another thought on alliances

Since for Latour an actor gains in strength through gaining in alliance, not through becoming purified, he offers the strategical reflection that one scientific theory succeeds best when it cuts off its rival from its allies, leaving its rival isolated.

For many years I found this convincing, but recently, less so. For one thing, too many allies to please might always mean diluting one’s position so as not to offend any of them. For another thing, as noted a bit earlier today, some of the key moments in intellectual history as well as in our own intellectual lives come from cutting ourselves off from prior links (it was Nick’s paper that got me thinking about that again).

In fact, Nick was offering a sort of counter-ANT political model in that talk. And again, what I like about it is his implication that in order to cut yourself off from networks, you don’t have to jump completely outside of the world as a special human subject that has the unique ability to transcend or nihilate. It’s always been bad ontology. Nick’s paper indicates why it’s bad politics as well. There’s obviously a certain anti-realism to the use of “Revolution!” as the ultimate weapon in political conversation. The slogan was able to stay afloat as long as the alternative seemed to be stale piecemeal compromise ratifying all things as they are. But the construction of these sorts of false extreme oppositions is usually a bad sign in philosophy. (Another example: “either all philosophical statements are logical arguments, or you slip into mere arbitrary poetry.” These sorts of things are usually the sign of unimaginative minds.)

Ironically, the other person who had me thinking about this recently was Zizek, when he spoke about how infinite demands actually aren’t very threatening, because those in power can always dismissively say: “Yes, wouldn’t it be lovely if we lived in a perfect world?” Far more threatening is to insist on a finite and possibly attainable demand.