Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Reading Latour 11.1: The Cartesian Individual

And Why it Must Be Rejected
Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

This is an appendix to my previous installment of Reading Latour. I want to say a bit more about the Cartesian individual, whom I jettisoned when I began to think about music. For it is this individual that has been, I believe, the default starting for most thinking in les sciences de l’homme, including most thinking about music.

By Cartesian individual I mean, of course, the individual that Descartes put at the center of his philosophical meditations. This individual mostly sits in his vat, unable to move, and ponders two questions: Is there a world out there? If so, is there anyone else in it? For such an individual society is deeply problematic—‘hell is other people’, remember that? When examined in the Cartesian shadow, society is conceived as atomic individuals held together by social stuff, that metaphysical substance Latour inveighs against.

When I began to read the literature in preparation for writing Beethoven’s Anvil, I found that it was dominated by this Cartesian individual, though it took me awhile to realize this. Music had been conceived and studied as something heard by a Cartesian individual not as something made by people interacting with one another through sound. Such a conception comes naturally in a society where most people experience many more hours of recorded music than live music and where the making of music is properly done only by children and a few particularly ‘gifted’ individuals. For the most part music is stuff heard by Cartesian individuals floating in their vats.

Now, we’ve got to be careful. The mere fact that psychologists have spent a great deal of time studying how individuals hear music need not imply that they are revolving in the Cartesian orbit. After all, we DO need to understand how the ear and the auditory system work. The only way to investigate them is to observe individuals listening to musical stimuli. It can’t be avoided.

That alone does not betoken Descartes’ shadow. But when I considered the whole array of work, yes, the Cartesian assumption was evident. In the literature that existed over a decade ago, relatively little attention had been given to rhythm and time. Yet without rhythm, no music, which unfolds in time.

When I looked for research on rhythm and on our sense of time, much of the best work was in the literature on motor control and on way-finding (navigation), not music. The psychologists and philosophers, not to mention the musicologists, who were interested in music, were much more interested in harmony and melody than in rhythm and time. Nor were they interested in how musicians coordinated their activities. I suppose that might be attributed to the difficulty of investigating such coordination but, in the overall intellectual context, that just didn’t wash.

No, it was clear to me that Descartes had cast his net over the study of music. But it was only in thinking things through that I realized that the Cartesian individual dominated all. When I started, I too bought the Cartesian story—well, not completely. The Cartesian monster came into view only as I realized that, if I took the existing literature as my starting point then I’d be forever explaining how these individuals would ever know whether or not a sound was REAL. And the only way to get them to make music together would be to ADD SOMETHING EXTRA.

Yet nothing seemed more basic than the obvious fact that we synchronize our movements together and that we do so easily. I knew that from my own experience. But I also knew it from the all-but-forgotten work of William Condon. And that’s what allowed me to think my way out of the Cartesian punching bag.

A few decades ago William Condon had investigated interactional synchrony. He would make high-speed films of people interacting with one another and analyze that interaction. What he discovered is that their movements were closely synchronized. In one investigation he filmed hour-old neonates as they listened to someone talking. The infants’ bodies twitched and jerked in synchrony to the speech pattern. For that to happen, this entrainment of one person to the rhythms of another, this capability had to be basic to the nervous system. It was not something ‘added on’.

I made Condon’s interactional synchrony my starting point. Where the Cartesian individual is a passive perceiver, I assumed active movers. Where the Cartesian individual is alone, I assumed people interacting with one another. Society is not an add-on. It is basic.

And not just for humans. For animals in general. Even bacteria communicate with one another via chemical means. Interaction is the way of the world.

That is certainly the way in Latour’s account. Agents of all kinds, human and non-human, interacting with one another. Not through some special social stuff, but through their own agency. When Latour sets out to reassemble the social, he is thereby rescuing our thought from the powerful Cartesian dispensation.

And that leads to an exercise for the reader. Early in the 18 century Giambattista Vico set himself the task of opposing Descartes. Where Descartes believed that we arrived at truth through observation, Vico believed we arrive at truth through making (verum esse ipsum factum). That truth is made, that is certainly what Latour thinks. That’s what he’s said about the scientific laboratory. Is Vico a precursor to Latour?

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