Daedalion is the result of the work that I did during a Graduate Readings (Independent Study) course in the English Department at St. Louis University in the fall of 2013. Early in the semester, I expressed to my professor my desire to do something for this course other than the typical 20-page seminar paper at the end. I wanted to produce something that I could send out into “the world”, something that would reach an audience beyond my professor, something that might actually be useful to someone. But what to make? To answer this question I began to wonder, “Is there a gap in the world of Latour studies (if that’s a thing) that my project could fill?” A brief perusal of Internet search results on Latour showed me that there was. To my surprise, there are no online resources (or at least, none that I could find) that are set up to help students/ readers who are encountering Latour’s work for the first time. Since I remembered being desperate for just such a resource when I first encountered Latour, I thought it could be a great help to others if I created one.
Let me say, though, before I go any further, that I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert on Latour. I am naught but a lowly grad student trying to understand Latour right alongside many others. In this blog, I am not speaking about his work from any position of intellectual authority. But I have read quite a few of his books now, and I’m starting to understand the basic contours of his philosophy, at least to the point where I think I could offer a few helpful words to the completely uninitiated. And yet I’m not always so sure about this. I’m still not convinced I really understand Latour at all times. So what I decided to do is let my lack of authority guide me into making my first decision as to what the project would be. I decided it would be a blog so that people could leave comments, suggestions, corrections, critiques, ideas, etc that can help improve what I’ve made. I want the interactive nature of this blog to be part of what bolsters its status as a helpful resource. Thank God it doesn’t just have to be me all by myself!
But as soon as I decided I would make a blog to serve as a resource, more questions came to mind. What should a Latour blog look like? What should it have in it? What should it be used for? Is there any way to guess how Latour would want me to make it? Can I take any cues from his philosophy that might help me answer these questions? After some pondering, I decided to let Latour’s notion of networks guide the way I conducted my readings and the way I created this blog. I decided to treat the readings I chose for this semester as a network, a maze that I would attempt to navigate. Like an ant in a maze, I am not able to see the whole picture. Thus, I will try my hardest not to “explain” Latour, as if I am standing above the maze, looking down on it, able to see where all of its turns will lead. The maze (the network) isn’t even a fixed entity! It is not pre-formed beforehand, and it will constantly shift based on what connections I followed.
All I can do as the ant is describe what I see, and try to leave a thread for others to follow (or not if they so choose), all the while doing my best to let the actors (in this case, the books) speak for themselves. Of course, I will be making definitive statements like “Latour means this” and “Latour argues that”, but I will not be offering any definitive interpretations of Latour that seek to explain what he’s saying outside his own terms. For example, I won’t be arguing that Latour is a Postmodernist, or a Neo-Marxist, as if I understand more about him than he understands about himself. I will simply be relaying to you my understanding of what he’s saying in these books. Yet I will also be including my reflections on the path I have taken through the network and the connections I have made between the actors. I think this notion of the path is important for understanding this blog. Part of the experiment I am trying to conduct with this study is one that seeks to trace the ways in which one’s understanding of Latour can be affected by the order and sequence of books one reads. For example, it’s important to note that I did not begin this semester’s study as one completely new to Latour, nor did I have the chance to read all of his books before the end. Before this semester I had read Science in Action and Reassembling the Social, and I think my familiarity with those two books had a drastic impact on the books that I chose for this semester’s study, the order I chose to read them in, and the level at which I comprehended them. For this sequence this semester I chose, in this order, We Have Never Been Modern, Aramis, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Rejoicing, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and Pandora’s Hope. I’m fairly confident that someone who started at a different place in the Latour network would have chosen a different path, would have made different connections, and would ultimately have ended up with a slightly (or maybe drastically) different understanding of his works and his philosophy. And so, I will be providing, along with my description of each book, a little bit of commentary about where I am in the network, whether I thought it was a good idea to turn where I did, and where I think one might turn instead. I have called these little sections of commentary “Tracing My Steps.”
In short, my intended purposes for this blog are essentially threefold; first, it is my hope that it may be used as a resource for students/ scholars who are encountering the work of Latour for the first time; second, I want this blog, and more specifically, my tracing of my path through Latour’s scholarship, to serve as an example of a way (not the way) one could navigate his/her way through his work. Hopefully, seeing how I did it will give readers ideas for tracing their own paths; third, it is my hope that this blog might serve as a discussion forum of sorts. I welcome comments from anyone who would like to offer them. If I left out anything in my descriptions of these books that you feel is crucial, please let me know. If you have any corrections for me, even better. If you want to share with everyone some or your own experiences reading Latour, or if you want to trace the steps of your own journey through Latour, even better still!
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