More Latour–by Harman

Or

“Having abandoned the Kantian landscape of the analytics and continentals, Latour enters exotic terrain. His philosophy unfolds not amidst the shifting fortunes of a bland human-world correlate, but in the company of all possible actants: pine trees, dogs, supersonic jets, living and dead kings, strawberries, grandmothers, propositions, and mathematical theorems. These long lists of random actors must continue until their plurality and autonomy is no longer suppressed. We still know nothing about these objects or what they entail. All that is clear is their metaphysical equality. The world is a stage filled with actors,; philosophy is object-oriented philosophy. […] But Latour emphatically rejects this rift between an inner substance and its trivial exterior. His ‘actant’ is a concrete individual, but not a nucleus of reality surrounded by shifting vapors of accidental and relational properties. […] But since Latour grants all actants an equal right to existence, regardless of size or complexity, all natural and artificial things must count as actants as long as they have some sort of effect on other things. […] For Latour an actant is always an event, and events are always completely specific” (17). 

The concreteness of all

“Latour’s difference from present-day analytic and continental thought should now be clear. Whereas Latour places all human, nonhuman, natural, and artificial objects on the same footing, the analytics and continentals both still dither over how to bridge, ignore, deny, or explain away a single gap between humans and world. While graduate students are usually drilled in a stale dispute between correspondence and coherence theories of truth, Latour locates truth in neither of these models, but in a series of translations between actors. And whereas mainstream philosophy worries about whether things exist independently of us or are constructed by the mind, Latour says they are ‘socially’ constructed not just by human minds, but also by bodies, atoms, cosmic rays, business lunches, rumors, physical force, propaganda, or God. There is no privileged force to which the others can be resduced, and certainly no ceaseless interplay between pure natural forces and pure social forces, each untainted by the other. Nothing exists but actants, and all of them are utterly concrete” (The Metaphysics of Latour 16). 

Irreducibility

In Latour’s book, We Have Never Been Modern, we encounter the principle of irreduction, which expounds the idea that no object is inherently reducible or irreducible to any other. In broad terms, this means that connections between two separate things can be made in a persuasive fashion, insofar as the equivalences are clearly traced and shown, but the connection cannot explain exhaustively the presence of either one of the elements involved. Irreducibility, in short, marks that no object can be translated into any other isomorphically. There is no actual transubstantiation in representation, verbal or visual. What the labor of translation points to is the excessive work of mediation that is involved, which creates as much proximity as distance. No deduction, strictly logical or arguably empirical, happens without elements and layers of meaning added and/or lost in the process. For Harman, “Nothing is a mere intermediary” (The Metaphysics of Latour 15).