Latour Modern, Not: A Prolegomenon to a Rhetorical Analysis

I am reading Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. And, yes, it is, as Graham Harman has often said, a remarkable book. But what KIND of a book is it?

An answer from Latour, p. ix: “Having written several empirical books, I am trying here to bring the emerging field of science studies to the attention of the literate public through the philosophy associated with this domain.” So it is philosophy. I guess I expected that, as Harman says Latour is a philosopher, considers himself to be one, and wishes others to think him one. But it is like no philosophy I’ve read, a statement, not an opening for critique. And the level of generality and scope—the relations between humans and things in the world—is of philosophical caliber.

It is for the “literate public”—so this is not, then, a book for specialists. Of philosophical caliber, but not (necessarily) for the professional philosophers. In fact, one has the impression that Latour feels that all too many professional philosophers have covered themselves in such shame that their arguments should not be given the dignity of detailed consideration. Which is perhaps one reason why the book is so short, less than 150 pages.

Philosophy, but not for philosophers. Nor is it a journalistic popularization or a textbook exposition. This is basic stuff, original exposition and argument. New ideas here, never before published in the technical literature of whatever discipline: anthropology, sociology, history, political science, philosophy.

* * *

I can imagine another reason for the short book, an active reason, a rhetorical one. Perhaps Latour thought the ideas would hold together more effectively if you could read through them expeditiously.

Think of your mind as a pond. Reading an idea is like dropping a pebble in the pond. When the pebble crosses the surface it sets up a wave that propagates across the pond. In time, the wave will die out. If a second pebble drops before the first wave has dissipated, then the two waves will interact. And a third, a fourth, and so on. If a book is short, there is a better chance that the first wave will still be active when the final pebble drops, allowing for all the ideas to interact together in real time.

Perhaps that is why the book is short. To have written a longer book, with more detailed arguments, more detailed examples, would have stretched the ideas beyond the breaking point. Rending the book incomprehensible.

(In which case I am, alas, in trouble, as I am reading it slowly.)

* * *

And then there is the conceit with which Latour names Chapter 2, Constitution. The whole book is staged as a constitutional convention. We have the humans, and their society, and we have the things, in nature. The constitution is about the relations between the humans and the things, the translations that connect them through ever longer networks and the purifications that pay the bills. The Moderns inaugurated a certain Constitution and that Constitution is now in tatters.

Largely as the inevitable result of the success of the Moderns’ various endeavors. It seems that the above ground monuments they burnished so brightly required the support services of underground tunnels running every which way. Now the ground is so riddled with tunnels that the monuments are leaning and falling.

This Convention, of course, is nothing less than the philosophically venerable conceit of the social contract. Sometime in the past, so we pretend, the ancestors got together, talked, told jokes, jawboned, chewed the fat, ate some knishes, smoked a couple of pipes, sang the old songs and danced the old steps and, in time, drew up a compact according to which they bound themselves into the future.

The Moderns, of course, didn’t actually do this. But that’s Latour’s conceit. And it helps, I suppose, that one of his star barristers, Thomas Hobbes, is a major theorist of the social contract, named after an Old Testament beast, Leviathan.

But what’s the point of using this conceit? What’s it allow Latour to do? If he didn’t have this conceit available, how would he have written the book? Would it have become a 600 page tome? Of would it have become impossible?

* * *

In courts of law, so I’m told, exhibits are introduced through testimony by witnesses. Witness, of course, are humans. They can speak, or otherwise communicate ideas and judgments. In courts of law, of course, they do so under oath.

Exhibits are things, anything: articles of clothing, weapons, photographs, meter readouts from scientific instruments, sound recordings, clumps of dirt, what have you. The things cannot talk, but their testimony may strike deeper than the words of the humans.

Such language of witnessing and speaking comes naturally to Latour, it’s of a piece with the legalistic fiction of the constitution. Evidence, of course, is as much a scientific as a legal notion.

* * *

You know the method of loci, the memory technique? First you memorize a path through a large and complex building, a temple was often recommended. Along this path would be many places, the loci, such as wall niches, doorways, corners, and so forth.

To memorize a list of items one calls up this prepared path and starts walking through the building. When you get to the first locus, you place the first item (to be remembered) there; you move to the second locus and deposit the second item there; and so forth until everything has been placed in its own locus. To recall the list, simply enter the temple and walk the path, retrieving each item from its locus.

Well, Latour’s Constitutional conceit is analogous to the path through the memory temple. It’s a device. His task is more complex than that of memorizing a list, and so his device is more complex.

Still, it’s a device. In the language of J. J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, what affordances does this device have?

As I see it, it’s as though this virtual Constitutional Convention is mostly a conversation among humans about how they’re going to talk and think about relations among humans and non-humans. In the end, though, in that Parliament of Things that Latour leaves to his successors, does he not want the Things to be among the constitutional conveners?

* * *

I am thus suggesting that a rhetorical analysis of We Have Never Been Modern would be useful. But we must be careful, as the tools of rhetoric have, in recent years, been commandeered by devotees of critique and linguistic turning. And it is not critique that I have in mind.

I simply want to know: What’s going on?