Latour's empirical metaphysics

Abstract

In this article we examine the mode in which Bruno Latour engages in metaphysics in his social scientific and philosophical project. In contrast to Graham Harman's recent reading of his work, we take seriously how adamant Latour is about not creating a metaphysical system, and how he is thus essentially sharing the anti-metaphysical tenor of much of the twentieth-century philosophy. Nonetheless, he does not shun making bold claims concerning the way in which the world is. Therefore, we need to ask: what are, then, the purposes for which Latour evokes metaphysics? We recognize two main answers to the question. The first purpose is the creation of a makeshift, pragmatic, methodological ontology. His concepts such as trial, event, proposition, collective, and mode are not meant to describe ‘the furniture of the world’ in the style of classical metaphysics. Rather, they form a kind of ‘minimum-wage metaphysics’, an ‘experimental’ or ‘empirical’ metaphysics that serves the purpose of opening the world anew, in conjunction with empirical research. The second purpose is Latour's elucidation of the metaphysics of modernity, in order to make our own preconceptions visible for ourselves. According to him, metaphysical assumptions are an unavoidable part of our relationship to our world, but we, the moderns, tend to give a distorted description of these assumptions. The ‘modes of existence’ of Latour's recent book are aimed at elucidating the complexity of moderns’ real metaphysics. Yet they do not constitute a list of what there essentially is, but provide a toolkit for understanding our ways of being and our practices.

Keywords:

• Bruno Latour
• empirical metaphysics
• experimental metaphysics
• explicit metaphysics
• Graham Harman
• implicit metaphysics
• metaphysics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Nora Hämäläinen is adjunct professor (docent) in philosophy at the University of Helsinki and a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2013–2016). She is currently working (1) on the methodology of moral philosophy, and (2) on conceptions of personhood in popular self-help literature and moral philosophy. Her recent publications include the book Literature and Moral Theory (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the articles ‘Reduce Ourselves to Zero? Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, and Feminism’ (Hypatia, 2015) and ‘Self-Help, Moral Philosophy, and the Moral Present’ (Human Studies, 2015). She has also co-edited, with Niklas Forsberg and Mikel Burley, the volume Language, Ethics and Animal Life: Wittgenstein and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen is professor of sociology at the University of Tampere. His present work centres on two topic areas. The first of these is insurance, especially how life, health, and death are commodified in the contemporary practices of insurance. In his other project, Lehtonen studies freeganism and dumpster diving, and, more generally, the role of waste in the contemporary way of life (jointly with Olli Pyyhtinen). Lehtonen's recent publications include ‘Producing Solidarity, Inequality and Exclusion through Insurance' (Res Publica 2015, jointly with Jyri Liukko) and ‘Picturing How Life Insurance Matters’ (Journal of Cultural Economy, 2014). He has also recently co-edited, with Ine Van Hoyweghen, a special issue on the ‘Economization of Uncertainty’ (Journal of Cultural Economy (2014).

Notes

1. Of course, Latour does not develop such terms in an intellectual vacuum, but their usage resonates with the work of his close collaborators such as Isabelle Stengers, Annemarie Mol, John Law, Michel Callon, and Antoine Hennion, to name a few. Furthermore, it could be argued that the way in which Latour arrives at the terms is influenced by both ethnomethodology and semiotics upon which he relies a lot in his earlier work, and philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres, or, more recently, A. N. Whitehead, Gabriel Tarde, John Dewey, and William James. But to study these intellectual lineages is beyond the scope of this article.

2. For a similarly problematic analysis of Latour's metaphysical position, from the point of view of analytical philosophy of science, see Collin (2010). Collin, like Harman, frames Latour as a fairly traditional metaphysician, defending a variety of ontological monism, arguably, neglecting the radically pragmatic character of his work that we investigate here.

3. Thus, our topic of discussion is markedly different from some recent social theoretical criticism of Latour that draw, among others, on Harman. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss, for example, whether Latour is able to take into account the question of emergence (Elder-Vass 2008), or whether the Latourian ontological presuppositions, with the thoroughgoing emphasis on actuality and relationality, miss out on something fundamental concerning the very objectivity of objects, a theme which Harman discusses in a sophisticated manner (Harman 2009; see also Pierides and Woodman 2012).

4. In this context, the relationship that Latour has with A. N. Whitehead's metaphysics is worth being noted. As Harman correctly points out, there are many affinities between the two. Latour might be an ‘occasionalist’ in the Whiteheadian vein, as Harman says, and he even uses notions such as ‘proposition’ and ‘event’ in a manner which is clearly influenced not only by his own reading of Whitehead, but also by that of his collaborator Isabelle Stengers (2002). Yet, whereas Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929) can be taken as a paradigmatic case of writing classical-style metaphysics in our age, this style is precisely what is alien to Latour's works, except for the early piece, Irreductions.

5. In this respect Latour remains true to the metaphysical project of Étienne Souriau, from whom he also borrows the idea of the plurality of ‘modes of existences'. For Souriau, doing metaphysics does not entail building a closed system (Souriau [1943] 2009).

6. Latour is, in spite of himself, here tremendously close to Wittgenstein. The reason why Latour does not appreciate this is his rather crude dismissal of all philosophies belonging to the ‘linguistic turn’. He reads these as operating with language as an ephemeral, self-enclosed system, essentially disconnected from reality (a belated product of the Kantian coup whereby reality as such has supposedly been proved unavailable to us). There are certainly important foundational differences between Latour's and Wittgenstein's views, but post-Wittgensteinian philosophy has in fact fostered a kind of realist context sensitivity much reminiscent of what Latour seeks to formulate in the quoted discussion (Diamond 1991; McDowell 1998; Winch 1987; for an analysis of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Latour from a different perspective, see Collin 2010, 136–8).

7. Again, this point that the researcher has to ‘follow the actors’ is heavily emphasized in Latour's early work (e.g. Latour 1984, 14, 16; 1992, 18, 137, 141; see also Latour 2005, 11–12, 68).

8. See Harman (2009, 16–17, 81) for a discussion of Latour and substance.

9. Harman (2014) provides a perceptive discussion concerning the heterogeneity of the modes of existence in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. It is obvious that there is a wide variety in the ways in which they can help one to analyse the constitution of the contemporary world. For example, the mode of existence of Reference seems qualitatively totally different and works in a quite dissimilar way from the mode of existence of Politics, which for its part does not have much in common with Double click. Unfortunately, within the frame of this article there is no room for a detailed discussion on these differences; however, what is most important from our point of view is that, notwithstanding the heterogeneity of the modes, Latour's own style of engaging in metaphysics is the same for each of them: not building a system but using these conceptual tools for speaking well about the contemporary world.

10. A very different and much more extensive study of Latour as a political philosopher is found in Harman's Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (2014).

11. Latour's ‘diplomacy’ draws heavily on Stengers (1997).

12. Yet in this context it might be worth noting that the vocabulary of modes is prominently used by Latour in two texts originally published already in 2002 (Latour 2002, 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Academy of Finland [under Grant 283447].