Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Fourth Source of Uncertainty: Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern,” pp. 87-120.
Back in post six in this series, Recouping Constructivism, I commented on some passages early in this long chapter. In the post I’m going to comment on a passage or two near the end of the chapter. As for the middle, as for how Latour got from there to here, briefly and crudely, it’s like this:
Traditionally, classically, the social sciences have proposed accounts of people’s behavior that are quite different from those proposed by people themselves. Thus, Jack buys a BMW because he likes its style and engineering. Mr. Sociologist, however, asserts that Jack buys the BMW to one-up his neighbors, who drive Toyotas and Fords. And so on. In the extreme, one might even say that Mr. Sociologist substitutes his account for Jack’s, making it clear that, as far as he, Mr. Sociologist is concerned, Jack doesn’t know jack---- about his own motives. These deeper motives derive, of course, from ‘the social’.
Well, the sociologists of science did the same thing for science, The scientists, unlike ordinary folks, protested: “You guys are crazy. Your ‘the social’ plays no role in our laboratories. What you see is what you get.” Latour choose to believe the scientists, though many chose not to.
And so Latour was motivated to drop the, or is it ‘a’?, standard distinction between the natural and the social. And so (pp. 111-112):
To our great surprise, once the artificial boundary between social and natural was removed, non-human entities were able to appear under an unexpected guise. For instance, rocks might be useful to knock an idealist back to his senses, but rocks in geology seemed to be much more varied, much more uncertain, much more open, and deploy more types of agencies than the narrow role given to them in empiricist accounts. . . . . Empiricism no longer appears as the solid bedrock on which to build everything else, but as a very poor rendering of experience. This poverty, however, is not overcome by moving away from material experience, for instance to the ‘rich human subjectivity’, but closer to the much variegated lives materials have to offer. It’s not true that one should fight reductionism by adding some human, symbolic, subjective, or social ‘aspect’ to the description since reductionism, to begin with, does not render justice to objective facts.
Latour ends up with what he calls a second empiricism (p. 115): “its science, its politics, its esthetics, its morality are all different from the past. It is still real and objective, but it is livelier, more talkative, pluralistic, and more mediated than the other.”
Enter, the Pluriverse
This is the heart of the matter. In this second empiricism objective reality is messier and more complex than it is in the empiricism of the positivists.
p. 116:
Such a multiplicity does not mean that scientists don’t know what they are doing and there everything is just fiction, but rather that studies has been able to pry apart exactly what the ready-made notion of ‘natural objective matters of fact’ had conflated too fast, namely reality, unity, and indisputability. When you look for the first, you do not get automatically the two others. And this has nothing to do with the ‘interpretive flexibility’ allowed by ‘multiple points of views’ taken on the ‘same’ thing. It is the thing itself that has been allowed to be deployed as multiple and thus allowed to be grasped through different viewpoints, before being possibly unified in some later stage depending on the abilities of the collective to unify them. There are simply more agencies in the pluriverse, to use William James’s expression, than philosophers and scientists thought possible.
This, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter.
Rather than continuing on with Latour I want to shift to some work I did with the late David Hays and some more recent work of my own. For it seems to me that we’ve arrived at more or less the same place as Latour has, but through a very different route. We arrived there through the computational study of the mind, though I note in passing that Hays had studied with one of the great sociologists of the the mid 20th century, Talcott Parsons.
Note that I am asserting this intellectual independence, not out of narcissism (“I did it myself”), but for epistemological reasons. We are in dangerous territory, there might be dragons around the next bend, who knows? In this parlous state the fact that two more or less independent lines of investigation have led to the same place, that strengthens the sense that that place is real.
Complexity in the Universe
Some years ago Hays and I published a brief paper, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity. After commenting on a passage in which J.J. Gibson noted that the chief feature of reality, as opposed to dreams and fictions, is that reality changes under repeated scrutiny, yielding ever more to inspection. We then asserted: “Reality is not perceived, it is enacted -- in a universe of great, perhaps unbounded, complexity.” The formulation, I believe, is Hays’s, and I no more know what he was then thinking than I know what I was thinking. But I see nothing in that formulation that is restrictive about just what agencies are doing the enacting and so conclude that we must have meant any agencies whatsoever.
Now, it seemed to us that much thinking has regarded complexity as a matter of superficial appearances. In such views, once one sees beneath or through those appearances one encounters a real reality that is inherently simple (e.g. Platonic forms). We argued that, on the contrary, real reality is inherently complex:
Biology is certainly accustomed to complexity. Biomolecules consist of many atoms arranged in complex configurations; organisms consist of complex arrangements of cells and tissues; ecosystems have complex pathways of dependency between organisms. These things, and more, are the complexity with which biology must deal. And yet such general examples have the wrong “feel;” they don't focus one's attention on what is essential. To use a metaphor, the complexity we have in mind is a complexity in the very fabric of the universe. That garments of complex design can be made of that fabric is interesting, but one can also make complex garments from simple fabrics. It is complexity in the fabric which we find essential.
We take as our touchstone the work of Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that order can arise by accident (Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1980; Nicolis and Prigogine 1977). He showed that when certain kinds of thermodynamic systems get far from equilibrium order can arise spontaneously. These systems include, but are not limited to, living systems. In general, so-called dissipative systems are such that small fluctuations can be amplified to the point where they change the behavior of the system. These systems have very large numbers of parts and the spontaneous order they exhibit arises on the macroscopic temporal and spatial scales of the whole system rather than on the microscopic temporal and spatial scales of its very many component parts. Further, since these processes are irreversible, it follows that time is not simply an empty vessel in which things just happen. The passage of time, rather, is intrinsic to physical process.
We live in a world in which “evolutionary processes leading to diversification and increasing complexity” are intrinsic to the inanimate as well as the animate world (Nicolis and Prigogine 1977: 1; see also Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 297-298). That this complexity is a complexity inherent in the fabric of the universe is indicated in a passage where Prigogine (1980: xv) asserts “that living systems are far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium and that living organisms are necessarily ‘large,’ macroscopic objects requiring a coherent state of matter in order to produce the complex biomolecules that make the perpetuation of life possible.” Here Prigogine asserts that organisms are macroscopic objects, implicitly contrasting them with microscopic objects.
That sounds awfully like the Jamesian/Latourian pluriverse.
The emic and the etic
Now, let’s take this plurality seriously. In particular, lets think about the plurality of sonic objects, such as the sounds of a natural human language? That’s a problem that linguists have dealt with by distinguishing between phonetics and phonemics. As I noted in one of my notes on cultural evolution, Cultural Evolution 8: Language Games 1, Speech:
The former [phonetics] is about the psychophysics of speech sound while the latter is about phoneme systems. These are obviously very closely related matters, but they aren’t the same. We tend to perceive the speech stream as consisting of discrete sound entities, syllables and phonemes; this is the domain of phonemics. But the speech signal is, in fact, continuous. If you look at a sonogram of some chunk of speech, you don’t draw a series of vertical lines through it separating one phoneme from another; nor can you snip a tape recording into phoneme-long or syllable-long segments and reassemble it into something that sounds like natural speech. The aspects of the speech stream which are phonemically active differ from one language to another, which is why foreign languages all sound like “Greek.” Independently of the fact that you don’t know what the words mean or how the syntax works, you can’t even hear the phonemes in the speech stream.
Yes, you can hear the speech stream. But it is far too feature rich, property rich, for your auditory system to attend to it ALL. Unless you know the language, however, you will not pick up just those properties that allow the stream to encode words and sentences. It’s just another complex sonic object.
Now, anthropologists have taken this distinction, between phonetics and phonemics, and generalized it into etics and emics, where, alas, it is not very clear. In practice it seems to have been used as a way of authorizing anthropologists to provide ‘sociology of the social’ accounts (etics) for the practices of a people as understood by them (emics). It is not clear to me whether or not such a generalization can be salvaged, and if so, how to do it, but I do think it’s worth considering.
Let’s return to the account of experimental replication I offered in an earlier post. I observed that “a replication can fail because the hypothesis is wrong. But it can also fail because the original experimenters inadvertently left out a crucial bit of information about apparatus or procedure.“ That is to say, the original account of the experiments may not have fully conveyed the “emic” features of the investigation. Indeed, the experimenters may not have fully understood the emics of their procedure and thus failed to distinguish them from the full etic array of features exhibited by their activity. Replication is the only way to ‘ferret out’ the emics.
At this point, of course, the object I’m talking about, the many-propertied object, the object florescent in all of its plurality, is the experimental investigation with its full array of agents, human and non-human, interrelated through a staggering array of mediations and translations.
This is the object against which Latour banged his head.
No comments:
Post a Comment