----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 1:02 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Bruno Latour on post-post-modernism
[From the April 2004 _Harpers_. Originally excerpted from the Winter 2004 issue of _Critical Inquiry_.]
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What has become of critique, I wonder, when an editorial in the New York Times contains the following quotation from Republican strategist Frank Luntz:
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"Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."
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http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2003/2003-November/027744.html
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Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show "the lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not try to fool the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument -- or did I? I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. But was I mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
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Well, the democratization of Pyrrhonism is tough to control, no?
Perhaps the danger no longer stems from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact -- which we have learned to combat so efficiently -- but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases. While we spent years trying to detect the prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the objective and, incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? Entire Ph.D. programs are running to ensure that good American kids learn that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same arguments to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?
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Ah, the prisoners of language metaphor. Perhaps part of the troubles can be traced back to:
Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation: but "nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly as though - why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law; nature is no different in that respect, no better off than we are" - a fine instance of ulterior motivation, in which the plebian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic as well as a second and more refined atheism are disguised once more. "Ni Dieu, ni maître" - that is what you, too, want; and therefore "cheers for the law of nature!" - is it not so? But as said above, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same "nature" and with regard to the same phenomena rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power - an interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all "will to power" so vividly that almost every word, even the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually sound unsuitable, or a weakening and attenuating metaphor -being too human - but he might, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary'' and "calculable" course, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. Supposing that this also is only interpretation - and you will be eager enough to make this objection - well so much the better. http://users.compaqnet.be/cn127103/Nietzsche_beyond_good_and_evil/bge_ch1_on_the_prejudices_of_philosophers.htm
Should I reassure myself by simply saying that the bad guys make use of any weapon at hand, naturalized facts or social construction, as it suits them? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to critique itself and do a bit of soul searching -- what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of facts? Nothing guarantees, after all, that we should be right all the time. There is no sure ground, even for criticism. Isn't this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this argument is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as a justification for destroying the things we cherish?
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Welcome to the death of God, dude.
"Deep seated preferences cannot be argued about -you can not argue a man into liking a glass of beer- and therefore, when differences are sufficiently far reaching, we try to kill the other man rather than let him have his way. But that is perfectly consistent with admitting that, so far as it appears, his grounds are as good as ours." [Oliver Wendell Holmes]
Artificially maintained controversies are not the only worrying sign.
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Ah, but who said "the truth is what makes you money"? The exchange value of professorial controversies ensure a steady flow knowledge rents, no?
What has critique become when Jean Baudrillard argues that the twin towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, undermined by the nihilism inherent in capitalism itself, that the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the attraction of this black hole of nothingness?
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Just another commodity, that's what.
What has become of critique when a bestseller can claim that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon?
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It's got a long way to go before it catches up with the "Left Behind" series and it'll never catch the Bible or the Koran........Perhaps a rereading of Kant and another long attempt at dismantling the fantasy of theism is in order; after all there's only so much one can say/write about bubble chambers, test tubes and other lab technologies as well as science as a networking and labor process. Perhaps we could move to Virginia, or Tennessee, or Texas and go after the tenured theologians and biblical apologists?
Are we like mad scientists who have loosed the virus of critique and now cannot do anything as it mutates, gnawing up everything, even the vessels in which it is contained? Or is it another case of the famed power of capitalism to recycle everything aimed at its destruction? If the dense and moralist cigar-smoking reactionary bourgeois can transform him- or herself into a free-floating agnostic bohemian, moving opinions, capital, and networks from one end of the planet to the other without attachment, why would he or she not be able to absorb the most sophisticated tools of deconstruction, social construction, discourse analysis, postmodernism?
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Commodification is their absolute and exchange value is their prophet.
I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to regret what I have done. My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, because of a little mistake in the definition of our main target. The question was never to get away from facts but to get closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing it.
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Wrong path, when there are countless combinatorics of possible paths in socio-ecological space-time? Which one is the right one. There was no fall, there is no spirit, there is no target. Oh, and there's no guarantee empiricism will be any better as an antidote to nihilism than theism.
The critical mind, if it is to be relevant again, must devote itself to the cultivation of a stubborn realism, but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's attention toward the conditions that made them possible. But this meant accepting too uncritically what matters of fact are. Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are only very partial and very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern. It is this second empiricism, this return to a realist attitude, that I'd like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.
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Devotion is for religion. Aren't we over such rhetoric yet? The metaphor of moving to and from facts and the accompanying pathos of distance is.........quaint. One can't help see in the quest for a return to realism yet another iteration on the tread mill of trying to find/create the final word[s]; the argument stopper that simultaneously leads your antagonist to forego reaching for *his* gun and to offer his hand in peace, accepting that the mouth-brain-cum-body is indeed mightier than all the weapons that are our greatest expressions of agression, fear and hate.
"But truth has no value apart from whatever is built, destroyed, sustained, or impeded with what passes for true. Truth has no power of its own, no utopian potential, no affinity for good, and will not make us free." [Barry Allen]
Whereas the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact -- which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions -- it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge to an ethos that adds reality to matters of fact and does not subtract from it?
<end excerpt>
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Is the will to love more interesting than the will to power?
Ian
"Listen should we fight forever "knowing as we do know "fear destroys" [Anderson, Squire & Howe]