It may be helpful to situate Latour in relation to his inter-connections with previous philosophers. This may especially be true due to the heavy neologisms which Latour insists upon using due to the 'weightedness' of the terms which we've inherited to think-through.

Despite a perhaps aversion to Hegel - due to his association with a absolute idealism - his idea of bringing seeming insuperable concepts together - such as the proverbial 'individualism/universalism' - in his 'Phenomenology...' and 'Encyclopedia...' excerpts - and liquidating their apparent contradiction/opposition is quite appropriate here for a 'Symmetical Arch.'. It is a movement to working-around inadequate conceptual frameworks - such as a person-thing fundamental '1st Philosophy' - in order to re-cognize an inherent 'holism' characterized by myriads of networked assemblages. Following along some of these networks quickly draws attention to the arbitrary divisions which form much of inherited conceptual thought.

While Latour would not prescribe a Hegelian resolution - as his symmetry disparages the entire inherited framework of the modern settlement - including the failure of dialectics - his repeated appeal to 'common-sense', much like the early pragmatists before him (esp. James and Dewey), as validation of his 're-threading' of the old binaries, resembles a therapy in making the obvious conscious (such as human-nonhuman imbroglios) for convalescence. And this re-threading of modernist-inherited concepts (eg. content vs. context in science, subject vs. object) is intended to be a therapeutic overhaul - to finally extricate us from the science wars over proverbial epistemological/ontological quandries and place us in a re-cognized collective of politics-nature.

Posted at Dec 09/2004 04:38 PM:
Chris Witmore: Latour would argue that the entire history of philosophy, much as the Hegelian dialectic posits, moves back and forth between dualities and monisms--dichotomies and syntheses, if you will. For Latour this is the uninteresting revolving door; the back and forth of the modernist predicament. Rather than continue into an act of conceptual therapy he would maintain that we need to go to the source of the ever increasing gap between the material world and language. For Latour this is Kant. By doing away with the modernist settlement brought on by the Enlightenment, Latour effects a radical change which is not conceptually theraputic in the Hegelian sense of the term. Latour has retraced Modernism and chosen the path that the Enlightenment thinkers bypassed long ago. In this way, we have never been modern because reality is not what has changed, only our conceptual frameworks.

Posted at Dec 14/2004 03:43 PM:
The only therapy that's going to matter is the therapy that people will need if they spend more than five continuous minutes reading this stuff. Whatever ideas are here are buried under so much mumbo-jumbo that I have no clue what you're trying to say. It's hurting my brain. Really. I'm calling the Trireme Veterans for Truth.

Posted at Dec 14/2004 04:27 PM:
tim webmoor: Yes, I take this point (anonymity is always for the insecure). The 'jargon' can be off-putting, especially as those coming to the internet are expecting to get quick-and-easy explanations as the average attention span over the web is less than a few minutes per page. Still, we need to contextualize the ideas a bit better and fill them out. Generally, though, neologisms in (for eg.) scientific journals are rarely questioned as it is an advance on understanding, filling the 'undiscovered world' with defined concepts. I think what may be better (in all cases) is what pragmatically proves useful (as a definition) should be retained.

Chris Witmore: This post was removed because of repetition.

Posted at Dec 14/2004 06:49 PM:
(Code got screwy in pevious post--sorry!) Tim-- First an apology; I realize how annoying anonymous comments can be. There was a genuine effort to understand the discussion on this page and some genuine frustration. And I was trying to figure out how these pages work -- whether one had to sign up somewhere to contribute, what happens when one deletes the name prompt in the comments box, etc. I'm [link], one of the three founding members of the [link] Trireme Veterans for Truth (TVfT). (Please don't suggest I'm not really real; I'm very sensitive when it comes to these identity politics issues, and I'm just as much a personality as 'Tim Webmoor' or anyone else is.) I shall add though that I and my TVfT colleagues have decent attention spans (unless we leave our [link] meds somewhere, but that's another story). And if we wanted quick-and-easy explanations, the last place on Earth we would probably go would be a Web site where one can view [link] each and every revised version of a page as it grows. Anyway, Tim, the trouble I had with the discussion above was not with neologisms per se. Hell, I'm all for them. (Some will accuse the TVfT of being reactionary idiots. They are wrong.) The problem I have is that in this case they're obscuring (my) understanding more than they're advancing or clarifying it. Instead of finding an 'undiscovered world' filled with newly-defined concepts, I feel like I'm drifting amid someone's mental flotsam and jetsam. As you point out, some context would be a huge help, because readers might not be aware of where the different threads woven into this discussion are coming from. Anyway, thanks for taking my comment seriously and not just blowing it off or telling me to go away. The TVfT enjoy the Metamedia site immensely. We promise not post any more comments anonymously (although we shall not put a lid on our sense of humour), and if for whatever reason you wish us to not comment at all, we shall, at your request, keep our thoughts to [link] (sorry it's mostly empty of content now; hopefully we'll get our act together before the New Year).

Posted at Dec 17/2004 07:44 AM:
tim webmoor: To get back to your point, Chris, I think our difference stems from a different investment in Latour's argument. I argue that his whole thrust in his last 4 books has been to re-formulate how the world is grasped/viewed so that we may bypass the insidious 'modernist settlement'. We must re-formulate our concepts inherited from the settlement in order to attend to the 'common-sense' world of increasing imbroglios of human-thing, where all humans+non-humans are granted 'action' (as actants). This re-grasping of reality as 'it really is' is a conceptual framework. And the tradition of extenstive glossaries of neo-logisms describing unfamiliar concepts is a further testament to this status. From the etymology of 'grasp', 'concepts' are how we think-through-reality and come to terms with it. While Latour wants to get away from anything associated with the troubling language metaphors of the modernist settlement, the result of his exhaustive descriptions of how the world really is, esp. in "Pandora's Hope", is a new way of thinking-through our political ecology with other actants. What Latour has described, with appeal only to common-sense and rhetoric as bolsters to his claim - which is his only recourse as a consequence of 'suspending epistemology' wherein he would have to (re)-formulate justification for knowledge claims or 'propositions' - is a new synthesizing framework for describing the common-sense world. Synthesizing as it pulls convictions from both entrenched camps in the science wars - eg. constructivists vs. dogmatic realists - and then re-threads the argument to bypass the divide and attain a collective. Only by utilizing some of the 'common-sense' convictions of dogmatic realists with a dash of the skepticism of relativists questioning autonomous objects does, I believe, Latour arrive at his convincing solution to appeal to both camps.

And your mention of Kant is apt, as I would draw analogy to what Latour is attempting to Kant's re-threading the gap and cracks that had appeared in the Enlightenment by the mid-18th century. Hume's Skepticism had questioned the capacity of the Entlightenment's all-important Rationality, Rousseau had contravened the very goals and beliefs of the Enlightenment by questioning 'progress' and Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' by insisting upon the deletrious affects of Rationality and modernization, and the Counter-Englightenment had begun with 'irrationalists' (Herder, later Goethe) in Germany, and so forth. Kant straddled a yawning divide between the Leibniz-Wolffian system of rationalism and Newtonian physics of a growing natural science (as well as most radically, Hume's skeptical empricism). What he proposed and accomplished was a radical break with the 'Enlightment settlement' at the time by, briefly, lodging Reality within all subjects. This was his bridging of Reality vs. Rationality. And he accomplished the bypass by re-grasping how reality and humans were positioned. So I would place Latour within 'conceptual therapy' - with this great task of re-describing common-sense reality of humans+non-humans in action via positing an exhaustive new conceptual toolbox of neologisms to bypass the current 'war' - as in fact of the highest order. This may cause knee-jerking from Latour adherents, but then I agree with Latour. Only I believe his work must be put in a greater context to shed historical similarities in his project - but which may portray him perhaps less unabashedly isolated and iconoclastic.

-see philosophical translation

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