As Sarah
Nuttall noted, panelists Annie Leatt, Daniel Roux, Meg Samuelson, Mandla Langa
and Hylton White addressed the “nature of things” in many different registers:
the sociological, the autobiographical, the literary and the (explicitly)
theoretical. I focus here on some of the issues that two of these speakers
raised, that returned me, in different ways, to theorizing from the South,
conflicts in reading Latour, and the ambiguities in the “objects” and “natures”
that concern non-subject-centered thinkers.
In the closing lecture of the panel, Hylton White
expressed his dissatisfaction with Bruno Latour’s analytic effects in the
humanities. Latour’s mistake, for White, lay in the idea that in “fetishism”,
the subject is casting her representation
onto things. As White argued, fetishism for Marx (and for critical theory) is a
fetishism of commodities: it is not a
general fetishism of “objects”, but a specific form of fetishism, in a specific
–capitalist –context.
Quite unexpectedly, White’s critique of Latour took me
back to a conversation with a friend in my hometown in India last summer. This
friend and I had both recently proceeded from the Sociology department at JNU
(Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) to Euro-American universities; she
joined the PhD program at the University of Heidelberg and I joined the New
School. Our interactions with graduate students had led both of us to conclude
that Latour was read in the Northern university context in a very different way
than he was read in our university context in India. In the Northern academy,
we thought, Latour was too often depoliticized, with Latourian approaches
conceiving of the ‘agency of materials’ as
if in a political vacuum, “distributing” agency between subjects and objects at
the cost of attending to the power relations between subjects.[1]
In reflecting on this, what interested me was that
White’s critique of Latour –his
suggestion that when it comes to theorizing objects, it is necessary to pay
attention to specificity, to the specific political and cultural contexts
in which humans have specific
relations with specific objects –bore
a resemblance to many an Indian graduate student’s critique of Northern Latourians. At the same time, I was also
struck by the divergence in the two contexts in how Latour’s work itself was read. Was there something,
apart from the historical particularities of different academic cultures, that
allowed for this quite stark difference in the reading of this particular
author?
To read Latour as if he himself pays no attention to
broader political context is, I personally think, to misread him: The Latour of
We Have Never Been Modern does call
for an attention to networks of subjects and objects keeping in mind their
political environment. Suggestions of this can be found in his discussion of
the possibility of the creation of dangerous
hybrids with consequences that the ‘moderns’ refuse to account for in the
process of their innovation (exhibit: perhaps the hole in the ozone-layer
itself) (see Latour 1993, 41), the modernist conceptualization of the
‘premoderns’ (part 4 of the text), and the endeavour to establish a ‘nonmodern
constitution’ (138), that challenges “the great narrative of the West” (112)
and guarantees that “the production of hybrids, by becoming explicit and collective, becomes the object of an enlarged
democracy that regulates or slows down its cadence” (141, my emphasis).
At the same, what I think does allow for a reading of
Latour as if he were politically vacuous is a central ambiguity in his own
text: his tendency, throughout We Have
Never Been Modern, to conflate ‘nature’
with ‘objects’, and the ‘subject’ with ‘society’. It is this conflation that I think makes it possible
for a certain strand of Latourians to speak of
nature/object and subject/society –terms that have been falsely rendered
synonymous –in absolute abstraction, allowing for a vehement but extremely
vague invocation of the ‘agency of things’. It seems that in post-Latour social
science, even the staunchest critics of the nature-culture
binary effect a different kind of categorical confusion in equating “nature” with “things”; so that even Achille Mbembe, in his incisive introductory
lecture, critiqued in one sentence the “separation between us and nature, us
and things”.
It is, finally, in this context that Annie Leatt’s
talk, opening the panel, was particularly instructive. Through her interest in
secularization and her ethnographic examples (deforestation and the ecology
monks in Thailand; Jae Rhim Le, the Korean “scientist-artist” who thinks of the
effect of the toxification of the human body on the environment) Leatt makes
a case for theorizing “nature” and “objects” together, instead of assuming
a synonymity between them.
Marx, one of the “moderns” that Latour critiqued and
that Hylton White then used to critique Latour, was exceptionally careful in
working out the relations between the subject, the object and nature. “Nature”,
in Marx’s work, is both human nature
and the external environment, and it is through his theory of labour and
estrangement, particularly in the Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts, that he shows us how (for him) they are
connected. If we are to think seriously
about the “future of nature”- if we are to know the future of which “nature” we are talking about, rather than
using the term to allude either to “objects” writ large or to an abstract, external
environment –then it is to these kinds of connections, to the particular
meaning of particular terms, in particular political situations, that we need
to attend. It is this that Leatt and
White, in their otherwise very distinct discussions of their very distinct
concerns, managed together to suggest.
Katyayani Dalmia
[1] Take, for example, the
very popular 2005 essay on the North American blackout by Jane Bennett, where
Bennett attempts to “distribute” agentive capacity, including the capacity for
political transformation, between subjects and objects {“…though
human reflexivity is indispensable for transforming political life, on many
occasions and in a variety of ways the efficacy of political change is not a
function of humans alone…effective agency is always an assemblage (Bennett
2005, 454)} Bennett is sensitive to the question of power, and to the critique
that allowing for the agency of objects may undermine the political
responsibility of subjects. And, she does specifically observe that “power is
not equally distributed across the assemblage” (ibid, 445). Nevertheless, there
is nothing in her method that in fact, allows for an accounting of the effect of this differential distribution of power
{What, for instance, would Latour-inspired approaches such as Bennett’s make of
gender?}
