Matters of Fact and Concern: 9-11 Truthers, Corn, Feeding the World

 Sorry for the long, rambling, disorganized, and sometimes off-point post, guys - it's hard to get my thoughts out accurately on these issues.

"Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived very late, after the facts had been thoroughly established, decades after bodies of evidence had accumulated? Now we have the benefit of what I call instant revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke" (228).

In this passage, Latour describes the current situation that he fears critique and science studies have had a hand in creating, in which conspiracy theorists and Republican strategists use the terms of critique to justify their rejection of well-supported understandings and accounts of an event.  He suggests that in this age, in which continual doubt has become a more hegemonic social force than fact, it is time for critical theory switch its object of critique from matters of fact to matters of concern. 

Specifically, he writes of the large 9-11 truth movement, whose followers use moves from critical theory to reject the official account of the September 11th attacks, believing (in the US) that the attacks were an inside job, or (in France) that they did not occur at all.  Seeing these movements using concepts and terms from critical theory to justify their crazy view of the world upsets Latour, prompting him to call for a rethinking and re-inventing critical theory as a tool for understanding and social change.  In his words:

"What has become of critique when my neighbour in the little Bournabbais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe the United States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when University professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naively believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible…."

One thing I have thought about over the course of this semester is the wide range of opinions and experiences that we each brought to this class when it started.  Far from all entering the classroom in a general state of agreement on the facts surrounding Global Warming and GMOs, we each had various levels of understanding and differing opinions on what sorts of claims could be considered "facts" in each of these cases.  Our understandings and opinions were mediated by identity.  To put it bluntly, some of us may identify more with "church, motherhood, and apple pie" than with Latour's self-conscious intellectualism, while some of us may be far from either of these positions.  Or: if I were a 9-11 truther (and I know some people who are), how would taking this class affect me?  I believe I would have been alienated by the characterization of my views as bullshit without any careful examination of the evidence on which I based my beliefs.  We spent some time, in our mostly failed Bourdieu blog posts, trying to explain why others who we disagreed with believed what they believed -- perhaps it would have been fruitful to identify a relatively baseless belief of our own and try to explain why it is that we believe it.

Something we have lacked in this class a lot of the time is in-depth clarification of available evidence, both on the issues we were examining and the concepts we were supposed to be using to conceptualize them.  By skipping from issue to issue without getting information from experts on any of the subjects, discussions were often left at the level of "well, this is just my personal opinion, and you're entitled to your own totally opposing personal opinion, we can all believe whatever we believe."  Perhaps this is a move that people must make to get along with each other in any social setting?  Nevertheless, it seems like there were too many issues to address, too fast, without in-depth examination of the physical facts of any of them.  Citations were often left unchecked, and incorrect or uncritical statements (my own included) were frequently allowed to just sort of float by (despite Ben and Robin's interventions to catch us and make us think critically at times). 

This sort of lack of depth opens the door to the sort of "two objects-two subjects" critical theory that Latour criticizes in this article.  For instance, in discussing our position in food and agricultural systems, we alternated between the idea that we could "vote with our dollar" to change systems and the idea that our actions are helplessly determined by our position in historical, social, political, and economic networks.  Additionally, we wavered between the view of today's corn plant as an acted-upon product of human ingenuity or of corn as its own actor that through its material form and force determines human actions. On the other hand, we did a good job at times of interrogating matters of concern rather than matters of fact.  Overall, it seems like we succeeded in treating corn as a Thing rather than an object.  Did we succeed in understanding that "matters of fact are a poor proxy of experience and of experimentation... a confusing bundle of polemics, of epistemology, of modernist politics that in no way claim to represent what is requested by a realist attitude"?  Maybe not.  Or not yet. 

One question that popped up in two or three class discussions was the question of whether or not small-scale, local agriculture could "feed the world" today.  This question can be approached from multiple perspectives, each with innumerable complex variables.  First, it could be taken as a sort of theoretical exercise, perhaps something that could be mathematically modeled to test hypotheses numerically.  In this sort of exercise, you would need to think about crop output/acre of various farming systems, global acres of arable land, ecological impacts of cultivating land in various ways, calorie and nutrient output of various crops, and so on, and construct a model.  You would test this model against current situations to see if it correctly predicted peoples' level of nutrition/malnutrition when current variables are inserted.  Then you would use it to predict nutrition outcomes in a planned future scenario.  This is essentially how climate modeling is done, which is how we arrive at our current understanding of the likelihood of global warming's future progression, its causes, and its consequences.  Secondly, this question could be taken as a practical question of whether or not it would be politically and economically possible to transition all food production to the control of small-scale local networks, regardless of whether or not those networks could produce "enough" food.  Within this framing lie questions of what sorts of economic, political, and social interests would fight for or against this move, and which of those have the power to prevail, and whether certain actions could be taken to change that balance of power if desired.  Third, this question could be seen as a red herring distracting from the currently important issue of how to create food systems that are just, healthy, and ecologically sustainable in "the long term."  In this perspective, the purported unproductiveness of small-scale agriculture is used as justification of unsustainable and unjust industrial agricultural practices today.  

Rather than treating the question of which farming system can or cannot feed the world as a question of fact (i.e. small-scale agriculture either can or cannot feed the world), I wish we had made a clearer move to interrogate this kind of broad theoretical question and break it down into more personal, practical, political, and yet actively challenging matters of concern, the kind of questions for which we could extensive and carefully-considered scientific evidence and perspectives from outside our own classroom to produce useful new understandings.  We started to get there, but for some reason it feels like we didn't make it all the way.