Latour, "Historicity of Things"

Questions with which we began:

p. 150 - Once something gains substance, does it modify the network?
p. 151 - What can constitute the archive for BL?
p. 162 - BL describes "document[ation of] the modifications of the ingredients that compose an articulation of entities".  How is this an account of history?  How an account of historicity?  Cf. "differences are all that we require, at first, to set a lively historicity into motion" (150).
p. 164 - BL uses "artificial" but what could this mean here?
p. 168 - Why is action in unkeep important? 
p. 170-2 - Two practical definitions of substance. Which dimension of time to retrofitting and institution map onto?

p. xxx - Relationship between reference and substance.


Discussions:

Methodology -- history 

How to do a history of that which is not networked?  Of that which is disconnected?

Attributes - Substances.  From attribute to substance, not from substance to attribute.

p. 162 - How is history being defined/conceptualized?
  - C's question: Is it the case that for Foucault history pushes the present from behind, and for Latour history is pulled out of (or spun out of) the present from in front?
  - Temporality and historicity is a function of differentiation
     - So temporality is made, not given
  - For BL, the past gets retroactively remade in the period following it.  (For BL, time is reversible.)
     - But is that the case for MF?  (Is time irreversible for Foucault?)
  - BL is interested in that which must be kept up.
     - MF is interested in that which keeps itself up.  But without appealing to 'context'.

Discussion of Latour and Foucault -- are they compatible?  are they incompatible?  This resulted in the above diagram, based on Latour's diagram in the text.  The x-axis is chronological time (e.g., in years).  The y-axis measures the layering (and thus the reversibility???) of time.  The blue arrow traveling toward the bottom right represents time.  The blue arrows traveling diagonally back into the past represent Latour's focus.  The green arrows traveling horizontally represent Foucault's focus.