Persistence of human sociality, or something like that

Levi Bryant’s blog Larval Subjects is always good for mind-bending and thought-producing posts. This week, following on from new work by Graham Harman on Bruno Latour, he wrote:

the key problem of the social and political is not so much how change is possible, but why it doesn’t happen all the time.

This persistence problem presents itself both in the fact that our systems neither fail nor change constantly. There is a sense of persistence in how certain negotiations are conducted and change builds up fairly gradually. Think of daily interactions like buying coffee, driving, walking down a crowded street, etc, where the rules are not constantly renegotiated by individual actors. The persistence underpins both a way of not-failing and not radically changing each time they are conducted. It prevents entropy.

Bryant continues:

Representationalist social and political theory would have it that it is shared beliefs, ideologies, and languages that function as the glue that holds entropy at bay.

The argument follows that it is not, in fact, shared representational systems, or constructions, or imaginings that hold the systems together but rather “nonhuman entities like roads, documents, speed bumps, tattoos, etc, that function as traces of social bonds and that function as catalysts of ongoing social bonds”.

This is very much like the argument made (however implicitly) by many place theorists, perhaps most clearly by Doreen Massey in For Space. This position goes that place/space are network actors within the same networks as people. In Massey’s interpretation, there are many instantiations (multiplicities) of place, but each would fit within the same ontological plane of immanence.

Massey argues that we should

recognise space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished, never closes.

Bryant concludes the post by arguing “if the political is to be found, in part, in the domain of objects or nonhumans, then this suggests that the site of political engagement lies in assembling nonhumans.”

A version of this position has been advanced by Latour, although it is very much within the representational mindset described by Bryant. In Making Things Public, he writes:

They [things] need to be represented, authorized, legitimated and brought to bear inside the relevant assembly

The difference between these positions is that Latour is asking that the nonhuman entities that the Bryant-Harman-Latour amalgam considers to be central/essential to politics be represented inside the relevant gathering established to consider them; formal politics. In contrast, Bryant suggests, rather soundly, that the objects can exert their influence on our daily (informal) politics outside the assembly, and it is just a matter of making them.

For my purposes, the positioning of the nonhuman aspects of place (landscape, location, nearby places, architecture, roads, trees, etc) not only within the broader political network but as connecting nodes of that network proposes something about how we might approach the politics of place beyond the assembly. By explicitly acknowledging the role that nonhuman entities play in gathering attention and creating publics and connecting the human entities to all other entities, the politics of place moves beyond the formal and into the everyday.

Imagining human social connections to be bound and supported by the nonhuman rather than solely by the interpersonal offers a fuller picture of the way in which place creates community and, in turn, community builds place.