All posts by anomalogue

Latour talking religion

Ideas

I knew Latour was Christian.

From “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame” (pdf):

Religion, at least in the tradition I am going to talk from, namely
the Christian one, is a way of preaching, of predicating, of
enunciating truth in a certain manner… It is literally, technically,
theologically, a form of news, of “good news,” what in Greek was
called evangelios, what has been translated into English as “gospel.”
Thus, I am not going to speak of religion in general, as if there
existed some universal domain, topic, or problem called “religion”
that could allow one to compare divinities, rituals, and beliefs from
Papua New Guinea to Mecca, from Easter Island to Vatican City. A
person of faith has only one religion, as a child has only one mother.
There is no point of view from which one could compare different
religions and still be talking in the religious fashion. As you see,
my purpose is not to talk about religion, but to talk to you
religiously, at least religiously enough so that we can begin to
analyze the conditions of felicity of such a speech act, by
demonstrating in vivo, tonight, in this room what sort of
truth-condition this speech-act requests. Since the topic of this
series implies “experience,” experience is what I want to generate.

…

What I am going to argue is that religion — again in the tradition
which is mine — does not speak of things, but from things, entities,
agencies, situations, substances, relations, experiences, whatever is
the word, which are highly sensitive to the ways in which they are
talked about. They are, so to speak, manners of speech — John would
say Word, Logos, or Verbum. Either they transport the spirit from
which they talk and they can be said to be truthful, faithful, proven,
experienced, self-verifiable, or they don’t reproduce, don’t perform,
don’t transport what they talk from, and immediately, without any
inertia, they begin to lie, to fall apart, to stop having any
reference, any ground. Either they elicit the spirit they utter and
they are true; or they don’t and they are worse than false, they are
simply irrelevant, parasitical.

 

 

Thoughts on art

Ideas

Art exposes illusory uniqueness, with concrete specificity. To express at all, self-expression must transcend individuality while remaining individual.

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An artist’s unique impulse expressing itself concretely, to the degree that it is unique, is not only incomprehensible to all but the artist — taken positively, the expression is useless and without value.

However, uniqueness does have negative conceptual value. In this, uniqueness (non-sameness) is similar to  the concept of liberty (non-compulsion).

But only the alienated can embrace the negative concept of uniqueness, and identification with uniqueness is resignation to alienation, an aesthetic mode of coping.

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Another strategy is to discover those aspects of humanity which have been forgotten or suppressed or vilified — or which have developed in seclusion under new life conditions — which have, through cultural pressures, been isolated in individuals and mistaken for unique. Here, the apparent unique expression is only lost or undiscovered universality.

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Art clears ground with negativity.

Art builds homes with shared positives.

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The most fragile fantasists and the most ruthless realists take refuge in art.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism

ANT, Pragmatism, Synesis

Extending my post from a couple of days ago, “ANT = Practical pragmatism”:

When you are temperamentally theoretical, it is tempting to stop at theorizing about practice, and never to practice anything but theorizing.

When pragmatism begins to apply its insights to practice — that is, to a study specific situation with an aim to understand it in pragmatic terms (which will always turn up unexpected theoretical problems which must be resolved) — pragmatism becomes Actor-network theory.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism.

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As an experience researcher and strategist, this passage from Latour is galvanizing, because it articulates what I do, and what I’ve had great difficulty communicating to clients and colleagues who still live in an essentially objective world inhabited by opinionated, emotional and behaving subjects:

Even once reality has fully set in, the question of its unity is still pending. The common world has still to be collected and composed. As we shall see at the end of this book, this is where the social sciences may regain the political relevance that they seem to have lost by abandoning the ether of the social and the automated use of the critical repertoire that it allowed.

That idea of “collecting and composing” a shared understanding of the world is what I’ve called synesis. I believe this involves a mode of thinking which goes beyond the algorithmic ideal of business thought into the specifically philosophical mode of intuitive thinking, dialectic.

Then things can be taken even further by modifying the network through the act of design. Maybe this is the best definition of design: intentional modification of actor-networks?

 

 

Latour getting melioristic

Synesis

Hell yes:

To go from metaphysics to ontology is to raise again the question of what the real world is really like. As long as we remain in metaphysics, there is always the danger that deployment of the actors’ worlds will remain too easy because they could be taken as so many representations of what the world, in the singular, is like. In which case we would not have moved an inch and would be back at square one of social explanation — namely back to Kant’s idealism.

The danger cannot be exaggerated when we consider that the open-mindedness shown, for instance, by anthropologists about the ‘other’s’ cosmologies is often due to their certainty that those representations have no serious relation to the solid world of matters of fact. In the scholar’s tolerance for wild beliefs, a great deal of condescension might seep through. There may be thousands of ways of imagining how kinships bring children into existence, but there is only, it is argued, one developmental physiology to explain how babies really grow in the womb. There may be thousands of ways to design a bridge and to decorate its surface, but only one way for gravity to exert its forces. The first multiplicity is the domain of social scientists; the second unity is the purview of natural scientists. Cultural relativism is made possible only by the solid absolutism of the natural sciences. Such is the default position of the endless debates going on, for instance, between physical and human geography, physical and cultural anthropology, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis, material and social archaeology, and so on. There is unity and objectivity on one side, multiplicity and symbolic reality on the other.

This is just the solution that ANT wishes to render untenable. With such a divide between one reality and many interpretations, the continuity and commensurability of what we call the associations would immediately disappear, since the multiple will run its troubled historical course while the unified reality will remain intact, untouched, and remote from any human history. But it’s not the case that shifting from social to natural objects means shifting from a bewildering multiplicity to a welcoming unity. We have to shift, yes, but from an impoverished repertoire of intermediaries to a highly complex and highly controversial set of mediators. Controversies over ontologies turn out to be just as interesting and controversial as metaphysics, except that the question of truth (of what the world is really like) cannot be ignored with a blase pose or simplified a priori by thumping on desks and kicking at stones. (I maintain the plural for ontologies to remind the reader that this unity is not the result of what the world is like at first encounter, but what the world might become provided it’s collected and assembled.) Even once reality has fully set in, the question of its unity is still pending. The common world has still to be collected and composed. As we shall see at the end of this book, this is where the social sciences may regain the political relevance that they seem to have lost by abandoning the ether of the social and the automated use of the critical repertoire that it allowed. There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one, but in this lowly world there lie in wait many more worlds that may aspire to become one — or not, depending on the assembly work we will be able to achieve.

Fortunately, we don’t have to solve those arduous questions all at once in order to do our work as sociologists. We don’t even have to deploy the complete set of agencies manifested by matters of concern. We simply have to make sure that their diversity is not prematurely closed by one hegemonic version of one kind of matter of fact claiming to be what is present in experience — and that goes, of course, for ‘power’ and ‘Society’ as well as for ‘matter’ and ‘Nature’. Once again, the key training for practicing ANT is negative at first.

 

Anthropology = empirical metaphysics

Anthropology, Hermeneutics, Synesis

From Reassembling the Social:

What ANT does is that it keeps asking the following question: Since every sociologist loads things into social ties to give them enough weight to account for their durability and extension, why not do this explicitly instead of doing it on the sly? Its slogan, ‘Follow the actors’, becomes, ‘Follow the actors in their weaving through things they have added to social skills so as to render more durable the constantly shifting interactions.’

It’s at this point that the real contrast between sociology of associations and sociology of the social will be most clearly visible. So far, I might have exaggerated the differences between the two viewpoints. After all, many schools of social science might accept the two first uncertainties as their departure point (especially anthropology, which is another name for empirical metaphysics)…

Fighting words from Latour

Phenomenology

From Reassembling the Social:

…Sociology has been embarrassed … by the prejudice that there exists a privileged locus in the social domain where action is ‘concrete’: ‘parole’ more than ‘langue’, ‘event’ more than ‘structure’, ‘micro’ more than ‘macro’, ‘individual’ more than ‘masses’, ‘interaction’ more than ‘society’, or, on the contrary, ‘classes’ more than ‘individual’, ‘meaning’ more than ‘force’, ‘practice’ more than ‘theory’, ‘corporate bodies’ more than ‘persons’, and so on. But if action is dislocal, it does not pertain to any specific site; it is distributed, variegated, multiple, dislocated and remains a puzzle for the analysts as well as for the actors.

This point will help to not confuse ANT with one of the many polemical movements that have appealed to the ‘concreteness’ of the human individual with its meaningful, interacting, and intentional action against the cold, anonymous, and abstract effects of the ‘determination by social structures’, or that has ignored the meaningful lived world of individual humans for a ‘cold anonymous technical manipulation’ by matter. Most often inspired by phenomenology, these reform movements have inherited all its defects: they are unable to imagine a metaphysics in which there would be other real agencies than those with intentional humans, or worse, they oppose human action with the mere ‘material effect’ of natural objects which, as they say, have ‘no agency’ but only ‘behavior’. But an ‘interpretative’ sociology is just as much a sociology of the social than any of the ‘objectivist’ or ‘positivist’ versions it wishes to replace. It believes that certain types of agencies — persons, intention, feeling, work, face-to-face interaction — will automatically bring life, richness, and ‘humanity’.

Nerd needs

Ideas

What a nerd really wants is other nerds who wish to dive deep into his subject with him, for that fundamental human need to share with others what is important to us, and also as a means to deepen understanding through collaboration. Generally if he attempts to share his enthusiasm, though, he gets friendly spectators who observe the surface effects of his excitement over something unfathomable (that is, unfathomably complicated and tedious), and the typological fact that this is always going on with him. There’s good will in the form of friendly sentiment — lots of “good”, little “will”.

Depths

Ideas

The hard part isn’t knowing deep or subtle truths for yourself — we all do that — but figuring out how to share them. And before you can do that, you have to experience why you’d even want to or need to share what’s difficult or impossible to say.

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First, I discovered that parables can be interpreted from many different angles, some of which have meanings beyond what I’d been able to imagine. Then I started noticing the profundity of cliches and their compact elegance. And now I wonder if many banal and goofy everyday expression might not have more to them than I’d suspected.

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Question is space

Ideas

An answer inhabits the space opened by a question.

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If you have an answer, it is wise to allow people to feel the question before offering it, so it has somewhere to go in people’s minds.

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An expansive mind knows how to ask many kinds of questions.

A mind feels hospitable when it can accommodate the questions you ask and the answers you offer.

Presenting perspectives

Ideas

This is the way to present something truly new. Latour, from Reassembling the Social:

In what follows I am not interested in refutation — proving that the other social theories are wrong — but in proposition. How far can one go by suspending the common sense hypothesis that the existence of a social realm offers a legitimate frame of reference for the social sciences? If physicists at the beginning of the previous century were able to do away with the common sense solution of an absolutely rigid and indefinitely plastic ether, can sociologists discover new traveling possibilities by abandoning the notion of a social substance as a ‘superfluous hypothesis’? This position is so marginal, its chance of success so slim, that I see no reason to be fair and thorough with the perfectly reasonable alternatives that could, at any point, smash it into pieces. So, I will be opinionated and often partial in order to demonstrate clearly the contrast between the two viewpoints. In exchange for this breach of fairness, I will try to be as coherent as possible in drawing the most extreme conclusions from the position I have chosen to experiment with. My test will be to see how many new questions can be brought to light by sticking firmly, even blindly, to all the obligations that this new departure point is forcing us to obey. The final test will be to check, at the end of this book, if the sociology of associations has been able to take up the relay of the sociology of the social by following different types of new and more active connections, and if it has been able to inherit all that was legitimate in the ambition of a science of the social. As usual, the result of whether this has been successful or not will be up to the reader.

The reason this jumped out for me is that it reminds me of my “policy” for responsible productive ideation:

First: inform your intuition. Second: leap forward recklessly. Third: test backwards scrupulously.

Latour, however, is using this same move, not for ideation, but for presenting an argument.

And really, if you are attempting to present a new vision, this is the only way to do it. Here is why: those who are committed to an old competing vision are able to scuttle the alternative way to see the problem, not by asserting conflicting arguments, but by simply asking old questions and requiring answers, which requires assumption of the old perspective. But what is at issue is precisely how the questions are asked. (This is a principle Gadamer called the hermeneutic priority of the question.)

Questioning in alien terms midway through a presentation constitutes an attack on an alien perspective, disguised as inquiry. And it is effective. If the presenter is stupid enough —  or powerless enough — to consent to interruption and to attempt to answer before the presentation is finished, he will find himself entirely unable to make his points to the satisfaction of the inquisitor. He has to go all the way to the end of his idea and make it understood.  If he stops short of the goal and turns around,  his truth will be paralyzed or lost in limbo.

Continue reading Presenting perspectives →

Reading

Ideas

Philosophy is practical literature.

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Literary immersion lets us try on a philosophy. We don’t suspend reality — we provisionally swap realities.

If we prefer the literary reality, we might want to keep it.

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The best reading recalls what memory cannot possess.

In other words reading can be prayer.

 

Two great X/Y statements

Ideas

Marty Neumeier’s positioning statement: “We are the only X that does Y.”

Dan Saffer’s hunt statement: “I am going to research X so that I can do Y.”

(Do not sneer. The most amazing insights are the ones so simple and retroactively obvious you cannot believe that you didn’t already know them. Literally: you cannot believe you didn’t know them, and so you don’t believe it, and so you credit yourself with having conceived it yourself.)

I am going to try to boil everything I know into X/Y statements.

Gifts of service

Ideas

When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort.

My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service.

Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world of building objects and utilizing tools as means to this end. He rejects precisely the cornerstone of service, utilizing the time and effort of human beings and reducing them to mere resources.

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Continue reading Gifts of service →

Trial lawyers and teachers

Ideas

A trial lawyer is an expert in using coercive reason against aggressive and unreceptive minds, and usually in order to persuade witnesses observing the exchange from an outside “objective” perspective, not the partner involved in the exchange. Reason is used to buttress one’s own position and to undermine the opposing position. And the conversation is more staged than real.

A teacher is an expert in using collaborative reason in dialogue with cooperative and receptive minds. The exchange is meant to persuade the partner, and is not (primarily) performed for witnesses. Reason is used to reveal the strengths of each position as well as to expose weaknesses, but less for the sake of advocating or eliminating unworthy positions than to spur creativity and to improve the positions, or to find paths to superior positions.

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A trial lawyer in a classroom teaches by destroying stupidity and clearing the ground for new ideas.

A teacher in a courtroom creates possibilities in a space overcrowded with offensiveness and defensiveness.

 

Agreement on the battlefield

Ideas

All generals believe in the existence of the battle they’re about to fight against one another.

They probably also agree on many facts concerning battle conditions: the terrain, the weather, the disposition of the forces, and where they disagree it has less to do with opinion than it does the availability of facts.

Beliefs diverge when they consider one another’s intentions, perceptions and character, and the psychological state of the men in their charge.

The generals must disagree on who ought to win the battle.

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Many types of agreement exist, and each requires different methods for resolution. Consider the differences between dis/agreements of perceptions, facts, insights and morals.