Precis on Latour's Plea for Earthly Sciences

In a text that literally begins with “ladies and gentleman,” it’s impossible for us to ignore the “Plea for Earthly Sciences” that Latour goes on to make. It’s refreshing that the thing he begins with is a she, even if it’s the accusation that we all of us are killing her and we none of us are doing it with reason. “Humans, as a whole,” wage war “without any explicit declaration,” and surely without any possibilities of winning, “against Gaia,” the goddess who has managed to “maintain life on Earth inside some fluctuating albeit restricted limits” (read: the atmosphere/biosphere/“magneto-sphere”—Dale’s word, not mine). For a lecture that’s given to an audience of sociologists, the politics he’s identifying with, at this point, and which he’ll circle back to at the end, sound undeniably green. Much like the British (those bloody semi-colonical British) at the beaches of Dunkirk, he spends the rest of the text retreating from the facts of truly “global disasters” to the crises that unite us in what must be a collective turning to face the facts.

Latour takes up Sloterdijk (ha, right?) when he says that the moment we took a breath of gas and not air is the moment we came to understand “the world” as “the environment.” This was the inaugural moment for modernity then, and it is from within that space that he defines the domain of the social. The world was transformed into the environment, then, in much the same way that the ecological crisis was transformed into a response, now, for the annual meeting which he is presently addressing. The meeting is titled, and I quote him, “quot[ing]: social connections: identities, technologies, and relationships.”

After a meditation on why we shouldn’t be proud to endorse the use of the word Anthropocene to describe “this new geological era,” (and why not? Aren’t we capable of war crimes of such a proportion that we should get to name our own extinction after us?)—Latour taks a jab at “the future.”

But something strange happens to our identities as Earthlings when the definition of the future changes. It’s not that we’re “free at last!” It’s that we’re sent “back to the design table” that I imagine looks a lot like the table in Haraway’s INFORMATICS. To the extent that that’s the occasion for this speech, Latour proposes (for “a second time,” because apparently the first was many years ago when nobody was listening) that “we shift the definition of sociology from the study of the social connections to the study of associations.” The shifting ensures that the social stays true to its etymology in a way that allows it also to explicate all other types of connections—the non-social: the natural, the material, the economic, the biological, the psychological.

Social is defined, in order of ascending importance, as social n1 or as social n2.

Social n1 is unsustainable, and no one is more acutely aware of that than Latour himself. It is defined as a domain that is not “non-social.” Not only does this fail to explain anything—including itself—it has to be explained. It solicits an explanation that can perhaps be best understood as the disappearance of “nature and society.” What Latour means by this is no small thing: it is a sea change (like the sea change that Gore endlessly cites in an Inconvenient Truth) in which matters of fact have become matters of concern and in which objects have become things.

Of what can the world possibly consist when it is made neither of “nature or society or any combination thereof”?

If we look to actor-network-theory (ANT), we have the example that my signature on a contract is a thing that is binding, but that it is binding legally and not socially. If we look to STS, we have the example of a container within which a space for definition of the “global” was opened up. It is the same thing to say that the spread of the container depends on “legal litigation” (among accounting procedures, labor relations among workers unions, and so on) as it is to say that a technology is an assemblage of “complex heterogenous threads.” The examples of law and technology tell us that the durability, solidarity, force and intelligibility of the associations is entirely due to the ways by which laws and techniques connect.

The problem—as made obvious at the level of examples themselves—is that these connections are radically contingent. When Latour says that a theory cannot claim that every mode of connection is specific, we are relieved and ready to hear the next of his theses: that “the social sciences have a true object which is not the social per se, but the shifting attachments offered by various non-social modes of connections.” When we realize this obfuscates more than illuminates his argument, we realize that it all makes sense if we just think of it as “Legos.” (What could possibly be more grounding than a toy pile?) It’s important that legos are used to build things—they’re literally building blocks. Legos—blocks that metaphorically represent things like the law, religion, politics, technology, avant-garde art—come in different colors and shapes and are differently pegged. They are particular, socialized, historicized. When a kind of collective is then built out of this heterogeneity, then all of a sudden things like “bricks coming together through legal ties” start happening. Even though the bricks come from “all over the place,” the thing that happens when they come together is that they are stronger in their solidarity regardless of the mode of connection of religion or politics or science.” And then when it is big enough, we, like children, smile and point at it and say of it “look, this is the social.”

When we look to define things like “science,” the closest thing to a definition we can come to is to nudge up against heuristics like it is literally the sum of its parts. If the way that a lego, a particular social domain, finds its way to solidarity is vis a vis the connections it makes in its continuity with other legos, the non-social domains, then we must look at the connections which are necessarily inexhaustible (“legally, scientifically, religiously, artistically, politically, technically,” and so on).

At a place in the text where our attention should “shift to the modes of connections,” it is appropriate that Latour would end by connecting his project back up to the place from which he began. When he acknowledges that the problem of the social sciences is that “they are not empirical enough,” the thing he does is jettison empiricism itself. Just at the time in history when it is most crucial that we redesign the whole sphere of existence “from top to bottom,” the thing he does instead is say—with trepidation, nonetheless—that we have to give up on what we hitherto have always depended on. We must give up breathing the air that has figured the world because when we treat palpably finite resources as though they were infinite we solicit a kind of murderous fantasy that only ever can be met with mustard gas.

Repudiation vs. Remaking: Gilroy on the Postcolonial Racism Discourse

"Articulating anti-racist hope in anything other than its negative moment: that is, as a creative conjuring with the possibility of better worlds rather than embattled critcism of this comprehensively disenchanted one"
The central point of contention for Gilroy as he reflects on post-colonial manifestations of race is how we confront in the present day the extraordinary bias of history that has led to the racial dichotomy of colored/white. Gilroy sees two approaches available: simply refute the idea of the negative image of oneself that is termed the Other and the sort of c0-dependent racism it hinges upon, or, to embark upon a project of the "unmaking of racialized bodies". Both of these methods, however, rely on the sort of racial absolutism that Gilroy rejects and utilize it in a clinical and subordinating fashion in which an unknown de-racializing force (the people? but if so what segments of the people have access to the institutions that allow them a greater voice?) deconstructs the dichotomy of race perceptions.

"The work Fanon described as 'dis-alienation', by which he meant the unmaking of racialized bodies and their restoration to properly human modes of being in the world."
This passage encapsulates the danger of Gilroy's project, in which it can be characterized not as a de-racializing mission but as a sort of gentrification of the Other. The "unmaking" connotes a forceful contact and resetting of the racialized bodies, while the project of "restoring" them to "properly human modes of being" assumes a meta-Creator vantage over these bodies, and the criteria for what is a proper mode of being such as to confer humanness relies entirely upon a Hegelian system that delineates moral and social superiority along a developmental trajectory that inevitably leads to the glorification of western European sensibilities. Viewed in these terms, Gilroy has taken Fanon's work of dis-alienation and used it as a new ground for racial imperialism.

"The character of racial and ethnic groups is seen to be at stake in attempts to overthrow [the political order of race]"
The central dilemma of repudiation vs. remaking hinges in this quote upon the meaning of character: whether it is taken to stand for tradition, heritage, cultural disposition, etc or whether it implies a sort of anti-matter or negative character, in which the defining character of all racial and ethnic groups is precisely their lack of a singular ethnic character leading all of their members to be directly ushered into the "global humanity", but albeit as rootless individuals left to stand alone against the crush of global capitalism.

"He calls this object 'The World.'"
Although I struggle to place this quote firmly into a spot in the argument, it remains for me the single most important line of the text. It has a rather impacting brevity, and even though it is a citation of W.E.B. Dubois in a section that is summarizing one of Dubois' books I feel as if Gilroy is attempting to lead the reader to a broader application of the Dubois text to his thesis beyond what is provided in Gilroy's explicit analysis. For context: the above quote follows a section in which Gilroy writes that Dubois did not address The Souls of Black Folks exclusively to an American audience (and its form of racism) but that it had a greater intention of "worldliness" and was "also aimed beyond those authorities to another constituency". It is this object, the greater constituency, that Dubois then terms "The World". Dubois' intention of the usage of "The World" seems rather obvious under these terms, but as I continued to read the article this single line kept appearing as the conclusive subtext and it gradually assumed Gilroy's authorial voice for me, and so I shall treat it as such. Even though I still don't know what Gilroy would wish it to mean. The terms that are open to ambiguity are the nature of the "He" and "this object". The "He" seems to reference either the racial dichotomy-repudiating individual, the remade individual, or the individual whose time and place have not progressed in the least from the colonial paradigm. The "object" for each of these entities then becomes respectively either a)the new terms of a humanity that is defined by intersectionality rather than duality, b) oneself, as an individual bled of all racial categories but nonetheless still fabricated by a humanist intellectual project, or c) the same overtly and intractably racist colonial world in which the colored individual is defined access to the World and at this imposed distance from it names it as an object rather than a lived reality. Additionally, it seems that for the repudiating and remade individual, one must at a certain point transition from viewing "The World" as an object and instead transpose onself as a subject (complete with the whole humanness as prescribed by "The World") into this World. And, for a parting tangent, there's some nice Derrida-esque interpolation in the calling of the object and "The World"'s resumed response to this naming. Does this mean that the various forms of "The World", with its particular institutions and moral discourses and conceptions of what humanness and an emancipated self contains, itself a subject of the imagination?

Katrina Sabatier
(absent 8/4 when Gilroy was discussed)

Precis on 'On Coincidence'

William Burroughs sets out his piece talking about religion. How Christ heard God’s Voice, but how the non-dominant brain hemisphere only created that voice. In modern times Christ would have been institutionalized. Someone claiming they hear a voice? Someone who says that they can heal people? Do we not laugh at them and eventually lock them up because ‘they can be a danger to themselves and to others’. Burroughs seems to slightly mock this form of what he calls ‘religious truth’, which is too absolute. He then goes on to talk about ‘scientific truth’, which according to him is too black and white. A scientist saying that something is ‘impossible’ is again an absolute statement. Burroughs would like to argue for another truth; the ‘magical truth’. This does not include Harry Potter waving around a wand, but it does explain coincidence. Because according to Burroughs we all have a certain mental power with which we can influence the world around us, like the CIA pushing a guy in front of a van with a ‘magical push’. This leads him to his main point, “lightning usually strikes more than once in the same place.” One incident can cause another similar incident to take place, not only at the same location but also with the same person. An example he gives: “If you start the day by missing a train, this could be a day of missed trains and missed appointments.” Now I have to say that (but maybe this is just in Holland) the reason your whole day is filled with missed trains and missed appointments is because the train network sucks and if you miss your first train, you will most likely not be able to catch any of your other connections resulting in you being late at least an hour and missing your appointments.
Let’s move on though. Burroughs claims that by thinking certain things, we induce events around us, we see signs on the street because we were thinking a certain thing. We create the world around us. Now the last paragraph of ‘On Coincidence’ reveals his reason for writing this piece, to convert Christians and Muslims. We need to “leave the Word-God behind.” I have to say, I am always in for a good discussion about faith and why someone (or me) would be religious and if you have good arguments I can be swayed to change my mind slightly. (You can’t really talk me out of being religious though, but you can try.) But Burroughs here tries to convert Christians and Muslims by offering up another truth, a ‘magical truth’ which seems even more farfetched. We do not see a sign on the street because the sign is there and we happened to look in that direction, no, we see it because we were thinking a certain thing. There is one point in the essay where I feel like Burroughs leaves a link open for religion to bond with the ‘magical truth’. He says: “… the assumption that nothing happens in this universe (…) unless some entity wills it to happen.” The question is, why can’t this entity be God? Burroughs however, does not supply us with an answer.
I almost felt at the end, that Burroughs was simply mocking religion the whole way through by coming up with this ‘magical truth’ to show the ridiculousness of believing in something greater. But to be honest, (and after some googling) I believe that he was serious and that he truly believes in this ‘magical truth’. And I have to say, who am I to argue with him? After all, I believe in someone who in modern times would have been institutionalized.

Martine

P*$$y Envy

After reading so much patriarchal dogma that comes flowing out of such great minds in Philosophy and Critical Theory, it is nice to see all of that flipped on its head for a second. Valerie’s SCUM Manifesto’s argument is to break down the system of domination through women pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and realizing their own power.

Valerie seems to not have any particular audience except for the world she feels is caught in this backward understanding of power dynamics between truth and reality. She addresses no gender/sex in particular but does give some direction to certain archetypes of people that exist in society.

Although I love Valerie’s espousal of feminist independence and power, her supporting reasoning that brings her to the social revolution she advocates is complete misandry. Beginning with the reasoning that men are incomplete people because they have the Y chromosome (which is an incomplete X, missing the fourth leg) falls so closely akin to Freud’s women and their penis envy that I knew it either had to be satire or grossly missing a larger picture of relationships, culture, sexuality, and gender. But in putting all that aside, her argument fights tooth and nail to prove the male inferiority and how that relationship has played out into a world where men try to take over through domination, violence and sex because of their ‘lack’ (to tip my hat to Lacan). In this patriarchal system men have also convinced women to be subservient and have subjected them to the role they find themselves in today through much institutionalization. If taken all reasoning to be true in her argument, here would be the crack in the dam; if men were so lowly and incapable of thought and feeling (like she claims multiple times, in multiple ways) there is no reasoning why the higher-being, AKA: ‘woman,’ would take to such subjugation. (At this point, that’s neither here nor there). The way to fight against the system though is to become SCUM, a Society for Cutting Up Men, to stop participating in the society the way it wants us to, vehemently. To stop buying, to be brash and crude, to loot, to destroy cars and businesses, to burn and pillage, to “couple-bust” and disrupt all that we have known to be good, normal, and comfortable-and adopt a new reality.

Through violence and everything that is the opposite of what feminine is, women should live for themselves, and only themselves. Creating, through the gathering of strong, dominant, independent women (and the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM), a new society. Divorcing oneself from the man-hate (which weighed against the amount of misogyny that has to be excused), the revolution that Valerie espouses is not so much about the man/woman binary but about the system itself, which falls akin to many-a-Marxist.

Amber Grimaldi

Precis to Dr. Schreber

(by Derick Olson)

Mr. Schreber wants to be a woman. Not just any woman, but the “wife of God,” ready to be miraculously impregnated by the “holy rays” of the Creator in order to give birth to the “new race of mankind.” From the initial delusion that his psychiatrist, Dr. Flechsig, would steal his soul and transform his body into a woman's for sexual pleasure, Schreber extends the delusion to a persecution from God and finally, the impregnation from God to save humanity. In “The Phychotic Dr. Schreber,” Sigmund Freud takes on the task of interpreting such delusions.

To start, it is a question of which comes first: the illusion or the fantasy? This chicken or the egg scenario leads to two possibilities: Does Schreber thirst for eternal glory and use his transformation into a woman as a means to such glory? Or does he secretly fantasize about being a woman, and justify the desire with the idea that it is necessary for him to save humanity as a woman?

Freud argues for the latter. He begins with the larger fantasy of saving the world, and dismisses it as a justification for Schreber's desire to be a woman. He then interprets the desire to be a woman as a form of Schreber's repressed homosexuality. This latent homosexuality, Freud says, is present in everyone, but is usually exerted through “brotherly love” and “comradeship.” Dr. Schreber consciously believes that he is interested in women, but his subconscious push for his true homosexual desires cause an internal struggle that, when paired with the stress of overwork, lead to psychotic delusions. He initially justifies his love of men with a desire to become a woman. But such a desire goes “against the order of things,” so he states that his psychiatrist, Dr. Flechsig, and later God Himself, is “persecuting” him in order to make him a woman for a male's sexual gratification (which is all Schreber really wants from mankind). Finally, Dr. Schreber creates a new reality where his delusions can thrive, the post-apocalyptic world in which an impregnation from God is the only way that he (or she) can save humanity.

Freud's interpretation of Dr. Schreber seems generally sound, especially when the added allusions to Schreber's life are taken into account (the links between the love for his lost father relate to his image of God, and his wish to continue his family line despite his lack of children). Yet the conclusions are solely based on the Freudian interpretation of the mind that it all originates with the libido and its consequent sexual urges. This view leaves no room for the inverse interpretation, that perhaps Dr. Schreber's desire was for glory and recognition, and the idea of becoming a woman was just a means to that end.

Let's say that Schreber felt that his life was devoid of meaning; nobody saw his genius as worthy of the glory that he desired. He had come from a prestigious family and was active in German politics, but it was not enough. Perhaps he felt that his superior intellect was worthy of divine recognition, that he should be in direct contact with God. As Schreber fell into delusions of heavenly contact, he needed a way to separate himself from God as not to confuse his well-deserved glory to that of God's. So he took the blow to his masculinity and decided to become the wife of God. Now, in Schreber's false reality anything was possible. If he could become the mother of a new humanity, he would be the savior of all men, and gain the recognition he deserved.

It seems that there could be an infinite number of interpretations of Dr. Schreber's psychosis, and that Freud simply chose one that fit his already-established views of the mind. He takes a fairly narrow angle in his interpretation, dismissing the point that some actions may be based on non-sexual tendencies, drawing lines that favor his theories while ignoring the fact that they could be drawn in infinitely many directions, and justified nonetheless. What Freud claims to be an analysis of the subconscious may be none other than an analysis of coincidence.

While I do admit that Freud's interpretation of the issue is most convincing, his one-sided approach and complete dismissal of the inverse option seems unjustifiable. To reduce the complex nature of the mind to a mere exchange of sexual energy (which I do agree is a large part) is to ignore all other facets of humanity. Although our primordial sexual nature is a dominant trait in our lives, desires of knowledge, power, and meaning seem independent of the libido rather than the outward appearance of our subconscious urge for sex.

Brandits! - or – A Use of Pejorative Language in Informational Texts as a Means of Persuasive Discourse

I needs must acknowledge my love of Wikipedia. They may well be tarnished by with a lack of credible accredited accreditors of “truth” but I have found these remarkable things called “footnotes” which show a link to a source for most any claims made in articles. Others attack Wikipedia on it's lack of direction and focus since, after all, the amount of attention given to the “plot” intricacies of Lost is greater than that of public intellectual and activist Naomi Klein. Such attacks are, in essence, the sad sorrowful (and sibilant!) lament of those who worship aura and ritual. Wikipedia is thus made to suffer from their sundry authors and their collective decision that Transformers the Movie is more worthy of their time and research than Barry Goldwater. However my instinct on doing a Google® search was not to click on the official Naomi Klein web page (whose imprimatur cannot be questioned, it's “official”!) but instead to click the return listing Wikipedia's name. Haters gonna hate, but I love me some Wikipedia.

I assure the reader that this is all relevant. My love for Wikipedia is not for any concrete thing. I do not love their corporate board, their foundation, their racks of servers in air conditioned rooms. When I inform you that I love Wikipedia what I am saying is that I love the image of Wikipedia I hold. Wikipedia's brand, if you will. Her Wikipedia page makes no mention of her love or hate of the online encyclopedia but her article in the leftist rag The Guardian makes it abundantly clear how she feels about the process and idea of branding itself. She does not care for it. It's also clear that she wants us to share this view, which brings us to our first irony and paradox. If sharing is caring and Klein wants us to share her view of not caring than what is the result? Wait, that's not it.

The actual paradox we are faced with is how a seemingly informative text can act to persuade. The key distinction between informational and persuasive is the existence of a thesis. From this difference all else flows. Newspaper articles, unless they are editorials, are not meant to persuade but to inform. This is true even in the all but commie trash tabloids that masquerade as newspapers in Europe and Klein is publishing excerpts of her book within that format and those constraints. Nowhere in the selection is the author's point of view expressed in a literal fashion; that the production of goods is superior to the production of brands.

Supposedly this is being made clear to the reader simply through the informational context. Naomi Klein reports the facts on brands vs products and we, the reader, decide. This is clearly not true and can be demonstrated with a simple thought experiment. If it was the information itself doing the convincing than there would exist splits in interpretation based on the readers viewpoint. Simplistically all republican's could read it and see it as supporting their views and all democrat's could do the same for their views. But when a piece has an argumentative tint it is clear to all reader regardless of perspective which way the evidence of information leads (whether they agree with it or not). This discrepancy is the result of confirmation bias in which a recipient of information is drastically more inclined to notice and remember information that agrees with their own views. This is the default state of human dialectic, and so rhetorical methods must be employed to break through it.

Enter the pejorative. Klein's first description of brands is that they are a “seemingly innocuous” idea. Let's see. . . the antonym for innocuous is harmful. So right away we are given that, in Klein's view, brands are not good things. Words do not have to be directly insulting to be a pejorative and most of Klein's pejorative is in tone rather than actual words. For instance when she says “The price difference, apparently, was the cost of the word 'Kraft'” she is belittling the notion of a brand being worth real dollars. Throughout her piece figurative language, such as irony and metaphor (quoting an ad man calling the consumer cockroaches and using the term herself) serves to create a thesis and argue persuasively for it. For instance I have nowhere in the body of this precis made literally known my opinion on those stalinist fishwraps that European's fondly imagine to be newspapers, but it should be abundantly clear to all but the most illiterate what I think of them. Sadly you have all been misinformed, I actually like and admire much of European journalism and the Guardian in particular. Readers, you just got punk'd!

While a firm believer that word count matters less than how much each word counts I am afraid that I might be reaching a point where I've used to much to say too little. So let us end where we began (if one accepts that all of us engaged in this text form a community of dialectic, or commune than it can be said we had a nice little communist revolution!) with my looking up information on Naomi Klein. Well, she's Canadian which might explain her dislike of logos and brands by way of jealousy of our obviously vastly superior culture and marketing power. . . Wait, what's this? Not only is she the grand-daughter of communists and the child of new leftists (read: socialists) she reacted to having an active and public feminist mother by embracing full on consumerism. Hmm. . . Then her mother suffers a stroke. . . Interesting. Wonder what Freud would say? Probably something about libido and homosexual tendencies. And last is. . . kind of horrible really. A crazy person took a gun and started shooting women in an attempt to fight feminism. Out of all this Klein is reborn a feminist and she proceeds to do a Henry V and take an ax to her old vices. Context is everything and Wikipedia provided me with context and so my love for Wikipedia (the brand) is affirmed.

Your humble and obedient servant,

- Birney