1

Name: Souradip Bhattacharyya M Phil First year Sub: Modern Social Thought First Assignment

Question: Latour proposes historically situated ethnographic study of specific networks in which humans and non-humans act as mediators. Foucault proposes genealogical study of disciplines. Are the two methods complementary or contradictory? Response: I should begin my paper with the remark that the final sentence in the above question really intrigues me. Especially the conjunction or which probably seeks to compartmentalize a priori the comparison between the analytical endeavours of Foucault and Latour under the strict boundaries of either complement or contradiction. Interestingly enough, neither Foucault nor Latour would bank much upon the process of compartmentalization as such. While a certain section of my paper deals with this approach on behalf of the two philosophers, I also investigate whether such compartmentalization is possible under the above-mentioned question. Bruno Latour in his critique of the social scientific approach towards Science Studies takes into task the formers compulsive endeavour towards discursivization of science where scientific knowledge is seen as an effect of discourse. Any new invention, discovery or disciplinary change would be for Social Science questions of discursive change, that is, a product of languagea technical language of sciencea disciplinary mechanism. Placing science under the paradigm of discourse, the social scientists would claim that it speaks nothing about the real world.1The operative factor over here would be to investigate the
1

Science for them is a product of discourse that scientists believe in and work, within the technical language of science.

position of Foucault under such a social scientific approach towards the functionality of science.2 In Discipline and Punish Foucault talks about the creation of docile (that is, quiet and easy to control) bodies by disciplinary power under the modern regime that used elaborate scientific techniques to produce a productive human body.3 For Foucault such processes produce a discursive truth/real where docility is produced under the tripartite process of exploration, breakage, and rearrangement 4 for its subjection and usage. In Foucaults patiently documentary5 study of the production of the docile subject his continuous stress would lie in the procedural implications involved on behalf of disciplinary power in creating a new body (or rather mind-body) flexible and manipulable enough to the demands of that power, in other words to obtain an efficient machine. 6 For Latour, such a Foucauldian take on science would be to approach it in a partial way. All that science has done is just not the proliferation of discourse but it has also addressed various real issues. Going by the Latour-ian logic, scientific descriptions of the impending danger in the widening of the ozone hole or the control of Aids are not merely rhetorical representations. Of course, such reports affect the daily life of people through various disciplinary constrictions. But for Latour the role of science does not end there. In addressing the question of the ozone hole or the control of Aids science must be focussing on certain real problems, real because they affect the life of people, have a possibility of annihilating it.7
2

After all, Foucaults criticism of disciplinary power in its appropriation of the body and characteral traits/behaviour (what Foucault calls gesture) of human beings has been of insurmountable importance in the proliferation of anti-humanist scholarship.
3

Foucaults approach is not exactly in alliance with the social scientific claim of the disinterest of scientific processes in the real world.
4

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Vintage: New York, 1995).
5

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76-100.
6 7

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Vintage: New York, 1995).

To contrast the methodologies of Foucault and Latour under just the above-mentioned aspects of the Science-Social dyad would be to miss the underlying intricacies. The Foucauldian and Latour-ian schemas are not exactly binary opposites in understanding socioscientific phenomena. After all, Foucault is not very far from Latours criticism of the modernizing procedure of disentangling the pre-modern phenomenon of a nature-culture complex into self-explanatory watertight categories of nature (or things-in-themselves) and culture (or humans-among-themselves). Culture or the realm of sociality among humans is not an a priori in life. There can never be a space for humans-among-themselves because the category of the human is not inherent, there are actually no pure humans-inthemselves.8 As Foucaults analysis of Docile Bodies would show, docility is created/produced in and through the physical and behavioural aspects of man under the dual registers of the Anatomico-metaphysical and the Technico-political 9 for submission and use. On the other hand, the Latour-ian schema would deal with the act of purification (the separation into nature and culture) as well, albeit in his way. Latour understands modernity as a work of purification that creates a non-negotiable boundary between the subject and object presupposing a flow from the subject to the object. This flow, or the act of mediation between the subject (human) and object (non-human) happens under a medium where the non-human (like the machine) does nothing of its own but is worked upon or transformed by human labour. The non-humanfor the modernhas no agency on its own. Very interestingly, while Foucaults objective was to document the production of a docile human mind-body under Disciplines scientific mechanism, Latour tries to investigate the subsumption of non-human by the subject by critiquing modern historicity

The crucial proposition in the Latour-ian tongue would be to criticize the partial falsification of the role of science by exemplifying such critical issues to say that science is just not an effect of rhetoric
8

Rather, we can say that the among and the in in the above-mentioned phrases are discursively produced.
9

Ibid.

and making in turn a historical analysis of the modern theory of progress 10. For the modern theory of progress and historicity (passage of time) events are situated, unlike calendar time with respect to their intensity.11 Since progress aligns itself to development, the passage from bad to good, modernity undergoes a break with the past.12 The act of denigrating the past coincides with the act of purification or is purification. The constant need to purify is to cleanse the present, to invest into a certain progress devoid of the effect of the past. While the act of purification separates the pole of nature from that of culture, trying to disentangle a pre-modern hybrid to create pure categories which can mediate objectively, such an objective mixture of pure categories actually feed into highlighting one type of category over another, working essentially through suppression. Such a stance is, nevertheless, paradoxical because it is precisely out of fear of the past that the Gordian Knot13 has been broken and no wonder it is this very fear that constantly drives the need to progress. What becomes very clear is the unavoidability of this fear. The operative question over here is to trace this fear which has made modernity adhere to a notion of time that is contemporary and follows a progressive continuity. Here Latours reference to Shapin and Schaffers analysis of Boyles experiment becomes very crucial. The main objective of Latour through such an elaborate description is to shift the attention of social scientists to the practice of science, to observe what scientists actually do.14 Boyles experiment of the vacuum pump is significant because in here the witness of the non-human (the chicken feather) produces scientific knowledge. Contrary to modernist logic therefore, the non-human seizes to be a mere object,
10

Latour criticizes a modern theory of progress that he thinks functions under the tripartite structure of purification, mediation, and translation. For further reference see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993).
11

Ibid.
12

The linear development to the future bases itself on the elimination of the past.
13

For further discussion on the Gordian Knot see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Chapter 1, (Harvard: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993). 14 No doubt the discursivity underlying the universal application of Boyles law in unavoidable. Every laboratory is a constructed fact, an act of human intervention producing a natural law as a result of that intervention.

a recipient. Such an experiment disrupts the entire modernist enterprise of the subject controlling the object, the equation of the act of manipulation flowing from the active agent (subject) to the inert object. Not only are the self-explanatory categories of subject-hood and object challenged (how can the subjects be one such controlling agent if object seizes to be inert and is therefore not an object?) but the very role of agency is put into question. 15 Latour here introduces the concept of the Quasi-, a combining form in adjectives and nouns meaning: that appears to be something but is not really so. Humans and non-humans for Latour are quasi-objects or actants that do not have inherent qualities but act as mediators in a particular network. Actants are not subjective or objective who. They have no essence because their actions are singular and variable. Hence there are no inner attributes attributable to actants. Hence the possibility of any precedence is annihilated. The world, for Latour, is a shifting network of actants. Hence a historical analysis of actants would fail to trace any permanent quality in them. Furthermore, the variability/changeability in the action of quasi-objects in accordance with the shifting nature of networks prevents the modern regime from actually breaking fundamentally with the past. Conceptualizing time according to qualitative change is a methodological tool that modernity adopts to actually suppress not the past but its fear. This is because of the unpredictability of the arrival of quasi-objects which lack essence and cannot belong to one particular network and hence cannot be purified. However, here paradoxically lies modernitys endeavour in purifying. If Latours historical investigation disrupts the mutual exclusiveness of nature and culture to talk about the unavoidability of hybrids16 and certain mobility in the nature of the quasi-, modernity would suppress such hybridity and try to discursively control the degree of

15

The functionality of agency necessitates a before, a prior, a construct that makes one an agent. However, there is possibly no agency of the chicken feather in Boyles experiment for the particularity in the task of the agent. Neither are they completely active conscious beings. 16 The hybridity exists too well from the laboratory (non-human witness and human observation producing hybrid knowledge) to the factory.

stabilization of the quasi-object for human progression, for the control over the static object by the subject. Coming back to Foucaults analysis of docile bodies, his focusas I have already mentionedis on the disciplinary construction of the human mind-body. Unlike Latour, Foucault is not interested in the singularity or variability of non-humans but in turn focuses on the power relations involved within disciplinary mechanism. However, it would be a major flaw to say that objects or non-humans do not play any part under such a mechanism. The point is to see how. Foucault in his genealogical study of disciplines does not just trace the evolution of disciplinary mechanism from sovereign power but simultaneously and consequentially attempts a genealogy of actions on the human body. Interestingly, in Foucaults analysis the politico-juridical relations that defined sovereignty did not undergo an abrupt ending and then successively give rise to disciplinary power. There is no definite point of change within monarchical power, an origin inside monarchy that can vow for the change to discipline. Foucauldian genealogy necessarily looks for events that occur abruptly, accidentally and exterior to the mode of pre-existing power though without a fundamental break with it.17 However, without addressing the possible reasons behind such change the genealogical analysis would remain incomplete. The shift from spectacular violence on the body of the condemned to its disciplining, and the scientific techniques that are borrowed from historically preceding institutions (probably belonging to a different episteme) define the technicality and objective of disciplinary mechanism. In Foucaults analysis the scientific object employed to regulate the life of human beings 18 like the timetable, the routine or the mode of hierarchical observation had evolved over time to be used differently under different circumstances. Like the Latour-ian analysis of the variability in the
17

The establishment of disciplinary power doesnt break completely with sovereign power but each seeps into another while the gradual transformation takes place. 18 Human beings like the soldiers, the pupils, or the condemned.

functionality of actants, the time-table or the design of hierarchical observation havent followed into present actions (i.e., under discipline) in exactitude from the monastic space or technology of the telescope. The idea of established rhythms, imposition of particular occupations,19 or that of eyes that must see without being seen 20 must have undergone changes, modifications or disruptions to feed into the present. However, one fundamental difference between the Latour-ian analysis and Foucault genealogical understanding lies in the concept of unpredictability of the non-human. For Foucault such disruptions are results of chance but in the changing power-relation between subjects within the disciplinary milieu and never the de-objectification of the object/non-human. Under the Foucauldian paradigm there are no humans-in-themselves because the docile body is a discursive creation. 21 However, he seems to be caught up much in this problematic of the human to completely ignore what the stance of the non-human could have been. For Latour therefore, Foucault is guilty of the notion of the human; he criticizes the social but brings back another image of the social and can never overstep the boundaries set by the human. Foucault criticizes the human sciences alright butLatour asksdo things really occur in Foucault? Foucaults example of the body-object articulation provides a glaring example. In learning to hold the rifle in the correct posture and also in learning to shoot, the subjectfor Foucault manipulates the object. The body of the soldier is instrumentally coded but that codification depends on the skilful mastery of the rifle; it revolves around an entire set of practices and guidelines that teach the usage of a rifle and hence codifies the human body. It depends on the manipulation of the object by the subject. Hence for Foucault, misfiring the gun is a certain disruption of the rule of firing and never the variability of the rifle.22
19

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Vintage: New York, 1995).
20

Ibid.
21

Humans are never pure categories and if the Latour-ian lexicon can be borrowed, humans for Foucault are hybrids. 22 Foucault as we can therefore see also adheres to a certain law, the law of firing the gun.

I would like to end this paper with a short insight on Latours endeavour to bring the objectification of non-humans into question. No doubt, by using the term quasi- he has been able to break the strict compartmentalization between nature and culture. In and with the quasi- not only is a degree of mobility attained but the distinction between an agent and a recipient is challenged. What however is the necessity behind this sameness? Foucault fails to recognize the presence of things of course. But what is the necessity of a parliament of things? It would be surprising if Latour wasnt aware of the metaphorical implication of parliament and its technical constructs to use such a political space to represent a congregation of things. One cannot help but notice a secret desire in Latour to stretch the quasi- to the realm of the human. One might therefore wonder what Latour secretly whispers into the ears of the quasi-object, a language that he claims not many social scientists have understood.

Bibliography:
1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , (Vintage: New York, 1995). 2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993). 3. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76-100.