Friday 19 March 2010

Bruno Latour's Making Things Public

It took a great deal of effort to read this exceedingly complex academic text (if ‘academic text’ is in fact the right word for it). Part encyclopaedia, part occasional text, part social-theoretical user’s manual - with colour-coded sections for ease of use - this text is a book on only in the Deleuzian sense; a ‘machine’, or perhaps better a ‘thing’, that calls the very idea of a book, and a ‘thing’, into question. As such, it is a book that is dizzyingly self-reflexive: a book about things that presents itself as simply one more thing and yet also more than a thing – a kind of reflexive ‘meta-thing’, the thing of all things that is not itself a thing. And who better to edit the book than the perhaps the world’s leading philosopher of things – Bruno Latour.

According to the editors of this collection of short essays, today’s key philosophical problem necessitates putting ‘the thing’ back to the centre of our philosophical and sociological investigations. More specifically, in order to make sense of what post-structuralist philosophers have termed ‘the political’, Latour and Weibel argue that is necessary to make the link between 'assemblage' and 'assembly', in such a way that we begin to understand democracy not in terms of a sacred political ideal, but simply as a mechanism or a way of ‘making things public’.

Husserl’s famous demand the philosophy should return to the ‘thing in itself’ is here transposed onto a higher socio-political plane where the ‘representationalist’ political ideals of the Enlightenment are no longer fully operative when we recognise that the ‘object’ has become part of the body politic. In this case, according to Latour we are forced to concede that ‘parliaments are only a few of the machineries of representation among many others and not necessarily the most relevant or the best equipped’ (p31). Thus the overall aim of the book is to collect an ‘assembly of assemblies’ that is not reducible to the European tradition of parliaments and to explore the way in which we can make new kind of political assembly out of all the various object-assemblages in which we are always and already enmeshed.

Neil Turnbull

6 comments:

  1. I wonder!I have only questions here. Sounds like a great idea, institutions such as parliaments are kept at a remove from the public; as was more than evident in the recent expenses scandal. But what might it materially entail? Does Latour give details how this assemblages of assemblies might take place? How public should things be? Should we maintain the private public distinction to some degree?

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  2. I like this, but isn't how things already are? We have an all consuming, global economy that no representative assembly is fully in control of.

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  3. That's a very astute point Rob. On some level capital always breaks down borders, always transgresses identities and is in some way universal. So I would tend to agree, corporate power works precisely in this way, setting up new streams of revenue, new points of synergy, new forms of immaterial labour, and new adminstrative agglomerations. The managerial economy or bust!

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  4. I think what Latour is trying to get at here is the Machiavellian idea that politics is made; constructed through strategy and alliance.

    These strategies are not just about bringing humans into play either - they bring the whole comsos into play. Politics for Latour is always a cosmopolitics....

    This is the exact opposite of neol-liberal non-agentive politics: where markets trump politics. It is attempting to reconstruct politics on a new ontological terrain on people, things and places.

    Neil Turnbull

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  5. Don't you have to find a non-agentive element to assemble your assemblies? If you create one then it will be intrinsically Machiavellian.

    The very notion of creating something to govern is Machiavellian and implies an untrustworthyness in humanity. I think finding out that you being goverened beyond anyones control is sort of relieveing in a way.

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  6. Although if you are being governed by "something" beyond everyone's control, then whatever it is is not accountable, which is itself worrying. At least with the Machiavellian prince the centre of power is clear--there is a fixed target for resistance which can be overthrown if it proves to be flawed. In this state of affairs, there is a tangible sense of governance.
    Without a centralised control, however, when power is diffuse and diffused, then the notion of governance in any tangible sense is dispelled, and there is little chance of resistance...

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