894 Reading Notes: Latour

Latour’s key idea and a few key terms

To use the idea of the “social” to explain social phenomenon is like pretending there is a material in which we are all floating, as if the adjective is a descriptor akin to silk or plastic.  Instead, Latour argues, to generate reliable explanations of how the social world works, one has to build a network of connections, spinning filaments that connect humans and objects within landscapes of activity, local point to local point, until a meaningful assemblage emerges.  The essence of ANT is captured on page 108: “I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely: there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (emphasis in original).

•  Actant—Basically “different ways to make actors do things” (p. 55, emphasis in original) without clearly defining the specific agents.
• Collective—A term which Latour proposes to “designate the project of assembling new entities not yet gathered together and which, for this reason, clearly appear as being not made of social stuff,” or, in other words, the ANT alternative to “society” (p. 75).
• Intermediary—This is “what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs” (p. 39).
• Mediator—In contrast to intermediary, these “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry… their input is never a good predictor of their output” (p. 39).
• Oligoptica—Something like a router, in that it is a hub or node from which multiple connections emerge.  It is describe as “star-shaped” (p. 182).  A couple of examples are a newspaper editor’s cubicle or a military command center.
• Translation—Basically, the channel of mediation, “a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (p. 108).

Drawing connections between things in the world (picture taken in Taipei, Taiwan)

Latour and literature

In my reading of Latour I was fascinated by the several times that he draws attention to literature in his text.  For example, in his discussion of actant, Latour uses literature as an example to explain the variety of actants that might occur, arguing, in fact, that literature is freer about what can be considered an actant than sociology normally is.  He gives as an example a fable in which a magic wand or even “a thought in the fairy’s mind” are as capable of acting as a knight with a sword (p. 54).  Later, in the discussion of the idea that objects can also have agency he brings up the “resource of fiction” for building connections between objects and humans (p. 82).

I was reminded of this point this week when I was reading an essay in The Best American Essays 2009, in which PatriciaHampl describes visiting an art museum to stimulate her writing.  She goes home and writes long descriptive passages, trying to better capture her memories.  But then something unexpected happens.  “To my growing astonishment, these long descriptive passages, sometimes running two, three pages or longer, had a way of sheering off into narrative after all.  The teacup I was describing had been given to me by my mother. And once I thought of the fact that she had bought these cups, made in Czechslovokia, as a bride just before the Second World War, I was writing about that war, about my mother and her later disappointments, which somehow were, and were not, part of this fragile cup” (p. 50).  The connection that Hampl makes between description and narrative reminded me of the ways that Latour describes the connections between objects and humans.  In fact, as Hampl goes on the parallels grow even more striking:  

“Description, written from the personal voice of my own perception, proved even to be the link with the world’s story, with history itself.  Here was my mother’s teacup, made in Czechoslovakia before the war, and here, therefore, was not only my mother’s heartbreak, but Europe’s. The detail was surely divine, offering up miracle after miracle of connections out of the faithful consideration of the fragments before me.” (p. 50)

Hampl’s use of this object, the teacup, not only creates a network of connections that resonate in her own individual life but ultimately opens to her the ways that she is connected to larger, broader networks, to larger populations and world events.

Mug memories: 

night street in Taipei and a favorite shop...

shopping at 10 pm coming back home... 

pencil box in Dad's shop (until I rescued it)... 

Taiwanese tea, Vietnamese and Malaysian coffee drunk in the USA... 

Reading Latour

Latour has been the most pleasurable author to read yet.  I found Spinuzzi accessible, but Latour has an accessible style as well, and rare for academic books, little glints of humor here and there. I especially enjoyed “On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog,” the simulated interview with a graduate student, in which Latour proves that if you try to “apply” actor-network theory to frame an analysis, you are missing the point. 

Because we recently read about hypertext theory, I realized that reading an academic book—particularly Latour—isn’t that different from hypertext.  In other words, an academic reader will move between the main text and the footnotes or endnotes, and quite possibly the references or even the index. Here, by using footnotes, Latour makes it easier to keep track of the main text.  Of course, this is by no means unique, but for Latour, it is a way that he demonstrates connections to an unusually wide range of sources and it is also a place for odd bits of information.  For example, I liked footnote 179’s comparison of French and American scholarship: “In France, you can be at once naively rationalist and a great admirer of deconstruction. Once transported across the Atlantic, this innocent passion became a dangerous binary weapon” (p. 126).  I might also mention footnote 171, similar for tongue-in-cheek style and in message: “After years of teaching in England and America, I have been forced to recognize that semiotics does not survive sea travels” (p. 122).[1] 

Another thing that was interesting about reading Latour was considering whether there is a French style of writing.  (I also bring into play here my vague memory of Hélène Cixous’ essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and an even vaguer memory of Derrida’s writing.)  At any rate, I noticed when I read Foucault that reading longer sections results in greater comprehension.  Latour is much more accessible, but I feel that he also argues cumulatively, driving an argument forward in small successive sweeps, and then circling back to remind the reader of an earlier point.  I feel like Anglo-American scholarship is more systematic, pushing the argument forward in evenly-paced steps. 

One thing that really works for me in Latour is his metaphor of travel.  He uses this to frame his warnings of what is to come and the distance the reader will have to move to get there. 

Walking slowly (ODU, July 2015)

Likewise, he uses metaphors of transportation to describe theories, comparing faster forms of transportation with ordinary social theories that quickly move to the explanation of the social. In contrast, he uses the idea of walking to describe the application of ANT as a theory, like an ant following a path of crumbs, moving slowly and painstakingly along the ground.  

References

Hampl, P. (1981). The dark art of description.  In M. Oliver & R. Atwan (Eds.), The best American essays 2009 (pp. 43-52). Boston: Mariner Books.

Latour, B. (2008). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

894 Mind Map

I am embedding my mind map here. This is my first time tweaking code, so I'm pretty excited that you can actually see SOMETHING here.  Let me know if it isn't working.

April 17 update

For social network analysis, I made connections to “network society,” because computing has made possible the data crunching that SNA depends on, to “relations” because SNA is looking at relations, particularly human-human interactions. I added another node as well, “data analysis,” which I have also connected to “network society.” It is true that it is primarily methodology but is so essential to SNA that it is almost like another concept.

April 3 update

I added a node for Castells and a small web of nodes capturing some of the main features I see in Castells. This is more interpretive than for some other scholars because Castells doesn’t establish a theoretical framework with a set terminology.  However, I decided to look at technological innovation and diffusion as a node and time and space, combined for convenience, as a node, which when bundled with human actors and non-human actants from previous theories, generate a synergy leading to Castells’ network society, another node.  I recognize that I am being redundant in listing “network society” in two places, except in the main node I am using at as a label for a theory and in the second as a concept, or perhaps better, an assemblage.  This node, in turn, connects to nodes for work and identity.  Connected to the work node are also nodes for the micro and macro changes in work, namely, how the network society has changed first, the nature of work, capturing the types of positions emerging and the changing workplace, i.e. the flexibility, stability and managerial climate of the workplace, and second, the structure of the labor force in terms of the economic structure of a country.  To be fai r, I should probably indicate international and global interdependence here, too, but I already have a fairly complex diagram.  I also connected concepts from Castells back to CHAT, thinking in terms of workplace and organizational studies that would probably illuminate Castells, to ecology due to the big picture nature of Castells’ system, and to laminated chronotopes because of the space and time relations that Castells include.  I also included institutions, a node previously associated with CHAT, because sociologists such as Castells inevitably implicate institutions to one degree or another.

March 27 update

I added a node for neurobiology connected to a node for "neural network," to which I attached nodes for "cognition," "emotion," "memory," "motor skills," and "sensory perception." These I connected to "mind."  The idea behind this addition was to see the entire neural capabilities of human beings, i.e. the brain and nervous system as part of "mind," through which human beings interact with the world in any of the other ways implied by other theories.  Bateson's theory, therefore, is in a sense compatible.

March 14 update

Even though I was inspired by Megan's mind map to make mine better, I haven't yet been able to come up with a better strategy.  I'll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, I added Bateson with connections to "ecologies," "actor," "non-human actant," and "mind."  I have the connections to the other nodes pass beneath "mind."  I really should have them link through it, but that was an afterthought.

March 4 update

I had the impression that I had added Latour with the last update, but I later realized that wasn't the case.  At any rate,  I added a node for Latour along with connections to ecology, actor, non-human actants and relations.  Actors and actants are obvious choices, but I think that Latour's approach, by focusing on tracing connections, makes relationships more explicit than some theories, though relationships are implicit in all network approaches.  I also added "plasma" as a new node and "black box".

February 26 update

I  added hypertext as a node and connected it to concept and rhetor/actor.  Concept was associated with Foucault, but I'm repurposing it here because hyperlinked terms are usually key concepts operating within a text, and this is somewhat similar to concepts that organize discourse in a Foucauldian sense.  I also connected hypertext to Vatz because of Vatz's claim that the rhetor generates the exigence for discourse.  In hypertext, the assumption is that the rhetor (the user/reader) makes meaning by the links that are made.  This is analogous, in that meaning is being generated by the operations of selection and connection.

February 21 update

I added CHAT as a node and connected from CHAT to actors (=people, in terms of CHAT), and actants (i.e. objects).  I also added "laminated chronotope" as a new node connected to CHAT, but also to genre, speech act, and event, since I see these as connected to the concept.  I also added "ecology(ies)" because this appears two places in the CHAT list.  The mind map doesn't allow me to handle this in the way that I'd like.  If I could do so, I would color-code connections to group nodes and connections into subsets, or I would draw boundaries around varies nodes.  Ecology, to my mind, would be better treated in this way than as a separate node.

Earlier updates

Because I didn't initially realize that I needed to put my mind map in the blog and trace my additions as I went along, it is a little hard for me to reconstruct exactly what I did when.  However, I know I did the following at different points:

• I added Foucault to the mind map and put the discursive formations as a block of nodes connected to Foucault. 
• I added Spinuzzi and genre theorists to the mind map and made appropriate connections to these as well as back to aspects of the rhetorical situation.

894 Reading Notes: Foucault

How Foucault is productive for me

"Discourse is.. a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed" (p. 55) 

(my photo)  

When I first studied Foucault in Modern Rhetoric, I approached his ideas with a certain level of discomfort, mostly because I wasn’t sure that I bought into his ideas about how power constructs subjects.  However, his insights in The Archeology of Knowledge have been more compelling as well as more productive for my purposes, and I tend to rank him higher as a theorist as a result.  Foucault’s view of “discourse” as a theoretical construct is something that I believe can be productively employed in the more theoretical social sciences, in cultural studies, and very definitely in rhetoric. While it’s true that Foucault does not offer a direct methodology for me to explore disciplinarity—particularly since Foucault makes the explicit point that discursive formulations are not equivalent to disciplines but more akin to discursive webs that cross disciplinary boundaries and institutional practices.  However, even if disciplines are not discourses per se, they do employ discourse in the Foucauldian sense and are “disciplined” by such discursive phenomena as Foucault discusses.  The Archeology of Knowledge is not an argument about the social construction of knowledge (see, for example, Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967))  or a version of the rhetoric of science, but rather the discursive construction of knowledge. That discourse is socially constructed is a fairly necessary foundation, of course, but it is not the focus of Foucault’s treatise.  Instead, he is concerned with how epistemologically structured discourses (that is, discursive formulations) emerge with a set of rules (enunciative functions) that in turn shape what can be said and known, and thus create knowledge.   I think some of Foucault’s ideas can definitely be productive for me as I look at disciplines as a community of practice and consider how discourses in the Foucauldian sense are superimposed on disciplines as well as working within disciplines.  I think I can use some of his concepts methodologically in a narrower way, as well.  In other words, even though Foucault is interested in discourses (big D discourse) that go beyond a single discipline or institution, it seems like it would be productive to look for discursive formations and enunciative functions within the discourse (small D) of disciplines and subdisciplines in the academy.

Reading Foucault

What reading Foucault requires (my photo)

My experience reading Foucault was challenging, but educational in several ways.  It goes without saying that I gained a great deal of insight about Foucault’s ideas from the inside.  It’s one thing to read about a theory; it is always a different experience to read the theorist.  However, I also learned some things about how to read a more challenging text.  For example, I eased my way into the book with some preliminary scribbled notes.  As I look back at them now, they hardly seem necessary but they were helpful for dipping my toes into the argument, for example, I started with “History seen as periods with trajectory, continuations…History in other disciplines—like literary studies as disruptions and ruptures.”  I began to think of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.  Foucault mentions the “Other” (caps, italicized) (p. 12) I asked, “What does F. mean? How does he use this term (i.e. compared with others who popularized it?”  (After reading the rest of the book, I’m not sure he did do much with it. I’m not saying that Foucault does not discussthe idea that there is an Other that is not being spoken because certainly the idea is salient to him, but I felt it was an indirect point in this book.) After I got going in the book, I thought about the concept of rhizomes from Deleuze and Guatarri (2004). 

Somewhere in part two I started taking more systematic notes, discovering that the outline of the book is, in fact, well-organized.  The table of contents and the chapter titles are a decent roadmap to the theoretical framework.  I also discovered something important about how to read Foucault.  I discovered that is better to read through to the end of a chapter without stopping too much, trying to keep track of the general flow of the discussion but don’t worry about understanding too much until I get a sense of where he is going with something. He often summarizes and rephrases a key point at the end of the chapter, and at the ends of sections, he often recapitulates his arguments.  A great example of this is the end of chapter 4 of part 3 (p. 116).  Even though Foucault did often come back to his main points at the end of chapters, I often had to re-read a chapter.  Rereading a chapter was always more productive than rereading a paragraph multiple times.  In fact, I feel like I understand Foucault overall much better now that I have a sense of the book as a whole that I did at any time or point during the actual reading process. This is the case even as I forget the details.  I don’t know if this has to do with the way Foucault writes per se, or if it is something of a French style.  I feel like Derrida, Deleuze and Guatarri, and Barthes gave me a similar feeling of discursive abundance, of flowing quite a distance before being circling back to make the point.  I might also mention that I discovered that Foucault often provides a road map ahead.  This is also helpful, more than anything when I flip back to these sections after I have read them. 

Occasionally Foucault discusses examples from his earlier studies, Madness and Civilization, Birth of a Clinic, and The Order of Things.   These sections were among the most accessible even though I had not read the works that he referred to.   I don’t think examples are strictly necessary; I wouldn’t argue that he should necessarily have illustrated all of us ideas with examples.  However, when he did have them, I found them helpful.

To wrap up this section, I think I am pleased with how accessible Foucault proved in the end.  If I read more of Foucault’s works, I think I have a better idea how to proceed.

A few quotes I like:

“A statement always has borders peopled by other statements” (p. 97).  

“Archeology is not in search of inventions; and it remains unmoved at the moment (a very moving one, I admit) when for the first time someone was sure of some truth; it does not try to restore the light of those joyful mornings” (p. 144).

Uptake of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

Some time back I became interested in learning more about discourse analysis. When I started looking for books and materials, I learned that “discourse analysis” means many different things to different people. One of the key ways the term is used is within linguistics where it primarily refers to taking a chunk of language larger than a sentence as an object of study.  That was a familiar concept to me, and more or less what I was looking into at that time, but I was a little surprised and mystified to discover that the term had also been taken up by different branches of social science and manifested itself as different methodologies.  Since then I’ve paid attention to different ways that the term “discourse” and “discourse analysis” is used.  In fact, it is a major research interest of mine now. By the time I began reading The Archeology of Knowledge I was already vaguely familiar with Foucault’s use of “discourse” as a philosophical concept, but I wasn’t aware until I did a little Googling that the concepts in this book have had a great deal of uptake in terms of what is now called “Foucauldian discourse analysis,” or as one recent online article put it, “FOUCAULTian discourse analysis” (weird capitalization in original). In fact, this article was quite interesting in capturing how Foucault’s method of analysis has been taken up in several national contexts—France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria and Netherlands, and Spain. It doesn’t talk much about the US, except to call the country an “underrepresented area” in terms of surveys like this one and to note that the impact “is enormous and the methodological orientation toward discourse analysis is increasing" (Diaz-Bone et al, 2007).   

Concepts of network, or why does this book fit this course

When I first started reading this book, I saw it as highly relevant to my research interests, to looking at how disciplinary discourses construct and are constructed by disciplinary beliefs and values.  What was less obvious to me was how the book fit a course in network theories. Spinuzzi and genre theory seem a reasonable fit since many genre theorists work within the framework of Activity Theory, and I think this is at least partially the case for Spinuzzi (2003).  Activity Theory is an ecological approach that connects moving parts in a network sort of way.  I figured Latour (2005) made sense. After all, the word “network,” is in the title and ditto for Castells (1996).  And Rickert (2013)? Well, the word “ambient” sounds dispersed and web-like.  But Foucault was less obvious as an inclusion.  In fact, most of the time when I was reading this book, the idea of network was not at the forefront of my mind.  However, there are some places where Foucault does explicitly use the term “network”. 

First, he discusses the idea of books as a “node within a network” (p. 23).  Interestingly, too, a book is not seen as the same kind of node in each type of discourse because different discourses are constructed differently.  Later, subjects are seen as situated within a “certain grid,” and, later on the same page, notes that a subject can occupy different positions  “in the information networks” (p. 53).  The next chapter discusses concepts in terms of “conceptual network” (p. 62), how concepts are established in relation to one another within a theory, a discipline or an approach at a given point in time.  Much later in the book, in the chapter, “Comparative Facts,” the idea of network is even more salient. Here Foucault discusses how different disciplines, institutions, and practices can be analyzed in different ways, and it is possible to reveal more than one “interdiscursive network” (p. 159). Finally, in contrast with the history of ideas, archeology maps rules of formation such as the principle that sometimes rules can only appear after others make room for their appearance.  In other words, “the archeological ramification of the rules of formation is not a uniformly simultaneous network: there exist relations, branches, derivations that are temporally neutral; there exist others that imply a particular temporal direction” (p. 169).

As I look back over my notes, I see that noticed them as I read.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in my notes, of course. By the same token, they are much more salient to me now as I cast my mind back over the entire book.  I can see how Foucault is primarily discussing connections and sets of relations—statements within a discourse, subjects in discursive spaces, connections between concepts, etc.   The notion of network is both explicit and implicit throughout.

References

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday. 

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum.  

Diaz-Bone et al. (2007). The field of Foucaultian discourse analysis: Structures, developments and perspectives.Forum: Qualitative Social Research 8(2). Retrieved from
http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/234/517

Foucault, M. (1989). The Archeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rickert, T. J. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.