Harper’s Magazine for April 2004 has reprinted an essay by Bruno Latour on “The Last Critique” that examines the role of critique. Latour starts by noting how “social construction” has been coopted by the right to undermine calls to deal with global warming. The right uses critical arguments to call good science into question in a way not anticipated by critical theorists. The problem is a general one with the left – what do we do when our methods are used against us? What do we do when criticism and dissent become reactionary?
What I don’t understand is Latour’s turn at the end to Turing. He sees in Turing’s paper on AI a way forward for critique.
Some quotes:
My question is simple: Should we be at war, too – we, the scholars, the intellectuals?
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My worry is that critique might not be aiming at the right target. .. We have not been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for the new threats, new tasks, new targets. … Would it be so surprising if intellectuals were also one war late, one critique late…?
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Perhaps the danger no longer stems from excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact – we have learned to combat so efficiently – but from excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases. …
(page 15)
(On page 20 Latour switches to what criticism could be.) The critic is not the one who debunks but the one who assembles, not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers but the one who offers arenas in which to gather.
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Turing cannot avoid mentioning God’s creative power when talking of this most mastered machine, the computer that he has invented. That’s precisely his point. The computer is in for many surprises; you get out of it much more than you put in.
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What if critique could be associated with more, not with less; with multiplication, not subtraction? Can we become critical again in the sense offered by Turing? That is, generating more ideas than we have received. This would require that all beings, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again mediating, assembling entities. If this were possible then we could let the critics approach our cherished matters of concern, then at last we could tell them: “Yes, please, touch them, explain them, deploy them.” They we would have gone from good beyond mere iconoclasm. (page 20)
Latour deploys an atomic sense of sub-critical and super-critical where when something super-critical has an atom/idea disturb it you get a chain reaction and “emergent properties.” You get more out than was sent in. This seems one of the central ideas that Katherine Hayles and others are struggling with around computers and culture – more seems to come out than went in and how can we learn from that.