Nonmodern Practices

Latour and Literary Studies

Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Claire Chi-ah Lyu, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Claire Chi-ah Lyu

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501354298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays responds to the urgent call in the humanities to go beyond the act of negative critique which, so far, has been the dominant form of intellectual inquiry in academia. The contributors take their inspiration from Bruno Latour's pragmatic, relational approach and his philosophy of hybrid world where culture is immanent to nature and knowledge is tied to the things it co-creates. In such a world, nature, society, and discourse relate to, rather than negate, each other. The 11 essays, ranging from early modern humanism and modern theorization of literature to contemporary political ecology and animal studies, propose new productive ways of thinking, reading, and writing with, not against, the world. In carrying out concrete practices that are inclusive, rather than exclusive, contributors strive to exemplify a form of scholarship that might be better attuned to the concerns of our post-humanist era.

Part One

Early Modern Tradition from a Latourian Relational Perspective

1

“Nonmodern Humanism”: A Relational Reading of Latour and Montaigne

Jan Miernowski

Dla Szymona

The goal of this chapter is to portray Bruno Latour as a humanist. This may seem to be a daring endeavor, both because of the intellectual context within which this task is undertaken and because of the specificity of Latour’s thinking. It is widely assumed that we live in a posthuman world. The death of God was closely followed by the death of Man, acknowledged by Sartre right at the end of the Second World War and trumpeted by Foucault in the 1960s.¹ Consequently, the key question with which humanists have wrestled—“What does it mean to be human?”—seems anachronistic. It can also be seen as ethically problematic. Indeed, the specificity, or worse, the superiority of the human being that traditionally is considered to be the foundational claim of humanism, seems outrageous in the era of the Anthropocene.² Latour is very vocal in denouncing the process through which we make our planet inhabitable.³ His ecological thinking and activism stem from his philosophical relationism which is programmatically indifferent to the distinction between humans and nonhumans. Being the “Prince of Networks” that are by definition composed of agents who can be either human, nonhuman, or hybrid, Latour can hardly be suspected of any anthropocentric glorification of Man.⁴

And yet, I would like to claim that Latour’s unique way of thinking and writing bears fundamental traits of a humanist practice. Let me insist on the word “practice.” Indeed, humanism came to be understood as a doctrine, an “-ism,” only recently. The nineteenth century invented humanism as a cultural movement that associated the study of classical literature with a conception of the sovereign Self. Such vision of Man was predicated largely on Kantian philosophy, which, needless to say, was unknown to Renaissance humanists. It is this post-Enlightenment conception of human exceptionalism that came under the fire of postmodern critique.⁵ Yet, contrary to nineteenth-century proponents of Kantian Bildung and to their twentieth-century critics, Renaissance humanists did not consider Man as a philosophical premise, but rather as the object of an open-ended questioning. This inquiry—studia humanitatis—had far-reaching ethical and political implications, but, most importantly, there was at its core a hermeneutical and an oratorical exercise based on the belief that through the exchange of “letters” reality can be changed and people can be made present.

It is in this practical, Renaissance sense, that I would qualify Latour as a humanist. Latour always had a keen interest for the historical period preceding the early seventeenth century for the simple reason that during that time people did not yet claim to be “modern.”⁶ Before Hobbes and Descartes, Western Europe, along with parts of the world that many still call “underdeveloped,” was resolutely “premodern,” at least in the eyes of Moderns whose illusion of modernity Latour strives to dispel. The Renaissance did not yet extend the laws of physics to the entire universe; it did not entrench the political communities within national borders. In sum, the “premodern” Renaissance did not complete what Latour calls after Whitehead “the Great Bifurcation,” that is, the separation between Nature and Culture, scientific laws and societal rules, the matters of fact and the matters of concern. Latour insists that despite framing the modern mindset, these epistemological dichotomies did not affect the real modus operandi of the Moderns. In practice, while claiming the “Great Bifurcation,” Moderns never stopped producing hybrids which embodied the displacements, transfers, and translations between what they loudly proclaimed to be “purely natural” on the one hand and “purely manmade” on the other. One of such hybrids is the Anthropocene itself, the beginning of which, according to Latour, should be dated in the first half of the seventeenth century.⁷

There is a great deal of nostalgia in Latour’s looking back at “premodern” Renaissance, the blessed era before the hypocritical purisms of Modernity: scientism, nationalism, deism, colonialism, postmodernism (which is just an inverted modernism), etc. “Humanism,” understood as a variant of neo-Kantian idealism, is yet another symptom of the nineteenth century’s “second Enlightenment.” But being nostalgic of the past is one thing, and trying to rethink the present is another. Latour does not advocate the return to premodernity, but rather a leap forward, into “nonmodernism.”⁸ I would argue that by doing so, Latour acts as a “nonmodern humanist” who revives the practices of the Renaissance humanists.

In order to prove my point, I will propose a few synthetic propositions that characterize the specificity of Renaissance humanist practice and I will demonstrate how Latour revives them in his own work. I would like to insist on the term “revives.” Latour’s affinity with the Renaissance humanists should be understood in the true spirit of the “Re-naissance” which relied on the realization that Greek and Roman Antiquity belongs to a remote past with which any continuity has been irremediably lost. It is only because Antiquity is a dead, albeit prestigious culture, that it can be reborn in the European fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not as a clone, but as a new, thriving organism. Similarly, Latour’s humanist practice is not a mimicry of the philosophical and stylistic idiosyncrasies of Montaigne, Rabelais, or Erasmus, but a fundamentally original intellectual proposition that shares a clearly distinct “air de famille” with ways of thinking and writing of the humanists dead four centuries ago. Latour is not a premodern humanist anachronistically catapulted into post-postmodernity, but a humanist who testifies to our posthuman times and invites us to look into a “nonmodern” future that hopefully will alleviate at least some of the impairments of the Anthropocene. For the sake of brevity, I will focus my demonstration on one of the most programmatic books by Latour—The Pasteurization of France⁹—with references to some of his other publications. As an epitome of Renaissance humanism, I will consider Montaigne’s Essays,¹⁰ while seeking occasional help from other premodern humanists.

Politics: The humanist is not locked up in an ivory tower of scholarship, but, on the contrary, is fully engaged in the public debate.

Machiavelli, seeking solace from the misfortunes of public life in the solitude of his library; Erasmus, portrayed by Holbein, bent over a manuscript in his studiolo; Montaigne, laboring on the Essays in the tower of his castle after having retired from a judicial position at the court of Bordeaux; etc., we often associate the humanists’ otium with isolation and indifference to the world around them. Nothing could be more removed from truth. In fact, Renaissance humanists were deeply engaged in the conflicts tearing apart their cities and Europe in general. This is obvious in the case of the Prince, which could be seen as an elaborate application for a political position, or with Erasmus’s Querela Pacis, which was a memorandum for peace sent to the most powerful world leaders in the guise of a bitter-sweet prosopopea. It was also true in the less obvious case of Montaigne’s Essays, which bear distinct traces of the civil wars during which Montaigne played the role of a diplomatic intermediary between fighting factions.¹¹

Like Montaigne in his tower-library, Latour is also surrounded by war. His most recent essay, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime, maps out the conflicts stirred up by the conjunction of globalization, increased economical inequalities, and climate change in the aftermath of the Cold War. Hence now, fifty years after May 1968, the rise of a new revolutionary spirit throughout Europe, but this time, of a distinctly right-wing orientation.¹² Latour’s humanist engagement in politics is a leitmotiv of his scholarship. In the Orwellian year 1984, at the time of the first edition of the Pasteurization of France, Latour also had some very pressing concerns. Europe held its breath amidst the Pershing-SS22 missile crisis and under the looming threat of a nuclear conflict. Both the 2017 and the 1984 books share the same anticipation of the worst to come alongside the same glimmer of hope that doom can be averted. This is exactly the same fragile hope that motivates Montaigne’s otherwise very gloomy assessment of the war-torn France at the end of the sixteenth century.

But there is another important feature of Latour’s thinking that imitates Montaigne’s humanist practice: war does not constitute a distinct object of study, and politics is not the field for a discrete disciplinary line of inquiry. Instead, political violence, which imposes by force new relations between things and people, is parallel to other aspects of the human condition—law and our bodily ailments, language and courtship, religion and the pretenses of science, etc. These topics are so closely intermingled that it is hard to tell what is the main argument and what is a digressive example. For instance, in “On Experience,” Montaigne invokes the theological quarrels leading to massacres and bloody battles as “purely verbal” disputes. The wars of religion and the deficiency of language are just different instances of our incapacity to empirically grasp reality. In “On Physiognomy,” a raid on his castle by some marauders gives Montaigne the opportunity to question the difference between nature and culture: was the mortal danger awaiting the author averted because of the genuine trustfulness of Montaigne’s character or thanks to the artfully staged frankness of his facial expression? Similarly, for Latour, reflecting almost twenty years after the first publication of Pasteurization of France, war is not simply the historical context in which his book was initially written, but rather a metaphysical risk stemming from the relational nature of reality. War becomes thus a potent epistemological model that allows him to think through the anthropology of science and technology in the same way it is helpful to conceptualize the politics of the day:

“The war of sciences.” I coined this expression then, according to the model of “the wars of religion” [civil wars that took place in France between 1562 and 1598—JM]. My intention was to reference the rapid transformation of a source of peace into the pretext for a scandal, which, at that time, was exemplified by the constant threat of an atomic conflict […]. The least we can say is that since twenty years ago we have not moved very far from the imbroglios of science and politics. On the contrary, the history has multiplied them abundantly.¹³

Metaphysics: The humanist does not presuppose the superiority of Man, but rather searches for what is human within the marvelous variety of beings.

Politics, sciences, and natural life are closely intertwined in Latour’s war-torn universe. Entities as diverse as governmental agencies and strains of bacteria, French colonies in Indochina and colonies of microbes on a Petri dish, scientific associations, and herds of cattle are implicated into the same integrated and ever-changing networks. This attempt to encompass the infinite varietas of things is a very humanistic ambition. In the early 1980s, during the last jolts of the Cold War, when Western Europe pondered the choice between being red or dead, that is between the totalitarian annihilation of democratic culture or the self-inflicted nuclear extinction of humankind as an animal species, Latour’s opposition to the “Great Bifurcation” of culture and nature was indeed groundbreaking. Soon thereafter, he launched Politics of Nature, a book-manifesto fighting on two fronts: on the one hand, against the capitalist exploitation of natural resources in the name of civilizational progress and, on the other, against its mirror image, deep ecology, which dreams of preserving the pristine purity of nature unstained by any trace of human culture.¹⁴ When Latour wondered how we can “bring the sciences into democracy,” he did not mean that scientific protocols should be subject to the popular vote, but sought to deny scientists their modern role of gatekeepers between natural facts and cultural values. He wanted them to be integrated into the holistic “parliament of things,” alongside other hybrids and under the rule of the new “Constitution” which does not discriminate between human and nonhuman agents.

It is a neo-Kantian, post-Enlightenment illusion to think that humanism consists of assuming the superiority of Man. For Renaissance humanists, being human is not a given, but rather an open question and the object of an unending pursuit. Yes, equality is not a value shaping the premodern Weltanschauung. Nonetheless, even if the Renaissance macrocosm is layered hierarchically beginning at unanimated stones and ending at celestial cherubim and seraphim, the place of humans on such an ontological scale is neither stable nor clearly defined. In the eyes of thinkers such as Erasmus, Charles de Bovelles, and Pico della Mirandola, human beings can fulfill their dignitas and reach the sublime heights of the spirit, but they can also remain mineralized in a state of insensitive existence. For premodern humanists, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction: For a “Literary Anthropology”
• Part One: Early Modern Tradition from a Latourian Relational Perspective
• Part Two: Reassessing Literary and Political Modernity with Latour
• Part Three: Latour’s Contributions to the Field of Contemporary Animal Studies
• Part Four: Issues of Practical Concern Related to Latour’s Thinking
• Afterword: On the Ambiguities of the Modern
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint