Beards and Beckers I: The Cultural and the Social

These [post-Fordist] experiential shifts have been intertwined with and enhanced by discursive shifts. Especially since the mid-1980s, commentators, pundits, editorialists, and scholars constantly inform us that we are living in a new world, that old economic paradigms have been superseded, that ours is an entrepreneurial age, that contemporary global flows of populations and ideas are unprecedented, and so forth. The bursting of the late-1990s "dot com" bubble quieted the endless babble about the "new economy," which was supposedly capable of creating wealth without generating actual revenues. Nevertheless, hyperbolic claims about the novelty of our current condition remain common. (It is a sobering thought that this chapter itself might be cited as an example.) In any case, the experiential effects of changes in economic and social relations have been magnified in the past two decades by discourses telling us that the new footloose relations are particularly significant--just as the discourse of the Fordist era previously magnified our sense of the solidity and standardization of socioeconomic relations. Hence, while it is surely true that careers have actually become increasingly unstable and entrepreneurial over the past few decades, careers during the Fordist era were less stable than we imagined and those in the current era are probably more stable than we imagine. The changes we experience are products both of changes in social relations and of changes in the cultural categories through which we understand them.

... I want to make it absolutely clear that I remain a determined advocate of the cultural turn. But at the same time, I think it is essential to recognize that the cultural turn was also fueled, in ways we were essentially unaware of, by a secret affinity with an emergent logic of capitalist development. Cultural history's tendency to celebrate the plasticity of all social forms made good political sense as a critique of Fordist social determinisms, but its critical force in the context of a capitalist regime of flexible accumulation is far less evident. Indeed, such a celebration indicates an unacknowledged and troubling complicity between the cultural turn and the emergence of contemporary flexible forms of capitalism.
- William H. Sewell, Jr., "The Political Unconscious of Social History," in Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (2005)

Cultural history, Sewell says, is to post-Fordism what social history was to Fordism: the reading of history most appropriate for the social, economic, and political climate of the time. His case is a convincing one, mainly because it is only a minor extension of David Harvey's two-decade-old argument about postmodernity. We live in a world of wobbly fluid things that leave no definite future for me or for you. It only stands to reason that we project the same networks and flows backwards through time. (Hence, perhaps, the surging interest in the eighteenth century--that, too, was an age of flows.) It might even be said that we're "complicit" with post-Fordism, although it is difficult to say how much we're really helping it.

Like Jameson and Harvey, Sewell is unable to separate his insight into the sociopolitical configuration of post-Fordism from his delusions about political agency. His unacknowledged premise is almost a shibboleth in the profession: if we could only develop a theory of where we are as historians, we could use that theory to fuel the kind of practice we support! But, although Sewell would be the first to distance himself from "crude" base/superstructure determinism, it is difficult to reconcile the claim that historiographical fashions mirror dominant political and economic trends with the claim that historians can rise up and do something about it. Of course, his answer is that we should pay close attention to social forces and temporality and such, which is all well and good in its turn but hardly represents the Treason of the Intellectuals he seems to want. (Foucault says somewhere that all we've got now are people who propose new intellectual programs that eventually die with them, and this is no exception.)

There is a great deal of potential to Sewell's claims, however, as long as we step back from the empty talk about agency. What his chapter reveals, in fact, is that historiography is always, in a sense, fighting the last war. When we "realize" our collective "error" (as in the late nineteenth-century reaction to Bancroft), we produce critiques in lockstep with the climate of our time (positivism, in this case). In fact, the internalist and externalist explanations for the shift between historiographical eras can no longer be cleanly separated. An internalist account, as Sewell says, will want to point to social history's blindness with respect to the neutrality of its empirical data and so forth and use that to explain its replacement by cultural history; an externalist account would point to society and economics. But if we trust the cultural historians, we begin to see that (external) transitions between sociocultural forms are workings-out of many of the same problems faced (internally) by historiography.

Sewell's book, then, should not lead us to try to abandon our intellectual context in favor of some kind of revolutionary bird's eye view. Rather, it should help us accept the blinders of that context, and learn to see them not as restrictive but as formative. Like an accent or a dialect, the temporal coloration of our historiography is part of its unique identity. It is pointless to try to predict what the trends in history will be in 25 years--except that they will likely not be the same as today's. So let's do the best we can, and study the cultural while it's there--and let's trust in the community of historians to shift its paradigm when it's ready. Otherwise we'll only deceive ourselves.

The Misanthrope

Only later did I feel the futility of it all; at that time I did not really understand anything. Later I felt if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response, neither approval nor opposition, just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert. So I began to feel lonely.

And this feeling of loneliness grew day by day, coiling about my soul like a huge poisonous snake. Yet in spite of my unaccountable sadness, I felt no indignation; for this experience had made me reflect and see that I was definitely not the heroic type who could rally multitudes at his call.

However, my loneliness had to be dispelled, for it was causing me agony. So I used various means to dull my senses, both by conforming to the spirit of the time and turning to the past. Later I experienced or witnessed even greater loneliness and sadness, which I do not like to recall, preferring that it should perish with me. Still my attempt to deaden my senses was not unsuccessful--I had lost the enthusiasm and fervour of my youth.

...As for myself, I no longer feel any great urge to express myself; yet, perhaps because I have not entirely forgotten the grief of my past loneliness. I sometimes call out, to encourage those fighters who are galloping on in loneliness, so that they do not lose heart. Whether my cry is brave or sad, repellent or ridiculous, I do not care.
- Lu Hsun, preface to Call to Arms

Reading Lu Hsun is an interesting experience. At first one senses a hint of the James Clavell Western-gaze effect, which for the Western reader accompanies nearly every Eastern novel. This effect is not the writer's fault: neither Yukio Mishima nor Lo Guangzhong can plausibly be said to be writing Oriental exotica. Rather, it's a consequence of the reader feeling out of place in a world where the writer feels at home. Mishima's novels feel somehow unreal because of their setting, despite the fact that his pavilions and temples are as naturalistic (and as unfamiliar!) as the wood-paneled parlors of Victorian realism.

With Lu Hsun, this does not obtain. One begins very quickly to see that his characters feel as out-of-place in their world as we do; it is to emphasize its alienness that he draws attention to the custom of dipping bread in human blood to cure tuberculosis. Lu's stories are full of broken, emotionally stunted people for whom the whole sheltering web of Chinese tradition is largely incomprehensible. In a sense, then, they resemble the classic brooding antiheroes of his European contemporaries, and thus could be said to have more in common with Western precedents than Chinese ones.

To make the latter judgment would be a mistake. Mishima can easily be seen in the context of Dostoyevsky and Proust, but Lu Hsun cannot. What distinguishes him from them is the fact that the sense of existential loneliness and futility in his stories is not comprehensible in a conventional narrative fashion, which is clear even from the preface. Instead of coming around to the liberating power of literature, Lu essentially shrugs his shoulders and writes because there is no reason not to. A story like "The Misanthrope" functions the same way: there is no cure for bitter loneliness, there is not even any meaning in it, there is only the howl of mutual recognition.

"In The Wine Shop" is perhaps the quintessential illustration of this. A man sits in a wine shop and meets an old friend, who reveals a belief in the utter futility of life and provides examples from his own. But both characters remain unshakably static, and it is not even clear that the protagonist has learned anything at all. His friend feels no strong passions, only weariness and the desire to "muddle through." The scene--it can hardly be called a story--has the suspended-in-time irresolution of a good poem. It offers us almost nothing but a clear mirror for our own understanding of the world.

It is a mystery to me why Lu Hsun would be beloved by the revolutionaries, or so strongly associated with their cause. Although he condemns the Qing order with satire and pastiche, his solution is deeply apolitical. In the Soviet Union he would be criticized as an elitist, as having no sense of the mass. And it would be true: he builds his stories out of individual people, who react sometimes as stereotypes and sometimes as desperate loners. But neither they nor the mass show any sign of agency at all.

The Memoir as a Novel

I remember nothing of that day's hunting; but the usual terse entry in my diary perpetuates the fact that the meet was at 'The Barley Mow'. "Found in Pilton Shaw and Crumpton Osiers, but did little with either as scent was rotten. Weather very wet in afternoon; had quite a good hunt of nearly two hours from Trodger's Wood; hounds were stopped in Basset Wood at 4.25." The concluding words, "Stayed at the Kennels", now seem a very bleak condensation of the event. But it did not occur to me that my sporting experiences would ever be called upon to provide material for a book, and I should have been much astonished if I could have foreseen my present efforts to put the clock back (or rather the calendar) from 1928 to 1911.

Yet I find it easy enough to recover a few minutes of that grey south-westerly morning, with its horsemen hustling on in scattered groups, the December air alive with the excitement of the chase, and the dull green landscape seeming to respond to the rousing cheer of the huntsman's voice when the hounds hit off the line again after a brief check. Away they stream, throwing up little splashes of water as they race across a half-flooded meadow. Cockbird flies a fence with a watery ditch on the take-off side. "How topping," I think, "to be alive and well up in the hunt"; and I spurt along the sound turf of a green park and past the front of a square pink Queen Anne house with blank windows and smokeless chimneys, and a formal garden with lawns and clipped yew hedges sloping to a sunk fence. A stone statue stares at me, and I wonder who lived there when the house was first built. "I am riding past the past", I think, never dreaming that I shall one day write that moment down on paper; never dreaming that I shall be clarifying and condensing that chronicle of simple things through which I blundered so diffidently.
- Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

When I was a kid, I was an aficionado of horse-racing novels. So when I purchased this book (for a dollar), I glanced at the illustration of the capped squire on his sad little horse and instantly knew what to expect. There would be races involved, and cheating, dark-complexioned opponents, and big prizes seized in the nick of time. The sympathetic, boyish narrator would gradually lose his ingenuity and, after a few training montages and loving descriptions of mares, would become a confident and skilled fox-hunter. And so on, and so forth. I expected my heart to be duly warmed and my brain relatively untouched.

This book has none of that. There are no conflicts; either the narrator wins easily or he is bested as inexperienced. Occasionally the specter of Great Expectations-style money-counting begins to loom, but it never looks particularly threatening and at any rate there is no convincing angst associated with the need to economize. The English gentry who populate the novel are invariably genial, hospitable stereotypes who would never do anything underhanded. The only thing that looks even distantly like suspense or climax is the conclusion, where the narrator is sent off to Flanders to fight for king and country and all his friends and associates are promptly and unceremoniously killed off.

Needless to say, a novel so radically pointless makes for a frustrating reading experience. It was only today that I discovered that it is in fact a "fictionalized memoir" with a weighty literary reputation in the right circles. In other words, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a memoir disguised as a novel disguised as a memoir. Unfortunately, it is not wholly satisfying either as a novel (obviously) or as a memoir, since the names are concealed and the writer's experiences are, shall we say, jejune. (Not to mention the fact that, inspired by his success, he later brought out an actual three-volume memoir). The prose style, while far from poor, is the sort of unobtrusive turn-of-the-century stuff that only works well if the writer has something truly interesting to say.

The book does, however, have one redeeming quality: Sassoon's incessant metatextual asides. He loves nothing better than to foreground his writing process, joyfully quoting the original diary entries that provide the material for the "dramatization" and making comments like "I wrote myself down that evening as I wanted myself to be — a hard-bitten hunting man, self-possessed in his localized knowingness and stag-hunting jargon." And then there's this brilliant bit:

I had ambled to the end of a musical comedy arrangement ('The Geisha' I think it was) and was bundling the perforated music-roll back again with reverse motion when he suddenly heaved himself out of the chair, yawned, remarked that he'd give anything to be able to play the piano properly, whistled to the dogs, and turned them out into the night for an airing. He then lit a couple of candles, extinguished the unshaded oil-lamp, led the way upstairs, and hoped I'd sleep all right. All this sounds humdrum, but I have since then spent many a much duller evening with people who were under the impression that they were talking brilliantly. I have never cared greatly about highly sophisticated persons, although some of them may seek to enlarge their intellectual experience by perusing my modest narrative.

Not only is Sassoon aware how boring he is, he uses the opportunity to make fun of his pretentious readers! If that doesn't take gall, I don't know what does.

I've been too hard on him, really. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a fine book, despite its deficiencies. It's just that it's neither a novel nor a memoir; it's a literary version of a wall-calendar with cheery pastoral depictions of the English countryside. It's hard not to feel a vicarious calm and contentment when reading about all those sunny days, playing cricket and pursuing the uneatable. The chapter on the big race evokes the proud satisfaction of a job well done. And the closing chapter, despite all the blood and death, serves only to reaffirm the hero's stiff upper lip. His retrospective sangfroid, an example to us all, is absolutely incapable of being shattered:

Anyhow, a pair of boots could be seen sticking up out of a shell-hole. But when we arrived at the boots we found them attached to the body of a French soldier who had been there several months. I didn't like this much; but O'Brien whispered to me: "T'Colonel shall have t'boot", and the boot, with half a leg on it, was sent down to Kinjack, as a proof of our efficiency.

Socialisme et Barbarie

A large part of the cultural revolution was the discovery of literary and art forms which would properly represent Soviet man and his aspirations at the same time as being comprehensible to him. Lenin made clear his views on the subject in an interview with Klara Zetkin, stressing that a proletarian culture would take a long time to develop. Although he pointed out that efforts were being made to take enlightenment to the provinces, he also made the observation that at the very time when here in Moscow a few tens of thousands of people are enjoying a brilliant theatrical performance, throughout the country millions are still striving to spell their names, and have to be told that the earth is not flat but round and that the world is governed by the laws of nature instead of by witches and sorcerers jointly with the Heavenly Father.' At the same time Lenin confessed that he himself had little appreciation for some of the newer forms of expression and declared himself a barbarian. Nevertheless, Lenin did not interfere very much with artistic freedom, as Stalin was to do. As for Trotsky, he went even further than Lenin, pointing out that since bourgeois culture required no less than five centuries for its creation, the proletariat would have to follow the one possible path of apprenticeship for many years to come, concentrating the bulk of its immediate energy on the proletarian world revolution. Meanwhile the leading members of the class could not through 'laboratory methods' build the proletarian culture by themselves.
- Paul Dukes, A History of Russia (1974 edition)

Trotsky, in this passage, sounds very much like a relic of his time, an unimaginative exponent of unilinear cultural progress based obviously on a crude base-superstructure reductionism. Lenin appears much more reasonable, although in essence he is saying the same thing: to follow his line of thinking, the inequality of cultural development among the Russian people is analogous to the disparities in economic development between the city and the country. In our age of henna tattoos and neoprimitivism, such a naive view of culture is rarely seen outside of the Civilization games. (In another decade or so, the influence of the Civ technology model on the contemporary history of ideas will be deserving of a book all on its own. But that's a whole other story.)

What Trotsky doesn't seem to take into account is that the Russian avantgarde aimed to do for the superstructure what the Bolsheviks did for the base. The latter attempted to reduce the hundred-odd years between the bourgeois revolution and the socialist one to a span of eight months--and buoyed up by the success of that attempt, the avantgarde erased the five hundred years of bourgeois culture as well. Perhaps it would be unfair to read too much into Trotsky's claim, which I have not encountered in his work; still, I do not imagine shacking up with Frida Kahlo to be the act of a cultural conservative.

How, then, could Trotsky not take into account the claim's central problem, the coexistence of bourgeois culture with a socialist economy and society? The Stalin-era rapprochement with Biedermeier canons of taste was still not in the offing, and in fact was never well-justified to begin with. One imagines, too, that Trotsky was reading Lukacs and thus had some sense of the impact of class relations on aesthetics. Neither universal literacy nor spelling reform nor electrification would be able to erase the class-bound aspect of those five centuries, and institutionalized atheism would be only a partial solution.

It becomes clear, then, that the avantgarde position corresponded to that of Orthodox Marxism, while Trotsky's radically clashed with it. Indeed, if the Party apparatus had followed him, all ideological coherence would collapse: since political forms (as well as legal ones, as Pashukanis would soon show) were superstructural in relation to the economy, the decoupling of culture from the economy would open the door to the decoupling from it of law and politics. The entire raison d'etre of the Party-State and the Revolution itself would disappear. The only sustainable position would be trade-union consciousness. The heavens would rain fire and the rivers would run red with blood.

This did not happen--but Trotsky was nonetheless correct. The most, in the Marxist understanding, anachronistic cultural and social forms did coexist in post-revolutionary Russia. (A particularly fascinating Cheka report from a troublesome rural province declares that the peasants are refusing to work on account of their belief that the Apocalypse is nigh and Lenin is the Antichrist). By the time Lenin died, it had already become clear that this situation would not disappear in the foreseeable future. The history of the Bolsheviks' accommodation to this fact is the history of the replacement of Soviet Marxism by its simulacrum.

The Other Ulrich

My view of, or task I would set for, literature: partial solution, contribution to the solution, investigation, or the like. I feel exempted from having to give an unequivocal response. I have, after all, also postulated the morality of individual cases, etc.

A justified objection: That was from the period before the war. There was no way of shaking up the totality. It went further too: everyone had this feeling. Whether one wanted it that way or not, there was a firm system of coordinates. A floating ball, which one pushed and turned every which way. One's interest exhausted itself in the variations. The tacit assumption was probably not the solidity of the environment but one's lack of concern for it, without one's being aware of it ...

The situation has now changed. The whole person has been flung into uncertainty. Discussions are of no use to him, he needs the solidity that has been lost. Hence the desire for resolution, for yes and no. In this sense, a person with as little substance as Brecht is exemplary through the form of his behavior. He moves people because he demonstrates their own experience to them. One has to understand this completely.

Therefore the didactic element in the book must be strengthened. A practical formula must be advanced.

Not further thought out: apparently this gives the practical-theoretical opposition, the original spy concept, new meaning.

- from Robert Musil's notes on the unfinished preface to The Man Without Qualities

All the way through reading The Man Without Qualities I was conscious of my memory of Proust, or what remains of it, at any rate. To compare the two is difficult, especially since the value one puts on the latter is often inextricably bound up with pride at having slogged through seven volumes. But it is clear that Proust does not come out ahead. In Search of Lost Time is in its way a tremendously self-satisfied book; Marcel never doubts the legitimacy of his character-analyses. He suffers and doubts, but always on the way to a conclusion that justifies him. That is why he is so astute when he brings out the ridiculous in his surroundings; he is so conscious of possessing an ultimate yardstick that the satirical mode comes naturally to him. Enveloped in Proust's megalomania, the reader often has difficulty telling the rapturous passages from the banal ones.

The Man Without Qualities is different. In another section of the preface notes, Musil describes the protagonist Ulrich as "not simply a failure," but someone who is constantly aware of "a further possibility." (A perfect description--imagine a Prufrock that can imagine a possibility beyond being Prufrock, and a possibility beyond that.) That means the novel is constitutionally incapable of constructing a self-justifying discourse like Proust's, since none of its infinite multiplicity of answers can ever be final. It also means that it is an immensely frustrating novel to read: it, quite consciously, never gets anywhere. The incomplete second volume is dominated by the specter of a Millennium, a passive and private utopia held forth as the resolution of Ulrich's disengagement from the world. But even this radical and fundamental retreat ends up being a failure that never makes good on its promise. It is, of course, tragic that Musil did not have the chance to finish his novel--and yet it seems impossible that he could ever have finished it.

Still, we are left with the notes, which are attached to the Wilkins/Pike translation. They are not like, say, Flaubert's drafts for the end of Bouvard and Pécuchet, which mesh so neatly with the narrative that one understands right away what the author had intended to write. These notes contain contradictory possibilities, the ghosts of events once supposed to transpire earlier in the novel, sketches for unknown characters, authorial remarks and marginalia scattered haphazardly through long passages of exposition, sentences that branch out suddenly into three possible turns of phrase: in short, a Borgesian garden sprouting untended in the vacant space. What are we to make of them? Are they worth reading? As Pike observes, these fragments contain some of Musil's most beautiful writing and clearest thought, but they are also totally unlike the orderly world presented in the finished wing.

The notes, I think, are best read as another novel, the possibility that haunts its built-up twin. The Musil of the notes loves hybrids, men-women and women-goats and goat-eagles: two creatures within one body, or two bodies under one soul. With its notes, The Man Without Qualities is such a hybrid, two literary beasts in one binding, one running headlong away from the other. Notes-Musil writes at one point, with desperation, that the prewar world he had spent decades trying to compass had disappeared --that the novel was now inevitably a historical one. In fact, with its grand debates, its inactive action, its strategic maps of intellectual oppositions, the complete part was already doomed to irrelevance as a masterpiece of self-conscious high modernism. Its counterpart, though, is perhaps the purest expression of what was to become the postmodern idiom; the fact that it is unintentionally so makes it all the more living. In the original novel, one sees not so much equally possible alternatives as options that are already foreclosed by other possibilities; in the counterpart, we are presented with a series of open Kierkegaardian Either/Ors, like a choose-your-own-adventure book without an ending.

One novel a failure, the other, in its way, a success. Could Musil have seen it this way? Could he have imagined a possibility beyond the book he knew as The Man Without Qualities? What could he have meant by this passage from the unfinished preface?

...It is not a satire, but a positive construal.
It is not a confession, but a satire.
It is not the book of a psychologist.
It is not the book of a thinker (since it places the ideational elements in an order that--)
It is not the book of a singer who ...
It is not the book of a successful
                                     unsuccessful author.

Yes, sic, sic, all of it--it does not make sense. The book is a satire and is not a satire. It is not the book of a successful author. It is not the book of an unsuccessful author. But perhaps it is still the book of a thinker.

On Having Been Modern

To be sure, by affirming that the Constitution, if it is to be effective, has to be unaware of what it allows, I am practicing an unveiling, but one that no longer bears upon the same objects as the modern critique and is no longer triggered by the same mainsprings. So long as we adhered willingly to the Constitution, it allowed us to settle all disputes and served as a basis for the critical spirit, providing individuals with justification for their attacks and their operations of unveiling. But if the Constitution as a whole now appears as only one half that no longer allows us to understand its own other half, then it is the very foundation of the modern critique that turns out to be ill-assured. I am thus trying the tricky move to unveil the modern Constitution without resorting to the modern type of debunking. To do so I am accounting for this vague and uneasy feeling that we have recently become as unable to denounce as to modernize. The upper ground for taking a critical stance seems to have escaped us.

Yet by appealing sometimes to Nature, sometimes to Society, sometimes to God, and by constantly opposing the transcendence of each one of these three terms to its immanence, the moderns had found the mainspring of their indignations well wound up. What kind of a modern could no longer fall back on the transcendence of nature to criticize the obscurantism of power? On the immanence of Nature to criticize human inertia? On the immanence of Society to criticize the submission of humans and the dangers of naturalism? On the transcendence of society to criticize the human illusion of individual liberty? On the transcendence of God to appeal to the judgment of humans and the obstinacy of things? On the immanence of God to criticize established churches, naturalist beliefs, and socialist dreams? It would be a pretty pathetic kind of modern, or else a postmodern: still inhabited by the violent desire to denounce, they would no longer have the strength to believe in the legitimacy of any of these six courts of appeal. To strip moderns of their indignation is to deprive them, it seems, of all self-respect. To strip critical intellectuals of the six bases for their denunciations is apparently to rob them of all reason to live. In losing our wholehearted adherence to the Constitution, do we not have the impression that we are losing the best of ourselves? Was it not the origin of our energy, our moral strength, our ethics?
- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

The Constitution Latour's talking about is not, of course, the US Constitution. It is the complex of binaries by which we separate our ideas of nature, society, and God into pure poles of transcendence (corresponding to the object) and immanence (corresponding to the subject). This fundamental cleavage, and the armory it makes available for critique, is for Latour the definitive characteristic of modernity; he even traces it, with admirable specificity, to Boyle and Hobbes. His method is to show that we have never carried out in practice what we imagine in the form of the Constitution; instead, the very purifying function of modernity enables the constant creation of hybrids that exist somewhere between the two poles.

I'm glad to have finally read this book, if only on account of this illuminating insight. But Latour is less successful with the rest of his argument. His objective, as far as I can tell, involves ridding us of our own bad faith with respect to the process of hybridization; we are to recognize that the poles do not exist, only the hybrids, and then bricole together chunks of pre-, post-, and just plain modern thought to enable ourselves to understand them better. (The particular chunks involved seem to have been chosen like pizza toppings.) The space in between is filled out with a predictable discussion of networks and the objects that love them.

At the very least, this is much more of a tactical than a strategic advance in thinking about thinking. Latour makes the point that particular hybrids and distributions of transcendence and immanence are created by collectives. But he seems to believe that the hybridity outweighs the stakes involved in its components. The contemporary understanding of personality, for instance, is what I take to be a classic Latourian hybrid: everyone agrees that both nature and nurture are involved. That doesn't mean debates about how much nature or nurture get any less acrimonious, or indeed partake of less fundamental metaphysical divides. We might start talking about it as a hybrid or a network, sure--but the search for purity (in whatever form) that defines the "modern" style of thinking doesn't go away.

In fact, the whole business looks suspiciously like an intervention on the side of immanence dressed up in mediationist clothing. Save for a few vocabulary changes, all of this collective futzing about with distributions is not so very different from Foucauldian discursive practices. As a good postmodern, I don't object to immanence at all. Immanence doesn't mind when transcendence wants to make a hybrid; it merely smiles into its moustache, knowing that the inner economy of the hybrid is always an immanent matter. Transcendence, on the other hand, requires purity if it is to mean anything. There must always be a part of Nature that is not "up to us." So Latour's claim to overcoming the demand for purity is unambiguously one-sided.

There are other objections I could make. (On what level does the network operate here? Are the concepts "immanence" and "transcendence" constituted by a network? If so, how can networks be somehow allied with hybrids?). Yet what I think about most of all is the other book I'm reading now: The Man Without Qualities (of which more next week). It is there that dueling denunciations and demands for purity emerge at their most vivid and most impotent. All six of Latour's stances can be found. But Musil is more correct--is still more correct: there's no escaping the cycle. Modernity is a nightmare from which we cannot awake.