irreduction

Gratton hits on THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION for a term that would mean the opposite of reductionism: Latour’s irreduction. Yes, I should have thought to contribute that term to the earlier debate, but it slipped my mind.

But, a few of the usual caveats:

1. The early Latour says everything is equally real, but not that everything is equally strong. This saves him from the typical charge of putting all fictional things on the same level as physical fact.

2. The price he pays for this is being forced to claim that what makes something “real” is that it has an effect on something else. In this sense, Santa Claus does have effects, just as protons or the sun have effects. (And by the way, I’m not with him here. For me there are exactly two kinds of objects. It can be argued that Santa Claus becomes real over time as well, simply by being accepted, but that’s a different debate. He’s not automatically real just by having an effect on us.)

3. This is no longer Latour’s position anyway. His increasing shift to his “modes of existence” system (which I must admit that I still don’t fully grasp, though perhaps no one can until his new magnum opus achieves final printed form) is designed precisely to abolish the “univocity of being” thesis found in his early works. He now has at least 14 modes rather than 1, and even more importantly, the 14 are not a permanent table of categories, but evolve over time, and are historically specific to the West.

My suspicion, however, is that the 14 modes are simply going to be permutations of the same 1 mode as before. I also don’t believe him when he says that all of them are historically generated. For instance, the mode “REP” (or “repetition”; he has three-letter abbreviations for all of them) is a fairly basic ontological feature of the world according to Latour. It displays the markedly occasionalist, anti-Bergsonian side that is so obviously present in his work (and Whitehead’s) but which people don’t want to see there simply because they don’t like it. But not liking it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. (And to repeat, Latour has explicitly agreed with my statement that he is “the anti-Bergson.” This poses certain difficulties for those who want to read much, in my opinion too much, into a Latour/Deleuze connection.)

This is easy enough to see. If REP were really just a historically emergent mode found in Europe, then we should also have a mode called CON (for “continuum”), to tell the other side of the story, a side found every bit as much in Western thought as the punctualization of the world described by REP. (REP for Latour means that a thing does not maintain itself in existence from one moment to the next, but has to be repeated endlessly in each moment. You yourself may not think that it makes sense to break up time into moments, but that notion is built into Latour, who thinks time is only something produced by the work of actors, not something over and above them.)

But REP is a mode for Latour, and “CON” is not. This indicates that his modes are not just totaling up all the basic thoughts found in the West. Rather, some of the more basic ones (RES for réseau –network– is another) are clearly meant to be Bruno Latour stating the truth about the way the world really is.

However, I don’t want to get too far into this topic before his book is actually published. We all gave him more feedback in Cerisy in 2007 than he could easily process, and I’m not sure when the final product will be available.