Today has been a rather slow day, spent reading articles on developmental systems theory and A Sociological Theory of Communication by Loet Leydesdorff. Leydesdorff’s prose is extremely dense and abstract, so I’m not entirely sure I follow him (examples please!) but he has a number of interesting thoughts on how systems emerge. At any rate, I sometimes find that after a heavy day of writing I feel almost hung over the next day. This seems to be the case today, which upsets me a bit as I really only have about month left to complete the initial draft of The Democracy of Object.
Over at Ian’s blog quite the discussion has erupted surrounding his post on Marxism. Among the comments, I was interested to come across a link to an unpublished article by Latour entitled “An Attempt at Writing a “Compositionist Manifesto” (pdf). Without getting into the details of the article, Latour argues that we should replace the practice of critique with that of composition. Composition here does not refer to write, but rather to composing or building out of heterogeneous actors. In this connection, the key question becomes not whether or not something is constructed (too many still insist on claiming if something is constructed it’s not real, but everything is constructed), but on whether it’s well or poorly constructed.
What really caught my eye, however, were some comments Latour makes on objects towards the middle of the article. Latour begins by remarking that,
…there is no way to devise a successor to nature, if we do not tackle the tricky question of animism anew. One of the principle causes of irony poured by the Moderns upon the 16th century, is that those poor archaic folks who had the misfortune of living on the wrong side of the “epistemological break”, believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational mind, in an inanimmate matter producing its effects only through the power of its causes. It is this conceit that is at the root of all the critiques of environmentalists as being too “anthropocentric” because they dare “attributing” values, price, agency, purpose, to what cannot have and should not have any intrinsic value (lions, whales, viruses, CO2, monkeys, ecosystem, or, worse of all, Gaia). (9)
Here we encounter a variation of Latour’s thesis, in the forefront of his thought since at least We Have Never Been Modern, that modernity is premised on a strict separation of nature and culture. Only in the domain of culture, the modernist story goes, do we find agency of any sort. The domain of nature, by contrast, is a domain of brute and dumb causes where the effect is already contained in the instigating cause. Latour, by contrast, wishes to treat nonhuman entities as also being actors.
What is interesting is how he fleshes this out in his manifesto. Latour goes on to remark that,
…what should appear extraordinarily bizarre is, on the contrary, the invention of inanimate entities which would do nothing more than carry one step further the cause that makes them act to generate the n + 1 consequence which in turn are nothing but the causes of the n + 2 consequences. This conceit has the strange result of composing the world with long concatenations of causes and effects where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning– but since there is no God in those staunchly secular versions, there is not even a beginning… The disappearance of agency in the so called “materialist world view” is a stunning invention especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the old resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to the cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency. There is a supplement. A gap between the two. (10)
What is interesting in these remarks are Latour’s references to a gap or a supplement in interactions between objects. This characterization of objects as entities capable of producing effects in excess of whatever perturbs them stands in stark contrast to Latour’s relationism where actants just are their relations. Indeed, here Latour sounds like a subtractive object-oriented ontologist. Perhaps he’s beginning to come around and recognize that you can’t simultaneously get novelty in the universe and reduce objects to their relations.
Larval Subjects . 
July 2, 2010 at 12:23 am
This is wonderful… but I’m confused as to what or who he’s thinking of as examples of ‘modernism.’ In arts and letters, the critical stance he assigns doesn’t seem to hold at all. Wolf? Joyce? Musil? Svevo?
Josopovici’s essay in Singer on the Shore on the premature abandonment of the modernist project understands something very different than this reductionist/corelationist sense of where the force of modernsit aesthetics was heading toward… his readings of bibilical narrative in this respect stand in stark contrast to any idea of objects without agency. Yes, they are stripped of DERIVED agency–from divine powers, but without stripping objects, human and other, of the potency of effecting difference…the kind of tension you can find in Melville that made his work so important to many high modernists.
Nevermind the visual arts! Picasso and his recovery of African masks? A negation of the power of agency in animism? Where is he finding his ‘modernists?”
July 2, 2010 at 7:34 am
Jacob, it’s the definition of modernism as found in We Have Never Been Modern, in which the modernist tries to purify the world into a rigid zone of real nature and an arbitrary zone of diverse human perspective– no matter whether the attempt is to reduce everything to nature, to culture, or to have a division of labor where some things are rigid natural facts and others are diverse human perspectives.
But you raise an interesting issue: where does “modern art” fit in this schema? I don’t recall his saying so in We Have Never Been Modern, where he was mostly concerned with modernism in the theoretical and technological sphere.
Latour’s major statements on art have been in connection with his two big catalogs for the exhibits in Karlsruhe that he co-curated. What he seems to dislike is *iconoclasm* in art, which for him is a variant of *critique* in the theoretical sphere, which he also dislikes.
But you raise an interesting topic in your comment… What would a Latourian approach to Picasso or Ezra Pound be like? Are they bad purifying iconoclasts, or good intertwiners of the supposed human and non-human?
July 2, 2010 at 7:50 am
[…] 2, 2010 Here Levi riffs on Latour’s COMPOSITIONIST MANIFESTO, which seems to show some movement in the direction of the object-oriented position, with its talk […]
July 2, 2010 at 8:34 am
@ Jacob Russell
I don’t think Latour’s use of ‘modernism’ has anything to do with modernist art or literature. The term has always been used somewhat different in art theory compared to elsewhere. His use is more in accordance with the social sciences. For Latour it is Marx who is the modernist par excellence, as, for Marx, history begins when Man begins to control the reproduction of his own conditions of existence – that is, when he begins to lift himself ‘above’ nature. Weber too – it was him, after all, that wrote of the ‘disenchantment of the world’, which is more or less the ‘inanimist thesis’ that Latour is most set against. Then again, on the more philosophical side one can also see Latour’s ‘moderns’ as being all those bifurcators of nature dating back to Descartes and Newton through Kant, Locke, etc.
Basically, Latour’s moderns are all those who believe that humans are distanced or even ’emancipated’ from nature due to their scientific ‘progress’; on the contrary, Latour argues, humans are more entangled in nature than ever before – more non-humans are part of our lives on more intimate a level than ever before. Hence ‘we have never been modern’.
July 2, 2010 at 9:14 am
Hi Levi,
This was something we brought up in response to Bogost’s nicely timed discussion on the enforcement of Marxism, as Latour is taking deliberate (but well meaning) pot-shots at the Communist Manifesto. I’m not sure where the essay was originally written, but I do know that he performed it at the 8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics and Aesthetics (Jan 2010) in discussion with Stengers.
Jacobs point about Latour’s examples of Modernity is a valid one, as sometimes its a struggle to latch onto any particular example. When Latour critiques Modernity, he’s slamming the sensibility of modernity rather than any specific examples. Nobody has ever lived in ‘Nature’, since Modernity he argues, the idea of nature has itself been composed. Latour also remarked that the invention of the inanimate is many ways a more exceptional premise that the animate, the realm of the inanimate objects could only have been invented by the realm of animate objects.
In the talk however, Latour gave a bit more emphasis on the degrading of progressive time in composition. Apparently Latour did some sort bizarre walk to show how Modernists don’t run towards the future but instead from run away from the past. The anti correlationist strand is evident in the way Latour suggests compositionism opposes Modern critique in many ways, the most prominent is the Modernist belief of a world beyond our own waiting to be discovered.
But I’d argue that ‘The Compositionist Manifesto’ is Latour’s attempt to create a political sensibility based on loosely cobbled heterogeneous parts which can make up a universal rather than pandering to Modern universality. I think it mirrors Bogost’s rant quite well; the far left’s foregone conclusion that social revolution will be inevitable or finally revealed, has reduced them to endless revisions of critique (of critique). Latour’s composition suggests that political change requires above all a great deal of composing, and a lot of effort to slowly create and (more importantly) maintain that change. Not only that but compositions need constant attention, with particular emphasis that multiple methods of composing and maintaining are needed to hold objects together. Some objects needed for political composition just won’t work, bodies of theory may not be of much use either. Maintaining and creating universal objects takes a great deal of effort.
If anything, politics has to become a more mundane affair; even something completely fragile and barely held together in most cases
July 2, 2010 at 2:01 pm
This is why in ET (yes that is the acronym…) I suggest we call the new view (crossed out) animism (“sous rature). Animism lacks the concept Nature which is to me the correlate (ha ha) of the concept (human) Subject.
July 2, 2010 at 4:06 pm
With regard to what Graham mentioned about Latour’s dislike of ‘critique’ (Graham’s comment just reminded me of this), endnote 8 in the Manifesto stands out:
To the best of my recollection (admittedly I haven’t gone back and checked, so I could be wrong) this is the first time he has associated what he calls ‘critique’ with the Kantian, bifurcative sense of that word. This is important because often it is easy to take his ‘critique of critique’ as a wholesale judgment on the notion of critical thought generally, which is highly problematic in, say, political science where the majority of subject matter necessitates being ‘critical’ in some form. Here he accepts that being critical in the banal, everyday sense is fine. It is a small admission but an important one.
July 2, 2010 at 7:39 pm
I’m actually working on a paper right now in which I argue that are traces of a supra-relational position in Latour’s work going as far back as “Irreductions,” and that it subsists in a certain tension with his relationism. Maybe I’ll start a blog and post it some day soon.
July 2, 2010 at 7:54 pm
[…] Leave a Comment Over at his workblog, Shaviro has written a response to my post on Latour last night. Shaviro writes: But here I think that Levi is wrong. It is not the case for Latour (or for […]
August 11, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[…] a recent article Latour has contrasted composition with critique. Critique occurs purely at the discursive level, […]
December 8, 2010 at 12:03 am
[…] like to use composition in the broader, more ontological, sense suggested by Latour in his “Compositionist Manifesto“. As I understand it, Latour’s compositions refer to assemblages built out of […]
June 7, 2011 at 3:44 pm
[…] at Latour's website; see also Lucas Verburgt's excellent analysis of Latour's argument, and Levi R. Bryant's discussion of it at Larval Subjects. You can find my own posts on Avatar here and here. The illustration at the […]
November 7, 2014 at 3:37 am
[…] Levi, B. (2010, July 1). A Compositionist Manifesto [wordpress.com]. Retrieved from https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/a-compositionist-manifesto/ […]