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Graham Harman

Bruno Latour and
Metaphysics

Prince of
Networks


Prince of Networks


Anamnesis
Anamnesis means remembrance or reminiscence, the collection and re-collection

of what has been lost, forgotten, or efaced. It is therefore a matter of the very
old, of what has made us who we are. But anamnesis is also a work that transforms
its subject, always producing something new. To recollect the old, to produce the
new: that is the task of Anamnesis.
a re.press series


Prince of Networks:
Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
Graham Harman

re.press Melbourne 2009


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© re.press & Graham Harman 2009
The moral rights of the author are automatically asserted and recognized under Australian law (Copyright Amendment [Moral Rights] Act 2000)
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which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the
work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not
use this work for any commercial gain in any form whatsoever and that you
in no way alter, transform or build on the work outside of its use in normal
academic scholarship without express permission of the author (or their
executors) and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you
must make clear to others the license terms of this work. For more information see the details of the creative commons licence at this website:
/>British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Harman, Graham, 1968Prince of networks : Bruno Latour and metaphysics / Graham Harman.
ISBN: 978-0-9805440-6-0 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978-0-9806665-2-6 (ebook)

Series: Anamnesis.
Notes: Includes index.
Bibliography.
Subjects: Latour, Bruno. Metaphysics. Ontology.
110
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Contents

Abbreviations

page vii

INTrODuCTION
The LSe event

3

Preface

5

PArT I: THe MeTAPHySICS OF LATOur
1. Irreductions

11

2. Science in Action

33

3. We Have Never Been Modern

57

4. Pandora’s Hope

71

PArT II: OBjeCTS AND reLATIONS
5. Contributions

99

6. Questions

119

7. Object-Oriented Philosophy

151

Bibliography

233

Index

239

v



Abbreviations

Ar

Aramis or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter,
Cambridge, Harvard university Press, 1996.

FD

La Fabrique du Droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat, Paris,
Découverte, 2002.

LL

Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts, with Steve
Woolgar, Princeton, Princeton university Press, 1986.

MB

‘Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?’, Isis, no. 98, 2007,
pp. 138-142.

MP

‘From realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things
Public,’ in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things
Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2005.

NM

We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge,
Harvard university Press, 1993.

Pe

‘On the Partial existence of existing and Nonexisting Objects,’
in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects, Chicago,
university of Chicago Press, 2006.

PH

Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge,
Harvard university Press, 1999.

PF

The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and john Law,
Cambridge, Harvard university Press, 1988.

vii


viii

Prince of Networks

PN

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter, Cambridge, Harvard university Press, 2004.

rS

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory,
Oxford, Oxford university Press, 2005.

SA

Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through
Society, Cambridge, Harvard university Press, 1987.

VI

Paris ville invisible, Paris, editions la Découverte, 1998. Available
in english at />

introduction



The LSe event

The initial manuscript of this book was discussed at the London School
of economics on 5 February, 2008 at a daylong symposium entitled ‘The
Harman review: Bruno Latour’s empirical Metaphysics’. The host for
the event was the Innovation Systems and Information Group in the LSe
Department of Management, and warm support was provided by its Head,
Professor Leslie Willcocks. Bruno Latour was in attendance to respond to
the manuscript. The panel discussion was chaired by edgar Whitley, with
additional presentations by Lucas Introna, Noortje Marres, and the author
of this book. Frances White provided critical help in organizing the event.
The Symposium Organising Committee emphasised further the highly international lavor of the event, featuring Aleksi Altonen, Ofer engel, Peter
erdélyi, and Wifak Houij Gueddana (all doctoral candidates) and Dr. Maha
Shaikh. In addition, some forty-ive specially invited participants were in
the audience that day.
In the words of erdélyi: ‘It was such an unusual and unlikely event;
even in retrospect it is diicult to believe it actually had taken place. What
are the chances of hosting a metaphysical debate between a Heideggerian
philosopher and a sociologist known for his dislike of Heidegger on the
grounds of a management school, organised by PhD students of an information systems department?’1 The chances are greatly increased when an
energetic and visionary group like ANTHeM is involved. The acronym
stands for ‘Actor-Network Theory-Heidegger Meeting’. Thanks to erdélyi
and his friends in ANTHeM my intellectual life over the last two years
1. Peter erdélyi, ‘remembering the Harman review’. Blog post at />

3


4

Prince of Networks

has been greatly enriched, and this book was able to become a public actor long before publication in its current, inal format. Though I normally
avoid ‘acknowledgments’ sections in books from fear of making my readers
feel bored or excluded, erdélyi’s group is not boring and excludes nobody.
It is worthwhile to join ANTHeM’s mailing list and browse their website:
/>Another non-boring, non-exclusive person is Latour himself. At various stages of writing this book I received the warmest possible treatment
from Bruno and Chantal Latour—in Cairo, Paris, and at the Latour ‘hut’
in Châtelperron dans l’Allier. Latour has responded graciously to my queries from as early as 1999, when I was just an obscure and unpublished fresh
Ph.D. struggling in Chicago. But there are countless such stories of Latour’s
openness to the young and the unknown, and readers of this book may one
day discover this for themselves.


Preface

This book is the irst to consider Bruno Latour as a key igure in metaphysics—a title he has sought but rarely received. Latour has long been prominent in the ields of sociology and anthropology, yet the philosophical basis of his work remains little known. While his many admirers are seldom
concerned with metaphysical questions, those hermits and outcasts who still
pursue ‘irst philosophy’ are generally unfamiliar with Latour. My aim is to
bring these two groups into contact by expressing Latourian insights in terms
bearing on the basic structure of reality itself. When the centaur of classical metaphysics is mated with the cheetah of actor-network theory, their ofspring is not some hellish monstrosity, but a thoroughbred colt able to carry
us for half a century and more. Though Latour’s career has unfolded largely in the social sciences, his origins lie in a rigorous traditional education in
philosophy marked by a strongly jesuit lavour. His choice of topics, his wit,
and his literary style are those of a contemporary, yet his works are a contribution to disputes over metaphysics traceable to ancient Greece.
As often happens with the most signiicant thinkers, Latour is attacked

simultaneously for opposite reasons. For mainstream defenders of science,
he is just another soft French relativist who denies the reality of the external world. But for disciples of Bloor and Bourdieu, his commerce with
non-humans makes him a sellout to fossilized classical realism. In Latour’s
own works, however, this tiresome strife between objective physical matter and subjective social force gives way to a more fascinating theme: objects, which he generally calls ‘actors’ or ‘actants’. unlike Heidegger and others, Latour takes apples, vaccines, subway trains, and radio towers seriously
as topics of philosophy. Such actors are not mere images hovering before
the human mind, not just crusty aggregates atop an objective stratum of
5


6

Prince of Networks

real microparticles, and not sterile abstractions imposed on a pre-individual
lux or becoming. Instead, actors are autonomous forces to reckon with, unleashed in the world like leprechauns and wolves.
The irst part of this book considers Latour’s metaphysical position as
developed in four key works: Irreductions (1984), Science in Action (1987), We
Have Never Been Modern (1991), and Pandora’s Hope (1999). Beginning in 1987,
Latour also worked secretly on a mammoth alternate version of his system—
which makes him surely the only philosopher in history to undergo his early and later phases simultaneously. The ‘later Latour’ is partly inspired by
the forgotten French thinker etienne Souriau (1892-1979), and Latour often
describes his hidden system with Souriau’s own catchphrase: ‘the diferent
modes of existence’. Latour’s new philosophy was partly unveiled to participants in a june 2007 colloquium in Cerisy-la-salle, Normandy. But the
manuscript discussed in Cerisy was merely a working draft, and at present
there is no inalized later system or even a single later book that might be
discussed here without pre-empting Latour’s own rights as an author. For
this reason, I conine myself to the Bruno Latour who can be known from
the key works published through 1999. As I see it, this is also the best way to
prepare oneself for whatever new works appear under Latour’s name in the
years to come.

The second part of the book considers the merits and drawbacks of
Latourian metaphysics, which I hold to be the most underrated philosophy of our time. Given that Latour’s strictly philosophical position is not
widely known, I will present him as a largely sui generis igure, though this is
only a half-truth. It would certainly be fruitful to consider Latour’s similarities and diferences with fellow non-analytic/non-continental (i.e., basically non-Kantian) thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson,
William james, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon, Gabriel
Tarde, etienne Souriau, and Latour’s own friend Isabelle Stengers. But
when this emerging ‘School X’ is promoted under such misleading titles as
‘process philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of immanence’, the result is a false sense
of beatnik brotherhood. For in fact, there is a major family quarrel underway on this list over a highly classical problem: the isolation and interbleeding of individual things. On one side are igures like Bergson and Deleuze,
for whom a generalized becoming precedes any crystallization into speciic
entities. On the other side we ind authors such as Whitehead and Latour,
for whom entities are so highly deinite that they vanish instantly with the
slightest change in their properties. For the irst group, substance is too determinate to be real; for the second, it is too indeterminate to be real. But
Latour’s own standpoint deserves special illumination before it is lost amidst
the turmoil of civil war.




the metaphysics of latour



1

Irreductions

Bruno Latour was born in 1947 in Beaune, in the Burgundy region of France.
The town’s cobbled ramparts and outdoor cafés make it a favourite of travelers, and its popular wines are enjoyed even by the ictional Sherlock Holmes.
For generations, the philosopher’s family has produced the famous Louis

Latour label of wines; the family estate at Aloxe-Corton is easily visible on
organized vineyard tours heading north from Beaune. Latour is a friendly
and approachable igure, a tall man fond of good cigars and good jokes. He
is married with two adult children, and resides in a comfortable lat on the
rue Danton in the Latin Quarter of Paris. After working for many years at
the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the ecole des Mines in Paris, he
recently moved to a senior administrative post at the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (or Sciences-Po, as it is commonly known). His greatest intellectual impact has probably been in the Anglophone world, where he is a
frequent guest of our elite universities.
Latour’s early schooling blended rigorous jesuit classicism with a private fondness for Nietzsche. Following study at the university of Dijon, national service duties took him to the Ivory Coast. His increasing interest in
ieldwork while in Africa set the stage for his long visit to roger Guillemin’s
neuroendocrinology lab near San Diego, where Latour’s famous program of
the ‘anthropology of the sciences’ began. This period culminated in his irst
book, co-authored with the British sociologist Steve Woolgar, published in
1979 as Laboratory Life. This early work shows the inluence of the so-called
‘Strong Program’ of the edinburgh School of the sociology of science, with
its infamous anti-realist tendencies. Nonetheless, even Latour’s irst book
escapes the strict form of social constructionism, since real inanimate objects are responsible for constructing facts no less than are power-hungry
11


12

The Metaphysics of Latour

humans. In later works, Latour moved even further from the constructivist
vision of reality, and now occupies a strange middle ground misunderstood
from all sides. On one lank, he is either praised by rorty1 or condemned by
Sokal and Bricmont2 as the latest in a long parade of French relativists who
deny the objective reality of the world. On the other, he is banished from the
constructivist fold by Bloor3 as a tin man tainted by realism, a compromised

if witty reactionary who pulls up short of explaining science by social factors. Latour’s middle ground between these positions is not an eclectic compromise mixing elements of both, but marks a position of basically greater
philosophical depth. The following chapters aim to present Latour’s standpoint in accessible and memorable form.
‘Any argument about my “philosophy,”’ Latour writes, ‘has to start with
Irreductions, which is a totally orphan book’. 4 The orphan in question is really
only half a book—a ninety-page appendix attached to the masterful study
known in english as The Pasteurization of France. Latour has never written
anything as compact and systematic as this small treatise, nor anything so
unjustly ignored. Here I will take him at his word, and treat Irreductions as the
gateway to the rest of his philosophy, despite his caveat that he is ‘not sure
how much [he] holds to these aphorisms’.5 If Latour eventually abandons
some of the claims in this treatise, we should irst adopt them in order to
share in their later abandonment. Written at a time when the phrase ‘French
philosophy’ was merely a collective nickname in the Anglophone mind for
Michel Foucault and jacques Derrida, Irreductions belongs to what I regard as
a more advanced stage of philosophy than either of these igures. Although
the irst principle of this early work is that ‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (PF, p. 158), the book is surely irreducible
to either of the rival schools of analytic and continental philosophy. Latour’s
taste for clear academic prose no more qualiies him for the irst group than
his French passport admits him to the second.
A. THe BIrTH OF A PHILOSOPHy

Late in 1972, a remarkable young thinker was driving his Citroën van along
the highways of Burgundy. Only twenty-ive years old, already married, he
was teaching at a village lycée and preparing for national service in Africa. In
one respect the young philosopher was an outsider, emerging from remote
1. richard rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, Cambridge, Cambridge
university Press, 1998, p. 8.
2. Alan Sokal and jean-Luc Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, New york, Picador, 1998.
3. David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour’, Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Science, vol. 30, no. 1,
March 1999, pp. 81-112.

4. Personal Communication, electronic mail to Graham Harman of 11 November, 2005.
5. Personal Communication, 11 November, 2005.


Irreductions

13

Dijon rather than the elite institutions of Paris. yet this provincial outlier
had also ranked irst nationally in the Agrégation, a stunning success that
must have felt like a license to speculate as freely as he wished. Too little
has been written about dramatic lashes of insight in the history of philosophy. We know of Descartes’s dreams and his stove-heated room, rousseau
weeping under a tree, and Avicenna saying prayers and giving money to the
poor after reading Farabi’s commentary on Aristotle. But we are unfamiliar with the breakthrough moments of Heidegger, Kant, Leibniz, or Plato,
though we know these moments well for every Zen monk worth his salt.
In Irreductions, Latour joins the minority by publishing his own moment of
epiphany: ‘I taught at Gray in the French provinces for a year. At the end
of the winter of 1972, on the road from Dijon to Gray, I was forced to stop,
brought to my senses after an overdose of reductionism’ (PF, p. 162). There
follows a Homeric catalog of various humans who like to reduce the world
to some special reality that explains all the others: Christians, Catholics, astronomers, mathematicians, philosophers, Hegelians, Kantians, engineers,
administrators, intellectuals, bourgeoisie, Westerners, writers, painters, semioticians, males, militants, and alchemists. All these reducers had inally
managed to repel the young Latour, who sat on the roadside dreaming of a
new principle of philosophy:
I knew nothing, then, of what I am writing now but simply repeated to
myself: ‘Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else’.
This was like an exorcism that defeated demons one by one. It was a wintry sky, and a very blue. I no longer needed to prop it up with a cosmology, put it in a picture, render it in writing, measure it in a meteorological
article, or place it on a Titan to prevent it falling on my head […]. It and
me, them and us, we mutually deined ourselves. And for the irst time in
my life I saw things unreduced and set free (PF, p. 163).

An entire philosophy is foreshadowed in this anecdote. every human and
nonhuman object now stands by itself as a force to reckon with. No actor,
however trivial, will be dismissed as mere noise in comparison with its essence, its context, its physical body, or its conditions of possibility. everything
will be absolutely concrete; all objects and all modes of dealing with objects
will now be on the same footing. In Latour’s new and unreduced cosmos,
philosophy and physics both come to grips with forces in the world, but so
do generals, surgeons, nannies, writers, chefs, biologists, aeronautical engineers, and seducers (PF, pp. 154-6). And though all these examples of actors
are human, they are no diferent in kind from the forces that draw objects to
the center of the earth or repress desires in the unconscious. The world is
a series of negotiations between a motley armada of forces, humans among
them, and such a world cannot be divided cleanly between two pre-existent
poles called ‘nature’ and ‘society’. As Latour puts it: ‘we do not know what