If I were to name a single thing that I most regret in all that I have written in since 2011, it would be my defense of Latour’s principle of irreduction in my article entitled “The Ontic Principle” in The Speculative Turn. Having reflected on this principle in the intervening years, I can’t help but believe that it would be a catastrophe to any knowledge-producing practices were it taken seriously. Why? Because to explain is to reduce. The sciences explain the powers of H2O by reference to the features of hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise, I explain the powers of hydrogen and oxygen by reference to more elementary particles. When someone interprets a novel, they’re carrying out a reduction saying, in effect, that the “manifest content” of the novel refers to this latent, ideational content. When a psychoanalyst interprets a symptom, they’re carrying out a reduction. Indeed, even Latour’s own actor-network analyses are reductions. He takes complex aggregates such as corporations and looks at all the actants that make them up. He’s reducing these aggregates to more elementary units. What we need is not a principle of irreduction, but of reduction that would allow us to distinguish between good and bad reductions.
The problem with the principle of reduction when taken at face value is that it leads us to treat every entity as an ontological given. “God, is but a set of beliefs, you say? Well by Latour’s principle of reduction this is an illegitimate reduction! Therefore we must include God in our ontology!” “Your depression is a chemical imbalance, you say? Well that’s an illegitimate reduction and it really means all that your confused says it means!” And while you’re at it, us Jews really were what the Nazis said we were because, well, it would be reductive to say otherwise!
I suspect that Latour himself didn’t think this is what the principle of irreduction means. After all, all of his actual analyses speak against this as he perpetually carries out reductions. What does Latour actually say? He says, “[n]othing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (The Pasteurization of France, 158). It’s the second part of the proposition that’s important. When he refuses reduction he’s challenging bad sociology. Like the mathematician, he’s saying you have to show your work. Somewhere or other he gives Freudian dream interpretation as an example of virtuous reduction. What’s good about a Freudian dream interpretation. It shows all the transformations (the dream-work) that lead from the dream-thought to the manifest content of the dream. It doesn’t just say “dream x means y”, but shows how the thought or repressed desire gets elaborated into y. Similarly, in the domain of Marxist social theory, it’s not enough to say “capitalism causes r”. You have to show all the mediations and mechanisms by which we get from the dynamics of capitalism to a particular social phenomena. We have to show our work. However, showing your work is a reduction nonetheless. A bad reduction is merely one that doesn’t show the mediations or how you get from point a to point b. Not everything exists. Sorry folks, there are no rainbows, though we certainly experience them as a result of the properties of light, raindrops, and our own neurological systems. Whiteheadian nonsense aside, in the absence of those neurological systems rainbows just ain’t there.
Larval Subjects . 
May 16, 2013 at 2:34 am
I don’t buy this line of argument. If an explanation is a reduction to a lower level, then the only possible explanations are those done in terms of elementary particles. But this is ludicrous. The point about H20 (or organizations or corporations or religions) is that they have emergent properties that they would not have were they not organized in such a away. To combine those parts (two hydrogen and one oxygen) in such a way produces a certain thing that is not reducible to two pieces of hydrogen and one piece of oxygen. After all, if you put just oxygen and hydrogen in the proper ration of 1:2 in a bottle, you don’t get water. Likewise, if you put a bunch of accountants in a room you don’t get an accounting firm.
May 16, 2013 at 2:43 am
To be a bit more clear because I’m not sure I succeeded, I think you are moving too quickly from “explain” to “explain away.”
May 16, 2013 at 2:51 am
Craig,
I forgot to add that nothing about that takes away the unique powers of water as an emergent entity.
May 16, 2013 at 4:21 am
Levi,
If water is an emergent entity with unique powers, why not a rainbow? Why not a god? Provided they are fabricated well, according to their respective felicity conditions. The difference between a good reduction and a bad reduction can’t be established simply according to type, especially if what matters most is that we show our work in each case.
I think I understand the concern motivating your argument, but I don’t see why it’s not mitigated by attention to different modes of existence within which entities are fabricated according to different sets of relations and interdependencies.
May 16, 2013 at 11:39 am
It’s shocking how often people misunderstand this (to my mind) quite simple principle. As I read it, Latour’s principle of irreduction actually has four parts – well, three plus a clarification. People tend to fixate on the first part and miss the rest. Here it is in full:
“1.1.1 Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else.
• I will call this the “principle of irreducibility”, but it is a prince that does not govern since that would be a self-contradiction”
1. Nothing is reducible to anything else.
To exist is to differ. If A is entirely reducible to B then A and B cannot meaningfully be said to be separate entities, they are one and the same. If any thing were to be reduced to any other thing then only the other thing would exist, by definition. That’s the ontology. Epistemologically this also means that no matter how much you study a thing that thing is always, necessarily beyond you. Reality exceeds knowledge not just in fact (‘alas we are merely flawed humans’) but in principle. Indeed, this principle of ‘excess’ applies to any form of relation, not just knowledge.
2. Nothing is irreducible to anything else.
Nothing is beyond relation, there are no hermetically sealed spheres separating things that cannot possibly touch. Anything can be brought to bear on anything else. No two things are sufficiently enemies that they cannot become allied. Reality is promiscuous. There are no dualities, no lines that cannot be crossed; there are only pluralities, many lines that can be crossed if you can summon strong enough allies. Furthermore, to ally, to join, to relate is to reduce. For X to form an alliance with Y each must reduce the other to some degree; they must simplify each other. But they must do this *because they are irreducible to each other*! It is *because* that one is irreducible to the other that, in order to relate, they must translate and simplify one another. The irreducible/reducible dyad is not so much a contradiction as a self-reinforcing circle. For things to relate and exist they must be *both* reducible and irreducible.
3. Nothing is reducible or irreducible *by itself*.
And things must *be brought* to bear. Nothing can persist by itself; it’s only through complex tangles of (vicarious) relations that anything can happen. Every thing is a swarm, every event is a cascade. Reality is a chaotic, raucous, poly-dimensional game of dominoes.
4. This is a prince(iple) that does not govern.
This is principle 1.1.1 of Latour’s thesis. It kickstarts the discourse but the axioms that follow from it do not ‘follow from it’ in the sense that they can be deduced from it or that they already exist in it ‘in potentia’. This contrasts to classical metaphysics, e.g. Spinoza, Descartes, where everything is supposed to be deducible from the first principle. Furthermore, however, I think this also means that this thesis doesn’t reproduce, replicate or represent the ‘heart of reality’; this axiom isn’t the source code from which the universe is pieced together. *That* would be a contradiction since it would reduce reality to words. No, what this axiom does is put something new out into the world, a new semantic creature that can form new alliances, perform new assemblages, etc. Thus it demonstrates its metaphysical truth by performative alliance building, not by summing up in words something that exists ‘out there’ behind appearances.
That’s my interpretation anyway. Later theses in Irreductions clarify and add to the principle but most of it is there in some form.
Latour is never saying that we must stop ‘reducing’ things altogether. That’s the criticism that’s usually levelled at this principle and it’s nonsensical. Ray Brassier’s ‘critique’ of Irreductions in the Speculative Turn is based almost entirely upon this elementary misunderstanding.
Reduction is more or less a *synonym* for relation – but you can only relate two things that are irreducible to each other (since otherwise there would not be two things at all).
The argument that science can only work by reduction fits with Latour’s axiom perfectly well. To reduce is to form a network. There’s no issue. But while science may ‘reduce to explain’ it doesn’t ‘reduce away’ as in ‘explain away’ – there’s always a remainder.
What we must be wary of is the claim that science captures what it studies completely, that knowledge of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself. What we must resist is the claim that you can reduce a thing completely without destroying it. Essentially it’s all an argument against the ideal of pure mastery – it’s all Nietzschean. Yes, we must resist the idea that things can be reduced without remainder but to resist reduction as such is an impossibility. In fact, to cease to reduce is to submit to unrelation: death.
Latour today distances himself from Irreductions, calling it a ‘naive’ book that he has ‘fondness’ for (off the top of my head, I think he uses these words). Certainly, he has moved on from much of it but the principle of irreduction is evident throughout his work, right up to the present. It’s one of the few unbroken threads running throughout his work.
When Latour talks about things being ‘irreduced and set free’ he’s releasing them from reduction*ism*, but not from reduction per se. Each flap of the seagull’s wings is a simplification and a reduction of the air around it, but it is irreduced insofar as it is set free from the notion that it is ‘nothing more’ than the diagram in the textbook or the DNA sequence digitised by the computer or the phenomenon apperceived by the thinking subject.
In short, you were right to defend the principle of irreduction, Levi! Irreduction isn’t the antonym of reduction, it’s a broader concept that *contains* it.
You can’t spell irreduction without reduction!
May 16, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Michael,
In the case of water we have a verifiable entity that acts in the world. No such verifiable entity can be discerned in the case of god. If the mere talking about and believing in things were sufficient to establish the existence of something then we’d also have to grant the existence of things like the Jewish plot, etc.
May 16, 2013 at 1:59 pm
This is wrong from a philosophy of science point of view, or at least, an oversimplification. It is noteworthy that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Scientific Explanation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/) includes no mention of reduction or reductionism. It is true that in order to explain we need to make some relation between the phenomenon and its explanans, but the explanans is not generally thought of as a reduction to phenonema at a more basic level. Main candidates for explanans include laws of nature (at the same level as the explanandum), causal mechanisms (most of which again are not reductions, e.g., mary throwing the rock explains the broken window), or unifications (again, many of which are not reductions, e.g., Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism).
It is also worth pointing out that one of the most canonical articles on reductionism (Oppenheim & Putnam’s “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis”) argues that microreductions can be explanatory, but takes other things (deduction from explanatory law) as definitional of explanation.
This example actually doesn’t work for you. While some features of hydrogen and oxygen, and some quantum mechanical principles like the Pauli exclusion principle, are part of the explanation of the features of water, but there are other chemistry-level parts of the explanation, including especially chemical bonds and related structural properties which are not part of atomic physics.
This looks true if you only focus on one moment in ANT analysis. (I just did Reassembling the Social w/ my grad class so this is fresh.) When Latour turns to look at actants, he recommends that we follow all of the connections that “make up” the actants, that make them do things. So while he might have us follow all of the parts of the Corporation as part of an ANT study of the Corporation, he’d also point out that the actants themselves aren’t themselves on a more basic level. Also, his point about the ways the Corporation “speaks” (wholly in documents) vs. how the person in the customer service department speaks to you on the phone seems relevant.
May 16, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Matt,
How are you using the term “reduction”? Explanatory reduction differs from ontological reduction. In an ontological reduction you’re saying that that the phenomenon reduced is not *real*. This is the case for Inwagen’s materialism. He argues that there are no rocks hitting windows, only individual particles interacting. An explanatory reduction doesn’t erase what’s being explained, but traces it back to more elementary laws and entities. Here, H20 is an absolutely real and [ontologically] irreducible entity, but it’s powers are also explained by the powers of the elements that make it up. Each example of explanation you give is an example of an explanatory reduction in this sense.
I think the issue is complicated in Latour and that Latour tends more towards ontological reduction than explanatory reduction. His tendency is to privilege mid-sized entities like humans, texts, staplers, etc, treat large scale entities as illusory abstractions. Consider, for example, his criticisms of Marxism and rejection of entities like classes. While he might *say* that he’s not erasing these entities, he repeatedly does so. We’re he not, he wouldn’t criticize entities like class as he does, but treat them as real actants. This is an example, I think, of bad *ontological* reduction. It’s like saying only neurons are real and ignoring what happens when sets of neurons are coupled together in brains.
May 16, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Matt,
I should add that much of this discussion arises from how some variants of object-oriented ontology are being put to use elsewhere. One of the central claims of all variants of OOO– my own included –is that entities cannot be ontologically reduced or erased in the way Inwagen would like. Trees, for example, are real entities over and above the cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles or strings that make them up. In some quarters, this has been used as a way of rejecting any account giving. For example, talking about the relationship between trees and their cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles gets immediately treated as an ontological reduction or erasure of trees. In other cases, this has been used to defend the existence of things such as rainbows that I don’t think plausibly can be said to be substances or independent entities. In contrast to trees, rainbows seem to be the sort of things that really ought to be ontologically reduced to certain interplays between light, raindrops, and certain types of neurological systems. Unlike trees that exist regardless of whether or not anyone perceives them, rainbows seem to require perceivers in order to exist at all.
May 16, 2013 at 4:55 pm
[…] I wasn’t quite clear in my post on Latour and left out the central point I was trying to make: there’s a difference between […]
February 25, 2014 at 6:20 pm
The principle of irreducibility in fact recognizes “the crucial importance…of enforcing boundaries, categories, and settlements” (Reassembling the Social, 227). The simple warning behind the principle of irreducibility is that reason must pay for its boundaries: you cannot have information without transformation. In a sense, as Philip writes above, reality exceeds knowledge, but even that crucial step puts us in danger of distinguishing a perpetual numinous reality “out there” from the values and relations we extract from it. Most recently, Latour has labeled the assumption that information without transformation is possible as “double click.” Once you engage in “double click,” you obliterate all types of veridiction, including scientific activity itself. In other words, you engage in absolutism.
For example, a scientist can map a tree with its cells, and hopefully does it well. This map makes certain kinds of activity possible that were not possible before. But if you believe that you have found the complete and true “form of the tree” in those cells, then you must also dismiss everything else that trees have been, can be, or will be. The ontological basis for Latour’s argument is the notion of “articulation.” There is no silent, hidden force — everything with being is articulated. For Latour, it is just as absurd to say, “there is no X, even though we experience the articulation of X” as it is to say, “there is X, even though it is never mediated.” X can be rainbows, God, peanuts, weight, joy, cells…