Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Concerning the chapter “Third Move: Connecting Sites,” pp. 219-246.
I want to deal with the material in Latour’s penultimate chapter, “Third Move: Connecting Sites,” by considering how one might think about literature in ANT terms. These ANTs will not, of course, guide us to deep descriptive knowledge of the texts, the sort of knowledge I’ve advocated in my notes on Heart of Darkness, to name one example. That’s not what the ANTs are about. The ANTs are about how people interact with one another and with a multitude of environments and objects, texts among them.
Texts and Standards
Latour is interested in “what circulates from site to site” (p. 222). Texts certainly do that. He starts by thinking about forms: “To provide a piece of information is the action of putting something into a form” (p. 223). A few pages later he’s talking about standards and metrology, the study of measurement. His first example is that of the kilogram. So generalize from that, for the contemporary world is woven through with standards of all kinds (p. 228): “Standards and metrology solve practically the question of relativity that seems to intimidate so many people: Can we obtain some sort of universal agreement?”
One can certainly read large swaths of the recent history of literary studies as a gloss on that question. Does the text have a single ‘true’ meaning? If so, how do we determine it and so compel universal agreement? If not . . . what then? These matters became acute in the 1960s through the casual, and near universal, observation that critics do not, in fact, agree on the meanings of texts.
Logically prior to the problem of interpretation is that of the canon: Just which texts are we supposed to be in agreement about? As a matter of recent history, of course, the problem of textual meaning came to a head before that of the canon.
The canon, it seems to me, is just that body of texts around and through which a population of individuals constitutes itself as a group. Canon wars are thus wars between groups or, perhaps more accurately in Latour’s terminology, wars among collectives attempting to constitute themselves as the hegemonic social group. What we need to think about is how texts can serve such a purpose.
Text as Intermediary
Earlier in the book Latour distinguishes between intermediaries and mediators (p. 39):
An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. . . . Mediators, on the other hand . . . transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.
As a first approximation I take it that the texts themselves are intermediaries while our various explications of the text, from the most casual (as in office chatter about the book you read the night before, or the movie you saw) to the most formal presentation in a professional journal, are mediators.
That’s my strong position. My weak position is that it’s the form of the text that is an intermediary; the ‘content’ may well have the flavor of being a mediator. In Literary Morphology I have argued that texts have a computational form that must necessarily be the same for all readers, a proposition which psychologist Keith Oatley accepts (Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction, p. 71).
In making such an argument what concerns me is how texts work in the mind and brain, which cannot be determined through interpreting those texts (cf. Bordwell, Making Meaning). Just how that—working in mind and brain—to be determined, well that’s the question, isn’t it? We don’t know as yet.
Oral Cultures
In thinking about this question, that of the text as connector among individuals, I prefer to start with how texts exist in oral cultures. They are not passed from person to person in the form of marks on paper. Rather, texts summon the group in recitation. The ‘texts’ to which I refer, of course, are the myths and folktales which are the common heritage of a people, not the every day stories they might tell about the day’s hunt or a child’s first steps.
These texts are recited in full public view of the group. The stories are standard ones known by all, the same set of characters, the same episodes and incidents. There is nothing new about the story at all, except the details of a given performance, which might be quite remarkable. In this situation the teller is aware of, and plays to, his audience, as members of the audience are aware of one another. It is the teller’s full performance, words, intonation, gestures, all of it, and under these circumstances—traditional tale performed in front of the group—that acts as an intermediary that couples the many assembled individuals into a coherent group, a society if you will. This does not, of course, happen in a single telling. But in many tellings over weeks and years and decades. It’s an ongoing process.
Were we to examine each such performance in minute detail, we’d discover this coupling in the gestures and movements of everyone in the group. Particularly in the timing. We’d see it in their gazes, their glances at one another, their attention to the story-teller. The laughs and groans, the clapping of hands and slapping of knees. If we could instrument everyone’s brain, albeit unobtrusively, we’d see the coupling in the synchronized neural activity across the many coupled brains (an argument I’ve made explicitly with respect to music in Beethoven’s Anvil and in my review of Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals). In such an investigation, in Latour’s formulation, “the boundaries between sociology and psychology may be reshuffled for good” (212).
Over time, the story adjusts to the shifting needs of the group and thus always remain within ‘coupling range’ (cf. Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity, e.g. pp. 49 ff.). As the needs of the group change, so the stories change to that they continue to be effective intermediaries.
Written Texts
Things change, of course, once the stories become written down. The direct connection between story teller and audience is broken. Once a story becomes fixed on the page it can no longer change and adapt. And so texts fall out of fashion as they no longer serve as effective intermediaries. New texts arise to serve that function.
In this view the ability of a written text to survive, to pass ‘the test of time’ as the saying has it, is its suitability as an intermediary. Texts survive because they are sharable. Just what makes a text sharable, that’s something we must discover.
Some texts, of course, acquire a class of explicators who both stand guard on the texts themselves and serve as mediators of those texts before the larger group. This happens first with religious texts and only much later with secular works – much, much, later. The ANT sociologist of the literary would, of course, have to describe all of the threads in the new web of the text, all of the actors.
In such a discourse the text itself would have to be allowed agency. It is no longer the dead ashes on paper so beloved of the reader response theorists. And, I’m tempted to say, the most powerful agency a text can have is to act as an intermediary. But not as an intermediary between the singular author, on the one hand, and the many readers, individually one by one, on the other hand. This is not a reverse panopticon, as it were, where a single author in the middle shovels the text through tubes to each lone reader in a private cell. Rather, as in the oral situation, the text is an intermediary among all the readers, of which the author, of course, is one.
In thus generalizing from oral culture to written culture I realize that I’m glossing over many problems. Surely it is not that simple. Surely much hard work will be needed to make such a story work, even in modified form. My point is simply that THIS is the starting point. As such it is very different from the Cartesian starting point, with its many isolated subjects earnestly in search of the world and—hope! hope! hope!—of another subject, at least one, please!
Reader as Agent
We must abandon the Cartesian starting point and work through all the difficulties anew, from this new vantage point. In the process I believe that we’ll recover the reader as agent, but not as the willful solipsist of reader response theory, but as a social agent interacting with others.
Let us return to Latour; he’s speaking of art in general and not specifically about literature, 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.
Agreed.
But, you might ask, just how does the text connect readers? What does it do? If it is a source of standards, what are those standards about?
Good questions all. And there are some answers ready and waiting. The texts provide norms and values, stuff like that. And, of course, we all knew that. That’s what the squabbling of the last 50 years has been about.
How deeply do we understand those things, norms and values?
Not very deeply, I suggest, not very deeply. I further suggest that this new study of literature will afford us ways of understanding, more deeply, just what those things, norms and values, are, and how they work.
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