Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

10. Local Construction

10 Local Construction The second half of our formula—‘‘though the One is not, there are unities’’—emphasizes how the multitude of objects , each of which is itself a multitude of objects, is responsible for locally constructing what unity there is. Absent a preformatted world, the multitude of objects must sink or swim. Latour’s bet is that, having removed the cumbersome flotation devices of reductionism, they’ll swim just fine. It is true, however, that ‘‘once we have exited’’ the prefabricated majesty of a world amenable to reduction, ‘‘we are left only with the banality of associations of humans and nonhumans waiting for their unity to be provided by work carried out by the collective’’ (PN 46). Where in traditional metaphysics ‘‘the rule is order while decay, change, and creation are the exceptions,’’ for Latour ‘‘the rule is performance and what has to be explained, the troubling exceptions , are any type of stability over the long term and on 30 a larger scale’’ (RS 35). Unity must be understood as a product, not a given. It should be approached as a performance , action, or operation, and it goes without saying that time, energy, and money are necessary to negotiate the formation of any concatenation. Doing metaphysics, for Latour , amounts to following this money trail. There are no free rides because ‘‘there is no preestablished harmony’’ (PF 164). Instead, harmony, though not entirely absent, ‘‘is postestablished locally through tinkering ’’ (PF 164). Where classical substances command, determine , and necessitate, Latour’s objects tinker, negotiate, and compromise because unity is ‘‘not an undisputed starting point but the provisional achievement of a composite assemblage’’ (RS 208). Nothing can guarantee unity, harmony , or a common starting point. No Master remains to make such guarantees. Latour’s only metaphysical guarantee is that there are no metaphysical guarantees. Apart from this, everything else has to be worked out on the ground by the objects themselves. The upshot is that Latour’s objects aren’t quite solid. They are real, but ‘‘these real, objective, atypical and, above all, interesting agencies are taken not exactly as objects but rather as gatherings’’ (RS 114). Further, it is not only the case that work must be done to gather an object into a provisional unity, it is also the case that continuous work must be done in order for that object to stay gathered. ‘‘Invaluable and fragile,’’ these concatenations can ‘‘survive only with meticulous care’’ (WL 162). Once assembled, some objects may require only low maintenance to continue as they are, but there aren’t any objects that require no maintenance . It follows, then, that ‘‘there is no group without (re)grouping’’ (WL 149). Latour’s claim that every grouping is a kind of regrouping is true in at least two senses. It is true in the sense that, Local Construction 31 once gathered, every object must immediately and continuously work at regathering or replacing its constituents to maintain its unity. But it is also true in a wider sense because , for Latour, there can be no assignable beginning to this work of gathering. Every gathering must proceed as a regathering or regrouping of objects already in circulation. As operations, order and unity do not assemble objects ex nihilo or from ‘‘pure chaos.’’ They are not gods. Some objects in some concatenated configurations must always already be at work. An experimental metaphysics always begins in medias res because there is nothing but medias res. On Latour’s account, every act of creation must be understood as a kind of exaptation that operates by repurposing, recycling, and regrouping. Nothing can come from nothing . The multitude of objects can have no beginning. As a rule, and in the absence of any metaphysical Adams or Eves, ‘‘order is extracted not from disorder but from orders’’ (PF 161). Were a starting point or common origin to be posited, we would be plunked back into the middle of a conspiracy theory with some object or objects being more primal and original than others. Though some objects are prior to others, none are more original. In this sense, Latour’s modest methodological commitment to avoiding any advance decisions about the world requires some minimal but perhaps surprisingly substantial metaphysical assumptions about the real: (1) it requires that the real be multiple and infinite rather than finite, and (2) it requires that this infinite plurality be itself without beginning or end. For...