ANTHROPOLOGICAL RADICALISM vs TRANSCENDENTAL CONSERVATISM: Latour’s modal recoding of empirical flows

Philip of Circling Squares has made some interesting and useful comments on Latour’s problematic « empiricism ». There is a real sense in which Latour’s approach is much more empirical than that of Badiou. Latour would have no problem adding to the open list of modes that he discusses, to make it include for example sport, cinema, and astrology (as long as it makes no claim to dealing with scientifically establishable causal chains). My point in invoking this last example, that of astrology, is to highlight a surprising feature of Latour’s ontological « radicalism »: the reassuring familiarity of the modes that he enumerates, even if his accounts of them can sometimes provoke surprise.

My problem with Latour’s distinction between modes and networks is that the networks are grouped into conventional domains that are then reduplicated in the corresponding modes and yet again in the felicity conditions for each mode and in their associated values. This mirroring of domains, modes, values and felicity conditions very strongly weakens the empirical status that Latour lays claim to. True, Latour has done empirical studies of law, science, and technology – but only insofar as they are delimitable domains. He then recuperates this empirical descriptive work on domains within a philosophical, or transcendental, framework of modes having normative force.

This normativity exists not just at the epistemological level of evaluating claims to modally correct enunciation, but also at the diplomatic level of evaluating the legitimacy of certain practices. The scientist has no legitimacy when he or she transgresses the felicity conditions of their mode and claims certainty nor does the religionist when he or she proclaims the concrete existence of a creator God or even when they assert their « beliefs ». Diplomacy is not just inter-modal, but also intra-modal, and so potentially has heuristic force and thus practical consequences on the pursuit of the domain in question.

Latour’s « empiricism » is thus double: an anthropological empiricism that is unequally applied to the modes he enumerates, and a transcendental empiricism proposes felicity conditions anthropologically delimited domains. The systematic ambiguity of his appeal to empiricism can be seen in the double narrative of the genesis of his ontology. In the anthropological narrative that is foregrounded in the first two chapters of the book Latour begins with his study of science, extends his findings to law, and then finds further confirmation in religion. Yet this empirical trajectory is a rational reconstruction of the transcendental trajectory outlined in his biographical accounts of his research. Here the a priori constraint of conserving religious truth despite the destruction of religious certainties effectuated by exegetical examination of the Biblical texts led Latour to posit a different sort of truth for religious utterance, determined as belonging to a régime of enunciation sui generis.

This splitting of religion into anthropological domain and transcendental mode of enunciation could then be transferred to the study of a scientific laboratory and the elucidation of scientific utterance. What provoked the passionate reactions of the « science wars » was the anthropologisation of the sciences, perceived as a relativist incursion. Post bellum, Latour affirms that people were blind to the other prong of the bifurcational fork, namely his determination of the régime, and thus of the type of veracity, of scientific enunciation. Yet the problem of relativism arises again at the meta-level. Scientific truth is supposedly not menaced by Latour’s analyses: inside science truth is not relative. However, scientific veridiction is relativised compared to other modes of enunciation, thus leading to a relativism of types of truth. Religious truth has just as much claim to epistemological respect as does scientific truth. That is to say that the mode of enunciation determines a sphere of legitimacy and a duty of non-infringement. Religious truth may not infringe on the practice and findings of the scientific sphere, and vice versa. Science has been contained to make room for faith, while receiving diplomatic assurances of total respect for its autonomy as long as it remains within its sphere.

The Jamesian radical empiricism that Latour explicitly espouses contains a Kantian overlay of transcendental conservatism, creating a new disymmetry. Latour proposes a radical anthropological study of science while affirming that this guarantees the classical value of « objectivity », while subtracting the illegitimate value of « certainty ». In the case of religion no such radical anthropological study is pursued, and the only radicalism here is in the transcendental analysis of the mode of utterance, baptised also mode of « veridiction », with the subtraction of the illegitimate value of referential « belief ».