William Connolly on Latour's Gifford Lectures; Pluralist conflux

William E. Connolly has posted an interesting piece on Latour's Gifford Lectures on his blog.

Well, I say it's on Latour's Gifford Lectures—for the most part Connolly takes these lectures as a jumping off point for a reflection on his own micropolitical interests; stuff that'll be familiar to anyone who's read his most recent work, particularly The Fragility of Things.

I think that he thoroughly misinterprets Latour's use of the word 'secular.' Connolly takes this to be referring to the 'new secularists' and their role as a political group. I see no evidence of that whatsoever. When Latour says that Gaia is 'secular' he means it, as I understand him, by contrast to Nature, which is an insufficiently 'secularised theological concept' (to use the phrase of Schmitt); it is because Nature presupposes transcendence and Gaia immanence that Gaia is secular—literally 'worldly.' Connolly is reading too much into that, I feel; although, it would be interesting to think how the new secularists would receive such ideas (not well, I'd imagine!).

Connolly also understands Latour as making a distinction between lab scientists and theoretical scientists—I must have missed that but I recall no such distinction being made, nor such a divide having any real importance. Latour waxes lyrical about the 'Earthbound scientists' but seemingly all manners of scientific praxis are included under this umbrella. The key point is that both lab and theoretical sciences must be irreduced, that is escorted back inside their networks; he has this to say about Stephen Hawking, for instance:

It is hard to point out a more situated knowledge than this one: from this very local place on Free School Lane, in the hands of a great scientist, electrons are supposed to have spread successfully to populate all chemical bonding and all computers! But in the next minute, the same physicists will have no qualms about admiring how Steven Hawkings’ mind roams through the whole cosmos in intimate dialog with the Creator, wishfully ignoring that Hawking’s mind benefits not only from a brain but also from a ‘corporate body’ described by Hélène Mialet in her book Hawking incorporated, as composed of a vast network of computers, chairs, instruments, nurses, helpers and synthesizers that are necessary for the step by step flow of his equations. With such a bifocal view of science, it is hard to reconcile the view from nowhere with the highly localised classrooms, office spaces, laboratory benches, computer centres, meeting rooms, expeditionary treks and field stations, where scientists have to locate themselves when they begin to really talk about their findings or to really write their papers. (86)

If anything Latour refuses the distinction between theoretical and lab sciences—both are fully instrumented, incarnated endeavours and that's the important thing about them. The Earthbound need theorists and lab scientists, both—and who embodies that fusion better than Dr Lovelock?

Connolly writes in conclusion:

I am glad Bruno Latour gave these lectures. They focus attention on the severity of the planetary issue and the denials and evasions attached to it. I am also moved by the spirituality that infuses them.

Latour's theology is about as heterodox as one is likely to find anywhere. He refutes the possibility of any kind of fundamental transcendence; God is only what is assembled in the reverential networks of his followers; religious practice transfers no information, only the transformations of love and tradition. Latour's theology jars with most religious theory at least as much if not more so than his thinking jars with most theories of science. However, in these Lectures he also insists upon the translatability of different deities; taking up Jan Assmann's work on mono/polytheism to suggest that we must conceive of Nature, Gaia or OWWAAB (Out of Which We Are All Born) as secular divinities that are at least potentially comparable, translatable with the divinities of others (as were the divinities of the pre-monotheistic world), thus facilitating a geo- or cosmo-politics that removes (or at least de-emphasises) one unnecessary and, frankly, stupid point of confrontation: whether or not there's a God.

This very much plays into Connolly's project of conceiving of political alliances being built across ostensive cultural and religious divides; heterogeneous assemblages that cultivate a certain political vibrancy in anticipation of Events that will draw them together and produce a General Strike, or some-such. (I have my doubts about Connolly's working-through of this point but there's something to it.)

It might be a stretch to call Latour a 'spiritual' philosopher because his theology is so very anti-transcendence (even more so perhaps than Connolly, self-described 'immanent materialist'!). I don't think many of his fellow Catholics would consider him spiritual on the basis of his thinking. His recent book (recently published in English, anyway) on religion—Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech—is a paragon of sensitivity and counterintuition but it is really questionable to what extent it is religious in the sense most people understand that (i.e. as spirituality). Just what is the point of a totally immanent God? Latour's theology is religious in the sense that Michel Serres describes religion as rooted in religiens, which is the opposites of negligens—i.e. 'religion is the opposite of negligence' (as he defines it in The Natural Contract). That is an extremely fecund point; I am converted inasmuch as this: 'Whoever has no religion should not be called atheist or unbeliever, but negligent.' To act religiously is an essential part of life, god or no god.

The real meeting point of Connolly and Latour is, however, pluralism—a pluralism that is political, not just metaphysical. It is this meeting point that presents the challenge; it is here that Latour's whole project of 'diplomacy' (taking up Stengers' term) comes into play. It'd be interesting to read a more sustained engagement by Connolly on this matter. There are clear, strong and (dare I said it?) vibrant parallels between these philosophies but also serious differences. Connolly, for me, leans too heavily on the notions of self-organisation. His reading of Hayek in Fragility is nowhere near critical enough either of Hayek's politics nor of the notion of self-organisation itself.

The problem with self-organisation (and I think this is a critique that needs to be impressed upon many, many... let's say post-Deleuzians who take up self-organisation as their ontological aesthetic of choice) is not the organisation aspect, it's the self—what is the self doing the organising? Gaia is, of course, a self-organising system but her 'self' is something that Latour takes some time discussing. She is not a 'super-organism' and not a final cause but rather the product of all the individual organisms, each of whom are their own final cause, their own providence, their own telos, each of whom follow their own interests but, in doing so, produce an effect, an agency in excess of themselves, an effective being that has maintained atmospheric and chemical conditions conducive to life (whatever that has meant in any given era) for billions of years.

For Hayek, of course, the importance of self-organisation is that it validates extreme market-based individualism (although Hayekian neoliberals are well aware of the need for a coercive state to force people to obey their own true selves...). The 'self' here is that of homo economicus, however contrived and enforced his existence may be. A methodological maxim: never speak of self-organisation without speaking also of a self.

Ramble ends.

Between aesthetics and reasoning – Brown reviews Harman and Morton

Terence Blake approvingly posts a review of Harman and Morton by Nathan Brown in Parrhesia. It's definitely an interesting review. I don’t agree with every bit of it but it raises some important points. The general accusation seems to be that of style over substance – aesthetics over reasoning. I like what James says at the start of A Pluralistic Universe: 'the distinctive quality of a philosophical truth is that it is reasoned.' There seems to be a generation of theorists who, one could argue, in rejecting Reason have forsaken reasoning too. It's a matter of rigour in a very specifically philosophical sense. Derrida's writing is notorious for its overstylised self-indulgence but there's no doubt that he was rigorous in his argumentation, in his own way. Rigorous to a fault, if anything! He worked incredibly hard to work through his analyses. His process was exhaustive and exhausting. His 'truths,' whatever their value, were most definitely reasoned.

I wonder whether this new philosophical aestheticism results in some way from Deleuze's claim that philosophy is the creation of concepts. I know that he meant something very specific by 'concept' (he had a rigour of his own) but that definition of philosophy has been taken very loosely by many people. It's seemingly become accepted that philosophy is the creation of concepts any-old-how. I am an unrepentant Jamesian in this respect. A philosophical truth or a philosophical concept must be reasoned. There is no one mode of reasoning called Reason but that doesn't absolve philosophers from the duty of reasoning. Every philosopher must construct their own version of reason and this may be something of a Sisyphian task but it cannot be avoided. No reasoning, no philosophy. Reasoning involves not just a series of utterances outlining an idea but a proliferation and working through of problems. It's not enough to paint a picture, that picture has to be closely scrutinised; the canvas has to be worked over again and again. Philosophy should be hard work. Producing concepts via aesthetics (or “riffs”, as Brown puts it) just seems a bit too easy – and, much more seriously, the end product is compromised as a result.

I suppose I'm a bit of a Platonist too in a very specific, methodological sense. Plato's dialogues are hard work. They are twisting, winding roads. There is no slick, smooth, polished superhighway in a Platonic dialogue (or, at least, there is none until the end – each dialogue is the construction of such a superhighway, a well-oiled cosmic escalator leading out of the cave). Contrasts and disagreements have to be worked through, there's no shortcut. Okay, interlocutors aren't all given a fair hearing, there are clear favourites, the field is tilted and the conclusion of the argument is usually fairly predictable. But the point is that the argument is worked through, it isn't just sketched out and put into circulation. Philosophy is a journey, a process, a travail – it isn't a product or a commodity. Yes, that’s the best word for it: philosophy is a travail in both senses of that word. It takes us back to the days when travel was hard work, when the roads were bumpy, muddy and potholed and, often enough, there were no roads at all. Philosophy qua aestheticism is an ironic, postmodern philosophy that skates about on the surface of concepts without giving a great deal of thought to what made that surface so smooth. It can be exciting, yes. Thrilling, in fact. But it’s like a sugar rush; it quickly gives way to fatigue and regret.

I suppose it would be unfair to hang this ‘philosophy qua aestheticism’ sign on Harman and Morton without a serious caveat. There is reasoning in their texts, undoubtedly. Genuine conceptual creation, too. There is philosophy. But I would agree with Nathan Brown, as I understand him, that there isn’t enough philosophy; that an interesting and suggestive lashing together of this and that is not enough; that difficult questions have to be worked through, they can’t be fobbed off; that superficial iterations of complex ideas is dangerous; that thinking of philosophical texts as objects in circulation does a tremendous disservice to philosophy. Every philosopher may lean on it to some extent but such freeform ice-skating can only go so far. If it isn’t held together by the laborious processes of philosophical reasoning, of whatever kind, then it produces texts that are shallow and misleading. And OOO, I would agree, sometimes skates too much and labours too little. That is what makes it so thrilling and wide ranging but it’s also what makes it oddly unphilosophical at times.

That said, OOOers are certainly not the only ones guilty of this sort of thing. Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society is a stunning book – stunning in part because it contains almost no philosophy whatsoever. Indeed, philosophy seems to be something he desperately tries to get out of the way early on so that he can get on with stitching together these concepts out of various elements of historical sociology. It’s an interesting and conceptually suggestive read but it’s not really philosophy as I'm prepared to understand it – it's more of a prolegomena to a new philosophy of society.

I’m about to read William Connolly’s new book The Fragility of Things (I’ve ordered it but it hasn’t arrived yet). While Connolly’s books are generally enjoyable reads I find them to be quite superficial (see his book Neuropolitics in particular – a text largely undeserving of its title). My preconception of this book is that it will largely follow the philosophy qua aestheticism scheme that I’ve outlined above. So, this isn’t something particular to OOO. I think it may have more to do this specific aspect of Deleuze, far from the best aspect, that has been extracted, simplified and rather impoverished – the idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts any-old-how.

Occupy London and the Church of England

I'm not a man of faith but I am a man of belief - belief that political alliances cannot be fussy or precious.

The Left so often acts as if until we agree on everything we can't do anything. The Right don't have this problem. They understand that if anyone agrees on anything then there is business to be done. Rightwing evangelicals and neoliberal bankers don't have a lot in common but they have enough to use and get used by each other. The usage is mutually beneficial. Their 'resonance machine' as William Connolly puts it is formidable.

What relationship does the Left have with organised religion today? Well, what does the canon chancellor of St Paul's cathedral Reverend Giles Fraser have to say about the protestors camped out in front of his 'house of god'?

Not a lot. Is it so hard to see dog-collared clergy and dishevelled youths standing and shouting side by side? They don't agree on a lot but they should agree on enough to know the exact answer to the question 'What would Jesus do?'!

Of course, this assumes that the Church of England isn't just another finger in the pie/dam (that damn pie) of the prevailing order.

Are they corrupted to the core too? Is there any trace of Christianity in the C of E?

It’s time to get off the fence Giles. It’s time to make your church the centre of resistance in the City. Or to admit instead that you’re just running a tourist attraction. That’s your choice. And there’s only one right answer if you really believe why you wear that dog collar.

So open those doors wide – especially when the police are nearby. It’s your job to provide a place of sanctuary or frankly that building you tend is of no relevance at all and nor is your faith.

Hard words - and, as usual, just the right ones. We need this alliance.

Of course, this alliance might require some people giving up - for a time - the prevailing sub-Dawkins religion-phobia and stop yapping on about religion being the root of all evil for long enough to actually engage in some politics: that is, collective action: that is, acting with people you don't necessarily entirely agree with about everything.

There's definitely a Leftist resonance machine to be constructed; but to do so will require some scheming, some cunning and some compromise.

Politics happens not when everyone agrees on everything but when some people agree enough enough something - anything - important enough to make them work together.

If these are not times for putting aside petty theological differences then we really are in the end times!