What's the Matter?
Ethnography as a Method for Ontology
Master Thesis by Sigmund Bruno Schilpzand
Supervised by Franz Berto & Federica Russo
University of Amsterdam
“'It's called frostbite. The cold does it. These bits are dead, Mr. Vess. This creature would certainly have died, just from being outside.' [...] 'I find that hard to believe,' he frowned. 'It's their world out there, after all.' 'Out there?' Isserley yelled. 'Are you kidding? Does this […] look like they've been running around in their natural element to you? Does it look like they've been having a little... frolic?'”
– Michel Faber (Under the Skin)
“Some words [...] help us forget what we are
actually talking about […]. And some, like
natural, mean next to nothing”
Contents
INTRODUCTION………1
CHAPTER 1: EMPIRICAL METAPHYSICS………...6
Section 1: The Threefold Structure of Empirical Metaphysics……….6
Ethnography, Metaphysical Replenishment, Metaphysical Destruction………..6
Section 2: Reassembling Bruno Latour………..8
Adding Reality to Harman's Account………...8
Detour de Latour: The Latourization of Postmodernism………..11
Back on Track: Relative Existence………...14
What Makes Metaphysics Empirical?...15
Section 3: Against Individuals………..17
Latour Without Overplaying the Individuality of Actants……….17
Section 4: From Metaphysics to Politics: “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!”………...22
A Real of Movement……….23
Composition on a Grand Scale……….………..25
Section 5: In Defense of Latour's Take on Philosophy……….26
The Failure of Transcendence-in-Immanence………..26
Concluding Remarks Against the Subject/Object-Split………29
CHAPTER 2: RENAISSANCE & CO-NAISSANCE………...….31
Section 1: Introduction to the Case Study………...31
Latour's Hypothesis on Matter………31
Modes of Existence: Network, Reproduction, Reference, Technology & Habit………....33
Section 2: The Case: Mathematizing Matter………...39
What is a Good Representation of Nature?...39
Digression on the Greeks………...42
A Technique for Rationalizing the World………...43
Section 3: Back to the Modes……….45
Bruteness Reversed………..…45
Section 4: Beyond Realism and Idealism………47
Two Notions of Construction………...…47
CHAPTER 3: ETHNOGRAPHY AND OTHER METHODS FOR ONTOLOGY………...49
Section 1: Recap & Mission Statement………....49
Recap: Where Did We “Follow the Actors” so Far?...49
Mission Statement: On Who to Write and Why?...50
Empirical Metaphysics……….………52
Quantification & Reflective Equilibrium……….…………57
New Scientism & Armchair Evidence………60
Section 3: Observation, Imagination, Formalization & Being………58
Why Ontology Should Prefer Agency……….62
CONCLUSION………....65
BIBLIOGRAPHY………67
Introduction
Most of this thesis was written on the sixth floor of the central public library in Amsterdam. A voice from the elevator exclaims “sociale wetenschappen!” (“social sciences!”) as it reaches this destination. The signs in and around the elevators, however, read philosophy first and then social sciences. That ambiguity of not quite knowing in what intellectual field one is, has reproduced itself here: I present ethnography, the study of the cosmologies and practices of peoples, as a method for ontology. 'Cosmologies' are understood here as sets of beliefs about what kinds of things there are; ontological commitments. Practices, however, can also be viewed as ontologically committing, perhaps harboring experiences that may make one reconsider one's “cosmology”1, if there is a gap between what one deals with in practice, described by an ethnographer, and
what one says exists2. Latour carries out this project of mapping the ontological commitments of the
cosmology and practices of a people called the Moderns, then draws out the contrast3.
I don't think the term 'Modern' was introduced as a catch-all to capture all previous philosophies or even those of the modern era. Latour offers an alternative to any ontology, but there are thinkers out there that don't fit the scheme of modernity as Latour proposes it. Furthermore, a relatively early ([1991] 1993) work by Latour is called We Have Never Been Modern. His latest book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, although subtitled An Anthropology of the Moderns, claims that what Latour calls 'the modernist parenthesis', a period starting with the Renaissance in Europe, is coming to a close4. The parenthesis opens with
instituting a dichotomy between what is natural and what is subjective through what Latour (following Whitehead) calls “the bifurcation of nature”5: the split between primary and secondary qualities. I will take
some time here to introduce those I feel Latour always take too little time to introduce: the Moderns themselves.
What distinguishes the Moderns from others, is their belief in an objective existence, nature, that must be grasped by a mechanistic natural science. A practice, defined by them, as pitting a human pole of understanding faculties against a 'matter' or 'nature' that has “always existed and always been there”6 from which
it either extracts (primary) natural, objective information, or of which it has an aesthetic (secondary) experience. The sciences that supposedly rest on the subject/object-poles involved are their prime example of rationality, rationality being among their highest values7.
Science is the activity that should do no less than understand the world as it really is. They thus reckon two ontological registers in their cosmology: objective nature, and humans that can either approach that object aesthetically or rationally. Latour grants God the role of source of morality, but on the moral side of the bifurcation He becomes a “crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines”. The moderns recognize: subject, object, and a source for moral interpretations of events, irrelevant to studying primary qualities: “Modernity
arises first from the conjoined creation of those three entities”8.
If Latour can define modernity, whence the claim that we, Westerners, have never been modern? Latour claims that these people that have claimed “to practice self-awareness, self-analysis, critique, lucidity […]
are opaque and in great need of ethnography”9. Their cosmology does not match the ontological commitments
their practices show, had they closely observed their relations to a world they hold to be morally interpretable, aesthetically pleasing, in later periods socio-historically constructed, but above all materially
inert, objective and strictly calculable (in later periods probabilistic). On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in,
and archive work on, laboratories, Latour develops the intuition that in practice, the seemingly inert world, is rather conjoined with the humans in a way that disallows an ontology in which there are just subjects and inert, interpreted, studied objects.
The reader may object: not all Westerners uncritically accept the certitude of the sciences, nor do all of them hold (whatever variety of) mechanics to describe what there is. And the reader is right: but 'Modern' designates those upholding the bifurcation. Moreover, the 'parenthesis' is coming to an end, so there may very well be people outside its scope. The other fact of the matter is that recognizably Modern themes survive until this day: a science of mechanics (Cartesian, Newtonian or quantum-) is often held to describe the basic foundations of the world, and textbooks, magazines, newspapers, philosophies, public- and not-so-public intellectuals defend the idea of a rational subject versus a simply existent, interpretable and mathematically describable objective world that scientific statements should truly identify.
The reason I think Latour is a philosophically interesting figure is that his main body of work is guided by two intuitions that run counter to the bifurcation that, even if you think his historical analyses misguided, set up an interesting framework that allows one to deal with the subject/object-divide as a proposed division of labor between world and mind in terms of passivity, activity, objectivity, meaning-projection and construction: an ontological puzzle with spots for stability and flux, built around a gap “philosophically privileged over every other sort of relation”, to be crossed in a correspondence theory of truth: mind's “access to the world”10. One that, moreover, does no justice to practices.
The first Latourian counter-intuition I became familiar with through Science in Action, The
Pasteurization of France and Pandora's Hope. The Moderns say they calculate inert nature's mechanisms
through empirical observation and rational thought: but what undermines this cosmology is that the tools that help them carry out their practices are enormously influential on ('mediate') their human capacities. In practice, the two poles not only blur, but are crossed out: objects act, their capacities embed themselves in what the moderns call human reason, but rather is a techno-scientific network. Moderns constantly add to nature: mathematical qualities, forces, entities and laws. They were not “there all along”11, because these
actants or qualities of actants are in Latour's sense simultaneously real and (because!) well-constructed12 in
conditions under which these entities, qualities and claims about them do not fall apart. 'Naturally', the moderns say, 'whatever we discover has always been there'. This, however, is false: investigating the discovery-situation reveals the many mediations actants go through before naturalization13.
The second counter-intuition I became familiar with through We Have Never Been Modern, Why has
Critique Run out of Steam? and the Inquiry: the Moderns do not just (unknowingly) participate in the
more threatening, strengthening Latour's incentives for cosmological revision above. Spurred by ecological concerns: “where are we to classify the ozone hole story, or global warming or deforestation? Where are we to put these hybrids? Are they human? Human because they are our work. Are they natural? Natural because they are not our doing”15. Such entities are ambiguous, because sciences can describe them, but the situations described are
unnatural. The loss or changing of beings (forests, the air, et cetera) we rely on for our existence strengthens and broadens the intuition above that to be is not to be naturally but to function in an 'ecosystem' of favorable rather (this has implications for political and moral philosophy) than natural conditions, further problematizing the modern cosmology of human and nature. What is scientifically studied must not be natural and the rationality involved does not function independently from instruments. In this thesis I illustrate, demonstrate, put to work, explicate and argue for these intuitions.
I do so in three chapters. The first two chapters present attempts to explain and demonstrate Latour's ethnographic method known as actor-network theoryi as a social-scientific-cum-metaphysical research
program: empirical metaphysics. It was impossible, it would even be contrary to my purpose of blurring the lines between these fields, to keep anthropological investigation, philosophical system-building and philosophical critique apart. I have, however, tried to deal with the more technical philosophical problems, like Latour's critique of canonical philosophical programs, and Latour's notion of existence, in chapter one, whereas I reserved matters closer to the study of human behavior, like developing Latour's notion of habit and a critique of the programs of other 'science scholars', for chapter two.
In chapter one I introduce Latour as a metaphysician. This has been done before by Graham Harman, but in my view his interpretation does not fully absorb the intuitions above. These, bundled together in
empirical metaphysics, I think are metaphysically replenishing and metaphysically destructive, for Latour can
present a new metaphysical realism based in the ontological commitments of practice, only at the cost of rewiring the relation between human and world we know as the modern cosmology, one that we can find, surely not in all philosophy, but in a great deal of it. I shall deal with some familiar philosophical frameworks to illustrate that the subject/object-relation fails to express features of the world that Latour claims are fundamental.
Rather than to just report my interpretation of Latour's metaphysics, I use the second chapter to enter into ethnographic work of my own. I work on the hypothesis from the Inquiry that the opening of the 'parenthesis', the invention of matter as a mathematized, stable existence, is a highly complex settlement that relies on an amalgamation of various modes of existence that should, by the ontological index of empirical metaphysics, be kept strictly separate16. In this investigation I involved studying technical procedures carried
out, and machines built, by Renaissance artists, techniques adopted from them by mathematicians, and the technical skills of engineers, to arrive at an explanation of the mechanical picture of the world in which the world is inherently mathematical. This allowed me to add to, or innovate on, Latour's account of the
invention of matter in the Inquiry because whereas he identifies a complex of two modes of existence, I think the account becomes much clearer (at least thicker) if one involves five. Moreover this chapter allows me to enter into discussion with other programs in the sociology of knowledge, and to pit Latour's notion of historical construction against theirs.
The third chapter, in a way, is the most experimental: having so far demonstrated and employed ANT vocabulary, insights and methodology, it seemed worthwhile to enter into a methodological discussion with other frameworks in ontology. Because it has never been done before, to my knowledge, and to open up new avenues of study to travel down and to facilitate communications between different styles of philosophy that, although all concerned with existence, seem far apart, I picked contemporary and well-established frameworks from the analytic field in order to draw out the contrast between Latour's ontology and that of his contemporaries. Whereas his aims at describing the various ways in which actants affect each other, calling these 'modes of existence', the other ontologies rather trace ontological commitments in language, be it that of the natural sciences or language expressing common intuitions countenanced by concerns of theoretical economy, to arrive at an ontology. I call the latter rather formal, as opposed to empirical metaphysics, the ontology of which I call based in unformatted content.
As a conclusion to this introduction, some remarks on what I think makes ANT worthwhile, and on what I didn't do in my thesis. Rather than listing things I could have done better, I will leave that to the reader, who will undoubtedly have ideas on this. I rather would give an impression of the weird 'coincidences' I left out of consideration: rereading Harman, I rediscovered his (and mine!) admiration for Lovecraft. When Harman was in Amsterdam a couple of years ago Tom Kayzel and I almost gave him a Cthulhu statuette for a present. When he came to the Drift Festival a couple of years later we gave him an object-oriented Rubik's Cube, one of the tiles of which had a stylized head of the Old One on it. Lovecraft's monsters always announce themselves by bending space into non-Euclidian forms. It seems that the love of monstrosities, whether you're Latour, a writer of 'weird fiction', or an object-oriented ontologist (Harman sometimes calls himself a 'weird realist'), and upsetting scientistic views of the world, are somehow linked.
I also came to wonder how it is possible that Latour, and Ladyman & Ross pick American pragmatists, James or Peirce respectively, as their patron saint, yet develop such different standpoints. Why did Maximilián Pirner paint a canvas called Empirical Metaphysics in 1919? Why do Ladyman & Ross develop a position called 'rainforest realism'? Is it an accident that Latour's clearest (in my opinion) exposition of his realism comes from ethnographically investigating a scientific investigation of the soil in the Amazon forest? Is it an accident that Deleuze & Guattari talk of a choice between arboretic and rhizomatic thought? Not to mention the strange fittingness of the psychoanalytic 'vanishing mediator' and 'subject supposed to know' I was reminded of when flicking through Žižek, to describe knowledge-production in Latour...
Jokes aside: what is very thought-provoking about ANT is that it draws together masses of things and people one can hardly imagine ever being in the same text together. I know of no other school of thought and research capable of drawing together: Aristotle, res cogitans, Deleuze, Quine, possible worlds,
Kant, Renaissance art, nightingales, modality, cyborgs, Adorno, microscopes, vision-rays, paint brushes, Foucault, matter, calculators, Guattari, armchairs, environmental concerns, feminism, real patterns, non-humans, standard theories of knowledge, reference and being, Hegel, res extensa, Galileo, essences, Derrida, being-as-other, anthropology, metaphysics, constructivism, realism, Horkheimer, the list goes on...ii ANT
tears them apart when necessary, recombines them if at all possible and presents a new metaphysics, that I have done my best to catch the fundamentals of, and employ, in the following pages.
ii This is what Ian Bogost calls a Latour litany. You can have them generated at random at this location: http://bogost.com/writing/blog/latour_litanizer/
Chapter 1 Empirical Metaphysics
In this chapter I introduce empirical metaphysics. I do so by (re-)introducing Latour as a metaphysician, often in reference to Harman's 2009 account. I disagree with Harman, argue against him and demonstrate and argue for my own interpretation. Moreover, to show the merit of Latour's work, I briefly discuss Latour's reading of predominant themes shared between canonical figures in continental philosophy and present analyses of my own, to defend Latour's views.
Section 1
The Threefold Structure of Empirical Metaphysics
Ethnography, Metaphysical Replenishment, Metaphysical Destruction
I claim Latour's empirical metaphysics has a threefold structure. Empirical metaphysics attempts to present a theory about the fundamental features of the world and dislodge others. So much is the same as ever; but Latour's project aims to 'add reality' to whatever is investigated, to be able to present whatever practice or object in a richer manner than before investigation.
First, as ethnography, it “describes both what the moderns actually do and what they really care about”17.
There would be no point to ethnography if human practices were highly transparent. There are, however, good reasons for rejecting familiar accounts of what modern life consists of. Latour traces, in the context of science, all the prerequisites to the 'objective' relation to nature we take pride in. Scientific practices are not transparent, and philosophies concerning our access to things have hence made mistakes, plunging into equally unwarranted positivism and skepticismiii. Like Latour-aficionado Harman expressively put it: “when
the centaur of classical metaphysics is mated with the cheetah of [ANT], their offspring is [...] a thoroughbred colt able to carry us for half a century or more”18, beyond the human/world-correlation, scientism, constructivism,
idealism and materialism. The agencies of actants render these metaphysical set-ups obsoleteiv.
Secondly, Latour's thought is replenishing to metaphysics, for it turns out that: “everything passes
iii The point of the introduction to Latour's Inquiry and the article Why has Critique Run out of Steam?, is to demonstrate that scientific practice, in the eyes of outsiders (academics in different fields, politicians, the public) takes on an opaque status: a thing which one either trusts, or doubts of. One either believes in natural objectivity, or emphasizes the critical role a person must take against authority. Latour argues against climate sceptics, skeptical of the trustworthiness of scientific claims, by opening up laboratories to the public – in the same vein, he argues against social constructivists like Bloor who claim that scientific claims do not describe realities but rather express cultural categories of understanding.
iv Arguably we may treat social constructivism as a metaphysical set-up because it purportedly tells us something about basic features of reality. To put it very simply, it states that what's real is a subjective historically formed reality, of which we do not know how close it is to a hidden objective reality.
between [subject and object], everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks, but this space does not exist [for the Moderns]”19: what seems to them to be science is mostly discourse employing 'hard facts'v. Latour
describes the 'in-between' ethnographically, compares and confronts modern metaphysics with it, and in this manner employs it as an explanatory force, adding realism to science, otherwise conceived of as the exemplary practice of a truth-producing relation between object and subject. Says Latour: “If science studies
has achieved anything, […] it has added reality to science, not withdrawn any from it […], we have portrayed lively characters […] closely connected to a larger and more vibrant milieu”20. It was exactly the vibrancy of the milieu
that metaphysics did not represent. Doing so results in a new metaphysical realism.
Finally, this is a destructive metaphysical move: “the moderns do not do what they say they are doing –
there is a gap between ordinary experiences”, experiences like knowledge-producing, “and the official accounts of
them”21 found in philosophies, textbooks, magazines and public defenses of science, further emphasizing the
need for an ethnography of the moderns. Arriving at this point from a different angle: if philosophers, science popularizers, humanists, metaphysicians, et cetera, are wrong about how humans and non-humans relate22, then the subject/object-distinction fails. It turns out, because the distribution of agencies must be
revised, that we need to re-settle metaphysics: the stability of nature and the universality of the subject will undergo critique. Or rather: reality will be added to them. What is hypostatized as material nature will turn out to be a rather complex interplay of active non-humans and humans, what is opposed to it as a mind will
too turn out to be a rather complex interplay of active non-humans and humansvi. As we will see, Harman's
defense of individuals does not suit Latour's metaphysics.
Like any other metaphysics, empirical metaphysics aims at reality; 'giving a good account of ultimate reality involves somehow grappling with reality' seems tautological. Latour's complaint about much of philosophy is, however, how “indifferent philosophy has become to the tasks of description”vii. Involving
agency in the quest for a description of what there is, allows us to arrive at informative claims like “X is an X,
behaves like an X, because it is a composite, holding together, of WYZ”. 'Added reality' is therefore a matter of
coming up with descriptions of reality that are thicker, more trustworthy, than philosophy that arrives at the mere 'essence' of a matter. Indeed, Latour does not recognize essences at the base of his ontology and I devote much space to weeding out this notion and replacing it with more realistic ones, given the 'vibrancy' of actants, though reserving the term 'obtained essence' for those entities so well-constructed by heterogeneous agencies that they 'simply' subsist23. We shall have to explain the origin of seemingly self-subsisting inertia
v But see note iii about climate sceptics above. For the rhetorical use of facts: Latour, B., What is the Style of
Matters of Concern? and Science in Action.
vi We can sense here Latour was on the verge of collapsing into actant-monism (Latour, B., An Inquiry into
Modes of Existence, p. 62) before he specified the fifteen modes of existence in the Inquiry. In the above I
have repeatedly invoked 'human' and 'non-human' as categories, but also noted that such categories do not truly hold – so far we have thus merely disguised a 'monism' of 'heterogeneous agencies' of which we will specify some, but not all, modes recognized by Latour in chapter two and three.
vii Which is why he won't settle for the term 'empirical philosophy': Latour, B., An Inquiry into Modes of
within Latour's framework, built on a labor-notionviii of existence.
Section 2
Reassembling Bruno Latour
Adding Reality to Harman's Account
In this section, I will (re)-introduce Latour as a metaphysician, innovating on Harman's earlier account24 to
explain, as he does not, what a labor-notion of existence is. It was Harman who introduced Latour as a metaphysician, hence I felt that my attempt to read Latour as such must take his view into account. The main problem with how Harman interprets Latour is how he interprets Latour's notion of 'actant': according to Harman, they are ontologically complete individuals by inherent integrity. Harman thinks any metaphysics reluctant to simply accept individuals is useless25; entailing infinite regresses of parts26. Harman writes: “The
most typical feature of Latour's philosophy is the dignity it grants to all sizes and types of actors. Neutrons [...] and black holes […], fictional characters”27, “propositions, and mathematical theorems”28, establishing, supposedly, for
Latour, their existence simpliciter. Although it is true that these actants are welcomed into reality, this is not a
full explication of their existences. I claim that for Latour, defending a labor-notion of existence, there is no such thing as existence simplicter. I agree with Harman on other topics.
Harman, as do I, thinks reading Latour as a metaphysician means: “expressing Latourian insights in
terms bearing on the basic structure of reality”29. I interpret this as: understanding Latour's ontology as a prima
philosophia that can accommodate the practices of humans and non-humans that Latour, as an ethnographer,
investigates30; to present a theory about the fundamental features of the world. However, I think Harman
ignores features of Latour's metaphysics that are crucial in that regard. In part, he could do nothing about this: since Harman's last work on Latour as a metaphysician, Latour has explicitly outlined his philosophical project31. Since there is no break between Latour's old and new workix, parts of Harman's interpretation
should be revised.
viii If this raises too many Marxist associations, set them aside. It is only meant to express that existence is agency. 'Action' sounds too active, since mountains and other slow things are supposed to hold together in this manner, as are species of animals and individual dinosaurs. I have less of a problem conceiving of agencies like pieces of grass growing and keeping together dunes, and rock pressing upon rock, as labor. This is an aesthetic choice. One could moreover say that labor is a subheading of acting anyway (unless Arendt (following Arendt, H., The Human Condition) is on the scene. Then 'labor' makes more sense than 'acting' or 'work'. There are, I think, interesting connections to be made between Arendt's taxonomy of acting, labor and work, her notion of politics, the public sphere and democracy and Latour's notions of
thing-politics, politics in general, the res publica, agency, et cetera. We shall not deal with these here).
ix Although Delchambre & Marquis, in Modes of Existence Explained to the Moderns (2013), claim just that. Theirs is in any case not a problem of incommensurability of the two projects: it is that earlier works neglect something which the latest work does according to them (this is their mistake): explicating the positive addition that ANT makes to the self-understanding of Moderns. In my view, ANT always did
just that, for it always showed the mediations that went into creating objectivity and other values the
In 1998, Harman began interpreting Latour as a philosopher32. In 2005 Harman developed a position
close to Latour's, called object-oriented ontology33. Harman's 2007 stance is that “Latour gives us possibly the first object-oriented philosophy”x, sidestepping the idea that the human-world relation critically limits metaphysical
inquiry into relations in the world. We shall deal with such 'Kantianism' below. Latour's metaphysics (as all object-oriented philosophy) deals with relations between things regardless of whether they are human or non-human34. Latour does this by mapping, either through ethnographic field- or archive work, the interplay
between human and non-human existences, called 'actants', defined by their performancesxi; ontologically
reckoned by the pragmatic criterion of displaying agencyxii. They join into actor-networks to constitute what
we think of as nature and everything else there is.
I think accepting agency as the threshold for existence – no one else, to my knowledge, raises this point – entails that subject and object only remain in Latour's vocabulary, as a translation device to turn statements into observations applicable to concepts in current academic parlancexiii. Highly stable, yet
therefore not unconstructed, assemblages of actants35 take the place of the supposedly designated entities
(human/subject, thing/object)xiv. Harman seems to ignore this, by proposing an understanding of 'actants' as
complete individuals. Harman writes: the Inquiry presents a “mammoth alternate version of [Latour's] system”xv.
Latour's Inquiry is a fuller exposition of what was always behind Latour's works. Nothing has changed, but Harman's individuals-account seems not to fit anymore. The new input problematizes his interpretation; almost as if we're doing philosophy empirically!
I think Harman misinterprets two features of Latour's metaphysics: I) he overestimates the supposed primacy of individual things (humans and non-humans36) in Latour's metaphysics, informed by the thought
that a metaphysics featuring an ontology of aggregates and some mechanism for individuation is “futile”37. I
claim this, however, is what Latour's notions of network and habit are supposed to fix. Networks I shall explain
x Harman, G., The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy, p. 36. Two years earlier his claim was a bit weaker: “Bruno Latour […] is probably the closest to the position that I will defend” (Harman G., Guerrilla
Metaphysics, p. 77), and he puts it more strongly two years later: “Latour [is] a pioneer of object oriented philosophy” (Harman, G., Prince of Networks, p. 151).
xi Latour, B., Pandora’s Hope, p. 303. They might also be called actors. The minimal difference being: “in
English “actor” is often limited to humans, the word “actant” […] is sometimes used to include nonhumans”. The
choice to call the theory ANT was perhaps made to sound less innovative to sociologists familiar with Goffman's dramaturgic idiom.
xii It was no surprise that in the Inquiry Latour shows his indebtedness to William James. We see his influence in Latour's idea of experience, and the idea of alteration (to be is to make a difference is practice, for pragmatists). Such pragmatic concerns can also be used contra Harman's infinite regress-rejoinder. Although a longer discussion would be useful, there is no space for this.
xiii Not too far remote from Derrida’s critique of binaries: they are false oppositions, but we cannot reason without them. But this is speculation.
xiv Yes, it's an ontological conspiracy theory: conspiracies of secret agents have always already taken the place of our trusted subjects and objects!
xv Harman, G., Prince of Networks, p. 6: Harman knew from personal correspondence and attending symposia that Latour was working on an alternate version of, not an alternative to, earlier works.
in this chapter, leaving habits for the second. II): he ignores Latour's indebtedness to postmodern thinkers who undermine the terms, and the supposed integrity of the things designated by, 'subject' and (characteristic of Harman) 'object'. I will elucidate I) by formulating what Latour contains of authors recognized under II). Taken together, I call this 'adding reality' because, where Latour 'adds reality'38 to our
understanding of the world by ethnographically indexing the agencies that constitute it, adding them to an account of Latour's metaphysics that skips them over, achieves a similar result.
There are, for Latour, many kinds of agencies, all ascribed to actors that one operating in a 'Kantian' paradigmxvi would categorize as either subject/object-pole, as many in philosophy and sociology doxvii,
including those phenomenologically inclinedxviii. These agencies however conform to neither
subject/object-pole. Central to Latour's metaphysical project is to show the volatile and composite status of anything, and to institute a labor-notion of existence: to maintain unity, to simply subsist, is to act39. This means that we do
not lose tables (suppose we believe tables have no agency) only at the cost of losing 'subjects' and 'objects' –
self-subsisting inertia being the association with 'object', reserving activity for subjects – as basic ontological markers, sending the understandings off to the realm of 'habit' where being's intricacies are omittedxix and
the things to the intricate networks in which seemingly self-identical things seemingly come to rest.
'Habit' we shall deal extensively with in chapter two. Below, I examine the way in which notions like
individual, thing, or object could make sense. For Latour there are no individual existences simpliciter. This is why
Latour's ontology cannot be object-oriented in Harman's sense: as if it were oriented to stabilities. We should render what typifies Latour's metaphysics differently; it is a mistake to render everything even as active existences simpliciter. This misreading might be due to Harman's thinking Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Foucault are foreign to Latour40. I wish not to spend much time on them; a quick survey adumbrates the
theme of the intricacies of existences Harman seems to neglect. I shall be linking themes, rather than writing a detailed technical exposition.
xvi Existence is merely a category of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, I., Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, A80/B106 (1781)). This persists all the way through Husserl (Méditationes Cartésiennes (1929)).
The ontological status of things in later phenomenologists is more ambivalent: in L'être et le N'éant (1943) Sartre attacks Husserl on this point.
xvii Even pre-Kantians: the scheme on page 58 of We Have Never Been Modern lists canonical authors from Hobbes to the postmoderns (it includes Hegel and Heidegger).
xviii Perhaps this explains Latour's negative judgements about phenomenology (especially Heidegger): the human pole is too unitary, the hammers too much under its command. There is some sense to this: the world is as much sense endowed by Dasein as by consciousness in Husserl, in my interpretation. Sartre, however, often mentions that the real offers resistance to our projects. There are, by the way, phenomenological sociologists, like Alfred Schutz.
Detour de Latour: The Latourization of Postmodernism
Harman had good reasons to ignore postmodernism: Latour seemingly distances himself from it41. What
Latour means with postmodernism is the cliché “confidence in the extension of reason has been abandoned”42.
However, Latour credits Deleuze and Derrida in the article Biography of an Inquiry. Henning Schmidgen's 2015 Intellectual Biography emphasizes the influence of Derrida and Deleuze & Guattarixx. Moreover, “the
actor-network […] is a lot closer to Foucault's concept of dispositif than one would think at first sight”43.
Authors called 'postmodern' developed projects purportedly reaching insight into the constitution of the real, treading (immanent) (meta-)metaphysical waters: concerned with the production of, with what
produces and maintains, truths, natures, rationalities and universals; 'subjective' and 'objective' items. Donna
Haraway and her cyborgs44, to whom Latour dedicates Pandora's Hope, round off the influences. With the
concepts below one can replace Harman's 'individuals'-interpretation, capturing features of Latour's ontology Harman cannot properly accommodate: the heterogeneity rather than integrity of existences. The point here is to emphasize, contra Harman, the theme of composition in Latour's metaphysics and to explain Latour's conception of existence as action, in order set the stage for the more intricate discussion of Harman's views on Latour, to present mine with a contrast. In the Inquiry Latour shows he holds actants to be
composites of varieties of modes of existence. He presents an ontology consisting of fifteen kinds of agencies
(existences) that together constitute the familiar things of this world. This I interpret as a variation on the themes in the table on the next page.
xx Among others. Schmidgen's Biography lists as influences: philosophers: Lyotard, Serres, Souriau, Nietzsche and Spinoza. Historical epistemologists: Bachelard, Canguihelm. Semiotician: Greimas. Theologian: Bultmann. Sociologists: Giddens and Tarde.
xxi Found in Haraways Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, especially in the Cyborg Manifesto it contains.
xxii 'Historical construction' is not confined to Haraway in any way of course, but Haraway's rendering of it in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women is particularly friendly to the Latourian notion of ontological hybridization as I argue, or at least claim to demonstrate.
xxiii Found in Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F., Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines: “bring [man and
machine] into communication in order to show how man is a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other men”. It can be
found in the psychoanalytical sense in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, but a synonym or the same concept was employed in the Balance-Sheet Program, pointing towards the fact of broader ontological ambiguity. xxiv Found in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, but the larval and fragmented subjects in Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition do not seem to me to be far remote. Of course the 'assemblage'-vocabulary is also a well-known
feature of Deleuze & Guattari's writing, and is currently used, for example, by Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett.
xxv This notion is discussed by Foucault in Power/Knowledge.
xxvi This notion is discussed by Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge.
Author Concepts Interpretation/relevance to Harman's Latour
Haraway Cyborgs & Historical construction Cyborg is the term for an organism/machine-hybrid, used
to designate modern peoplexxi. Historical constructionxxii is
the term introduced to explain that an X we conceive of as natural, is not.
Deleuze & Guattari
Transversality & The pre-personal Transversality is an ontological twilight status. The
transversal entity is neither clearly subject nor object. In psychoanalysis it bears an ambiguous relation to a psyche: i.e. a child's teddy bearxxiii. The pre-personal is a term
recognizing that prior to personhood, one is constructed from materials or experiences that are therefore pre-personalxxiv
Foucault Dispositif & The formation of objects
The dispositif is the ‘material’ factor in the genealogical analyses of knowledge; the ‘apparatuses’ for maintaining knowledgexxv. The (discursive) formation of objects is the
process of defining the objects of a science by the scientists. Tracking socio-historical considerations, Foucault recognizes that the objects factual statements refer to are not simply givenxxvi.
To explicate: Foucault uses his analyses to get to the object-filled heart (dispositifxxvii), of the
maintenance of knowledge. This resembles Latour's actor-networks of (apparently Derrida-inspiredxxviii)
'inscription devices': instruments producing formalized results, 'inscriptions', of their measurements45. These
constitute 'centers of calculation': assemblies of such devices and operators that put out scientific descriptions of phenomena46. The devices thus produce results we surmise only subjects can, constructing
knowledge with certain authority. For this observation, Latour mentions Foucault positivelyxxix. Science (the
construction of facts) is therefore an activity in which human and machine become conjoined47. Nor does
object formation (although Latour does not follow Foucault's account) allow objects to be simply givenxxx.
Although Latour does not use the term 'cyborg', the following holds true: scientists achieve ('obviously') cyborg status, as “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and
crafted”48, for all entities involved are problematic to the subject/object-dichotomy. The machines talk, the
test-subjects are not natural givens.
Whether in a psychoanalytic, historical(-materialist), or another register is unimportant: if the authors abovexxxi share a theme, found in Latourxxxii, it is outlining the prerequisites for
making-objective/naturalizing relations, opinions and things. They develop indexes of realities (texts, machines, policies) constitutive of reality, undermining reality's supposed integrity. They equip themselves with inquisitive techniques to arrive at an index of what goes into making reality, and hence come up with an account of powers and agencies that constitute not only the truths and objects of science, but affairs within domains like religion, government, the body, the economy, the psyche, law, et cetera, broadening the scope of reality beyond naturalism, through field- and archival- workxxxiii. This can be read as: recovering agencies
xxvii This term is often translated as 'apparatus'.
xxviii The influence of Derrida on Latour lies in the idea of “inscriptions” (Latour, B., Biography of an Inquiry, p. 4) allowing Latour to “[bypass] both knowing subjects and known objects” (Biography of an Inquiry, p. 6) in his description of science, and invalidate them as ontological markers. Schmidgen explains that in
Laboratory Life (1979) “[Latour and Woolgar] understand “inscription” not only as letters and symbols. Rather they use the term “to summarize all traces, spots, […] recorded numbers [...]””, hence anything that, when
added to earlier texts, turns texts into facts (Schmidgen, H., Bruno Latour in Pieces, p. 45).
xxix In 2005: Latour, B., Reassembling the Social, p. 82.
xxx The terminology of modes of existence and especially the 'enunciative function' Latour deems specific to one of his modes ('reproduction') are found in Foucault's Archaeology too (Foucault, M., The Archaeology of
Knowledge, p. 100). Determining whether this is terminological coincidence or conceptual inheritance
would require an in-depth study; for which there is no space in this thesis. xxxi I have not forgotten about Badiou.
xxxii Tom Kayzel showed me this passage by Ian Hacking from 1992, basically making the same point: “Latour is a bracing reminder of that glorious Parisian world of long ago in the late sixties, when inscriptions were
the reality and text was substance” (The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences, in Science as practice and culture, ed. Pickering, A.). Of course, to be a reminder is not to be an exemplar.
xxxiii Both can be part of the ethnographic framework of Latour (see chapter three), for they are manners of tying humans together to the things they employ and are employed by to go about their business. With field, here. I mean the clinics of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, and of course the 'archive-' reaches anywhere. Empirical metaphysics cannot uncritically adopt their findings, because of differences in method. But in this exposition, I was looking for similarities.
which confront us constantly, which we forget once we uncritically live on.
Back on Track: Relative Existence
One prescript of Latour's metaphysics is “not to shock common sense”xxxiv. The inexistence of individual things
would be shocking. From the above we could however conclude that everything is, in fact, merely constructed, hence nothing should be conceived of as individual. We have seen above that Harman thinks individuals exist tout court. And it indeed seems incoherent to say that an item one can manipulate or be manipulated by, a text or idea one can reiterate or that impresses us49, does not exist. Latour proposes a
complicated relation between individuals and actor-networks. Whereas Harman holds that individuals
absolutely exist (also for Latour50) because it is otherwise inexplicable why we reckon individuals rather than
swarms, Latour holds that we should “define existence not as an all-or-nothing concept”51. Moreover, based in
ethnography, this should express a common experience of the worldxxxv. I shall unpack this claim in the
remainder of this chapter.
A 'futile' phrase that Harman attributes to Badiou (whose influence Schmidgen nor Latour mention, but whose proximity Harman explicitly rejects) comes close to saving Latour from an ontology of only assemblages that reduce their 'individual'-effect to (the would-be-shocking) illusion: “there are units only
because they are counted as one, not through any inherent integrity of their own”52. Latour holds something
similar. There are two notions in his framework that help us specify this: network and habit53. Habit fulfills
the function of recognizing and dealing with seemingly ontological units that are nonetheless relative to aggregates54 and the notion of network serves to explain the holding-together of these aggregates, bypassing
any notion of inherent integrity. The lesson learnt by Latour from the postmoderns above, is to problematize the ontological markers 'subject' and 'object'. To posit a generality, that holds true of Latour too, which Harman seems to have missed: they offer analyses of seemingly unproblematically existing things we accept as humans, things, objects, subjects, and problematize that status as hybrid and belabored. Latour traces, what I call, the interaffecting of agencies that are reducible to neither subject/object-pole.
This entails a view on individual, incompatible with Harman's interpretation of Latour: to bypass subjects and objects is not just to recognize, versus reductive scientism and social constructivism, the agency of non-human actants like Harman does, but to ontologically dignify and interpret the heterogeneity and labor that goes into constituting them. I have chosen to highlight this throughout the following with Haraway's notions. These allow me to replace the individuality of Harman's individuals with the compositeness of 'subjects' and 'objects', cancelling out the stability of these categories with Latour's notion of agency. In the below I argue, against Harman, that philosophy must not resist the urge to “despite our
xxxiv Latour, B., An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, p. 59. This phrase Latour adopts from Alfred North Whitehead.
constant experience of objects in daily life, […] find a more basic reality lying beneath all these entities”55. Latour has
resources to abate Harman's fear of infinite regress. This is where I differ from Harman most: I claim he misses what makes Latours metaphysics empirical.
What Makes Metaphysics Empirical?
Latour is often (mis)understood as a 'mere' “ethnographer [...] of everyday technology”56 or a 'science scholar'57.
In that role, as Harman says, to “mainstream defenders of science, [Latour] is just another soft French relativist who
denies the reality of the external world”58. Their notion of objectivity will be explained away as a cultural
phenomenonxxxvi, but Latour does not discard the trust in the sciences so closely linked to it, as we shall see.
His metaphysics is an attempt to conceptually rewire the presentation of science's relation to its objects59,
modelled on scientific practice, and not to deny said relation. But “Latour is attacked simultaneously for opposite
reasons”, for this “commerce with non-humans makes him [for social constructivists] a sellout to fossilized classical realism”xxxvii. This cannot be right: any shape the subject/object-settlement has taken, has to be discarded in
the light of Latour's empirical findings. Says Latour: “[the production of truth] is attached neither to the knowing
subject nor to the known object”60, no practice essentially tied to them, all adjacent theory erroneous. In the
following, I shall present a more in-depth interpretation of Latour's metaphysics, taking into account the concerns above; without: a) overplaying the individuality of actants, b) collapsing into old-fashioned realism,
c) collapsing into social constructivism. I will do b) & c) (parts of Harman's account to be preserved) by a)
(contra-Harman) explicating why this renders Latour's metaphysics empiricalxxxviii.
Although Latour does not call his project by a definite name, switching between ANT, symmetrical
anthropology, empirical philosophy, cosmopolitics, comparative anthropology, experimental metaphysics and practical ontology, I settled here for the term empirical metaphysicsxxxix, because it captures what is innovative about
Latour's work when presenting him as a metaphysician. Latour's work establishes a metaphysics, but is anthropology, and in this manner, Latour unsettles long-lasting tropes in modern philosophy, already hinted at. In particular we have been, and will be dealing, with the subject/object-divide: a proposed division of labor between world and mind in terms of passivity, activity, objectivity, meaning-projection and construction, an ontological puzzle with spots for natures, stability and fluxes built around gap
xxxvi In chapter two.
xxxvii Harman, G., Prince of Networks, p. 5.
xxxviii Setting the stage in the next couple of pages, I shall really get to it in the section Against Individuals.
xxxix I took the term from Harman's Prince of Networks. I supposed that Harman coined the term to name a 2008 colloquium at the London School of Economics. After personal contact with Christophe Leclercq, who worked for Latour's research team for the AIME project, however, it turns out to have been Annemarie Mol of the Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body group at the University of Amsterdam, who coined it, according to Latour himself. After asking her, though, she said the term came from Charis Thompson (Berkeley University). The plot thickens.
“philosophically privileged over every other sort of relation”, to be crossed in a correspondence theory of truth: mind's “access to the world”61.
Given that ethnography is the undertaking of describing world-bound human practices, it is no surprise that a metaphysics based in anthropology produces accounts of practices accessing the world, rather than regimented concepts that create problems: subject excludes objectxl. Latour takes an exemplar of access held in high esteem in philosophy and among the moderns generally, natural science, and draws out the contrast between the actants, empirically traced, involved in the constitution of access, and subject/object-cosmology. The point of empirical metaphysics is to turn that actant-filled account into an alternative description of access on par with modern philosophy; the empirically metaphysical supplement to modern metaphysics.
I wish not to say that no other metaphysician ever attempted to be realistic, empirically adequatexli,
nor that any rationalist moment is per se faulty, but rather that it is possible to strike a different balance between the sensible and philosophy than often has been done in traditional models of philosophy (especially through the subject/object divide), through the descriptive methods of the social rather than the exact sciences. What distinguishes such empirical metaphysics from older frameworks, is having a touchstone for theories in experience preceding (I will argue that these should be preferred in chapter three) the 'brute factitiousness' of the existence of material things and their 'adventures through space and time'xlii. Says Latour: “we shall know how to speak appropriately about a plurality of types of beings by relying on the guiding
thread of experience, on empiricism as William James defined it: nothing but experience, yes, but nothing less than experience”62. Latour's metaphysics is rooted in experience through ethnographyxliii; an experience that does
not omit the agency of existences, absent from being-qua-material things and from Harman's individuals.
xl Gerard de Vries once pointed out that Latour argues along Wittgensteinian lines: concepts create problems, looking at practices in which such notions would play a role solves them by annulling them. xli Aristotle, for example, did nothing but attempt to be adequate in this respect. Leading him and/or those
of his school (the introduction to the Loeb-published book tells me the classicists are unsure), into questions of detail like: 'Why do fishermen, divers for murex, and generally those whose work is on the sea have
red hair? Is it because the sea is hot and a drying agent because it is salty?' ((pseudo-)Aristotle, Problems (+/- 300
BC)). On the other hand, it is not an uncommon opinion that it takes until the twentieth century for the relation between world and human, ruined by Descartes (following Heidegger, M., Sein und Zeit (1927)), to become less awkward.
xlii I take this phrase from Whitehead, sprinkled throughout his Science and the Modern World and The
Concept of Nature to designate what the natural sciences think they are inspecting: a simply existent and
totally real matter and its causal relations (to which secondary qualities can always be reduced), taking place in time and space.
Section 3 Against Individuals
Latour Without Overplaying the Individuality of Actants
The goal here is to present Latour without collapsing his thought into old-fashioned realism or social constructivism, to that extent agreeing with Harman. Empirical metaphysics works against these options, because the first recognizes neither the constructedness nor agency (outside causal powers) of things and the second overestimates the role of the subject in the composition of the world. I claim Latour's metaphysics is best presented as empirical metaphysics if we do not (contra Harman) overplay the integrity of actants. Harman portrays Latourian metaphysics as expressing the following four core ideas, arrived at by sifting through Latour's case studies. That is not to say these principles are intuitive. The four pillars are: ontological equity (flatness)xliv, the principle of irreduction, the principle of translation and the principle of
alliance63. These define, according to Harman the strain of realism that Latour presents:
Whereas “realism usually accepts some ultimate substance […]. But these substances are merely treated as
[…] a final stratum of reality on which everything else is built. Latour's realism denies [such a substratum]”64, which
forces us to explain rather carefully what the idea of flatness means, because it states simply that “the world is
made up of actors or actants”65. We need to explain in which sense Latour denies a substratum – a claim with
which I agree – and in my view, Harman does not do this very carefully. The slogan however holds for Latour's realism (and not for traditional realisms).
Whereas “traditional realism often defends the parallel notion of essence, since substance ought to have
essential properties [as opposed to accidents] Latour recognizes no inner sanctum of the thing”. Harman uses an
accurate formulation to conclude this feature of Latour's realism: “actants are always public, not hermetic”xlv,
which is to say that to the equity of all beings is added a certain equipage of contingent relations that Latour uses to account for whatever happens in the world. However, the public nature of things should also, in my reading, refer to Latour's notion of anything being a 'matter of concern': whatever seems to simply be factitious, even universal, exists in virtue of being very well-kept66 within a network. I will stress, contra
xliv Prince of Networks, p. 14. Harman says regarding the same principle; “All entities are exactly on the same
ontological footing”. I claim this is not exactly right.
xlv Harman, G., Prince of Networks, p. 72. When Harman says 'traditional', he means: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Leibniz, Democritus and Marx (Ibid.). Of course this is an incomplete overview of realisms, and limited to frameworks from the continent. The overall point however, is that Latour does not collapse into any of these positions – which is true. Dealing with trope- and bundle- theories, as dealing with (realist) anti-essentialists beyond the postmodernists already discussed falls outside of the scope of my thesis. I readily accept the limitation that after six years of study, I know something about continental, but not a lot about analytic thinkers. It is too bad that Harman's overview is, like my knowledge, incomplete, but I hope that the reader can read on after this remark without being surprised by the signature, mine, that this text of course bears. Noting this lack gives me an opportunity for further study, and a first attempt at connecting Latour's metaphysics to contemporary analytic metaphysics is carried out in chapter three of this thesis.
Harman, the myriad agencies involved in keeping together existences.
Finally: “for Latour the split [between things and how they are perceived] merely leads to a Copernican rift
between things-in-themselves and phenomena. His escape route is to insist that we are always in contact with reality”.
Moreover: “Things relate to one another, translate into one another, and are never out of mutual contact”67. We may
call this ecologyxlvi, relativismxlvii – it describes, in any case, the function of a network. We shall see below (the
airplane-example) that Harman thinks this is an insight regarding individuals interacting with individuals, whereas I think composition should take the foreground.
We have already seen that what we understand by 'the human', an active (qua mind, perception or practice) connector of things68, does not hold up, ironically, to anthropological inquiry, for as we have seen,
and Haraway writes: whereas we thought “[machines] could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not
man, an author to himself […]”, the world is more ambiguous. “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”69, shifting the scientist into cyborg-status, though reckoned in discourse as the
human/subject-pole. We shall recognize this is important when dealing with the tradition later. Although the machines above are reckoned as individuals, we will soon see that the smooth operation of non-humans too, along with the facts they inscribe, is the result of agencies as composite as the scientist-cyborg. I will now present Harman's four pillars, to bring the contrast between our interpretations.
Flatness: “the world is made up of actors or actants […]. All entities are exactly on the same ontological
footing. An atom is no more real than Deutsche Bank […]. This principle ends the classical distinction between natural substance and artificial aggregate […]. It also ends the tear-jerking modern rift between the thinking human subject and the unknowable outside world”70. To Harman's defense: being an anthropologist of science, Latour could
trace how failing to get adequate funding may postpone or cancel the production of 'natural' facts. Money has an effect; agency, translated through chains of the things required for fact-production. Note however, that it's organizational impact is of a different caliber than that of a more 'natural' entity that may also upset or encourage scientific inquiry. Moreover, despite their microscopic size, the spores that produce penicillin had a huge effect on the soldiers they healed and researchers they encountered. It is such differences of agency which empirical metaphysics also grasps, whereas Harman skips them over. Harman makes it seems as if the agency of well-demarcated entities is all there is, and that hence there is no substrate to reality. But indeed: given the artificial production of nature, what remains of the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial, the natural and the socio-cultural?
I agree with Harman that although one would normally grant spores, money and soldiers different ontological standings, spores belonging to hard, objective, given, solid, unitary nature, and money and soldiers to human interest driven, fickle, flux-like society, this categorization is what Latour means to cancel.
xlvi Following the vocabulary I might suppose Latour would currently favor, in the Inquiry.
xlvii Which is the vocabulary Latour employs most notably in 1999's Pandora's Hope – there one could rather, to avoid confusion, read relationism. The difference being that the former often designates philosophies barring access to the real or makes it trivial, whereas Latour's metaphysics claims to find access to the objects of science, and other beings, by describing quite specific relations between agencies.
