Formalism, Compositionism, Affect

In their introduction to Critique and Postcritique, Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski ask whether "postcritique require[s] a different ethos or affect" than critique?¹ Bruno Latour offers one clear option in his 2004 hard-nosed injunction to "return to the realist attitude."² Expressing his uneasy sense that climate-change deniers have co-opted "the weapons of social critique" to undermine the validity of scientific findings, Latour endorses a turn away from the "debunking impetus" inherited from the Enlightenment and toward a mission "to protect and to care" (CRS, 230, 232). Such a shift in ethos would allow academics to face a new set of "threats" in the world: "there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one" (CRS, 231).

What intellectuals find in their new and improved arsenal is what Latour will in a subsequent essay specify as "compositionism," an alternative to critique that "takes up the task of searching for universality but without believing that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered."³ Compositionism would appear to meet the postcritical or "constructivist" call to replace "the ethos of someone who … subtract[s] reality" with that of one who "adds reality" (CRS, 232). According to Latour's "Attempt at a 'Compositionist Manifesto,'" this work would entail 1) introducing gaps between causes and consequences, in part because consequences have overwhelmed their causes and we now inhabit that overflow; 2) extending agency to nonhumans in a return to animist thinking; and 3) composing or projecting these agencies across space and time "slowly and progressively" in the making of another world—one that is "much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied" (ACM, 484).⁴

It is worthwhile to compare Latour's theoretical reset to another glimpsed in our own field of eighteenth-century studies, Sandra Macpherson's (anything but) "little formalism," a critical redirection that would basically detonate Latour's "wish to compose a common world" (ACM, 484).⁵ "My own wish," Macpherson states, is "for a genuinely formalist critical practice, a little formalism that would turn one away from history without shame or apology" (ALF, 385). What Macpherson means by form is partly the inquiry of her essay, but one offering is "a perceptible, perhaps a recurring pattern that makes something the thing it is" or, in reduced form, "merely … being the thing one is" (ALF, 388, 401). In comparing the outlooks of these two materialist thinkers, we might start by observing their tonal differences. Latour's "Manifesto" risks a certain chirpiness as it toggles between dogged affirmation (let's reboot modernity!), productive alarm (oh god, the planet!), and mood-enhancement (surely we can dispute, compose our futures, say yes to the sixteenth century?!). Where Latour's exclamatory style lifts, lightens, and rallies, Macpherson's dark austerity brings us back to an unforgiving earth—solid ground wholly indifferent to critique, a cold planet after all.

Their points of countervision are profound. To Latour's emphasis that we attend to gaps in causation, we have Macpherson's "philosophy of life committed to the notion that biology is destiny" (ALF, 400). To Latour's embrace of nonhuman agents, we have Macpherson's objection to critical projects based on agentive solutions, in particular, object-oriented ontology ("OOO"), which for Macpherson is forever granting objects the status of subjects in a predictable celebration of freedom, autonomy, and knowledge-production—an all-too-human posthumanism. "To move beyond the human, it turns out, is to find her everywhere," writes a disappointed Macpherson (ALF, 399).⁶ No formalism without ontology! is the slogan to her own "determinist formalism" (ALF, 390, 401, emphasis mine), and where for Latour, "critique has not been critical enough" (CRS, 232), for Macpherson, "OOO isn't reactionary enough, isn't committed enough to the 'staleness' of substance" (ALF, 397). Instead of agents who subtract or add reality, what emerges is just reality: impervious, durable matter. Finally, to Latour's urbane optimism, we have Macpherson's stalwart commitments far beyond the pleasure principle. "About the end of our...