Latour, Modes of Existence

I assume that’s still the title of Latour’s new book, until I hear otherwise. He’s really nearing the completion of it, and it sounds like French publication in 2012 and English in 2013.

Latour is unusually comfortable with collective intellectual work, which is one of the reasons for his truly vast circle of interdisciplinary colleagues (the omnivorous character of his interests is another). His revisions of the manuscript have drawn heavily on the 2007 Cerisy event, where some 60 or 70 of us offered feedback on the ms.

Once the book is out, it will become infinitely more collective than that, since he has designed an ingenious mechanism to turn the further development of his new system into a collective project, and has even received a very healthy grant to make it a reality.

Like a good artist, Latour has responded to what he sees as a primary defect of his earlier work: namely, that the ontology of Irreductions and other books of that period is too flat. Not enough room is left for distinguishing among various different types of entities.

Enter the modes. The modes of existence are specific kinds or manners of being, and it would be a category mistake to apply the terms of one mode to another.

Furthermore, the modes are not permanent categories of the world or of human understanding. They are produced historically, and do not have an infinite extension in time and space. In principle, modes could presumably be created or destroyed.

There are 14 modes in all, but Latour sometimes speaks of 12, since 2 of them have a special status in governing all the others.

And to repeat perhaps the most interesting feature of this story, Latour has been working on the “modes” project since 1987, making him the only philosopher to be working in his “early” and “late” periods simultaneously. He simply didn’t publish anything from the “late” phase until now. Imagine Heidegger writing the Beiträge and “Einblick in das was ist” and On the Way to Language during the 1920’s but simply withholding them. It’s a funny thought.

If you’ve missed the Latour train so far, it’s unfortunate, but you’re not too late to catch up. He’s been pretty much ignored by philosophers, despite his philosophical pedigree, and even as he rose to become the 9th most cited person in all the humanities, living or dead, due to his great impact on the social sciences.

For the past generation, Anglophone reception of French philosophy has passed primarily through two partially overlapping phases: the Deleuze phase and the Badiou phase. Is Latour the philosophical inferior of these two? I don’t believe so, outnumbered though I may be. It is not inconceivable that half a century from now (if not sooner), Latour will look like the primary French philosopher of the 1984-1999 period (from the brilliant Irreductions through the fully mature Pandora’s Hope), and perhaps even into the 2010’s if he can pull off a Matisse-like late masterpiece with the Modes project.