It’s true I’ve been reduced lately to doing Google searches out of sheer exasperation – “what’s the deal with proportions?” or, “homologues, what’s the deal?” It’s a handy feature and a workable starting point if you ever want to figure stuff out without Malcolm Gladwell giving you all the answers.

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, his David and Goliath talks from 2013 have been showing up on my YouTube feed lately. Literally all I did was type in David and Goliath. One time. So maybe not ‘fortuitous’ but still a good and useful supplement for those who wish to become more versed in the evergreen yet voguish underdog trope.

Gladwell made use of a notion of asymmetrical power relations that also appears at length in the 1991 work of contemporary French philosopher Bruno Latour. The case as put forward there calls for a general principle of symmetry to establish equality as well as measure differences (asymmetries) in comparative anthropology. According to Latour, new differences are measurable only because the scales have first been calibrated by the principle of symmetry. The establishment of equality is the only way to set the scale to zero (107). The approach is supposed to skirt the problem of an absolute relativism that “immediately abolishes differences by rendering them all equally different” (107).

Movement between terms in an asymmetrical relation seems to call not only for their being made similar in some key aspect but also for the work of intermediaries. Two good examples are the invention of the compound pulley by Archimedes as related by Plutarch (Latour 109-111) and David’s use of the sling shot as Gladwell tells it.

Archimedes uses knowledge of mechanical proportion to figure out how to replace the labor of a multitude of men with a pulley system, which invention King Hiero of Syracuse exploits to win wars, but after that the now famous Archimedes disavows the role he played in war mongering and only takes credit for the ‘divine’ use of mathematical proportion.

Latour says symmetrical anthropology would make visible this effacement and subsequent incomprehension that it yields, so that the political Archimedes and the divine Archimedes are both in evidence (112).

The work of leveling necessary to effect a sharing of qualities and/or reversal of power relations can also be effected by the one who frames the story (which, as I’m saying it, seems like an obvious thing to say). In the traditional telling of David and Goliath, the technological innovation of the slingshot appears to be the critical element in restoring a balance of power. For this outcome, however, there needed also to have been a principle of symmetry at work such that “the same causes account for successes as well as failures,” as Latour put it.

Everything changes if the staunch discipline of the principle of symmetry forces us to retain only the causes that could serve both truth and falsehood, belief and knowledge, science and parascience…When the balance of symmetry is reestablished with precision, the discrepancy that allows us to understand why some win and others lose stands out all the more sharply. (94)

It might also go without say that there needs to be consent from hearers, i.e. an acceptance of that frame which allows us to think of Goliath as weak for the same reason he is strong. This point about the work of mediation is consistent with the key Kantian solution that Latour adapts for his own thesis of a “Copernican counter-revolution,” which calls for an increase in the number and kinds of intermediaries, networked collectives of humans and nonhumans, rather than a radical separation and consolidation of centers of power coupled with the repression of “human multitudes and the nonhuman environment” (76-79).

What is wanted, according to Latour, is to be able to describe our world as a whole using the exact sciences, to see in one picture the work of ‘purification’ and ‘mediation,’ and to be capable of “confronting the true knowledge to which we adhere totally,” rather than rehearsing a traditional sociology of knowledge that has historically treated truth and error in unequal or disproportionate terms. That is, even where it’s readily acknowledged the exact sciences are in part rooted in deviations and errors stemming from “society, beliefs, ideology, symbols, the unconscious, madness” – to be disavowed later – if these are the errors, how do we account for the truths? Latour: asymmetrical relations of authority made it so the truths just ‘were,’ without a way to say how they won out as truths, knowledge, science. “Scientific truth is scientific truth because it is not ideological error.” This is how elements from an earlier ideology may be preserved in science, but since these elements have been uprooted in the transformation from “quasi-objects” to objects, the “mediating network” that would have allowed for any tracing to its partial source in ideology has been disconnected, an epistemological break. One is then unable to account for how it is that he knows something. I like to think of it as ‘the’ epistemological question that Gertrude Stein posed to Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast.

To sum up so far, modern society itself is being described as the residue left over from acts of purification. Neither can any single explanation account for it, since the very act or series of purifying acts consists in kicking over the traces of how it came to be. At its best, the set of practices is defended as necessary in order to ‘keep forces fresh,’ which is to say the ‘power of comprehension’ attributed to the divine mind and harnessed to wage wars is subsequently separated out from the material product, thereby stranding or ‘liberating’ the latter, depending on your view, to free market forces. The gist seems to be that humanity is formed in the general and universal senses from founding outrages against cultures and natures, regrettable errors to be atoned for later. In the case of the citizen-subject who is brought into being in this way and left stranded (or liberated) to carry on with his business, there is no less of an ‘incomprehensibility’ in accounting for his own present state, much less in his being held accountable for that of others. From an observational and reflective standpoint, this all tends to run more true where there hasn’t been already initiated a conscious break from state building using unconscious processes such as these.

Some of the narrative strains done up here in modern dress share affinities with religious orthodoxy. Readers of the Old Testament will recognize the themes of prohibition against the use of divine knowledge, transgression of this prohibition and attempted concealment, and the ensuing expulsion of man to a fallen state, while the New Testament contains themes of separation and purification. Less familiar – perhaps to say more or less ‘privileged’ – is a recounting of how religious authority was won in parts of ancient India in much the same manner, where salvation discourses “representing the raw materials of personhood” may have drawn dogmatically on “prescriptive texts which suppress(ed) in a characteristically Sanskritic manner all awareness of their origins in time and space” (Alexis Sanderson, “Purity and power among the Brahmans of Kashmir,” in The Category of the Person, 1985, 191).

Nor is the ‘incomprehension’ Latour laments in accounting for scientific truths unique to science. On the popular front it doesn’t strike me as all that different from cultural amnesia. In Bengali literature it has been termed ‘self-oblivion,’ perhaps the most famous example being Kalidasa’s version of the classic tale of Sakuntala. In other (clearly polemical, speculative) writing on the history of Bengal by Haraprasad Sastri, said to be an early pioneer, Bengalis as a people were characterized as ‘self-oblivious’ despite evidence of their having attained “a high level of civilization” (Samaren Roy, The Roots of Bengali Culture and Other Essays, 1966). Another author, Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay, identified caste inequalities as the basis for conditions in which “knowledge was not allowed to be spread among the masses by caste leaders.” In his profile of 19^th century Indian activist Bankimchandra, he wrote:

Brahmans monopolized learning and used their knowledge only to maintain and further strengthen their own privileged position in society. The Hindu society they established appeared to Bankim as a bundle of rites and rituals unmeaning to the problem of society. It is against this rotten social order that Bankim took up his pen. (The Bengali Intellectual Tradition, 1979)

In general it seems that for any politics-based society regardless of specific scientific or religious context, the source of incomprehension in accounting for ‘how we got here’ is the practice of concealing knowledge in order to secure authority and privilege in the hands of a relative few, and that such practices may underlie miseducation if not self-oblivion, ultimately. Thus when Marxist intellectuals asked themselves in hindsight whether there was something in Marxism that gave rise to Stalinism, their answer of “distortion” could conceivably speak as well to the kind of distortion resulting from fundamental disparities in access to knowledge. Evidently there was such a thing as a difference between ‘the people’s math’ and that taught to aristocrats in ancient Greece. Even if Jesus knew how to multiply loaves, the thuggish ideologues in Stalin’s Russia knew only starvation and torture cells as persuasion techniques. Knowledge gaps such as these may be why Latour pushes for layers of multiple intermediaries, perhaps to say you can never be sure who actually has read his Marx and who is content to gaze upon his statue. This is the other unavowable obstacle (mainly because it’s left unavowed) along with the recognition of empirical-ideological truths that can’t be accounted for in full.

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