Hermeneutic suspicion fails to identify and challenge violence. Prefer a pragmatic politics to alleviate material violence.

In all of this, there has been little reflection on the practices of critique being enacted in educational scholarship. The more common academic reaction to lack of policy response tends to be further hermeneutic suspicion, and continued analysis of how power is exercised to exclude the voices and possibilities of critique and progressive forms of change. Here, certain forms of critique might be argued inadvertently to be reproducing that which they critique. Given this, we might well heed Latour’s argument that critique has run out of steam in education as elsewhere.

Latour (2004) is never afraid to be controversial and starts his discussion by drawing an analogy between the logic of some forms of critique provided by researchers, including himself, and those offered by conspiracy theorists. In particular, he is commenting on the way the critic can unveil the truth to others by identifying the agents through which power is exercised behind their backs.

[W]hat’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularised, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired for instance by a too quick reading of ... Pierre Bourdieu? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because ‘of course we all know’ that they live in the thralls of a complete illusion on their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again, it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes – society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism – while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation .... What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness? (Latour, 2004, pp. 228–229)

Here, the logic of critique is about taking apart, separating out and unveiling what lies behind actors to explain their position and actions. It is only the critics who can see this, whether they are social scientists or conspiracy theorists. Latour identifies a certain pattern in the conventional practices of social critique.

This time it is the poor bloke, again taken aback, whose behavior is now ‘explained’ by the powerful effects of indisputable matters of fact: ‘You, ordinary fetishists, believe you are free but, in reality, you are acted on by forces you are not conscious of. Look at them, look, you blind idiot’ (and here you insert whichever pet facts the social scientists fancy to work with, taking them from economic infrastructure, fields of discourse, social domination, race, class, and gender, maybe throwing in some neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, whatever, provided they act as indisputable facts whose origin, fabrication, mode of development are left unexamined). (Latour, 2004, p. 238)

For Latour, these social substitutes do not explain but themselves need exploring, as the social alone cannot be taken as foundational. Thus, the uptake of theory as an explanatory framework to be applied to data, to make sense of phenomenon, is for Latour nonsensical. Yet it is arguable that this is what much of the critique of competence-based education, including that drawing upon Foucault, precisely does.

Latour is arguing that explanations relying upon taken-for-granted social categories substitute the invisible and hidden for the visible. As such, they produce a determination of practices that do not reside with the actors themselves, and indeed assume a priori who the actors are. The politics emerging from this form of social explanatory critique is limited, a commentary on how most actors are dupes of some order that is beyond them. It is the social critic that is always right and able to see what is invisible to others.

For Latour, the limitation of this form of critique arises fundamentally from the separation of a specifically social domain from nature and the material. This both limits critique and the identification of actors to enact alternatives. His argument is that sociology has two possibilities, depending upon etymology. One is to become the science of society, establishing matters of fact about the world based upon a separation from the natural and material, which entail the closing down of controversies. The second is to trace associations of multiple materials in the enactment of matters of concern, wherein controversies are kept open, conditional. He argues that the former has predominated at the expense of the latter, because of the modern logic of separation and the centring of the human. As a result, there is a reification of the social as an entirely distinct domain from the natural. Thus ‘critical sociologists have underestimated the difficulty of doing politics by insisting that the social consists of just a few types of participants’ (Latour, 2005, p. 250). The social is taken to be ‘constructed’ from human intention and agency (the subjective), while nature is taken to be inert matter (objective), subject to human action. In critiques based upon this separation, the social is used to explain the social, trapping criticism in a logic where what is used to explain – e.g. social structures, capitalism, neo-liberalism – precisely needs explanation themselves.

Latour argues that social explanation relies upon a substitution of the phenomenon by some other social substance, usually an abstraction. For instance, in examining the phenomenon of educational inequality, scientists of the social might put forward capitalism, class, gender, race as explanations. These substitute for the phenomena themselves, working behind their backs. In the case of the critique of competence-based education using Foucault, discipline becomes a substitute for competence. Critique takes apart, unveils and explains phenomena regardless of what the actors say or do themselves. In contrast to a science of society, Latour argues for a sociology of associations focusing on traceable attachments, whatever and wherever they might be, deconstructing the separation of society and nature. Thus, his argument for different critical practices and their associated politics.

The separation of society and nature is fabricated by a range of other practices of purification and naturalisation, between, for instance, matter and signification, practice and theory, object and subject, intervention and representation (Edwards, 2012). These separations result in and from particular practices of critique, wherein things are separated out as objects with properties, the relationships between which then have to be explained. For Latour (2004), these practices fabricate ‘matters of fact’ around and over which develop particular practices of critique. Matters of fact assume and enact an epistemological representation, of separation untangled from the material practices through which they are fabricated or enacted. Critique becomes merely a matter of the conflict of represented facts – ‘she says, he says…’ – the taking apart of the object and a debate over truth, evidence and facts. To establish matters of fact entails a closure of debate, already a political practice. However, ‘reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs’ (Latour, 2004, p. 232, emphasis in original).

It might be argued that this is a position with which many social critics would agree. Much critique is about unveiling matters of fact as ideological mystification, fetishes, forms of alienation, disciplinary, etc., in order to make them controversial and political. Social critiques regularly argue that what is taken to be real is actually contingent. On this basis, what is so different or controversial about Latour’s position? The answer lies in the continuation of the logic of separation and unveiling in social critical approaches, wherein there is one world, but many interpretations. In other words, because of the assumptions with which they work, the social critic is caught within a logic of arguing over matters of fact, even as they critique the given facts.

By contrast, for Latour in particular, realities cannot be stabilised through separation and the closure of controversies to establish matters of fact. Realities are experimentally enacted through things, which are attached, gathered and negotiated as ‘matters of concern’, through open controversies. Here the real is not contrasted with the socially constructed, but is taken seriously as fabricated. Matters of concern are an attaching, gathering, for instance, matter and meaning, objects and subjects, nature and society, non-human and human in their enactments. Here, the practices of critique are about what can be gathered or fabricated as concerns, where that attached is not simply human, and the relationships and their effects can be traced. Thus, for instance, critique, rather than exploring (human) public participation in political issues, engages in experimentation in the enactment of publics through the gathering of materials and humans (Whatmore & Landström, 2011). In the very methods of critique there is active political engagement, but one where the political collective is not simply human. It is perhaps notable here that Foucault himself combined his writing on topics like madness and discipline with active political engagement on topics, whereas many of the critiques drawing upon his work are separated from the multiple possible forms of political activity. The later uses concepts from Foucault to try to explain phenomena, whereas his written work was part of his intervention in the issues he explored.