Latour Speaks

Events are closing in on me, that is, I seem to have overcommitted my time, and, in consequence, my blogging schedule is likely to suffer over the next week or two. Thus, rather than another bit of commentary on Latour, I offer this video (h/t Tim Morton), May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics:

This lecture has been published: An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 3, Summer 2010. If you can’t get behind the pay wall, you can download a prepublication draft here (PDF). Levi Bryant comments at Larval Subjects.

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I plant two more posts in my Latour series. One of them, most likely the next one, will be about Latour’s view of the political, which he articulates in the last chapter of Reassembling the Social. The key notion, as I now see it (subject to reconsideration), is that political change is possible only in those ‘zones’ that are still fluid. The sociology of the social, as he’s been calling it, cannot, by it’s very methodology (and it’s success) map these zones. It is a sociology of a world that has settled into more or less stable institutional form. Only ANT sociology has the tools to identify, via description, zones of change.

My other post will sketch out the consequences of ANT for literary criticism. What tools does it afford us? A key passage (p, 236):

Apart from religion, no other domain has been more bulldozed to death by critical sociology than the sociology of art. Every sculpture, painting, haute cuisine dish, techno rave, and novel has been explained to nothingness by the social factors ‘hidden behind’ them. Through some inversion of Plato’s allegory of the cave, all the objects people have learned to cherish have been replaced by puppets projecting social shadows which are supposed to be the only ‘true reality’ that is ‘behind’ the appreciation of the work of art.