More from Latour

A few further scattered comments from and on Latour.

1) He disputes the notion that the modern world is disenchanted, claiming that the claim of disenchantment is merely the reflex of the Constitution of modernity and its premise that We are completely different from Them. He also attributes the modern self-castigation for disenchantment and meaninglessness to a kind of perverse asceticism – “how we do love to wear the hair shirt of the absurd.” But the world has not and cannot be disenchanted, he claims: “How could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before? . . . How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fraile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things?”

2) The problem of disenchantment, rationalization, bureaucratization also rises partly from what he calls the confusion of “products with processes.” Rational bureaucracies, he points out, do not require rationalized bureaucrats, efficient technologies do not require efficient engineers to produce them, and the production of abstraction is not abstract: “We might just as well say that a refinery produces oil in a refined manner, or that a dairy produces butter in a buttery way!”

3) This confusion is also a confusion about the character of the relation between the local and the global, between the particular and the universal. Moderns think in terms of totalities that cover entire social surfaces; technology is everywhere around us, universalized. Latour more reasonably speaks in terms of networks of lesser and greater sizes, using the railroad as his initial model. The railway universalizes because it can get us nearly everywhere (though it doesn’t get us everywhere); but it does so along tracks and stations, each of which is very particular. We are never really dealing with either pure global or pure local, but always with localities, albeit they might be linked to other localities in a network that approaches global proportions. I can get lots of places on airplanes, though not everywhere; but I always access this universal at a particular airport, get on a particular plane with very specific fellow passengers, pilots, and stewardesses.

This applies to communications technology and media as much as to transportation: “Electromagnetic waves may be everywhere, but I still have to have an antenna, a subscription and a decoder if I am to get CNN.” Knowledge and information also travels networks. Nature is unviersal; wherever I drop a pencil on earth, it falls to the ground. But the theoretical constructions of science – a theory of gravity, for instance – are transmitted by various sorts of “railways” – schools, books, experiments – all of which are particular and local.

4) Throughout his book, Latour emphasizes the importance of objects to sociology and anthropology. Objects have been ignored in modern political thought: Hobbes’s citizens, he points out, are naked citizens, without tools or technologies. But this deletion of objects from social theory (caused by the Constitution that separates Nature and Society and ignores the “middle kingdom” of nature-culture hybrids) makes all sorts of things incomprehensible. Huge collectives, the macro of sociology, seem to be of a different ontological order from the humble human beings that participate in these collectives. But that is just another example of treating a network as if it were a total, unbroken surface. When we actually look at the collective, we find a variety of localities, people with their objects and tools, in longer or shorter networks:

“If we wander about inside IBM, if we follow the chains of command of the Red Army, if we inquire in the corridors of the Ministry of Education, if we study the process of selling and buying a bar of soap, we never leave the local level. We are always in interaction with four or five peopole; the building superintendent always has his territory well staked out; the directors’ conversations sound just like those of the employees; as for the salespeople, they go on and on giving change and filling out their invoices.” Thhe organization is a “thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations. An organization, a market, an institution, are not supralunar objects made of a different matter from our poor local sublunar relations. The only difference stems from the fact that they are made up of hybrids and have to mobilize a great number of objects for their description.”

5) Finally, it’s the myth of totality – the myth that institutions, technologies are surfaces rather than networks – that accounts for the preference for the margins that we find in all sorts of anti-modern protest movements. If the center is not an unbroken surface at all, but a complex web of intersecting and proliferating lines of travel, communication, information, personal connection, and so on, then the margins lose their lure: “It is fine to want to defend the claims of the suffering body and human warmth against the cold universality of scientific laws. But if universality stems from a series of places in which warm flesh-and-blood bodies are suffering everywhere, is not this defence grotesque? Protecting human beings from the domination of machines and technocrats is a laudable enterprise, but if the machines are full of human beings who find their salvation there, such a protection is merely absurd.”

Latour, I suspect, means “salvation” here in a strong sense; earlier, he had cited Heraclitus, who declared, after emerging from an oven where he hid himself, that “here too the gods are present.” Machines cannot disenchant; the gods are there too.