"It also ends the
tear-jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the un-
knowable outside world, since for Latour the isolated Kantian human is no
more and no less an actor than are windmills, sunflowers, propane tanks,
and Thailand."
Wittgenstein also seems to do this in a way. He purposes a public world where questions of an isolated human being just gives rise to problems which can be untangled by viewing a human being as inside a form of life. The objects a person uses and the way they interact with him are part of this form of life or language. Viewing everything language encircled whole, where the language games function and rules are followed, things seem to be in their proper place and act as they do without problem (a philosophical problem that is). The description of the Stalingrad encircling movement reminded me of LW's example of people bringing stones (I would consider the stones to be just a much part of the game). Yet I wonder if this is still too reductionistic for Latour, as it does in a way reduce the function of objects to their function in the language. Also LW always seemed to put humans in charge of setting up this game which may give them too much credit for Latour (though I'm not really sure as I may have interpreted him wrong and I may misunderstand Latour) To what extent do Wittgenstein and Latour overlap/ agree?
"Latour’s difference from present-day analytic and continental thought
should now be clear. Whereas Latour places all human, nonhuman, natu-
ral, 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."
I think my question also has relevance to this passage because LW could be seen as having a coherence theory of truth. I recall him saying that religion and mysticism play different games and are therefore true despite the completely different view of science. Though maybe that is stretching the word "coherence" and LW is beyond both with Latour.
LW could also be said to explain away the gap... but it seems more likely that he rejects any notion of a private space in the mind. Does Latour's series of translations (and by extension the notion of truth) exist in the public space, or is its location somewhere else?
4 comments:
Perhaps turning to the last chapter of Harman's book will clarify some of these issues for you: I think that the certain claims you make trying to link LW's public world to Latour don't recognize the irreducibility of objects, or derives them from a primal whole (language conceived as rules, see 159-162 of Prince of Networks). Fundamentally it is a matter of affirming both at once and escaping the need to be "radical" in the sense of deriving everything from one sort of logic (see 151). The problem with this theory, though, and the virtue of Wittgenstein, is that we don't end up trying to prove that the object is some monad all the time. Actants relate to each other, and Harman is both interested and yet too skeptical about this. Wittgenstein would have more to say about how they do. It's also worth pointing out that the actant theory is derived precisely from AJ Greimas, the structuralist linguist, so what you really have in Latour is indeed a development of a language-based approach to things, which, while differing in huge respects from LW, is similar in this respect.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.
I don't know--I might be wrong... what do you think?
I don't really know either. It would be easier to say if Wittgenstein discussed objects more. But objects themselves (unless we say we have no direct access to them because we are isolated) present no problems for him (for Heidegger as a phenomenologist they do). To Latour's ir-reduction he might say objects are only as reduced as they are in our language.
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