Reading Latour 7: A Bit of Reflection

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

Reading Latour is both rewarding and frustrating. Rewarding because yes yes yes. Frustrating because yes yes yes. At this point I almost feel as though I should transcribe large sections of his text into these posts and simply interject ‘yes yes yes’ here and there by way of commentary. And that’s all. For, in a sense I have nothing to add. What he says seems to me, almost / more or less self-evident in the words he uses.

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Right now I think the best thing is to sit back and reflect a bit. I’ve spent most of my career thinking about the mind and about culture, using literature and music and this and that as vehicles for so doing. I know, of course, that mind and culture are intimately bound up in society, but society hasn’t been front an center in my thinking. Well, reading Latour I see he’s framing the question of society in a way that’s commensurate with mind and culture as I have come to think about them.

Thus, what he says is at once utterly familiar and utterly strange. It is familiar in that I do recognize what he’s talking about, in particular, I recognize the zig-zag network of connections between objects and humans that he points out at every turn. No, it’s not that I recognize those networks he points out. They are strange to me, things I’ve not thought of myself—though graffiti’s brought me very close to them. Rather, I recognize them as points of attachment for ‘the mental’ and ‘the cultural’ that I’ve been examining.

So I see the fit. And now I just want to get on with it, to hook it all up. Hence the frustration. For I know it’s not that easy. That you have to describe it . all . in minute . precious . detail. So much work to do! Hallelujah! So much work to do! Pushing the rock up the hill up the hill up the hill.

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Both ‘the mental’ and ‘the cultural’ suffer from the same disease Latour has diagnosed in ‘the social’. And, if anything, the cultural has it worse than the mental. So much talk of culture is as though culture was this substance that does things. It binds people into groups—in this it is much like, if not identical too, the social—it sets groups one against the other, it dictates thoughts and feelings, in its hands, we are puppets—again, like the social.

In fact, culture and society are often confused. To talk of X culture—American culture, Taiwanese culture, Lakota culture, and so forth—is almost inevitably to talk of American society, Taiwanese society, Lakota society, and so forth. So why, then, two words? The distinction, I think, goes roughly like this: The society is the group of people; the culture is the norms, beliefs, attitudes, and so forth through which the people in society organize their relations with one another. In practice it’s all but impossible to think about one without thinking about the other. But they are not the same.

The peculiar thing about culture is that it is at one and the same time located in the mind and in the society, if we are to talk that way. It is, if you will, what allows the private minds of a bunch of individuals to open out into one another and so allow those individuals to function in a group. It is what affords the semblance, but/and only the semblance, of a group mind.

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What does Latour mean for me as a student of literature? My current hobbyhorse, of course: description, description, description.

I went to graduate school in the Department of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. That department had one program in Literature and Psychology, mostly psychoanalysis. Another program in Literature and Society, which gravitated toward Frankfurt School sociology and cultural studies in the Raymond Williams mold. There were other sub-programs as well. And an office door bearing the sign, “Center for Peripheral Studies”.

Getting back to psychology and society. One program asks you to use psychology to explain the text, or, at the time, more like explain the reader’s response to the text. The other program saw society in the text, the text as an expression of social structures and processes, in particular, social class.

Against that background, my own interest in form, the actual formal aspects of texts, might seem hopelessly old-fashioned, except that I’ve elaborated that interest with the newest of tools, or, what’s pretty much the same, apparently not tools at all, beyond some often strange and elaborate diagrams. So my interest is just strange.

In the Latourian context, it seems to me, my interest in description and form is simply a precondition for considering the text as a vehicle for the mental and / or the social. Both and neither are there. They hook-up link together, interact, in the text. To explore that interaction, that networking if you will, you must first describe the text.

Well, you don’t HAVE to do so, not in any rigorous way. But if you don’t, then, same old same old. That’s where literary studies is now: same old same old. ‘Round and ‘round the wheel, keeping the old older oldest ideas circulating.

But if we keep this up we’ll never join up with Latourian ANTS, for we won’t have the detailed specifications necessary to achieve linkage. Nor will we be able to mesh with Herb Simon’s sciences of the artificial, and for the same reason. As for evolutionary psychology, I’ve beaten that horse enough already and don’t need to rehearse that here and now. Suffice it to say that the Darwinians do not have a useful appreciation for textual detail and let’s leave it at that.