With a basic framework in place, we’re ready to take a careful look at the heart of Latour’s project: the principle of irreduction. Using what he calls a “pseudoautobiographical style,” Latour describes in self-consciously (and mildly parodic) religious language how he arrived at the principle of irreduction. Bone-tired, he is traveling home on the road from Dijon to Gray when he is stopped dead in his tracks by an abrupt epiphany that both brings him back to his senses and “exorcizes” his demons one by one. Post-epiphany, Latour, like Paul, finds himself blind, his ability to see reductively permanently impaired. Though, like Paul, this blindness also brings with it insight into the irreducible beauty of the multitude. Latour’s own account is worth citing at length:
I taught at Gray in the French provinces for a year. At the end of the winter of 1972, on the road from Dijon to Gray, I was forced to stop, brought to my senses by an overdose of reductionism. A Christian loves a God who is capable of reducing the world to himself because he created it. A Catholic confines the world to the history of the Roman salvation. An astronomer looks for the origins of the universe by deducing its evolution from the Big Bang. A mathematician seeks axioms that imply all the others as corollaries and consequences. A philosopher hopes to find the radical foundation which makes all the rest epiphenomenal. A Hegelian wishes to squeeze from events something already inherent in them. A Kantian reduces things to grains of dust and then reassembles them with synthetic a-priori judgments that are as fecund as a mule. A French engineer attributes potency to calculations, though these come from the practice of an old-boy network. An administrator never tires of looking for officers, followers, and subjects. An intellectual strives to make the “simple” practices and opinions of the vulgar explicit and conscious. A son of the bourgeoisie sees the simple stages of an abstract cycle of wealth in the vine growers, cellarmen, and bookkeepers. A Westerner never tires of shrinking the evolution of species and empires to Cleopatra’s nose, Achilles heel, and Nelson’s blind eye. (PF 162–163)
Latour’s list goes on, but you get the idea. In example after example, Latour says, everyone is working “to put everything into nothing, to deduce everything from almost nothing, to put into hierarchies, to command and to obey, to be profound or superior, to collect objects and force them into a tiny space” (PF 163). It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about “subjects, signifiers, classes, Gods, axioms,” everyone is working “to have for companions” either “the Dragon of Nothingness or the Dragon of Totality” (PF 163).
But then, Latour recounts, cramping under the weight of these reductions, lightning strikes:
Tired and weary, suddenly I felt that everything was still left out. Christian, philosopher, intellectual, bourgeois, male, provincial, and French, I decided to make space and allow the things which I spoke about the room that they needed to “stand at arm’s length.” I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to myself: “Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.” This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one. It was a wintry sky, and a very blue. I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head. I added it to other skies in other places and reduced none of them to it, and it to none of them. It “stood at arm’s length,” fled, and established itself where it alone defined its place and its aims, neither knowable nor unknowable. It and me, them and us, we mutually defined ourselves. And for the first time in my life I saw things unreduced and free. (PF 163)