On the Existence of Bruno Latour's Modes

In this article I take a critical look at the origins and sources of Bruno Latour's pluralism as it is expressed in his book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE, and compare it to other similar projects (Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Badiou). I consider the accusations of reductionism and of relativism, and demonstrate that Latour's «empirical metaphysics» is not an ontological reductionism but a pluralist ontology recognising the existence of a plurality of entities and of types of entities. Nor is it an epistemological relativism but an ontological pluralism affirming the existence of a plurality of types of existence. These two strands, pluralist ontology and ontological pluralism, mutually reinforce each other to produce at least the outlines of a robust pluralist realism.

In this article we shall try to distinguish pluralism from its relativist shadow, and to elaborate, both abstractly for its own sake, and in relation to a concrete example of a pluralist thinker, the concept of a realist pluralism. The concrete example that we shall examine is the pluralist metaphysics of Bruno Latour as it is expounded in his book AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE.

I defend the pluralist realism of Bruno Latour and Paul Feyerabend from its conflation with a vapid relativism of worldviews in which all opinions have equal validity.

Common Knowledge, 2013, fall 2014

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) is a multimedia exhibition of the results of Latour's thirty-year-long investigation into how Moderns -Western, educated, technically well-equipped, well-meaning, proudly enlightened, and self-described rational humans -comport themselves and explain the world.

Isis 105/3 (2014): 673-675

We exist only because we inhabit a world in common, embedded within networks of associations between humans and nonhumans. This is endlessly disclosed by our experience of the world. And yet, despite its palpability, it is clear that we have failed to mobilize a notion of the common world into something capable of guiding our modes of thought and collective forms of activity—our attitudes, our affective lives, our politics. How have we arrived here? Bruno Latour’s work suggests that an answer can be found in the common world’s status as information—its self-evidence works to exclude it from a world of values. What, then, should be done? In his recent work on the modes of existence Latour develops a pragmatic metaphysics inspired by the speculative method of Alfred North Whitehead. Metaphysical speculation becomes a tool for moving beyond the “bifurcation of nature” through the construction of abstractions with which to interpret the pluralism of experience. Rather than pregiven information or a totalizing universal, Latour develops a notion of a common world out of the messiness of experience and, as such, aims to transform us into beings who would be moved to actively pursue and care for such a notion.

In recent years, a hierarchical view of reality has become extremely influential. In order to understand the world as a whole, on this view, we need to understand the nature of the fundamental constituents of the world. We also need to understand the relations that build the world up from these fundamental constituents. Building pluralism is the view that there are at least two equally fundamental relations that together build the world. It has been widely, though tacitly, assumed in a variety of important metaphysical debates. However, my primary aim in this paper is to argue that this has been a mistake. I will show that serious problems concerning the relationship between building and fundamentality afflict pluralism and are likely fatal to it. I claim that, for better or worse, our best hope is building singularism, the view that there is a single most fundamental building relation. I conclude by examining the advantage that singularist accounts enjoy over their pluralist rivals.