in thing language

Is it possible to imagine a beginning to the thing we call earth? Because of an education which required sitting through too many introductory biology courses, I came to imagine the beginning of this planetary life as a frenzy, as a desire to live on and on and on as an eternally self-reproducing unicellular organism.  Death in the beginning of life, would be unknowable, unthinkable, for the organism might deteriorate and disappear, but only after dividing into two perfect reproductions of itself.  It was only mutations over time, the evolution of sexual reproduction that death enters the scene.  Here two a-symmetrical multi-cellular organisms could form a third, but that third was not a copy, it was another entity altogether, who, like its parents could reproduce, but could not escape the fate of eventually disappearing forever. In other words, dying.

The second evolutionary-like fantasy I entertain only for the reason that I read it once in a short story.  The author suggested that when our present inside was still our outside, we would vibrate on the waves, and as the sea passed through us, my vibrations would move through you, vibrating on your wave, along the crest and into a marine abyss.  Then one day, flipping inside out, we crawled out from the ocean.  But the sea still pulsed through our blood, inside rather outside.  So the story went.  But what could happen next?  Now that our signals could not be carried one to the other on the waves, now that we had a thick, dry barrier of skin between us?  Perhaps, it is to compensate for these skins, which muffle all our vibrations, that we learned to rely on all these things: bombs and pipelines, music, money and of course, language for transmission. 

What we share with our organic, cellular ancestors, then, is the effort and a potential to produce, albeit lacking the perfect ability to reproduce, ourselves in time and space, which the machines, the bombs, pipelines, music, money and of course, language cannot do.  However, what we share with our technology, our things, is the assurance of our mortality, that we are each an entity with a singular lifespan.  But perhaps this quasi-evolutionary (scientific?) business is unnecessary, for here we are, on planet earth, all of us together with our separate names and our own agendas: cells, pipelines, bombs, language and me, tapping little keys. 

But how do we begin to tell our story? And can it, in fact, actually be narrated, or merely peeled, as Latour would say, like the layers of an onion?  Certainly there is a network-like, collective universe I wish to illustrate, but, without even worrying about how far out the network extends, I am curious to think about how things, small things, human and non-human, working together or against each other, could be animated in an alternative narrative to science or culture as Bruno Latour has insisted for years that it must.  For example: the water, with the brackish taste of the ocean still makes up 70% of my body, keeping the system inside me fluid, vibrating.  Yet when that same salt water finds it way into, let us take the example of an industrial pump of a pipeline in the Niger Delta, it corrodes its edges, breaks it in two, and bleeds oil into the fertile delta soil, and into the sea that laps its borders.  The oil spoils the potential of soil and sea to host the still self-reproducing organisms living, living, living on in nature. It stunts the cell before the nucleus has time to double itself.  And yet, a little less lively, life continues, the human body, still pulsing with the rhythm of all things, who came like you and me from the ocean, full of these atomic clusters of hydrogen and oxygen.  My interests here, is taking this small example, a generic oil pipeline in the Niger Delta and exploring the possibilities of narration.  Rather then apply actor network theory, rather then track the way in which the pipeline is constructed as an object, I want to asses the difficulties involved with sorting out the human from the non-human actors in writing.  The problems might be many, but they seem to congeal here around three features, the question of encounter, translation, and concern. 

encounter and thinginess

The question of encounterability might be the only starting point for considering, as I propose to do in what follows, the oil pipeline as an object/actor/non-human, as a “thing” in the world of things.  The oil pipeline as a “thing” is paradoxical.  It can only be sensuously experienced up close, as a slick, smooth, round surface, a steely, sometimes plastic-coated thing.  As it exists in time and space, one can conceivably touch it, wound it, be wounded by it. However, weaving below and above ground, across vast spans of territory, the oil pipeline is also a thing meant to cover distance, ever-extending beyond the immediate range in which one can experience its materiality.  Therefore, it can only ever be taken as an entire object through a map, blue print, chart or other abstract models. It is a thing whose very possibility relies on a physical and technical continuity, but it cannot be experienced materially, as a totality, and this defines its conditions for representation.

In the desire to write an encounter with materiality, there is a tension between how a thing can be understood as both a presence and a representation.  On the one hand, there is an ambiguous, lived, experiential present of a thing.  On the other hand, there is a word, an image, a flattened, stored and circulated object standing in to communicate the thing, naming it, describing its conditions of use.  Of course, even in the lived world, the line between presence and representation is never consistent with experience.  Technical operators know the pipeline as a set of interfaces on their computer screen, while inhabitants in Nigeria’s Niger Delta encounter the pipeline as a physical, everyday material danger and source of sustainability.  I would not want to suggest that in one the pipeline is pure presence and the other mere represention.  I am interested in seeing (from a purely conjectural perspective) how it can only ever be the two, presence and representation, endlessly repeating the other in the lived as world as on the page, though certainly without in any way suggesting they are the same thing. 

The oil no longer beats with the rhythm of the sea, as living organisms do and as many mechanical, technological creations like the valve of the pipeline or the motor of a car attempt to imitate with their rumbling.  What is named “oil” or “petroleum,” or “black gold” (it makes no difference really) is merely the putrefied corpses of our animal ancestors long since extinct.  Their graves are now invaded by the sharp end of a metal drill, crunching through layers and layers of rock that had been so kind to serve as a protective headstone all these long, long, millennia.  Now in Nigeria, language transforms particular oil into the particular metaphoric referent, the lifeblood of a nation.  Thus metaphorically and materially the oil can lubricate both failing economies and the motor of machines.  But I don’t wish to be hasty, the danger with things is always language, and certainly the water molecule that moves through my veins and the pipeline and the sea cannot be found in the word or the structure of the alphabet…not yet.

On the technical level, the pipeline is itself, in oil-industry-speak, a delivery system.  It operates using highly complex hydraulics that pumps oil and petrol products along its inner surface, from the site of extraction to the platform, to the refinery, or to various recipient locations.  Therefore, as a basic definition it is a kind of infrastructure or network.  Yet, even though I stated rather mournfully above, that the pipeline cannot be known as a material totality, it is indeed composed of an entire knowable thing universe.  The pipe casings themselves are outfitted with valves, fittings, and flanges, communication and surveillance networks.  Yet, approached from the perspective of its things, the pipeline is itself inalienable.  If the composition of parts break down, they can be understood as various alienable pieces, such as a compressor, tubing, floating ball valve, high pressure valve, etc.  However, it is only a fully functional and totalized “pipeline” when all its pieces are working together and oil gets moved from here to there without any molestation to its surface or any malfunctioning of its parts.  The pipeline, then, must be wary of the agency of unwarranted invaders, such as the water molecule mentioned above, or the humans who, in the Niger Delta share residence with the pipeline and all its actors.

Sometimes underground, other times exposed, the pipeline has a highly technical quality, its metal cast defining it as distinctly different from the roots and soil, the water and the fields and the fish.  By this I mean, the oil pipeline is inherently inorganic, and yet, its winding in and around such vast swaths of territory, the fact that it is sunk into the ground and encountered in exposed patches everyday by people with no technical relationship to it, risk being misrecognized for the organic.  And here, in the Niger Delta, we can understand that in fact, the pipeline is used, to a certain extent, as if it were a public, natural resource, a metal plant.  It can be tapped quite easily, and often is by local populations who sell it on the black market.  It can be destroyed and used for political leverage and blackmail from militant youth springing up all over the Delta, brandishing their guns and holding for ransom, not only oil, but oil workers.  The pipeline can also explode, combust, rust over and leak, killing people and the environment in which they subsist.  The flares that burn off excess gas from extraction processes cause heavy pollution, but can also be used for drying cassava or roasting food for local populations when the cooking fuel runs out.  In the journey from here to there, this object of transport is in no way neutral, is in no way simply an object, a commodity, though, as Marx has noted, it is at first glance, a curious thing.  It has animate properties and is outright confusing.  As Latour explains in his essay, “Why has Critique Run out of Steam, from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” the pipeline could be “a mediating, assembling, gathering thing,” an event, occasion, a matter of concern, something very present and caught up in a network of real, ongoing processes. (Latour 2005, 231)

Yet, there is still another way in which the pipeline is present.  The majority of human personnel are generally skilled foreign technicians operating out of control rooms on a system called, Human Machine Interface (HMI,) an electronic network that transmit the pipeline through sensors, wires and via transmitters attached to communication towers and trees.  According to a very handy thing manual for beginners, Oil and Gas Pipelines in Non-Technical Language, “Screens are the visual information link between controller and pipeline.” (OGP, 147)  From remote location to display, the book boasts a real time delay of a few seconds, so that when there is an encroaching threat to the pipeline’s body, the control operators can be alerted, and most times, from their comfortable chair inside the control room, manage to fix it.  When adding or subtracting features to the physical pipeline, there is an addition or subtraction of a new display to the screen.  The conceptual model and the physical modifications of the pipeline remain as aligned as possible, speaking to an operational fantasy in which the pipeline is a seamless, completely isolated universe which can be controlled through the flipping of switches and buttons.  With HMI every new practical challenge results in a new network of signals and of icons on the screen.  Implementing physical changes alters the abstract, representational model, just as operators in evaluating their screen thing can plan what they see as a necessary alteration to the body of the pipeline.  Human and non-human, machine and blueprint then operate on a kind of feedback loop, one revising the other.  The need for the screen to remain readable coincides with the need to for the pipeline to continue functioning.  And yet, even though, as ideal, as simulacra, the screen image can never actually substitute for the pipeline, this representation, this network of transmission is a real experience with a real thing that control operators come to know intimately.  When a blinking warning sign flashes on their screen, their hearts race, their minds move, their fingers fly to keyboard in a panic.

But sticking to the material, where is there to go? Can I take this generic example further?  Perhaps I am being too partial toward the human actors.  Perhaps, things willed themselves into existence.  Or, if it sounds too absurd or general to make such a statement, at least, in a more limited discussion, we can try to understand all those pipelines running through the marshes as not merely feeding any rational/irrational desire of the human race to produce capital and capital things, but the desire of the machines who need oil to continue working, to defy their obsolescence.

Oil is also a force, a force that allows the machines we make and live with function.  Taking this tack, pipeline construction and the black market are contingent first, not on the value of oil, but the life it provides for all the machine things.  Then it is perhaps the violence of machine desire, always needing to consume more and more of a limited resource, which makes the humans into its extended network of actors and sets them one against the other in the battle around extraction.  Perhaps this explains why any human seen stealing oil from the pipeline in Nigeria is to be shot on site, not because, as our cultural-legal rhetoric has it, that they are stealing from the nation-state,[1] but rather, that they are threatening the pipeline’s raison d’etre, to move oil from here to there.  The spilling, this time of blood from the human vein, vibrating once again on the outside, either makes its way back to the general sea or remains cloyed to bits of crumpled metal, and left to dry unlaved.  And oil in this kind of story, which makes the production of so many things possible, and is indestructible because it is already dead, causes dire effects on the living and reproducing world.  The desire for these dead by the non-organic machine who continues, against all odds to function, drives the living to make a mess of the earth and wreak unspeakable atrocities on other humans and plants and animals and even the sky itself.

But the story could go another way because what I am unsure about is what can be assumed to be the function of our things?  Is it, in the case of the pipeline, to pump oil from one end to another? Or like the bomb, to self-destruct? If I apply Bataille’s poetic fallacy to enter into thing consciousness, would the pipeline, an object, a material, be self-reflexive?  In its thing immanence, would the pipeline register the footsteps overhead, as a women with a worn flip flop on her way to market, or a bright orange jump-suited man coming to scrap the rust from its insides?  Would the pipeline. as subjective universe, detect a difference between the animal remains pumping through its center and the salty water collecting along its edges?  But most importantly, even leaving all these musings unanswered, does the pipeline imagine its purpose to be living or dying?  Perhaps the rust built up on its insides, the breaks, the buckling are its function.  Perhaps the destiny of things, machine or otherwise, might very likely be to work themselves into extinction.  Therefore, the pipeline would not hope to be maintained, sustained, but to be run into the ground; to give itself up to its materiality, to the assurance that one day all its parts will succumb to the atmosphere so that it can dissolve, once again, into elements and atoms and become something else in that future neither humans or things know how to anticipate.  It is possible, but as Bataille points out, “poetry describes nothing that does not slip towards the unknowable.” (Bataille, 21) In trying to think the pipeline as a sentient being, “I am only abusing a poetic capacity, substituting a vague fulguration for the nothing of ignorance.” (Bataille, 22)  But if we are taking Latour’s division between the human and non-human seriously and their analysis as a work of symmetry, then how, in recounting their mutually entwined pasts, presents, futures are we to account for the sentience of one and not the other?  It remains to be seen what any work narrating the human and non-human universe intends to and actually can accomplish.

in translation

In thinking through things encountering each other from various fictive perspectives, there seems to be little analytic work.  Perhaps what I have written above was merely play, perhaps it avoided the more careful and rigorous possibilities laid out by Latour and others who understand their stories of human and non-human actors as never a wish to write fictively, but to get more at the heart of reality.  I do not wish to suggest that one could not or should not apply something like ANT to the situation in the Delta, it is certainly one way of many to analyze the intricate and infinitely complex situation.  However, what science studies in its drive to reset the balance of non-human agency often overlooks, are the contingencies involved with their own narration.  And while over-emphasizing the problems of representation might risk destruction of some more pressing matter of the real, it is also quite misleading to imagine writing on human and non-human agency gets closer to occurrences on the ground.  It is necessary to acknowledge, or at least keep in mind that all these accounts must still pass through human thought in order to be processed onto the page for publication. 

After breaking down the nature/culture divide, delineating the non-human from the object, in Pandora’s Hope, Latour states “now that nonhumans are no longer confused with objects, it may be possible to imagine the collective in which humans are entangled with them.” (Latour 1999, 175) However, now that we have moved away from the episteme and into the post-human, revised the analytic task as trying to imagine rather then to deconstruct our world full of human and non-human actors, now that we acknowledge that we are all bumping up against each other, cross-bred and intertwined, we still need a way of describing these multifaceted relationships.  In our academic idiom that tool is still language.  And yet, my point is not to say that this process is over-determined by language, that we always speak from some conditioned positionality.  But there is something muddled and disconcerting in the reverent and missionary tone used to declare the era of the post-human.  I want to suggest, because it seems unaccounted for by Latour and others, that when it comes to describing and experiencing things, there still a need for a question to be formed around language and its role as a transmitter in narration.[2]

Even Latour, though never addressing the problem directly is clearly playing in his conceptual constructions, with language.  Latour uses the word, translation, “to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies the original two.” (Latour 1999, 177) Latour accounts for the gun and the man, their mutual transformation in the man-gun hybrid which is then translation into subject or object.  His aim is to be able to better analyze goals and actions, the way in which one thing, human or non-human punctures or is allied with another.  Clearly translation is a convenient for the purpose of explain the way by which hybrid artifacts, like facts, undergo processes of mediation and purification.  And to apply it to the pipeline would be useful since the sinking of the pipeline and keeping it operational is as intensely geographical a project as it is a technical one. The pipeline is in constant translation.  The scientific, manufactured parts, conceived in language of physics and mathematics are translated to the particular soil and thing and human universe of the delta.  In turn, it is retranslated into screen of operators.  Yet to understand the idea of translation between the agendas of humans and non-humans in language is perhaps more richly understood by the theorist who still maintains the subject/object divide.

The central tenet of Jean Baudrillard’s “System of Objects,” proposes an alternative classificatory system for what he calls “object discourse” generated in the disruptions of an object’s technical ‘language’ by human needs.  “Man is not at home amid pure functionality,” he explains. (Baudrillard, 84) Therefore, functional tools, things are transfigured into ‘speaking’ objects.  Baudrillard is concerned with objects that are marginal, defunct and reused, and the “secondary meanings” they acquire in order to resolve the contradictions between the rationality of the object and the irrationality of needs. (Baudrillard, 10) The pipeline, though certainly neither marginal nor defunct is similar[3] in that the language of its technology is never quite realized and is always altered in its encounter with humans, whether on screens or while being stepped over on the way to town.  The pipeline does not only transform the ground in which it is placed, nor simply allow for new potential re-orderings of the human and non-human into subjects or object.  As Baudrillard points out, it transfigures that very language of meaning used to approach things, to give them weight in the imagination. The presence of the oil pipeline, then, can sometimes stand as a sign of neglect, of exploitation, other times power, profit and energy needs.  Even on a symbolic level, the pipeline is at times a sign of the global hegemony of western, capital nations, gobbling up national resources, but also, the most immediately identifiable symbol of the Nigerian state that refers to itself as an “oil nation.” 

Like many of the objects that fascinate Baudrillard, the pipeline and the oil it transports are prone to mixing with discourses of desire and fetishization.  What is useful in thinking with Baudrillard, is that translations are not just rescripting or entanglements, but a way in which the physical imbrication of human and (alas, not quite non-human) object worlds also resides on the level of language. Therefore, confusions, mistranslations, misrecognitions don’t just change the physical ground, but alter the ability to know and describe ourselves and our things as separated entities.  Being human or social-centric does not always result in a subject object divide.  Although Baudrillard tends to fetishize the alienation engendered by a capitalist modernity, he also provides an illustration, along with many psycho-analytically oriented writers, that, in the world we know and describe, disentangling the human and non-human is impossible, and that this has something to do with the imbrication of ourselves and things already active in our language.

This makes it possible to understand why, if the technical language of the pipeline is thought in terms of a transport system, as stated above, there is a temptation to use analogies of the body, a kind of making sentient of the universe around us, “as the skin has many equivalents in the external made world, so does every other body part.” (Scary, 282) Indeed, the Nigerian government and its citizens refer to oil as the “lifeblood” of the nation of which the pipelines form the veins and arteries.  As the debates in the Delta and of oil production in general tend to center around environmental destruction, the pipeline is also described as a trachea, a speech apparatus, in which the residue of the ancient, marine life is carried like a gust of air through this steely throat, until it bursts forth, releasing its primordial poisons into the atmosphere, speaking itself by blackening the earth, clouding the sky and warming the oceans.

And yet, all these conceptual devises, some of which I am obviously employing myself, still fail to grasp the pure effect of the materiality of the pipeline.  But Baudrillard’s system of objects, is helpful.  First, because we would be deluding ourselves to think these fragments of thoughts we produce in the academy could exist outside writing, and second, because the only way to properly problematize the world of things, is to begin by recognizing the way in which discourses of language bleed into discourses of materiality.

From a Latourian perspective, it is tempting to scold Baudrillard for being social-centric.  But the question of materiality has to take into consideration much more then the dichotomy between the human and non-human, it has to acknowledge the difficulty involved in being able to know the difference between them.  This is the difficulty of knowing what and where a thing, human or otherwise, is located, active, present, and also, our ability to identify how its relation to the universe in which it is submerged can be thought through as a representation. 

Ultimately, Baudrillard is interested in how misrecognitions and a death denial sediment into particular discourses and create a system of meaning.  Yet, for Latour discourse could only exist as a narrative mediating or purifying an ongoing confluence of active possibilities.  Therefore, Baudrillard seems lofted in the realm of hyper-representation, while Latour grows weary under the weight of too many things happening all at once.  As an analytic problem, it might be more clearly stated this way: Granting things the positive character of agency provides the possibility to acknowledge that the non-humans have a real rather then merely metaphoric, and figurative, presence in the world.  However, it does not get around the problem of representation and necessarily arrive at anything more relevant to say about the everyday lifeworlds that we move through.  Latour is attuned to the transformative work performed by the translation of a thing into a side of the nature/culture debate.  However, Baudrillard reveals that not just transformation, but transfiguration occurs between human and thing.  In the translation process, our use of language always passes through the mind of the human, of the social, which makes it a harder habit to break then simply outlining the principles of the symmetric analysis Latour envisions.

descriptive tools and matters of concern

It is necessary, at this point to mention some virtues to the Latourian analysis.  I certainly don’t want to imply it is useless, or that Baudrillard is offering any kind of alternative to actor network theory.  Indeed, Latour’s writings have opened new doors for thinking about, writing about and genuinely understanding this very populated planet.  In a discussion on the Niger Delta, it presents the possibility to discuss the oil pipeline as an agent.  It also exemplifies how that agency is often denied through processes by which it becomes a tool to draw the lines between science and material and people and the social in thicker strokes.  Science studies helps understand why, despite the unnecessary deaths, the rampant pollution, dialogues can spring up about how to balance nature and culture, the one against the other.  The Niger Delta becomes calculable and the state and NGO’s and corporations can negotiate risks and damages against capital investment and social welfare.  Contracts can be made, the pipeline and the value of the oil it pumps can be naturalized and its laws enforced by the gun.  To consider human and non-human agency as both a present and a part of a larger, ongoing historical trajectory opens new possibilities for approaching politics and what Latour calls “matters of concern.”[4]

The question of language might just be troubling for no reason then, unimportant, and not a matter of concern.  When Marx said things had a life of their own, perhaps we, like he, jumped too quickly by assigning the negative qualities of the fetish.  Latour kindly offers to explain the historical error as a fear of the proliferating, hybrid monsters mixing our metaphors.[5]  Therefore, language, always mixed up seems more like an enemy to analysis then a friend. It causes unwarranted panic, anxiety, so that despite any good intentions we try to keep things objects and humans socially conditioned subjects. 

That said, isn’t language an agent too?  It was not completely arbitrary that I grouped it together with the bomb, the pipeline and money as “things” which came into the world as prosthetic communication devices.  Our graphemes and sound images and little black marks that circulate and meet again and again on the page, are all materials.  And is it polite to say books and utterances are less real then when foot meets steel, or explosions break the sky open with their purple flames? Aren’t they like the bomb, the pipeline things trying to communicate, performing an action and prone to deviate from its script? As it was discussed above, in deference to Baudrillard, it seemed that language is a thing that must pass through thought and therefore the representations and concepts it offers will always, to a certain degree, be called, socially conditioned.  But, perhaps the question could be put in Latour’s terms: in the world of intersecting, gathering things, is language a human or a non-human?

To take language as an object, as a materiality, as a matter of concern, has a history that pre-dates Latour (and very possibly it is the one he is working directly against.) As Blanchot acutely states the dilemma, “the word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being.” (Blanchot, 379) And where does its being reside? Certainly not in the referent, for Blanchot, the referent of language is always death, pure negativity.  Language essentially signifies the possibility of destruction.  Literary theory seems to grow anxious over this supposed lack of the thing on the page, that it is troubled by the unstorable, untransmittable thinginess of things, collecting like the fetish a cascade of alphabetic arrangements, trying to supplement the missing part with textual authority.  And yet, for Blanchot, “literature is a concern for the reality of things, for their unknown, free, and silent existence; literature is their innocence, their forbidden presence, it is their being which protests against revelation, it is the defiance of what does not want to take place outside.” (Blanchot, 386) In other words literature, language put into writing,[6] is also an actor in the world, it performs a metamorphosis.  It does not merely collect a stifling density of petrified syllables, it detaches things from their supposed conditions from reason and principles and transfigures them into representations to be known on other terms.  It acts on behalf of the invisible, the unseen forces and possibilities, it points to the boundaries of the knowable and the unknowable.  And though Blanchot will end by idealizing the institution of literature rather then its materiality, there is a recognition of a certain kind of work performed by writing as opposed to the negativity of language.  It is clearly an actor, an agent of its own right, but can it be called human or non-humans?  In this case, writing is a force, neither identical with the non-human thing it refers to, nor identical with the human mind that produced it, the social world which made alphabetization into a range of limited black marks.  It circulates and therefore has a life of its own, performing different ideas and images for different readers, and yet, it is readable because certain humans share an understanding of how to put those letters together in their mind.

It is possible then, that Latour avoids questioning language and writing for this very reason that it risks being neither human nor non-human and is not as simple as a hybrid man-gun.  Perhaps, he agrees with William Burroughs that, “language is a virus from outerspace.”  However, though he does not problematize the relationship between human, non-human and language, he takes seriously the question of narration.  His future critic in “Matters of Concern” has not to have new ideas, but must devise a “powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concerns and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and care.” (Latour 2004, 226) Regardless of his attempt to reformulate his contribution to the academia, his interest in critique puts forward again his desire that there be a better way of describing how things are made and unmade.  From Kant to Hedeigger, according to Latour, “their objects are never complicated enough; more precisely, they are never simultaneously made through a complex history and new, real and interesting participants in the universe.” (Latour 2004, 234)

In his essay, Latour wants to emphasize the need to see how an object is made from and can return to being a gathering, the complicated, entangled, Thing.  This is how matters of facts can become matters of concern.   An object as fact can, like the Columbia shuttle, suddenly burst and unfold from every angle at once.  The matter of concern is to wonder if objects are not as multifariously assembled as they are taken apart.  Oil, as I have attempted to explain, is a thing so terribly complex, it cannot ever be made into a matter of fact, it is involved in a great gathering.  To understand what is involved with making oil a mere object, a single commodity would fill and has filled volumes.  Conversely, an oil pipeline could quite easily be over-looked as mere object, a simple, technical fact and there is very little understanding and intellectual interest in its construction, function.  And yet, Latour tells us the gathering of the pipeline not necessarily less complex then that which made oil, it depends on the story.

Latour’s magic has always been to point to how great and careful an effort it takes to connect everything together.  This is where he has always profited where other science studies followers have failed.  He has not been looking to gage some all encompassing, expansive network, but tried to understand how it is, we can move so seemingly seamlessly from one thing to the next, from earth to sky.  What interests him is the connective tissue, the different intentions and accidents, conspiracies and battles that congealed in history and political life.  In other words, he is interested, as I am here, with my pipeline, in the difficulties and triumphs involved with moving from here to there, in narration, “To reconnect scientific objects with their aura, their crown, their web of associations.” (Latour 2004, 237)

Without Latour, it might be difficult to be so bold as to talk of things as actors, but it is necessary to be careful while latching onto his mode of story-telling.  For there are certain points of contention, certain lacks and limits.  And perhaps it is the problem that Latour choose, network, or collective, or, recently “gathering” for metaphors, rather then basket weaving the metaphor used by Ingold.  The former imply a fluidity, a congealing, the latter is still rough.  Your finger could still move along the basket edge and feel the ridges.  And indeed, it is feeling and the senses and the realization that even objects can’t manage to account for everything, to gather it all up into a seamless Thing, that gives Latour’s exciting, expaning ideas a limit point.  In contrast, the basket weaving described so exquisitely by Tim Ingold, as a set of processes connecting to a practice and a material production, takes a small example, but charges it with “a current of sensuous activity.” (Ingold, 361) Here experience is determined but also re-ordered through the meeting of ideas, their materialization.  And if the basket is undone, the re-weaving experience, it would still have a palpable quality. 

Latour’s radical symmetry, is at once a liberating and condemning move.  Even if he didn’t relegate the question of subjectivity to the purified, mediated, social realm, a consideration of the senses or of consciousness is foreclosed in a purely symmetrical analysis.   As I failed earlier with invoking Bataille’s poetic fallacy to enter thing sentiment, thing consciousness, so Latour, perhaps after a similar failed effort, realized that for humans and non-humans to remain as equals, the senses and consciousness could not be taken into consideration. 

conclusion

But to conclude my amalgamated evolution story I am tempted to move into the present/future tense. What is, of course, my personal frustration with a Latourian approach, is that it does not take very seriously the question I wished at the ouset to craft about life, reproduction and destruction, a sense, however strange it may sound, which every being, organic or not, living or not, can somehow, if not understand, then experience.  That Latour himself is such a careful and exciting writer works only to his disadvantage, for he continues to produce charitable ideas, entangled in the network of things and thing metaphors, but never concedes the unknowable, the untenable that his network theory in fact, unleashes.  Perhaps it is as simple as saying, there is no more poesis in critique.  There is an interest in being accurate, fair, equivalent to the real, but no interest in making reality felt, as Blanchot would say, by putting us up against its opposite, annihilation.

Alas, used up and metamorphosed into gas, our animal ancestors now crowd together like ghosts on the roof of the atmosphere, smother the earth as if in a effort to melt the world back into itself, to cover everything once again in the life for life for life, before the humans with their things or things with their humans, destroy the possibility for all reproduction on earth.  But this apocalyptic future, part speculation, part rumor, and perhaps completely true, is also the work of narration.  And the problem of telling stories of the future is the same as those of the past.  The story I wanted to write is as impossible to tell as the future.  Both are contained in a past/future that can’t be narrated since, in turn, all such past/future are already included in its own past, and, to make matters more confusing, in the many collective and individual pasts of organisms, humans, manufactured and manufacturing things.  If I have at least pointed to some complexities, challenges in the world of human and non-human actors, if I have transmitted some kind of sensation to the reader connected to a place, a thing, a human or non-human, even if it is confusing, I guess that will do for now.

references

Bataille, G. (1989). Theory of religion. New York, Zone Books.

Baudrillard, Jean. (2005). The system of objects. London ; New York, Verso.

Blanchot, Maurice. G. Quasha, et al. (1999).  “Literature and the Right to Death” in The Station Hill Blanchot reader : fiction & literary essays. Barrytown, N.Y., Station Hill/Barrytown, Ltd.

Ingold, Tim. (2000). The perception of the environment : essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London ; New York, Routledge.

Latour, Bruno. (1993). We have never been modern. New York ; London, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandora's hope : essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno. (2004). "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 2(30): 225-247.                

Miesner, T. O. a. L., William L. (2000). Oil and Gas Pipelines in a Non-Technical Language. Texas, Penwell.

Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain : the making and unmaking of the world. New York, Oxford University Press.