"The Fairy Position"

While reading Latour's article, I remembered this video that I stumbled across sometime last week. While it also fits into our discussion about rhetoric and the way it works from Robin's article, this also fits into the reading for this week.

Latour presents us with the idea of two positions (I will only be focusing on the fairy position) that objects have in the social sciences (Latour, 237). The position that objects have been given is unsatisfying for Latour, he sees it as being completely "useless" because it makes it "impossible" to consider it with any "objectivity" (Latour, 237).

Latour states that when the fairy position is used, "the role of the critic is then to show that what the naive believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself. Here they have diverted to their petty use of the prophetic fulmination against idols "they have mouths and speak not, they have ears and hear not," but they use this prophecy to decry the very objects of belief- gods, fashion, poetry, sport, desire, you name it- to which naive believers cling with so much intensity" (237-8).

I wanted to use this video as an example because I think it depicts many of the topics that we covered in class, specifically economics, food, and global warming. Most importantly it is desperately trying to convince people that everything that we've heard about global warming and change of economics within the U.S. is false and that ideas of change are only made in order to disrupt and destroy the lives we live. His main line is, "If I wanted America to fail..." He then continues on to make statements in order to support his claim. This is where Latour comes in.

The statements that he makes are, to paraphrase, like, "the energy we already have is 'cheap' and 'abundant'. This is big within itself because they are simple and vague adjectives. They don't state any scientific understanding of how he is able to make these claims, but instead he states them as being fact. He has turned the thing/concern of energy into an object (as being objective).

Here, energy is the material entity, which of course" does nothing by itself" unless we as people give it some sort of meaning, give it some sort of objectivity whether it be to conserve energy, or to think that it is forever usable and disposable. And those who listen to this man/Freemarket.com begin to fetishize over the idea that people of power have come up with the idea of global warming in order to ruin America and destroy Americans (whoever that term actually refers to). By speaking with such matter of fact language, it is difficult to separate it from what it actually is, which is a matter of concern.

This spokesperson for Freemarket.com is acting as a critic for this company, and creates a following because as a critic, as Latour states, "you are always right!...You (the critic) can turn all of those attachments (which belong to the naive believers) into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see...their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you the never sleeping critic, alone can see (239). What Latour is saying here, is that the critic has authority while critiquing, and so the "naive believer" looks to the critic and seeks out factual information from the critic, because he/she is the one who is supposed to know, he/she is the one that states that they know and also uses objectivity in order to state that they know.

Latour does a nice job in bringing up that any type of critic uses his ability to critique for his advantage, in order to debunk another type of critique. This means that anyone must look at the type of critique you are reading and understand that there is discourse within it. We must get away from this type of critique and create a new type. One that will "generate more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away" (248). That we must look at things as what they are, that is as things and not objects and then we can have a better understanding and a reason to believe the critics that are active in the critique.