tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post5086858093136699692..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: we fuse like a familyCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-5749805395280035202011-03-03T18:10:51.857-05:002011-03-03T18:10:51.857-05:00“The knowing self is partial in all its guises, ne...“The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.” <br />---Donna Haraway, ¨Situated Knowledges¨Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-80144280604604776442011-02-26T09:35:05.760-05:002011-02-26T09:35:05.760-05:00Eileen, I agree with you, Latour strives for "...Eileen, I agree with you, Latour strives for "better descriptions of the way the world work": but he is not reticent to say WHY such a "better" description might be desirable: such composition is future directed. <br /><br />I do get that in some of his writing Latour seems to be hovering above the fray, observing dispassionately the struggles of humans and things to form enduring networks and bring to life novel realities, but invariably towards the concluding moment a judgment arrives, always an ethical one. I'd point, too, to how deeply biblical many of Latour's metaphors and citations are (very unusual, in my opinion, among French writers). His Catholicism I think is a non-negligible component of his endeavors.<br /><br />_Reassembling the Social_ does have many explicitly ethical moments. _Pandora's Hope_ and the "Compositionist Manifesto" as well...Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65584971996235939472011-02-25T21:32:12.644-05:002011-02-25T21:32:12.644-05:00Jeffrey: thanks for the recent essay by Hache and ...Jeffrey: thanks for the recent essay by Hache and Latour, which I plan to read tonight [in a few minutes, actually]. After reading Harman's description of Latour's thinking in "Prince of Networks" this past Monday [pp. 11-95] and also having read Julian Yates's essay on oranges and "agentive drift," my students were actually wondering if there was a specific ethical bent to Latour's ideas about ANT, and they didn't think so, and so I went home and thought some more about that. I actually think theorists such as Jane Bennett and Timothy Morton actually address that issue more directly, and I have not read Latour as much as you [and keep in mind that I don't necessarily expect an ethics from Latour], but everyone always throws out the fact that Latour opens up/gestures toward the idea of, or necessity for, a "parliament of things," and maybe he does, but from what I've read, he seems to operate more as a sociologist who is simply rendering better descriptions of the way the world work [and which, in many of his descriptions, seems to be a very "thick" rendering of various asymmetrical and non-centralized arrangements of force, resistance, and politics: of things, persons, institutions, etc. So, I see Latour more as a sociologist/philosopher of science than I see him as offering any sort of ethical philosophy. But maybe really good descriptions of the world are the real beginning of ethics, more so than prescriptions for dispositions and actions that are often founded on everything we supposedly *don't* know. Morton, for example, very obviously under the influence of Levinas [who we all know I also love, but ....], says repeatedly in "The Ecological Thought," that since there are certain things we can never know [like the exact dimensions of self-reflection in, say, an ant], we have to proceed as if we are always responsible for others with whom we are "enmeshed," regardless of their status, as determined in some sort of human-centered system of description, vis-a-vis quality of sentience, etc.<br /><br />But now I'm going to sit down with that essay by Hache and Latour, anyway.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30820468750052691852011-02-25T14:34:34.074-05:002011-02-25T14:34:34.074-05:00Just wanted to add: this entry on my seminar is wo...Just wanted to add: this entry on my seminar is woefully incomplete, due mainly to being timed out in writing it on a very busy morning. That's why it ends so abruptly. As the accompanying picture suggests, we also did a unit on posthumanism, reading these essays from the inaugural postmedieval: Joy and Dionne; Allen; Harris; Yates; Steel. The last one stole the show and was the class favorite. It's a beautiful piece.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14971644252310386622011-02-25T08:05:09.535-05:002011-02-25T08:05:09.535-05:00Thanks for that thoughtful question, Dan.
I am n...Thanks for that thoughtful question, Dan. <br /><br />I am not comfortable with answering about ethics and Harman, yet; but then again I don't see ANT and Object Oriented Ontology as being the same thing. I have a much easier time speaking of Actor Network Theory and Bruno Latour, since that's a topic I've been working on more deeply and for quite some time. There comes a point in almost everything Latour has published when he lays out the stakes, and inevitably these involve bringing about a more just society, one in which the rights and interests of nonhumans are recognized, a democracy or parliament of things. Latour is a compositionist, not a constructivist: meaning that he doesn't trace how certain entities are culturally determined so much as show how they have been put together, and wonder if they might be better constructed. So much that is ethical rides on that "better."<br /><br />This morning I've been reading a tremendously good essay on ethics and objects that Latour co-wrote with Émilie Hache: "MORALITY OR MORALISM? An Exercise in Sensitization" from the journal Common Knowledge. You can download it <a href="http://commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/16/2/311" rel="nofollow">here</a> (warning: PDF). This lucid little piece makes the ethical stakes of ANT very clear indeed.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-46688904839577182912011-02-24T17:18:37.220-05:002011-02-24T17:18:37.220-05:00Jeffrey, I apologize out front for not being able ...Jeffrey, I apologize out front for not being able to articulate my concerns precisely at this point, but I'm taking your lovely pedagogical 'cri de couer' to heart myself and fighting my own sense of incompetence. This is where I'm struggling with ANT right now:<br /><br />"Actor Network Theory promises a more ethical mode of understanding the world; it is built upon the conviction that the political, the social, the natural need to be opened up, to become a democracy of people and things."<br /><br />I have no doubt that ANT opens up these arenas in exciting ways, and that the old dichotomies have to be uncorked into a new understanding of hybrid networks in which essentialist hierarchies (even contructionist-essentialist hierarchies!) have to be leveled through new conceptions of agency and mediation, but I'm not sure yet how these possibilities are opened by ANT per se, at least in my reading of Harman and Latour. The move toward networks from dichotomies and hierarchies is, I think, potentially though not necessarily ethical. <br /><br />I guess I'm wondering what 'moves' or 'mediation' it takes to go from ANT to ethics? Is it Harman's 'aesthetics as first philosophy,' his 'allure,' 'vicarious causation,' and 'tool-being' for example? <br /><br />I have to admit, though, that my reading is far from complete though I'm immensely excited by ANT's possibilities, particularly in regard to rethinking natality, infancy, and childhood - Andre Turmel's work is groundbreaking in that regard. (I'm making my way through Harman's reading of Levinas via Heidegger, 'natch, but I'm not sure Harman really gives Levinas's il y a its full resonance, which, I think, does not remain confined to the human though it does not level the human/object distinction as fully as Harman might like.) And I'm not sure in what way that leveling is also democratic, though it certainly brings to the fore much of what has remained hidden or unthought.<br /><br />Wonderful stuff, though. The last time my head felt like this was when I first started reading Foucault all those years ago, and then Derrida. The neuropsych folks keep telling us the brain is plastic, though mine is melted these days, in the best ways. <br /><br />dkline<br /><br />BTW, 'the leftovers of Toni Morrison's birthday cake' moving from the Library of Congress? There's a book right there.dtklinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14754509776199786016noreply@blogger.com