In today’s class I want to wade through Latour’s rather difficult essay in order to tease out his objection(s) to the critical tradition.
Latour and Critique
Let’s begin with a short Canvas “Writing Opportunity.” This one asks you to explain Latour’s objection to the critical tradition. Please quote one sentence from the text in your response. Why does Latour think critique is no longer an adequate tool for today’s problems?
From my forthcoming article, “Uncrossing God: How Levinas’s Ethics Might Contribute to Latour’s Politics”
Graham Harman celebrates Latour’s work for its capability to refresh philosophy, noting that “here we encounter the vigorous attitude of a genuine philosopher, as opposed to the tedious professional enforcers of insights already won” (2009, 62). While I appreciate Harman’s work on Latour, I would assert that Latour is not primarily interested in rejuvenating philosophy, even if his work might contribute to such a project. I champion Latour’s idea that academics (scientists, humanists, postmodernists, etc.) have too long looked “out the window” at a world that needs direct intervention. Postmodernism did little to change the crippling institution, the towering knowledge factory, constructed by the Moderns. While Latour’s characterization of postmodernism might be little more than caricature, its comedy might provoke us enough to rethink the institutions in which we work and dwell.
Finally, Latour’s opposition is not to postmodern methods as much as it is to (what he incorrectly identifies as) its goals. Latour argues that the reflexivity, deconstruction, and heterogenous chronology germane to postmodernity are essential tools for developing a nonmodern democracy, provided academics can move past “their irony, their despair, their discouragement, their nihilism, their self-criticism” (1993, 134). Similarly, Latour allocates a crucial job to postmodernists in the service of Politics of Nature’s political ecology, the role of the moralist responsible for advocating on behalf of entities denied entry into our collective world. From Latour’s perspective, postmodern methodologies (multiplicity, constructivism, reflexivity, denaturalization) can be redeemed if they are adapted to his project, to serve “Enlightenment without Modernity” (1993, 135).
From my forthcoming book chapter “From Constituting to Instituting: Kant, Latour, and Twitter”
In Irreductions (1988) Latour indicted academics for desiring an “escape from politics” (p. 215). He wrote, “We would like there to be somewhere, a way of knowing and convincing which differs from compromise and tinkering: a way of knowing that does not depend upon a gathering of chance, impulse, and habit” (p. 215). In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Latour identified Modernity’s desire for purification, a preference for abstraction that led it to divide knowledge into discrete, autonomous disciplines, each with its own bounded purview. We have never been modern precisely because we have never lived in such an abstracted world. The real world is a collection of “hybrids,” material and cultural combinations that reject the fundamental binaries of Modern epistemology and ontology (nature/culture, subject/object. human/object, cause/effect, and so on). Below, we trace this dividing back to Kant’s strategic solution to the conflict of the faculties, which is the tension between political power and academic labor. Here, we would emphasize the extent to which this epistemological division underwrites the institutional framework in which contemporary academics research, teach, publish, and administer. While we might have never been modern, academics continue to work modern every day.
Pandora’s Hope (1999) emphasized the need for academics, scientists in particular, to reintegrate themselves back into politics, to replace the modern desire for purification of knowledge with a non-modern appreciation for the noisy yet essential cooperation of politics. Latour argued that “if scientists want to bridge the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to a lot of noise and, yes, more than a little bit of nonsense” (p. 17). He advocated in favor of working with (rather than dictating to) the Body Politic. Though scientists were the focus of Pandora’s Hope (1999), they are not Latour’s only target. In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” (2004), published the same year as Pandora’s Hope, Latour took aim at humanists, questioning their dedication to established critical methods despite their questionable impact on politics or society.
In Politics of Nature (2004b), Latour advocated for a new politics dedicated to “the progressive composition of a common world” shared by humans and non-humans in which each are given equal voice. Latour reiterated that academics will have to sacrifice the epistemological purity of the lab or office for the noisy, messy, cantankerous and at times irrational clamor of what Burke (1969) so famously identified as our “human barnyard” (p. 23). We argue that shifting to a non-modern constitution and returning academics to the agonistic, political sphere requires more than the sacrifice of epistemological purity. It requires a radical transformation of how we conceptualize our work, organize ourselves, and credential our professionals. As currently constituted, the tenure process, our chief concern in this chapter, is dominated by disciplinarity. A candidate for tenure must demonstrate affiliation through proper publication in field-specific journals. Further, tenure cases are evaluated by other established, in-field experts. Latour’s ambitious political ecology requires academics invest themselves less in specialized circles and more in the composition of one, common, public sphere. A would Latourian university would be wary of the esoteric. Tenure cases would be vetted by extra-disciplinary participants. A successful candidate for tenure would demonstrate civic relevance and publish across disciplinary lines. In this next section, we explicate the extent to which the academy’s Kantian heritage impedes Latour’s vision.
Manifesto Project
I wanted to take some time to introduce the manifesto project to those who are not writing the research paper. First, we need to define what a manifesto is, and what are the expectations of the genre. Let us turn to the all mighty Google.
One reason I instructed you to watch the Rivers videos is that he frames them as a form of manifesto, a call for the discipline to think about not only how Latour echoes what it already does, but also about how Latour’s call might reshape the kind of work we do and validate.
This video was my initial inspiration for the project.
Here is another famous web manifesto.
Here is another manifesto, created via links.
For your assignment, I would like you to make something digital, something that advocates for a change or an idea–or something that rages against the machine (or, perhaps like Latour, rages against the inefficacy of rage). I would like the project to–at least once–reference the material we have worked with in class somehow.
I wouldn’t mind a project that returned to the definition of rhetoric, either–provided that project was invested in course materials.
Homework
Remember that we will not have class again until next Tuesday–Thursday’s class is cancelled.
Please read Corder “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” [JSTOR] and Ratcliffe “Rhetorical Listening” [JSTOR]
