Is there such a thing as reality?

This post is an over view of Bruno Latour's introduction to Pandora's Hope. I wrote this as a way to prepare for a reading group meeting with member's of C-Cred, BaseKamp and our very own Think Tank:

Feb 10th 2007

Bruno Latour began working on Pandora's Hope when confronted with the question put forward to him by a colleague. He was asked by his friend, a psychologist, if he believed in reality. This question let Latour to argue that to ask such a question means that you have had to become so distant from it that the fear of losing it is quite plausible. Backing up this argument is the content of his book. He begins: How is it that this question could even be asked? And in asking how, Latour gives a brief summary of the history of the philosophy of modernism. Beginning with Descartes up to the present practices of the fields of science.

Descartes argued that our minds are distant and separate from the world. (Latour names this "the mind in a vat" syndrome.) The only plausible way to experience the world (out there) was an intervention from God through the tenuous connection of the gaze. The empiricists abandon the need for divine intervention, yet whole heartedly embraced the "mind in a vat" gazing out onto the world: receiving an endless amount of stimuli. Kant attempted to explain how we are able to decode and make meaning from this visible empirical world by claiming a universal system (that exist solely in our mind) which interprets the world (out there) (my comment: C. Greenberg, was heavily influenced by Kant. His definition of "taste" in relation to aesthetics is a direct reference to Kant's "universal a priori") The predetermined code, which we all shared was soon replaced by a constructionists definition, that claimed that our gaze was socially constructed. Latour argues that constructivism rather than freeing us from the "mind in the vat" syndrome, simply expanded the prison of the in/out from the individual cell to a large dormitory. (my words: replacing madness for organized socialized pathological behavior-read foucalt?.) Phenomenology in this century, tries to give the mind back to the body, where the mind/body, experiences the world directly "a lived-world, however, Latour argues that theirs is only a partial mending that leaves science practice of mind in-to world out, intact.

Strangely and dangerously this modern history intersects with an older one going back to Socrates. Where the singular mind of reason, he argues, was superior to "10,000 fools" hence an outside world needing to be dominated and saved from their inhumanity. (my words: Here is our western history of conquest at its beginnings) The separation of the "humane", the "pure" from the "inhumane" and the "beastly" created a deep anxiety of the pending mutiny by the unruly, named the "fear of the mob" syndrome. (again greenberg's "avant-garde and kitch" argues that the avant-garde could save culture from the base work of kitch)

The "mind in the vat" with its FoM syndrome (down there) gazing out at the spectacular (read spectacle) world out there, created a descending whirling dervish away from any contact with reality, away from all that makes us who we are and have become-all those "non-humans".

Latour replaces the word objects with the word non-humans in order not to only free objects from their cold and calculated objectivity but also to free us humans from our subjectivity, which leaves us separated from the world of objects. Humans and Non-Human's implies "a social history of things" and a "thingy history of humans". When humans and non-humans fold into each other they form constant changing collectives. Hence, an alternative to the modernist trilogy-mindin-worldout-foolsdown is the notion of a factish, which "cancels out the twin affects of belief and knowledge." (I can't help but think of 911 here, maybe there is something to that????)

Scientific research is the zone where humans and non-humans are thrown into an extraordinary collect experiment, (with sites, experiments and groups of colleagues) whose outcome is always unknown and undetermined. This Latour claims is a practice of the non-modern differentiated from the post-modern. The post-modern practice debunks and negates and is derived from the modernist settlement. (Like an adolescent who has woken up to the revelation that her parents are not "God") the Post-modern reveals the failures, inconsistencies and falsehoods because of tenacious over-identification with their modernist inheritance. The non-modern takes a step back to a forgotten pathway, not to regress, but rather to move forward, a pathway that is not interested in domination, a practice which claims that there is no outside world. Yet not to negate its existance but rather to refuse to grant it a cold alienated experience. The non-modern replaces science with research deeply engaging in a practice of deployment, affirmation and construction.

The hope in Pandora's Hope is for us to embrace this practice where "facts and artifacts with their beautiful roots, delicate articulations, their many tendrils and fagile networks, remain for the most part to be investigated and described." (Latour, Harvard University Press, 1999)