Courts decide that graffiti is REAL 2: Further thoughts [reframing the discussion]

I’ve been thinking about my post of April 9, Courts decide that graffiti is REAL – Meaning and identity in graffiti, skateboarding, and on the web. I’ve been tinkering with it since I had originally posted it. The title has changed a bit (I forget what the original title was), the final three paragraphs (after the asterisks) weren’t there, and some other changes. The effect is to give the piece an emphasis on identity and meaning that I didn’t have in mind when I’d originally written it.

The piece needs to be rewritten, reframed with that in mind. But I don’t want to do that now. Instead I offer some observations.

In the first place, graffiti IS about identity. Graffiti is built on the name, not the writer’s legal name, but the name they take as a writer, e.g. TAKI 183, SEEN, DONDI, etc. The objective was/is to get your name out there as widely as possible. As CAY 161 told Norman Mailer a half-century ago, “the name is the faith of graffiti.” Because these names are not legal names, they cloak the writers from ordinary (‘legitimate’) society while revealing their presence to the graffiti community, thus setting the graffiti community apart.

In particular, the graffiti community originated outside the regular art community, with its institutions of schools, galleries, and museums, and has had and still has at best a problematic relationship to that world. But it has become the accepted graphic style of hip-hop and extreme sport. The legal decision in the 5Pointz case grants legal recognition to the rights of graffiti writers and their art and represents acceptance of graffiti by the institutions ‘legitimate’ society.

[I need a better term than ‘legitimate’ society. Is there one? What about coining a new one? Later.]

The world-wide web and, in particular, social media, present a different picture. They have arisen within the commercial communication and media infrastructure of the what I’m an calling legitimate society. But the present individuals with a new arena in which they can develop an identities. This is most obvious in the opportunity to create one or more user names that are distinct from one’s legal name, thus introducing an element of opacity between one’s online identity or identities and one’s ‘real’ identity in ‘meat-space.’ Much of the friction and anger that exists in social media is directly tied to the dynamics of identity formation and elaboration. Cancel culture and wokism are dependent on it, as are a whole range of conspiracy theories. The online world abounds in the elaboration of alternative construals and constructions of reality.

At the same time, as people navigate the online world they throw off streams of data that are gathered and sold by service providers. The same data can be used for surveillance by the state. What ownership rights to people have in the data about them? And the moment, few to none.

To a significant extent, these issues exist around and about and outside the boundaries of existing law and institutions, as graffiti originated outside ‘legit’ institutions. Do-it-yourself skate parks, like FDR in Philadelphia, are similarly outside those institutions. While skate boarding doesn’t present the acute identity that graffiti, by virtue of its emphasis on the name, presents, it originated outside the existing institutions of organized sports and so has had to struggle to establish itself. The existence of DIY skate parts is a manifestation of this status. The inclusion of skate boarding in the (now postponed) 2020 Summer Olympic Games represented recognition of skate boarding.

More later.

Reading Latour: Assembling the Society of Graffiti

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

—Bruno Latour

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

During the late summer and early fall of 2011 I blogged my way through Latour’s Reassembling the Social (RS) and then, at the end, Latour’s manifesto on compositionism. I would read a chunk of the book, generally a chapter, and the write a blog post based on passages from that chapter. I then assembled those posts into a working paper, which I issued in October of that year.

One of the things that attracted me to RS is that it was concerned with social life before a network had coalesced into an institution. And that, as far as I can tell, is the status that graffiti culture has in the contemporary world. It’s been around for going on five decades, but it has never quite become institutionalized. For that reason I used graffiti culture as a running example in my notes. In some notes talk of graffiti was prominent, but other notes had little or nothing about graffiti in them.

As there are people whose interest in graffiti exceeds their interest in Latour, it seemed like a good idea to release a second abridged edition of the original working paper. That’s what this is. With the exception of the very first segment, which sets up the whole series, I’ve simply dropped the segments that said nothing about graffiti. But I’ve not changed the numbering, so you can see where the “holes” are, if that concerns you. As I did not attempt to build a cumulative argument in this series of posts, the missing posts shouldn’t cause any problems. If you’re curious, however, I’ve retained the complete list of all the original posts at the end of the introduction.

Downloadable PDF: Reading Latour: Assembling the Society of Graffiti

Introduction: Reading Latour

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

—Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Here then is a series of notes (downloadable PDF at SSRN) I made over the course of a month and a half in which I worked my way through Reassembling the Social (RS) and then, at the end, Latour’s manifesto on compositionism. For the most part I’ve gathered the notes in the order in which I posted them. But not completely.

The first set, RL0, contains my (provisional) thoughts on compositionism, suggesting that it has various precursors, including the cognitive science movement. I conclude those notes by suggesting that the future of compositionism lies precisely in redrawing the boundaries between psychology and sociology, which Latour calls for in RS, but does not deliver in a deep way.

And that, in turn, sets the stage, it seems to me, for what I was up in my sets of notes. On the one hand, yes, I was reading RS and commenting on it. But I was also assimilating it to my own work, and my work to it, though an extensive series of reflections on graffiti. Graffiti and its culture is just the sort of phenomenon for which Actor Network Theory (ANT) was devised. It is a relatively new phenomenon—dating only back to the early 1970s—and it is not yet fully institutionalized. It is in flux.

My descriptive notes on graffiti stay, for the most part, within the social sphere. Where I talk of cost-benefit calculations, of the significance of so-called ‘pieces’, and about stylistic fidelity (RL3), however, I move into psychology. Those notes are about how graffiti writers think about their work. Later on I move more deeply into psychology with discussions of cognitive science, music, and literature. Accordingly, the following listing shows the ‘intrusions’ of other material into observations directly on Latour’s ideas. Collectively, this other material suggests ways of extending Latourian analysis and description of society to and through psychology to culture.

Reading Latour 0: Ontology, Methodology, Compositionism

(Revised 12 Oct 2011)

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

An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”, New Literary History, 2010, 41: 471-490.

Though it’s not so long ago that I decided to read Latour, I don’t recall the exact route that led me to his work. It might go like this: I was intrigued by the notion of Latour litanies, read a post by Graham Harman where he referred to one he’d quoted in his study of Latour, Prince of Networks, and so downloaded that book, as it was available as a free download. Once I got the book I looked up the specific passage Harman had mentioned, a quotation from Richard Rhodes on p. 103, and then looked around in Harman’s book, finally deciding I needed to read Latour himself.

I suppose I choose Reassembling the Social both because it is relatively recent (2005) and for the systematic exposition promised by its subtitle, An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. What I read struck me as a fascinating and brilliant, if slightly odd, treatise on method:

To describe the social world, this is what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

The many examples Latour gave were interesting but, given what he was saying, individually a bit thin (I assume he has thicker descriptive work in other books), as were the specific how-to-do-it suggestions. There was some talk of notebooks in one chapter, but that was as much a thought experiment as a practical suggestion. It’s as though the methodological flavor served as an elaborate metaphor for something else, indicated in the whys. And that something else is philosophy, more specifically, ontology.

Reading Latour 13: ANT and Politics

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. Comments on “Conclusion: From Society to Collective—Can the Social Be Reassembled?” pp. 247-262.

I would dearly love to pick up from my post on ANT and Literary Studies and generalize to culture in general, drawing, of course, on my remarks about graffiti and music as well. The idea would be to recast memes as rigid intermediaries constituted as, shall we say, semiotic codes. The individual code items, then, could be combined into various ‘texts’—in the extended meaning of that term—which function as mediators between individuals and the groups of which they are members. But I must leave that generalization as an exercise for the reader. Were I to embark upon it I’m afraid I might never find my way back out and thus would never be able to finish these notes.

Not a useful result.

Laws and Explanations

So, to the final chapter of Reassembling the Social. And we’re going to get there by taking a look at the concluding paragraph of the penultimate chapter (p. 246):

The laws of the social world may exist, but they occupy a very different position from what the tradition had first thought. They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardize, they coordinate, they have to be explained.

That last sentence came as something of a rude shock after Latour’s earlier proscription of explanation. Here’s a passage (p. 137) I quoted in Reading Latour 10: Description & Graffiti:

Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.

But I stopped reading too soon. That passage continues with this line (and of course more): “There is an exception, however, if it refers to a fairly stable state of affairs where some actors do indeed play the role of fully determined—and thus of fully ‘explained’ intermediaries—but in this case we are back to simpler pre-relativist cases.”

That is, we’re back at the sociology of the social, which is about stabilized social worlds, not worlds in flux, for which Actor-Network Theory has been devised. It’s those worlds in flux where description must be paramount, for how can there be laws if there is no stability? Well, I think there may be an approach to that question, but I’m going to set it aside.

I take it that Latour’s point about “laws of the social world” is that, when we’re dealing with a stabilized world, that stability itself must be explained. Those are the explanations Latour seeks. The laws stating the regularities of a stabilized world are the products of something—forces, structures—Latour fails to name (as far as I can determine).

But his final chapter is not about those worlds. It’s about the world still in flux.

The Latour Locus, An Interlude {Reading Latour 9]

One of the things that Latour does in Reassembling the Social is show that ‘the local’ is deeply ambiguous. This is nowhere more obvious that in photography, where, automatically, at least three loci are conjured into being by every photograph: 1) the locus of viewing, 2) the locus of taking-the-photo, and 3) the locus/loci IN the photo.

Consider this photograph:

When I took that photo I was standing at a certain place; at that time the locus of viewing (1) and the locus of taking (2) are/were the same. Now, of course, the locus of viewing has become many, each at the place where a viewer looks at the photo. The locus of the-taking, of course, remains unchanged.

But what about the loci IN the photo itself? The lamps were, say, 10 to 20 yards from me. The tall building to the left is the Goldman Sachs Building in Jersey City. It’s, say, between a half-mile and a mile from where I stood when I took the photo. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building (in the middle) would be, say, five or six miles away on the island of Manhattan. The clouds in the sky, how far away are they? And the sun, it is nowhere visible in this photo, but its existence is implied by the fact that the photo exists. For it supplied the light, the photos, which are the physical basis of the photo. It’s 93 million miles away.

Just where IS this photo? What is the locus?

In asking that question I don’t mean to be mysterious, or philosophically deep, or problematic. None of those things. The loci in question can be traced, at least in principle, in a fairly direct fashion. What’s important, at this juncture in our thinking about the world, is that the apprehension of the Latour Locus, if I may, be immediate and intuitive. One should not have to pull out the threads laboriously one after the other. Rather, one should intuit them immediately and be prepared to spin them out as necessary.

Reading Latour 12: Actor-Network Theory and Literary Studies

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.

Reading Latour 11.1: The Cartesian Individual

And Why it Must Be Rejected

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

This is an appendix to my previous installment of Reading Latour. I want to say a bit more about the Cartesian individual, whom I jettisoned when I began to think about music. For it is this individual that has been, I believe, the default starting for most thinking in les sciences de l’homme, including most thinking about music.

By Cartesian individual I mean, of course, the individual that Descartes put at the center of his philosophical meditations. This individual mostly sits in his vat, unable to move, and ponders two questions: Is there a world out there? If so, is there anyone else in it? For such an individual society is deeply problematic—‘hell is other people’, remember that? When examined in the Cartesian shadow, society is conceived as atomic individuals held together by social stuff, that metaphysical substance Latour inveighs against.

When I began to read the literature in preparation for writing Beethoven’s Anvil, I found that it was dominated by this Cartesian individual, though it took me awhile to realize this. Music had been conceived and studied as something heard by a Cartesian individual not as something made by people interacting with one another through sound. Such a conception comes naturally in a society where most people experience many more hours of recorded music than live music and where the making of music is properly done only by children and a few particularly ‘gifted’ individuals. For the most part music is stuff heard by Cartesian individuals floating in their vats.

Now, we’ve got to be careful. The mere fact that psychologists have spent a great deal of time studying how individuals hear music need not imply that they are revolving in the Cartesian orbit. After all, we DO need to understand how the ear and the auditory system work. The only way to investigate them is to observe individuals listening to musical stimuli. It can’t be avoided.

That alone does not betoken Descartes’ shadow. But when I considered the whole array of work, yes, the Cartesian assumption was evident. In the literature that existed over a decade ago, relatively little attention had been given to rhythm and time. Yet without rhythm, no music, which unfolds in time.

When I looked for research on rhythm and on our sense of time, much of the best work was in the literature on motor control and on way-finding (navigation), not music. The psychologists and philosophers, not to mention the musicologists, who were interested in music, were much more interested in harmony and melody than in rhythm and time. Nor were they interested in how musicians coordinated their activities. I suppose that might be attributed to the difficulty of investigating such coordination but, in the overall intellectual context, that just didn’t wash.

Reading Latour 11: Plug-ins and Couplings

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Second Move: Redistributing the Local,” pp. 191-218.

Much as I’d like to say something about each chapter of this book. I can’t. Don’t have time. Read it yourself. Please.

I’m skipping over 50+ pages so I can rejoin Latour in “Redistributing the Local.” And I’m skipping much of that so I can pick up the trail here (p. 207)—with just enough language from the skipped-over text to offer a taste of what you’re missing:

Surely the question we need to ask then is where are the other vehicles that transport individuality, subjectivity, personhood, and interiority? If we have been able to show that glorified sites like global and local were made our of circulating entities, why not postulate that subjectivities, justifications, unconscious, and personalities would circulate as well? And sure enough, as soon as we raise this very odd but inescapable question, new types of clamps offer themselves to facilitate our enquiry. They could be called subjectifiers, personnalizers, or individualizers, but I prefer the more neutral term of plug-ins, borrowing this marvelous metaphor from our new life on the Web. . . . What is so telling in this metaphor of the plug-in is that competence doesn’t come in bulk any longer but literally in bits and bytes. You don’t have to imagine a ‘wholesale’ human having intentionality, making rational calculations, feeling responsible for his sins, or agonizing over his mortal soul. Rather, you realize that to obtain ‘complete’ human actors, you have to compose them out of so many successive layers, each of which is empirically distinct from the next.

So that’s what we are, a bunch of plug-ins ‘downloaded’ from the web of our acquaintances. There’s the eat-breakfast module, the pick-up-a-package module, another for writing a research paper, one performing a Beethoven quartet, raising a barn, planting tobacco, canoeing through rapids, and so on. Each of us has our own set of apps, but there are some we all share, at least within a group, such as language.

Latour’d mentioned language a bit earlier (p. 177) but didn’t discuss it much. This one bootstraps though some built-in equipment, as do many others and, in the theory advanced by Vygotsky, is an internalized other (which I discuss in some detail in both this paper, on the self, and this one on Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”). At first the young child listen as others talk around her and to her, directing her movements and her attention through their words. As the infant gains verbal fluency she talks to herself so becomes capable of using language to direct her movements and attention. Then the self-talking goes silent and is completely internal. Now it has become ‘thinking.’ Plug-in fully installed and ready, of course, for new submodules and upgrades.

Reading Latour 10: Description & Graffiti

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Fifth Source of Uncertainty: Writing Down Risky Accounts,” pp. 121-140.

Here’s what I’m going to do this time out. First I’m going to quote from brief passages from the chapter. Then I’m going to return to graffiti, my ‘home base’ for the rest of this post. That’s the only way I can internalize what (I understand of) Latour’s ideas.

Some Passages

p. 122:

If we want to have a chance to move up all the controversies already mentioned, we have to add a fifth and last source of uncertainty, namely one about the study itself. The idea is simply to bring into the foreground the very making of reports.

p. 124:

Since we are all aware that fabrication and artificiality are not the opposite of truth and objectivity, we have no hesitation in highlighting the text itself as a mediator.

As a matter of methodology, sure, talk about how to write a proper account. But as epistemology and ontology ... be careful about being too reflexively clever, no?

p. 128:

To put it very simply: A good ANT account is a narrative or description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there. Instead of simply transporting effects without transforming them, each of the points in the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of a new translation.

p. 129:

A good text elicits networks of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations.

p. 136:

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

For my colleagues in literary criticism, let me repeat these words as though they were my own. After all, describe describe describe has been my mantra and my practice for quite awhile.

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement. Again: No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement. Third time’s a charm: No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

Note, however, that I’m talking about describing texts, while Latour is talking about describing an ontologically heterogeneous network of actors in manifold interactions with one another. Two different kinds of things. But this is not the time and place to discuss the differences.

On the other hand, here’s where I get off the bus (p. 137):

Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.

I don’t agree with this. Explanation is always necessary. But it may not always be possible. And THAT, I suspect, is where we are now. Our capacity to describe has out-stripped all our old and familiar explanatory moves. They don’t do any work any more, not in the face of our new descriptions.

That’s certainly how I feel about literature. In the old days, which are still very much with us, a reading or an interpretation WAS CONSIDERED TO BE an explanation. That move has grown tired and stale. The literary Darwinists think they can explain texts by redescribing actions in terms of evolutionary psychology, a move that’s always already stillborn. The cognitivists seem to want the same from their cognitive tropology. Stillborn. Meaning explains nothing.

I’ve been staring at descriptions for years and years. I have hints and clues about things to be explained. And maybe even a clue to a hint or three about what kind of thing might possibly serve as an explanation. But none of that’s very solid. You couldn’t toss it over a swamp and expect to walk over the swamp on it. No, the only hope for solidity right now is in the description of the text.

And I suspect that’s where Latour is as well. When he says ‘no explanations needed’ he means that reference to ‘the social’ in any of its many guises does not count as an explanation anymore. You cannot explain graffiti, for example, by drumming up some theory about social marginalization under later capitalism. Sure, that’s going on. But we knew that before we even looked at graffiti. And intoning that mantra, or some variation on it, or even an alternative to it, that tells us NOTING about the writing on the walls.

Reading Latour 8: Some Conjunctions in the Pluriverse

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.”

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.

* * * * *

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.

Reading Latour 6: Recouping Constructivism

With a Note on the Sciences of the Artificial

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.

For what it’s worth, this is the second longest chapter of the book, the longest being the penultimate one, “Third Move: Connecting Sites”, pp. 219-246.

Now Latour confronts the sociology of science, though in its newer guise as “science studies.” This is where he first made his mark, where I first heard of him, though did not read him. And this, as we all know, has been the site of some of the nastiest intellectual fighting of the past three decades, a war that bled out of the academy and into the general sphere. And it remains there, and in strange forms and strange company indeed.

But that’s an aside.

The set-up (p. 88): “We now understand why the word ‘social’ could entail so much misunderstanding; it confused two entirely different meanings: a kind of stuff and a movement for assembling non-social entities.” And it’s on that distinction that Latour will recoup ‘construct’ as in ‘science is socially constructed.’

We all know, of course, that science, like pretty much everything else in human culture, is socially constructed. That, as they say, is banal and trivial. And yet, that’s the fulcrum point on which Latour will re-construct social construction. Indeed, that’s what he’s been doing in the whole book, showing us why ‘the social’, but the social considered (constructed?) as assemblages of heterogonous networks of entities, is not at all trivial. That is, when you look, carefully, at how science or anything else is constructed, it’s not trivial at all. When seen carefully it all looks like those parodic contraptions we know as Rube Goldberg machines, named after, you guessed it, Rube Goldberg, cartoonist, engineer, and inventor.

That seems innocent enough. But, alas, that’s not how ‘the social’ was construed in much of this newer work on science in its social setting, and that’s certainly not how the opponents of this work construed the social. In these discussions it was the other social that was in force, the social as a “kind of stuff”. In that reading, the social construction of science meant that scientific knowledge was constituted of/by this social stuff and, as such, was pretty much arbitrary with respect to how the world works. That is, science wasn’t objective it all. It was just a bunch of ideas that the boys in the club agreed upon.

Them’s fightin’ words, and fight they did. But we know all that.

Reading Latour 5: Things

“No ideas but in things”
—William Carlos Williams

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency,” pp. 63-86.

Some Passages on Things

p. 68:

It is always things—and now I mean this last word literally—which, in practice, lend their ‘steely’ quality to the hapless ‘society.’

pp. 71-72:

This, of course, does not mean that these participants ‘determine’ the action, that baskets ‘cause’ the fetching of provisions or that hammers ‘impose’ the hitting of the nail. Such a reversal in the direction of influence would be simply a way to transform objects into the causes whose effects would be transported through human action now limited to a trail of mere intermediaries. Rather, it means that there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence. In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action’, things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on.

I note that Latour highlights J.J. Gibson’s notion of affordance in a footnote to this passage. Affordances are considered to be properties of things out there in the world, but they are the properties that allow us humans to ‘latch on’ to them, whether perceptually—how do we smell, hear, see, touch, taste them?—or motorically—how to we move to, from, around them, how do we manipulate them?

p. 74:

It is true that, at first sight, the difficulty or registering the role of objects comes from the apparent incommensurability of their modes of action with traditionally conceived social ties. But sociologists of the social have misunderstood the nature of such incommensurability. They have concluded that because they are incommensurable they should be kept separate from proper social ties, without realizing that they should have concluded precisely the opposed: it’s because they are incommensurable that they have been fetched in the first place! If they were as weak as the social skills they have to reinforce, if they were made of the same material quality, where would the gain be? Baboons we were, baboons we would have remained.

Latour is concerned about the stability of so many human social arrangements, and he’s pointing out that this stability depends, in so many various ways, on our interaction with things. Think of those stone weapons and tools so prominent in humanity’s early archeological record, so prominent that homo faber, man the tool-maker, is one prominent conception of our nature. But think also about books, the written word, stable repositories of specific language strings, not thoughts, no not thoughts. Just strings of characters. We read the thoughts into those characters. The reading may change from decade to decade, century to century, millennium (gasp) to millennium, but where would those readings be is they had only ephemeral atmospheric vibrations as their object?

Reading Latour 4: Society and Culture

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

Before I forget, talking of the admittedly awkward label, actor-network theory, Latour observes (p. 9):

I was ready to drop this label for more elaborate ones . . . until someone pointed out to me that the acronym A.N.T. was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler. An ant writing for other ants, this fits my project very well!

And ants, we know, leave chemical traces wherever they go. They navigate their world by following those traces.

For use larger-brained animals, the process of thinking leaves chemical traces in our brains.

Process and Upkeep

It’s become obvious that Latour is reacting against the reification of ‘the social’ into a metaphysical substance with inherent causal properties (p. 35):

Whereas, for the sociologists of the social, the great virtue of appeals to society is that they offer this long lasting stability on a plate and for free, our school views stability as exactly what has to be explained by appealing to costly and demanding means. . . . The great benefit of a performative definition [is that] it draws attention to the means necessary to ceaselessly upkeep the groups and to the key contributions made by the analysts’ own resources.

I’m a bit skeptical of that last clause I’d like examples of continuing social groups brought into being through the scrutiny of analysts—but otherwise, yes.

It has become obvious to me though my thinking about the cultural evolutionary process that, while “evolution” tends to denote change (of a certain type? through a certain mechanism?), that stability is the first requirement. That is, whenever / however fully human culture first emerged, it’s first ‘task’ was to achieve stability, reliable transmission of cultural patterns from one generation to the next. Prior to this achievement, culture would ‘drift’ aimlessly from one generation to the next. Once stability had been achieved—can we see this in hand axes?—well, then it takes real ‘work’ to create cultural change. Cultural change, ‘evolution’ in the ordinary sense of the term, becomes a problem to be explained. And the rapid change of cultural forms in the West over the past half-millennium, how odd! And yet we’ve come to see it as the norm.

How odd!

Is ANT a sociology of cultural evolution?

Reading Latour 3: Groups and the Game of Graffiti

This reading Latour (Reassembling the Social) is tough. It’s not that the ideas are particularly tough; they’re not, at least not so far. It’s that I read a line or paragraph, and it sets me to thinking, and thinking, and thinking . . . so I put the Latour down and think and think some more. It takes time to run his stuff through (several decades of) my own accumulated thoughts, which include the graffiti thoughts I’ve been having for the past few years.

And it’s graffiti I really want to understand, not so much Latour. I’m reading him so I can better read graffiti.

Groups

On to groups. I talk of graffiti culture as though there is such a thing. There is graffiti itself, on the walls, in photos, in books and on the web. And there are the people who make the graffiti, take the photos, put them in books, and on the web. And others besides, those who look at the graffiti and the photos.

Sometimes when I talk of graffiti culture, I mean to indicate a group of people. And that, groups, is Latour’s first topic after the introduction. So, p. 29:

To sum up, whereas for sociologists the first problem seems to settle on one privileged grouping, our most common experience, if we are faithful to it, tells us that there are lots of contradictory group formations, group enrollment—activity to which social scientists are obviously crucial contributors. The choice is thus clear: either we follow social scientists and begin our travel by setting up at the start which kind of group and level of analysis we will focus on, or we follow the actors’ own ways and begin our travels by the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups.

What’s interesting about graffiti is that the graffiti itself is a means through which and around which groups come into being. Considered as a group, or as an irritant or stimulus to group formation, the illegal nature of graffiti is crucial. Let’s follow it out.

Redefining

I’ve been going about this the wrong way—isn’t it always thus? The illegal nature of graffiti IS an issue, as is the FIDELITY of graffiti style to the NYC and Philly originals all over the world. And the two ARE linked. The question ISN’T so much: Why did graffiti persist despite its illegal nature.

Rather, the question IS more like: Under what circumstances will the illegal nature of an expressive practice tend to foster that practice? What does the existence and persistence of graffiti tell us about the world?

The fact that graffiti is illegal means that the state is going to impose costs on the activity. If graffiti is to persist in the face of those costs, then those costs to ‘the graffiti community’ must be lower than the benefits of graffiti, however those costs and benefits are counted up.

With these considerations in mind, let’s take another look. To begin with, we must note that graffiti started as the expressive practice of (mostly) minority young men, young men who were already somewhat alienated from mainstream America. Thus, the disapproval of mainstream America is not new to them and might even conceivably be rewarding to them if they settle on an Oppositional identity.

The Game of Graffiti

So, to define our game a bit: (1) The individual graffiti writer is one player in the graffiti game. (2) The state, as represented by the police and the justice system, is a third player. The state functions as a proxy for the whole of legitimate society. (3) Each writer ‘plays’ to what I believe sociologists call a ‘reference group’, the group of people which a given individual, such as a graffiti writer, considers to be his peers, his homies. This group will be fuzzy and fluid, but will include other graffiti writers, but also those among their immediate associates who may not themselves be writers. Considered as a collectivity, these reference groups are another player. Call it simply the graffiti community.

THAT’s the group whose existence we’re trying to understand, along with graffiti itself.

Reading Latour 2: The Social

The Question of Graffiti

Public discourse on graffiti tends to be dominated by one question: Is it art or vandalism? My first impulse, as you might imagine, is to note that we don’t have an either/or dichotomy here, that graffiti can easily both. I suspect that reaction is both too sophisticated and not sophisticated enough.

What I’m thinking, of course, is whether or not an image is art is logically independent of where it is and whether or not it is legally there. The people who pose the question obviously don’t think that way, otherwise they wouldn’t post just THAT question. Still, if you asked them, What is art? what would they say? I don’t know, but I can imagine that someone during the conversation at least some of them would say: I know it when I see it. And some might say: You know, it’s in museums and galleries and sells for lots of money.

That first non-answer is what happens when you try to define art by its content and someone pushes you to the wall on it. When I say that the nature of art is independent of its legal status, that sort of thing is surely what I have in mind. And if you pressed me on it, well, seriously, if you REALLY DID press men on it, I wouldn’t say “I know it when I see it.” But I’d admit there is a problem. What about Duchamp’s urinal? What makes that urinal art, but not all the other urinals in the world?

Which brings me to that second answer: It hangs in galleries, etc. That, of course, is an institutional definition. And it’s a very sophisticated sense of what art is, more sophisticated than most people are on such matters. My imaginary interlocutor is not, in fact, offering such a definition. Rather, in desperation, they’re using museums and galleries as shorthand ways of pointing out thousands of examples of capital “A” Art. And so they point to the institutions that, in the institutional definition, constitute art.

And so we’re back at that question: Is it art or vandalism? If that question is taken as one, not about the images themselves, but about the authorizing institutions, then, YES, it is dichotomous. And the dichotomy is between institutionally authorized and, not merely unauthorized, but entirely outside legitimate society. What I think is that, as ordinarily asked and understood, the question is unclear, indefinite, ambiguous. It is not clearly and explicitly about institutions, but it implies them; nor is it NOT about imagistic content, for the question does implies it.

Social Calculations

The question is a messy one. As is the matter of ‘the social.’ And that brings us back to Latour. As I mentioned in my previous Latour post, he sets up his argument by countering his position against what he takes to be The Standard view. Here’s how he starts that (p. 3):

The first solution has been to post the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon variously called ‘society’, ‘social order’, ‘social practice’, ‘social dimension’, or ‘social structure’. For the last century during which social theories have been elaborated, it has been important to distinguish this domain of reality from other domains such as economics, geography, biology, psychology, law, science, and politics. A given trait was said to be ‘social’ or to ‘pertain to society’ when it could be defined as possessing specific properties, some negative—it must not be ‘purely’ biological, linguistic, economical, natural—and some positive—it must achieve, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or subvert the social order.

Reading Latour 1: Tracing

I finally decided that I’d have to bite the bullet and read Latour. Not Harman, who is an explicator of Latour, or Bryant, or Bogost, who gave us the Latour Litanizer, nor even Morton, who introduced me too OOO, and whom I’ve been reading in blog-sized form. Which counts for more than you might think, as not only have I been reading, but I’ve been commenting, and Tim’s commented back. And making my own OOOish posts, on which Tim’s commented. That dialog is worth, say, 5 thick books, merely read.

But all signs pointed to Latour, a sociologist by trade. Who likes flat ontologies. And whom, so I’ve read, sees things, mere physical things, as ineluctably part of the social.

That, it seems to me, is what I need, for my specific problem is that of the graffiti site, the wall on which the marks are made, time and again. As I’ve said time and again, the site is some kind of agent in the graffiti world. And the graffiti world, well graffiti world is just a phrase, a label. That I use the term should not be taken to imply that I understand it.

Further, object-oriented ontology is, well, it’s philosophy. And I’m not sure about philosophy. What does it mean to talk about capital “B” Being, and to do so with a straight face and without crossing your fingers? Heidegger? I’ve known about him for years. Never read him. Merleau-Ponty was my man back in the day. I’m not sure I how far I can go with thinking that regards Heidegger as a living influence. & Latour doesn’t even have Heidegger in his index—I’m talking about Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, the book I bought.

No, I simply don’t know how to negotiate my way in philosophy, not anymore. And I’m not interested in reaching philosophical conclusions. My immediate task is to understand graffiti. Such understanding as I manage to scrape together will, I figure, be some kind of informal and discursive social science perhaps with a psychological twist. It’s not going to be philosophy.

No doubt whatever I do implies some philosophical stance. But I’ll let others worry about it, if, that is, there’s anything worth worrying about.

Latour.