view of capitalism is ‘that of an ethnologist much more than that of a political commentator.’ The canvases go on to sell for half a million euros a piece. It is not difficult – when thinking of this ethnographic gaze that reflects and perhaps inadvertently valorises contemporary capitalism, rather than directly critiquing it – to recall the work of Bruno Latour. His project of actor-network theory speaks to the descriptive project of mapping and charting ‘objects’ – hence the ‘Latour litany’ of objects that recur in his studies. Beginning in the social study of science Latour’s articulation of networks, appropriately, seems to extend everywhere: urbanism, law, art, philosophy, politics, etc. His work has also been influential, notably most recently in the articulation of so-called ‘speculative realism’, but also more broadly in literary and cultural studies. Houellebecq’s scene, in which the artist profits from his descriptions, also speaks to the equivocal status of such gestures. While Latour’s work is premised on the novelty of network analysis as a mode he notes that this approach seems to mirror the operations of a What concerns me here is not only analysing the risk of a convergence between this style of analysis and the features of contemporary capitalism but also, more broadly, the equivocal attraction exerted by this kind of work – its discreet charm. In particular, I am concerned with Latour as merely one symptomatic instance of ‘anti-critique’; the turn from critical analysis to the descriptive, and the loss of confidence in the very gesture of critique. I could have chosen many other figures to target this kind of ‘anti-critique’, so widespread is it; for example, we could consider the work of Jacques Rancière, which relentlessly problematizes the capitalism.
reactions to come together as a textbook case of the laws of economics, a new socio-technical world had to be assembled to hold them together.’ If Weizman demonstrates, or tries to demonstrate, how the ‘network’ or assemblage model multiplies agency, Mitchell’s work stresses also the de-reification of capitalism, as its flip side. He refers to ‘so-called global forces of capital’, to contest any conception of what he calls ‘capitalism’s homoficient historical logic.’ This is replaced with a new formulation: ‘oil-based industrial capitalism no longer appears self-sufficient. Its success depends on other forces, which are both essential to and disjunctive with the process we call capitalist development.’ Very obviously indebted to Foucault’s equivocal ‘pluralization’ of capitalism into capitalisms, which is equivocal because located in proximity to the theorizations of neo-liberalism of plural capitalism, we can see a strangely rigid standard set for the functioning of capitalism that, perhaps obviously, at no point seems to regard any reference to Marx’s actual analysis as necessary. On the one hand, this type of work indicates how Latourian, or Latour-style, analysis allows an entry into the empirical not immediately burdened with the risk of reproducing the world as we find it. The act of de-reification allows access to the minutiae of reality that certain forms of critique tended to displace or disable. On the other hand, the difficulty, however, is that this restoration of analysis occludes other forms of ‘reality’ – notably that of capitalism – and does not necessarily lead to a restoration of agency. The very means that allow tracking of networks struggle if those ‘networks’ ramify or solidify too far. In fact, for all the de-reification we can in fact say that capitalism operates as a ‘network’, but this doesn’t seem to multiply