Book Review

Science, Technology, & Human Values

38(4) 588-594
The Author(s) 2012
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Bruno Latour
Review Essay: 2012. Enquete sur les modes dexistence:
Une anthropologie des Modernes. Paris, France: La Decouverte.
504 p. ISBN 978-2-7071-7347-8
Reviewed by: Antoine Hennion, Centre de sociologie de linnovation, MINES-ParisTech/
CNRS (UMR 7185), Paris, France
DOI: 10.1177/0162243913492215

sur les modes dexistence: Une

Bruno Latours (2012) latest book, Enquete
anthropologie des Modernes, provides a general presentation of his longterm inquiry into modes of existence. According to Latour, the books aim
is to gather the work he has undertaken for more than five years now with
the active participation of students, young researchers, and colleagues coming from very diverse domains, interests, and disciplines. Conceived as a
is proway of relaunching this collective inquiry, the 500-page Enquete
posed to be a provisional report meant to expose the state of the project and
extend the inquiry to a larger scale.
is an answer toand a kind of posAs Latour himself explains, the Enquete
itive continuation ofthe mainly negative stance that he made more than
twenty years ago, that we have never been modern (Latour 1993). Science,
reason, and rationality are not properties discovered by so-called Moderns that
would explain or justify their superiority on the Others. No! We are like
them. But if so, what have we done? In French, in order to say we are
right, we continue to use the expression nous avons raison, we say we have
reason at our disposal. But, if we can no longer rely on self-explanatory reasons, how do we explain the last few 100 years of history? How did people
of European origin infiltrate the far-flung corners of the globe and impose laws,
both in the military and in the scientific senses of the term?
does not dramatize the interrogation as I just did, openYet, LEnquete
ing the way to a prophetic or apocalyptic discourse. To the contrary,
because the matter is urgent, Latour slows things down. He takes his time,
following the ancestral art of diplomacy. His take is that we have been too

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589

fast and that compounded layers of simplification have rendered us blind to

what has happened. What have we done, indeed. This should not be a matter
of exonerating ourselves, but rather something that has to be taken as an
object of investigation. Is it possible to reexamine the way we see ourselves,
such that we discount the triumph of rationality? This is the challenge of the
(Inquiry), whose subtitle is An Anthropology of the Moderns. The
Enquete
political stance behind this turn of phrase is crucial: for Latour, anthropology is not a gratuitous exercise, but rather a necessary condition that is
needed in order to reconstruct a place where Moderns, and the Others that
modernity has constituted, can lose their capital letters and speak again. It is
also needed in order to welcome those entities that had been long excluded
from politics, but that have made a violent comeback into the arena: viruses,
the greenhouse effect, pollution, global warming, and so on.
To express who Moderns are and who is being investigated, Latour often
appeals to an enigmatic we. What does this mean? It is not a matter of
returning to the past, but rather of understanding it better in order to formulate a common future. Politics needs a we, though not the old one, of
course. We have to live now, in a common world. Managing this common
world means asking not only what have we done, as in the first critical
stance, but also what is to be done? Current events demand that we dramatically question our political inability to deal with Gaa or globality, just
as these events challenge our ways of producing knowledge, of mastering
markets, and of taking into account new unknown entities, our salvation,
or the future. At their current scales, the environment, science policies,
political sciences, globalization, public debate, diplomacy, and representation (of humans and nonhumans): all must be reinvented. So long as Moderns believed in progress, so long as we saw efficiency and democracy as a
common benchmark of merits acquired in accordance with a unique occidental mastery of reason, that very Biblical questionwhat have we
done?was but a matter of ethnocentric epistemology. We could sit back
and politely discuss the rules that guarantee the truth of Truth, while leaving
the Market to do the rest. Now the issue is a concrete emergency for all. But
action requires that we forge a collective will. This book has been written to
help recover a voice for such a we (or is it to recover a we for so many
voices?), open to new beings, to former others, and to nonhumans. This
is why Latour, borrowing from Isabelle Stengers, proposes a renewed diplomacy. New fears spiraling out of control have forced the Moderns into a
position of humility. The we is challenged to speak with themall
those formerly excluded othersand to speak for the first time with
nature itself.

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Science, Technology, & Human Values 38(4)

The books main objective is to reopen, enlarge, deploy, and rearticulate

matters that have been systematically summed up by what Latour, following Whitehead, calls the great Bifurcation: the dualism between matter
and mind, primary and secondary qualities, nature and culture, physics and
politics, object and subject, and so on. This dualism systematically mistakes
the results of many operations for causes. Yet, things are not lined up along
such clear-cut binary divides. They are both heterogeneous and connected.
Those passes and passages, those mediations, those translations have to be
made, and maintained. Any global concept that names an autonomous reality is merely a way of hiding behind a key word (like science, reason, society,
or nature), a key word that stands in for a laborious net-work (the hyphen signifies just how much work is needed). A crucial part of Latours enterprise
consists in meticulously unfolding those operations, which are much more
concrete, partial, and painstaking than the glorious path described by Modern
thinkers in the Age of the Enlightenment.
The focus of the inquiries is to carry out this unfolding. They are mostly
based on Internet databases being nourished by minute-by-minute accounts
of various controversies as they arise in real time.1 Each inquiry is detailed
and in depth, directed toward an intermediary, operative level. Although it
is difficult to give an account of what happens when things shift from one
particular mode, or regime to another, each mode is characterized by its
precise tune. The wording here becomes delicate. A specific tune is what
gives an activity or reality its capacity to produce specific beings and
relationships. But each mode of action must nevertheless lean on other
connected modalities, or regimes. Regimes denonciation is the previous
term Latour had for these specific operative levels, a term taken from
semiotics and enunciative pragmatics. In this work, he borrows the beautiful
expression of modes dexistence2 from Etienne Souriau, which Gilbert
Simondon (1969) had already employed to analyze technical objects.
The proposed inquiries are intended to help researchers document all the
modes of existence displayed in the book. From the work his team has
already completed, Latour has extracted a provisional fifteen modes, distributed as five groups of three.3 The book cannot be easily summed up, and
it should not be, in fact, since it aims to create a space for polyphony. Some
of these modes recover traditional domains with slightly different characterizations, as politics or technique, or droit, which better defines the mode
in question than the word law does in English. Each mode begins from a
difficulty Latour names a hiatus, the provocation of a hesitation, a question, or the call for a move. And each can be dotted with specific trajectories, criteria of veridiction, beings that must be instituted,4 and

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591

alterations. The number of modes are deliberately many, so that they cannot
be reduced to an abstract structure. Yet, they are far too few to describe the
plurality of the world. Latour himself mocks them, as he can only justify
having chosen them because they have empirically held for years. New
situations will force the invention of other modes. What matters is whether
an observer has a better view of how they work under a precise constraint
and of how they emerge from another one. All modes borrow, combine,
depart one from the other, and from this very interdefinition lead to a more
and more precise specificity.
It is clear that in spite of the way Latour presents this work as an ongoing
is a masterpiece on its own. As always,
collective process, the Enquete
Latour arrives with a variety of inspiring insights and innovative arguments.
But perhaps more importantly, the modes that he proposes form a palette
that is both ambitious (considering the issues in question) and modest (considering the practical, concrete tools Latour has crafted). Like a surgeon
with a little scalpel, Latour expresses himself with prose that is very clear
and simple, as though he believes the more crushing the stakes are, the
lighter and the nimbler the writing should be. Indeed, the whole book
resembles a surgical operation: some concepts stitch up realities that have
been too strictly divided; others slice through flesh and tissue that have been
made too compact. This is one of Bruno Latours major books. A reviewer
in Le Monde has compared him to Hegela reference that may not sound
that pleasant to Latours ears! Be that as it may, it is worth engaging,
whether or not future inquiries will actually take place that force the author
and his many collaborators to completely rewrite it as he so ingenuously
demands.
Even though Latour markets this book as a threshold to the future, the
present volume looks more like an open recapture of the vast empirical and
theoretical work he has done all along his forty-year career. The account retrospectively gives this winding trajectory a striking coherence despite the
amazing variety of Latours objects of investigationfrom the Ivory Coast5
to Actor-Network Theory (ANT; Callon and Latour 1981); from Science
in Action (Latour 1987) to Politics of Nature (Latour 2004a); from Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979) to the analysis of the Conseil dEtat in
La Fabrique du droit (Latour 2004b); from Pasteur and his microbes
(Latour 1988 [1984]) to Reassembling the Social. We might also add Aramis (Latour 1992), his book on the automatic train that represents his contribution on technique, innovation and engineers, and lesser known books
about religion or pictures.6 All along his production we can see both a common mode of investigation into the ways in which all of those realities are

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Science, Technology, & Human Values 38(4)

made and a constant attentiveness to the diversity of their results and the
variety of realities made. The first aspect, the common method, is what
ANT had originally expressed in a very radical formula. Latours new book
is an explicit effort to revisit and rework ANT. The aim is not to moderate it,
but to prolong it, deepen it, render it more supple. He refines it to better fit
with the objects, beings, and matters that it renders visible, but which it has
also tended to render as being the same.
A second core aspect of the book is to find ways of accounting for the
differences of realities without returning to any essentialism. This is but a
quest to find a relevant recognition of what is usually seen as science, technique, religion, art, law, politics, economy, and so on, but without referring
to them in a circular way by assuming that they have a specific nature, an a
priori order, or an absolute principle in the first place. Science, art, and technique, for instance, do not do the same thing. This does not mean they are
autonomous orders. Their specificity is a matter of stressing an aspect, of
insisting upon one particular operation. Moreover, all of these different
activities use the others as a kind of background, or material, and they make
of that a specific agencementa favorite term of Latours longtime partner,
Michel Callon. We can see the strong influence of pragmatism in this position, especially the Jamesian radical vision of a pluriverse made of heterogeneous but loosely connected fabrics having no exteriority (James 1909).
is to make such a vision operational, to give it
One central idea of LEnquete
a method, to transform it into a matter of empirical practice. In order to
achieve this, Latour proposes to distribute diversity in a new way. He delegates diversity to much more detailed and concrete operations, fits it more
closely to the issues in question, and demands more sensitivity to the beings
concerned. His gambit is that only minute inquiries can make visible again
those operations that cannot be measured once science, law, the market, or
art have been made coherent, homogeneous, and largely autonomous. Once
these great orders achieve their greatness, they appear mysteriously able to
sustain themselves. They are explained from the outside in reductionist
ways that obscure how they have been concretely produced.
As one can see, this hefty handbook, which was supposed to leave us
with instructions for an inquiry that has yet to be made, does not leave the
reader empty handed. We gain the equipment to better understand what
Moderns have done by abandoning the great binary divides that Moderns
are so fond of, and by paying attention instead to the multiple hesitations,
vibrations, foldings, leanings, and tunings that articulate modes that are
remade again and again. Continuing in a pragmatist filiation, but a more
Deweyan one this time, Latour concludes that a better understanding of

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593

ourselves, even if it is not a guarantee of progress, is a condition and perhaps

an opportunity to establish new conditions of peace. He suggests we may be
reequipped to respond to the new wars the world is facing, wars that involve
entities we have yet to name, wars which we may be embarking upon
without knowing in whose name they are undertaken.
has received a positive reception in France. This was not
LEnquete
given in a place with such a strong tradition in epistemology, structuralism,
and social critique. That the book has been largely debated in France, both
in the academic world and in the general press, is a good sign that it is well
on its way to being a major contribution. Latour is always unpredictable,
sur les
bringing unexpected, and renewed understandings. His Enquete
modes dexistence is both relevant as an academic accomplishment, central
to the present crucial and passionate debates in social and political sciences
and philosophy, and as a practical guide that should help concerned, nonacademic publics to think anew matters like environment, public debate, the
management of science and technology, and postcolonial politics.
Notes
1. The inquiries have already begun, hence the strange form of the book. In addition
to the use of strange three capital letter blocks I will explain belowRES, TEC,
FIC, ORG, ATT, REL, and so on, it has an electronic double, with not only the
footnotes and references but also the material of the inquiries themselves. The
book in paper is full of uniform resource locators that refer to the diverse modes
of existence analyzed in the book, of which the controversial material is accessible online. This is not just a gadget. It directly connects with the treatment
of the global/local articulation that the book addresses.
2. See Souriau (2009 [1956]). With Isabelle Stengers, Latour recently had Souriaus
great book republished, with a long preface in which they underline the deep originality of the philosopher of art. As he had already done with Tarde, Whitehead,
and James, Latour shares with other great philosophers an ability to read differently authors that scholars have too quickly put in little boxes and let sleep under
simplistic labels.
3. Here come the bizarre acronyms that are used so as not to be confused with the
ordinary meaning of words. Latour defines three references to the grammatical
modes of the inquiry (network, preposition, and double click); three references
to what is before any quasiobjects or quasisubjects (reproduction, metamorphosis, and habitude); three references to quasiobjects (technique, fiction, and reference); three references to quasisubjects (politics, law, and religion); and three
references to the links between quasiobjects and quasisubjects (attachment, organization, and morals).

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4. In French, Souriau better calls this operation their instauration.

5. Still a student, instead of playing the ethnologist looking at the autochtons (the
former having science on his side and the latter being prisoners of their culture),
he looked at the local knowledges exactly as one would look at a laboratory in
France. Then, he looked at the Salk Institute in San Diego exactly as an ethnologist would look at natives accomplishing their rites. Already a symmetrical
anthropology, both in the sense of not prefiguring a difference between them and
us and of treating science as a work in progress that has to be performed, not only
discovered.
6. Besides Actor-Network Theory that Michel Callon, Latour, and John Law
invented in the late 1970s, Latours long collaboration with Callon also gave
birth to articles on markets and economics.

References
Callon, M., and B. Latour. 1981. Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors
Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So. In Advances
in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macrosociologies, edited by K. D. Knorr Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, 277303. Boston,
MA: Routledge Kegan Paul.
James, W. 1909. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Green & Co.
Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through
Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 1988 [1984]. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Latour, B. 1992. Aramis, ou lamour des techniques. Paris, France: La Decouverte.
Latour, B. 1993. We have Never been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Latour, B. 2004a. Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 2004b. La Fabrique du droit. Une Ethnographie du Conseil dEtat. Paris,
France: La Decouverte.
sur les modes dexistence: Une anthropologie des ModerLatour, B. 2012. Enquete
nes. Paris, France: La Decouverte.
Latour, B., and S. Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of
Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Simondon, G. 1969. Du mode dexistence des objets techniques. Paris, France:
Aubier Montaigne.
Souriau, E. 2009 [1956]. Les differents modes dexistence, Presented by I. Stengers
and B. Latour. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France.