Latour, Latour

Ok—to be very honest, I (like John), was overwhelmed by this week’s readings. Unlike
Lindsay or Nikki, I never got to a place of completely enjoying or wrapping my head
around Aramis. I hated—even resented Latour’s format—more so than when reading multi-genre novels that use various fonts, etc.

Overall, I struggle with Latour. I have wanted to understand his work from the time I first stumbled upon his Politics of Nature, a book in which Latour purportedly establishes the conceptual context for political ecology. Except now, I’m not sure what he means by “context.” In any case, in PON, Latour seeks to disabuse readers of their notion that political ecology has anything to do with “nature,” Which he dismisses as a jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism, and American parks” (from the book’s back cover [I never even got past the book’s intro and a cursory inspection of subsequent chapters of PON]). However, I did glean that Latour reads nature as a way of assembling political order rather than as a domain of the real. In fact, he claims that political ecology must relinquish “nature.” Explicitly, he says that “if ‘nature’ is what makes it possible to recapitulate the hierarchy of beings in a single ordered series, political ecology is always manifested in practice by the destruction of the idea of nature” ( p. 25).

Sorry for the digression into another of his texts, but I am relating this by way of an analogy as I try to understand his application to “technology” in Aramis, because in PO, Latour argues for the inclusion of nonhuman actors in an analysis of environmental and ecological issues. Because I am interested in environmental discourse(s), I have been frustrated when that when conducting Critical Discourse Analysis, nonhuman actors are never accounted for—even when they are manipulated within the discourse; while they are actors, they are never counted as actors because they are not human!

Back to what I am gleaning from Latour in Aramis: although Latour is a kind of social constructionist, he departs from SCs at just my last point: it does not account for inanimate or nonhuman objects or subjects (like plants or animals). But in reality, all these actors—which he calls actants—are recruited, almost hailed or interpellated (though not discursively) in the Althusserian sense, into a network. We should, however, not confuse this network with a web-like structure such as the Internet. IT is more like a jumble of marionettes, whose strings are entangled and pull on both one another and the puppeteers—animating all involved. So all intertwined actants work one another; none are privileged—not even the political—so no delimitation or delineation exists within the construct of the network among actants, network, artifacts, technology. I am guessing that is his same take on “nature.” (Interestingly, Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Botany of Desire makes a similar, if more poetic argument).

I am still working all this out in my head; it has not clicked completely fro me in terms of why this is so important vis a vis technology…but I am sometimes dull of mind. Van Ittersum brings it home for me much more solidly—if less “creatively” than Latour. I so struggle when someone like Latour or Eco weds theory with fiction.