Levi/Latour

It was a long night of meetings, but here’s one post I meant to make a couple of days ago. Here was the first reaction to my sample diagram from the forthcoming book…

Levi Bryant: “I confess that [Harman’s] theory of vicarious causation and his analysis of the four-fold are the aspects of his ontology that have left me most scratching my head.”

That was by way of his saying that the diagram begins to make it a bit clearer to him. But the interesting point is that you could easily replace Levi’s statement with the following one. See if you can notice the difference…

Bruno Latour: “I confess that [Harman’s] theory of vicarious causation and his analysis of the four-fold are the aspects of his ontology that have left me most scratching my head.”

Notice the difference?

The only difference, of course, is the proper name of the one saying it. The words are Levi’s, not Latour’s, but Latour would probably say exactly the same thing. Those are also the two aspects of my position that leave Latour the most puzzled.

In short, the great irony is that Levi’s philosophical position is actually closer to Latour’s than mine is.

*As for the fourfold, Latour only has a onefold. The famous Heideggerian axis (no pun intended, Emmanuel Faye) between veiled and unveiled is meaningless for Latour. Everything is real in the same way, but not everything is equally strong. If I’m understanding Levi’s curent position correctly, his “democracy of objects principle” says much the same thing. For me, it is not the case that Popeye and neutrons have the same sort of reality, nor has it ever been the case. Some people have mistaken my explication of Latour in the first half of Prince of Networks for my own position, even though I give a pretty clear account of our differences in the second half of the book. So it goes. All I say is that Popeye is not reducible. That doesn’t mean at all that he’s real in the same way as genuine entities are, because in my position such entities are real independent of their effect on anything else, whereas Popeye is not. (There might be a sense in which even Popeye takes on autonomous reality, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

And of course, what I call the “second axis” of the Heideggerian fourfold is completely foreign to Latour’s position, since he hasn’t even the least sympathy for Husserl, and basically follows the empiricist line of treating objects as nothing over and above an ensemble of qualities. Hence, it is no surprise that Latour has no time for the fourfold structure.

*As for vicarious causation, this is actually where I think Levi’s missing something… He seems to find it unproblematic that one thing affects another– even though he insists that all relation is translation. Same holds for Latour. Oddly enough, Latour does see that a form of vicarious relation is necessary: politics and neutrons cannot touch unless Joliot makes them touch. The problem is that Latour never accounts for how Joliot can touch either politics or neutrons in the first place if these entities cannot touch in their own right, etc.

Levi and I will have plenty of chance to debate such issues in Atlanta, or even before (in cyber-format) but I was interested to note that the two most head-scratching parts of my position for Levi are the same two that Latour finds most odd.