i am in the midst of bruno latour's an inquiry into the modes of existence (perhaps not the most prepossessing title the world had ever known). now, latour is the, say, living intellectual master for whose work i feel the most affinity. in one way it's pretty easy to say why: he makes the simple, completely necessary move of replacing the social within what i would call and what he would sometimes call a material world. the ontology of ant (actor-network theory) is close to mine in entanglements, etc. i love also his conceptiion of and relation to rationality; he's actually fundamentally engaged in both a rational critique and critique of rationality (he wouldn''t like 'critique' maybe).
also i like his writing on several grounds. he's lively as hell; the stuff is always studded with examples, sudden felicitous crystallizations, surprising juxtapositions. his prose is relatively clear, perhaps clearer than the ideas at key junctures; well, that is unusual in a fashionable french intellectual!
but i am going to say that i am a bit let down so far by this book, presented as a sort of magnum opus. i'm not sure that ultimately he has got beyond where he has been, even though again and again as always the insights flash from the material and the method. but what is new is a kind of quasi-technical apparatus describing the 'modes' or existence or 'verediction', such as the political, the religious, the legal, the scientific, and so on. really it's a plea for epistemic pluralism, for different modes of truth in different domains. but latour ends up deploying dozens of technical terms, three-letter abbreviations, etc (presented in charts at the end, e.g.). i don't think that this machine adds anything fundamental; it just sort of quasi-legitimates what is a considerably more...poetic approach as a logic, a weight it can't ultimately bear.
also, one of latour's less charming tics is on display here quite a bit: he spends at least as much time telling you the amazing things that he (or 'we') are going to do than actually doing them, and he leaves you wondering over and over what exactly he has done. now on the other hand, even here i take a sensual delight in reading him, and i propose after trying it the other way round a bit to release the technical apparatus and rest content with sentences or paragraphs where the old latour technique and voice and thrown around with improvisational impudence and also profundity.
it's not that i doubt that there is a series of thoughts underneath latour that can be rendered rigorous. nor do i think that that couldn't be a worthwhile project. but still it is a question whether latour's thoughts on "the anthropology of the moderns" are best schematized at all or best schematized in a way such as this. and still and all, i don't think latour's thought is as rigorous as he consistently presents it as being. but it is more profound than he presents it as being too (e.g. this is not about the anthropology of the moderns - whatever that means exactly - but about the nature of the universe and the human relation to it).
it's funny but you just have to reach for sources of authority, for a voice that legitimates its assertions, a place to speak from authoritatively. now one thing i do really like about latour is that he is remarkably playful, multiply ironic, with regard to his own authorial stance. yet still he takes up that stance, and one thing it always says is: stand back, i am about to unveil the nature of science, or whatever it may be. then there are myriad preparations, which often get you in the old-fashioned way to see through the concepts in terms of which the question was formulated, or to regard them geneologically, etc.
alright! here is just the sort of thing i do love about latour, though:
The anthropologist of the Moderns thus has to get used to living in a cloud of dust, since those whom she is studying always seem to live amid ruins: the ruins they have just toppled, the ruins of what they had put up in place of the ones they toppled, ruins that others, for the same reason, are preparing to destroy. Mantegna's Saint Sebastian in the Louvre, pierced by arrows, his corpse already stony, upright on a pedestal at the foot of which lie the idols of the gods he has just sacrificed, the whole framed by the arch of one of those Roman ruins so admired during the Renaissance - this is the sort of emblem we confront when we approach the tribe of taboo-breakers. Or the astonishing film that ran in the Iconoclash exhibit, showing the consecration of the church of Christ the Savior in Moscow, performed by popes and patriarchs in clouds of god and incense (this was from the early days of cinema), then the destruction of the church of Christ the Savior by the Bosheviks in clouds of dust, followed by construction of a Soviet swimming pool, followed at once by its destruction, in new clouds of dust, which permitted the construction of a facsimile of the church of Christ the Savior, once again consecrated, a century later, by Orthodox bishops, once again gleaming with gold and precious stones. . . . Have you ever come across a critical mind that was secularized? (An Inquiry into the Modes Of Existence, 168-69)
