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This article was downloaded by: [University of Vermont], [Adrian Ivakhiv]On: 06 March 2015, At: 11:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

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Global Discourse: An InterdisciplinaryJournal of Current Affairs and AppliedContemporary ThoughtPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgld20

Bruno Latour: reassembling thepolitical, by Graham Harman, London,Pluto Press, 2014, 216 pp., £19.99(paperback), ISBN 978-0745333991Adrian Ivakhiv aa Environmental Studies University of VermontPublished online: 04 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Adrian Ivakhiv (2015): Bruno Latour: reassembling the political, by GrahamHarm an, London, Pluto Press, 2014, 216 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0745333991, GlobalDiscourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought, DOI:10.1080/23269995.2015.1018663

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1018663

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BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM: BRUNO LATOUR:

REASSEMBLING THE POLITICAL , BY GRAHAM HARMAN

Bruno Latour: reassembling the political , by Graham Harman, London, Pluto Press,2014, 216 pp., £19.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0745333991

Will the real objects of politics please stand up?

Adrian Ivakhiv

Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political continues Graham Harman ’ s project, begunwith Prince of Networks (2009 ), to present anthropologist of science Latour as animportant philosophical figure for our time. As the first book devoted to Latour ’ s political philosophy, Harman ’ s is a groundbreaking work that carefully situates Latour ’ s thinkingamidst an array of political philosophers of the left and right. As with his earlier volumeon Latour, Harman writes judiciously here, carefully weighing out alternative interpreta-tions while positioning both Latour ’ s and his own as pointing toward a sensible ‘ middleway. ’ While the writing occasionally deviates into caricatures and sideswipes at rivals –

from Ray Brassier and the process-philosophical wing of speculative realism to the trendyhard left voices that dominate today ’ s Continental philosophy scene – the larger argument is presented cogently.

As with his writings on object-oriented ontology, or OOO – the philosophical move-ment that Harman has spearheaded over several books, numerous interviews, countlessarticles, and an endless stream of blog posts – Harman begins here with a useful, if oversimplified, schematic mapping of a complex terrain. With OOO, the mapping takesthe form of two binary pairs: one distinguishing the real from the sensual , another distinguishing objects from qualities . The result posits four types of things in the universe – real objects, sensual objects, real qualities, and sensual qualities – and four ‘ tensions ’

between them, which he labels time, space, essence, and eidos. In Reassembling the Political , Harman also presents a conceptual fourfold, but here it is made of two axes

rather than binaries: the first counterposes the political Left from the Right, and the secondcounterposes Truth to Power. Left is defined as belief in the goodness of human nature,and Right as its opposite, the belief that human nature must be curtailed by law; Truth isdefined as belief in the accessibility or knowability of Truth in some form, and Power asits opposite – a belief in the lack of Truth and the consequent need for Power alone. Theseare, of course, false dichotomies: either in the sense that their existence belies the truth of the middle (human nature is neither good nor evil, but is simply what it is – an evolved, partially stabilized yet still-changing set of capacities for surviving together socially inlarger-than-social environments), or in that they are not necessarily opposites (the acces-sibility of truth does not negate the possibility of power-in-itself, nor does the latter

eliminate the possibility of truth).If the dichotomies are overly schematic, the positions ascribed to notable thinkers –

from Hobbes and Rousseau to Schmitt, Strauss, Žižek, Badiou, Lippmann, and Dewey –

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make for productive discussion. But they raise the question of whether or not these twoaxes ought to define political philosophy. Harman ’ s leap is to propose a new, third axis –

that between human- only and human- plus-nonhuman – and then to point out that Latour ’ sinnovation is precisely in charting out this third frontier and making it central to his work.The case for the novelty of this ‘ Object Politics, ’ as Harman calls it, is straightforward. None of the other thinkers Harman mentions make much of the nonhumans. This is not tosay that such thinkers don ’ t exist: environmental philosophers like Val Plumwood andArne Naess, animal ethicists like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Cary Wolfe, and evensome better known for other work but whose forays into these areas are substantial(Haraway, Derrida, Macintyre, and others) have already paved the way for a political philosophy that makes space (and time) for nonhumans. But Harman ’ s task is not to makethe case for these other thinkers, but for Latour. That case, alas, becomes a little muddy, in part because of the slipperiness of the word ‘ object, ’ which serves to obscure an important difference between Latour and Harman.

Harman ’ s careful readings of Latour show that there are two main senses of the political in his work. The first, an expansive sense, traces the life of political objectsinto at least five variations, which may follow one another in sequence but need not dothat. In Harman ’ s concise summary, the five ‘ pass in a series from vague backgroundconcerns (Political-1) to nascent problems for the public (Political-2), to the subject of sovereign intervention (Political-3), to the sphere of explicitly political debate and pro- blem solving (Political-4), and finally to banal problems of governance ’ ( BLRP , 230). Thisexpansive sense of politics aligns well with the Latour of science and technology studies,the patient follower of actors who describes in tremendous detail how one kind of thing ismediated by other things to become another kind of thing.

The second, a more minimalist sense of the political, is that which for Latour

distinguishes politics from all other activities. This essence of politics has something todo with the gathering of a collectivity, a polity or demos , around some object of concernthat is neither fully known beforehand nor fully knowable in consequence. This gatheringinvolves the drawing of a circle where no circle exists, an assembling under a provisionalagreement without any guarantees. This second sense aligns more with the metaphysicalLatour, who is in principle not that different from his post-structuralist predecessors (likeDerrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and others), whose modus operandi was to deny the stabilityor final knowability of the objects they examined while privileging the active middle-ground that shapes them ( différance , power/knowledge, desiring-production, and so on).Latour simply pushes this anti-essentialism to include both the human and the nonhuman – and therefore both culture and nature, discourse and materiality – along with any boundaries between them.

Harman correctly identifies Latour ’ s mature political philosophy with the Dingpolitik (thing-politics) that becomes a prominent theme in his writing of the last 15 years. Latour makes no presuppositions here about humans, nature, the cogito , truth, knowledge, or indeed about politics; the political, for him, ideally emerges around those issues of concern around which a polity or demos can be assembled. In his programmatic statement ‘ From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik ,’ Latour ( 2005 ) calls for an ‘ object-oriented democracy ’

that brings together the ‘ Who is to be concerned ’ with the ‘ What is to be considered? ’ (allemphases in original). It conjoins ‘ an assembly, a gathering, a meeting, a council ’ with ‘ atopic, a concern, an issue, a topos. ’ ‘ How, ’ Latour asks, ‘ do they assemble, and aroundwhich matters of concern? ’ (6). ‘ If the Ding, ’ he asks rhetorically, ‘ designates both thosewho assemble because they are concerned as well as what causes their concerns and divisions , it should become the center of our attention: Back to things! ’ (13). ‘ What are the

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various shapes of the assemblies that can make sense of all those assemblages ?’ (14). Thisway of phrasing things unfortunately preserves the appearance of a dualism betweensubjects and objects, actors and issues. Harman reads this symmetry – which echoesLatour ’ s ‘ symmetrical anthropology ’ of humans and nonhumans – as betraying a lingeringCartesian (and we can add Kantian) dualism that cannot think of relations between, say,quarks and moons, but only of relations between quarks and people, and between moonsand people (see, e.g., BLRP, 59, 90).

But this is to mistake Latour ’ s epistemology for his ontology. For Harman, each of these things – quarks, moons, and people, alongside bridges, thoughts, and superheroes –

is an ‘ object, ’ and each harbors a withdrawn core that lacks relation with any other object.Harman criticizes Latour for building his ontology around ‘ actants ’ that are fully defined by their effects and relations (Harman, 178). For Latour, however, who follows aWhiteheadian metaphysics, they are not so defined. For Whitehead, they are not, becauseeach ‘ actual entity ’ is constituted in part by its own creativity – that is, by the kind of thing that Harman elsewhere calls a ‘ mini-transcendence. ’ For Latour, who doesn ’ t admit any ontological claims, calling something an actant is all we can do because we do not know what they, in reality, are. Latour ’ s ontological humility is exemplary here: asHarman notes repeatedly, Latour remains agnostic about what constitutes an object, anactor, an issue, and so on. An actor, he tells us, ‘ is whatever makes a difference ’ (Latour and Sanchez-Criado 2007 , 366); but whatever makes a difference, as the Modes of Existence project (Latour, 2013 ) makes clear, can be anything including even the repeti-tion of the same ( ‘ [REP] ’ ).

The key, for Latour, is not in distinguishing the actors from the issues. Rather, all that is significant occurs in the relation, the mediation , which, as Harman writes, ‘ is the heart of Latourian political philosophy just as it is the heart of everything else he has written ’

(Harman, 15). Mediation, however, is not an object –

as it is for Harman, for whomrelations are sensual objects, while non-relata are real objects. Mediation is an act; it iswhat an object does. Latour is agnostic about what the object is, since he cannot access it apart from its doings. Harman takes this to mean that Latour ’ s objects are exhausted bytheir ‘ effects and relations ’ (178), but this mistakes a result for an action. The evidence of the action is in its results, but the action itself is the mediation – which suggests that allaction is relational in form, but constructive and creative in nature. Harman is correct that Latour is ‘ much better at describing things that have already occurred than at consideringthings that might still occur ’ (130), but it ’ s not clear to me how Harman ’ s system does any better: it simply calls things ‘ objects ’ and insists that there is a withdrawn essence to eachobject, but it tells us little about that essence, since the essence withdraws . Like Latour,Harman is tacitly acknowledging that we (anyone or anything) can only know another thing from its outside – which means from its relations with us – and not from its phenomenological inside. Ontologically, he posits that there is an inside, while Latour remains silent about that; epistemologically, neither tells us anything about that inside, but Latour tells us a lot about the results of its actions.

What ’ s important, however, is that both Harman and Latour propose that the politicalnot be limited to the human. For Harman, though he doesn ’ t spell it out here, political philosophy ought to move toward an acknowledgment of the withdrawn essence of all things. Ontologically, that seems a tenable position to me, but politically it is a non-starter:hammers, viruses, and quasars may have the same ontological status as fetuses, elephants,nations, and fairy godmothers, but how does recognizing that help us decide what sort of world to craft together? For Latour, on the other hand, who begins from the ‘ matters of concern ’ that would draw together a nascent political community, the most important

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political issues are also the ones that matter most to those of us who are drawn into that community. Studying the successes and failures of such polity-building efforts can help uscraft new ones in the future. We – humans or otherwise – may not share the same measureof concern about all things, but surely there will be some things that matter to more of us,which will draw some of us together and generate new actions across the gaps betweenactors (those of us who are so drawn) and issues (the concerns that touch us profoundly).Latour usefully focuses on the mediations that make up the political and pushes us toconsider how the political today is also eco- and geo political. That, to my mind, is worthyof more than one book. Harman ’ s is an excellent start.

ReferencesHarman, G. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics . Melbourne: re-press.Latour, B. 2005. “ From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik : An Introduction to Making Things. ” In Making

Things Public-Atmospheres of Democracy , Catalogue of the Show at ZKM, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Latour, B. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns . Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B., and T. Sanchez-Criado. 2007. “ Interview: Making the ‘ Res Public ’ .” Ephemera 7 (2):364 – 371.

Adrian Ivakhiv Environmental Studies University of Vermont

[email protected]© 2015, Adrian Ivakhiv

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2015.1018663

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will the real objects stand up.pdf

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