Reading Latour 5: Things

“No ideas but in things”
—William Carlos Williams

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency,” pp. 63-86.

Some Passages on Things

p. 68:

It is always things—and now I mean this last word literally—which, in practice, lend their ‘steely’ quality to the hapless ‘society.’

pp. 71-72:

This, of course, does not mean that these participants ‘determine’ the action, that baskets ‘cause’ the fetching of provisions or that hammers ‘impose’ the hitting of the nail. Such a reversal in the direction of influence would be simply a way to transform objects into the causes whose effects would be transported through human action now limited to a trail of mere intermediaries. Rather, it means that there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence. In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action’, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.

I note that Latour highlights J.J. Gibson’s notion of affordance in a footnote to this passage. Affordances are considered to be properties of things out there in the world, but they are the properties that allow us humans to ‘latch on’ to them, whether perceptually—how do we smell, hear, see, touch, taste them?—or motorically—how to we move to, from, around them, how do we manipulate them?

p. 74:

It is true that, at first sight, the difficulty or registering the role of objects comes from the apparent incommensurability of their modes of action with traditionally conceived social ties. But sociologists of the social have misunderstood the nature of such incommensurability. They have concluded that because they are incommensurable they should be kept separate from proper social ties, without realizing that they should have concluded precisely the opposed: it’s because they are incommensurable that they have been fetched in the first place! If they were as weak as the social skills they have to reinforce, if they were made of the same material quality, where would the gain be? Baboons we were, baboons we would have remained.

Latour is concerned about the stability of so many human social arrangements, and he’s pointing out that this stability depends, in so many various ways, on our interaction with things. Think of those stone weapons and tools so prominent in humanity’s early archeological record, so prominent that homo faber, man the tool-maker, is one prominent conception of our nature. But think also about books, the written word, stable repositories of specific language strings, not thoughts, no not thoughts. Just strings of characters. We read the thoughts into those characters. The reading may change from decade to decade, century to century, millennium (gasp) to millennium, but where would those readings be is they had only ephemeral atmospheric vibrations as their object?

Those things are indispensable. Their physical stability makes them vessels of our social stability. And our mental stability too, for our minds are inextricably intertwined with our society.

A bit further down the page (and continuing on to the next, p. 75):

. . . any human course of action might weave together in minutes, for instance, a shouted order to lay a brick, the chemical connection of cement with water, the force of a pulley unto a rope with a movement of the hand, the strike of a match to light a cigarette offered by a co-worker, etc. [NB: a Latour litany composed, not of nouns, but of noun phrases.] Here, the apparently reasonable division between material and social becomes just what is obfuscating any enquiry on how a collective action is possible. Provided, of course that by collective we don’t mean an action carried over by homogeneous social forces, but, on the contrary, an action that collects different types of forces woven together because they are different. This is why, from no on, the word ‘collective’ will take the place of ‘society’.

Here’s a big one (p. 75):

. . . we have to accept that the continuity of any course of action will rarely consist of human-to-human connections (for which basic human skills would be enough anyway) or of object-object connections, but will probably zig-zag from one to the other.

There we have it, zig-zag continuity through a ‘flat’ ontology.

And so forth and so on. Really, I can’t spend all morning just transcribing and paraphrasing big chunks of this chapter (pp. 63-86) onto the web. You should read it yourself, for it contains many useful examples.

Still, a little more (p. 78): “So, we have to take non-humans into account only as long as they are rendered commensurable with social ties and also to accept, an instant later, their fundamental incommensurability.”

I suppose one might wonder whether or not there is a ‘transcendental social’ in which the commensurable and the incommensurable are rendered commensurable. But that’s babbling. That transcendental social is simply the world.

Power and Graffiti

Latour devotes the last section of this chapter to power relations, a major concern of ‘standard-issue’ social theory. I won’t attempt to reprise or condense his discussion. I’ll just cut to the chase (p. 85):

There exists, however, an even more important reason for rejecting adamantly the role given to objects in the sociology of the social: it voids the appeals to power relations and social inequalities of any real significance. But putting aside the practical means, that is the mediators, through which inertia, durability, asymmetry, extension, domination is produced by conflating all those different means with the powerless power of social inertia, sociologists, when they are not careful in their use of social explanations, are the ones who hide the real causes of social inequalities.

So, the rich and powerful live in BIG houses, many of them in several BIG houses dispersed over a wide geographical area. The poor and powerless live in small houses, if that. How is it that one gets to live in a big house? What resources does one deploy in one’s work? Factories and capital and laborers and raw stuff and tooling and laws, all of that is necessary to the ownership of big houses. Those who live in big houses have large and highly dispersed collections of material stuff at their disposal, the material anchor of their power—a Mortonian hyperobject perhaps? The poor are object poor.

And then there’s graffiti. You rack (that is, steal) fifty or sixty cans of aerosol paint, sneak into a lay-up at night, and paint the side of a subway car. That’s a big hunk of iron you’re just laid claim to. It’ll cost the authorities a nice hunk of change to buff it clean of your art. They command many more objects than you do. And yet you can push them around with a couple of cans of spray paint.

These days that’s known as asymmetrical warfare. It’s how the thing-poor impress their existence on the thing-rich. Now, if the authorities had been willing to chop off the hands of graffiti writers, and with only circumstantial evidence, then they might have been more cheaply effective in cleaning up the New York Subway system. But they weren’t willing to do that. It would have seemed, and been, barbaric. And it would certainly be unconstitutional, cruel and unusual punishment. Style Wars has an interview with Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City (early 1980s), in which he says that the third offense should get you five days in jail. How many pieces can you get-up on subway cars before you’re caught, with good evidence, for the third time?

The Train, the Triceratops, and the Man

As a meditation on power, think of the trains, the piece, and the man in the following photos. Note that many of the cars in that train will have graffiti on them. The man (Michael Bérubé, founder and chair of the WAAGNFN Party) is a bit over six-feet tall; the piece behind him is 18 feet wide and over seven feet high. What kinds of things, what kinds of power, who commands them? Note that that land is posted as no-trespassing. Thus, Japan Joe was breaking the law when he painted that piece, and Bérube´and I were breaking the law simply by being there.