speaking of Hird

She’ll be appearing AT OXFORD NEXT WEEK with Lynn Margulis and other interesting speakers. I thought about going, but have a final exam and six Dean candidates to help interview.

first reference

The first published reference to Prince of Networks appears in an article by MYRA HIRD, a very productive and interesting sociologist based in Canada.

Hird, M. J. “Coevolution, Symbiosis and Sociology.” Ecological Economics In Press, Corrected Proof.

“My research is engaged in thinking through two implications of bacterial symbioses for ecology and sociology. First, the proportional representation of ANT’s parliament of things – microbes, fungi, flora and nonhuman animals occupy the bulk of the biospheric parliament – is all but entirely absent from current sociological formulations of ecology. As Harman puts it ‘all reality is political, but not all politics is human’ (Harman, forthcoming, p. 118).”

This touches on a point that is always important to remember about Latour. For instance, when he says “there is no difference between might and right,” this could be read as reducing reality to human politics, but only if one forgets that for Latour “might” refers equally to the force of soldiers, aircraft, Thomas Hobbes, priests, comets, and tsunamis. “Might” does not just mean human political violence for Latour.

If there’s a problem with this view, it lies not in the (completely non-Latourian) view that reality is arbitrarily constructed by human power dynamics, but in the fact that “might” for Latour is always purely relational. It is might only as exercised here and now, with no residue lying outside.

ADDENDUM: This was not sent to me by Hird herself or by a personal friend of hers, so I assume it must be publicly accessible.

Gibbon quote for the day. May 19.

Gibbon is really good. It seems to me that Poe was right that Gibbon’s strong suit (concision) and weakness as a writer (artificiality) both come from his need to compress very complicated issues into just a few sentences. But has anything better ever been written about Augustus Caesar than this passage? It’s hard to do this much psychology in just a few lines.

“The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition, prompted him at the age of nineteen to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside. With the same hand, and probably with the same temper, he signed the proscription of Cicero and the pardon of Cinna. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial; and according to the varied dictates of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the father, of the Roman world.”

time for a/c

Speaking of frightening, it’s already feeling like a brutal Cairo summer is headed our way. It’s pretty oppressive tonight, on May 19.

I grew up in a place where May meant beautiful springtime. But early in my second semester in Cairo, during my second Arabic class, we had an exercise where we had to classify the months by their seasons. I classed May under spring, and was mocked by the Arabic teacher for doing so. I was a bit taken aback, and had no idea what she was talking about. But once May 2001 arrived, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

The months in Cairo usually go roughly as follows:

January-February are a sort of paradise. The weather is crisp and cool, the pollution is lower than usual, and it feels great to be alive. (The last two Februarys have been cold, but I hope that was a brief anomaly in the climate.)

March is the beginning of the sandstorm season, which carries on into April.

Then the summer begins in May, extending into early September. During July/August it’s hard to walk far without carrying a bottle of water, and one usually goes through 3 shirts in a day.

October/November are pleasant, and December often feels to me like the coldest month. I tried to make it through my first Cairo winter without even a jacket, but shortly after Christmas that became impossible.

Furthermore, since the winters aren’t all that bad, heating is usually quite poor in public buildings. It’s simply not worth the investment. For this reason we were told to expect the winters to be harder to deal with in Egypt than the summers. And that is arguably true, though perhaps a bit of an exaggeration.

If I were independently wealthy and could move around the globe throughout the year as I pleased, I might well choose Egypt as my annual January-February home. That’s when visits are probably most advisable.

And it barely ever rains. Some Cairenes contradict me whenever I say that, but I think they’re simply wrong. For all practical purposes, it never really rains. Once in awhile a sudden drizzle will catch me in the open, but rarely does it last for more than 15 minutes.

response to Levi on causation

A more fruitful discussion is possible with Levi Bryant, whose LARVAL SUBJECTS blog has been home to a frightening level of productivity recently.

I’m being a bit lazy by reposting blog comments here, I know, but it’s been a really draining week, and will only get worse next week as all the Dean candidates come to town.

“I think Graham has gotten some of the issues with bi-directional causality right in a way similar to what you seem to be alluding to here. If A and B, in your example, are nothing but this relation, the two terms seem to drop out altogether such that we get nothing causing nothing. That is, if A is caused by B and B is caused by A, don’t the two terms simply fall out or disappear into nothingness? Graham’s strategy, in response to this observation, has been to argue that there is a kernel of the object that is always in excess of all of its relations and which is completely irreducible to its relations. I’m still working out my own position on this matter, though I do think it is one that has to be responded to.”

Yes, and this is actually stated more succinctly than I’ve done it, too. It’s always odd when that happens, but it seems to be a fairly frequent experience (that other people can fire back our own ideas in clearer form than we can do it ourselves; Zizek said that about Johnston’s book, and Latour said it about the first half of Prince of Networks).

But there’s another twist to my position, which is that not only is there a kernel of both A and B outside the interaction, but there’s also an asymmetry to the interaction. Real A comes in contact with the sensual B, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. There really is an active term and a passive term in all relations (though there might be a simultaneous relationship the other way in which the active and passive roles are reversed, as almost always happens between two people, this is not true of all relationships between entities– it is possible and even normal for A to be in relation to B without B standing in any relation to A at all; this will be a major theme of my upcoming project).

uncomfortable outside

It was already an unpleasantly hot day. Then the sandstorm hit. Then I discovered that I had inadvertantly brought an ominous, weird-looking flying ant back into the house in the shopping bag. It obviously wasn’t able to sting, but there was something terrifying about its strange appearance. And I don’t like harming living things, including insects, unless they assault me directly (such as mosquitoes). Luckily, I was able to get it out of the house with surprising ease.

Why is this incident worth mentioning? Simply because it was fascinating. And I do think that one of the keys to intellectual method is to learn to identify the things that truly fascinate us, however humble. That in itself takes some doing, because we are so used to looking at ourselves through the mediation of pre-existent intellectual usages and pretending to ourselves that we are interested in things that we don’t really care about at all.

But if you can figure out what *really* is of interest to you, in both intellectual and everyday life, then you have some grains of reality from which larger thoughts can be built.

Most critique is insincere, and that is my objection to it. Go to a lecture, and a good number of the questions are obviously showboating, devil’s advocate, or hairsplitting contrarianism. It is a good principle of critique, already stated on this blog, that the critic should stick his/her neck out as much as what is being criticized. You should be standing for a different and positive principle, not just for the negation of the other person’s proposal.

I’ve been reminded of that this week in academic politics as well. There are certain faculty members who think that their primary job is to say “no no no no no” to anything coming from an administrator. But this is pointless, because the administrator has a job to do, and if the only feedback is “no no no no no” then the faculty will simply be circumvented and ignored. That’s not the way to interact with those who have “power” (Latour has suitably ridiculed the meaninglessness of this word). The way to negotiate, intellectually or politically, is to identify the most detailed point on which you both agree. Start with that positive point, then fight it out on that basis. People are fully willing to hear debate and criticism as long as you’re not trying to take everything away from them.

Naysaying is an inherently conservative gesture. It defends the status quo in any area by senseless carping at all attempts to do something. It is nothing but intellectual heckling. It may allow you to strut around in front of your fellow hecklers and act like a big shot, but they’re too busy with their own strutting to even notice what you are doing. And moreover, the decision makers will simply ignore you, because they are in a position where they need to do something, one way or another, and you’re not giving them any alternative options to work with.

Now I’m a half-time administrator. But even before that, I always generally trusted the decisions of administrators more than of faculty bodies (except in the case of rotten administrators; those always exist in large numbers, of course; I’m talking about average administrators vs. average faculty bodies). I realize that this is an unfashionable position in many quarters, but the principle is this: some people have to act, and acting means having to take responsibility; others get to be “critical thinkers”, which means they can pose as too pure to do anything, and they can always strike an unearned pose of moral superiority. And given that intellectuals have been nourished on a couple of centuries of the knee-jerk dogma that to think means to oppose, many faculty members have picked up the bad habit of thinking it profound to say no to absolutely everything that is proposed, no matter what it is. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

That’s why it is often an easy and deadly rhetorical move simply to ask them what they want– because they usually don’t want anything, except to say no to whatever you want yourself.

online bookstore sites

I’ve had some email from people asking how to find Prince of Networks.

The easiest way is to go to www.re-press.org and click “forthcoming” on the left-hand side. (It’ still forthcoming, since the cover design isn’t quite ready yet, but all the proofreading and indexing is finished, and I’ve seen the final PDF with everything but the front and back cover.)

As for Amazon, they simply haven’t posted it yet.

Barnes and Noble does list the book, but they’ve misspelled my first name as “Grahram”, so it only appears if you search for the title.

Thanks for your interest.