In response to one of my posts over at Deontologistics, Traxus writes:
latour and social constructivism is a tricky issue. he’s not technically a social constructivist, but his metaphysics is anti-normative. if everything is a product of forces (without additional predicate), then no ‘kind’ of force can be superior to any other. any justification for why a given constellation of forces is right in a given case would have not have recourse to metaphysical arguments. in terms of his metaphysics only force decides (naturalism might be superior to theism because it has stronger relations to different types of forces, but this can’t be determined in advance).
i see the OOO-osphere as reacting to the nietzscheanism inherent in this view by asserting objects over relations as the fundamentally real units.
oh, and badiou’s antiphilosophers aren’t necessarily sophists. for badiou they’re essentially religious — they assert a founding ahistorical, moral intuition — for latour it would be the importance of ‘democracy.’ like foucault, latour engages in genealogical (of a kind) critiques of knowledge in the form of case studies, with one rather ironic foray into systematic philosophy with ‘irreductions.’
At the outset, I suppose I should confess that I have an almost visceral suspicion of philosophical and political discourses that make normativity their central focus. On the one hand, I associate this sort of focus with neoliberal and conservative discourses that obfuscate social issues by portraying them as issues of “values” and rights. There seems to be a way in which the moment we begin talking about values and normativity, discussion and politics gets detached from the structure of concrete situations, rendering all of that invisible. This has even been enshrined in the whole distinction between the “is” and the “ought”. Insofar as the “is” is completely separated from the “ought”, normative discourses see themselves as entitled to ignore the “is” altogether. As a Marxist and a historical materialist, I simply think this is the wrong way to go. Moreover, contrary to those who seem to believe that neoliberalism is a discourse where self-interest is the only deciding factor and that Marxism is an axiological discourse independent of self-interest, I can’t help but see that Marx’s arguments are based on interests. What Marx shows is that our self-interest lies with the collectivity. This is why, for example, we join unions, pay taxes, form institutions to protect ourselves, and so on.
read on!
On the other hand, following Nietzsche, it has been my experience that those who scream the loudest about normativity are often the most wretched and despicable human beings. To clarify, I am not suggesting this of Pete or Traxus, both of whom seem to be above board and terrific persons. However, again and again it seems to me that those who are obsessed with rule based normativity are those who are cruelest to others, most hypocritical, and most abusive to those about them. We see this again and again in public politics where we discover that some culture warrior has been doing the very thing he publicly denounces in his public life, but also with the manner in which certain normative positions are manipulated as ways of oppressing others and vilifying them. It’s difficult not to discern that talk of family values is really about hating women and homosexuals, rather than any genuine care about family. It’s not difficult to see that talk about charity as opposed to government programs is really about the desire to selfishly keep one’s money despite having benefited so much from society, rather than anything to do with cultivating public involvement and charity. Whenever I hear talk of norms I just can’t help but hear the rumblings of some dark and sadistic desire behind the public space of moral motives. Nine times out of ten a focus on normativity seems to be an alibi for people behaving badly towards others. And yes, I realize how paradoxical these observations are given that I am here making all sorts of normative claims in this analysis. The point is that somehow the focus on normativity seems to create rather terrifying monsters in people. I am not sure why this is. Moreover, this seems somehow restricted to rule based normative systems that are focused on “right” and “wrong” and judgment. You do not seem to find it in Eudaimonistic ethical systems, Stoic ethical systems, or Epicurean ethical systems, where the question is one of how to live a life of human flourishing, not a question of how to distribute guilt, blame, and debt. Judgment seems to be a poison in the soul. It is difficult, for example, not to feel as if one is suffocating or drowning when reading the work of Adorno, pervaded as it is by this dark spirit of judgment and all it produces psychologically.
Setting all of this aside, I wonder what it is that Traxus is asking for in a contemporary philosophy. While Badiou certainly rejects those anti-philosophers that ground their views in a religious or mystical intuition, I think the real criteria for Badiou as to whether or not one counts as an anti-philosopher lies in whether or not they hold that Truths are possible. Latour doesn’t fit with this model. Whenever Badiou references religious anti-philosophers he speaks of thinkers like Wittgenstein or certain trends that have taken place in contemporary phenomenology with the so-called religious turn. Not all of his anti-philosophers fit this model.
More to the point, I am not sure what alternative Traxus is proposing. It seems to me that Traxus’s argument puts the cart before the horse. In short, he’s arguing that because he would like to live in a world where there are transcendent norms, he is warranted in rejecting any philosophy that does not grant the existence of these sorts of norms. That is called wishful thinking, and is a habit we seem to find in many politically driven philosophical discussions, where a set of normative commitments is being used to decide what is and what is not. If we begin from the premise of immanence or the death of God– a premise, I believe, more or less shared by everyone in this debate, even those in theology –we can no longer appeal to transcendent norms to ground our discourse as this would require either something like Platonic Forms, Divine Laws, or Kantian style a priori categorical imperatives. The first two choices are out the window in an immanent universe. The mostly likely candidate is the third, but that doesn’t work within an evolutionary universe because Kant explicitly evokes design arguments in his ethical writings to ground the categorical imperative.
What is required is an immanent genesis of norms without reference to transcendence. This genesis must be historical in character, rejecting the notion that norms are ahistorical and eternal, and provide an account of how these norms come into existence. Marx’s dialectical materialism was one such account. Marx doesn’t begin from the premise of ahistorical and eternal norms, but rather shows how norms are generated within historical settings or how they become available. When I hear obsessive focus on normativity among those who purport to be Marxists, I cannot help but think that they are turning Marx on his head, arguing once again that it is spirit or the ideal that defines the real, not the reverse.
Badiou’s theory of the event is another model of how norms come into existence. However, note how close Latour and Badiou are on this issue. Like Latour, Badiou holds that norms cannot be grounded a priori and that they are not foundational. Rather, for Badiou norms are the result of a decision that itself has no ground. We can’t even prove that events have taken place. Rather the event only sustains itself through our fidelity to the event. Second, like Latour, Badiou emphasizes that the truth of an event is established through a truth-procedure or the activity of a subject re-configuring the elements of a situation in terms of the event. Here we have something perfectly analogous to Latour’s trials of strength.
I suppose I’m being a bit of a realist here. What is it that transcendent norms add to our concrete politics? It seems to me very little beyond narcissistic gratification of “being right”, while the world nonetheless remains the same. How do norms change the world as was demanded by Marx?
Larval Subjects . 
October 6, 2009 at 11:25 am
[…] and Explanation Revisited Levi has put down some initial comments on my last post (here and here), and I feel that I really must clear up what appear to me to be some obvious misunderstandings of […]
October 6, 2009 at 11:33 am
Hi Levi,
I’m glad that you’ve reopened comments, and that you at least sometimes find my critical comments helpful. I’ve put up a response to your response now. It was meant to appear yesterday, but it ended up being longer than I intended it to be. I’ve also just realised I didn’t respond to your point about reading Latour as a relativist. I don’t think I am at all, but that involves further clarifying the difference between the two forms of ‘internal’ grasps of normativity I was talking about, and I’ll leave that for now.
http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/normativity-causation-and-explanation-revisited/
October 6, 2009 at 6:01 pm
deontologistics already responded to your broader defense of latour in a way i more or less agree with (until he gets to the part about ‘transcendental’ normativity), so i’ll just reply to your criticisms of my comments.
one, i’m not sure where one would find anything like truths, events, or fidelity in latour’s writings. these all seem like claims that are ‘debunked’ by ANT, in that they can only be followed existentially, not in the sense of an investigation, genealogy, history, etc.
two, pretty much everyone in the public sphere uses rights and values discourse, left, right, and center. and pretty much everyone criticizes rights/values discourse, albeit from different ideological positions. one can, for example, defend human rights in specific situations without being “obsessed with rule-based normativity,” just as one can relativize moral arguments without being a historical materialist (look at the health care debate).
three, i’m not interested in coming up with transcendental norms and values. but in latour, normative arguments as such are reduced to ‘actors in networks,’ which invalidates their normative function and in effect refuses to engage them. one can agree that philosophy and marketing are ontologically equivalent (i do) but regard this fact as irrelevant to how they’re analyzed (as i also do). latour’s ontology, however, gives him the opportunity to submit them both to an unusual sort of tribunal where their value claims can only be evaluated ironically. that is, prior to: historically, morally, physically, rationally, etc. he does history, he engages in rational discourse, but from a position determined by an anti-normative ontology. the notion of a non-transcendental norm can have no meaning for him distinct from his notions of causality and force. this is his commitment to liberal democracy in action: between equal rights, force decides, and since everything has equal rights (is the same value), arguments about rights and values (or existence and non-existence) can’t be taken seriously. the ontologization of democracy makes actual democracy impossible, or at most a play of illusions.
to contrast latour with marx, marx’s assumption of self-interest has no analogue in latour (or nietzsche, for that matter). latour doesn’t privilege selves as the locus of any norms whatsoever. like empirical reality and moral outrage, self-interest is an assumption that marx apparently holds but doesn’t bother to defend in philosophical terms.
in the interest of brevity, here’s an article by latour i posted a while ago where he does an analysis of capitalism which is strictly idealist. note the low opinion he has of any theory of self-interest:
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/poparticles/poparticle/p071-en.html
October 6, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Hi Traxus,
Thanks for the response!
While it is certainly true that Latour does not use this language, I do not see anything inconsistent with what Badiou describes. Where Badiou talks about truth-procedures, Latour talks about trying. The activity of trying consists in forming alliances of human and non-human actor in a collective to form a new collective. Far from debunking something like what Badiou describes, I think Latour adds a lot of flesh to it. Just read, if you have not already, The Pasteurization of France. Here we get something that looks a hell of a lot like one of Badiou’s truth-procedure. What Latour is interested in is how truths are made. This is very different from a “debunking” of truths such as you find among social-constructivist sociologists.
I think you’re misconstruing my remarks a bit here. Of course everyone is interested in normativity. That’s not my point. My point is that when particular theoretical discourses suture all other questions to questions of rule-based normativity, a rather frightening sort of subjectivity tends to emerge organized around judgment. The subjectivity seems to be organized more around judging others as wrong and oneself as right, in vilifying others, rather than effecting any positive or real changes in the world. You don’t seem to get this sort of subjectivity in non-rule based normative systems that focus on the question of “the good life”, rather than assigning debt, blame, and guilt. More practically, I think the obsession with rule based normativity affects political engagement in a rather noxious way. Since one is focused primarily on truth and being right or what is morally right, the focus comes to be on these things rather than producing concrete change. One thinks it is enough to have the right position even if it’s not changing the world at all. As a result, the deontologist sits around congratulating himself for being able to recognize that sweat shops are brutally oppressive and that our industrial practices and lifestyles are destroying the earth and believes that because they can show this they’ve won the day. Meanwhile those sweat shops remain, those practices continue, and nothing has really changed. It’s the logic of the beautiful soul in Hegel. The point is not that we should not care about truth and the good, but that our focus should be on really changing things. To change things, however, we have to focus on the concrete organization of situations, not armchair normative debates that tend to render that organization invisible.
Again, I don’t see this as being the case at all. Moreover, this attitude strikes me as rather “angelic”. Latour is not making the claim that mathematics is really rhetoric, nor that somehow the world is flat because many people believe it. Rather, Latour is investigating those forces that produce differences in the world, how they produce differences in the world, and what differences they make. In following Latour one is not committed to the thesis that just because your demonstration that x = 5 in 3x + 5 = 20 fails to persuade someone it becomes false. This argument is as sound as it ever was. It just has exercised little force in a particular context. If I suggest that your remarks here are a little “angelic” then this is because you seem to want to deny the existence of certain things (like rhetoric, for example and bad arguments) simply because you don’t like the role they play in the world. That is going to lead to some very ill considered political engagement.
In my view, endorsing aspects of Latour’s ontology and his social theory does not entail endorsing the man’s personal politics. I think Latour comes down far too hard on Marx and often gets it wrong in his own analysis of actors. I don’t think there’s anything about Latour’s ANT that intrinsically leads to his own political positions. This would be like arguing that one must be a Nazi to appreciate much of Heidegger’s thought.
October 7, 2009 at 7:31 pm
discussion seems to have moved on, so i’ll limit my remarks to self-defense and maybe put up a real response some other time.
in your post you accused “philosophical and political discourses that make normativity their central focus” with the quite colorful observation that “those who scream the loudest about normativity are often the most wretched and despicable human beings.” i was not aware you were merely referring to “particular theoretical discourses.”
but in a society of laws, normative claims frequently come in handy in producing concrete change, including ones derived from morality rather than legal precedent.
also, the idea that capitalism as a system follows certain determinate laws is in fact challenged by latour in the article i just posted. the theory is considered ‘false’ because it refers to something that latour does not believe exists properly so-called. truth in the mathematical sense isn’t at stake here, nor is it in arguments where morality or ethics are invoked.
i still find the comparison of latour and badiou baffling but we’ll set that aside.
October 7, 2009 at 7:43 pm
oh, last little point – this absolute separation of ontology from politics insisted on by some blogs seems sort of counter-latourian. isn’t pasteurization of france an exploration of how science is not cut off from society, much as it would like to appear in terms of its institutional ideology? this is relevant because latour’s ontology is the aspect of his work that is the most revealing of his politics. it’s not even covert in his case (not necessary as he doesn’t consider himself a philosopher) – he literally uses language derived from democratic political theory and ideology. his ontology is based on expanding the field of communication (‘the social’) to include non-human actors. for what it’s worth i don’t think this connection is as strong with heidegger. but to hold that the politics of a philosopher are of minor importance to their thought is to impute to both a kind of insupportable essentialism, rather than seeing all their actions in the world together as constituting systems in a field of systems.
October 7, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Hi Traxus,
I quite agree that being able to evoke norms comes in handy in producing concrete change, though I think these tend to be the weakest tools in the activists arsenal in producing that change. As for rule based norm focused discourses, I am not referring simply to theoretical discourses, but rule-based norm focused forms of life as in the case of certain forms of legalistic religiousity. As both psychoanalysis and Nietzsche have convincingly shown, these sorts of discourses tend to create very specific forms of subjectivity that we are better off without. I also think this is another reason to be skeptical of the thesis that somehow norms don’t exist as Pete is arguing.
I’ll have to read Latour’s article to evaluate his argument. I’m of two minds about this. First, Latour tends to reject any “big theory” that draws attention away from the concrete. For Latour, effective political action requires knowing how networks are actually put together. The problem for him with big theories like “theories of capitalism”, “structuralist theories of society” etc., is that they give us the impression that we already understand what we’re engaging and therefore don’t need to map it. Often, however, I think he’s far too bombastic in expressing this point. The point here is very Lacanian, though: What is to be avoided is the belief that we know before we know. Second, Latour isn’t always right. I don’t think there’s any contradiction in the idea of an assemblage based or ANT form of Marxism. As I’ve argued in the past, I think Marx was doing a sort of ANT analysis of capitalism. The fact that Latour rejects Marxism out of hand is his problem, not the theory’s problem. Moreover, I suspect that what he’s responding to when he makes these sorts of pronouncements is “doctrinaire Marxism” that simply repeats a series of theses rather than examining situations.
October 7, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Traxus,
You’d have to flesh out your point more. First, “society” is a category Latour everywhere tries to demolish. According to Latour, the concept of society is one in which only social actors and human phenomena produce society. Instead Latour offers the concept of “collectives”, that include both human and non-human actors. Latour certainly does discuss the role that politics played in the pasteurization of France, and much more besides. Unlike the social constructivist that argues everything is built out of social forces, signs, signifiers, discourses, etc., Latour thinks the entities in the laboratory are entirely real. It just happens that institutional politics also plays a role in what research is done, why it is done, how it is funded, and so on. I am not sure I understand your negative statement about democratic political theory here. It seems to me that one of the points of political engagement is to render our collectives more democratic, not less democratic, and that this follows directly from Marxist political thought. Hell, I think this is even the case in Badiou and his radical nominalism based on a deep egalitarianism. Why is democracy a priori negative? Do we not trust people to speak on their own behalf? When I hear rejections of democracy I often suspect that they’re conflating democracy with forms of governance such as we have here in the United States. While apologists in the States like the throw the word “democracy” around, however, what we have here is not a democracy but a plutocracy and an oligarchy. I take it that one of the questions of political thought should be that of how to create a true democracy.