Along with Latour’s most important articles on political themes, the book chooses three works as exemplary of the distinct periods in Latour’s thinking: The Pasteurization of France, Politics of Nature, and the recently published An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, as his conception of politics evolves from a global power struggle between individuals, to the fabrication of fragile parliamentary networks, to just one mode of existence among many others.
Along with Latour’s most important articles on political themes, the book chooses three works as exemplary of the distinct periods in Latour’s thinking: The Pasteurization of France, Politics of Nature, and the recently published An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, as his conception of politics evolves from a global power struggle between individuals, to the fabrication of fragile parliamentary networks, to just one mode of existence among many others.
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Overview
Along with Latour’s most important articles on political themes, the book chooses three works as exemplary of the distinct periods in Latour’s thinking: The Pasteurization of France, Politics of Nature, and the recently published An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, as his conception of politics evolves from a global power struggle between individuals, to the fabrication of fragile parliamentary networks, to just one mode of existence among many others.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745333991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2014 |
| Series: | Modern European Thinkers |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
In Search of a Latourian Political Philosophy
At the time of this writing in early 2014, Bruno Latour is firmly established as one of the world's leading intellectuals. Not yet 70 years old, he has reached the point where his battles for influence have mostly been won. His work has been cited tens of thousands of times in so many disciplines that we have to regard Latour himself as personifying a new discipline. He has received Norway's lucrative Holberg Prize, that emerging Nobel of the human sciences. He has delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, thus joining the ranks of such canonized philosophers as Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead. He has ranked as the tenth most cited book author in the humanities, just ahead of the formidable quartet of Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger. Nor has Latour gone unappreciated at his home institution, having served as Vice President for Research at Sciences Po in Paris, one of Europe's most dynamic universities.
While none of this proves Latour's ultimate historical weight as a thinker, it certainly earns him the right and the burden of comparison with the names mentioned above. The names I have chosen are mostly those of philosophers; as a philosopher myself, I am more concerned with Latour's contributions to my own discipline than with his already celebrated achievements in the social sciences. And in philosophy, I am sorry to report, results are still delayed. Here Latour's battle for influence has barely begun, and is likely to continue beyond his own natural lifespan. It is sufficient to note that the same list that ranked Latour as the tenth most cited author in the humanities described him only with the headings "sociology, anthropology," though the "philosophy" tag was awarded freely to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler (all of them dismissed by some academic philosophers as charlatans) along with Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, and Roland Barthes (all of them further from disciplinary philosophy than Latour himself). Though academic categories are of little long-term importance, the problem is not just one of categories, since philosophers still do not seem to be reading Latour's books in significant numbers. In 2009 I published Prince of Networks, the first treatment of Latour as a pivotal figure in contemporary philosophy. The primary aim of that book was to alert philosophically trained readers to a neglected major figure living in their midst. But so far, at least, the evidence suggests that Prince of Networks has served to introduce more social scientists to philosophy than philosophers to Latour. While I am delighted that Prince of Networks has reached such a large interdisciplinary audience, it is puzzling that Latour remains unread and sometimes even unknown in the continental branch of philosophy, where recent French authors can usually count on a warm reception and an optimistic hearing. Even so, his status in France has improved to the point where Patrice Maniglier could risk describing Latour as "the Hegel of our times" in the pages of Le Monde without sounding ridiculous.
But since Prince of Networks has already made a detailed case for Latour as a philosopher, I shall not repeat the exercise here, and will behave in what follows as if Latour's recognition by philosophers were a fait accompli. The question guiding the present book is different: granted that Latour is a philosopher, can we find a political philosophy in his works? So far he has not written an explicit treatise on politics in the usual sense of the term, nor does he seem in any rush to do so. Yet the word "politics" can often be found in Latour's books, and not just in explicit titles such as Politics of Nature or "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik." His work abounds with intriguing references to such political philosophers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schmitt, and more recently Dewey and Lippmann. In his early period Latour shows a tendency to identify the political sphere with reality as a whole, to such an extent that he is often accused of reducing truth to politics. Yet the place of politics in his work remains visibly unsettled. In his more recent writings on the "modes of existence," Latour claims to renounce his earlier ontologization of politics, reframing it as just one mode among numerous others. These changes in his conceptions of politics, along with his evident worry over the possible overuse of political metaphors in his earlier work, indicate that the nature of the political sphere remains one of Latour's central concerns.
FOUR DANGERS
Before beginning, we should be aware of four pressing dangers that threaten political philosophy in the field that I shall call, without qualification or irony, "continental philosophy" — as opposed to the Anglo-American analytic philosophy that dominates university departments in most of the world. Reports of the death of the analytic/continental divide are highly premature, and the rampant claims that this division is "merely sociological" seem to imply (in rather un-Latourian fashion) that sociology deals only with figments of the imagination. Although Latour's star is probably still brighter in the Anglophone countries than in Germany and his native France, it is the continental philosophers of the latter nations with whom he is ultimately destined to be weighed: with Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, rather than analytic philosophers such as Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and W.V.O. Quine.
The first danger is that of relative silence about political philosophy, which is more common than might be expected. For while there have obviously been numerous works of political philosophy over the past century and a half, some of them quite memorable, many of the greatest philosophers during this period have had little to say about politics at all. Here I must agree with Leo Strauss, who complained that the most significant thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century (he meant Bergson, Whitehead, Husserl, and Heidegger) had offered surprisingly little to political philosophy in comparison with past figures of comparable rank. We need not accept Strauss's call for a return to the ancients to accept his point that the major figures of philosophy had reached a political deadlock by the middle of the twentieth century: it is enough to compare Bergson with Spinoza, Husserl with Plato, Heidegger with Hegel, or Whitehead with Locke to grasp Strauss's point. Does Latour avoid this first danger? The answer is mixed. It is true that we find no detailed theory of government in his writings, and if you ask Latour in person about his political philosophy, his answer will not be as decisive as that of a Straussian or a Marxist. In this respect he faces the same deadlock that continental philosophy has long faced in trying to pass from a general ontology of the world to the drawing of specific political consequences. Nonetheless, Latour's works are saturated with political concepts in a way that is obviously not true of Bergson, Husserl, or Whitehead, and in my view is not true of Heidegger either (despite the shrill charges of Emmanuel Faye that Heidegger's entire philosophy consists solely of Nazi propaganda). In the writings of Latour such terms as force, alliance, and delegation are so ubiquitous that when we attempt to reconstruct his political philosophy, the trail is not altogether cold.
The second possible danger — the polar opposite of the first — is that of finding politics everywhere in philosophy rather than nowhere. This common defect takes on one of two possible forms. The first is to treat philosophy as the handmaid of politics, a problem often encountered on both the Left and the Right. On the Left there are those who hold philosophy to be worthless unless it messianically liberates humanity from the depredations of capital, as in McKenzie Wark's demanding lament that "perhaps the problem is not with correlationist philosophies but with philosophy tout court. If the philosophers were going to save us they would have done so already." On the Right we find those who dismiss the supposed conceptual innovations of philosophy as "poetry," while treating philosophy in its own right primarily as a tool for the political hierarchizing of perennial human types. The late Stanley Rosen (a disciple of Strauss) is a good representative of such a position, revealing his private views in what looks at first like a summary of Nietzsche: "[T]here cannot be a radically unique creation ... The fundamental task is one of rank-ordering types that have always occurred and will always exist." For all the generational and political distance between Wark and Rosen, they are brothers in viewing philosophy as the servant of an ultimate political order known only to themselves and a handful of privileged masters and peers. This particular danger is not the one facing Bruno Latour, who is not sufficiently committed to any particular vision of political life to subordinate the rest of his thinking to it. Yet there is another way of mistakenly finding politics everywhere in philosophy: through the ontologizing of politics. Rather than treating philosophy as the vassal of a favored political cause, one might describe the whole of reality with political metaphors in a manner that blurs the distinction between the political and the non-political. We shall see that this danger, unlike the Wark-Rosen danger, haunts Latour throughout his early career. It is surely one of the chief motives for his more recent insistence that politics is merely one mode of existence among thirteen others. Latour's manner of navigating this danger, whether successfully or not, will be our concern in Chapter 4.
The third danger facing political philosophy in present-day continental circles comes from what Francis Bacon called the Idola teatri, or Idols of the Theater. It is always hard to step outside one's time and challenge the reigning political doctrine of the moment, which since the wonder year of 1989 has been a largely unchallenged model of representative democracy combined with a market economy. Yet we always frequent more than one theater at a time, and hence our idols can assume opposite forms simultaneously. For while it may be true that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (a remark often attributed to Frederic Jameson), it is now equally difficult to imagine a continental philosophy that would not be robotically committed to the axiom that capitalism must be reversed, destroyed, mocked, abhorred, or accelerated to the point of suicide. In short, if the Left remains sadly beleaguered in the contemporary world of malls and elections, continental philosophy faces the opposite problem of a crushing peer pressure under which everyone competes to rush to the left flank of everyone else, and to be seen in public as doing so more radically than everyone else.
Only recently did this atmosphere fall upon us once again. For several decades the mainstream political position of continental philosophers was a sort of unsurprising left-leaning liberalism. Those who counted as the leaders of continental philosophy in the 1980s and early 1990s spoke little of revolution, and limited themselves to taking often admirable stands on issues relatively un-risky among intellectuals: Apartheid, capital punishment, imperialism, greater opportunities for women. But the situation has now changed to the point where the hard Left is the only respectable place to be found. This may have begun with the mid-1990s ascendance of Deleuze, whose irreverent style and personal political track record seemed to hint at the wildest revolutions of desire. But over the past decade de facto rulership of continental philosophy has been assumed by Badiou and Zizek, communist sparkplugs who are willing to defend, respectively, Mao's Cultural Revolution and Stalin's forced collectivization. In this new intellectual climate there is immediate social payoff for proclaiming oneself a militant, calling for a total overthrow of the existing order, referring to mainstream liberals as "reactionaries," and airing gloomily nihilistic claims about the present human situation. Since Latour will never be mistaken for a radical Leftist, he provides a valuable source of intellectual friction for those who subscribe too easily to the views just mentioned. We consider Latour's relation to the Left in more detail in Chapter 5.
The final danger is one that confronts Latour specifically rather than continental philosophers as a whole. My original proposal for this book received unusually thorough and helpful feedback from four anonymous referees. One of them remarked a little skeptically that while it would be interesting to see what I had to say about Latour's political philosophy, it would probably just boil down to Latour arguing that "might makes right." This concern is understandable. After all, Latourian actor-network theory has little place for right that fails to acquire might by linking up with allies and arranging other entities in efficacious fashion. By Latour's own admission, he has often been unfair to the losers of history; his philosophical commitment to immanence often verges on a commitment to victory, since he allows little room for a transcendent right that would console the losers on a rainy day.
FOUR CLUES
Along with these four dangers, we also have four intriguing clues to guide us in piecing together Latour's political philosophy. The first has already been mentioned: the fact that Latour recently signalled a drastic change in the place of politics in his thinking. This was heralded in 2008 in his remarks at the London School of Economics:
[W]e should not confuse ... the idea of multiplicity of beings and the consequent abandonment of the human-nonhuman distinction with any position about how to organize the polity. This is an entirely different question and ... relies on the specification of what is original in the political mode of existence, as different from laws as it is from reference, and so on. (PW 97)
Whereas the early Latour ably employs such terms as "democracy" to describe the ontological equality of humans and nonhumans, the later Latour seems to regret this flattening of all actors onto a single plane, and tries to re-establish distinctions between various different modes of existence. It is necessary to account for this shift in Latour's views on politics from the early phase to the late. Though normally I detest the method of cleanly dividing a thinker's career into discrete periods, we shall need to cut Latour's career not into two parts, but into three. If the Latour of the 1980s shows a snare-drummer's delight in depicting animate and inanimate entities as locked in a Machiavellian duel to the death, his emphasis in the 1990s and early 2000s shifts to politics as the careful fabrication of fragile networks in the name of civil peace. We treat these early and middle phases in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, before shifting in Chapter 4 to Latour's late conception of politics as a rare and specific mode of existence.
A second clue can be found in Latour's great respect for politicians, quite unusual among intellectuals. As he puts it, "contempt for politicians is still today what creates the widest consensus in academic circles" (PF 245). But Latour could hardly disagree more with this consensus: "It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician [... Others] simply have somewhere to hide when they have made their mistakes. They can go back and try again. Only the politician is limited to a single shot and has to shoot in public" (PF 210). We will never do better than a politician. Latour has no time for those beautiful souls who cling to the supposed purity of their principles while unable to bring victory to their cause. "What we despise as political 'mediocrity' is simply the collection of compromises that we force politicians to make on our behalf" (PF 210). A more common Latourian term for compromise is mediation, and mediation is at the heart of Latourian political philosophy just as it is at the heart of everything else he has written. For Latour we are mediocre not when we assemble actors in networks of associations, but when we strike poses in the name of principles without doing what it takes to have them win. An old military maxim tells us that amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics. While these words are already Latourian enough, we might make them even more Latourian by writing: "Amateurs talk ends but professionals talk means." The mediations required to bring something about inevitably lead to a translation of our initial goals. Here Latour strikes a realist note that is clearly audible throughout his political theory, and that immediately puts him at odds with the ultimately Rousseauian notion that the primary meaning of politics is the removal of oppression.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bruno Latour"
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Copyright © 2014 Graham Harman.
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Table of Contents
A Note on the Life and Thought of Bruno LatourIntroduction. Truth Politics and Power Politics
1. In Search of a Latourian Political Philosophy
2. Early Latour: A Hannibal of Actants
3. Middle Latour: The Parliament of Things
4. Late Latour: Politics as a Mode
5. “Usefully Pilloried”: Latour’s Left Flank
6. “An Interesting Reactionary”: Latour’s Right Flank
7. “A Copernican Revolution”: Lippmann, Dewey, and Object-Oriented
Politics
8. Concluding Remarks
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index