"Morephisms" Post on Latour and Powers

For a very interesting bit of reading that may challenge your Thanksgiving-addled brains, I recommend this post on We Have Never Been Blogging by Mike Johnduff.

In it, Johnduff looks at Bruno Latour's take on Richard Powers, and it is definitely worth reading in light of the frequent accusation (see James Wood) that Powers doesn't convey character well. Here's a taste:

This doesn't seem to me to be a big deal--except that it seems typically philosophical, which is something I don't usually expect from Latour since what he's up to usually appears so very different in its form. I'll put differently: Ultimately, what reviewers I think object to in Powers is his taking his de-priveliging of character in the psychological, anthropomorphic sense to the nth degree. However, when Powers does this full-on, in his recent The Echo Maker, he precisely gets the National Book Association award and is a finalist for the Pulitzer... so go figure. Meanwhile narratology has long picked up this issue of the over-anthropomorphization of characters, even when they're made into actants. So, the situation is complicated. Latour comes along and oversimplifies it--as anyone who confronted such a situation would. But he also does so in a typically philosophical way: he wants to presume we all read like 19th century readers of Dickens, or present-day readers of Harry Potter, in order to demystify that fact. This leaves us with the sense that, yet again, we're getting an essay on the "aesthetic dimension" of a philosophy, or the review of a piece which best exemplifies this work--a task which has to say all the considerations before it appears take the function of art in the wrong way.