Modes of Existence - Chapter 6 - Defects
In the previous posts, I have talked about defining our object of inquiry as well as a little on what documents matter. I also wrote about how defining is actually a bit more tricky but easier within this method because it allows researchers to learn. More recently, I wrote a bit about how definitions of charisma exist in tandem and sometimes overlap. This was then followed up by the concept of space in method. and Chapter 5’s writeup called Modes of Existence - Chapter 5 - Impediments. In order to better contextualize Chapter 6, we we need to re-consider Chapter 5 a bit.
Chapter 6 is titled, “Correcting a Slight Defect in Construction.” This is perhaps the most useful chapter for the world of computing. It focuses on the ramifications of what Latour calls straight talk which is akin to another term he uses, double click. In this, we see something like a mixture of the work of Sherry Turkle and Robert Putnam mix with Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger. Unclean data, or data noise, or, the parts of the social life of information we have to remove so computers can process data, results in a loss of perspective, a loss of impermanence, or a loss of reality.
To the STS scholar, this is a thing we charge computing with but for Latour, this is a thing computing did because it’s what the social scientists did, the moderns. And so, he uses computing to criticize social science. This, to me, is of supreme importance as i’ve long felt social science’s criticisms of computing were disingenuous stones thrown at faux glass houses. Social science created many of the problems that it now blames computer science of causing. While that cause is mostly focused on perpetuating issues and baggage in the social sciences, there has not been a useful reaching out to work with, just a furious writing of strongly worded emails between ivory towers. No one is the better for it.
And it is interesting that it grows a little more interesting because one of Latour’s biggest contributions is that of the second part of his text, Pasteurization of France called, Irreductions wherein he discusses how the social sciences tend to see how science talks about the world to be impossible to do by the social sciences; and yet, it is the thing that the social sciences have been trying to do. At the time of his writing that text, Parsons and everyone involved with the spread of structural functionalism. To that, we haven’t really lost the desire for things about society to be called upon as science and Latour writes:
“Wanting to use straight talk thus does not mean…that one is going to speak “as the sciences do” or “the way a scientist talks,” but that one wants to imitate the results without having to encumber oneself with imitating the burdensome process as well.” - 127
There is a quote out there from Latour that I cannot remember the origin of. It may be Irreductions but I have a feeling that it is more likely We Have Never Been Modern or one of his manifestos. The quote is essentially, “Sociology is the only science wherein our subject of study is not permitted to act.” He refers to this in Irreductions when he is discussing the differences between Robinson Crusoe and its satire, Friday, the Other Island. In the former, Crusoe is saved by re-creating all of the structures of modern society whereas in the later, Friday blows up the structures of modern society and suddenly realizes how he has been unable to be a person in the world. The social sciences started this by essentially dictating every aspect of humanity being a result of theoretical processes and examining the creation of agency while never allowing humans themselves to pursue it. To this, Latour goes on to note that:
“Strangely, it is the very implausibility of straight talk that makes it astoundingly effective for disqualifying all the other models.” - 127
It is because of the pursuit of scientific communication and study that we end up seeing sociology and social science more generally being used to thwart the idea that other kinds of critical analyses are possible. While this argument is perhaps more of an insider one in the social sciences, it has been replicated in the computer sciences under the auspices of, “If you don’t know how to program then don’t bother criticizing software, you don’t know what you’re talking about”-style arguments that seem to dominate the current discussion in and around LLM’s and what we call AI now. So, it’s easier to talk about it that way. This gets into the next part of the argument of this chapter wherein folks are engaged in a different kind of speech other than straight talk where Latour notes that:
“Once the standard of straight talk has been invented, everyone else suddenly begins to engage in crooked talk; they become double-dealers, liars, manipulators.” - 128
He then goes on to say that:
“The Moderns are those who have kidnapped Science to solve a problem of closure in public debates.” - 129
As a result, we have lost an ability to discuss things without sounding like we’re scientists. As a researcher who routinely engages in practice-based fieldwork, I run into this problem twofold. First, I can’t get folks to listen to me in practice because, while i’m a first generation student from a working class background, my language has been impacted and sounds like I am one of those highbrow academics. Simultaneously, because i’m from a working class background, I do not sound properly straight to academics either. This next gets more interesting because the topics that I tend to research fall outside of the cone of straight talk, the topics are often difficult to get anyone to discuss. Instead, I am often told:
“People have told themselves that they had to talk straight to have a chance to straighten up those who talked crooked; as a result, two modes have been made to deviate from well-formed speech instead of just one.” - 131
To this, I am often told to chase trends, to simply follow what the leaders are doing and mimic them. But yet, in thinking about this project through the lens of charisma, we run into the issue wherein folks who are in the lead often do not consider what they’d consider to be instrumentation or optional issues. Charisma just isn’t easily quantifiable as it is intended and so it was avoided as a topic until it was properly coded, used, and quantified. To this, we are starting to get to the bulk of Chapter 6 when Latour notes:
“Our immediate concern is to shadoow to what extent the veridiction of this mode cannot be properly judged either by straight talk or reference…The only result that matters to us here is showing that political speech is by no means indifferent to truth and falsity; it defines them in its own terms” - 134/135
And so, getting back to Charisma, we have to consider a chain of reference. First, this concept appears from the Weberian sense of charismatic leaders. It is only after computing encounters this and we see a lot of back and forth in development that we suddenly find ourselves using the original definition from religious spaces. In that respect, we have to consider this within the discussion of vintage versus modern tech and its impact on society more generally. But this brings in a separate issue, the space of technology AS culture. Technology, for the modern, is a manifestation of cultural power and through that, we cannot actually see what constitutes success, only that something has been pre-defined as true. Latour notes:
“We see clearly that it cannot be a mode, since Double Click completely denies that information needs to pass through any hiatus, any discontinuity, any translation whatsoever - the counter example also enlightens us as to its methods. Its felicity conditions are thus unattributable.” - 137
So with technology being pre-defined as successful and we thus lose the capacity to note what is true because it is not attributable to any sort of measure of success, we simply keep pushing forward the same successes that require no testing or verification. And in doing so, we actually create something that folks obsess over, often without an ability to do more than point at helplessly, the theory and practice gap. Latour notes:
“There is an extremely crucial prohibition on speech here that explains in large part the gap, among the Moderns, between theory and practice…”
From this, we see there’s something fascinating going on here. The gap between theory and practice is one of creating a TRUTH that can exist over its discussion, its agonistic environment. And so, we see a slowing discussion among and between mediums in favor of computing which is, in and of itself, Moderns given form.
Once digitized, this is what must be copy and pasted into new things. The loss of the Tabletop industry is not because the games are bad or onerous, but that because it reflects the Moderns themselves and in doing so, offers no alternative through which to counter it. Why play D&D when we can play by ourselves, with less baggage, less energy required? Latour ends up getting closer to a conclusion we can move into Chapter 6 with:
“It is clear that we cannot let this distinction go simply by tossing the words ‘pluralism’ and ‘speaking well’ into the air.” - 140
Followed by:
“Our anthropoloigst probably jotted this down in her notebook: ‘Definition of the Moderns: they believe in language as an autonomous domain that is carrying on in the face of a mute world.” - 145
And so Chapter 6, the focus of this post, finally makes itself known: we have no actual ability to trace Charisma in any sense of the word using methods that are already in use. Latour notes that:
“the difficulty of following the chains cannot account for the extent of the misunderstanding about knowledge, the ineradicable attachment people have to a theory of Science that is so contrary to the interests of the advocates of objectivity.” - 155
Ineradicable is a useful word here, it means, “cannot be destroyed or removed.” And to this, we see an issue within the concepts of science. We must engage in the facade of science so that we can be perceived as authority. It is fascinating to think about it this way. And in this regard, he too also calls upon the most frustrating development of social science in recent memory, that of social construction. Latour notes:
“The ethnologist can hardly turn to critical thought to make the notion of construction more positive. If it has become impossible to say in a dingle breath, ‘This is well constructed, it is therefore true, and even really true,’ it is because the negative view of mediations (even though they alone are capable of establishing the continuity of networks) is shared by both those who want to defend values and by those who want to undermine them.”
We lack a language through which to discuss HOW WELL a thing is constructed or to more of a point HOW BADLY. We can see it, we see it all over the place though i’ll refer back to the criticism that if you cannot write code, you cannot comment on software. This mode of argument shuts down all discussion, all criticism. We simply say that things are built using a material we call social. How, how well, or how badly is never part of that discussion and this is where we point to Charisma both as a reason and effort to actually engage in finding new ways to discuss this stuff. I’ll start concluding here:
In previous chapters, we have seen why: either the Moderns find themselves face to face with obtuse raw materiality, or they have to turn toward representations that reside only in their heads. And what is more, they have to choose between the two: in theory, of course, since in practice they never choose; but this is exactly the space that interests us here: why is what is necessary in practice impossible in theory? In the wake of what events has the very civilization whose continual practice has been to transform the world so radically agreed to acknowledge in theory only two domains of reality?
And this is where the Charisma project is interesting. We are essentially seeking a way to dispense with a binary of THEORY <><><> PRACTICE and to make it simply, “What has been done, how did it come to be done, what has changed, and why did that change?” To this, I think I find myself excited to keep working.