on “Latour Litanies”

Bogost has proposed the name “Latour Litanies” for the rhetorical device of listing long strings of objects. It’s a fun name, and I choose to adopt it. But Latour did not invent them, of course. These long lists of objects are useful whenever concrete plurality is threatened by grim ultimate principles. I’ve discussed this point at some length in Prince of Networks (look up the passage on Richard Rhodes and Hiroshima in the index).

For this reason, I’ve never felt seriously tempted to stop using them, because they still do good philosophical work when employed with a bit of literary skill. There have been 2 or 3 sneers about these lists (all by the same person, I believe) but it still feels to me like they work effectively.

Here is one I like from page 4 of Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Univ. of California Press, 1994):

“In Honduras they are filling ships with pineapples, coffee, and tobacco for us; at the port of Balikpapan in Kalimantan they are filling the oil tankers that will fuel the cargo ships; in the dunes of Morocco they are shovelling phosphates; on the beaches of Malaysia they are scooping up tin; in Zimbabwe they are digging in pits for the diamonds; in Zaire they are mining uranium.”

The sentence is recognizably Lingis and no one else. I can’t even read it without hearing his voice in my head.

By the way, am I the only one who didn’t realize that “shovelling” is what one does with phosphates?