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.

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

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.

(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 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”)??

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.

The [scientific] laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. (Pragmatism, p. 23)

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:

When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium. (Pragmatism, p. 25)

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?