Category Archives: ANT

The medium of action

ANT, Philosophy, Politics

Had Hannah Arendt lived to read Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: she would never have written this:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

This last sentence is perfectly, elegantly wrong, and overcoming this belief is at the very heart of Design Thinking.

Circuits

ANT, Etymology, Philosophy

Intersubjectivity is conducted through the medium of things.

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I and You runs a circuit through It.

Are things otherwise?: I is short-circuiting, again.

An indicator of a closed circuit: intense heat.

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Circuit – ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from Latin circuitus, from circuire, variant of circumire ‘go around,’ from circum ‘around’ + ire ‘go.’

(It is interesting to think of the circuit as primarily the movement, not the substance that enables the movement.)

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Laurie Anderson’s “Closed Circuit”

 

Universal respect

ANT, Ethics, Politics

To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.

To believe one is too great to bother with  lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)

Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.

This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.

Miller/Latour: What religion does

ANT

I need to make friends with some fellow-nerds whose heads combust when they read stuff like this:

Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.

The principle of irreduction guarantees resistant availability and bans any slick metaphysics. Absent the singular transcendence of a traditional God, grace isn’t dissolved but distributed. An object-oriented grace is fomented by a restless multitude of cross-fertilizing transcendences, resistances, and availabilities. Here, grace is the double-bind of resistant availability that both gives objects to themselves and gives them away to others. Or, better, grace is what gives objects to themselves by giving them away to others. There is no grace if the resistant is not also available and there is no grace if the available is not also resistant. Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude’s resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of grace.

On this account, sin is a refusal of grace. It is a refusal of this double-bind. It is a desire to go away, to be done once and for all with the necessity of negotiation, to be finally free from the imposing demands of others. Sin denies both the graciousness of resistance and the graciousness of availability. It can see neither work nor suffering as the gifts that jointly constitute the object that it is. Sin does not want to be dependent on a grace it cannot control and it does not want to be impinged on by a grace it did not request. Sin wants the given to be something other than given.

The business of religion is “to disappoint, first, to disappoint” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, “to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the incompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by a black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, “incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Great effort is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. “Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.

The trick, as Latour puts it, is “to paint the disappointment of the visible without simply painting another world of the invisible” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Something obscure does need to be revealed, but the obscurity in question is not the kind proper to what is distant, resistant, or transcendent. Rather, religion aims for a revelation of the obvious as otherwise than we’d assumed. In religion, “what is hidden is not a message beneath the first one, an esoteric message, but a tone, an injunction for you, the viewer, to redirect your attention and to turn it away from the dead and back to the living” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Life and redemption depend on this revelation of a novel tone.

(This passage is from Adam Miller’s Speculative Grace. Highly recommended, if you are one of those rare freaks who actually digs theology.)

Consolations of gnosis

ANT, Ethics, Ideas

I finished “Irreductions” from The Pasteurization of France.

To me, Latour looks like the most rigorous and radical fusion of Nietzschean and Pragmatist I’ve read.

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Superficially, Actor-Network Theory looks almost amoral, but Latour always inserts a moral at the end of his fables.

ANT neutralizes the twin delusions of omnipotence in knowledge and helplessness in practice that prevents visionaries from taking an honest shot at actualizing their ideals. The consolation of knowledge has seduced the most imaginative intellects of the world to build paltry private kingdoms in their minds — each a place of its own — leaving uncontested the domination of the public world to whoever will dominate it.

ANT closes off all antipolitical paths. Those who wish to gain power have exactly one option: build alliances.

Latour’s novel insight is that those alliances occur not only between people but between people and things, and strength is nothing more or less than the cooperation lent by each participant in the alliance.

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Some quotes from Heraclitus seem compatible with this line of thought:

“The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. ”

“Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.”

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. ”

 

Where politics has no rights

ANT, Ethics

A hint at Latour’s ethic:

We would like to be able to escape from politics. 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. We would like to be able to get away from the trials of strength and the chains of weakness. We would like to be able to read the original texts rather than translations, to see more clearly, and to listen to words less ambiguous than those of the Sibyl.

In the old days we imagined a world of gods where the harsh rules of compromise were not obeyed. But now this very world is seen as obscurantist and confused, contrasted with the exact and efficient world of the experts. “We are,” we say, “immersed in the habits of the past by our parents, our priests, and our politicians. Yet there is a way of knowing and acting which escapes from this confusion, absolutely by its principles and progressively by its results: this is a method, a single method, that of ‘science.’ ”

This is the way we have talked since Descartes, and there are few educated people on earth today who have not become Cartesian through having learned geometry, economics, accountancy, or thermodynamics. Everywhere we direct our best brains toward the extension of “science.” It is with them that we lodge our greatest, indeed often our only, hopes. Nowhere more than in the evocation of this kingdom of knowledge do we create the impression that there is another transcendental world. It is only here that there is sanctuary. Politics has no rights here, and the laws that rule the other worlds are suspended. This extraterritorial status, available only to the “sciences,” makes it possible for believers to dream, like the monks of Cluny, about reconquering the barbarians. “Why not rebuild this chaotic, badly organized world of compromise in accordance with the laws of our world?”

So what is this difference which, like Romulus and his plough, makes it possible to draw the limes that divide the scientific from other ways of knowing and convincing? A furrow, to be sure, an act of appropriation, an enclosure in the middle of nowhere, which follows up no “natural” frontier, an act of violence. Yes, it is another trial of strength which divides the forces putting might on one side and right on the other.

But surely this difference must represent something real since it is so radical, so total, and so absolute? Admittedly the credo of this religion is poor. All that it offers is a tautology. “To know” scientifically is to know “scientifically.” Epistemology is nothing but the untiring affirmation of this tautology. Abandon everything; believe in nothing except this: there is a scientific way of knowing, and other ways, such as the “natural,” the “social,” or the “magical.” All the failings of epistemology — its scorn of history, its rejection of empirical analysis, its pharisaic fear of impurity — are its only qualities, the qualities that are sought for in a frontier guard. Yes, in epistemology belief is reduced to its simplest expression, but this very simplicity brings success because it can spread easily, aided by neither priest nor seminary.

Of course, I am exaggerating. The faith has some kind of content. Technically, it is the negation of the paragraph with which I started this precis . Since the gods were destroyed, this faith has become the main obstacle that stands in the way of understanding the principle of irreduction. Its only function is passionately to deny that there are only trials of strength. “Be instant in season, out of season,” to say that “there is something in addition, there is also reason.” This cry of the faithful conceals the violence that it perpetrates, the violence of forcing this division.

All of which is to say that this precis, which prepares the way for the analysis of science and technology, is not epistemology, not at all.

Irreductions

ANT

From the introduction to Latour’s Irreductions:

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

This text follows one path, however bizarre the consequences and contrary to custom. What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge of what a force is? What happens when we do not know how their way of relating to one another is changing? What happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to reduce everything?

Supposing truth converses…?

ANT

More attempts to internalize the ANTsy moves:

Today, physicists never discuss a matter without allowing the matter to participate in the discussion.

Physicist’s experiments always ask leading questions. The questions have a clear, coaxing thrust, and the matter in question cooperates or frustrates the hopes implicit in the line of questioning.

Much of physics is hammered out through competition between conflicting leading questions. Physicists approach a matter a make conflicting propositions. They compete for the right to speak for the matter. The matter rewards the one who understands the best with a fickle faithfulness.

Interview with a quark

ANT, Ideas

If a physicist could talk directly with a quark to get hints from it that would help the physicist invent new productive theories and experiments, most physicists would get to work scheduling interviews with any quark willing to talk with them.

Unfortunately, this is impossible, so physicists must rely solely on quantitative methods.

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So far physicists have found the material world to be composed of entities that can be taken as identical, so that what is learned from one example of a type can be applied to all other entities of the same type. Entities recognized by physics do not harbor dissenters. Or maybe dissenters exist, but are rare, uninfluential and reducible to noise.

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When we say the entities of physics are identical, do we know what it means? In respect to the interactions we have with these entities — experiments — they behave predictably.

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The periodic table is a segmentation of substances.

A book describing each element is a sort of catalog of personas.

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(This has been an attempt to dance the ANT.)

On Justification

ANT, Ideas

Two reasons I am glad to have read Luc Boltanski’s On Justification:

  1. I have been looking for something like Boltanski’s Framework for Analyzing the Common Worlds for two years: basically a structure for describing a lifeworld/worldview.
  2. Boltanski’s descriptions of the different political worlds in pure and hybrid form have provided me with a much finer schema for understanding political affinities and differences.

My immediate use for it is in business, in understanding political conflicts and in establishing cohesive hybrid solutions that can serve as a foundation for inside-out brand differentiation.

To me, this system is very similar to Jung’s personality theory of functions and types.

OPP

ANT, Pragmatism

Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) is going to be a useful concept. From Wikipedia:

Obligatory passage points are a feature of actor-networks, usually associated with the initial (problematization) phase of a translation process. An OPP can be thought of as the narrow end of a funnel, that forces the actors to converge on a certain topic, purpose or question. The OPP thereby becomes a necessary element for the formation of a network and an action program. The OPP thereby mediates all interactions between actors in a network and defines the action program. Obligatory passage points allow for local networks to set up negotiation spaces that allow them a degree of autonomy from the global network of involved actors.

To put it in Jamesian language, the “cash value” of all ideas involved in a social situation transacts at the OPP — for a social scientist, at least, who is interested in accounting for the transpiring of events. Is there any perspective deeper than that? (I’ll leave that question open.)

From, for and within

ANT, Pragmatism

Just as science is not really a body of knowledge on what is true about things, but rather the record of disciplined interactions human beings have with things, with a focus on the patterns that predictably occur when certain conditions are in place… philosophy is not really the truth of how human beings necessarily relate to existence (“the human condition”), but rather the record of individuals (who belong to societies) trying to make coherent and comprehensive sense of their own experience, as defined by what they take to be relevant, which is intimately connected with what that individual wishes to do in the world. Existence might be conceptualized in thingly objective terms, or psychological, intellectual, logical, political, experiential, moral, etc. terms.

And because what people take to be relevant varies from person to person — (and perhaps varies most dramatically between the type who decides to conceptualize his experience versus a type who simply interacts with whatever he encounters) — different people will have different philosophies, which will enable them to interact with the world in some very particular way, perhaps as a scientist or a philosopher, but maybe as a salesperson or a respiratory therapist or a concierge or a politician.

So, both science and philosophy attempt to relate to the whole of reality, but always from, for and within some purpose, outside of which there is nothing but the mystery of the possibility of learning and changing. In any intellectual activity an actor is always someone relating something, whether the emphasis is on the someone or on the something and even if that something is taken to be fellow someone/something actors.

I think my use of this approach to relating myself to existence, which includes as a consideration other people approaching existence differently from myself makes me a pragmatist. Never forget: American Pragmatism was a response to the experience of the Civil War.

Crediting James

ANT, Pragmatism

Graham Harman, from Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics:

We are now amused to think that there used to be two kinds of physics, one for the earth and one for the sky. But it is equally absurd that we still recognize two different kinds of reality: one for hard scientific fact and another for arbitrary social power. What exists is only actants: cars, subways, canoe-varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists, all on the same metaphysical footing.

I’ll say it again: as far as I can tell Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is nothing more than the most radical form of Pragmatism, which has advanced from its humble clean, abstract, conceptual infancy to a truly radical maturity, which for Pragmatism means a dirty, concrete mess of real life observations and real life applications of the understandings so derived. The most radical form of Pragmatism is practical Pragmatism.

The concept of “actant” is an ontology of Jamesian “cash value”, with all (other?) metaphysics (as such) bracketed — not negatively, but positively as something with force of some kind. When Latour uses accounting language — “I am perfectly happy with the resonance of the word [accounting] not only with Garfinkel’s accountability but also with ‘accounting books’, since the weak but essential link of accounting with economics has been one of the most productive, and unlikely, domains of science studies.” — it seems to me that it is precisely this pragmatic cash value inhabits the cells of the ANT spreadsheet. And really, money is a very human thing, and is embedded in the etymology of some of our most exalted words. It seems that extreme love or hatred of wealth seems symptomatic of of an individual’s rejection of being human.

 

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?