The Clean, Neat Lines of Fundamentalism

Glenn Greenwald writes:

[T]o act as though Muslim anger toward the US and Israel is primarily the by-product of crazy conspiracy theories is itself a crazy conspiracy theory.

True, though it does beg the question: why is it the nutty conspiracy theories and faux-spontaneous outrage at cartoonish prophet-mocking that form the lightning rods around which these larger angers vent themselves? (Please excuse the mixed metaphors.)

Those who claim that the US is responsible for everything good that happens and those who claim that it's responsible for everything bad are just two sides of the same fundamentalism. There's a purity to conspiracy theories that both sides love since they are unburdened by any of the actual messy complexity of a reality characterised more by finitude, contradiction and accident than awesome, looming, all-powerful super-baddies.

Politics and Ontology: The Question of Racism

Sara Ahmed writes:

I am using the example of racism to show the entanglement of ontology with politics which is not the same as saying all ontology IS politics (or all politics IS ontology).

I don’t think anyone ever claimed that politics and ontology aren’t entangled. It’s just that two things can’t be entangled if they’re not two different things to begin with. There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement here. We can give examples of where politics and ontology are all bound up together or examples where they aren’t. I think the point is that it’s casuistic. On that we would all apparently agree.

I think part of the problem here is that, to take the example of racism, we live in a society where racism has already been made political. It is, in a manner of speaking, an historical a priori. A racist act such as a racially motivated shooting is understood to be political because there has already been decades upon decades of campaigning, protest and so on in order to politicise such events. We encounter such events as being a priori political, historically. With this I see no problem. However, this is not the same as saying that racism is essentially political — as if it were a priori political regardless of the history of the thing.

Because racially motivated killings are already widely regarded as political issues, when such an event occurs it only takes a minimal push to enroll that act into the wider political networks — the networks are there ready and waiting, as it were. For that reason it may seem as though such an event is essentially political; that it’s political character is simply given. However, if we imagine a time or place where racially motivated killings aren’t widely accepted to be political then any given instance of such violence would be very difficult to enroll into the political networks.

The claim that racism is political as an historical a priori is, I think, basically compatible with an OOO or ANT understanding of the situation. That it is political according to some more abstract a priori — this I can’t imagine. If anyone believes this to be the case I can only ask: how?

Universal Politics, False Radicalism

For some it is the epitome of radicalism to extend politics to cover everything but actually I think that this is the most conservative of moves since if everything is always already political then the work that I believe is necessary to make something political, to tie it into those networks, is unnecessary.  The universalisation of politics, far from being intellectual radicalism writ-large, is a conceptual rationalisation of political quietism and a justification for inaction.  We need only sit around and lament.

If politics is nothing without politicisation, on the other hand, then we're not faced with a universe of politics that some people are too stupid to open their eyes and see but rather a meshwork of politics that hasn't gone far enough, yet.  The tasks required to set the latter straight are, if not simple, then at least thinkable.  There's no mystery.  The tasks necessary to solve the former, however, are so gargantuan as to be frankly unthinkable.

Politics and Ontology: More from Agent Swarm

Agent Swarm remarks on an old comment of mine on the politics/ontology question:

Harman scores points against a very silly opponent: “Once blog exchanges reach a certain point of fruitlessness, I tend to stop reading them. Hence it came as a shock to me to learn that anyone ever made the argument that if I say that corporations are real objects, I must therefore support corporations”.

If we go back to Alexander Galloway’s original post, we see that nowhere does he say this. Something like this is falsely attributed to him by a commenter called Philip, of Circling Squares: “And as for the claims that granting reality to corporations justifies their political enfranchisement … well, my mind boggles at that. That would only be the case if ontology and politics were fused. Only then would the granting of ontological thing-hood simultaneously be the granting of political personhood”.

Once his position has been caricatured in this way, the caricature can live a life of its own and be”refuted” effortlessly in both curt (Harman) and long-winded repetitious (Bryant) versions. And the original argument, containing (horror!) concepts, can be forgotten.

From Alex Galloway's "A response to Graham Harman’s 'Marginalia on Radical Thinking'":

This brings out a secondary problem with OOO in that it falls prey to a kind of “Citizens United fallacy”.. everything is an object, and thus Monsanto and Exxon Mobil are objects on equal footing just like the rest. Like other (human) objects, Monsanto is free to make unlimited campaign donations, contribute to the degradation of the environment, etc.

For what it's worth I did read the post that I commented on. I didn't just take Harman's word for it. And I agree with his interpretation of what I've quoted above. It seems to me that Alex made ontological thinghood and political personhood one and the same thing and used that supposition to critique the philosophy of Harman et al. Harman's claim, like mine, is that this doesn't follow. Whether or not a thing is a political person is a property of that thing, not a question of the thing's bare existence. Saying that an object exists tells you nothing about what kind of object it is. Therefore, nothing about saying that corporations are real necessarily means that they are or should be political persons.

Simply, the claim that ontological realism vis-a-vis corporations necessarily entails the granting of political personhood to corporations is a non sequitur. I don't know what 'concepts' of Alex's got lost in my interpretation. As I read it his post was a fairly weak caricature based upon some simple misunderstandings and/or misrepresentations. It was actually rather light on concepts.

p.s. I try to avoid engaging in the malice that these discussions seem to generate so I hope that this comment is met in the spirit of friendly discussion that it is intended, rather than the vindictive turf wars that these things seem to all too often degenerate into!

Politics and Ontology: The Multiplicity of Regimes

 The Agent Swarm blog writes:

The attribution of ontological commitment must take into account the regime of enunciation, otherwise you are guilty of the declarative fallacy: reducing all enunciations to the declaration of facts. Levi Bryant’s example is typical: “if you tell a person that your mother is seriously ill and going in for surgery and they reply by saying “I will pray for you”, their statement, whether they realize it or not, presupposes an ontology. Minimally such a statement presupposes ontological claims about the types of beings that exist and about causation.” Not necessarily, Latour would tell you that religious enunciation does not have the same ontological commitments as “double-click”discourses. Lyotard’s philosophy of phrases in THE DIFFEREND converges with Latour’s analysis. Bryant’s technique of revealing the ontological commitments of enunciations does not take into account the heterogeneity of regimes of enunciation. I agree that the enunciation (not the “statement”) does have ontological presuppositions, but not those that Bryant describes.

On the contrary, as I understand it, Bryant's answer is premised upon the heterogeneity of regimes of enunciation. This is why he claims that politics and ontology are separate -- because they belong to different regimes; different practices, with different rules. They can overlap and one can depend on the other but that's the thing with enunciation regimes: they needn't be distant in space and time. Any one person can speak from a number of regimes at once. They can speak ontologically, politically, scientifically, all jumbled up together. The important claim is that these this spatio-temporal co-existence doesn't detract from their difference qua regimes (I think this is broadly Latour's position and Bryant's claims vis-a-vis discourse are basically Latourian). Their difference qua regimes depends on their different rules and internal operating principles, not on their being confined to any particular place and time. Consequently one can speak politically while having ontological presuppositions without politics and ontology becoming coterminous. The fact that there are different kinds of ontology shouldn't make a difference. Perhaps there is a specific kind of ontology particular to political talk -- that'd have to be demonstrated. But even so that wouldn't make them one and the same thing, it'd only establish a meshwork of relations between the two.

Politics and Ontology: Entangled but Several

I confess that I’m thoroughly baffled by the question of what politics an ontology should entail. I readily recognize that an ontology can be pervaded by illicit ontological assumptions and that these should critiqued, but still maintain that as a regulative ideal, our claims about what is and what is not should not be based on our political and ethical preferences. ...

This again! I agree with Levi.

Politics and ontology are both human discursive practices — two different practices. You can think about politics ontologically and you can think about ontology politically — but you’re either ontologising or politicising, either way.

Either ontologising or politicising may or may not be the right thing to do in any given circumstance — it depends. For example, if someone approvingly repeated Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as society only individuals and families’ then clearly that is an ontological claim that needs to be attacked both ontologically and politically. But the manner of attack would differ depending on which approach one chose to adopt. It’d involve different kinds speech acts, different regimes of truth or modes of enunciation. These modes and regimes can be mixed and matched even in the course of a single sentence but they’re still part and parcel of different practices.

They’re just not the same practice. The only way anyone can make out that they are is if they do the ‘everything is political’ trick, which really just amounts to demonstrating that anything can be politicised and inferring from that that everything is therefore political, which doesn’t follow. Frankly I’ve never understood it since if everything is political then no work ever has to be done to politicise anything — everything just is political, always already, regardless of whatever anyone does about any of it. How?

But what I fail to wrap my head around most of all is why people seem to want politics to be omnipresent — and for apparently political or moral reasons. Politics is an ugly, inglorious business much of the time (and I’m not just talking capital P, parliamentary politics either). Why would anyone want that ugliness to be universalised? If omnipresent politics sounds blissfully utopian rather than horrifically dystopian to anyone then I can only question your rather blinkered and peculiar definition of politics!

I’m really quite glad that politics is, as Latour might put it, restricted to its own particular conduits — just like everything else is. It can be made to overlap with any other practice and, in practice, it has been spread far and wide, insinuated in some small part into most aspects of our lives but each extension of the network was nevertheless an event and it cannot ever cover everything, like Borges’ proverbial map did. Thank goodness!

Anything can be politicised but politics is still a practice limited to its own variegated and widespread but still particular and partial networks. If you want to extend it to something hitherto unattached then do so — but it’s folly to pretend that politics is a reality somehow there already, under the surface just waiting for us if only we’d shed the scales of ideology from our tired, downcast eyes. Not that such surreptitious objects of our ignorance don’t exist but calling them ‘politics’ is a misnomer. Latour called them another P-word — ‘plasma’ — meaning that on which the requisite formatting work has yet to be performed in order to make these things circulate in social (or, in this case, political) networks. This seems to be a far stronger ontological basis for thinking politics, to me.

So:

‘Politics is everywhere’ — yes.

‘Anything can be politicised’ — also yes.

But: ‘Everything (including ontology) is always already political’ — I don’t think so.

Consequently, ontology can be politicised but it must be politicised and, therefore, one should present a reason for doing so rather than just lazily claiming that it must be because everything is. Often that politicisation is perfectly justifiable but such justification must be casuistic, not universal.

Philosophy or Science? Yes, please!

In the Guardian today, a conversation between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss.  The former asks the latter:

So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

The language of 'territory' and 'mission creep' has it exactly wrong. It's a 'God of the gaps' argument for philosophy that goes like this: Before 'science,' philosophy was the method used to answer the various questions of existence. As science has progressed it has provided convincing explanations of various aspects of existence and as it has done so it has made philosophy superfluous in those areas.

Or, in short: philosophy recedes as science advances -- their's is a zero sum game.

Rubbish. Science and philosophy are, first and foremost, methods. You can investigate anything or ask any question either scientifically or philosophically. They do not and cannot have separate 'territories' -- that isn't the difference between them. The difference is the methods they use, the standards they adhere to and, consequently, the conclusions they arrive at.

Science beats the heck out of philosophy in many, many respects. In terms of instrumental value there is clearly no comparison to be made. However, instrumentalism is not the only criterion for assessing value -- to believe that this is the case is an extremely impoverished world-view.

Moreover, historically, science developed out of philosophy. Philosophy provided the cognitive preconditions for scientific thought -- and, in my opinion, it still does in many respects.

Scientific practice has philosophical presuppositions. To say that we can or should do away with formal philosophical thought doesn't make those presuppositions go away it just means that we lose the capacity to interrogate them and we are thereby condemned to unthinking dogmatism with respect to them.

If science and philosophy are not engaged in a zero sum game, if they are not competing over territory like horny, rutting stags, then we, instead, need to look more broadly at their relative values with respect to specific problems and questions. For instance, morality. It is dead wrong to say that science 'cannot' answer questions of morality. Scientists can and they have!

Since most of us are taught basic science from a young age and since it permeates through all our culture and media and so on, science informs every aspect of our moralities just as it informs every aspect of our worldviews (whether we know or like it or not).

The pertinent question is not whether science can answer moral questions but whether scientific answers to moral questions are ever going to be sufficient. I think that they most certainly will not be. They have a place in the conversation but, nevertheless, moral judgements require more than explanations of why we make moral judgements.

Anyway, it's an interesting piece, although I'd have preferred reading a conversation between a physicist and a philosopher who doesn't suffer from such an acute case of physics envy. Saying 'science doesn't know everything yet' is as pathetic a justification for philosophy as it is for religion.

Anthropocentrism, Humanism and Growing Up

The moral case for non-anthropocentrism is far stronger than for the contrary -- even from the point of view of a self-interested human!

Anthropocentrism isn't just bad for the trees, birds and algae that, through no fault of their own, have to share the planet with us -- it's bad for us humans too. It's a narcissistic ignorance that stops us from really taking care of ourselves. Or, if you like, genuine humanism needs to be non-anthropocentric.

It's like growing up: to become an adult you have to take responsibility not only for yourself but for others too -- and you do this not just to be nice, you do it because that's the only way anyone will do anything for you. Becoming an adult means engaging in a web of interdependence and breaking from the wonderful but naive narcissism of childhood.

So it is with the anthropocentric myopia. It seems as though it's the most human, most moral of mindsets but actually it's naive, a distraction. Children lucky enough to have caring parents don't have to worry about how the care of themselves presupposes their care of others. Humans aren't so lucky -- God's dead, after all.

Yet more on Latour, Things and Geography

Patrick Jackson replies to my previous argument:

What we have here is a failure to communicate ;-) which is because your reading of Latour -- which I generally agree with -- links his scientific ontology of the social to a dualist/representational philosophical ontology that I think is neither what Latour is up to nor self-evidently what we social scientists/analysts ought to be engaged in. "If we live in an ontologically hybrid world we need modes of analysis suited to that world. Social constructivism or discourse analysis in the vein of Foucault, Laclau, Wittgenstein, etc. are well suited to particular areas of our world but they miss out entirely on vast swathes of it because of their blinkered and entirely unnecessary dualist predispositions..." I would disagree pretty fundamentally here, because like most philosophical mind-body dualists you're trying to "put ontology first" and make categorical claims about how we should study the world based on the character of the world -- a gesture that just side-steps the basic conundrum of how we might get to that character of the world without the conceptual equipment that you are suggesting follows from that character...leaving us with a profession of faith in the character of the world (in this case, that it is made up of "hybrid networks"). Instead of this, why not spend time demonstrating how regarding the world as made up of "hybrid networks" allows us to explain it better? Once one does that -- once one shifts one's philosophical ontology from dualism to monism, come to the dark side, we have cookies -- a lot of the supposed "controversy" dries up and withers away.

I'll say again: no discourse analyst who actually has read Foucault can consistently claim that discourse is somehow opposed to practice or "the material." The scientific-ontological duality you keep bringing up is a misreading of the social constructivist and discourse-theoretical claim, because it persistently misunderstands such explanations as ideational determinism. Which they are not. I am not putting a line between sociality and materiality, and you are not doing so in your Latour-inspired account of the social world. You are doing so only in the straw man you persistently attack ;-) Let it go, no one is actually arguing that here, and let's get down to business: whether Latour is better or worse than, say, Bourdieu or Foucault or Luhmann (or, what the heck, Gramsci or Braudel) as a way of making sense of the social world. In that vein, for my money what Latour is doing is relational discourse analysis, with a considerably broader sense of the extent of the relevant networks of discursive practice than most Foucauldians have and perhaps than Foucault himself had. Latour's networks make meaning possible, so we can sensibly refer to cities and the time and the results of an experiment; in that sense they're meaning-making practices just like Foucault's epistemic grammars are. So I personally don't see the fundamental difference.

I appreciate that our opinions are maybe not as different as I have suggested (oh, academic-types and their nitpicking!) but riddle me this: if discourse analysts by and large do nor operate on the basis of a 'bifurcation of nature,' as Whitehead put it, then why are the non-human things upon which ANT analyses focus almost completely absent from DA texts?

Let's back up: the ANT concept of 'actant' comes from semiotics (mostly from Propp and Greimas) where it can refer to any character or thing within a narrative that does something -- it can refer to mountains and unicorns, equally, if either of those things does something in the course of the narrative. (This is where the 'principle of symmetry' between human and non-human things in ANT comes from.)

Looking at an ANT analyses in these terms the actants in these texts are many and varied: Latour's aforementioned 'Paris: Invisible City' invokes bollards, security cameras and atoms as well as people, texts and so on. If you look at any given discourse analysis text in the same way you will find a far less heterogeneous assemblage of actants: you'll have signifiers, meanings, subjects, texts -- at a push you might have human bodies and printing presses and so on, but rarely (I don't think that Foucault is especially representative of this creed, as it happens).

DA texts just don't draw on the same range of resources as ANT ones do. Doesn't this suggest some more profound philosophical differences beyond simply substituting 'discourse' for 'network'?

To take another example, in his book on Pasteur, Latour describes an event that Pasteur hosted at Pouilly-le-fort in 1881. What Pasteur did was stage essentially an act of scientific theater. He gathered together scientists, journalists, politicians and others and made a grand wager: He took two groups of sheep and infected them with anthrax. One group were inoculated with his vaccine, others were not. The inoculated group would survive, Pasteur claimed, and the rest would be dead in a few days. If he was right he would have proved his theory of microbial infection (or at least he would have submitted an extremely convincing proof of it to all in attendance and, consequently, also to their colleagues, readers, constituents, etc.).

Latour considers the whole event as theater, quite literally. He shows how it was carefully stage managed down to the last detail in terms of how the farm-cum-lab was set up, how the guests were treated, how the vaccines were administered and so on. But, and this is the point, who (or what) is the star that comes onto the stage at the end -- the fat lady, if you will --, at the triumphant moment? It is the microbes themselves. They enter the fray as fully fledged actors when they kill the unvaccinated sheep and spare the vaccinated ones. Not the microbes as they are represented -- not microbes as linguistic terms or microbes reduced to their meaning (and he is very careful to make this point). Sure, the whole socio-linguistic apparatus was necessary to make their appearance thinkable but it is still the things themselves that enter into the performance, as actors or actants.

Could or would a discourse analyst ever write such a thing? Could a non-human actant ever occupy such a role in a DA text? Would a discourse analyst ever even be interested in such an event?

Of course this is an impossible argument in the abstract -- there is no such thing as 'Discourse Analysis' only discourse analyses. If we include, for instance, 'Discipline and Punish' within the corpus of 'discourse analysis' (and I'm not totally on board with that) then perhaps we can say that some DA texts do allow for non-human actants to enter the narrative on an equal basis with signifiers and so on. But even then such instances are extremely rare.

Which brings me back to my previous claim: DA texts are extremely actantially homogeneous compared to ANT texts. Why is this so if DA does not, by and large, bifurcate nature and bracket off a sociolinguistic realm from everything else? I believe that it does, although I appreciate that my own 'theater of proof' may be less than convincing and is somewhat under-evidenced.

p.s. I wasn't trying to be unduly polemical in previous comments -- although sometimes that mode of discourse can be fun ;)

This discussion now bears little resemblance to the original post but hopefully it has been interesting to someone, somewhere!

Related to the OP, I've just started reading Robert Kaplan's article 'Revenge of Geography' and I can see that geographical determinism of the most blunt and ignorant sort is very much alive and kicking. This is food for critique, yet I do think that ANT and the like stand a better chance of taking apart this sort of paleo-materialist block-headedness than social constructivism as it has been traditionally practiced -- and for the reasons I've mentioned above.

The Reductions of Irreduction

There's a little debate going on over at Installing (Social) Order with regard to irreduction: Hendrik argues that reduction is inevitable in order to explain, that irreduction is itself reductionist and asks what an irreductionist epistemology would look like.  In response Rowland asks "how do we reject (but not fully do away with) essentializing or reductive ideas?".

I think it's a misreading to take 'irreduction' to mean 'anti-reduction' or 'non-reduction.' It's a source of great error for proponents and critics, alike.

What's the first principle of that treatise? "Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else." It's important to note that this is, first and foremost, an ontological rather than an epistemological proposition.

Things exist insofar as they are irreducible to other things. If A is reducible to B then A cannot exist, only B can since A is literally nothing more than B. So, our bodies cannot be reduced to their constituent atoms, a painting cannot be reduced to the intentions and skills of the painter, etc. Everything is its own thing. Every thing is 'irreduced and set free' as Latour puts it.

But things are not hermetically sealed, eternal monads, transcending all else. Nothing is irreducible either. Nothing can be without something else, without something to translate and be translated by. Moreover, there are no categorical divisions in reality, cutting things off from one another -- , no nature, no ideality, no sociality, etc. Anything can be allied to anything else and any alliance is a reduction -- however, it is a partial one. If I eat an apple I have somehow reduced that apple to my being but not entirely since I do not control whether it makes me healthy or ill or whatever. I reduce it, it isn't irreducible, but I don't reduce it entirely, since that would make it, literally, a non-entity.

So what this means for inquiry is that preconceived, universal categories are wrong. You can't just pick up categories of nature, culture and so on and thereby exclude most of reality from your purview a priori. You don't ever know what is going to be important so you have to keep an open mind, or an open ontology at least.

But, furthermore, whatever actors, traces and trajectories you end up following you will never see them 'as they really are' because your own inquiry is itself reducing those things. A scientist isn't only an agent chopping up rat brains and pouring chemicals over neurons and so on. A scientist has a whole backstory, hopes and dreams and fears and ambitions; they had toast for breakfast, they've got a bad right knee -- but, so far as the study goes, that stuff only matters if it impacts upon the assay you are following. If you're interested in the chain of reductions or translations that the scientist is performing then you must set limits on what matters. You must yourself reduce.

So, of course, irreduction is a weapon against the kinds of reductionism that say either that life is reducible to DNA or physics to particles or human history to economics. Indeed, to 'perform an irreduction' means to 'escort things back inside their networks' and dispel their appearance of essential potency. Reductionisms point to one portion of reality and say that that is fully real and determinative and everything else is little more than an apparition emerging from what really matters. This is anathema to irreduction. But the point is emphatically not that we should therefore never reduce anything, that we must be anti- or non-reductionists. This is impossible. Every translation simplifies and misunderstands that which it translates -- and this is so because every translation is a reduction.

In this sense, irreduction doesn't end or dismiss reduction so much as it redefines it as something inherent in each and every translation, rather than something that occurs between two ontological realms, one real, the other derivative.

More on Geography, Materiality, etc.

Further to my last post, Prof. PTJ replies in the comments to the original thread) that:

Allowing a little non-social influence on social relations is like being a little bit pregnant, because strictly speaking, these are both firm dichotomies rather than categories that can be somehow combined. If social action has parametric non-social limits that can be definitively grasped, then social action isn't constitutive and creative except within a sphere that something else grants to it. Which is why a little bit of "physical features of a region matter on their own, autonomously" is, conceptually speaking, physical determinism. 

That said, realize that I am not making fundamental ontological claims here, but analytical ones. Obviously people need to eat, so the food supply is important. Duh. At issue is how one conceptualizes "the food supply" or the mountains/rivers/diseases you invoke. I do not think that it makes sense to simultaneously say that intrinsic characteristics of food/rivers/mountains/diseases cause social outcomes, and that the discourses (and I shouldn't have to say "discourse isn't talk, but a system of practical meaning-making activity," but I am saying it anyway just in case) disclosing these things as meaningful objects cause social outcomes. Theoretically speaking, it's one or the other, not both -- and if it's both, then it's usually the former....

Below, Nawal then raises the subject of Latour:

Curious though PTJ, if you think Latour and his relational actor-network theory offers us a way out of such dichotomies or conundrums? As in the dichotomy between the "ideational" and the "material?" I read him as offering an alternative conception of the "social," which ontologically it could be fleshed out, but epistemologically speaking? I'm not quite sure... 

Or to put it another way, I read him as attempting to map out configurations of transactions and relations between social sites, the latter which could be physical objects, persons, etc., hence problematizing the "social"/"non-social" dichotomy. On the other hand, if we did take into account the analyticist methodology you've outlined elsewhere, physical objects would still be interpreted of course for the sake of theoretical accounts, so in a sense, perhaps, the "social" is either A) still taking precedence here, or B) as Latour puts it, we're forced to rethink what "the social" entails. ...

To which PTJ replies:

I read Latour much the way that you read him here. I think he's basically a relational discourse theorist who is reacting against the "ideational" misreading of Foucault, so he and his disciples say "material" a lot when they mean discursive in the correct, narrow, Foucault-Laclau-Mouffe-Pickering-and-I-would-also-say-Wittgenstenian-sense of systems of meaning-making practices. The word "material" is a red herring in all-too-many of these discussions. 

For Latour there are no such things as 'social relations' in an abstract sense.  There are no 'social relations' as such, only mediators, which are things.  When Latour talks about 'the social' he is talking about a particular 'mode of existence' or mode of connection particular to sociality.  In other words, sociality is a particular way of connecting things; it is not a separate sphere or realm apart from things.  It's not composed from a different kind of 'stuff' to other kinds of things.  He isn't 'problematising the dichotomy' -- he's outright denying it.

Consequently, for him, sociality isn't limited to words, meanings, texts, etc. -- anything that performs a social connection is social.  While I'm fully aware that "discourse isn't talk, but a system of practical meaning-making activity" -- i.e. it isn't 'ideal' -- that isn't the problem.  Some discourse theorists are of course willing to embrace the concept of materiality insofar as texts are material, as are human bodies and regimes of discipline and so on.  But these caveats are generally pretty half-hearted and fail to go anywhere near far enough.  In fact they're just margin-notes to a whole mindset that is wrong.

Latour's definitely not a discourse theorist in any way, shape or form.  He certainly owes dues to Foucault, while semiotics is his main 'toolkit' but that's as far as it goes.  This becomes perfectly clear in any of his actual actor-network analyses.  For example: In his photo essay 'Paris: Invisible City' (available on his website) he goes around Paris looking at all the institutions that hold the city together as a city.  The city qua city -- that is, as a social entity.  He looks at, for instance, how the clocks keep time.

Tracing that network one can go from the watch on one's wrist to the radio towers that transmit pulses to update devices wirelessly to broadcasting stations, to the statute books and standards documents that prescribe the specific definitions of time to the laboratories where standards are produced, criticised, tested, reproduced and so on.  But if you keep pulling at the threads you can go even further.  Those laboratories don't just work on texts and traces; they also tie themselves into the persistent, unfailing pulses of decaying radioactive isotopes and the perfectly consistent throbbing of distant, dying stars.  These are the objects whose own time-keeping is used to set the whole network in lockstep.

These technical, legal, scientific and political institutions tie the city of Paris together by keeping it in time with itself.  And at what point is this network 'social' in the narrow sense?  The stars, atoms, papers, fibre-optic cables and so on are not part of the network 'in a manner of speaking,' nor are they only enrolled insofar as they are meaningful.  They simply are part of the network, just as all the meaningful human agents are.  The network isn't reducible to atoms and stars but nor does it make the least bit of sense without them.

Latour doesn't ask 'how is meaning made?' he asks 'how do things hold together?' -- and cities are held together, in some small part, with stars and atoms -- so long as the requisite networking institutions exist, that is.

Stars and atoms aren't the 'really real' behind the veil of subjective impression and they don't determine anything.  The fear of material determinism is frankly silly if you look at how much hard work goes into making the whole network hold together.  Stars and atoms don't easily lend themselves to humans' peculiar ends.  They have to be enrolled, enlisted and maintained.  Far from determining the whole getup on their own they are utterly indifferent towards us.  They have to be made to determine the time on our wrists and on our walls.

And yet, despite all of that, actor-network theory can easily be read as constructivism.  It steadfastly refuses, for instance, the notion of an absolute, objective Time sitting behind all our subjective perversions of it.  The stars and atoms do not pulse and decay in Real Time, 'out there,' as it really is.  The aforementioned network does not produce a subjective approximation of an objective absolute.  Time is the product of a specific network and, consequently, there are as many times as there are networks producing it.  But none of that constructivism draws a line between the atoms and the texts, the things and their meaning.  On the contrary, if there were such a line the whole network would collapse; the network exists precisely because the lines of the network look like this: ------ (connected) and not like this: ----|---- (disconnected).  Drawing an arbitrary line between sociality and materiality (thereby constituting the fantasy that such things exist, severally) prevents us from understanding these hybrid networks because the networks themselves do not operate on the basis of such distinctions.  This is why ANT adopts the ethnomethodological principle to let actors themselves define their own meta-languages, rather than imposing an analytical master-language from the outside.

And this is why our dualist SOPs (whether they're ontological or just analytical, it makes no difference), in my opinion, are no longer helpful.  They are the problem, not the solution.

So, PTJ, basically I don't accept that we should have hard and fast divisions between the ontologies of our daily lives -- in which we know that the world is full of things that have all kinds of effects on us -- and the ontologies of our analyses -- where only the 'meaning' of things is relevant.  It's not because ignoring materiality locks us into 'subjectivism' or because looking at things rather than people makes us all hard-nosed and serious -- these criticisms are bogus and based on their own dualisms.  It's because arbitrary, pre-judged distinctions between what matters and what doesn't make it impossible for us to understand hybrid networks that, themselves, only work because they do not make such distinctions.

If we live in an ontologically hybrid world we need modes of analysis suited to that world.  Social constructivism or discourse analysis in the vein of Foucault, Laclau, Wittgenstein, etc. are well suited to particular areas of our world but they miss out entirely on vast swathes of it because of their blinkered and entirely unnecessary dualist predispositions (again, whether it's ontological or analytical dualism, it makes no difference).  Social constructivism should be valued for what it does well but no number of successes should paper over where it goes awry -- and where it goes off the rails is in the face of hybrid networks, which are everywhere.

PTJ on SMW on Education and Knowledge

Patrick T. Jackson on Stephen M. Walt on the education of young gentlemen would-be policy wonks:

Walts (sic) sings the praises of a liberal education

I have a problem with this part:

Walt suggests that "geography matters" so students ought to learn things like the physical characteristics of different regions. But this is a non sequitur, since it is entirely possible for one to maintain that geography matters without becoming a geographical determinist. Studying the physical characteristics of a region and expecting them to give one insight into social and political dynamics is geographical determinism...

This 'non sequitur' allegation is itself a non sequitur!  'Physical geography matters' is not determinism; 'physical geography determines' is determinism.  And I don't buy the slippery slope argument that if we allow mountains, rivers and so on into our analyses that we're a hop and a skip away from Mackinder.  What about, for instance, Jared Diamond?  Is he beyond the pale?  I know that he has a tendency to reify things like 'national culture' and for that I would criticise him but in general he does an excellent job of drawing sociality and materiality together in such a fashion that neither determines the other.  Braudel too.

This either/or logic is the fundamental weakness of social constructivism: that either we bracket out materiality (in this case physical geography) completely or else we'll inevitably end up saying that mountains, rivers and disease mechanically determine the various trajectories of humanity.  It just doesn't follow.  More seriously, it limits the potential of constructivism with respect to critique, interpretation and explanation.  It's old fashioned dualism dressed up in fashionable new jargon.

Down with this sort of thing!

Other than that, however, I agree with PTJ.  Walt all too easily, and perhaps even subconsciously, suggests that some epistemic practices have access to reality while others simply stitch together different aptitudes and interpretations.  This is the very worst of advice.

In this century the sociology of knowledge has to be a core part of any decent liberal arts education (or, frankly, any decent education).  Without it there can be no reflexivity or self-awareness with respect to everything else that one is learning.  Without that students are likely to take the geology, biology and, worst of all, the economics of the matter to be the 'really real' behind all the interpretations.

However, that said, it'd help if social constructivism (the kind taught to IR students, at least) didn't so wilfully cut reality straight down the middle and pretend that most of the constitutive elements of our worldly existence should be ignored, lest they 'determine' us.

More on Mr Ferguson

Dan Drezner on Ferguson and Zakaria:

Intellectual power and responsibility in an age of superstars

I don't think it's fair to suggest that Ferguson's critics are jealous of his income.

People despise Niall Ferguson because he uses his academic status to lend a veneer of intellectual credibility to the bare faced lies and misinformation of whatever right-wing talking point is doing the rounds. Academics especially despise him, consequently, because he cheapens their vocation. He's a self-interested hack falsely credited as a profound thinker. He is where he is not because of his exalted brainpower but because he tells rich and powerful people exactly what they want to hear.

Now, of course, he's not stupid -- the market for telling rich and powerful people what they want to hear is very large indeed and he's clawing his way to the top of it -- but he's not much of an intellectual either. Perhaps I'm just a silly old romantic but 'intellectual' suggests to me someone who venerates ideas and truth-saying above stroking their own ego, lining their own pockets and sating the appetites of the powerful.

Intellectuals say what they believe, regardless of who is listening and/or paying. Someone who does the contrary is just a big-talking pseudo-celeb.

Royalty and 'Disgrace'

'Rich, famous young man has some fun -- world shocked.' He should be stripped of his title (instead of his underpants), some suggest.

If 'arry is 'disgracing' the blessed Royalty by his antics then isn't that a fantastic reason for him to keep his title? Anything to disrupt the smarm-secreting, anally-retentive, buttoned-up, master-signifying bullshit-mongers. Anything to drag this country's self-image into the Eighteenth-bloody-Century.

Labour, Taxes and Failings Thereon

Richard Murphy quotes a Mr Peter Watt, former general secretary of the Labour party:

We should state clearly that while government must collect taxes so that it can deliver the services and protections that we expect them to, we understand that tax is a necessary evil and that people have the right to try and legally minimise the amount that they pay. Furthermore, any government should have a duty to minimise the amount that people and companies have to pay in tax and to spend the tax that it does collect wisely.

It sounds very much like Mr Watt is not so much a Labourite as a disappointed Conservative. He buys all the ideology but doesn't share the hope that a Hayekian utopia can be realised. 'Alas,' he sighs 'tax is a necessary evil.' Presumably he concludes that people are too feckless and stupid to achieve the ideal -- but the ideal remains hallowed and beatific.

A real Labourite would recognise, contrariwise, that the ideal is thoroughly dystopian and that the realisation of it could only be worse still.

I doubt many people feel particularly overjoyed when they pay their taxes. But that doesn't make taxes 'evil'! They're an integral part of social solidarity -- something that Labour doesn't have too much to say about these days, sadly.

Austerity: a reversal of means and ends

The conventional narrative says: austerity is a means to the end of reducing the deficit.

This has it exactly backwards.

In fact: the deficit is a means to the end of imposing austerity.

ANTHEM on Plasma

Peter Erdelyi writes:

First at Circling Squares: Latour revisiting ‘Paris: Ville Invisible’, and then at Object-Oriented Philosophy: Latour’s plasma.

P.S. Actually I’m sympathetic to both arguments, even though they seem antithetical at first. Circling Squares says plasma is a sociological concept, while Harman says it’s a metaphysical concept.

In The Prince and the Wolf Latour gave primarily a sociological and epistemological explanation:

So plasma is what appears once the so-called natural sciences are added to the pot, so to speak, and made to circulate, not to cover the whole. (…) So, what people don’t understand is that when you do science studies you have completely different views of all that. The whole space is actually empty. And then in this very, very empty space where ignorance is the rule basically, you have circulating in the full vein, the very, very, very full vein, which is the circulation of active and formatted knowledge about mathematics, and about chemistry, and about physics, and about sociology, and about economics. So it is a reversal of background and foreground. Plasma is what you do when, to your shock, you make all of the formatted knowledge circulate inside the landscape. (p. 81)

Now, how do you call what is not formatted plasma? I mean, you can abandon the word if you want. But I think that’s the point with our criticisms: we are never in awe of or in dispute with the natural sciences. We like them because they occupy so little space! And when you’re struck by the ecological crisis, immediately you recognize a completely different territory. Here we know barely anything; we are in a state of complete ignorance. And then you have this very, very small channel of knowledge in the middle of a completely empty space. So suddenly you breathe (lots of space!) but then you are terrified by our shared ignorance, and then the question of reassembling the collective becomes central. (p. 82)

(…)

So if you take an organization (I’m very obsessed by the question of organization now). No organization would work one minute if it were not constantly drawing on this reserve of… so-called unformatted plasma. The point is just that we don’t know what it is exactly, of course. (p. 83)

(…)

So, plasma is completely… I mean it is a concept. If you want to show where the plasma is, I say everywhere
because it is… it’s not the unformatted that’s the difficulty here. It’s what is in between the formatting. Maybe this is not a very good metaphor. But it’s a very, very different landscape, once the background and foreground have been reversed and the sciences have been added to the landscape, instead of being what defined the landscape. (p. 84)

So this passage would seem to support Circling Squares’ argument. However, in Reassembling the Social, just after he first mentions “the strange figure of the ‘plasma’” (p. 50), Latour goes on to say

Most social scientists would adamantly resist the idea that they have to indulge in metaphysics to define the social. But such an attitude means nothing more than sticking to one metaphysics, usually a very poor one…” (p. 51).

He constantly argues for sociology to practice metaphysics and praises Tarde for doing so: “What is most useful for ANT is that Tarde does not make the social science break away from philosophy or even metaphysics” (p. 15). Harman therefore is also right to consider the concept of plasma within the metaphysics that Latour puts forward.

So is plasma a sociological or a metaphysical concept? I would say it’s both. This however doesn’t necessarily have to mean that it does work as such. Remember that Latour advocates the use of ‘weak terms’ as infra-language. So a concept like plasma is kind of a probe: it is sent forth as part of an experiment, the result of which can be either success or failure (and probably there is some zombie state in-between the two). My guess is that Latour probably wanted to use the concept as both sociological and metaphysical, but it is designed in such a way that if it fails as one (e.g. as a metaphysical concept when put under scrutiny by a philosopher like Harman), it can still carry on as a sociological concept. (After all Latour did say that “Maybe this is not a very good metaphor. ” ) I heard some people criticise this strategy as flip-flopping or being slippery, but it is consistent with Latour’s pragmatist commitments.

I agree that there isn't always a straightforward distinction between sociology and metaphysics in Latour's work. However, that isn't really the important point. What is obvious from Latour's self-evidently sociological writings (e.g. Reassembling the Social, Paris: Invisible City, etc.) is that 'the social' is a very narrow, particular portion of the world. Latour constantly refers to how isolated, specific and fragile it is -- how it needs to be constantly taken up and rewoven and how until things are tied into the social they are not themselves social. In other words, there is no 'always already' social -- the social has to be composed; and it is composed from non-social things.

I believe that these sentiments are so commonplace in Latour's work that citations would be superfluous; however, the following posts contain more detail if such is needed:
http://circlingsquares.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/sociality-and-relationality.html
http://circlingsquares.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/harman-on-me-on-harman-on-latour-on.html

Never does the social seem to be all encompassing -- far from it. In fact, Latour is at pains, particularly in Paris: Invisible City to show over and over again just how disconnected most of 'Paris' is. Indeed, Paris as a totality is seen to be profoundly fragile and totally dependent upon its sociality. 'Social' describes the filaments that hold Paris together qua a city -- it doesn't describe the elements that hold it together in any other sense; it doesn't describe the bonds holding together the atoms composing a street lamp on the Champs-Élysées. Or, rather, it doesn't so long as there isn't some institution socialising those bonds and tying them into the social somehow. If these bonds were social in the absence of any such institution then the social would be always already there, any- and everywhere that there were relations of any kind; it would require no composition and politics (as the progressive composition of the common world) would be pointless.

And politics is the point: take a look at Latour's recent essay 'Paris, invisible city: The plasma' -- the essay that my original post was actually commenting on. In that essay (particularly the last few paragraphs) Latour is quite explicit that the importance of plasma is political -- that if things are not always already bound up into a given social configuration then politics becomes necessary to compose and bring together those previously unsocialised elements to make a new common world. Never is it implied that these 'extra-social' elements are plasma in the sense that Harman suggests -- that of ephemeral phantoms transcending all relationality. The plasma is only implied to be those elements that are not yet circulating in social networks.

If the police chief turns off his CCTV cameras he's closed off part of the social. The streets he was previously looking at haven't evaporated -- they still enjoy other kinds of relations and other kinds of existence, he's just temporarily disconnected them from his portion of the social network of Paris. If a person dies from an unknown illness the pathogen is perfectly real but it is not social since it cannot be formatted in such a way as to circulate in social networks. And so on. (See the second post listed above for more on this.)

The main point is simply this: if you take social association to be a synonym for every kind of relation altogether (i.e. take it to be metaphysical in and of itself) rather than taking it to denote a particular kind of relation then Latour's entire sociology takes on a completely different meaning. The social ceases to be narrow, particular and requiring composition and it becomes sprawling, all encompassing and limitless. Its outside (its plasma) ceases to be other assemblages of unsocialised things enjoying and employing other kinds of relationality and instead becomes something phantosmagorical, ephemeral and occult, transcending all relation.

This little, seemingly innocent abstraction -- from social qua kind of relation to social qua all relation -- changes the meaning of pretty much everything.

Of course people are free to interpret Latour's work as they see fit and it does make a very interesting metaphysics if you abstract it from the particularities. However, what I am trying to resist is the idea that Latour's sociology can be easily abstracted from all the particularities it explicitly presupposes and lose nothing in translation.

While I very much like his version, Harman's Latour is very different to the Latour one encounters actually reading the primary texts. The translation of Latour's sociology into a metaphysics involves a large degree of transformation -- transformation that isn't always adequately acknowledged. There's nothing wrong with transformation but, unacknowledged, it will, I fear, prove misleading and confusing, conflating, as it does, quite different sets of ideas.

Newsnight, Lydon and Tory Desperation

I enjoy the BBC's Question Time. Many look down their noses at it. Sure, its dominated by a middle-of-the-road, establishmentarian kind of vibe. And, yes, they generally fill the panel with politicians who regurgitate the party line and journalists who play to the crowd. And, of course, it's irritating when they throw in some 'wild card' celebrity who's got nothing much to say just to grab some publicity. Despite all that it's an interesting barometer of where the country's political discourse is centered at that moment in time. Indeed, its very middle-of-the-road-ness is what makes it interesting.

What most struck me in last night's edition was how far we've come with respect to the banks, regulation and so on. Even Tory MPs are banker bashing. That might not mean that they'll do much about increasing regulation and so on but these discussions just couldn't have happened even a few years ago. Both main parties are falling over themselves trying to blame each other for laxly regulating the city. Of course this is all stupendously stupid because both are very much to blame. Both are in the City's pockets and both fully subscribed to the neoliberal dogma that markets work best when as lightly regulated as possible. Worse still, the Tories clearly still believe in this; Labour appear to be on the fence. The shrill pandemonium of their accusations and counter-accusations is as predictable as it is distracting. But still, these discussions are happening -- and on QT!

So that's the good. As for the bad, last night's 'wild card' was Johnny 'Rotten' Lydon. He was certainly a spectacle, flitting between eloquence and incoherence, almost at random. 'The bad' isn't so much that he was on the panel (he certainly outperformed one or two of his co-panelists) but rather that he is the only thing the media seem willing to talk about today. Everything else just gets buried, since there was a celebrity on and he done swears and stuff.

Johnny was alright; the real clowns are those who are incapable of focusing on what really matters.

Sociality and Relationality

A few excerpts from Reassembling the Social:

... social does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social.

... ‘social’ designates a type of link ...

... social, for ANT, is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes.

As I've previously argued, for Latour 'social' is not a synonym for 'relation'; it, instead, designates a particular kind of relation. Therefore, to say that something is outside sociality does not mean that it is outside relationality altogether.

It seems from Reassembling the Social, Paris, Invisible City and, indeed, Latour's own comments in response to Harman's in The Prince and the Wolf that plasma is supposed to be outside sociality specifically rather than relationality altogether. Therefore, the claim that plasma is a metaphysical concept in the sense of something existing beyond all relation is unsupported by what Latour actually says. Indeed, the contrary is rather strongly suggested.

Plasma could be rendered metaphysical (and remain consistent with what Latour says of it) if we understood it to be: (a) that which is outside, enveloping, supporting and feeding any given relational complex, social or otherwise, so long as it was also (b) particular to that network -- in other words, if what was unformatted, unrelated plasma to one complex could be fully formatted and enrolled in another (e.g. that which is plasma with respect to sociality is not plasma with respect to physical existence).

However, to conflate sociality with all relationality and to infer, on that basis, that plasma is outside all relationality requires a fairly large imaginative leap beyond what the text specifies. That doesn't make it any less valid an interpretation (no translation without transformation, the author is dead, etc.) but it does mean, in my opinion, that the gap between the two versions should be acknowledged. Indeed, refusing to acknowledge this gap will only confuse things for everyone.

On Killing a Meme

Following Jay Foster’s recent article, the Circling Squares blog claims that I’m overgeneralizing Latour’s plasma. I ignored this when Foster said it, but with two people it risks becoming a meme ...

An amusing irony that I neglected to mention in the previous post is that, given that about 10 people usually read this blog (on a good day), Harman would probably have been better off ignoring what I'd said as in picking my post out for criticism he only went and increased my readership tenfold!

Perhaps this is another lesson to note in the critique of critique: if you strike a meme down it might become even more powerful! I jest, of course; I don't expect anyone to take me seriously but it does demonstrate that, once you adopt an actantial, 'object-oriented' or memetic way of thinking, it becomes plain that there is much more to discourse than proclamation and refutation. These things have 'a mind of their own.'

Incidentally, I haven't read Jay Foster's article so I don't believe that I'm reproducing that particular meme.