In an object-oriented metaphysics the truthfulness of a statement depends solely on the number of relevant agents persuaded to line-up behind it. With respect to truth, Latour is an unrepentant populist. The result is a kind of relativism, but Latour’s forceful critique of other populist conceptions of truth is that they’re not nearly populist enough. A conspiratorial populism (i.e., a disguised elitism) that, de jure, disenfranchises the vast majority of voters will rarely elect anyone worth the trouble. The viability of a referential populism depends on radically expanding the base of voters to include all available objects—living and nonliving, sentient and nonsentient, conscious and nonconscious, human and nonhuman.
In a metaphysical democracy, every object gets a vote. Producing statements that only some humans find persuasive won’t get you very far. If you want to speak truthfully about icebergs, then it is not enough to convince your fellow scientists, some influential politicians, or even a bevy of soccer moms. To have real traction you must also convince the icebergs themselves to line up behind what you say. If you want to make claims about honey, your alignment will have to queue not just bee-keepers, but flowers and hives and bees as well. The more bees that agree, the more substantial your claim becomes. When it comes to truth, appeals to authority carry only as much weight as the masses that such authority can muster. Blanket appeals to truths sponsored by absent gods, angels, Platonic forms, natural laws, or noumenal things-in-themselves have no force. “Nowhere more than in the evocation of a kingdom of knowledge do we create the impression that there is another transcendental world” (PF 215). Truth is the product of a mundane democracy, not the province of a magic kingdom. In order to vote, you have to show up at the polling place.
The work of a referential machination—the work of alignment engaged in by scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors, politicians, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs alike—is simply to get out the vote. There are no metaphysical shortcuts for skirting this work. “If an unfortunate witch attributes success in battle to a magical rite, she is mocked for her credulity. But if a celebrated researcher attributes the success of her laboratory to a revolutionary idea, no one laughs, even though everyone should. The thought of making a revolution with ideas!” (PF 217). There are no exceptions to the double-bind of resistant availability and the work it entails. Ideas aren’t alchemical and truths aren’t backed by otherworldly banks. Ideas and truths are objects that must persuade, negotiate, translate, and suffer like every other object.
Strictly speaking, Latour argues, “we do not have ideas” (PF 218). The traditional notion of an idea is a bit too slick. Rather than ideas, “there is the action of writing, an action which involves working with inscriptions that have been extracted; an action that is practiced through talking to other people who likewise write, inscribe, talk and live in similarly unusual places; an action that convinces or fails to convince with inscriptions which are made to speak, to write, and to be read” (PF 218). Because it is an object, an idea is an action to be performed, a work to be repeated, an alliance to be negotiated, a packing-away to be consolidated. Thinking is manual labor, a kind of hands-on work that obviously requires objects like brains, fingers, words, papers, pens, desks, books, calculators, chairs, oxygen, and so on. “Why, then, is this trade of thought, unlike all others, held to be nonmanual?” (PF 187) Given this misconception, it might be better to say that, in relation to truths, “we neither think nor reason. Rather, we work on fragile materials—texts, inscriptions, traces, or paints—with other people. These materials are associated or disassociated by courage and effort; they have no meaning, value, or coherence outside the narrow network that holds them together for a time. Certainly we can extend this network by recruiting actors, and we can also strengthen it by enrolling more durable materials. However, we cannot abandon it even in our sleep” (PF 186). But why would we want to abandon it? The whole point of an idea is to ramify our connections with the objects of this world and bind us more tightly to them, not to sever those ties in a fit of fancied independence.
The purpose of knowledge is to gather rather than isolate, to brew up new kinds of interdependence rather than recover a prelapsarian liberty. Reference doesn’t work by way of reductive correspondence and neither does knowledge. “Knowledge, it seems, does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object, any more than reference designates a thing by means of a sentence verified by that thing” (PH 69). Investments, alignments, negotiations, translations, multilateral agreements, capital loans—these are the name of the game. Observing the play of reference, “at every stage we have recognized a common operator, which belongs to matter at one end, to form at the other, and which is separated from the stage that follows by a gap that no resemblance could fill” (PH 69). Truth is this common operator that travels both up and down the concatenated line of borrowed forms, massaging their alignment and generating consensus.
It is better to talk about the work of these common operators in terms of consensus and alignment than in terms of accuracy because we have nothing but the fluid, competing claims of other objects against which a truth might be measured. There are no originals. Objects are copies all the way down. All we can know of truths “is where they lead to, how many people go along with them with what sort of vehicles, and how easy they are to travel; not if they are wrong or right” (SA 205). Fortunately, when available, this is plenty. It is enough for a truth to be repeated. Truth is a function of both popularity and durability. If a truth hits it off with a persuasive mass of humans and (in particular) nonhumans and then manages to get itself copied and repeated, it has a career on its hands. Truths “are much like genes that cannot survive if they do not manage to pass themselves on to later bodies” (SA 38). Claims that are not persuasive to humans and nonhumans alike will quickly die out. “Where is it written that a word may only associate with other words,” or even, only with humans? (PF 183). A word can “enter into partnership with a meaning, a sequence of words, a statement, a neuron, a gesture, a wall, a machine, a face” (PF 183). There is nothing outside the text. Everything is fair game. “Each time the solidity of a string of words is tested, we are measuring the attachment of walls, neurons, sentiments, gestures, hearts, minds, and wallets—that is, a heterogeneous multitude of allies, mercenaries, friends, and courtesans” (PF 183). The stability of a truth depends on this ad hoc heterogeneity.
It is true, then, that in an object-oriented world, “we can say anything we please, and yet we cannot” (PF 182). We can say anything we like, but it is dangerous to alienate one’s base. “As soon as we have spoken and rallied words, other alliances become easier or more difficult. Asymmetry grows with the flood of words; as meaning flows, slope and plateaus are soon eroded. Alliances are formed among words on the field of battle. We are believed, we are detested, we are helped, we are betrayed. We are no longer in control of the game. Some meanings are suggested, while others are taken away; we are commented upon, deduced, understood, ignored. That’s it: we can no longer say what we please” (PF 182).