See this call for papers for EIASM’s 1st Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop to be held near Stockholm on 3-4 June 2010. The announcement gives a good summary of the recent surge of interest in the nature of markets and the contributions actor-network theory driven approaches and science and technology studies (STS) have made to this area in recent years. The workshop aims to be interdisciplinary and calls for contributions from all areas that have an interest in markets, such as business studies, marketing, STS, economic sociology, economics, economic geography, consumer research, cultural studies and anthropology.

Possible topics:

• the various forms markets may assume
• the processes through which markets are realized
• the import of economic theories at large on markets (economics, marketing, strategy)
• the role of devices and metrics in shaping markets
• the role of “market professionals” in the organizing of markets
• how regulators act in and on markets
• how representations of markets contribute to shape the markets they depict
• how market agencies are equipped
• how markets produce values

To apply, submit a 3-page abstract by 29 January 2010. The organising committee consists of Hans Kjellberg (Stockholm School of Economics), Debbie Harrison (Norwegian School of Management), Claes-Fredrik Helgesson (Linköping University), and Susi Geiger (University College Dublin). Guest speakers include Bernard Cova (Euromed Marseille), Barbara Czarniawska (Gothenburg School of Economics), and Steve Woolgar (Saïd Business School, Oxford).

It is nice to learn from Graham Harman that his Bournemouth talk last year on Heidegger’s “origin of the work of art” essay has directly inspired this interesting forthcoming paper by Robert Jackson: “Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure.” That event was actually organised by Tammy Lu at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth (since then  renamed as the Arts University College at Bournemouth), although I was the one who took this crazy photo of Graham:

Three days later Graham gave another talk on “The Greatness of McLuhan” at the Media School at Bournemouth University. We posted the recordings of both talks on this blog and they both became quite popular, however the Heidegger talk has the edge: it has been downloaded 1,027 times since 8 February 2008, as opposed to the 884 downloads of the McLuhan talk.

Strangely, both of these talks are more popular than Harman’s first lecture at the LSE  “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” on 29 November 2007, which has been downloaded 778 times, even though that was the event that launched the Heideggero-Latourian project most explicitly. I would have thought that the juxtaposition of Heidegger and Latour and the invocation of Latour’s concept of the plasma would be provocatively alluring (or alluringly provocative) enough to attract more attention. But the most popular Harman download (besides the respectable 1,688 downloads of the Harman Review itself) seems to be his “Assemblages According to Manuel DeLanda” from November 2008, with 1,385 downloads since then.

[Although I should hasten to add that these figures are somewhat misleading, as both the plasma talk and the Harman Review are also available on the LSE website, so probably just as many people if not more would have downloaded them from there. As for the DeLanda talk, it received a boost after being listed on Speculative Heresy.]

Jackson’s paper sounds very interesting though, so I’ll reproduce his abstract here:

Abstract for “Heidegger and the Work of Art History”

Session at Association of Art Historians (AAH) Annual Conference, April 15-17, 2010,

Glasgow, UK.

“Heidegger, Harman and Algorithmic Allure”

Robert Jackson BA (Hons)

School of Computing, Communications and Electronics

Art and Social Technologies

Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth.

In recent years the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has surfaced with a “realist” re-reading of Martin Heidegger‟s Tool-analysis, pushing it to its logical limits (Tool-Being – 2002). Dismissing Dasein as the root of truth for human beings, Harman instead argues that “Readiness-to-hand” and “Present-at-hand” are qualities available to all entities in the cosmos even if humans created such objects.

In January 2008 Harman‟s paper “On the Origin of the Work of Art (atonal remix)” attempts to perform an “object-oriented-philosophy” reading of Heidegger‟s influential essay on aesthetics, identifying Heidegger’s “strife” as a philosophical idea which escapes into the qualities of all objects and not just privileged artworks. But the extension of Heidegger’s strife hints to the idea of aesthetic “allure,” which Harman describes as “a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partly disintegrates.” “Allure” occurs when objects are split from their qualities, exhibiting tensions between its essence of “Being” and the way it has been described. Artworks, metaphors and jokes turn out not to be affecting features of human literary culture, but primordial constructions of the universe itself.

The paper will argue that these rich conceptualisations offer insightful commentary on technological artworks which utilise computational algorithms. I claim that artists such as John F Simon and Antoine Schmitt create generative and emergent aesthetic objects which display “allure” in all of their partial opacity, leading to the idea that technological artworks can propel vigorous independence, worlds away from superficial artificiality.

Recently, I received an early Christmas gift: Bruno Latour’s new book, The Making of Law, expedited from the UK several months before its American release. I’ve been blogging about the book, offering up some very impressionistic, very tentative thoughts on it or, more accurately, my experience of reading it. In this post, I reflect on the book in its entirety. The other entries may be found here: Preface & Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6.

Overview

This spring, I’ll audit a sociology of science course at Boston College. We’re focusing on actor-network theory. This is the first time, as far as I know, that the approach will be examined in the department. Over the course of the semester, we’ll cover several of Latour’s works and Callon’s article on scallops. The course builds up to Reassembling the Social, which we’ll read sometime in April, and ends with two open weeks. I suppose we’ll be filling those weeks at some point, once the class is in a position to reflect on ANT and make an informed decision about what we’d like to read at that point.

Would I recommend The Making of Law for those open weeks? With the class’s newly-acquired background in ANT in mind, my answer is a definitive, “Nope.” I’d recommend the bulk of The Making of Law—that is, the first four chapters—only to specialists, sociologists of law and those drawn to ANT who are explicitly dealing with non-scientific constructions of accounts. I count myself as the latter, working, as I am, on a study of how Congress produced knowledge of torture during the Bush administration. The little that I gleaned from these early chapters was a result of a very strategic reading of them; of each chapter, I could ask, “what does this tell me about how Congress makes knowledge?” This was why I found Chapter 2, with its focus on files, so helpful. But, without that strategic question in mind, I’m not certain I could have convinced myself that my sluggish forward-motion was worth it. Skimming, too, would have been in order.

Chapters 5 and 6, however, are another story. A reader with moderate familiarity with Latour’s work will, I think, enjoy these chapters. Really, one can probably move from Reassembling the Social straight to them, but familiarity with We Have Never Been Modern and Science in Action would probably help too.

I’m not sure, though, how these chapters would “feel” if one hasn’t read the previous four. Specifically, I wonder if one would be convinced, since it is the earlier chapters that provide the ethnographic proof of the claims Latour makes in the final two. My hunch is that that sort of reading would work. And, of course, the brutal first four are always there, waiting for the skeptic.

A week or so ago, I received an early Christmas gift: Bruno Latour’s new book, The Making of Law, expedited from the UK several months before its American release. I’ve been blogging about the book, offering up some very impressionistic, very tentative thoughts on it or, more accurately, my experience of reading it. In this post, I discuss Chapter 6, “Talking of law.” Other entries may be found here: Preface & Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Overview.

Chapter 6, “Talking of law.”

So I made it. &, I’ll admit, after struggling through the first four chapters—the first 197 pages of a 277 page book, I’m glad that I did. Chapters 5 and 6 thrill, even if, by thrilling, they are considerably more difficult to summarize than the earlier ones. I just have a few thoughts on the final chapter.

Chapter 6, like 5, keeps the reader on familiar terrain. Really, it feels like a rehashing of Reassembling the Social; no “social” explanation is sufficient, the social is too weak to explain law, law is one way of associating. (It’s worth reminding oneself that the original, French edition of The Making of Law preceded the publication of Reassembling the Social by three years or so; The Making of Law, then, isn’t a straightforward application of Reassembling, but one of the places where its claims are worked our and empirically grounded.)

Chapter 6 also forwards a rather peculiar definition of law. Law is…a (the?) way of tethering speech and acts to people.

Everything happens as if law were interested exclusively in the possibility of re-engaging the figures of enunciation by attributing to a speaker what he or she said. Linking an individual to a text through the process of qualification; attaching a statement to its enunciator by following the sequences of signatures; authenticating an act of writing [...] all law can be grasped as an obsessive effort to make enunciation assignable. (p. 274)

This leads Latour to a rather wonderous conlusion: without Law,

we wouldn’t be human; without it, we would have lost the trace of what we had said. Statements would float around without ever being able to find their enunciators. Nothing would bind the space-time entity in continuum. We would be unable to find the trace of our actions. There would be no accountability. Is this not enough to present ourselves with some self-respect before other peoples? To ask them to have a closer look at what we call the ‘rule of law’ and rightly see [it] as a treasure to be cherished?

This is as close to poetry as Latour gets. And it is compelling. Yet I wonder about it. Throughout the final chapter, Latour takes great pains to distinguish what law does from what religion and politics do. To be sure, I am not a student of the former and am barely a student of the former. But each seems, it seems to me, to accomplish what Latour says law accomplishes: the tethering of acts and speech to actors.

For a season or two, I was obsessed with the story of Cain and Abel. It seemed to me that that first murder, that first crime against a human, had many peculiar qualities. I wondered if Cain could intend to murder Abel when there had been no such thing. Surely, the brothers were familiar with death, with the causal linking of act to life, through Abel’s sacrificial offerings. But would Cain have extended this causality to his relations with his brother. Perhaps, but I’m tempted to think that he did not. This sort of causal-confusion, I like to think, explains his famous response to God.

⁹Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”
“I know not,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Yet God produces that causal-ordering, that binding of the “space-time entity” as Latour puts it, with an accusation dressed as question.

¹⁰Then He said, “What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!

Is this Law? In Latour’s sense, nearly. These observations, as unfounded and out-of-line with traditional interpretations as they are, have led me back to the work of theorists like Mead and Butler, both of whom seem to locate accountability in social relationships. Without the Other, my self has no order, no time. Perhaps sociality precedes law; maybe it is a type of law.

And what of politics? There’s an awkward moment in the footnotes of The Making of Law when Latour credits Lynch and Bogen’s The Spectacle of History for offering one of the few “precise empirical descriptions of the making of the law” (p. 253). This book, though, analyzes investigative hearings held in response to the Iran-Contra affair. These are quasi-legal affairs; one can perjure oneself in testimony; one can be subpoenaed to testify; and one can refuse to give testimony on all sorts of legal-ish grounds. But, as far as I know, no legally-binding decisions or anything close to to legally-binding decisions are issued at the end of hearings. At best, reports are and these, as with Iran-Contra, can be partisan things, with no certain conclusions reached. Yet accountability is pursued and it is pursued by attempting to link actors to documents. These sorts of acts are all over The Spectacle of History just as they are all over the Senate Armed Services’ Committee’s hearings in response to Abu Ghraib.  Is this sort of politics better called law? Or is there overlap between these activities? Chapter 6 leaves me wondering…

So there we are. I’ll return to Chapters 5 and 6 one day; they’re those sorts of chapters, dense, theoretical, and important.

A week or so ago, I received an early Christmas gift: Bruno Latour’s new book, The Making of Law, expedited from the UK several months before its American release. I’ve been blogging about the book, offering up some very impressionistic, very tentative thoughts on it or, more accurately, my experience of reading it. In this post, I discuss Chapter 5, “Scientific objects and legal objectivity.” Other entries may be found here: Preface & Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 6, and Overview.

Chapter 5, “Scientific objects and legal objectivity.”

An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2004; this version appears online at Latour’s website. Yet there is something thrilling about reading it in The Making of Law. Perhaps it is that the chapter refreshes, leading the reader to familiar terrain: laboratories, where familiar knowledge-building work is done. Perhaps it is also that the chapter leaves out the lengthy, ethnographic reconstructions of legal talk. Simply put, this chapter is the pay-off that this reader had been seeking.

In “Scientific objects and legal objectivity,” Latour tries to distinguish what it is to do law from what it is to do science. The chapter begins by discussing something like law’s and science’s “presentation of self”: the former appearing detached from the fate of claims, the latter appearing passionately commited to this. This is, Latour recognizes, a half-reversal of common understandings of these professions; scientists, at least, are supposed to appear detached and “objective,” yet it is the Counselors, who have several “micro-procedures” to sever the links between themselves, the cases they hear, and the claims they follow. For instance, the reporters who first present his notes on a case are required to produce two drafts of decisions, essentially one on “each side” of the case: rejecting the request for the Counsel to hear the csae or for “declaring the [challenged] decision null and void” (p. 213).

For a scientist, this would be quite scandalous; it would be like deciding at the last moment, in light of his colleagues’ reactions, whether the phenomena she was talking about existed or not (p. 213).

We then turn toward distinguishing between the ways scientists and Counsel members treat information. This, to me, is the most rewarding section of the chapter; it is, really, a conversation, two and three decades later, with Science in Action and Laboratory Life. Latour finds significant differences between how scientists build and link and how Counsel members do. To begin with, scientists have more diverse equipment (“the sources of inscriptions are heterogenous” P. 235) than do Counsel members. That is, a lab is filled with all sorts of tools that I cannot name; the Counsel with files, file, files, shelves for files, a computer that helps organize those files, rubber bands, and pencils. No matter where one goes in the Counsel, this is all one will find. But the treatment of information is far more interesting. Scientists prefer what we might call hi-def information and law lo-def info. Legal information goes through few transformations, perhaps but a single one. That is, simple photographs, simple, official forms are sufficient to bring the world beyond the Counsel into the Counsel” and establish the facts of a case; these are “short referential chain[s]” (p. 226). Science, on the other hand, involves “cascades of transformations” (p. 235).

No scientific article would make do with one single such transport, with just one representation in the form of a graph, but has instead to orchestrate dozens, each linked to the other so as to compose a drama or a chain of reasoning, each one being precarious in the sense that it seeks to carry over all of the relevant elements of the preceding layer… (p. 225)

Yet, for law, lo-def information is sufficient because law, not information, is the basis of judgment and judges can, by living with the “facts” of the file, that information that has not been disputed, quickly move on to legal, rather than informational things. “They can only attain precision,” Latour writes, “by progressively distancing themselves from direct contact with common sense and the senses” (p. 229).

These differences between law and science lead Latour to characterize the former as possessing “objectivity,” “indifference and serenity as to the solution” and the latter “objectity,” the ordeal by means of which a scientists binds her own fate and that of her speech to the trials undergone by the phenomena” (p. 236). What he means for scientists is relatively straightforward: they are not judges of truth, but judged by the non-humans they torture (and somewhere, I can’t locate it now, Latour does call science torture).

Suspended above researchers, there is always a third object that is appointed judge and charged with deciding on their behalf, to which scientists delegate the task of judging, without worrying whether they themselves, in their own consciences, are “objective.” (p. 237).

Judges lack this delegated-judge; “they have,” Latour writes, “no one else to judge on their behalf, and they can become ‘objective’ only by constructing an intricate and complex institution which detaches and isolats their consciences from the ultimate solution” (p. 237).

I’ll leave it at that. This was, as I’ve said, a thrilling and rewarding chapter. Probably, for that reason, it has been the hardest to write about. I’d do better to have read it over and over before putting down any ideas. What is here is a piece-meal reconstructing, certainly a lo-def constructon that leaves out so much (like, for instance, why law doesn’t want to rock its own boat and why science does). Thankfully, the chapter is online, I’ve provided a link above, and one can go from this transformed version of the chapter to Latour’s version. An ordeal, indeed.

Arcadia: (Greek: Ἀρκαδία) refers to a Utopian vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature

apropos

Peter Kennard's 'Haywain with Cruise Missiles'

What is nature? Dictionary.com has 17 different definitions    HERE

The first four definitions make no room for man in nature. Five is a correlationist universe of appearing phenomena. Six is a Newtonian universe of quantifiable forces. Seven defines nature as opposite to culture. Eight defines nature as the present-at-hand. Nine defines nature through conforming to an innate pre-determined behavior. Nine to fourteen define nature through a norm or original consistency. Fifteen defines nature as barbarism. And lastly, seventeen, nature as the absence of God’s will. The distinct thread running through all these definition is that nature is something Other to human beings or that human beings are in but out of joint with nature and with the natural.

These definitions support the idea of Bruno Latour that all discourses in nature and ecology point to a multiculturalism of the human world against a mononaturalism outside of human control. It is us verses it. I agree with Latour that a separation between multiculturalism and mononaturalism leads us only back to the Cave (i.e. to a Platonic fundamental dualism) and that ‘political ecology has not begun’ until abandons ‘Nature’. Thus object-oriented philosophy (OOP) should be a strong guide in defining nature and the natural via an ontology with a radically inclusive depth.

I will start this investigation with a quote from Eric S Nelson’s paper Responding to Heaven and Earth:

Heidegger and Laozi spoke of Sein and Dao rather than of nature. The English word “nature” is derived from the Latin “natura,” which if Heidegger is correct about its import, needs to be placed in question precisely for ecological reasons. Heidegger analyzed the word natura, and its modern derivatives, as a basic misunderstanding and mistranslation of the archaic Greek disclosure of phusis. The word “nature” is already a denial of the sense we want to give it (i.e., what nature is intended by us to say), because natura is already a transformation of being that reduces it to the purposive, the pragmatic, and the useful—that is to the human. Nature thus has to be reinterpreted according to phusis, and I will argue later the Dao, which means the holding sway and upsurge of being rather than the raw stuff or material of cultivation and formation implied by the Latin understanding and use of natura.

The word nature is a product of translation from Greek to Latin to English. There can be no translation without transformation. Thus, the word nature looses the essence of the Greek word phusis, which comes to play an important role in the work of Heidegger and the OOP of Graham Harman. Aristotle was the first to define Being as presence, which would have a knock on effect to phusis which was, until then, a concealed primordial structure. With Being as presence, phusis becomes physics and thus nature become the world of scientific inquiry.

Phusis must be understood in OOP terms as the ‘real object’ or as Harman suggests, ‘unnatural object’ – the core ‘character’ of objects remains unknown and always unnaturalized. Real objects are the “serving bearer of being” (the concealed Heideggerian earth). logos is the sensual object that performs semantic (or apophantic) articulations of phusis: as Harman notes in Tool-Being, all objects are Dasein. Dasein ’speak out’ the prevailing “growing growth” (that which has been born and has the propensity to grow) of phusis. It is the nature of phusis to come forth through logos as something at all or in particular. Objects form the world through the universal structure of semantic logos which articulates phusis as something-at-all. The logos can be considered something inclusive of but not exclusive to human Dasein. Just as “Language in its essence is neither expression nor a human deed. Language speaks” (Heidegger, Language).Language operates ontologically the same way as art. Language reveals the tension/strife between world and thing, logos and phusis, sensual object and real object. Therefore, logos partly naturalizes unnatural objects and forms them into worlded things as something-at-all.

We must take seriously the claim of Harman’s that retroactive causation is a universal principle, because it allows us to think nature as Zizekian barred nature applicable to all object-object relations: all objects abstract and phantasize the isness is the other object and thus engage in brutal acts of instrumentalized reduction. We should not look to ‘nature’ for a model of balance any more than we should look to capitalism as a guide for a fair and ethical society.

I shall now propose some propositions regarding nature:

>There is no holistic totality of Absolute being known as Nature.

>Objects are not all interconnected. Mystical Oneness is a “pathological exacerbation of the ego” that ignores mind-independent reality in an act of narcissistic presumption (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound)

>Balance cannot be an ontological principle (such as ‘natural balance’).

>All objects exist in-themselves prior to being part of an assemblage; yet are themselves assemblages ‘all the way down’.

>Objects are finite.

>Objects are in-themselves prior to human praxis.

>Nature does not equal God.

>Nature should not thought as inaccessible and barred (such as the Zizekian barred nature: nature does not exist as nature).

We cannot talk of an all inclusive nature in our discourses concerning ecology. In realist terms, nature is a double edged sword, it provides a basic cognitive feature which proposes a reality externally existing to that of human consciousness, yet it excludes human beings from the process entirely, thus generating a binary between nature and culture. For ecology to operate proper, human being must be seen to operate within a chaotic and continually shifting assemblages of objects and their relations, where remedies to environmental problems cannot be seen as a movement back to a balance state of ’scared’ nature, but to a state of banal coping. Coping with problematic naturalizations which erupt from being caused by human and non-human world forming logos. This must be done not through the idea of human being’s control over nature. Bringing human beings into balance with nature, which, as described in the previous post, is not only a myth, but leads to not nature qua nature, but a naturalization of something unnatural, the object in-itself. The result of a naturalization of the unnatural is a human projected nature based upon the fantasy of balance and peace. Nature is made present and predictable, in tune with a denial of the chaotic. Being One with nature is thus not a state of nature balance, there is non, but recognition of the independence and impossible Real kernel of objects which remains forever unnaturalized by any relation. Ecology should not be a focus on a phantasmatic natural world, but a engagement with a turbulent reality of effervescent change and always temporary attempts at order. We cannot tell ‘Nature’ what to be: we cannot tell real objects what they are.

“The distinction between “natural” and “artificial” always struck me as somewhat… artificial”    HERE

]]> http://mackereleconomics.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/bruno-latour-on-science/ Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:53:42 +0000 mackereleconomics http://mackereleconomics.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/bruno-latour-on-science/

The CBC documentary series Ideas did a 24-part series entitled How To Think About Science. In Part 5, Bruno Latour said this:

When I did this work on science practices, no one understood it. It was taken as a “debunking” of science. So I was very interested because I never though that that had to be debunked. I though it had to be studied and described, but not – debunking never interested me. And yet it was taken by people as debunking. So I became very interested in that argument – why is that people, when you describe science, [...] people believe it is a debunking? So what’s their idea of society when a description of science becomes a threat?

This question was a response to the backlash that he received because of his first book, entitled Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact, based on his use of the term “social construction” to indicate the book’s focus on the social aspects of scientific practice. He indicated that it was never his intention to debunk science, and that he only intended to enrich science by providing a more thorough and socially-grounded explanation of how science is actually done. After people began expressing distaste at the idea that scientific fact could be “socially constructed,” he came to realize that the possibility of this distaste is predicated on a dualistic view of the world that posited a sharp demarcation between nature and culture. Under this paradigm, science can be viewed as purely rational, and consequently a mere description of nature unaffected by the messy social influences of culture. Thus, a description of scientific facts as being socially constructed threatens to make science “disappear,” because it does not fit neatly into the nature/culture paradigm. (Compare arguments that gender is socially constructed; opponents of this view often feel as though traditional gender roles are in danger of disappearing. Because the view of gender as being “natural” rather than “social” fits so well into a dualistic nature/culture worldview, the acceptance of a paradigm that legitimates social influences on gender is hard to swallow, despite it’s being ostensibly more thorough.) Not surprisingly, Latour suggested that the split between nature and culture is merely political, and that it serves institutions that are in a position to benefit from speaking for one side or the other: science for nature, and politics for culture. I’ve repeatedly stated, here and elsewhere, that the nature/culture dualism is frustratingly normalized, and that things that are posited as purely in the realm of one or the other are almost always affected by a combination of both. I agree with him that overcoming this false dichotomy is a critical project. Latour seems unduly optimistic, though, when he suggests that, in David Cayley’s words, “this myth [...] is now clearly finished, undone by an ecological crisis in which human and non-human agencies are clearly blended” (namely, global warming). This may be the case in philosophy of science circles, as it seems to be in academic feminist ones, but I think this dualism still underscores a vast majority of people’s understanding of the world and serves as the basis of their decision making about issues that affect it, and that fact legitimates the existence of, for instance, climate change deniers in the highest echelons of power.

Some of Simon Schaffer’s more interesting pieces are his essay reviews, which we ought to discuss more often in this series.  The most important, though, is the confrontational “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991): 174-192, a review of The Pasteurization of France.  Schaffer discusses Latour and this piece in this video (approx. from 28:15 to 35:30):

The discussion in the video, and the one it segues into about the characteristics of science studies/history of science, provide an unusually explicit discussion about what scholarship should be like, and it’s useful to have it, because I disagree with it.  Schaffer cites Latour’s arrival with a bottle of his family’s best wine to work out their positions as a testament to Latour’s personal qualities as a scholar: Latour takes the time and effort to reconcile differences rather than engage in petty infighting.  Nevertheless, the tensions brought up in “Eighteenth Brumaire” are extremely interesting, and I view it as unfortunate that the dispute was apparently resolved socially in private, rather than intellectually in public.  (If I’m missing some crucial source, as usual please correct me in comments; to my knowledge Jan Golinski comes closest.)

Schaffer acknowledges that their positions were never fully resolved, comparing the product of the tensions between their points of view to the interference fringes produced by overlapping light sources.  He goes on to discuss how our field is highly unusual in its ability to support perspectives arising from different disciplinary backgrounds.

Yet, I tend to view the persistence of unresolved perspectives as a weakness.  It is important to note that the products of unresolved intellectual tensions can exist only in the minds of those scholars who resolve the differences between perspectives on their own.  Such individuals constitute a fairly narrow group that Chris Donohue has called a “court of understanding” (see also my discussion of “perspective layering” last February). Without an explicit and widely acknowledged resolution, the productive effects—if indeed they exist—are necessarily private, or at least excessively limited.  Audiences are divided into the elite “court” and non-elite spectators who may not even be aware that two tiers of conversation exist, mistaking a non-rigorous outline of the high-level conversation for the real thing.  (See also my take on Daston’s appraisal of the “microhistory” trend a couple months ago.)  This is an ironic outcome, since Schaffer makes a point of lauding Latour for his commitment to “honesty and rigor,” and to making work public, as through gallery exhibits.

Coming back to the piece at hand, most discussions of “Eighteenth Brumaire”  that I’ve heard take the dispute simply to be about whether or not non-humans can have “agency”, since Latour gives microbes a role to play in the rise of Louis Pasteur (see this blog’s previous discussion of Pasteurization here).  This makes it difficult to see Latour’s approach as much more than a too-clever-by-half joke compared to more sober historiography, and one’s response to Latour is thus determined by whether or not one is willing to humor Latour’s eccentricities for whatever salubrious qualities they might have (he is just another perspective to be judiciously layered).

Schaffer did indeed criticize Latour for endowing microbes with agency, but it is important to note his argument’s place within programmatic disputes between different schools of sociology, each of which view the utility of history differently.  In “Eighteenth Brumaire” Schaffer was specifically asserting the tenets of Harry Collins’ “Bath School” against Latour’s “French School” as more appropriate to historical understanding.  It is useful here to know that Collins’ sociology of calibration had played a major role in the argument in 1985’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump, and Schaffer’s 1989 piece “Glass Works” was essentially a demonstration of its utility in generating new historical analysis.

The sociology of calibration is not as trivial as it sounds, because for Schaffer its “regressive” mode of analysis spoke to the crucial issue of what social means established the credibility that determined which experiments done by which experimenters with which instruments produced valid forms of knowledge, and in whose eyes.  Asking such questions, it turned out that historians could indeed find answers, and for Schaffer this was a major innovation in historiographical craft.  He took Latour’s Pasteurization to threaten this innovation.

Schaffer noted the importance of the “ideal reader” in Pasteurization: a spectator viewing the unfolding of Pasteur’s rise to prominence through the pages of certain journals without having any intellectual way of knowing whether any of the actors were in some way “right”.  By charting authorities invoked—including that of the microbes’ positive response to experiments—Latour offered a way of offering a sort of play-by-play in a language that doesn’t frame historical development in terms of the progress of, and resistance to, those we might suppose deserved to win out.

Latour, Collins, and Schaffer could all agree that the presumption of victory for those who were “right” hamstrung historical inquiry by denying that those who were “right” had to do work to see their views accepted—correctness somehow spoke for itself in such accounts.  In their view, looking forward in time to find out who won, and thus privilege the narratives of certain historical actors, was to commit an analytical heresy; call it the Whiggish heresy.

The crucial point of dispute was that Latour allowed, by granting agency to microbes, that being in some sense correct could be a valuable asset in asserting one’s position.  This position was intolerable to Schaffer, who argued (with Collins and Steven Yearley) that Latour was himself committing a specific form of Whiggish heresy called “hylozoism”, allowing nature to settle human disputes.  For Schaffer, hylozoism, like grosser forms of Whiggism, hamstrung historical inquiry by short-circuiting the need to establish why evidence was considered credible in disputes:   “Protagonists in dispute must win assent for … material technologies.  Hylozoism suggests that the microbes’ antics can explain these decisions.  Sociology of knowledge reckons that it is the combination of practices and conventions which prompt them, and these strategies get credit through culture.  Only when credibility is established will any story about the microbes make sense” (190, my emphasis).

But this misunderstands Latour’s project in two ways.  First, it misses the fact that Latour seeks a universal language of description, not a means of explanation.  Second, Latour’s descriptions are actualistic: they are play-by-play in real-time.  Latour’s actualistic descriptions do not look forward to find out what happened, but they also do not look backward to establish sufficient conditions.  Where Collins’ and Schaffer’s projects—like a philosophical account—would look backward to identify a set of conditions that establish why people, institutions, instruments, and experiments were considered credible, for Latour’s purposes it was only important that they had credibility.

For Latour, such description could grow or shrink to encompass any frame of inquiry.  A historian could expand the scope of inquiry to a multi-national account, or delve into Pasteur’s laboratory notebooks, and just chart more alliances of people, instruments, objects, and so forth.  On the other hand, for Schaffer, there was always a proper frame of inquiry: the failure to look to crucial challenges to Pasteur, especially that of the German Robert Koch, was an essential weakness in Latour’s account of the rise of Pasteur: Latour “can explain this shift in loyalty [of the Revue Scientifique] by reference to Pasteur’s experiments alone, and the good behaviour of microbes, because he deliberately omits their most potent enemies” (188, Schaffer’s emphasis).

The differences here hinge on the analyst’s sense of their own function.  For Schaffer the historian, to provide a sufficient (and thus legitimate) account of the rise of Pasteur, one had to understand how Pasteur defeated the potentially fatal challenge of Koch, which itself could only be understood by going back in time before the acceptance of Pasteur’s arguments and investigating the sources of credibility that made that acceptance possible.  Investigation through time was essential to Schaffer’s enterprise.  But for Latour, the main task was to describe or simulate the subjective experience of the contemporary spectator who had no such investigatory inclinations or resources, just as most people today experience the use of knowledge in society on a day-to-day basis.

The differences between Schaffer and Latour were programmatic, and each approach could have its own uses for the historian and sociologist alike, when used to accomplish method-appropriate tasks.  For the sake of enhancing the rigor of our work, these differences should have been fought out, articulated, and re-articulated in view of everyone.  They should not have been buried along with the hatchets in a private ceremony over a bottle of good wine.

Latour is at least correct on one thing, that there is no going back to a time when science was not yet political. “Matters of fact” have become irrevocably “matters of concern”, as he puts it. Which, put another way, means that science cannot remain impervious to the wider struggles which go by the name of ‘politics’. Put in a way which Latour would not endorse, because like the pluralists he does not see that in capitalist societies one set of political forces is always dominant above all others, mediates and re-forms all others – the struggle between the attempt to extract surplus value and the resistance to that extraction – science cannot ever fully avoid becoming subsumed into the class war. A grim example from today’s news: climate scientists are now not only having their files hacked, their computers are now also being robbed. A modest prediction in the light of this: science will be one key terrain on which the war of the next (or last) few decades will be played out, as those who have a vested interest in preserving capitalism’s carbon infrastructure try their damnedest to do so.

Update: death threats made against climate scientists.

A Latourian moment in Michael Polanyi’s “A Society of Explorers” lecture:

The popular conception of science teaches that science is a collection of observable facts, which anybody can verify for himself. We have seen that this is not true in the case of expert knowledge, as in diagnosing a disease. But it is not true either in the physical sciences. In the first place, you cannot possibly get hold of the equipment for testing, for example, a statement of astronomy or of chemistry. And supposing you could somehow get the use of an observatory or a chemical laboratory, you would probably damage their instruments beyond repair before you ever made an observation. And even if you should succeed in carrying out an observation to check upon a statement of science and you found a result which contradicted it, you would rightly assume that you had made a mistake.

The acceptance of scientific statements by laymen is based on authority, and this is true to nearly the same extent for scientists using results from branches of science other than their own. Scientists must rely heavily for their facts on the authority of fellow scientists.

This authority is enforced in an even more personal manner in  the control exercised by scientists over the channels through which contributions are submitted to all other scientists. Only offerings that are deemed sufficiently plausible are accepted for publication in scientific journals, and what is rejected will be ignored by science. Such decisions are based on fundamental convictions about the nature of things and about the method which is therefore likely to yield results of scientific merit. These beliefs and the art of scientific inquiry based on them are hardly codified: they are, in the main, tacitly implied in the traditional pursuit of scientific inquiry. (pp. 63-64)

Michael Polanyi (1966) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

un moment d’intelligence des images:

“émission du samedi 28 novembre 2009 : Bruno Latour

Affinités électives

par Francesca Isidori
le samedi de 22h10 à 23h

Philosophe et sociologue, Bruno Latour est né en 1947 à Beaune, en Côte d’Or. Après une agrégation de philosophie, il s’est formé à l’anthropologie en Côte d’Ivoire. Il a longtemps enseigné dans des écoles d’ingénieur, le CNAM d’abord, puis l’Ecole des Mines où il avait rejoint le Centre de sociologie de l’innovation en 1982. Professeur à l’Ecole des mines il a longtemps été responsable du cours “description de controverses scientifiques” (maintenant enseigné par Dominique Linhardt), et du doctorat “socio- économie de l’innovation” (aujourd’hui dirigé par Antoine Hennion).
Depuis septembre 2006, il est professeur des Universités à Sciences Po.
Depuis juin 2007, il a été nommé directeur adjoint de Sciences Po, chargé de la politique scientifique.”

source & lien RSS & podcast

* retour au début / back to the start *

Reading: Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

p. 21

“When we talk about hybrids and imbroglios, mediations, practice, networks, relativism, relations, provisional answers, partial connections, humans and non humans, ‘disorderly messes,’ it may sound as if we, too, are marching along the same path, in a hurried flight from truth and reason, fragmenting into ever smaller pieces the categories that keep the human mind forever removed from the presence of reality.”

“Everything is external to everything else, and it takes difficult work to link any two things” – thus summarises Graham Harman one of Bruno Latour’s metaphysical points (Prince of Networks, pp. 104-105). The blog medium makes linking unrelated things rather easy, so hopefully it is not an entirely frivolous act to link transaction-cost economics with actor-network theory through the figure of Charles Péguy. The Organizations and Markets blog has just highlighted that the following Péguy quote is evoked at a crucial moment in Oliver E. Williamson’s (yes, this year’s economics Nobel Laureate) 1996 book, The Mechanisms of Governance, in support of  the ” microanalytic program” of TCE:

“The longer I live, citizen. . .” — this is the way the great passage in Peguy begins, words I once loved to say (I had them almost memorized) — “The longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the efficiency of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the efficiency of conversion, extraordinary, sudden and serious, in the efficiency of sudden passions, and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work. The longer I live the less I believe in the efficiency of an extraordinary sudden social revolution, improvised, marvelous, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship — and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.” (pp. 13-14)

As the O&E  post points out, Williamson somewhat “botched” the quote, being unable to cite the source and having conflated two different segments. The original (from Péguy, Charles. “Encore de la grippe”, Cahiers de la quinzaine, volume I, number 6, March 20, 1900.) should read something like this (in Randy Westgren’s translation, who adds the following caveat: “Péguy is also noted for involuted literary style, so amateur translation isn’t easy”):

– … And genius demands patience to work, doctor, and the longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the effectiveness of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied by or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the effectiveness of sudden, wondrous, extraordinary conversions, the effectiveness of sudden passions, – and the more I believe in the effectiveness of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.

– The longer I live, responded the doctor gravely, the less I believe in the effectiveness of a sudden, extraordinary social revolution, wondrously improvised, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship, – and the more I believe in the effectiveness of modest, slow, molecular, definitive, work for society.

Putting aside the issue of what may have been lost in the translation, the interesting connection with ANT is of course that Bruno Latour’s first published article was on Péguy’s theology and Péguy figured heavily in Latour’s doctoral thesis, “Exégèse et ontologie: une analyse des textes de résurrection.” In a recent speech (“Coming Out as a Philosopher“, PDF), Latour reflects on the significance of this early work: “That this PhD thesis was never read except by rats and mice doesn’t mean that it was not for me an essential learning experience… ” The concerns of what came to be known as actor-network theory and its central concept, the notion of translation, have already been present to some extent in this work according to Latour.

Translation as betrayal, “betrayal by mere repetition and the absence of innovation, and betrayal by too many innovations and the loss of the initial intent” was the key focus of the dissertation, which Latour had done “through  a  close  reading  of  Charles  Péguy’s amazing book CLIO, the topic and manner of which was precisely on the question of good and  bad  repetition  (a  question  that  was  also  taken  up  by  Deleuze,  in  DIFFÉRENCE  ET REPETITION published at the same time)” (p. 3).

The interesting question for the theory of the firm is whether it is Williamson’s transaction-cost economics or the competence perspective of the Schumpeterian tradition that is more in tune with Péguy and Latour’s insight about the relationship between routine and innovation.

* Three Mile Island may still be leaking. More at Infrastructurist, which gives the story a strong pro-nuclear slant not really supported by the facts.

* When it rains too much, sewage gets in your drinking water. The stimulus package could have been devoted entirely to infrastructure and green economy programs and that still would have been just a start on the sort of spending that is necessary.

* John Marshall says the public option is now so tiny it is no longer worth fighting for. I like Josh, and I see his point, but I really think this takes too short-term a view; the point is to get any public option in, so that it can subsequently be improved and expanded using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. And even in the short-term, the progressive left is sufficiently invested in the public option that its loss would be widely understood as (another) demoralizing defeat—which is something we just don’t need right now.

* HASTAC is part of a big Obama administration science and math initiative today.

* The terrifying story of a man trapped in a twenty-three-year coma.

* And via Tim Morton, the Danish journal ReThink has a new section on climate change, with pieces from Morton and Latour among others. Check it out.

Ognuno vende le sue certezze.

Sì, perché la gente, tutti noi, vogliamo illuderci di vivere in mondo di verità assolute.

Nella vita di tutti i giorni ma anche in quegli ambiti, come il mondo scientifico, dove il senso comune ritiene regni la verità, la certezza, l’esatto, l’assoluto, ci si trova di fronte a contraddizioni, conflitti fra le verità di cui l’esperto di turno si fa paladino.

Questo ci sconcerta, ci spiazza, ci scuote.

Le certezze, invece, ci fanno sentire a nostro agio.

Ma la realtà è troppo complessa per darci certezze.

Noi siamo troppo complessi per leggere ed interpretare, tutti, allo stesso modo una stessa realtà.

I dati di fatto sono filtrati dai nostri sensi e sentimenti.

Viviamo immersi in sistemi complessi, siamo sistemi complessi. Siamo abituati a pensare in termini lineari ma quasi mai questi descrivono correttamente l’intrico di feedback o contro feedback, azioni e reazioni circolari, indirette, vincolate e vincolanti. Qualcuno ha definito tutto questo Kaos.

La scienza si sforza di fornire strumenti per dare certezze. Ma gli strumenti sono utilizzati dagli uomini, che hanno ambizioni, interessi, obiettivi.

E così ecco che si creano discussioni, controversie. E giù numeri, prove, riferimenti, citazioni, a sostegno delle proprie tesi.

E noi, affamati di certezze, sposiamo una tesi o l’altra e ci battiamo per questa. Siamo convinti che, in quanto “scientifica”, sia vera.

Quello che ho imparato oggi è che il meglio che possiamo fare è farci un’opinione sforzandosi di conoscere tutte le “verità” relative allo stesso oggetto.

Post ispirato dalla lettura dell’articolo,, apparso su Nòva24, “Non più dogmi ma controversie” di Bruno Latour, professore e prorettore per la ricerca all’Università Sciences Po di Parigi.

Cosa ne pensi? Lascia il tuo commento.

For Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Philosophy. Thank you to Paul John Ennis for adopting this image.

Untitled
Pencil and gouache on paper
16cm x 27cm
© 2009 Tammy Lu

”When it comes to the ‘vertical’ relation between real objects and their accessibility to others, the real object is always something more than the  translated distortion through which it is encountered. That is why the real object is said to withdraw from all access, in a manner to which Heidegger alerts us better than anyone else. But the situation is different with the ‘horizontal’ relations between the two kinds of objects and their respective qualities. Here, the object is always less than the features through which it is known. For on the sensual level the tree has a core or eidos that cares nothing for the specific angle or degree of shadow through which it is grasped at any moment. And on the real level, the object is not fully green or smooth or brittle, but unites these traits in a specific and limited fashion, so that any quality is an exaggeration of sorts even with respect to real objects. In fact, we might say that both the real and sensual objects are completely unified, with all of their qualities compressed together in bulk: ‘thistreeness’, for instance. This unified quality becomes pluralized only by leaking off elsewhere into a different quadrant of reality. This can easily be seen from the intentional realm, where a tree is a vaguely grasped unity that becomes plural only through its specific appearance (accidents) or through an intellectual grasp of its most crucial features (eidos). Otherwise, a sensual tree or a wolf per se remain inarticulate blocks or vague feeling-things for the one who encounters them.”

Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (2009)

The critique of the critique of critique, like the old man in the sphynx’s riddle, is left, in the end, with only one leg on which to stand. Still kritizierbar is this alone — the myth of a heroic beginnings, of grand gestures, of new vistas, new worlds of thought, that might appear (ah… Baltimore… 1966) in a conference paper, written in a mere 10 days.   Master thinkers, and their disciples. A playfulness that was serious.  Now our seriousness is stillborn in its seriousness.

Against the sweet insouciance of Friends, there is something terrifying about this sitcom, which is marketed in Korea under the title: “I love Friends.” As if Friends, and the friend, had already become the object of a pathetic longing. As if, even in this, we must resign ourselves to an Ersatz-friends. With a macabre instinct, someone recognized that the great joke of Seinfeld, the fake cast, had suddenly been recast as a real sitcom.  As if there were a third repetition in history, beyond tragedy and farce.

But this third brings us back to the first: the husband, an architect like Mr. Brady, tells his children how he met their mother.  The purest form of the tyranny of mythopoesis.  As if the children could, or should care.  As if the very idea that they should care, that the mystery of their birth could be reduced to an endless sequence of tawdry vignettes, were not the most terrible offence against childhood. As if the novelty of birth could be seamlessly folded into the life of the parents.

What did Oedipus and Antigone talk about during their long years of wandering?

All myth, every beginning, is perverse.  This silliest of sitcoms brings us to the brink of tragic, Dionysian knowledge. The parents who entertain their child with the story of their prehistoric misadventures demand that the child replicate their own desire for life — without having lived.  They seek nothing less than the confirmation of their own desire for life in the lifeless desire of their children.  This is the prosaic, everyday form of mythic incest. And the tyranny of desire is always this: the desire for obsolete forms of desire.

We who watch are like the children who listen.  We do not live, but we desire to live.  And we late-born theorists (we theorists after theory…) are, in this, not so different than the couch potato. (Hence the critique of television is not the least bit irrelevant for proto philosophia) We do not think, but we desire to think.  We desire the form that thinking once took in its still fresh, but wholly mythic past.  We cannot imagine happiness but in a form that is no longer possible for us. True happiness for us is whatever happiness we cannot have.

The genius of Tristram Shandy suddenly dawns on me:  the sobriety of prose begins with the parody of the myth of our own drunken birth.

I was born then, in 1966, and before this: in Weimar, in Vienna, in Berlin, in Prague, in Jena, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, and Athens. And also in places far from the cities.  Why do I then feel so melancholy as I read this book by François Cusset:  am I nothing simply because I was not there to watch my birth. Is there greatness only in beginnings?   But hasn’t philosophy, which has created so much from a single matter, always been the next best thing.

It is late afternoon on Wednesday, and I have somehow managed to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish by this time. On Friday, this seemed like a goal that was unattainable, so I am reasonably pleased.

Somebody mentioned to me this last Saturday, “I occasionally read your rants against post-structuralism.” It had not been explicitly discussed in class that Foucault and company actually constitute an “-ism”, so I’m sure I was a deer in the headlights for a second while I figured out what my friend meant. Flesh of My Flesh has been explicitly exposed to more theory than I have, so I’ve been hearing about the supposed difference between signifier and signified for some time, but again, that this movement had a name was new information for me. A couple of things clicked once I understood the label; this is the same friend who a few years ago overheard me saying that it made no sense to me to read modern ideas of sexual equality and identity into texts for which those ideas would be anachronistic, and consequently chided me for “not believing in gender theory,” adding, “Applying theory is not ‘reading something into’ anything. That’s just you having an ideological problem.”

For all I know, maybe he’s right. He’s in the English department, and maybe there’s a way these things actually make sense from the standpoint of literature. Maybe, too, this is the difference between a “scholar” and an “intellectual” — I do not give a fat, furry, flying rat’s hindquarters about theory. I have not entered an academic discipline because I am interested in the “isms” which seem to plague the humanities right now. (I am told that “thing theory” was rather well-represented at last week’s Byzantine Studies Association of North America conference, which makes me want to tear out my own teeth with a rusty screwdriver.) I have entered an academic discipline, because, funny and naïve and idealistic as it may sound, I am actually interested in, and even like, my subject of study.

What does that make me? A paleostructuralist? If so, then so be it. (“Paleostructuralist” sounds cooler and more dignified than “anti-post-structuralist” anyway.)

I still have more to write on Foucault in this space, but it’s going to have to wait a bit yet while I finish some other things. In the meantime, my most recent (and last) response paper for my “Introduction to the Professional Study of History” course starts to sketch out some of the thoughts that will show up there. Certain elements will be no surprise to those who visit here somewhat regularly, there are a couple of moments where it will be evident that I just got through watching all of Christopher Nolan’s movies in chronological order (which merits its own post), and the couple of somewhat coy suggestions that certain things should be discussed elsewhere will be developed in my final paper for this course.

–

The Safe Retreat into Omniscient Third-Person:

The Problem of Historicizing Oneself

Or

A Response to Kate Brown’s “A Place in Biography for Oneself”

(As Well as a Number of Other Bits and Pieces from the Fall 2009 H601 Course)

“Historians,” writes Kate Brown in her essay “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” “expose other people’s biographies, not their own.”[1] How can this be, however, when according to Marx, “[m]en make their own history” [2]? How, ultimately, may historians be their own agents of history while being true to their own profession? How might historians assume the first person voice in their own work, that is to say, our own work, or still more to the point, my own work – honestly?

To expand Marx’s quote, men make their own history, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Brown certainly did not choose her circumstances. She is from a small Midwestern town whose economic history could have stepped out of the pages of The Marx-Engels Reader; in her home town of Elgin, Illinois, as she tells it, the beginning of her life intersected with a narrative of Western expansion, labor strife, industry flight, economic redevelopment, and gentrification.[3] Her own retelling of the story gives significant credibility to Marx’s claim that “[t]he tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”[4]:

From Elgin… I came to understand how closely one’s biography is linked to one’s place… I recognized the impulse to bulldoze and start over, to push on toward a brighter, cleaned-up destiny, which meant abandoning some places and people and losers of an unannounced contest.[5]

The past – that is to say, one’s history – and its relationship to location are a weight that one must learn to carry or learn to jettison. Perhaps this can be understood as an inversion of the opening line of Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides – rather than the wound being geography, the anchorage, the port of call, it is geography, and the confluence of circumstances that one encounters in that geography, that is the wound.

All well and good — but how real is this confluence of circumstances? How objectively may its existence be assumed? Per Benedict Anderson and his analysis of how seemingly disconnected events make up the front page of a newspaper, perhaps not much:

Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition… shows that the linkage between them is imagined.[6]

What, then, is the difference between one’s life and the front page of a newspaper? Do they both represent a constructed – that is to say, not objectively real – and affected way of arranging events? For the historian, how does that construction and that affectation influence how they read history, view history, and write history? How does understanding how one’s life interacts with one’s work impact either, for better or for worse?

As a scholar, I have been carefully trained to avoid using the first person in my work. “Don’t ever say things like ‘We can see the following…’ in your research,” I remember being told in one undergraduate course. “This is not a journey ‘we’re’ going on together. It’s a research paper.” My training in languages also tends to inform how I view texts – “Read what it says, not what you think it means,” my first Greek instructor repeatedly told our class. My research goal, therefore, is typically to state a clear, impersonal thesis and then get the hell out of the way of my own argument, simply letting the facts and the observations speak for themselves as much as possible. If I present it as something that “I” think, then I will have fundamentally devalued and undermined my argument – why should anybody care what I think?

Naturally, there is far more to it than a hope to rest comfortably on objectivity. Why should anybody care what I think, indeed. I’m a nobody, a college dropout from nowhere, a first generation college graduate at the age of 29, having taken eleven years to finish a four year degree (a B. Mus. at that, not a liberal arts degree), who then, even with good grades and test scores, still had to do three years of coursework as an unmatriculated student before there was any way to be competitive for graduate schools, all the while hearing from a chorus of professors, “I’m more than happy to write you a letter of recommendation, but I’m not sure you’re going to be able to get there from here.” Why should anybody care what I think? Good heavens, I will need to make sure I publish under a pseudonym just to be taken at all seriously. Better yet, I should somehow indicate on my C. V. that I simply sprang forth fully-grown from the head of Zeus with my PhD already in hand.

But there is still more to it than that, surely. I’ve been at Indiana University in one capacity or another since 2003, somewhat ironically making it the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. My family bounced around a lot for reasons best recounted elsewhere, and even now, they live, quite dispersed, in places I have never lived, in houses I never called home, in zip codes I never visited until they moved there. Brown can rely on her connection with the place of Elgin, Illinois as an anchor for where she is now, but I am literally from nowhere, in the sense that I have had to construct my notion of “home” from different raw materials than place and family, and I find it very difficult to relate to concepts of home that do center around place and family. If my family moved around for reasons having to do with the military or career development, than I might be able to legitimately claim – as a friend of mine, the son of a prominent Russian History scholar, does – to be a “citizen of the world,” to be from everywhere. Alas, I can claim nothing quite so romantic or interesting. Robert Frost once said that home is where, if you have to go there, they have to take you, but the places where that is even marginally true are places that have never actually been a part of my life. If Brown is correct that one’s biography is closely linked to place, than I truly am the Nowhere Man – so again, why should anybody care what I think?

But, of course, there is still more to it than that.

“In my quest to explore the human condition,” writes Brown, “I have hidden behind my subjects, using them as a scrim to project my own sentiments and feelings.”[7] There is an undeniable connection between who somebody is and what interests them; for her own part, Brown describes this connection by saying, “I believe that I was able to see stories that had not yet taken shape for other historians because of the sensitivities I acquired in my past.”[8] My advisor, Professor Edward Watts, is potentially an example; he is an academic raised in a family of academics. His parents are both academics, and his sister is an academic. What was the subject of his dissertation? Rhetorical education in Late Antique Alexandria and Athens. As I told him after I read the book, it is difficult to not see his work as having an aspect of meta-commentary on the academic life. He chuckled and said, “You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.”

Beyond that example, I saw with my own eyes how the personal connection between historian and subject might manifest with my colleagues during orientation and initial class meetings:

“Hi, I’m Roberto Arroyo, and I’m interested in Latin American history.”

“My name is Isaac Rosenbaum, and I do Holocaust history.”

“I’m Lakshmi Patel, and I’m studying the history of relations between India and Pakistan.”

The Late Antique Byzantinist whose last name is not “Ioannides” or “Sotiriou” is left at something of a disadvantage in such company. Yes, there is, in fact, a personal reason that connects me to my subject of inquiry, a personal reason that should not be too hard to surmise for the careful observer (but one that is best discussed in another setting), but a personal reason that is nonetheless internal, abstract, and conceptual rather than immediately and concretely constructed by place or family – that is to say, by the circumstances which I did not choose. I have personal stakes that led me to my areas of interest, but because they are of my own choosing I must be circumspect in how I speak in terms of “I”, “we”, and “our” if I am to be seen as having sufficient distance from my subject to be credible as a scholar. Edward Said and Dipesh Chakrabarty appear adamant that cultures and societies must define themselves, that to not allow such self-definition is cultural imperialism,[9] and yet this mandate of courtesy with respect to communal identity does not appear to extend to those who have embraced certain communities voluntarily.

Of course, I also have the problem that I am not interested in my subject from a critical point of view; I find it anachronistic to explicitly read whatever my own political beliefs and values may be – and, for today’s purposes, we may broadly describe them as uncomfortably conservative as Russell Kirk defined the word, which according to contemporary definitions probably makes me liberal – into my historical subject, but per Elizabeth Blackmar as quoted by Ted Steinberg, we historians are not supposed to evade the question of politics.[10] According to Steinberg, the role of the historian in the present day is evidently to explore “the history of oppression,”[11] and this attitude is one I see largely borne out in my cohort. Nonetheless, the reality is that such a history is not the history of the Late Antique Eastern Roman Empire I have any desire to write. I have better things to do than study something with the express purpose of tearing it down. I fundamentally believe it is possible to be more productive and constructive – but do I only believe that because of my other beliefs in the first place? Is my choice of the word “constructive” itself telling, possibly signifying that I would rather buy into the social constructions that historians are supposed to deconstruct? The 3^rd person voice of objectivity keeps me from having to mess with such potentially treacherous questions.

If men make their own history, but not under circumstances they choose for themselves, and history is supposed to be the history of oppression, then must a historian writing their own history engage in self-hatred by definition? Brown does not appear to write a piece of self-hatred, but it is clear that she is uncomfortable with the implications of her own essay – “My palms sweat as I write this… The intimacy of the first person takes down borders between author and subject, borders that are considered by many to be healthy in a profession situated between the social sciences and the humanities.”[12] Chakrabarty suggests one possible way out, explicitly referencing autobiography and history as two separate and distinct genres[13] – so not only is autobiography, the history of oneself, not history, but history isn’t a discipline anyway, it’s a genre. But here is the rub – if history is a genre somewhere “between” the social sciences and the humanities, and a historian writing their own history must find a methodologically honest way to not engage themselves at the level of self-hatred, which then in fact moves the work into a different genre altogether, then the historian can never actually engage in a real work of self-historicization that is not self-mutilatory.

At any rate, can we claim objectivity anyway by avoiding biographical detail or the first person? In a post-structuralist world where we must assume a fundamental disconnect between signifier and signified, does it really matter to begin with? Or is a research paper written in the omniscient third person much like Bruno Latour’s depiction of the laboratory[14] or Bonnie Smith’s history seminar and archive[15] – a socially constructed, that is to say false, space of knowledge-based privilege that can assert authority it does not actually have simply because a particular group of people have become convinced that it does?

I do not have answers to my own questions, posed at the outset of this musing. I am not certain where to go with them. My inclination is to say the various circumstances of my own life may appear as arbitrary as Anderson insists the front page of the newspaper actually is, but by virtue of the very fact that I in fact experience those circumstances in chronological order, I nonetheless perceive them as my own narrative. My inclination is to say that I cannot be forced to historicize my own life as a history of oppression any more than I can legally be required to self-incriminate in a court of law. My inclination is to say that nonetheless, I am better off keeping my arguments in the third person and keeping my “self” out of the voice of my own work, that regardless of what I think, we all know what a coffee table will feel like if we rap it with our knuckles, and that in saying that I am not privileging people who have hands or who do not have nerve damage. My inclination is to say that there must be a world outside of our own minds, and that there must be a way we can discuss it, even if our own minds tell us how we’re going to organize our perceptions of that world. Are these words and ideas too strong, too dangerous, too naïve, too uninformed? I do not know, but I do not know where else to start.

And perhaps that is why it is good I work in a period many people find irrelevant. It keeps me from becoming a danger to myself or to others.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 2 ed. New York: Verso, 2006.

Blackmar, Elizabeth. “Contemplating the Force of Nature.” Radical Historians Newsletter no. 70 (1994).

Brown, Kate. “A Place in Biography for Oneself.” American Historical Review no. 114 (2009): 596-605.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?” Representations no. 37 (1992): 1-26.

Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In Science Observed: Perpsectives on the Social Study of Science, edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, 141-70. London: Sage, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594-617. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Reprint, 2003.

Smith, Bonnie. “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research.” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1998): 1150-76.

Steinberg, Ted. “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History.” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 798-820.

[2] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978), 595.

[3] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 600-3.

[4] Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 595.

[5] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 604.

[6] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2 ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 33.

[7] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 603.

[8] Ibid., 605.

[9] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994; reprint, 2003). Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?,” Representations, no. 37 (1992).

[10] Elizabeth Blackmar, “Contemplating the Force of Nature,” Radical Historians Newsletter, no. 70 (1994)., 4. Quoted in Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002), 804.

[11] Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” 802.

[12] Brown, “A Place in Biography for Oneself,” 603.

[13] Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks For “Indian” Pasts?”, 8.

[14] Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed: Perpsectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983). Accessed online at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Latour_GiveMeALab.html on 9 November 2009.

[15] Bonnie Smith, “Gender and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and Archival Research,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1998).

Περί Υποδομών

Diana Crane
(University of Pennsylvania)

To read this article and its associated commentaries for free just click on the PDF links below.

Crane PDF

Commentary 1 PDF - Gabriel Ignatow (University of North Texas)

Commentary 2 PDF - Mark Jacobs (George Mason University)

In order to post your comment and response, please use the comments box at the bottom of this post. All comments are moderated and will appear shortly after they are submitted.

——————————————————————

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the relationship between cultural sociology and approaches to culture in other social science disciplines. What are the characteristics of the theoretical environment in which cultural sociology is operating? The paper begins by reviewing the literature on interdisciplinarity. Many authors argue that interdisciplinarity is increasing or should be increasing, but the general consensus is that disciplinary isolation is the norm. From this perspective, the relationships between disciplines can be understood in terms of trading zones in which fields in different disciplines have little in common, theoretically or empirically.  Interdisciplinary communication in ‘trading zones’ requires that participants laboriously construct a set of terms that permits them to exchange ideas.

Alternatively, I propose that clusters of fields in different disciplines are linked by free-floating paradigms. Participants in disciplines that share ‘free-floating paradigms’ are able to communicate with one another more readily. The paper presents evidence for the second interpretation, drawn from survey articles in disciplinary handbooks.  Disciplines and fields in which the study of culture draws from the same pool of paradigms and models and shares a set of lines of inquiry with cultural sociology include traditional disciplines, such as anthropology, communication, geography, history and psychology and interdisciplinary fields, such as cultural studies, communication, feminist theory, material culture, science studies, and visual culture. Interdisciplinary fields, particularly cultural studies, perform an important role in diffusing paradigms across disciplinary boundaries.  Free-floating paradigms are associated with the work of major theorists, such as Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Clifford Geertz, Bruno Latour, Adorno, Gramsci, and Habermas.

Much contemporary management practice revolves around ideas of consensus, alignment and agreement. So, we are expected in organisations to ’share values’, to agree to the vision and mission, and in some developmental organisations to ‘be the change we want to see’, after Gandhi. We are to become saints like Martin Luther King or perhaps Mandela. The overwhelming mood is positive and successful.

One way of understanding this is as an injunction to leave our ‘bad self’ at the door and only to be ‘constructive’ at work, where constructive is taken to mean not causing any ripples. When conflict does arise it should be managed. Of course, there isn’t much that can’t be managed these days: time management, diversity management, anger management and more recently talent management.

An alternative way of understanding how change comes about in organisations, rather than through the planned, rational interventions of calculating managers working with staff who are good and agree not to disagree is through the exploration of difference. However it is important not to take this up as another positive and naive inducement – “let’s encourage diversity and difference!”, as though this is an easy thing to do which can only bring about good. I have been working with a group recently where the exploration of difference has proved painful, disruptive and dangerous. Because co-participants have refused to have their differences ‘managed’ it has caused consternation and bewilderment amongst all those concerned and has begun to affect others in the programme too.

What would it mean seriously to work with difference in ways that avoid the usual dualist solutions (good difference and bad difference, constructive and destructive), or the appeal to holism, where somehow we are obliged to synthesise a new ‘whole’?

One prerequisite is the openness to be moved by what one is hearing, to listen. The act of listening brings with it the potential for the recognition of otherness, which implies a changed recognition of our own self. We are obliged to shift from our ground and be reflexive. In recognising the other we have the possibility of understanding ourselves and what we are doing differently. If we find ourselves agreeing with Hegel that ultimately all knowledge is self-knowledge then in the interaction with different others we can come to recognise ourselves anew.

A second characteristic of being open to exploring difference is the possibility of finding ways of expressing what it is we are experiencing together, of becoming more articulate. This implies an ability to stay in conversation with others, no matter how uncomfortable the experience, or rather to try and stay in conversation because it is uncomfortable, because of what one might find out about oneself and others. We are learning, as Bruno Latour wrote, to be affected. This is very difficult to do because of our natural tendency to be defensive when encountering difference, to retreat to what we know, which is our current understanding of ourselves.

I am making no suggestion here that staying in conversation with a different other is somehow looking for a resolution of that difference – we are not trying to resolve conflict, since some conflicts are unresolvable. But we are trying to find new possibilities, new articulations from the exploration of difference which we are undergoing. These new articulations may sometimes take the form of generalisations from our experience, and if others find these generalisations helpful then it allows for further articulation of difference. We are trying  in Norbert Elias’ terms, to become more detached about our involvement with others as a way of inviting further engagement. This involves no splitting of the subject from the object with language somehow as the medium between the one and the other, but a greater ability to objectify the subjective by generalizing and working  with the resonance that others may have with these generalisations.

The encouragement to work with difference is neither an injunction to cover over conflict, nor to encourage it, but to understand the potential for its transformative power. There are many ways of avoiding it by claiming that it is too difficult to do, or demands too much of people: or simply by claiming that differences arise out of the clash of different personalities. But to stick with the possibilities that the exploration of difference might bring is to acknowledge that we are never mere subjects. True, it does take patience, persistence and fortitude, but we can all learn better to articulate the differences we are encountering.

A New Patrons lecture with Bruno Latour and Chantal Mouffe on the civil society patronage of art in Europe at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 7pm, 9 October 2009.

Bruno Latour: “From Iconoclasm to Compositionism”
Chantal Mouffe: “Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices”

Nick Srnicek’s talk, “Framing Militancy” [PDF], at the Militant Dysphoria event at Goldsmiths this week generated some interesting blog reflections on the relationship between politics and actor-network theory. Here are Levi Bryant’s thoughts on ANT and politics. Graham Harman’s thoughts on the role of networks and connectedness in politics are here, here and here.

This post is an expansion on my previous post on Lorraine Daston’s discussion of the proliferation of microhistories that are “archivally based and narrated in exquisite detail” but that seem to serve no clear end.  I largely agree with her assessment of this trend as an unsatisfactory state of affairs, as well as with her linking of the trend to a divergence from a prior era of productive dialogue with the other fields of science studies.  However, she makes two key claims with which I disagree:

1. “…in large part because of the mandate to embed science in context, historians of science have become self-consciously disciplined, and the discipline to which they have submitted themselves is history” (808).
2. “Insofar as there has been a counterweight to these miniaturizing tendencies in recent work in the history of science, it has been supplied not by science studies but by a still more thoroughgoing form of historicism, namely, the philosophical history of Michel Foucault” (809).

I do not believe historians of science have in some way exchanged science studies for history, and I believe the historicism associated here with Foucault represents a continuity with the scholarship of the ’80s.

Let’s start with the intertwined set of highly productive conversations that took place around the ’80s (which we are beginning to revisit on this blog, and of which Daston was a part).  Participants understood their gains to be generated by studying things like “practice not ideas”, “instruments”, “cultures of the fact” and so forth, which are slogans that make sense if you have a precise understanding of what they were reacting to. Absent the detailed content of these conversations, a pantomime of the basic historiographical techniques used in achieving those gains—looking at science at the archival level, problematizing and historicizing supposedly rigid ideas, etc.—was methodologically canonized in the assumption that these techniques were productive in and of themselves.  Dances understood to have once brought rain were repeated, creating a kind of “cargo cult” historiography.

The trouble with this situation is not that this historiography is invalid; rather the historiography seems to make claims to being highly progressive, even as some observers seem at a loss to describe what it is accomplishing, leading to talk of “fracturing” of historiography, the proliferation of  “microhistory”, or, my preferred term, the creation of a “gallery of practices” (which I like because cross-temporal studies of scientific images and objects or even old-fashioned genres like biography can participate in the detailed archival portraiture to which Daston refers.)

The methodological inclinations behind the creation of the gallery can be illustrated as an unlikely amalgam of the disparate methodologies of three scholars: Michel Foucault, Carlo Ginzburg, and Bruno Latour.

It is, on the surface, strange that Daston should associate a trend in archival detail-mongering with Foucault’s historicization.  When I read Foucault’s work, I find it helpful to imagine him clearing out whole shelves worth of materials in a library, sitting down with it for some months, picking out patterns, and then lecturing and writing about what he saw with maddeningly sparse detail (usually not even referencing what he read, preferring to speak of “eighteenth-century ideas” or some such phrase, in the assumption that you too have read these books).  While affirming the individuality of all works, Foucault sought out coherent epochal epistemic continuities cutting across that individuality.

I believe it is Foucault’s emphasis on the tacit in texts, which even includes things like ideas embedded in architecture, that makes him relevant to the present conversation.  These ideas were both located in history, and their histories were outside of human control over text, and—and this is important—they could only be read across a large sample of texts.

If Foucault’s history ends up still being a history of ideas of people who wrote books and drew architectural plans and painted paintings, Carlo Ginzburg’s famous microhistory The Cheese and the Worms was intended to try and get back to the vicissitudes of “popular culture” by looking at the sheer idiosyncrasy of ideas inhabiting any individual’s world view.  Ginzburg noted that his literate miller Mennochio was not a representative peasant; rather he was intended to convey to the intellectual history literature (which included Foucault) and also to the Annales School, the intellectual autonomy of non-elite thinkers, who made their own use of the books they read.

Daston sees Ginzburg (with Natalie Zemon Davis) as “a virtuoso … [who] can see the universe in a grain of sand, illuminating cosmic themes on hand from a single, richly described episode.”  The microhistorian must be deft (and, like Foucault, well-read) to present a compelling microhistory.  “Alas,” Daston observes, “virtuosi are rare in all fields, and the average microhistory in the history of science places the accent heavily on the ‘micro’…”  In other words, they miss the point of the exercise, and their work fails to transcend its mundane subject matter.

I think the presumed point of microhistory (or any other kind of detailed portraiture) for the “average” historian of science is that it is meant to be treated as a Foucauldian “text”; something in which some larger tacit thing may be read.  In the case of science, it is its social-cultural content.  Whether this content comes from the sociology of knowledge or a stock set of ideological macrotraditions like “Victorian values” or “seventeenth-century masculine ideals” has never been especially important for most historians.  See, for example, the pastiche of topics in the widely-cited 1996 Osiris on “the field” edited by Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler.

The questions remains: how did Ginzburg’s focus on the narrow come to be understood as an acceptable methodological paradigm for replicating the gains Foucault achieved by reading broadly?

The strategy is pretty consistent across historical and cultural studies disciplines and has a lot of reference points, but, for the case of history of science/science studies, Bruno Latour is as good a reference point as any other.  Latour has always set up his work as working against some alternative, dangerously naive, and supposedly culturally dominant view perpetuated by philosophers and the media, which he eventually labeled as “modern”.

Using the term “historiographical theodicy”, I have discussed this notion of the historically dominant view as an imagined source of distress or even evil in the world, which motivates the work of science studies scholars and historians, and is presumably behind the view that it’s really urgent that we work harder to reach out beyond our discipline.

According to this straw-man dominant view, science is something that arrives at truth by adhering to method.  Thus, simply by challenging the rigidity or permanence of broadly accepted concepts and by locating scientific practice in a socio-cultural context by unveiling the vicissitudes of the archival record, one learns something about the history of the practice, and about local manifestations of the macroideological context, but, above all, one contributes to the “new vision” of science, which Daston herself seeks.  That this task is not noticeably advanced by any single, narrow, Ginzburgian work is (sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly) justified by the notion that the historiography is eternally exploratory, never synthetic—a humble contribution to a worthy cause.

The unsettling thing to me about Daston’s article is that the literature to which she refers is, as near as I can tell, created in the presumption that it is contributing to a project in which she herself is regarded as a revolutionary leader (indeed, watch on p. 802 for the obligatory disdainful reference to “the litany of my undergraduate teachers” that she and others escaped so that we might be free).  Yet, since this literature is detached from the deeper conversations in which she has engaged for thirty years, not only does she not recognize it as a continuation of the original project she helped launch—seeing in it a retreat to “history”—she doesn’t actually seem to think too much of it either.