What if we Talked Politics a Little?
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What if we Talked Politics a Little? Bruno Latour Ecole des Mines Paris, 60 bld St Michel 75006, Paris, France. E-mail: [email protected]
Political enunciation remains an enigma as long as it is considered from the standpoint of information transfer. It remains as unintelligible as religious talk. The paper explores the specificty of this regime and especially the strange link it has with the canonical definition of enunciation in linguistics and semiotics. The ‘political circle’ is reconstituted and thus also the reasons why a ‘transparent’ or ‘rational’political speech act destroys the very conditions of group formation. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 143–164. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300092 Keywords: politics; semiotics; speech-act theory; rhetorics; enunciation
Translated by Liz Libbrecht. First published in French in Politix 15 (58): 143–166 (2002). Revised and updated for Contemporary Political Theory Complaints about a loss of interest in politics are heard all over.1 But what if the famous ‘crisis of representation’ stems simply from a new misunderstanding of the exact nature of this type of representation? As if, in recent years, we had begun to expect it to provide a form of fidelity, exactitude or truth that is totally impossible. As if talking politics were becoming a foreign language gradually depriving us of the ability to express ourselves. Could it be possible to forget politics? Far from being a universal competency of the ‘political animal’, might it not be a form of life so fragile that we could document its progressive appearance and disappearance? This is the hypothesis that I would like to explore in this paper. The idea can be formulated simply: by attempting to explain politics in terms of something else, we might have lost its specificity and have consequently forgotten to maintain its own dynamics, letting it fall into disuse. To retrieve the invaluable effectiveness of political talk, we need to start with the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher so forcefully put it, ‘society doesn’t exist’. If it does not exist, we have to make it exist, but in order to do so we need the means to do so. Politics is one of those means. The recent resurrection of Gabriel Tarde allows a sharper contrast between two diametrically opposed types of sociology: that which assumes that the problem of the constitution of society has been solved, and that which studies the fragile and temporary construction of social aggregates. The former, a
Bruno Latour What if we Talked Politics a Little
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descendant of Emile Durkheim, uses social explanations to explain why some political forms of coordination are so sturdy. I call this type ‘sociology of the social’. The latter type I call ‘sociology of association’ or ‘of translation’. When political sociology sets out to explain politics through society, it renders politics superficial and replaceable. By contrast, when the other political sociology strives to explain the very existence of social aggregates through political discourse, that discourse immediatel
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