Philosophical anthropology with Bruno Latour, Maison Francaise, Oxford

Bruno Latour was in the country last week and, more importantly, in Oxford for a few days. Although I missed his ‘A Compositionist Manifesto’ on the Wednesday (as I was over at Royal Holloway), I was able to attend both the session of ‘Mapping Controversies’ at the School of Geography on Thursday morning, and the launch of his newly translated book on law, at the Maison Francaise the same afternoon. A recent addition to the MSc in ‘Nature, Society and Environmental Policy’ (NSEP), Mapping Controversies is a:

course developed from an EU project MACOSPOL (MApping COntroversies on Science for POLitics) and a course on mapping controversies first taught by Bruno Latour to students at the École des Mines in Paris. The online version of the course has been developed jointly by Sciences Po, MIT and the École des Mines (http://www.demoscience.org/). As well as Oxford, the University of Manchester (Department of Architecture), the École Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne and the University of Amsterdam (Department of Media Studies) are also part of the Mapping Controversies programme.

The session began with a series of presentations of group projects and their particular controversies, followed by a conversation between Andrew Barry and Bruno Latour. Taking matters of concern rather than matters of fact as his point of departure¹, Latour explained that through MACOSPOL he was trying to create a platform for mapping, an opportunity to orient yourself both in a map and in a controversy. Arguing that the web has not been exploited well so far, Latour contended that if a website can be printed, it’s a bad one (as an aside, this one can be printed but it doesn’t look the same so perhaps it’s not all bad). Demoscience, part of the larger MACOSPOL project, is an attempt at developing a handbook of good practice as there are no standards for websites, as well as differently visualising the micro and the macro. But there is much more to be done, in particular in terms of being able to navigate from one controversy to another, and how you might enter a controversy (a particular style of front-page), to navigate a matter of concern. Indeed, the very notion of controversy is itself controversial, Latour noted, as it is is positivist but he claimed it had become a technical term.  What he was most interested in talking about was what is the effect of a well-designed web-site, and how it  might encourage intervention in a debate (or even transform the debate). Latour seemed to be advocating a particular approach when he argued that the general public does not exist (and that there are many intermediary steps in the fabrication of any public), privileging smaller cases as they (1) are easier, as there are fewer scientific paper to read and (2) enable you to see how an issue becomes public. The talk ended with a few comments on Geography, as we were told that it is ideally placed as the only discipline to have maintained the connection between the physical and human:

(AB) The connection is sometimes tenuous… and actually, I think that, one of the importances of this kind of work is precisely to re-think what these connections are.

(BL) It’s tenuous, it’s disputed, in many Geography departments… But it’s there!

The talk in the afternoon was titled: ‘Law as a special type of social link: a field study of a French Supreme Court’.

After a long period of fieldwork on one of the French supreme Courts, [Latour] has published a monograph La Fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat. The English translation, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat (Polity Press, Cambridge) has just been published.²

Latour’s philosophical anthropology, as it was called by one the panelists, sought to engage with the question: if the social is made of associations, how can these associations connect? Law, for Latour, is one of these ‘connectors’, rather than a domain as such. The paper was accompanied by a PowerPoint slideshow, displaying a few key themes – such as A place of justice, A paper technology, A world of files, A strange institution – and plenty of photos (although none of him, as has been noted before by Sarah Whatmore³). The talk was recorded and can be streamed (as well as downloaded) here.

The following day, Latour was involved in the ‘Beyond the Academy: Research as Exhibition‘ conference over at the Tate Britain in London. Although I was unable to attend there is a report by a geographer from the Open University over at her blog.

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Where next for EwG?

The last day of the workshop finished at lunch but we still managed to fit in several presentations, the two designed soundwalks from the day before and a short session discussing feedback and the future of Experimenting with Geography (EwG), the documentation of this event and possible sources of funding for another ocassion. There was a sense of sadness that the event was coming to an end, and there was much talk of forming a new experimental department (or hijacking another one)… Even if that does not come to pass, I really hope that the workshop in Edinburgh was just the beginning of some sort of experimental network, with the potential for future collaborations. There was a lot of swapping of email addresses and my impression was that everyone was keen to share materials from the week. I’m not sure that here is the best place for the audio recordings but if you’d like a copy (and I haven’t linked to their location in the comments soon), then please get in touch.

Following the end of the workshop, now two weeks ago already, there have been an incredible number of emails going round, and an outpouring of thanks to the organisers. If I might, I would like to add my thanks to those who organised, presented and participted at EwG – it was a lot fun. Eric perhaps best summed up the week when he wrote:

Can you come again next week? This one has lacked crackly birdsong, vibrating balloons, soldering irons, city symphonies, anechoic chambers, autumn salmon roe, centrifuges, quarry hammers, avian corpses, men on scaffolding (well it hasn’t, but has in that storyboard way), violin-voices in the foyer, cycle rides to the Wild West and most importantly, the music of your enthusiasm.

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]]> http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/conference/see-hear-make-do-future-collaborations/feed/ 3 http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/review/dewsbury-seven-injunctions/ http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/review/dewsbury-seven-injunctions/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:07:30 +0000 Thomas http://www.spacesofexperimentation.net/?p=1041

Dewsbury, J-D. (2009) Performative, Non-representational, and Affect-Based Research: Seven Injunctions. In: DeLyser, D., Atkin, S., Crang, M., Herbert, S. & McDowell, L. (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research in Human Geography. London: Sage. Ch. 18

This is a very welcome paper to find in a handbook of research methods within human geography, advocating resolute experimentalism through the series of seven bold injunctions. Striking in its opening, the chapter is built around four key qualifications that are outlined early on. Firstly, there are few references to qualitative research in geography. Secondly, the emphasis is on the generation of problems rather than solutions. Thirdly, and perhaps unsurprisingly given Dewsbury’s other publications, there is an emphasis on the non-representational. Lastly, the paper attempts to stage the danger of scientism, the view that natural sciences have authority over all interpretations of life. As part of this ethos of disrupting, Dewsbury calls for us to strive to think the unthought and contends that this must take place at every step of the research because “[m]ethodology is far from dull: it is extremely political” (p. 323).

Following a lengthy (though necessary) introduction, the chapter opens out to explore some key agendas within performative research: thinking, sensing and presenting. Arguing that methodologies have always been somewhat improvised, Dewsbury suggests that approaches which fall broadly under the banner of the performative question why only some ways of knowing count. Put differently, performative research embraces the failures as much as the successes of research. This of course raises the thorny question of what might be considered a failure, and who might be able to decide whether or not something is a failure, an issue which is perhaps not adequately addressed. Running throughout the piece is the aforementioned series of injunctions, which are compared to proscriptions rather than prescriptions; proscriptions do not “suggest a formula or a known or better way to proceed to in performative methodological endeavour” (p. 322). This term reminded me of Whitehead’s (and more recently Isabelle Stengers’ and Erin Manning’s) use of propositions. Neither judgements nor necessarily true, propositions are theories-in-the-making, generative constraints for the opening of a relational process (Manning, 2009). Dewsbury’s injunctions-proscriptions-propositions encourage the reader to: embrace experimentation (rather than fret about the risks), have conviction in your experiments, not fear the judgement that tethers social science to scientific values (such as efficacy and rigour), remember you are producing an understanding of the world because it is not given, concentrate on experience, and to be more acute and cute in the research stories told.

The chapter is sharp, witty and eminently readable. It might even be described as a manifesto for doing non-representational geography. Witness:

“The idea is to get embroiled in the site and allow ourselves to be infected by the effort, investment, and craze of the particular practice or experience being investigated. Some might call this participation, but it is a mode of participation that is more artistic and, as with most artistic practices, it comes with the side-effect of making us more vulnerable and self-reflexive. It is not however an argument for losing ourselves in the activity and deterritorializing ourselves completely from our academic remit, but nor does it mean sitting on the sidelines and judging. Rather the move, in immersing ourselves in the space, is to gather a portfolio of ethnographic ‘exposures’ that can act as lightening rods for thought. It is then in those key ‘times out’ as we set upon generating inventive ways of addressing and intervening in that which is happening, and has happened, as an academic, that such a method produces its data: a series of testimonies to practice. This is of course the flipping over of ‘participant observation’ to ‘observant participation’ that Thrift made (2000) to emphasise the serious empirical involvement involved in non-representational theory’s engagement with practices, embodiment and materiality.” (p. 326-327)

It is not however, Dewsbury reminds us, a question of ‘anything goes’. Embracing uncertainty through experimentation and employing an extended notion of the empirical – where encounters might include readings of philosophy, material sites or even research problematics – might allow for alternative methodological strategies (see also Adkins & Lury, 2009). Therefore, alongside an ethos of disrupting, there is also an “ethos of stretching the means by which research is done and striving to continue as experiments fail or always come short in the attempt” (p. 323). Here, research is treated as an ongoing process, where data – or rather materials (see Whatmore, 2003) – could, and perhaps should, include “the feelings, the codes, the awkward intensities, the architected space, the architecture of time, to name but a few” (p. 326). The attempt at the articulation of these empirical experiences or events is more important than its success; indeed, the very attempt to articulate is part of a project which takes materials seriously, allowing them to work-with, and against, initial research questions. Approaches need to be adapted to each singular situation; there is no one-size-fits-all methodology which can be used and re-used again and again. To combat this methodological conservatism we are encouraged to engage with resolute experimentalism, at once productive, proliferative and interfering.

References

Adkins, L. & Lury, C. (2009) Introduction: What Is the Empirical? European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1): 5-20

Manning, E. (2009) Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Whatmore, S. (2003) Generating materials. In: Pryke, M., Rose, G. & Whatmore, S. (eds.) Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. London: Sage