Skip to main content

Latour and Rorty

Latour, in AIME, debunks the ontology, semantics and epistemology of what he calls the Res Ratiocinans. It is a mix of Res Cogitans and Res Extensa that makes the world intelligible and pictures knowledge as something free of any construction. It is a ready made material world indifferent to the activity of any actor, human or not. Its language is literal-ese, the privileged vocabulary to mirror the world. Other languages are pure metaphors, nothing but culture. Its epistemology is that of avoiding construction, even the best ones. It is a fanaticism: no construction can replaced revelation. Rorty's criticism of privileged vocabularies makes no appeal to ontology. His point is to distribute respect to all languages by making them all worth of the same blend of pragmatist anti-realism and Davidsonian capacity to convey a great number of truths. Latour's strategy is to respect all languages by taking them seriously ontologically. He can be read as an ontologized Rorty. Instead of hermeneutics, allagmatics. Instead of Lebensformen, modes of existence. Instead of coping languages, instauration and régimes de veridiction. Construction and reconstruction instead of deconstruction. It is interesting to ask about the political effect. Is it the same?

Latour makes an interesting (if Rortyan) critique of analytic philosophy in AIME, p. 144. It believes, he says, that clarification in thought could be done by an analysis based on the language of literality. It believes too much in what Latour calls Double Click - the way to make things magically look amenable to a literal description. Analytic philosophy is hostage to a fear for metaphors, believing that there is a single language tool for analysis, that of literal definitions. There is therefore a starting presupposition: there are no discontinuities to be disclosed by analysis, no discontinuities, at least, of the sort that leaves its marks in language.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6 March 2014 at 15:32

    "Construction and reconstruction" wasn't this Rorty's move (via his kuhnian reading of Davidson on living and dead metaphors) pace Heidegger? That aside what are the benefits (if there are any) of ontologizing Rorty?
    -dmf

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hilan Bensusan14 March 2014 at 13:49

      To use Latour's words in his Intro to AIME, to make vocabulary relativism traffic in hard cash...

      Delete
    2. Anonymous15 March 2014 at 01:40

      well cashing/fleshing these matters out, for Rorty via anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, politics, lab-work, etc, was central to his own pragmatist move away from ontology/metaphysics, I guess we will see which of these moves has greater efficacy/cash-value, I put my money on the players in these practices/places where decisions of/with power are made and see that the new speculative-crowd is already splintering (turning if you will) without even much of an impact in academic circles.
      -dmf

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
1 comment
Read more

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...
Post a Comment
Read more