February 15, 2007
Latour, Dewey and Concept work
I’ve just come off of a week of discussions with Bruno Latour, (more on that over here) who was a “distinguished visitor” for a week. In particular, I roped him into teaching in my class on the topic of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems and Lippman’s The Phantom Public. The discussion was electrifying, not least because Latour has recently read both books extremely carefully. His current work, which is increasingly in the domain of metaphysics, takes the Dewey-Lippman debate as an occasion for theorizing “political truth”–or the possibility of achieving a distinctive form of truth in politics. The diagnosis and critique from which PP proceeds is the debate with Lippmann on the status of publics and public opinion. Contrary to the wikipedia version of things, it’s clear that there is more agreement than disagreement between these two, and the Lippmann is almost as radical a thinker (perhaps more) than Dewey. Lippmann is usually branded as a conservative, a theorist of elitist democracy–but he was as much a pragmatist as Dewey, it was only his solutions that differed. Latour gave a fantastic lecture on the debate.
Reading it apropos of ARC, Dewey’s book contains a prescription of something not unlike the “concepts” and concept labor discussed by ARC. Here is a salient quote that gives a sense of how familiar the language is: “Our central need [is] to possess conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use.”(168) Lifted from context such a claim can sound exactly as postivistic and methodologically narrow as the worst kind of naive realism. As with most of Dewey, however, there is subtlety everywhere. In the case of PP, the question of “concepts” is not the center–rather the practice of “inquiry” is, especially what he calls “social inquiry.” Dewey’s logical theory, his experience-based system also referenced by the term “inquiry” (as in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) is extended in PP to include a range of forms of “social inquiry”–journalism, social science, and expertise more generally. It’s purpose however is more than just the scholastic test-and-refine version of concepts familiar to most economists and political scientists–it’s purpose is the production of political truth that leads to the discovery of the state, necessitated by the empirical fact of our complex entanglements with each other, and the unintended consequences thereof.
Social inquiry proceeds amidst a broken system of media reporting and propaganda–the news media cannot turn “sensations” into “perceptions”, so this is the task of social inquiry. The practical prescriptions that attend to this are akin to current demands for “open access”: “There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on public affairs (166).” Without that baseline publicity, there is every reason for individuals and collectives to take advantage of the differential access to the results of social inquiry. A social inquiry that is available only to experts in DC, for instance, is useless, regardless of how accurate or correct or scientifically sophisticated it is.
The fact that Dewey suggests that inquiry lead to cocenpts that “grow in actual use” is also a kind of radical departure from our contemporary status quo: concepts are not “critques” of practice, they do not undermine, unmask, reveal or deconstruct. Rather they are fundamentally meant to be like tools (’equipment’ in Paul’s sense) which connect the ceaseless production of sensations related to a particular issue (stem cells, for instance) into meaningful perceptions that allow a public to attach meanings to events, and to form attachments that are good rather than bad, with respect to contemporary events.
The down side of Dewey’s public, however, is that it is so eerily familiar. My students all agreed that his descriptions of the “Great Society” (read, globalization avant le lettre) sound exactly like the present–except that things today are much worse, much more entangled, much less amenable to an optimistic faith in “social inquiry.” Nonetheless, there is a germ of a possible renewal of pragmatism here–or rather, more specifically, a renewal of Dewey’s theory of logical inquiry or James’ radical empiricism (in order to avoid dead-ends like Rorty), that might be brought into productive engagement with the questions raised in ARC. Is social inquiry similar to collaborative conceptual labor? Is “inquiry” a better term for what ties these collaborations together than “research” or “fieldwork” or “ethnography?” especially if it is given the force that dewey gives it as a version of experience-based logical inquiry? Dewey’s attentiveness to experience as a necessary feature of thinking seems to share much with the “contemporary”…
Obviously, I think Dewey is just dreamy. What about you?
[...] [1]Dewey, John, The Public and it’s Problems, Swallow Press 1954 [1927] p. 166. About which I have more to say, e.g. here. [...]
Anthropos Today has a discussion of Dewey and Foucualt. “Marking Time” does as well.
The ARC has a whole section devoted to concept work.
But when it comes down to the aura of the SunKing from Paris all else fades.
I guess, Collier is right, none of these fields is where our work belongs.
Reading your recent postings I somehow get the idea that you are arguing that confusion is the same as fusion or inversely that making analytical distinctions necessarily implies empirical dissociations.
I increasingly think that the real challenge of science studies, worth its mettle, is to critique the real backbone(s) of science : (i) mathematics which is purely esoteric, is about true and false, and makes all advances in thought and action possible, and on the other hand, (ii) technology, purely exoteric, is about good and bad, and it works; it is wholly efficacious.
If we remember that the value of any explanation is when it can admit both what it posits to explain, ‘X’, and its opposite, ‘Y’, and if we then take Dewey’s approach as (i) a general description of human action, (ii) an inquiry proceeding from a sense of discordance and (iii) where knowledge/concepts are born from practical experience, can we critique algebra or geometry whose strength lies in its feat of abstractions and its ability to be dissociated with particular entities ? (Whitehead’s example : when we think of the number 7, we get rid of the particular instances, 7 days or 7 birds, and abstract from any consideration of particular experiences and think of it as pure generality.)
Even going outside of numbers, I am just trying to think of all those cases where a thought was proposed even before a problem, whether practical or otherwise, was in sight. Riemann made elegant formulations in differential geometry even BEFORE an application for his theory was found (later found to be the prop for Einstein’s relativity theory). Or as Leibniz wrote that Euclid furnishes an elaborate proof for something that even a fool is not ignorant of, viz., in a triangle the sum of two sides is greater than the third side.
Either we concede that (a) mathematics is outside of any social inquiry or critique (in which case I don’t know what the big claim about opening the “black-box” of science was that science studies made) or (b) we admit that Dewey’s approach is not so general (in which case one could ask why should his approach be any more relevant for social inquiry than a purely positivist methodology). Similarly, for technological applications, how does one critique technology other than denunciation or the option of saying it does not work ??
My aim in posting this comment is just to highlight the significance of experiment along with experience in comprehending political truth as much as nanotechnology/synthetic biology.
I’m still trying to digest everything in Chris’ two posts, so for now I’m only going to comment on the comment:
I’m going to interpret the “Sun King” comment as part of your critique of Latour’s sovreigntist tendancies, Paul, although I think it would be beneficial to us all if we could expand on exactly what that means.
I would start with how this kind of concept work does or does not implicate itself in both the object and analysis… “Adjacency” is the term we’ve been throwing around. I think this is really important for sussing out what is distinctive about the ARC approach and, ultimately what our various conversations about mode/method/movement (currently unfolding on all three ARC blogs) are circling around.
For example: clearly Chris has pointed out several elements of Latour’s work that have striking resonances with our own (seemingly the same objects, the same organization of empirical inquiry and concept work, much of the same intellectual genealogy); the difference (if any) seems to lay somewhere near the M/M/M question. How do we begin to talk about this?
Arpita– these are great questions–difficult indeed for pragmatism to deal effectively with, but not impossible, I think. The case of mathematics is an excellent one. Most versions of pragmatism are content to collapse ideas into the realm of things we experience–i.e. to insist on their empirical character. To the extent that mathematicians understand mathematical objects as ideas that help them do something (i.e. create other ideas) then pragmatism is just as good an explication of that activity as rationalism. So, in this sense, even the pure generality of number is just one kind of idea that helps move things to the next level, as it were. Actually, James has a nice, if simplistic, statement of this:
By this logic, there is no reason at all why mathematics would be outside of inquiry or critique–it is just as much a body of ideas and concepts accreted through the work and experience of mathematicians as any other realm of science or knowledge–and not at all “the backbone of science.” The statement that it “makes all advances in thought and action possible” doesn’t make sense to me…
I also come at this from the perspective of the problem of computers–devices that are both mathematical and technological–so the esoteric/exoteric thing doesn’t hold at all–at least not for any kind of experience or experiment since 1950. Prior to that it might be possible to think of mathematics and technology as opposed–but a pragmatic approach would probably see much more imbrication, much more. Here is James again, making a similar claim:
kevin– I won’t speak for Latour, sun king or not, my post was about Dewey, and merely occasioned by the burgundian glow that darkens Paul’s world. In the case of Dewey, AS I THINK PAUL HAS CLEARLY SHOWN IN HIS WORK BEFORE LATOUR OR ANYONE ELSE (LET IT BE KNOWN!), there is a great deal in common with the approach of ARC, the concept of adjacency, and the debate about the role and fabrication of concepts. I think I should stress a bit that Dewey’s book on the concept of the Public is a later statement than the one Rabinow uses in Anthropos today, and much more directly engaged with the problem of “social” inquiry as something much more than simply the activity of philosophers or social sciences.
Dewey’s dream of an “experimental” discovery of the state by a public is related to the necessity of constituting a form of social inquiry that is different than the mere circulation of information. For a public to exist, to be authentic and to come to power, it must have access not only to information, but it must have ways of understanding it that are stable (produce the experience of continuity in social affairs) and that transform new events (sensations, as in sensationalist reporting in the news) into perceptions that can be used to direct the inquiry of that public into the issues that brought it into being. Hence, adjacency is a sine qua non, precisely because it is an empirical fact of our modern world: we happen to be engaged in inquiry along side all kinds of other inquirers–but what we lack are sophisticated ways of resisting the relentless production of mere sensations, and instead directing all social inquirers towards a shared set of “perceptions” (concepts, perhaps) that are useful for directing public responses to new issues. whew.
Excellent clarification – many thanks, Prof Kelty – but, as should be the case, it raises further questions. Hopefully you will not find my posts too tedious to reply to.
I agree that objects are all imbricated together (though don’t know if it is increasingly so after 1950s or has always been the case) but can we stop our analysis there ?
Shouldn’t we instead ask what is the specific logic by which things come together (or go apart). For instance, Roman Jakobson elaborated on 2 kinds of connections : If I say “you are as brave as a lion” then language/culture is positing a connection between two different classes of objects or contexts, lion and bravery, through a logic of similarity or resemblance (metaphor). If, on the other hand, I say “the White House issued a statement”, then instead of writing the President issued a statement, I use a term that is proximate, or in the same context, and thus make a link based on the logic of proximity, and/or distance (metonymy)….
(i) To say that technology, like computers or robotics, (as you point out) brings together mathematics, aesthetics, functional design, etc is NOT sufficient without specifying exactly what kind of synthesis is being achieved. (And for this, or any other kind of explanation, making analytical distinctions, in the first place, are just as necessary.) We should ask ourselves what is an assemblage - an additive synthesis of elements a+b+c ….n (in a mechanical sense) or what is the nature of transformations that relations undergo during synthesis (in some structuralist way) or is there some “dialectical unity” (in the old fashioned Hegelian sense) etc etc.
[It is on such grounds that I sometimes find Bruno Latour’s work to be superfluous; it is just description with very little offered by way of analysis, or rather it is not generative of further analysis.]
(ii) At what level are we seeing the imbrications – are we interested in the production (of modernity, innovations, technology or whatever) like Weber, Durkheim or Marx or are we focusing on the processes of dispersion or consumption to find the presumed fusion of opposed ideas ?
(ii) What is the overall rationality that is in operation in fusing objects/ideas ? Is it one of “expediency”, the end justifies the means as necessary if undesirable (as pragmatism would most clearly recognize) ? Or is it one of “technicism”, the means justifies the end as desirable though not necessary. My favorite example of this, and which I cite many times, is the following : Madonna refashions new personas of herself EVEN when previous ones are hugely successful (and NOT from any sense of failure or discordance). There is no need or use there but it draws our attention to the symbolic or expressive aspect of things. Can a Deweyan explanation account for symbolic action other than by reducing it to pragmatics, the way you interpret Dewey in your post while replying to me that mathematicians recognize that their ideas have further use in expressing other or richer ideas (“mathematicians understand mathematical objects as ideas that help them do something (i.e. create other ideas”)??
I offer just a modest — perhaps clarifying — comment on the somewhat heated debate about Dewey. I hope it’s coherent (I am terribly sick).
(1) I do not think that science studies is anthropology. And I do not think that Latour is an anthropologists (anthropology is about the other).
(2) One might doubt, perhaps, if Latour is bringing social theory into the 21st century. One could reasonably claim the opposite: His approach is classical ethnography, namely the insight that “nature” is part of society and that we moderns forgot — for this seems to constitute Modernity for him — what all others have always known: we have to include the hybrids, otherwise we’re ruined. Another comment on the same point: Paul has frequently mentioned that Latour is a Saint Simonian, he is interested in the government of man and things (cf. the first pages of French Modern). From such a perspective, it is not quite clear what’s 21st century about Latour. It is rather 19th century ethnography and sociology.
(3) Chris writes about Latour: “I see him as the consummate fieldworker—someone for whom the constant, shocking, unpredictable flow of events is experienced as such, as wonders and as changes, and not as a constant test of his theories—theories which he is happy to abandon if the changing world so demands it.” Given what I wrote above — and I may say that I have discussed these question at length with Latour in Paris, where I met him regularly — I find it difficult to relate this to Latour. Latour does not change his theory. In fact, his theory (I would say) has remained almost exactly the same throughout his career (in which book would he be fieldworker? In Lab Life? In Pasteurization? Where?). Furthermore, one could say that he has no theory — he has an ontology. He has ontologized his method (cf. Paul’s essay “Epochs, Presents, Events”), hence he knows how the world is. Therefore he is into politics now: In order to go into politics one needs to be convinced that one knows the right thing to do).
(4) Why does Dewey matter to Latour (or the Dewey-Lippman debate)? Answer: Since “We have never been modern” Latour is interested in the conjuncture of metaphysics and politics, specifically with the question of how to constitute a public in which man, things, animals, etc. figure equally prominent. We all know Latour’s idea of a parliament of things, of a political ecology, of his felt need to make cows join the political realm, etc. It seems to me as if Chris and his students picked up this interest in the political and focused on: the public, the relation between nanotech and public (which is a relation between science and society), on the role of social science for the constitution of such a public.
(5) Why would Paul — and with him all of those interested in an anthropology of reason or in fieldwork in philosophy — be interested in Dewey? Answer: Dewey opens up a possibility to anthropologically study thinking (what Paul once called fieldwork in philosophy). A given situation, perhaps due to an event, enters into a state of disequilibrium. In Dewey’s words, factors or elements of a situation become “discordant.” The consequence is the need to rethink a situation. Perhaps this is best explained in relation to Paul’s work on technicians of general ideas. Who does rethink a situation? How? How are new ideas institutionalized or translated into a new infrastructure? Are new categories or classifications emerging? Do things appear in a new light? Such questions are the background — if I may speak for them — to the work of Steve and Andy on VSS, to Carlo’s work on avian flue, to Lyle’s work on Syndromic Surveillance, etc. It is a variation of “an anthropology of thinking,” for one tries to anthropologically discover and analyze the rise of new modes of thoughs. The focus is, perhaps, a Foucauldian one: an event changes the categories or patterns that structure our thought — not in the abstract (as philosophy) but concrete (administration, infrastructure, etc.) In short: Dewey is not central because of his philosophy (this would be Rorty, read Dewey on Education and Democracy and engage his philosophical claims) but because of the tools he offers to those who try to practice “fieldwork in philosophy.” I might add here: Concept formation is not just interesting because social scientists have to formulate concepts. Reflections on concept formations are interesting as well — perhaps even more so — because they potentially offer ways for analyzing the coming into existence of new (or the composition of old) concepts — concepts that structure our thoughts about a given domain (in addition to Dewey one could mention Weber or Canguilhem or Bachelard or Hacking, Daston, Rheinberger, etc.).
(6) So how would one anthropologically approach nanotech or synthetic biology? One possibility — and I think this is Chris’s focus and explains his interest in Latour and in Dewey — is the focus on the public, on the role of social science for informing the public, for contributing to a politically just (or better) relation between science and society (by the way, the work of Warner and Povinelli on publics seems anthropologically and analytically more pertinent than Latour’s). Another possible anthropological approach to synthetic biology (or nanotech) could be described as anthropology of reason (or as historical epistemology or as historical ontology). Nanotech or synthetic biology then do matter because here new things come into existence, things which require new modes of thinking in order to be comprehended — new modes of thinking which alter (or change) the ways we have thought hitherto. In Dewey’s words: a stable situations has entered a state of flux. Where will this motion lead to? Can we practice an analysis of/in terms of movement?
(7) So we have here two fundamentally different approaches (and hence two fundamentally different ways of engaging Dewey). On the one hand Latour: Latour already knows how the world really is — only the circumstances (say from mythology to genomics to tissue engineering to nanotech) change in his scheme but never the scheme as such (the scheme of integrating nature and culture and making hybrids part of politics) — and thus relies on a stable ontology. On the other hand Berkeley (if I may say so): In Berkeley the focus is one events or developments in which the schema and with it the things change their form and their dynamic. Hence, one practices a certain variation of a historical ontology. Said in yet another way, Paul and others are interested in events that change the scheme in such a way that the already known no longer offers solutions.
(8) Finally — I am not against Latour. I think highly of his work and found, in my work, that he offers valuable insight. I merely tried to outline differences in attitude and approach.
I hope no one else is experiencing this as a “heated” debated… to me it feels considerably more temperate than most blog discussions. It’s the nature of the medium–and one that takes getting used to… In any case, it’s clear that I probably shouldn’t have invoked the name of Voldemort in this context, since it inflames the passions and clouds the brain with visions of mortal struggle and irreconciliability… but thank you Tobias
I should say that the notion of doing “fieldwork in philosophy” is exactly the same phrase Latour used to describe his own work– so lest we be reduced to debating who is actually doing what they think they are actually doing, I prefer to see it as a methodist/anabaptist split, rather than the “fundamentally different approach”. A certain amount of sectarianism is healthy, but too much is counter-productive.
1. fair enough, you probably wouldn’t think I’m an anthropologist
either. Alas…
2. actually, here is another place where i’m informed by Rabinow’s approach as much as Latour. I think both are keen to develop *new*
concepts and new tools for approaching the contemporary (i.e. to insist that there is progress in ethics and ontology, just as much as in science and technology)–and together in being opposed to the kinds of tools and concepts that dominate the great bulk of social science in their scientistic and technicist approach to problem-solving. Again, more similarity than difference measured against the vast swath of social science research.
3. Aha! I see something to agree with here: There is something troubling about the fact that Latour seems not to be changing his theories… I agree that he has “ontologized his method” and indeed, when I teach Latour, I frequently insist that ANT is not a theory, but just a method… and what good is having only a different method? However, I think the feeling of sameness comes from the rhetorical style, the strawmen he repeatedly attacks and, yes from the “classical” insistence that nature is also part of society. He certainly isn’t doing historical ontology of the sort that I associate with Foucault, or with Hacking. On the flip side, when he insists that “we have never been modern” this is not an ontological claim–it’s pure negativity. The onus is on him to develop a theory of what we *have* been. And it is here that I *do* see development in the long career of his work, most recently in his attempts to develop a kind of metaphysics around the ways truth appears in diverse realms–scientific, legal, politcial etc.– I don’t see a demonstration of sameness in each domain, but a developing sensitivity to differences in truth conditions. Of course, that’s all in the future though–and perhaps I will have less faith when I get there.
4. Yes, exactly. the public is the core problem of political truth, and of a theory of democracy and science, so yes, this is one reason I think Dewey (and in particular, the Dewey of the Dewey-Lippman debate) is central. Latour is far from the only person to have noticed this– however it is peculiar that this debate is so badly historicized and so generally unknown in America… but that’s a tangent.
5. This is a nice clarification. Two things: one is that the problem of the public in The Public and its Problems is not about individual thought and thinking–but about “social inquiry”– or “social intelligence”– a problem Dewey came to later, I think, and never quite formalized the way he did his experimental logic. Thus, the reason I am interested in Dewey here is to understand not only thinking and how thinking proceeds to produce concepts, but to understand how the publicization of thinking works–and how the “agencies of publication” circulate and standardize, or make discordant, existing concepts. I agree that concept formation happens beyond social scientists, and is therefore open to reflections–but I’m also trying to point the way here to understanding how concepts move and reproduce–which is perhaps why Latour and ANT strike me as one of the few possible alternatives. Okay maybe only one thing.
6. yes. yes. Definitely yes on Warner, my jury is hung on povinelli. And yes this is one reason why the nanotech/synthbio comparison is so timely–because it is not only about the problem of life which Paul is so ably handling, but also about the problem of “science and society”–or following dewey (and noortje marres’ interpretation), the ways in which issues like nano do or do not “spark a public into being”–and the ways in which social inquiry guides the “new modes of thinking” that are needed. I should say also, that I come to this primarily through thinking about open source/free software and how it “makes things public”… but that is another book…
7. again, i totally fail to see “fundamental difference” here. I see differences, for sure, and that is a good thing… but there’s far more similarity in terms of the need for consolidating the kinds of approaches to the problem of theorizing the public, the relations of science and society, or the practice of “fieldwork in philosophy”… and if Berkeley has the monopoly on historical ontology, or even one of its variants, then I’m siding with the anti-trust division of the Department of Conceptual Justice…
8. by the same token, I’m not a Latourian… but I’m enough of one to see that “extending the network” is more powerful than carving it up–so I like highlighting the similarities…
9. get well soon.
Arpita… your questions get more difficult with each response… I’m not sure I can do them justice in this forum. However, just one clarification:
Pragmatism, as a philosophical movement, opposed itself to rationalism as a philosophy that could explain meaning in experience… rationalism by contrast, especially the heavily theological and scholastic forms that James and Dewey associate with Hegel’s followers, was critiqued primarily for its over-aestheticization of analytic distinctions, distinctions that pragmatism saw as effectively irrelevant to life, and the living thereof. So to the extent that mathematicians (or philosophers) make irrelevant distinctions, pragmatism is essentially saying “so what?” and refusing to talk. But by the same token, pragmatism is not at all opposed to analytic distinctions, only to the mode of verification: which difference makes a difference?
There is much more to say about the relationship between mathematical practice and the invention and development of computers (to say nothing of the personas of Madonna), but probably not in this thread… but you’ve got me thinking…thanks
You have been very gracious in replying to my long and convoluted posts. These posts, back and forth, have helped me bring some clarity to my thoughts. Thank you for tolerating my nonsense so far.
This is interesting, and lively, and helpful. Here are a few minor considerations:
As Chris points out, pragmatism places the work of concepts in the domain of the experiential. I agree. The problem, however, is that there may also be a tendency in pragmatism to reduce the experiential to the functional. As Arpita reminds us, the functional is only one way (albeit a powerful (and very American) one) of relating things. And as Paul points out in Anthropos Today, what is missing in pragmatism is a consideration of power. Finally, there is Foucault’s idea that concept work is closely related to work on the self. The telos, accordingly, might include both, rectification and self-transformation in situations that are always already pre-figured and pre-occupied. So maybe that’s what one might mean by remediation: a work on a given problematic situation that goes along with a work on the self.
The other question that Chris raises is also very interesting. What characterizes a public in the sense of Dewey, and how is it different from the governmental simulation of society through procedures of “public consultation” that are currently invading the Euro-American world. In the domain of pandemic preparedness there is a lot of work going into engaging the public. I have not yet figured out my position regarding this effort.
As to politics, my sense is that Latour’s approach is ultimately fundamentally anti-political. If everybody and everything should be allowed to enter the parliament of things there is not difference anymore that makes a difference. Similar with science: I tend to agree with Weber that science is not a democracy but an aristocracy.
It is also, at least ideally, a question of accountability. If experts fail when it comes to the safety of a vaccine they can be held accountable (at least ideally…). Also, experts have to offer an argument, while a democratic decision doesn’t need to be based on any kind argument or reason. What counts is the procedure. A democratic decision can only be valid or invalid, but not true or false.
[...] event is Chris’ recent posts on Latour’s visit to Rice, and the subsequent discussions both here and on Savage Minds. Chris’ post is a useful instigation for collective discussion and [...]