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Review of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthology of the Moderns written by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, recently published in Common Knowledge, Volume 20, Issue 3, Fall 2014 pp. 491-493

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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. It is also a systematic, comprehensive ontology. The enterprise (500-page text, charts, glossary, elaborate online apparatus, densely packed hypertexts, and ever-expanding addenda) is exceptionally ambitious. But the achievement is genuinely grand: an intellectual feast and adventure that will give its readers much to savor and ponder in the years to come.

A mode of existence in AIME is a way of keeping going, of operating more or less effectively across temporal, spatial, and other ontological discontinuities. The modes include a number of familiar—though here significantly defamiliarized—domains of Modern (and more general) activity, such as law, politics, technology, and religion, plus some unusual but, in AIME’s scheme, no less fundamental ones, such as reference, metamorphosis, fiction, and attachment. In successive chapters Latour introduces the individual modes by unfolding—slowly, richly, often humorously, sometimes mordantly—the distinctive features of each: the trajectory it pursues to keep going; the discontinuities it must traverse along the way; the determinations of truth and falsity by which it operates; the type of outcome it achieves when all goes well; and the always fragile beings—for example, mountains, machines, human collectives, fictional characters, psyches, or angels—instituted by its always contingent operations. Along the way, his alter ego, an earnest female ethnographer, puts the increasingly complex scheme to use interpreting the peculiar practices and puzzling self-explanations of the tribe—the Moderns—she is investigating. Readers familiar with Latour’s work will recognize the elaborations and updates of his earlier writings, especially Irreductions and We Have Never Been Modern. But AIME subsumes and transforms the entire Latourian corpus, here put in the service of a more radically comprehensive vision and mission.

All the modes of existence in AIME are “rational” (or at least none is “irrational”), and the entities associated with each are “real,” though, given Latour’s skeptical view of the Moderns’ veneration of Reason and Reality, one recognizes irony in his use of these terms. Indeed, there is some irony in Latour’s use of any term, including his own labels, puns, and neologisms. A thorough nominalist, he is appreciative of rhetoric but irreverent toward word forms as such. (He cites Paul: “For the letter killeth.”) In AIME as elsewhere in Latour’s writings, the abstractions, dualisms, and monster reifications crucial to Modern thought—Nature and Society, Mind and Matter, Science, the Economy, and so forth—are not so much analyzed or deconstructed as exploded into Dickensian carnivals, crammed with colorful characters and tangible things in motion, all engaged in densely inter-implicated activities. As notable as the pluralism of Latour’s ontology—his insistence on the irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity of equally existent beings and ways of being—is its dynamism.

The modes of existence in AIME are, significantly, also mutually incommensurable. What Latour calls “category mistakes” lead recurrently to conflicts and misunderstandings, as when a mode is grasped in the wrong key or when spokesmen for some mode (for example, poets, popes, or positivist philosophers) claim supremacy or unique truth for their favored mode and fail to respect the ontological claims of other modes. The most continuously significant category mistake in AIME (and the one most conspicuously vexing for its author) involves the religious mode of existence and whoever—or whatever spokesmen—would deny its reality, dismiss it, or defend it in the wrong way. The mistake here is a failure to recognize the distinctive trajectories, types of transcendence, outcomes, and instituted beings of religion, for example, liturgy, iconography, salvation, or the Virgin. (Allusions to Christian tradition and its appurtenances in AIME are less than confessional but more than incidental. “Religion” here is identified, without apology, with an exceedingly nuanced and rather heterodox Catholicism.) Thus, it is improper to assess the truth of religious speech—which, when felicitous, “transports” persons, not information—by the mode of veridiction associated with the sciences. The latter mode, which Latour calls “Double Click” (the idea or ideal of...

External resources:

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/common_knowledge/v020/20.3.smith.pdf