Latour on Critical Barbarity

There has been some discussion of Bruno Latour's article in Critical Theory on the problems with the popularization of critique. We should be careful about over-interpreting the article. Latour explicitly denies that popular relativisms and the like are direct appropriations of critical theory: he insists that they are absurd deformations of critical arguments, "like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party". The repeated parallel to nuclear weapons -- a result of applied science -- is, I would be willing to bet, quite deliberate; Latour's claim is not that he and other critical theorists were wrong but that he and other critical theorists find themselves in much the same boat as nuclear scientists. One of the longstanding points of critical theory has been that when scientists reassure themselves that things like nuclear weapons are simply the result of 'bad guys' using any weapon at hand, they are kidding themselves; and thus Latour finds critical theory in much the same state: critical theorists can't simply say that the conspiracy theories are just what you get when your critical arguments land in the hands of 'bad guys', even though the conspiracy theories, like nuclear weapons are a sort of absurd deformation of scientific work. Latour is unreprentant about what what he calls his critiques of "an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact"; he simply doesn't want to deny that something else also requires critique, namely, "an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases."

In other words, Latour's argument is simply that critical theory must be examined by critical theory. This becomes much clearer, I think, in the expanded version of the article on Latour's website (actually, the lecture on which it is based). There Latour discusses critical theory as pharmakon -- i.e., drug, one that can heal or poison. As he sarcastically says,

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't this really worth going to graduate school to study critique?

Latour calls this suspiciously convenient inconsistency 'critical barbarity'. In his view it's a failure of consistency in the application of critical theory itself: "We explain the objects we don't approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don't like by disciplines whose makeup we don't examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern." On one issue the critical barbarian uses antifetishism; on another, positivism; on another, realism; without the slightest concern that the three positions are mutually inconsistent. However, Latour goes on to insist that people in science studies are at least somewhat immunized:

But of course such a cavalier attitude with such contradictory repertoires is not possible for those of us, in science studies, who have to deal with states of affairs which fit neither in the list of plausible fetishes—because everyone, including us, does believe very strongly in them—nor in the list of undisputable facts, because we are witnessing their birth, their slow construction, their fascinating emergence as matters of concern. The metaphor of the Copernican revolution, so tied to the destiny of critique, has always been for us, science students, simply moot. This is why, with more than a good dose of field chauvinism, I consider this tiny field so important: it is the little rock in the shoe that might render the routine patrol of the critical barbarians more and more painful.

The danger of the critical participant in science studies, Latour argues, is believing that he has provided an adequate social explanation of the sciences, because then he has begun to use the results of one field (e.g., sociology) uncritically. And so he ends with a challenge to his fellow critical theorists:

Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools? Would we not be thoroughly humiliated to see that military personnel are more alert, more vigilant, more innovative than us, the pride of academia, the crème de la crème, who go on ceaselessly transforming the whole rest of the world into naïve believers, into fetishists, into hapless victims of domination, while at the same time turning them into the mere superficial consequences of powerful hidden causalities coming from infrastructures whose makeup is never interrogated? All the while being intimately certain that the things really close to our hearts would in no way fit any of those roles. Are you not all tired of those "explanations"? I am, I have always been, when I know, for instance, that the God to whom I pray, the works of art I cherish, the colon cancer I have been fighting, the piece of law I am studying, the desire I feel, indeed, the very book I am writing could in no way be accounted for by fetish or fact, nor by any combination of those two absurd positions?

...The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya between antifetishism and positivism, but the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing. Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.

I think Mooney's probably right that this article marks a change in the Science Wars; I very much doubt, however, that it marks the change Mooney suggests. Latour doesn't want to let go of the old critiques; he is not saying he was wrong. (Indeed, he explicitly denies that he was.) He is saying that the old critiques need to be reformulated in a more sophisticated form. He's not conceding defeat, or even reluctantly reaching across the table for an alliance; he's gearing up for a new set of battles, for a more thorough critique.

(HT: Reality Conditions)