Speculative Grace by Miller Adam S. Bryant Levi R

Author:Miller, Adam S., Bryant, Levi R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

22

Black Boxes

If the world is stuffed full of grace—pressed down, shaken together, running over—then where does it hide? What accounts for its frequent obscurity? The obscurity of grace is tied, in part, to the nature of objects themselves.

Latour’s experimental metaphysics allows for the reworking of a variety of classic, philosophical concepts. In addition to how he retrofits transcendence, Latour offers novel approaches to concepts like substance, essence, matter, form, subjectivity, and reference. The key to his innovative account of substance (and, by extension, to the obscurity of grace) is his description of objects as “black boxes.” A substance is a black box. Sets of overlapping relations that are stable enough to qualify as objects do so because they cleanly foreground, in relation to a given line of sight, some consistent aspect of those relations. An object is a foregrounded through-line that (1) abstracts, orders, and stabilizes the relevant subsets that compose it, while (2) simultaneously obscuring the irreducible complexities of the unruly sets that underlie it. An object is this double operation: a making-available whose strength depends on the degree of resistance mustered by its packing-away. Latour calls this kind of clean, substantial, tightly-packaged availability a “black box.”

A black box is a set of relations bundled for availability. “The word black box is used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of machinery or a set of commands is too complex. In its place they draw a little box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output” (SA 2–3). For Latour, every object manifests this kind of parceled complexity. Every object is a latent jack-in-the-box, its integrity borrowed from but ultimately compromised by the coiled tension between its making-available and its packing-away. But, at least for a time, a set of relations can hold fast and function as an object, as “a closed file, an indisputable assertion, a black box” (SA 23).

Some black boxes are produced by nonhuman agents, some by collaboration with human agents. Some black boxes are strong, some are weak. Some are small, some are large. Some survive billions of years, some just seconds. In each case, a black box qualifies as such when it manifests sufficient unity and integrity to function as an agent. To be an agent, a black box must be able to leverage coordinated action. It must function as a machination. In turn, an object’s capacity for action, its status as an agent, depends on its ability to make some course of action, some horizon of possibility, available. A black box becomes a black box when, as an integrated agent, it makes possible some previously elusive relation.

Take, for example, the human-sponsored work of constructing a new black box like a scientific fact. On Latour’s account, scientific facts aren’t given but made. The resistance proper to a fact initially presents itself as a complication or source of perplexity that, because it is muddled, has the ability “to force the discussion to deviate, to trouble the order of discourse, to interfere with habits” (PN 103).

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