This week's theory reading gets to be a lot more thoroughly read and considered, and decidedly before the day it's supposed to be done, a treatment that really should be the case for everything I read for any and all classes, but thanks to the absolute limits of time and energy is often short-cutted to my detriment. I don't think I could have had a useful interpretation or reaction to this one, if I was trying to read it less thoroughly. Bruno Latour's metaphysics, as explained in Politics of Nature, while brilliant, is the sort of stuff that requires a lot of time and caffeinated sugary soft-drinks, and even then it makes one's brain tired rather easily. Actually, I tried to get this reading started at least once a week every week since the semester began, and until this weekend, as my schoolmates could attest, I really hated it. I in fact hated it until late Friday night, after I had spent a few hours letting my thoughts drift back to Herman Hesse's glass-bead games, that lovely idea of a way to take the beautiful lace of knowledge in my head and put it out into the world, to communicate that intricate beauty to my friends. I am still not thrilled with all of Latour's new terms, especially as I am not sure that the words in the English translation of his French ideas have the connotations necessary to convey his ideas as he would have stated them in French. Not knowing much French, I can't test this idea by reading his French writings, so I am left feeling a bit uneasy about some of it. Still, Latour's model creates out of the chaos of the Universe an emerging lace, as collectives join up the points to create giant abstract bead-games as collaborative, democratic, evolving narrative frameworks.
Actually this unease is not so bad, within Latour's own ideas, because when I have reconciled all that unease and congealed all of my impressions of his metaphysics into something aproblematic, I run the risk of creating out of this complex topic of concern a rigid fact, missing the subtleties that would then remain unexamined by me in my mistaken certainty. I have some issues with some of his language about rationality, still, reading as a Randite Objectivist, but interestingly, I think there is enough reasonableness in Latour's world that Rand's ideas could be quite compatible. I don't know any other Objectivists with whom I could expect to discuss this possibility, unfortunately, and for reasons I won't go into in print just yet, I have little hope of meeting any. I have just the vague impression now of what Objectivism would look like when mapped into Latour's world, but that may be a good summer project.
I am rather curious as to how this book will be received by my class, now. The biggest limitation I can see with approaching the Universe as a complex mesh of interacting propositions/points/glass beads is that we humans are specialized into our respective fields, and it takes a lot of seemingly unproductive time to reach a point where one has read and studied and thought enough to understand more than a small part of the whole mass of the sum total of human knowledge. In reading this book, I have read Plato, and Darwin, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and thanks to my History of Science class a few years ago I've spent a semester looking at how humans have dealt with the concepts of space and time. In addition, I have all these science images- the old idea of ether and of the newer reincarnation of an ether-like stuff, the idea of binomial nomenclature of species and the extent to which that has controlled systematists' perceptions of organisms, the constant redefinition of genetics as we add more information to what we think we know, and my favorite, the image of the light-boundary of our Universe, beyond which we cannot know about the Universe yet, and which is always expanding with time. All of this, plus my readings of Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi/ The Glass Bead Game and of Douglas Adams, was nearly indispensable for me to digest and absorb Latour's model of the Universe. This is not a criticism of the validity of his model, but it is certainly a potential problem, if he is right. How can we adjust our systems to create more people capable of thinking across so many disciplines, so that each discipline is not reinventing the wheel, and so that when these disciplines try to communicate with each other they can actually understand where they already agree?
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