Latour's Cartesian Fallacy

    Years ago, I visited New York City's transit museum.  Among the exhibits on display was a retrospective on the mapping of the city subway system. One of the innovations highlighted by the museum curators was the abandonment of geographic scale in subway maps. Designers discovered that a map of the subway system--its stations and lines--was more clearly intelligible when they did not strictly adhere to measures of physical displacement.¹

    After being advised by numerous individuals last semester that my project reminded them of Latour, I was expecting great things. Unfortunately, I've already encountered the ideas in We Were Never Modern, repackaged by Boulder philosopher cum [E/e]nlightenment guru, Ken Wilber.² Of course, I might at least have hoped that Latour, writing a decade before Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, would have offered some nuance, some insight, lost in Wilber's later attempt at amalgamating these and so many other ideas within a "theory of everything".  Instead, Latour launches into an all too common misreading of Leviathan³, as he commences to build a theoretical account of modernity upon a conflation of uncanny and chimerical.

    From Wilber, we get the concept of pre-trans fallacy.⁴ Where Wilber uses the pre- v. trans- distinction to identify the undifferentiated masquerading as the integrated, however, I would reverse the directionality, to suggest that while Latour, like Wilber, would "transcend and include" the premodern and the modern to achieve the nonmodern, his nonmodern is arrived at through a confusion of pre- and trans-, from the latter position.

    Latour's new constitution of delegation among networks coarsely put, is stuck in Cartesianism.  Unlike the MTA's subway map designers--who switch between different network representations as needs must--Latour mistakes the networks for reality.  As Alfred Korzybski reminds us, "The map is not the territory."  Now, the territory is no less artifactual than the map, but nonetheless, a network is nothing more and nothing less than a map:  an intelligible spatialized rendering.

    This is Latour's conflation of uncanny and chimerical.  For a chimera is intelligible, or to put it another way, imaginable.⁵  Chimera are distinct, and more to the point, as Latour emphasizes with his appeal to quasi-objects, they are distinctly objectifiable.  Chimera are things, even if only imaginable things, which Latour would organize in relation to other things between his two poles.  The uncanny, however, defies intelligibility, defies the capacity to imagine.⁶  Indeed, Latour touches on this very briefly midway through his text, when he talks of the "event", but then loses it⁷, falling back on safe and familiar objectifiable spatializable quasi-objects (and moments later, quasi-subjects!).  Unprepared to grapple with the pre- of indeterminacy, Latour obscures the uncanny by wallpapering the world with the trans- of networks.

notes

¹ In contrast to Latour's fetishism of modern scale, this clarity was obtained not through a quantitative change in order of scale, but rather by swapping one scale, measured in cartographic distances, for another, measured in stops along a path of movement.  By moving orthogonally, from one qualitative scope to another, they were able to better represent the same space--a commuter rail system connecting five boroughs--within the same quantitative scale of a subway map.

² Latour's four modern repertoires appear a decade later as Wilber's AQAL model, his quasi-objects appear in Wilber under the term holons, the spiral temporality Latour toys with briefly is found in the Boulder philosopher's discussion as a further development of Spiral Dynamics.  I do not recall Wilber attributing these ideas to Latour, but then Wilber would subsume Latour's nonmodern as but one link in a teleological chain of transhuman development.

³ Latour, like so many others, seems to miss entirely Hobbes's painstaking ontological heavy lifting to establish a multitude in covenant with itself, rather than a deified representative king, as "Mortall God".  See Land-Trujillo, B. (in preparation), "Corpuscular Leviathan", A Problem of Number: Social Theory as Physics.

⁴ It is here that Wilber makes his real contribution, but in a way that neither Latour nor Wilber, committed as they both are to a transcendence without immanence, would appreciate.  If Latour's favored workhorse of a prefix is non-, Wilber's is trans-.  Wilber marshals trans- in several modes, including--of relevance to us here--his concept of pre-trans fallacy. Drawing on the work of developmental psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, and harkening to Freud's dismissal of "oceanic fusion", Wilber declares pre-trans fallacy whenever he believes the wrong "yes" has been arrived at in a "yes-no-yes" sequence of development:  i.e., according Wilber, just because you arrive at the same answer as someone developmentally mature, does not mean you are mature, as the reasons for your answer are different.  Like Freud, Wilber believes undifferentiated experience is mistaken for spiritual enlightenment (Unlike Freud, however, Wilber believes the last yes is attainable.)

⁵ To use Descartes's example, "we could quite well distinctly imagine the head of a lion on the body of a goat".

⁶ Schrödinger's cat is uncanny: at once both dead and alive, neither dead nor alive.  Indistinct, indefinite, indeterminate, Schrödinger's cat is no more situated "in" the experimenter's box than she is "between" two ontological poles.  The uncanny is a performance without reference to Cartesian spatial relations.  Where a chimera has committed to being someplace between places, positionable in a network map of relations, the uncanny is not so much uncommitted as acommittal, not a thing in relation to other things, but a happening in relation only to its own immanence.

⁷ Or perhaps jettisons it, so determined is he to achieve a transcendence without immanence.