For those are interested, you’ll find my Georgia Tech talk below. It seemed fairly well received and generated a lot of lively discussion, which is always nice. At any rate, here it is, “The Faintest of Traces: Objects and the Self-Organization of Social Assemblages”: fainttrace1.
February 20, 2011
Larval Subjects . 
February 20, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Hi there,
really interesting piece, i have been specifically following Latour/Harman’s work on the satus and position of ‘objects’ within assemblages, so i suppose i am very taken to your approach to analysis.
I wanted to see what you thought about certain critiques around this method which accuse it of a kind of neo-liberal conservatism, or of a kind of priveledged social theorizing. As i understand (but dont necessarily accept) the objection is something to do with the fact that actor network is perhaps quite impotent and unsustainable in light of the asymetry of capitalist socio economic relations. That it doesn’t provide an affective form of discourse and perhaps withdraws into a fundamental intellectualism. This is problematic in terms of any ‘democratization of objects’ as there is maybe not an attempt for the actual liberation of repressed entities (pertaining to objects and humans).
Maybe you could say what you think would follow (in terms of the above) if the appraoch you advocate became the ‘New Constitution’ or a dominant position. Does the actual democratization of objects (and whatever kinds of social or cultural forms which may emerge) follows from the ontological democratization of objects?
Does this form of analysis even attempt to think a social formation radically other to the neo-liberal Capitalist hegemony?
Are these questions even relevant?
Your thoughts would be great!
February 20, 2011 at 9:57 pm
Hey Ali,
Thanks! I’ve never really understood how people arrive at this criticism, though Latour, it seems to me, does not do himself any favors when discussions of capitalism comes up. As articulated in this, talk, however, the sorts of things that you raise are exactly what I’m trying to get at. I’m interested in how the assemblages such as those we find in neo-liberal capitalism come to arise and maintain themselves at all.
As for the question of how to think something other than neo-liberal capitalist hegemony, I kinda think this is above my pay grade. This might have something to do with my Lacanian background and experience as a psychoanalyst. In the psychoanalytic clinic, the role of the analyst is to be an advocate for the analysand’s desire, not to harbor fantasies of what the analysand ought to be. The point is to create a space through which the analysand can articulate their desire. Often this will turn out to be something other than what the analyst might want or wish for.
I think something similar is the case with social change. It is the people that invent their forms of life. We saw that last week in the case of Egypt. The role of the theorist, I believe, is not to offer an alternative to existing social assemblages, but rather to play the part of a cartographer of social assemblages, how they are put together, what actors are involved, and how they produce a certain sort of inertia that maintains the assemblage. This is what Marx did in works like Capital, what Foucault did in works like Discipline and Punish or what Judith Butler does in works like Gender Trouble. Often this sort of work provides little in the way of alternatives, but by revealing the networks upon which certain social relations are dependent, they’ve done far more to change the world as people take these things up and begin to experiment with alternatives by forming new networks, abolishing certain relations in existing networks, and so on. In addition to this work of cartography, I also think social theorists play a role in reflecting those dissident tendencies and their meaning as they unfold in the social field. In this way they assist in rendering new possibilities available so that these emerging practices might be intensified.
February 20, 2011 at 10:52 pm
Its interesting in relation to the field I work in (art, contemporary sculpture) because there does seem to be this tension surrounding the plurality of production in a market system – the reduction of objects to the economic determination of the market, the speed at which work is co-opted as ‘style’ or design or rhetoric, or a heavy emphasis on a critical position as the debasing of the conditions which underlie production.
This always seems extremely narrow and focused through a priviledging of ‘meaning’ as the ultimate arbitrator of worth. Where actual objects and systems become a kind of place-marker or purely significatory.
February 21, 2011 at 2:52 am
if you get a chance check out Rabinow’s ‘Foucault’s Untimely Struggle’ Theory,Culture, and Society2009 v26(6)
where following Deleuze on the “history-less penumbra(nuee)” that always accompany significant events he suggests that “the critical task of the thinker:to seize an event in its becoming, while the work of the historian is to insist on the importance of historical elements as conditioning whatever takes place. The latter method, of course, produces valid knowledge of a specific sort: the former, the ‘inopportune'(l’intempestif), operates adjacently, in a space of becoming where the old and the new are available if one approaches them in a mode of vigorous contemplation of the about-to-be-actual.”
February 22, 2011 at 3:46 am
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