing [rep]!)