In Memory of Darren Hynes, Redux (with apologies), 10/03/2014

You may have noticed that my post from this Saturday relating some memories of a former professor of mine has disappeared. This is because, where I wanted to write a series of brief recollections that depicted what stuck in my mind about a former colleague who died too young this March 1, I expressed them in a way that offended some of his close friends. This is why I’m no good at funerals; I always say the wrong thing. Or worse, I say what I want to be the right thing in the wrong way.

Because I don’t remember Darren as a perfect person. He wasn’t. And neither am I. But where I wanted to describe my memories impressionistically and respectfully, I appeared instead dismissive, as if I held him in contempt.

When I think about my own relationship with Darren as a student colleague at Memorial University’s philosophy department in the mid-2000s, today I think about someone who wasn’t getting a fair shake anymore, and who deserved better than what he got. My first impression of him came when I was 20 years old, taking a summer course from him in the philosophy of the natural sciences. I still have the book of essays from that course, because it was a solid collection of essays central to the development of analytic philosophy of science. I found him very fair to me, after one day in particular. I had volunteered to do a presentation in that course on a subject having to do with philosophy of physics. I had the philosophy down, but was still a little sketchy on the physics. Of course, the physics was the focus of a persistent line of questioning from my friend P. As I was becoming flustered, Darren noticed and filled in the physics background better than I could (and he still gave me a terrific mark on the presentation). It went beyond what I think most professors would do for a student, and I really appreciated his doing me a solid that day.

Because I don’t remember very many people doing the same for Darren, myself included. He would always attend the weekly discussion groups the philosophy department would organize, called Jockey Club. And he would quite often be corrected by some other professors in the department. Sometimes they’d be right, because we all misread an idea sometimes, or speak without knowing the full conceptual or historical context. But sometimes, people would disagree for little more than the sake of disagreeing, picking holes in his perspective that weren’t truly present. I don’t think I ever did that to him. At least, I hope not.

He had a remarkably distinctive mannerism when speaking as well. He would hold his hand up, palm facing inward, in front of him, then draw the tips of his fingers together as he spoke, moving his hand away from him. Back and forth, as his fingertips would draw together and spread apart. I don’t know how he developed that habit. At least Darren tried for some theatrical flair.

I feel as though I never treated him as well as I should have. Partially, that was why his early death affected me so much, so unexpectedly. One commenter on this weekend’s memorial post accused me of acting superior to him. And I didn’t intend to do that the other day, although I appeared to do so in relating the following memory.

I felt uncomfortable around Darren when I’d visit the philosophy department on my occasional trips back to St. John’s during my doctoral work. His academic career seemed to be stalling over the last few years. When he first started teaching at Memorial, he was employed on regularly renewed yearly contracts paying a full salary. Over the last few years, he was hired only as a per-course instructor, with much, much lower pay. He could become frustrated and stressed easily, so I imagine he didn’t take it all that well.

While this was happening to Darren, my own career in universities felt like it was soaring. From 2007 to this year, I’ve attended 14 conferences (across four countries in addition to Canada) including the upcoming Canadian Philosophical Association at Brock University in St. Catharine’s. I’ve presented or commented at all but two of those conferences. My article publications continued at a parallel pace. I felt as though, with a track record like mine, the next phase of my university career was assured. So when I saw Darren still struggling to be published, having trouble just hanging onto his mediocre job at Memorial and not getting any feedback from applications elsewhere, I did feel superior. And I wish I had the chance to make up for that somehow.

It’s why my post from this weekend disappeared so quickly after Darren’s old office-mate Bernie Wills told me how offended he was by what I wrote. In the last year, I’ve hit a similar wall in my own career, one that I think hit me harder because I was so over-confident in the certainty of my coming success. I don’t know that I’ll ever work in a university again, but at least this has hit me just as I turned 30, at a young enough age that I can make a reasonable adjustment to my livelihood. I don’t know what I’d do if the same collapse of academic employment hit me in my late 40s, as I could see happening to Darren. It took me nearly a year just to get back on my feet as it is. For all the academics being pushed out of the system they’ve already given decades to, at a time of life when a fresh start has become practically impossible, I don’t know how recovery can be done.

Bernie told me that he and Darren had prepared some fascinating work on Plato that has so far gone sadly unpublished. I remember one day, Darren being terribly upset over an article being rejected from a journal. But the paper was over 50 pages long, and journals just don’t publish works of that size anymore. I remember in the early days of what became that collaborative project on Plato that Darren tried to explain it to me, something to do with the concept of the dyad. I didn’t really understand what he was getting at, but it sounded fascinating and original. Too many journals of ancient philosophy today are too conservative to publish large, strange interpretive works.

I still think Bernie should try to get a book contract for it, though. More people can read books. That way, more people can have Darren Hynes on their shelves.

The Politics of Names and Singularity, Research Time, 07/03/2014

The concept of singularity is central to the broad conceptual argument of my Ecophilosophy project, essentially a corollary of Leibniz’s Law. If two objects share all the same properties (including spacetime location), thereby becoming completely indiscernible, then they’re actually the same object and there’s only ever been one. The reverse would be true, that the uniqueness of any object is constituted by only the smallest difference. The least variation constitutes absolute uniqueness. Of course, we can map the degrees and kinds of variations and divergences, but from an absolute sense, every body is unique, singular.

One of the central challenges in my composing that manuscript was developing its politically relevant articulations. In that context, the principle of singularity implies the importance of preserving natural diversity, the continual creation of new bodies in ecological processes. But Donna Haraway gave me a spin on the concept that works for feminist politics as well in her essay “Reading Buchi Emecheta.”

I owe Haraway thanks again for revealing Emecheta to me,
another African novelist whose work I should read soon.

Emecheta is a Nigerian novelist and academic who has been publishing since the 1970s. Her biography practically defines human strength. Married at 18, she had five children with a husband from whom she had to hide her writing because he opposed her developing the ability to think for herself. After he left her in England with their children in council housing, she went on assistance while raising them alone and attending school, eventually earning a PhD in sociology. She has since become an internationally successful novelist and has lectured in prestigious universities in Britain, the United States, and Nigeria. Her novels often describe in Nigeria and the West who are beaten down by the injustices of sexism and racism that limit opportunity through prejudice. Haraway describes her as having a sharply critical view of how women are treated and controlled in the institution of marriage. After reading this essay, I’d like to get hold of some of Emecheta’s work.

Haraway’s essay discusses two critical views of Emecheta’s work, as well as her own. Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi reads Emecheta in terms of how well the novelist measures up to her own theory of African liberation through the embrace of traditional lifestyles like plural marriage, conceiving of the solidarity of African women in the diaspora as “amicable co-wives with an invisible husband.” She rejects Emecheta as rejecting her African identity by concentrating on the injustices that follow women after the failure of marriages, and so is incompatible with her vision of African liberation. Barbara Christian’s reading fares little better, although she was friendly to Emecheta’s ideas, incorporating the Nigerian into her own project of tracing articulations of motherhood throughout the history of African and African-American women through slavery and the modern era. In both of these interpretations, no matter how hostile or friendly, Emecheta’s work and life is judged on the basis of their own intellectual priorities.

Haraway’s own reading, which she gave in her class, “Methodological Issues in the Study of Women,” discussed and valorized Emecheta’s “heterogeneous statuses as...

“exile, Nigerian, Ibo, Irish-British feminist, black woman, writer canonized in the African Writers Series, popular writer published in cheap paper back books and children’s literature, librarian, mother on welfare, sociologist, single woman, reinventor of African tradition, deconstructor of African tradition, member of the Advisory Council to the British Home Secretary on race and equality, subject of contention among committed multi-racial womanist and feminist theorists, and international figure.”

This list of attributes is a gesture toward the singularity of Emecheta, and indeed of everyone. Human reason operates by forming general sets of standards for evaluation and judging phenomena by their accordance with those standards. But true respect for people (and for any body) requires recognizing the inability of anyone to be completely encapsulated within a general systematic framework of evaluation. Look hard enough, and you will discover aspects of someone who won’t fit your pre-existing framework of comprehension and value. To know someone, you have to understand them not in terms of your own priorities, but simply know them.

“TO HAVE DONE WITH JUDGMENT” 

— Antonin Artaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze

Of course, I’m subject to this kind of judgment, even as I write about how I want to have done with judgment. My own philosophical development of the concept of singularity essentially creates my own framework against which to judge something. I can judge a critic by the degree to which they attempt to understand a figure through exploration of their singularity or subsume them within a more general framework. In this sense, judgment is inescapable. But I’m also aware that we can never truly, in the words of the figures I identify with in the philosophical tradition, have done with judgment. It will always be useful. 

The key, I think, that puts my own approach above that of the people I judge is that I don’t absolutize my framework of judgment. One has to remain away that any general framework of comprehension and value is a pragmatic, contingent matter, a tool that’s used for a purpose. To extend such a framework for judgment beyond its pragmatic purpose is the harmful move, boxing the singularity of Emecheta into a cause that she never chose.

Would You Commit Infanticide for a Genetic Heritage? Research Time, 06/03/2014

Many of Donna Haraway’s most famous essays featured her take on the history of primatology research as a route to explore the underlying ideologies and concepts of social applications of biological science and thought. The earliest generation she described, contemporaries of the Great Depression and the Second World War, understood apes as reflecting a pure nature without the dilution of culture and egalitarian morality: brutally violent conflict among powerful men to dominate and achieve domination.

If you spell out those four layers of theoretical articulation (the primal, the political, the molecular, and the ideological), you have Haraway’s vision of how the sciences and politics interact. Now, I’m still not sure whether the ideological occupies a foundational role here. I’d prefer that it didn’t, because if an ideology determined all other modes of interpretation and thought, it would be impossible to change. That’s a paradox that would actually doom Haraway’s work. I would think that an ideology and its various articulations all exist interdependently, without a thread gaining absolute priority in generation.

The incredibly adorable Indian langur monkey.

Anyway, the essay “The Contest for Primate Nature” describes the shift in how we understand primate societies happening through the generational shift in the people studying them. Seeing this shift is very easy because they’re all students (or the students of students) of seminal sociobiologist Sherwood Washburn. From the first studies of langur monkeys’ society, they were thought to practice infanticide as an articulation of violent male dominance. Packs of langur are regularly stormed by others, when their men overthrow the leading males of the invaded troop and kill their children. This was, of course, interpreted as a matter of preserving one’s own genetic line.*

* It may sound very amateurish to say so, but I’ve always found this explanation in biological and social evolutionary science to be a little dubious. We know what kind of actions can perpetuate a genetic line, but an animal has no knowledge of evolutionary theory. Just because you see an activity in nature, don’t presume that it’s already evolutionarily optimal.

But as the generations of scientists changed, the interpretation of langur behaviour did as well. The first shift saw Phyllis Dolhinow née Jay (a pupil of Washburn) describe langur social conventions with little reference to males at all, concentrating on the roles of females and infants in the troops. The second shift, in the work of Jane Bogess (trained by an elderly Washburn and another middle-aged former pupil of his), tackled the question of infanticide head-on to find that it wasn’t there.

Yes, after the invasion and ouster/killing of the central males in the langur troop, many of the children tended to die. But Bogess could find no actual evidence that they were murdered, despite being in a better position to do so. The first generation of researchers mostly observed the animals from afar to avoid encounters with more dangerous animals, and so as not to interfere with the natural behaviour of the monkeys. By the time Bogess got to work, the observational techniques of primatology enabled her to live with the langur troop themselves. So she was able to see more of the details of their lives.

Now we can see the ideology of domination appearing again. The original studies of the langur monkeys saw invasions as a natural occurrence, and the infanticide of children by the usurpers as the natural result of securing one’s genetic line through violence. But if the infant monkeys weren’t killed to establish the dominance of the usurping males, how did they die?

Another flaw in the old ideology of nature was that it presumed that every trait and behaviour that was found in nonhuman organisms had to be explained in terms of how it was evolutionarily optimal, how it would have helped this species survive and thrive. I still see this far too frequently today. This idea presumes, essentially, that the process of evolution is done, and that everything in the natural world is the product of optimization.

The death of infants in a langur tribe after a hostile takeover happened due to stress from a variety of factors. One example is the squeezing of habitat space for the monkeys after the encroachment of human settlements around their region of India. If the langur population had enough space, then troops wouldn’t invade each other at all. The infant monkeys are casualties of pathological behaviour caused by ecological changes that the langurs have trouble adapting to. A langur troop under constant threat of invasion and with such a high infant mortality rate isn’t behaving according to the paths that developed in their calmer periods. Just because you’re dealing with a natural population doesn’t mean that every behaviour is automatically optimized. If it were, then species would never actually go extinct.

Ultimately, Haraway has traced a story of the purging of an ideology from an evolutionary science. The field no longer presumes that animal societies operate by violence to assure male dominance, or that human industrial processes have no subtle effects on animal behaviour, or that all natural behaviour is always already evolutionarily optimized to the current situation because it has been optimal in the past. Worth at least an extra paragraph or two when I eventually get back to my Ecophilosophy manuscript revisions.

The Fractal Structure of Ideology, Research Time, 05/03/2014

Partially on the enthusiastic recommendation of one of my compatriots, I’m finally filling the Donna Haraway gap in my philosophical knowledge. I think the reason why it’s gone unfilled for so long has been that my education in feminist philosophy has come too late. I first developed as a philosopher at a very friendly, strong, welcoming department. But I didn’t fully process its gender troubles until a few years after I left. It was disheartening at the time, but I’ve accepted it now.

So my education in feminist philosophy, queer theory, and related directions of thought was always rather lacking compared to some. Once I got to my doctorate, I either didn’t have time to read up on the classics of the feminist tradition, or felt as if I wouldn’t be able to overcome my handicap. But first cracking open her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women collection, I came to a corker immediately. I’m still sorting out her theoretical layers. 

"As we learn about primates, so we learn about ourselves."
Wait, that's not how that line is supposed to go.

Let’s start with specifics and see if I can tease out what might be the foundation, if there is one (and I hope not). “A Political Physiology of Dominance” focusses on describing the work of Robert Yerkes and Clarence Ray Carpenter, two of the leading scientists in animal sociology over the 1930s-40s. They released a colony of rhesus monkeys onto a subsidiary island of Puerto Rico to study their behaviour; from this work, we have the stereotype of primates behaving according to systems of male dominance, aggression, and possessiveness of females. They also conceived of these primate studies as providing clues to the natural evolutionary path that humanity took. That is, we used to be what the apes are. (Layer A: Stereotypes of primates)

Haraway’s next step is a delightfully sarcastic description of the social world these researchers were raised in. Coming from rich, well-connected families, Yerkes and Carpenter attended elite institutions which, at the time, were run by traditional cultural conservatives with possessive views toward women and virulently racist views of non-white ethnicities. Their animal sociology work was funded through a Rockefeller-connected think tank, which was also connected with the American government’s semi-eugenical programs to organize its population according to scientific medical principles through the coercion of the state. Carpenter was a genuinely rigorous scientist, but his work was the product of a society based on domination by rich and powerful men. (Layer B: The obviously political)

But the self-conscious intellectual influences on the animal sociology studies were fundamental studies of developmental biochemistry, particularly embryology. The mathematics describing intensive systems such as embryonic development described them in terms of axes of dominance. A particular process (in this case, the currents that stabilize into the shape of a head) among the roiling currents of embryonic fluid comes to influence those currents, and determine the overall shape of the stable entity that emerges from all this chemical activity, the embryo. That process was conceived in terms of its coming to dominate the other currents and movements within the system. One key element of the embryonic studies was that if you removed the proto-head from the semi-completed developmental process, other currents would violently slosh together until a head emerged from their collisions and reunified the embryonic process to develop its proper shape. (Layer C: Intensive dynamics of multi-cellular production)

White patrician American scientists in the 1930s and 1940s
conceived of the natural political arrangements of living
creatures as authoritarian dominance established through
violent conflict and discord. I wonder who they could have
thought best exemplified the most natural human
government during their era?

The major trend of this era wasn’t just theorizing about dominance, but conceiving of domination as the natural state of humanity. The political research of the science of the era concentrated on the authoritarian personality who governs through the imposition of violence on inferiors. If the authoritarian dictator were removed, the society would convulse violently until a leader emerged from the chaos who could impose his will on all the inferiors. (Layer D: Theory of political authoritarianism) 

Haraway’s final move is the kicker, linking these layers seemingly without a foundation. The political theory of dictatorial authoritarianism was conceived as a socio-political articulation of the same process of embryonic development universal to all animal life. This theoretical move made violent authoritarianism the natural political organization for humanity because it was the inherent principle of life itself. Layer C was conceived as the primal process that determined the nature of Layers A, B, and D. 

But the people doing the conception were already embedded in social structures of domination, conditions of their personalities’ development that led them to presume dominance and violence to be universal essences of existence, or at least life. Such a perspective would have no trouble with the intensive dynamic theories of development being adapted to theories of galactic constitution, as in Lee Smolin’s Life of the Cosmos. So I guess Layer B determines the nature of Layers A, C, and D. 

One would think that the ontology is prior to political theory. I usually do, because you can’t have political actors without ontological developments first — there has to be carbon and the organisms made from carbon before there can be politics among social carbon organisms. But how we theorize about the ontological nature of life and the universe depends on habits of thinking that we’re socialized into before we even think to start theorizing. Reading Haraway, one is no longer sure if any attempt to understand how the world is can escape the partiality of our established habits of thought, even for a task so simple as getting an outside perspective.

Those Sad Believers in the Religion of Science, Jamming, 04/03/2014

For most people, science is a big truth-producing black
box that has as much content as this T-shirt.

Yesterday, my girlfriend and I were discussing a meme that she finds frustrating and I find sad. No, not that one. I’m talking about Science: It Just Works. One of her friends posted it on Facebook, and they got into a conversation about why he posted it. He said he would always defend science against those who would push pseudo-sciences like crystal energies, homeopathy, and climate change denial. And that’s good.

But that kind of rhetoric obscures an important truth about the practice of science that isn’t really known to people outside the scientific industries and that people have to understand if they want to make sense of our world. Science is actually a very messy, difficult process, and conclusions only come with the accumulation of massive amounts of data. Even then, the conclusions are often inconclusive. What’s more, those data can be very difficult to acquire if the investments of large amounts of money are involved in the necessary experimentation. Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough cash to prove a hypothesis.

Bruno Latour’s early work was part of the wave of publications that opened these operations to the public eye. Anyone can pick up a copy of Laboratory Life or Science in Action, or any subsequent ethnography of scientific practices and communities to learn about the messy reality of scientific research. A lot of the theoretical groundwork had already been done in the historical studies of Thomas Kuhn and the philosophical work of David Bloor and the Edinburgh School of sociological philosophy of science. But for the past ten years, he has regretted doing this, first expressing his frustrations in his 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” His basic point is that the tradition of science studies that he helped start has, far from helping people understand the practice of science, has only enabled skepticism and the loss of faith in it.

The irony of Boyle is that he created an image of an
apolitical science as a political act to defend the scientific
community from partisan conflict. Oh, damn, the picture is
the wrong Robert this time.

The problem Latour identified was that his critical movement had been too successful. But I think it had actually not been successful in the right way. The answer lies in the historical research Latour himself laid out in We Have Never Been Modern. The modern experimental paradigm of scientific research was developed by Robert Boyle and the Royal Society in Britain in the mid-1600s, just as England was getting out a civil war that shattered the island’s society. The Royal Society was a community of scholars and researchers, all broadly devoted to developing human knowledge, and Boyle was one of their most prominent figures. In the social instability after the civil war, he was most concerned with protecting himself and his compatriots from the political turmoil of the country. After all, a century later, Antoine Lavoisier, France’s greatest chemist at the time, would be beheaded in that country’s Revolutionary Terror. Scientists constitute a threat to the rule of established authority: a scientific conclusion can correct a king. And kings are very hostile to being corrected.

So Boyle developed his most successful invention, more successful than the machines he built for his experiments: the image of science as an apolitical practice. Scientists were a new kind of monks, whose devotions were experiments to discover the previously mysterious workings of the world. They were a spiritual practice who aimed to enlighten humanity with knowledge of the world they lived in. The method of a scientist was to be trusted. Science was above religion and politics, because when a scientific truth was established, it could not be disputed.

Bill Nye has become our most famous proselytizer of belief
in science. But he pushes it as a faith, especially when he
debates Ken Ham in a high-profile event that helped the
founder of the Creationist Museum resurrect funding for
his amusement park based on Noah's Ark.

We’re still taught this today. In grade school, we learn about the sanctity of The Scientific Method. But none of us could ever say what The Scientific Method is because there isn’t one, perhaps other than ‘Collect as much reliable data as possible and analyze it hoping to discover something you hadn’t noticed before.’* Yet huge amounts of philosophical ink has been spilled on articles trying to isolate precisely what The Scientific Method is. Unless you’re a scientific practitioner yourself, you probably believe that The Scientific Method is a thing. That’s what we learned on PBS from Bill Nye and on the private networks from Beakman’s World. If you stopped doing science classes in grade ten because the math was hard, you believe in The Scientific Method as if it was a matter of faith.

* This is a personal bugbear of mine. Part of the research for my Ecophilosophy manuscript involved analysis of traditional medicine among indigenous groups, bodies of immense knowledge about the properties of local plants and fungi. Discussing this research with a friend, he mocked such knowledge because they didn’t use The Scientific Method. But just the because the shamans don’t wear labcoats, their useful biological databanks have been ignored. But they’re at the tail end of thousands of years of data collection and analysis. Smart pharmaceutical companies send teams to consult with indigenous leaders about their medicines because they'll be able to mass produce the chemicals that the shamanic tribes use locally without as much processing.

You start to look defeated when you're old and tired.

So now, when you see books like Latour’s and those that have followed him, you’re like a man who has lost his faith. You’ve grown up believing that science had a perfect method, The Scientific Method, and that its use resulted in absolutely true knowledge. That’s why Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens could talk about the superiority of science over religion: scientific knowledge was above the petty political provincialism of religion. This is just Boyle’s defensive thesis, formulated as a desperate gamble to protect his community from violence at the hand of post-war partisans. But part of the success of that gamble was that they succeeded in covering up why they convinced us all of that. So today, shrill writers like Dawkins repeat it as dogma.

Read those books that describe scientific practice in all its messiness: the vulnerability of funding to corporate or political whims, the jockeying of scientists across universities and research institutes, the fact that you’ll always find some study with data contra-indicating the conclusions of 95% of all other studies in that area. If you believed in the perfection of scientific knowledge as a dogma, as too many of us still do, you won’t see a book that educates you about the practice of an important human institution.

You’ll have your faith broken.

Latour shouldn’t be upset because the sociology and ethnography (and related philosophy) of science were too successful. If anything, they failed to root out the true rot: the conception of science in too many people’s minds as a subject of dogma. 

Deleuze in Disguise, Research Time, 03/03/2014

From the first time I heard about the basic concept of what the sociologists call actor-network theory, I have had a sneaky suspicion about it. Reading a late passage of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern has convinced me that I was right. Latour’s actor-network theory is basically the exact structure of the assemblage theory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, articulating the same ontology, but in a different context, one whose frameworks of thinking are structured by the conclusions of his ethnographies of scientific practitioners and the social dynamics of laboratories.

Let me give you a quote from Latour just to put the matter in context. Anyone who has read Deleuze will see how evocative this is.

“[The moderns] thought themselves revolutionary because they invented the universality of sciences that were torn out of local peculiarities for all time, and because they invented gigantic rationalized organizations that broke with all the local loyalties of the past. In so doing, they missed the originality of their own inventions twice over: a new topology that makes it possible to go almost everywhere, yet without occupying anything except narrow lines of force and a continuous hybridization between socialized objects and societies rendered more durable through the proliferation of nonhumans.” We Have Never Been Modern §4.11.

Latour describes our frameworks for understanding the connections among bodies in the world as topologies, maps of spaces that can themselves bend in a variety of shapes within a restricted locus of possibility. His problematically-named quasi-objects* are the building blocks of complex bodies that are hybrids of assemblages that have existed before. Every new network, every new mode of relating, is a mutation of what has come before. The present is the raw material of the future, even though the future may change the present so much as to make the new arrangement appear as if ex nihilo. But all novelty is mutation, merely radical mutation.

* Problematic because his vocabulary remains rooted in the dualist-implying language that the entirety of We Have Never Been Modern strives to overcome. I think one of the main reason people have misunderstood Latour’s ideas in this regard is because he keeps talking in terms that evoke subjects and objects, the two pure poles of the Modern conception of being that he pitches his own philosophy as trying to overcome. If he’d just admit that he’s basically a process philosopher, and use terms of that cobbled-together pseudo-tradition, he wouldn’t have sparked nearly the confusion that I’ve seen from younger students experiencing the trouble they do to understand the fine line Latour’s thinking walks.

I can definitely understand not wanting to appear influenced
by Deleuze and Guattari in one's hairstyles, but their
philosophical work is immensely valuable.

As for how networks relate to each other, that is a matter for fields and currents of force. The distinction of human and nonhuman, artificial and nature, disappears, ontologically speaking. All the differences are preserved, but none of their separateness, the cleanness of the categories no longer applies to the world. Maintaining the cleanliness of our traditional conceptual categories only prevents us from understand what are practically becoming the most important material relationships in our world. All these ideas are central to the ontology that Deleuze and Guattari develop in their collaborative writings.

All of these ideas are central to the works of Deleuze and Guattari, yet Latour never really explains his influences throughout this book, and cites them only three times in the entire book. A mediocre professor once told me that I should discount sources that are cited very rarely and in very general ways. These are just gestures, he said, that amount to nothing but provocation and evocations of vague associations. I have since concluded that these vague associations are more often hints of a wider, more pervasive influence than a writer is willing to make explicit.

In this case, I think they are a sign of Latour’s wanting to hedge his bets. I think his hesitation to cite his Deleuzian influence (or at least accidental heritage) lies in the social situation of intellectual life in France in the 1980s and 1990s, and as well today. Here in North America, we identify (especially in cultural studies and literary theory programs) French philosophy as the psychoanalytic and post-structuralist waves of experimental theorizing, the difficult, strange texts of authors (quite a few of them communist or otherwise leftist) who tried to conceive existence in a new way.

Their response to the so-called failure of modernity, or at least the increasing tendency toward totalizing the state and corporate control of individual life and the inability of our old rationalist motivations to deal with our growing ecological crises, was not to give in to despair or double down on the old destructive attitudes. Their response was to develop a new way of thinking about existence.

By the 1980s, all these people were being discredited. There was a new generation of thinkers (the infamous Bernard Henri-Lévy among them) who was literally doubling down on the old habits of total rationalism and uncritical faith in the ability of Western culture to emancipate people. They were intellectuals who hid their heads in the sands about the destructive acts and absurdities of cultural colonialism and globalized corporate capitalism. One could not admit being a follower of Deleuze and Guattari’s insights without ruining one’s academic career.

So Latour did the obvious good thing: he got devious, and smuggled all these motivating ideas into a career based on the ethnography of science. Latour essentially used the tools of anthropology and ethnography to trace the shape of the networks that we live in, and that build the machines and processes which create our world. If Deleuze and Guattari lacked anything, it could be said that they lacked a method. In this way, a universal ethnography overcomes the ivory-tower universalism of philosophy and science. If everything can be analyzed, then every universal that pitches itself as transparent can be revealed for what it really is: not a lie, but a posit for the sake of the smooth operation of some other social machine. 

I Would Rather Be Invisible Than Absurd, Jamming, 01/03/2014

I few months ago, I wrote a post about Albert Camus; to be more specific, it was about Edward Said’s reading of the colonialist presumptions and absences within his most famous work, The Stranger. I recently started reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, sparking a few thoughts in relation to Camus' work, which I think can be enlightening. When I first wrote the Camus post, I advertized a little more widely than usual — beyond Facebook and Twitter, I also went to a couple of Reddit boards — and it got more hits than any other. But there was one critique of what I had written that stuck out to me, which was that I didn’t understand the concept of the Absurd Man.

If you're making a film in Europe about the alienation of a
decadent, nihilistic character who symbolizes all the
existential emptiness of post-War European Man™, you
cast Marcello Mastroianni. Federico Fellini did it with La
Dolce Vita, and Luchino Visconti did it with his adaptation
of Camus' The Stranger.

Now, I can understand why this Reddit user would say such a thing. The Stranger is the fictional articulation of a universal posit about human nature itself, whose philosophical version is The Myth of Sisyphus. At least, this is how it’s most often presented to people. Camus had more philosophical subtlety than this in his writings, but one can definitely see the common territory between the two works. Basically, the philosophical point is that we all live isolated from each other, that no one can ever truly know our personal perspectives on life, and this personal viewpoint is the sole true source of meaning in our lives. Meursault is only interpreted as having no concern or emotional connection to the death of his mother because he doesn’t express it in the customary way. He practically alienates himself from people because he appears emotionally dead, externally. But this only shows our actual alienation from each other. We all have our own burdens to shoulder, and no one will ever help us or even be able to understand those burdens. 

There are other ways to explain absurdity, about as many as there have been literary theory papers about it. But this will suffice for my purpose today. Because reference to the universalism of what Camus is trying to say doesn’t overcome Said’s basic critique of The Stranger, as well as The Plague: its Arabs are invisible. This would be uncharitably interpreted as Said attempting to invalidate Camus’ philosophical perspective by reducing that perspective to an erudite expression of racism. And it’s exactly what a bad post-colonialist reading of the product of an imperialist culture does. It’s exactly why such reduction is a bad post-colonialist reading.

A good post-colonialist reading would understand how Camus’ universalizable idea failed to achieve all that it could precisely because of the invisibility of Arab people in the social world of his characters. There was an enormous, complicated aspect of Camus’ world that he left behind. The basic concept of the absurdity of life can hold, and remains philosophically rich and useful. The problem with Camus’ version is that Meursault himself is too solipsistic. Even The Plague, which is my favourite of Camus’ novels because it focusses on how worldly friendships and community-building can overcome our individual alienation, remains incomplete because these wider relationships are ignored. 

If Camus had lived long enough to write a truly political novel, it would have been brilliant. Camus was always a partisan for French colonial control of Algeria: he was a French Algerian, and Algerian independence under Arab rule would have disenfranchised its white and mixed citizens. Indeed, it did. But Camus never engaged with his own thoughts on Algerian independence as a wider social phenomenon; he only saw how people like him, the poor whites of French Algeria, would have been left behind. He couldn’t sympathize with Arab Algerians because his own personal heritage embedded him in that war on a partisan side. 

I don’t fault Camus for this lack of engagement. It takes a long time to understand the historical and cultural perspectives of a people who have declared themselves your enemy. A lot of people never do. I think Camus had that potential because of the nuance of his thought. I think an aged Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre could have reconciled their friendship after May 1968 and the conservative counter-revolution of Europe in the 1970s. 

Of course, that never happened because Camus died in a car crash in 1960, two years before the Algerian War even ended. He simply never had a chance to write a great political novel about poor white French Algerians: people who were shut out of the material wealth of the colonial elite, but who were never able to join the cause of the revolutionaries because their race made them complicit with the colonial powers in Arab eyes. He never got to write a gritty, brutal, philosophically deep, epic novel of the Algerian war from the viewpoint of people who always lose in every violent political revolution: poor people, no matter their race. I think that if Camus had lived, he would have had the potential to become one of Europe's great chroniclers of revolutionary war in the 20th century, alongside Gillo Pontecorvo. But he died.

I've heard criticisms of existentialism that it is an
apolitical philosophy that offers no ethical
guidance for your political life. This is true unless,
like me, you consider Invisible Man to be an
existentialist novel.

Instead, we have Ralph Ellison. I’m probably not the first to compare these books; indeed, the comparison strikes me as obvious. Ellison’s protagonist lives a life story punctuated by his attempts to strike his own perspective into institutions and movements that would make him no more than a cog in their machines, a voiceless element in a larger plan. Invisible Man speaks to the irreducibility of an individual’s singularity in the face of wider social values, conventions, institutions, and structures. Just as The Stranger did. But in this regard (as well as differences in style and form), Invisible Man is the better book. After all, imagine if The Stranger’s protagonist was an Arab.

Invisible Man presents a protagonist with a very different type of story, more multifaceted in what kinds of incidents it includes and what kinds of people appear. It’s about someone who just wants to make a positive statement for himself, always with justice in mind, but who is overcome and silenced by his surroundings. Meursault does the same thing, but can only justify it through his individuality alone; separate from political contexts, he only has his raw singularity. That raw singularity is important to understand, but we in our lives have more than our singularity on which to draw. Ellison’s narrator has mobilized his political existence, his entanglement with the world, to justify the singularity of his existence with a power from which Meursault has separated himself: a call for justice.