User:Amy Suo Wu/annotated bibliography

Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, 2004, Bruno Latour. Article from Critical Inquiry, a journal of Art, Culture and Politics, Published by the University of Chicago.

Bruno Latours article questions the ethics of critical inquiry. Beginning with global warming as an example to demonstrate his concern about the misuse of social critique, Latour mourns over the fact that people are abusing the techniques he was pioneering to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements. "[T]here is now, an excess of distrust of good matter disguised as bad ideological bias." (p. 227) He spent many years undermining the certainty of scientific matters of fact, however these strategies he helped to created are now used to attack the 'good' facts scientists rightfully fought. He feels the weapons of social critique have now mutated and have been mutinously deployed to attack what it used to defend. Conspiracy theories for Latour are an absurd deformation of scientific argument. With regret, the global warming theory is something that is being questioned by naive believers for its foundation of reality based on a lack of certainty. He feels complicit in being a 'mad scientist' for letting this virus of critical inquiry unleash without control.

Latour relates the difference between what he calls matters of fact and matters of concern to Heideggar's mediation on the word 'thing' as having strong connection to a quasi-judiciary assembly. This ancient word 'thing', once designated a site in which people did their dealing and disputes, has become in modern usage, a word which designates what is out there, what lies out of any dispute, out of language. Thus matters of fact can be seen as an object, out there, and matters of concern can be understood as issues in there - a gathering. In the case of global warming, he feels like it was an object (fact) that has been degraded into a thing (discussion).

He poses two approaches are that used by the contemporary critical scene: the fairy (anti-fetish) and fact position. Both these positions are based on the premise of debunking one another. The anti-fetish position reveals the power of free will as own power that is projected such as culture and art, and the fact position reveals powerful causalities of external forces such as economics, genetics. etc. His critique is that social critique can choose either one to argue for what you don't believe (anti-fetish position) and use another for what you do believe in (fact position), without any consistency. Latour stands for a critic who doesn't debunk but assembles, one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.

On the one hand, I can understand that Latour is trying to defend urgent issues like global warming as something that should not be primarily regarded as a lack of scientific certainty, but should rather be regarded as a matter of fact. On the other hand, however, I find it a little hypocritical that while he stands to offer participants spaces in which to gather as a practice of matters of concern, the global warming matter of fact should be left alone and not be turned into a discussion. Though I find it helpful to use his distinctions and definitions of fact and gathering, I would like to re-visit the global warming case (perhaps against his wishes) as a matter of concern.

The Weather Imagination, 2005, Luian Boia. Reaktion books, London.

Boia traces human's relationship and imagination of the weather and sets the field to discuss how discourses like ideology and politics have mediated questions of climate change causality as either a god/nature inflicted phenomenon or a human caused phenomenon. As a historian, he traces texts ranging from scholarly manuscripts of medieval Europe to scientific literature to modern sci-fi writings to reveal an ever-constant malaise of crisis expressed through an imagined catastrophe. His position in the global warming debate is neither a believer or non-believer, rather he calls into question, both the certainty of scientific (statistical) models and the human propensity for catastrophism. "Our search for explanation must go beyond the factual basis of the (global warming) theory and focus on the reasons for its dominance." In a sense his position is quite similar to Bruno Latours 2004 article, in that they both recognize that the issue is not the factual foundation but rather the issues that govern its outcomes. That said, I feel like Boia is more skeptical of the prestige that scientific models holds, a position that is more closely related to the Latours' constructivist position held in his eariler works (Science in Action, Labortory life).

This book is organized into three sections, however the third section is most relevant for my research. (The first is the anthropological and psychological analysis of our relation to climate as a means to explaining human diversity. i.e. Human beings are different because they live under different skies. The second is historical; climate as a way of illuminating the progress of history. Since the 19th century, the climate was regarded as one of the casual factors in the historical development and the radically different destinies of civilizations. ) The third is climate and catastrophe. The prototype of this kind of over-dramatization is the Biblical Flood, evoking an overwhelming natural force threatening humanity. The nature of catastrophe is the nature of what Florian in Tangent Conspiracies (annotation below) describes as the Sublime. In this section, he traces the religious historical interpretation of catastrophes as apocalyptic notions of the universal Flood which served to be a moralistic concept of human destiny. He highlights historical relationships to climate as once being the arsenal of the forces of divine justice and how it became demoted, due to The Enlightenment, to 'natural phenomena'. He continues, however, that the anxiety felt about the sins of men against God has been maintained today in the "form of a preoccupation with the 'end of civilization'". Throughout the ages, natural phenomena is integrated into interpretative systems which the interpretations are the manifestations of the socio-ideological tensions of the time; mostly likely to result in war and revolution, rather than end of the world.

In the concatenation of disasters beginning from the 1900's, the Flood acquired a new equally frightening variant in the form of a 'human tide'. He explains that this was brought on by the interchangeability of anxiety toward nature and people, the world wars and the increasingly sense of the 'other'. The fear of 'technological flood' is what Boia describes as a catastrophe based on humanities ability to destroy itself. There are a however, a plethora of evidence to prove and disprove global warming theories based on different ideological grounds. He also tries to emphasize that we are tempted to confuse 'existing reality' with the 'virtual reality' of (scientific) models, as they are "…simplified, coherent and synthetic versions of a certain dimension of reality or determined process. They are extremely useful as long as we remember that they are not the real thing: they are methodological fictions" (p.177). It is also interesting to note that the early meteorological recording of medieval europe focused on the usual, the excesses, the dramatic - an attitude that still prevails today exemplified by the operations of media. Harmless consequences are of no interest to the media, as it is the most dramatic versions that will receive the most publicity. This of course fuels our imagination for catastrophes.

Tangent Conspiracies, 2006, Florian Cramer. A lecture given at a V2 event (Rotterdam) by the same name.

In this lecture, Cramer sketches the field of conspiracy theory and cultural theory; Political Theology, Semiotics, Paranoia, Sublime, Underground Politics, Postmodernism, Overground Politics, Network, Media. I found his talk on conspiracy theory analyzed through a broad cultural perspective very relevant and inspiring for understanding various interconnecting themes (sublime, conspiracy theory, epistemological critique, (alternative) representations of truth/reality) in my own research.

He defines the nature of conspiracy theories as targeting the gray area between religion and politics. Defining terms like exoteric as being the visible and official and esoteric as being invisible and hidden, Cramer talks about conspiracy as an esoteric undercurrent, an underground counterculture which contradicts official history. Further more how both exoteric and esoteric to both fluculate between religion and politics, (political theology). He talks about the potentiality of conspiracy theories as hacking our understanding of truth because they construct alternative realities and disrupt common sense truth. They "could be in the very best cases be practical and philosophical or epistemological critiques." However, once they become exoteric, that is overground, they have the danger of turning into official politics e.g. the protocols of the elders of zion being disseminated by the Third Reich of Germany.

Seen through semiotics (the study of the interpretation of signs), conspiracy theories can be thought of as hyper-semiotics or paranoid semiotics as is tries to form a theory of coherence even from the most accidental details. Cramer goes on to explain paranoia as the only form of irrationality that is 'perfectly rational - if not overly rational', because since it cannot deal with irrationality, it tries to compensate by rationalizing that which it cannot. Fear, uncertainty and doubt, as components in paranoia describe the aesthetic (in ancient greek: perception, sentiment or subjective judgement) dimensions of conspiracy theories. Since the 18th century, fear, uncertainty and doubt as an aesthetic mode is described as the Sublime. The nature of the Sublime is an overwhelming natural force that threatens human being, however in the 19th century the sublime gets detached from nature.

• watch it here

The Reform of Time. Magic and Modernity, 2001, Maureen Perkins. Pluto Press, London.

Through tracing the changing definition of 'superstition', Perkins reveals how definitions of knowledge changes according to hegemonic ideas in time - this i feel, is at the core of her book. Her writing has provided me with grounded examples which is the foundation of my research question: how acceptable knowledge and its value is constructed. Her examples drawn mostly from 19th century Britain, show that epistemological undertakings were underpinned by social and economic endeavors lead by political agenda. What counted as 'knowledge', the value of information, was dictated by doctrines of progress, a project that had implications in the development of modern consumerism. It is also helpful that she references David Spadafora (The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1990) as coining the distinction between idea of progress and various doctrines of progress in a social context, the former term conveying a belief in improvement or change in a desirable direction, while the latter signifies the expression given to that belief in a particular social group, such as writers on education.

Her book explores how we conceptualize human agency, that of the interplay between free will vs determinism (individual struggle vs social structure) throughout different time frames in history. Starting from the 19th century, a strengthened belief in human agency due to reform movements which represented free will as the individual's potential for self-improvement to contribute to a wider social good, took place against the backdrop of the doctrine of progress. This is exemplified in the invention of blank calendars symbolizing a tabula rasa of opportunity on which members of society could write their future, increasing the emphasis on individual responsibility. The publication of the first Letts diary in 1812 originated ‘a new [future focused] concept of diary-keeping completely different from the traditional use as a personal historical record’. She continues to write that progress in its technological form is constantly held up to society as the justification for the advance of capitalism.

According to Max Webber, accurate prediction lay in the heart of rationalism. The principle of development inherent in the process of 'civilization' was driven by the use of calculation as a strategy of social action. As such, rationalism, another credo of the 19th century reform movements, set the chasm between what was considered a rational way to 'calculate' and the superstitious way (faulty understanding of nature, a definition in the late 18th century ) to predict. Statistical calculations superseded and marginalized older superstitious forecasts about the future. 'The rise of a culture of planning, is, in fact, a form of secular prediction'. Example starts with the suicide of Robert Fitzroy, the first head of the new governmental department of meteorology in England, because his weather forecast to the newspapers proved to be disastrously wrong. As a result, the sensitivity towards such terms as prognostications, prophecy, or forecasts and as a result were tainted due to the association of practicing 'superstition'.

The phenomenon of prediction, once belonging in the realm of magic and prophecy, still has crucial importance to modern secular society. Perkins argues that modern forecasting, however has become a powerful means of excluding alternative interpretations of the future. "The so-called decline of magic, in the West at least, has allowed a linear, exclusive teleology of progress to dominate." Referencing Ziauddin Sardar, (Rescuing all our Futures: the Future of Futures Studies (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999)), who suggested that the modern secular prediction helps to create community by excluding the possibility of difference: '[T]he act of prediction exhibits a way of thinking that is limited to a certain cultural understanding. Moreover, the act of prediction is part of a cultural worldview that constricts the future to being only one future, by assuming that it is already ‘out there’ in some sense, waiting to be discovered'.