Symmetrical treatment, Latour says. Yes, but also self-reflective, both as to one’s own epistemic presuppositions and as to one’s own geo-cultural ‘situatedness’ – which, ironically, is precisely what we should expect from an anthropologist. In the 1970s, in Africa, Latour saw himself as a ‘provincial bourgeois Catholic’, but not as French – something which could have been useful in contextualizing his own experience of ‘the Moderns’. As it is, the whole project is somewhat Kafkaesque: there is an enquête, an investigation, in which those who are the accused are presented as terrible and dangerous – but it remains unclear who the accused are, and of what precise crime they are accused. In the concluding and apparently self-critical chapter, Latour states: ‘The first test can thus be formulated this way: by following these navigation procedures, have I been able to make perceptible to readers a certain number of tonalities or wavelengths that modern institutions in their shambles have made it impossible to capture?’ (477). Does this mean that it is ‘unjust’ to blame Latour for his lack of precision? Apparently, his ambition is to come up with new and improved conceptualizations of the major ‘modes of existence’ in a plural modern world. In so doing, he pretends to ‘improve’ the overall conceptual scheme, and thereby overrule the various specialists. But when he says that it would be ‘unjust’ to criticize his formulations, this claim functions as a rhetorical twist that also precludes unpleasant questions about his gigantic project. Yes, there is a need for interdisciplinary reflection. But the idea that one discipline – the Latourian version of anthropology – could be able to provide the (one and only) adequate conceptual overview of the whole of the modern world, with its plurality of values, activities and institutions, and of all the other disciplines with their various perspectives and insights, is both naive and arrogant.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 15:33:45 +0000
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