lines still too long; modes of existence

The advice I received from a lifelong Parisian the other day was correct– there’s no point trying to go to any museums until January. There are just too many tourists here this week. Next week they’ll all have to go back to work, and the museums will be nice and empty. I’ve never actually been here over the Christmas/New Year’s season before, so it’s my first time seeing just how bad the lines can be during this week.

Since the weather is a bit warmer today (though still rainy off and on), I tried to sneak in a museum visit today (the Musée d’Orsay, which I haven’t been able to enter due to extremely long lines since 2006) but the lines were still too long.

So, I’m finishing up Latour’s new manuscript, which has in fact changed a lot since many of us saw the first draft for the Cerisy week in 2007. Some of the key terminology has changed, for instance.

But the basic program of it is still the same. Instead of everything being part of a big flat network, there are different and incompatible networks, each with its own modes of veridicition, its own “conditions of felicity and infelicity.” [ADDENDUM: Yes, I know that comes from J.L. Austin, and so does Latour– he credits Austin with it.] One example, for instance, would be that law doesn’t have the same truth-conditions as scientific reference. Law links together chains of documents and other evidence and comes out with a result that one hopes is something like justice. Law does not function on the basis of a correspondence theory of truth.

Then there is a more controversial mode, religion. Latour may be a practicing Catholic, but I doubt his theology would count as very orthodox, since he doesn’t believe in a transcendent God that can be correctly pointed to as existing in the objective world. That would be to confuse the separate modes of REF (reference) and REL (religion). Instead, God is what circulates within the network of religious entities.

REP (or reproduction) is another mode of existence, already discussed at length in Cerisy in 2007. This is the mode that led me to call Latour the anti-Bergsonian par excellence (and he agreed at the time, and presumably still does). This is the occasionalist side of Latour– there is no inertia nor inherent”becoming.” A thing only exists at time T and has to reproduce to exist again at time T + 1. Any attempt to compare Latour with Deleuze will stumble forever over this point. Latour is a Whiteheadian, not a Deleuzian, and the attempt to blend Whitehead with Deleuze is a historic mistake– a mere side-effect of the ongoing attempt to turn Deleuzianism into the philosophical master discourse of our time.

How do you know when the attempt is being made to turn something into a master discourse? When the claim is made that there is nothing outside the master discourse. When the master discourse can supposedly account for everything and its opposite. When the master discourse claims that it has no real enemies, because it actually already agrees with what its enemy is saying. (Deleuze’s attempt to turn Leibniz into Spinoza in Le Pli was an alarming sign even during his lifetime.) Derrida was the former figure on whose behalf this attempt was made, and Deleuze seems to be the new one.

What I always love about Žižek is that he makes no attempt to be a master discourse or skeleton key in this sense. He simply declares what he thinks and attacks that with which he does not agree.

But back to Latour. He wants feedback on this manuscript from a number of people. However, this is actually a fairly difficult juncture at which to provide feedback, both too late and too early.

It’s too late in a sense, because the publication date is already set for the coming year, and there’s no way he’s going to be able or willing to make any significant changes to this manuscript, which is clearly a finished book.

But in another sense it’s too early, because it’s going to take awhile for everyone to digest this new project, even though it has been in incubation since 1987, if memory serves. In short, I’m not yet sure what I think of it, even though this is about my third time reading some version of the project in the 12 years that I’ve known Latour.

I’m planning to do a follow-up to Prince of Networks a few years from now called Prince of Modes, to extend the interpretation to Latour’s new “modes of existence” system (which is inspired by Souriau, of course). But I don’t think I’d be able to do it yet today, because I’m not sure I’ve figured it all out yet. It will certainly take time to digest.