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Pandora's hope Ch1 (Headshop Reading Group)

  
 
Saturn's nod
08:33 / 03.12.06
For chapter 1 of Bruno Latour’s ‘Pandora’s hope’ (link to free online text)

In the Headshop Reading Group thread it was suggested by Tom Coates that we try reading 'Pandora's hope' by Bruno Latour, which seemed to be met by sufficient interest to make a start. Some people are investigating the possibility of distributing scanned pdfs but as far as I know that hasn't happened yet. The text of chapter one is available on Latour's website, and the book is available from Amazon (UK, US)


I suggested some questions in the Headshop Reading Group planning/discussion thread, which we might each write our answers to, in order to begin discussion. The intention is to help people frame their response, so if you have something to say about the text but don't like the questions, please don't feel restricted by that format.

Those questions are:

1. What is the author's main point in this passage? (MAIN POINT)
2. What new light do I find in this particular reading of this passage of the text? (NEW LIGHT)
3. Is this passage true to my experience? (TRUTH)
4. What are the implications of this passage for my life? (IMPLICATIONS)
5. What problems do I have with this passage? (PROBLEMS)

This topic post is to introduce the chapter, and I’m planning to follow up in a post with my own answers to the questions later.

Chapter one has four sections:

(Unheaded first section)
The Strange Invention of an Outside World
The Fear of Mob Rule
The Originality of Science Studies

It might make sense to answer the questions for each of the three headed sections, or for the chapter as a whole, depending on how much effort you're inclined to go to.

I suggest that to make this a 'reading group' thread, people make their first post in this thread directly in response to the text of the chapter under discussion. Then when each person has shared something about their take on the material, subsequent posts can pick up on each other's remarks.
 
 
Saturn's nod
11:13 / 06.12.06
I read the text through once, and then to write my response I skimmed through the chapter backwards, summarizing what I perceived to be the main points under each section into my notes, using the signposts in the text ("firstly", "there are two reasons", "there are three problems" and so on). Then I wrote a bit about my thoughts in response to the text, using the framework of the five questions above. I thought I'd describe that in case anyone finds it of use to get into the discussion, and I'd be interested in a note-in-passing on anyone else's study techniques.


The strange invention of an 'outside' world
Main Point: the modern settlement is situated in intellectual history and can be seen as based in fear of losing touch with reality.

The fear of mob rule
Main point: the fear of losing touch with reality can be seen as a consequence of the modern settlement, not a feature of human being. The modern settlement seen as founded on the desire to control and silence other humans (from the example of Callicles/the Gorgias), but an alternative is possible.

The originality of science studies
Main point: To distinguish nonmodern from postmodern despite superficial similarities of language, via declaration of allegiance to experimental science and explanation of contrasts with other disciplines.


New Light:
How certain Latour seems of his reality. Seems to me he writes as if reality itself has never been in doubt and yet for example many citizens of the US don’t buy the scientific consensus about the age of the world or the reality of human beings as a biological species related to other apes. He’s not actually entertaining any question about the nature of reality. I think this is a positional taken consciously, experimenting with the consequence of not being afraid of mob rule.

I love Latour’s arrangement of the history of the modern settlement because it provides an explanation for the ferocity with which I observe people clinging to it. I find the contribution hopeful: because it sets out a process by which humans can undertake collective processes of discovery together with our nonhuman co-inhabitants. He sets it out as an alternative to the current 'War of the worlds' in his 2002 essay.


Truth:
There does seem to be a fear lurking in the vehement proponents of the modern settlement I’ve encountered, which could account for the abovementioned ferocity. I’ve sometimes felt a bit like a cultural alien, observing a few philosophically inclined scientists undertake what seem to be strenuous mental gymnastics to perpetuate the modern settlement. I’ve not felt entirely certain of their motivation: perhaps Latour’s explanation accounts for it.

I’ve not in the past felt I understood enough to explain the different way I see it - have felt silenced by their insistence that modern settlement is the very essence of science. Latour’s ways of describing research seem to me to offer a vocabulary to verbalise my intuitive understanding of the world and a more accurate way to describe the reality of the collective investigations made by all literate humans.


Implications:
I am interested in what reaction I’ll get as I take these questions out into the world. I want to ask people, especially what Latour calls ‘cold-war scientists’: are you afraid of losing contact with reality? Are you afraid of being overwhelmed by an ignorant majority? Certainly Richard Dawkins’ strident anti-religious campaigning has that flavour, to me – I wonder what his understanding is of what can be known and how?

Also, I am interested in whether I can use this kind of articulation in reality testing: for example does it allow me to articulate a more precise contrast between the accounts of Otaku-kin and people with imaginative spiritual practice whom I understand to be more functional?
 
 
Lurid Archive
15:24 / 06.12.06
I've read the article carefully once now, and skimmed it another time, though I confess that I suspect I should probably read it carefully again to do any honest evaluation justice, since I found the style rather off-putting. But I'll march ahead so as not to put it off forever, and you can pick up my misunderstandings along the way.

I should probably start by saying that I read this piece partly out of self-interest. I am a pseudo-scientist of a sort, and so I'm keen to hear different perspectives on what I and colleagues do, with a view to deepening my understanding of it and perhaps making improvements.

As Saturn's nod comments in the other thread, there is an air of stark assertion to this intro, which it would probably be unfair to criticise too strongly, since the content is more likely to be found within the book rather than its opening, so I won't say too much about that even though it grated a little. But maybe it put in an ungenerous frame of mind when it came to other things. For instance, the claim that Latour occupies a reasonable middle ground, under attack from two irreflexive and historically imprisoned extremes reminded me somewhat of Tony Blair's rhetoric. Everyone thinks their own position is right, but I'm not sure what gets added by imagining that one is positioned in a well considered compromise. Its the sort of thing you say if you don't want to bother with actually defending your own position, since it works as a shortcut to argument. You might think I'm being unfair but there are people who would criticise Latour a lot more heavily than that, or simply take him at his word. On reflection you'll find my criticisms to be very balanced.

This is just stylistic, however, and one can easily ignore it, so I'll move on. I suppose if I want to say anything about what I read it is that I didn't really understand what was being said. That is, I read it, I reflected and worked hard to understand the position outlined, and then I read again and reflected again and was little the wiser. For a start, what is the "modern settlement"? I understand that Latour understands it as originating in an old philospohical debate and that it tries to avoid scepticism, while not failing to mob rule. OK. But spefically, apart from retaining some of the essential features of a brain-in-a-vat, with the exception of narrow and exclusive window to the world, what is it? Who supports the modern settlement? Of course, I anticipate the answer to this last question to be "scientists", but I have trouble reconciling this uneasy mix of philosophical extremes with the views of people I know. But, of course, this may be due to the fact that I'm really not sure what position Latour is opposing, nor what he is espousing, beyond being against crude extremism. This I why I included the "Third Way" criticism above, because a lack of definite content is pretty much what characterises Third Way rhetoric.

Also, I'm not sure how appropriate the following remarks are given the publication date of 1999, but there is a curious lack of social context given for the naive psychologist's question. That is, there is a worry that, especially in the US, the erosion of the fact/value distinction is a real threat not only to science but to the public. The concern is that Republican's dismiss science as ideological precisely when they don't like it, on issues like evolution, global warming and pollution, and are systematically trying to supplant consensus scientific opinions with ideologically formulated counter-opinion, light on evidence but strong on funding. (See here for a discussion of this issue - pdf doc.)

So the psychologist's question has a context, which isn't mob rule since the fear is about the abuse by the powerful, not the mob. And the related concern is that these abuses are partly enabled by the attitude of science studies - that in studying, the sociology is the only thing worth talking about. Of course, one can see such a concern as an unfortunate product of the Two Cultures misunderstanding eachother, but I'm not so sure. For instance, I wasn't all that surprised when Steve Fuller testified in the Dover Trial with a limited defence of Intelligent design. I suspect that many more people agree with the creationists' abstract point than say so, but the politics of creationism put most people off.

So I'm confused, more or less, by the "modern settlement", by the distinction between "Science" and "Research" and by how these apply and could apply to what I do and know. I suppose I might even be called a "cold war scientist" by some, though I barely recognise the caricature offered. I can however respond to Saturn's nod's questions briefly - I'm not particularly worried about losing contact with reality, but I am worried at the lack of familiarity people have with distinguishing evidence from ideology. I don't think the distinction is an easy, uncomplicated one, to be sure, but I fear that deceptions like the claims of WMD in Iraq owe something to the failure to consider the distinction. So, no, it isn't mob rule I fear but rule by the powerful. If all is ideology, the guy with the biggest megaphone wins.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
15:44 / 07.12.06
Humm, lurid...

I thought this might happen. The ideology/reality confusion. The unexpressed desire to believe that knowledge can be seperated from ideology and then the reference to Fuller's ridiculous testimony....

The problem is that you are reading science studies as if the debate around science is ultimately a reactionary debate. Which is to say that science studies enables (encourages) conservatives (neo-liberals, religions (both evangelicals and muslims)) to reconstruct the universe in reactionary postmodern terms. But this avoids the real issue which is that science studies aims to bring the actuality of science practice into the view of a better informed public. One way of usefully thinking about this is that it enables the question of 'how we control what science we allow the researchers to carry out' in ways that plain questions of 'science <> truth make difficult. For example - more serious than the reactionary stupidity of the ID debate, are instances of plainly ideological science for example 'gay genes' ... Sciences studies, which does imply that treating science as being a range of ideological and thus understandable practices is not about 'Truth' but about 'truth...'

Latour's positions are different than normal science studies positions because he argues that grand sociological theories (aka human sciences) need discarding in favour of an actor-network approach that only works on the empirical evidence. Actions, events and empirical facts are all that can be understood as 'real'...

The creationists point is unscientific because there is no supporting evidence to justify there requirement for a designer. The challenge which you do not make is what proof is there to support your ID ?

let me repeat - evidence... is what Latour and SSK requires...

steve
 
 
sdv (non-human)
15:55 / 07.12.06
And I missed this:

"Are you afraid of being overwhelmed by an ignorant majority? Certainly Richard Dawkins’ strident anti-religious campaigning has that flavour, to me – I wonder what his understanding is of what can be known and how?..."

This is not what Dawkins argues. Dawkins asks for proof and empirical evidnce supporting a case. There is no empirical evidence supporting any religious or spiritual position. Faith is always an argument that cannot be proven or falsified... "strident anti-religious campaigning..." Please ! It is up to the religious and the spirtual to prove the 'truth' of their case, and up to you to read and understand why they are arging that case. The most interesting thing about this is why religion is a protected field of 'knowledge'. I can critque the obvious stupidity of a 'gay gene' or scientific studies which 'prove' the inferiority of women and africans, but i'm not allowed to suggest that evidence is required to prove that 'allah made language for human use'...

sigh

steve



It;s completely unreasonable to insult Dawkins
 
 
Lurid Archive
18:19 / 07.12.06
But you can't admonish me for wanting to separate ideology from knowledge and then tell me the answer is to look at evidence. Because the same also applies to evidence; you can't separate it from ideology any more than you can separate knowledge. And this is precisely the line being taken by proponents of ID, and one in which Fuller's testimony makes perfect sense. (People might want to read Fuller's chapter in the pdf book I linked to, since he makes all these arguments about the sociology of science as a reason for why ID should be supported. I think he sees this very much as a democratising move.)

I also did expect your other point, sdv, that science studies has good ambitions so we can't really criticise it for being reactionary - though I note that this is perfectly analagous to the ID line, and is one that Fuller somewhat endorses - but it is nonsense anyway. I wouldn't imagine that referring to the noble pursuit of knowledge would be taken seriously as a defence of scientific research - and rightly so - so I'll treat the stated goals of science studies in the same way.

We are perhaps veering off topic, though the "gay genes" example is an extremely odd one, and I'd rather not run with it until you explain it further.
 
 
nighthawk
11:08 / 20.12.06
I've held back from posting to this thread because I feel that what I've got to say now might prove irrelevant as I read the rest of the book. But, in an attempt to sustain Barbelith's interest in this project...

I don't really like Latour's style so far. He seems quite glib, but then perhaps that's understandable in an introductory chapter - despite what I say below, I am witholding judgement till I've read the rest of it. I'm going to base this loosely around Saturn's Nod's post, for ease's sake. Apologies if this seems more like in-progress notes than a coherent contribution...

The strange invention of an 'outside' world
Main Point: the modern settlement is situated in intellectual history and can be seen as based in fear of losing touch with reality.

- I appreciate what Latour's doing here, and I think SN has characterised it rather well there. Still, I'd like to see more support for his intellectual history of the 'modern settlement' than the superficial run through of the history of philosophy he offers. I'd also like a clearer definition of what the modern settlement is, and who settled it. Is he talking about the beliefs of a set of particular individuals about the relations between Nature/Science/Society/Mind/God? Or is he outlining a structural feature of the way we, as a society, approach and divide domains (which wouldn't be unrelated to the previous suggestion, but would make the modern settlement more universal)... Or perhaps its something else entirely?

Regarding the 'intellectual history' itself: I can allow that science (its subject matter, methods employed, evidence sought and counted relevant, etc.) is not totally isolated from contemporary concerns -- but I'm not convinced that 'losing touch with reality' has been a pressing concern since the advent of Cartesian science -- his colleague's question in particular seems more a reaction to some people's (mis)understanding of claims made by some contemporary philosophers - what Latour later identifies as the 'postmodern' - such as the claim that words don't refer to reality, etc.

The fear of mob rule
Main point: the fear of losing touch with reality can be seen as a consequence of the modern settlement, not a feature of human being. The modern settlement seen as founded on the desire to control and silence other humans (from the example of Callicles/the Gorgias), but an alternative is possible.

I have a similar reaction to his suggestion that the fear of mob-rule has been a pressing concern since fifth century Athens -- it seems such a vague and abstract claim -- like there's this overarching structural feature shaping all scientific practice/claims for the past several hundred years: fear of mob rule. I can't help but feel that although Latour seems to be making a political point, its so vague and ahistorical that he ends up depoliticising science (or at least ignoring the specificity of the various idelogies and interests that have dominated the societies in which scientific knowledge has been pursued) in favour of vaguely universal/structural claims. It sounds grand, but it feels more rhetorical than substantial.

I mean, science is certainly a social practice, I'm not arguing with that -- but are the factors that have shaped these grand metaphysical doubts? Or something more politically and socially and temporally specific? (Perhaps metaphysical isn't the right word - I'm struggling to find the vocabulary to engage with what I think Latour's doing here...)

- Like Lurid, I'm not particularly impressed by the middle-way rhetoric - perhaps because i've never immersed myself in the 'science wars', so feel no unbridgeable gap between science and humanities. Most of the critiques of claims made by science I've read have been by scientists, so I don't see science as a uniform or ideologically homogenous discipline... Of course, that's only based on my own intellectual history, but my point is that I'm not immediately onside with Latour because he claims he will offer a way beyond apparently insurpassable tensions.

Right, at this point I'm going to quote the opening paragraphs of the introduction to Richard Lewontin's Massey Lectures, in an attempt to demonstrate where I'm coming from here:

Science is a social institution about which there is a great deal of misunderstanding, even among those who are part of it. We think that science is an institution, a set of methods, a set of people, a great body of knowledge that we call scientific, is somehow apart from the forces that rule our everyday lives and that govern the structure of our society. We think science is objective. Science has brought us all kinds of good things. It has tremendously increased the production of food. It has increased our life expectancy from a mere 45 years at the beginning of the last century to over 70 in rich places like North America. It has put people on the moon and made it possible to sit at home and watch the world go by.

At the same time, science, like other productive activities, like the state, the family, sport, is a social institution completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions. The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so- called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience.

Above that personal level of perception, science is molded by society because it is a human productive activity that takes time and money, and so is guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time. Science uses commodities and is part of the process of commodity production. Science uses money. People earn their living by science, and as a consequence the dominant social and economic forces in society determine to a large extent what science does and how it does it. More than that, those forces have the power to appropriate from science ideas that are particularly suited to the maintenance and continued prosperity of the social structures of which they are a part. So other social institutions have an input into science both in what is done and how it is thought about, and they take from science concepts and ideas that then support their institutions and make them seem legitimate and natural. It is this dual process--on the one hand, of the social influence and control of what scientists do and say, and, on the other hand, the use of what scientists do and say to further support the institutions of society--that is meant when we speak of science as ideology.

Basically, its possible to 'socialise' science without making Latour's sweeping structural generalisations about 'fear of mob-rule' etc. Now its perfectly possible that I've misunderstood what Latour's doing here; likewise, he might go on provide more support for what he's outlined in this chapter. So what I've said is more potential quibbles rather than a throrough critique...

Part II of this post to follow. I want to talk a bit more about the relevance of the whole fact/value debate and its relation to Latour's 'fear of losing reality', plus maybe some stuff about Neo-Darwinism/I.D., Steve Fuller, if this is the place to put it.
 
  
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