Ontological Pluralism, Modes of Existence, and Actor-Network Theory: Upgrading Latour with Latour

ABSTRACT

Bruno Latour, one of the architects of actor-network theory, has now enfolded this approach within a larger project: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Framed as an empirical inquiry into the ontological and epistemological conditions of modernity, Latour argues for a radical shift in how ‘objectified knowledge’ is established within the world. In this article I draw on AIME in order to respond to criticisms of actor-network theory that derive from broader sociological and philosophical standpoints. I argue that actor-network theory should now only be understood as an integral aspect of Latour’s newer inquiry, and ought no longer to be considered in isolation but instead as being integrated within a critical as well as pragmatic reading of Latour’s AIME project.

KEYWORDS:

• Actor-network theory
• education
• ethnography
• modes of existence

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Rola Ajjawi, Dennis Beach, Anna MacLeod, Rille Raaper, and Oakleigh Welply. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers who have been constructive and insightful in their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This discussion is necessarily brief. Alongside Latour (2013a), a more pithy discussion of the cosmology of the fifteen Modes of Existence can be found in Conway (2016). The AIME website allows the user to move between the different metalanguage terms employed by the project using hyperlink texts, in a manner that the linear text of a book or a journal article can never afford, and provides a more extensive discussion of the ways in which the Modes are defined as well as differentiated in terms of these four qualities [http://modesofexistence.org/inquiry/#a=START+UP&s=0].

2. Frodon (2016, 373) explains that ‘the confusions between “religion”, in the sense of an established body of doctrine supported by rituals and, usually, a clergy, and “the religious”, in the sense of a structured relationship to invisible forces that are referred to as God, gods, “the spiritual” … ’ form the underlying principle of [REL]. He also argues that whilst Latour’s exposition of [REL] purports to be universal in scope, the inquiry as a whole privileges Christianity over other faiths (ibid.).

3. The AIME website allows the user to navigate all of the different crossings that are possible within/across the fifteen Modes of Existence, providing examples that are additional to those that appear in the book.

4. Of these three, Ward (2017) provides the most extensive discussion of an additional mode of existence – recognition [REC] – derived from the work of Axel Honneth, and explicated in terms of trajectory, felicity and infelicity conditions, specifications, and alteration. Ward (2017, 103) also provides an entry for [REC] for a re-imagined pivot table.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Tummons

Jonathan Tummons is Associate Professor of Education at Durham University, UK. He is an ethnographer of education and sits on the organizing committee for the Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference. Alongside his ongoing research into Latour’s Modes of Existence project and the evolution of actor-network theory, Jonathan is currently researching the ways in which people and technologies work together in a variety of higher education contexts, drawing on not only Latour but also on Learning Architectures and Communities of Practice theory.