Structuralism’s Afters: Tracing Transdisciplinarity through Guattari and Latour

Abstract

This article analyses Guattari's and Latour's bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity. These works impose a definitive break from the history that, in the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism in order to oppose philosophy with an epistemological revolution from the perspective of a scientific problematization and first transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l'homme. It is shown that the second anti-structuralist transdisciplinarity affirms as its raison dêtre “the necessity to return to Pragmatics” (Guattari), to enact the new significance of the transversal constructions liberated by the rhizomatic monism of a hybrid social ontology (Latour). Between Guattari, Latour, and the ecologization they share, a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization is engaged. It leads to the fall of the 'Ontological Iron Curtain' erected by the philosophical tradition between mind and matter, nature and society. The article concludes by critically addressing the final statements of both Guattari and Latour towards a new aesthetic paradigm and a new diplomacy of institutional forms respectively.

The writings of Guattari and Latour are best described as interventions, which mobilize the politics at stake in the respective economies of their work. At the same time, they enact a provisional, open, late state of the transdisciplinary problematic, critically deconstructing and destroying the whole field of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledges. They involve a common, paradoxical and polemical ‘political epistemology’ (Latour, 2005: 254) that identifies the redefinition of politics at stake in this uncertain ‘epistemology’ with an ontological pragmatics – or a pragmatic ontology – which submits epistemology to an absolute de-definition, forced upon it by the new ecological emergencies: environmental, social and mental ecology, as Guattari insists.

I propose here to redesign these two bodies of work as radical developers of a transdisciplinarity that imposes a definitive bifurcation as the historical and ontological truth of its final construction. Following the rediscovery and reinvention of pragmatics (Guattari-Deleuze) and pragmatism (Latour), this bifurcation ends up breaking through that history which, since the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism and post-structuralism in order to question disciplinary definitions of the sciences and humanities. It affirms as its raison d'être ‘the necessity to return to Pragmatics’, to experiment with the new transdisciplinary significance of the processual constructions liberated by the ‘magic formula PLURALISM = MONISM’: i.e. the hard ontological core or milieu of A Thousand Plateaus and its rhizomatic (that is, anti-structuralist) motto (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b [1980]: 23). And it does so against any of the disciplinary ordinations maintained by the dualisms of subject/object, mind/matter, nature/society, etc.

It could be objected to this anti-dualistic statement that the passage in which the ‘magic formula PLURALISM = MONISM’ is proposed speaks of proceeding ‘via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging’. Yet the context clearly shows that this sentence involves nothing other than the strategic presentation of the rhizome and of its ‘transformational multiplicities’ in contrast to a structure ‘which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b [1980]: 23, emphasis added). Or, in Latour’s words (here adopting a kind of Guattarian parlance): ‘in structuralism nothing is really transformed, it is simply combined’ (Latour, 2005: 153). And the antagonism is so asymmetrical, from the perspective of ‘an immanent process’ that overturns the very idea of model and abstract modelling – since ‘it is perpetually in construction or collapsing’, and the process is ‘perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting again’ – that ‘there is not a new or different dualism’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b [1980]: 23). Rather, there is a radical bifurcation mobilizing the ontological problem from which interdisciplinarity is equally and differently excluded as a mere institutional resolution of epistemological questions, and from which transdisciplinarity gets its affirmative sense and critical empowerment with regard to both the sciences and philosophy, in the uncommon monism of a social ontology – ‘not a social epistemology’, Latour emphasizes (Latour, 2007: 14).

To explore the pragmatic turn that spurs the equation PLURALISM = MONISM, and the zone of resonance where Guattari and Latour meet within and beyond Deleuzian philosophy, in the recoding of ‘ANT’ (actor-network theory) as ‘ARO’ (actant-rhizome ontology) (Latour, 1999: 19), we need first to retrace the history of this bifurcation.

Structuralism Re-cognized

The transdisciplinary research program of structuralism was based on the structural functionalism of linguistics and developed in a combinatory system of relations mobilizing the scientific problematization of the ‘human sciences’ against the transcendental legitimacy and theoretical primacy of philosophy. It is this radical challenge to philosophy that makes Ricoeur (during the famous 1963 debate with Lévi-Strauss organized by Esprit) ironically render explicit what structures are not, in a neither/nor that condemns any possible mediation, dilemma or balancing between a ‘subjective’ form and/or an ‘objective’ content: structures as transcendental apparatus and structures as objectivities located in the real in itself (Ricoeur, 1963). ¹ It is not so much that the ‘theme’ of the ‘end of philosophy’ was translated into the linguistic opening and operational closure of structural space, but rather that the unrivalled ontological status of the structure opposes to philosophy its epistemological revolution from the perspective of a transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l’homme and within a structural-linguistic paradigm that breaks with representation – i.e. with any representative content related to forms of consciousness of the subject, ‘within the meaning bequeathed by philosophy’ (Lacan, 2001b [1966]: 222). ² This formally or symbolically redefines the very concept of science to include a thoroughly recast anthropology, psychoanalysis and ‘class struggle in theory’: Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser. ³ If this sequence brought together linguistics and mathematics as the centre and major point of tension of the structural paradigm, it must be emphasized that its transdisciplinary identity/alterity depends on a prior condition. This prior condition is that of a flat ontology of the sign where the differential and purely relational/positional character of the sign undoes the association of ontology with metaphysics – ‘une ontologie sans métaphysique’, Foucault wrote (2002 [1966]: 370) – to identify it with the symbolic order itself: ‘a new type of ontology’ (Milner, 2002: 38), an ontology of the symbolic order that raises the classical modern problem of the relation between being and subjectivity, and conceives of subjectivity itself as the split effect of a non-referential logic of the signifier, which ‘vectorizes’ onto-topologically the transdisciplinary plane of consistency of structuralism.

This provides the full logic of sense of Deleuze’s re-presentation of structuralism, ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ (2004 [1967]), ascribing its origin to linguistics and erecting the symbolic as its ‘first criterion’, the better to re-enact the Lacanian empty square (neither an image, nor a concept: this is Deleuze’s sixth and last nominal criterion) as the differentiator of difference itself and the ‘problematizer’ of the ‘complete determination of singular points that constitute a space corresponding to these elements’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 177). However, the most interesting thing about this infamous article by Deleuze is that it over- and under-determines the structuralist archaeology of knowledge put forward by Foucault in his concluding remarks about the ‘human sciences’ in The Order of Things (1966). Briefly stated, since Étienne Balibar largely carries out this work in his article in this issue (Balibar, in press): it is well known that the final chapter of The Order of Things proposes a substantial variation of the first transdisciplinary unification operated by an episteme through invariants that govern formal correspondences and conceptual analogies between the disciplines articulated in a general type of rationality: a classically modern transdisciplinary rationality, or paradigm. In fact, Foucault argues in favour of a totally new transdisciplinary status for psychoanalysis and ethnology: ‘they span the entire domain of [human] sciences, […] they animate its whole surface, spread their concepts throughout it, and are able to propound their methods of decipherment and their interpretations everywhere’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 413). It is through their structuralist recasting that they can work as ‘counter-sciences’, unmaking ‘that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences’ while ‘they intersect at right angles; for the chain of the signifier by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of culture are constituted’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 414–15).

A transdisciplinary model of structural ordination here submits the subject to its own systematicity. It is worth quoting what follows since it formulates exactly what Deleuze tries to problematize and render differential in his 1967 article (Deleuze quotes this passage from Foucault; Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 189), before producing an alternative ‘anti-model’ that can only come after structuralism – and after Guattari’s critique of structuralism). It reads:

At any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of society; inversely, at each of their points of choice the social structures encounter a certain number of possible individuals (and others who are not) – just as the linear structure of language always produces a possible choice between several words or several phonemes at any given moment (but excludes all others). (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 415)

If, to quote Balibar, ‘linguistics is the “counter-science” par excellence’ (Balibar, in press), and already incorporates the transdisciplinary paradigm identified with structuralism, it is because it is in linguistics that ‘the theme of a pure theory of language’ emerges and provides ‘the ethnology and the psychoanalysis thus conceived with their formal model’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 414). It is this new scientific order of positivity determined by the emergence of the structure (as an invariant relation of elements within an ensemble of elements) that, after reopening its relations to mathematics and ‘traversing the whole space of human sciences, would encounter the question of finitude’, desubjectivated and dishistoricized in the very ‘being of language’ (‘l’être du langage’) as ontologically explored in literature (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 415–18). But is it not exactly this double modernist ‘solution’ that Deleuze diplomatically refuses when he reopens the enquiry on structuralism at the very end of his article, under the heading ‘Final Criteria: From the Subject to Practice’? These will be immediately considered as ‘the most obscure – the criteria of the future’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 192).

As we know, Deleuze dramatizes a mysterious ‘structuralist hero: neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal … without an identity, made of non-personal individuations and pre-individual singularities’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 191), a hero whose emergence is located between two quotations from The Order of Things. The first one is extracted from the last Nietzschean-inspired page of Chapter 9, ‘Man and His Doubles’. It states:

It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency [a lack: un manque – EA]; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled in. It is nothing more and nothing less than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think. (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 373, quoted in Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 190)

But in Deleuze’s text, this ‘void’ strictly refers to the Lacanian paradox of the empty square, disengaged from any negativity to affirm the ‘positive being of the “problematic”, the objective being of a problem and of a question; it is (nothing else than) the onto-topological problem of the subject since ‘the subject is precisely the agency [instance] which follows the empty place: as Lacan says, it is less subject than subjected [assujetti] – subjected to the empty square, subjected to the phallus and its displacements’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 189–90). Nevertheless, against Lacan’s active void, negating the very existence of a ‘virtual’, ⁴ by definition irreducible to a formal language determining the subject, ⁵ this subject will be immediately translated – or better, transduced – into the Deleuzian nomad subject, de-defined in terms of ‘non-personal individuations and pre-individual singularities’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 191). It becomes thus, par la bande (a Bergsonian ‘band’!), the philosophical ‘truth’ of the structuralist break-up qua this ‘new transcendental philosophy’ from which structuralism would then be inseparable. But the most interesting thing is the way in which the possible ‘accidents’ of this nomad subject (the disappearance of the ‘signifier’ or the fading away of the ‘signified’: the two pathological aspects of psychosis) are brought back to the question of their immanent determinations in the structures and to the problem of their mutations. This, finally, relates to the problem of praxis, to the ‘resistant and creative force’ of a (structuralist) hero, ‘the break-up [éclatement] of a structure affected by excess or deficiency’, with the opposition of ‘his own ideal events’ to ‘the ideal events we have just described’ – as ‘strictly determined by the play of [the] structural adventures and the contradictions resulting from it’ (Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 191, my emphasis). Invoking a possible radical rewriting of the Lacanian analysand’s ‘subjective conversion’ (Lacan, 1966: 43), this passage is footnoted with a second quotation from Foucault concerning the onset of a structural mutation at the beginning of the 19th century (the ‘Age of History’): ‘a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of the knowledge, and whose signs, shocks and effects it is possible to follow step by step’, and which can be thus ‘analysed’ but not ‘explained’ (Foucault, 2002 [1966]: 236, quoted in Deleuze, 2004 [1967]: 308, n.64). ⁶

In Deleuze, the radical event has changed place and subject to become the heroic ‘point of permanent revolution’, still referred to as a structuralist ‘practice’, be it ‘therapeutic or political’, but clearly announcing, as it traces out this unique path translating structuralism into post-structuralism, a subjective break with an all-too-complete structural determination and with the effects of other logical structures of a twofold epistemological transdisciplinarity, maintaining and perhaps accentuating its closure in the ‘symbolic’ passage from classical modern knowledge to contemporary thought. Interestingly, the Foucaldian passage from a still unexplained ‘transformable group’ (ensemble transformable) referring, in Archaeology of Knowledge, to the historical a priori of positivities, to ‘transformable singularities’ is based upon a ‘modality of relation to the self’ which will result in a hermeneutics of the subject – an anti-Lacanian non-self-identical form. ⁷ Its Deleuzean re-presentation in terms of ‘lines of subjectivation’, escaping from the lines of sedimentation of established powers and constituted knowledges, gives it an immediate Guattarian output — ‘a process, a production of subjectivity in a dispositive [dispositif] … a line of flight’ (Deleuze, 1989: 186–7) – superposing the ‘crisis in Foucault’s thought’ from which it emerged onto Deleuze’s own crossing of the line.

Guattari: From Machinic Transversality to a New Aesthetic Paradigm

Following Guattari, who in the 1960s was struggling with the very same question from within a Lacanism he reconfigured out of the ‘structuralist impasse’ (Guattari, 1972: 180; 1984a [1972]: 182), ⁸ it was as if structural transdisciplinarity had critically to become transversality, had to reopen the problem of ‘causality, subjectivity and history’ in its most theoretical and practical stakes from within the politically (re)charged question of transformation. ⁹ The Deleuzian warning in The Logic of Sense (2001 [1969]) will certainly have been part of the crystallization of the agencement in Deleuze-Guattari. It reads: ‘How are we to stay at the surface without staying on the shore?’ (Deleuze, 2001 [1969]: 179). Guattari, for his part, had already stated that on this surface ‘Reality and history have become subject to an eternal symbolic order from which they are totally isolated and which essentially nullifies them. Subjectivity and the signifier have become interchangeable’ (Guattari, 1984a [1972]: 177), in the guise of the action of the structure (Miller, 2012). ¹⁰

From this perspective, it is 1968 as the driver of a historical and causal break that ends structuralism. Breaking through an anti-Oedipus more generational than ethical, 1968 liberates the non-identique à soi from the chain of the signifier (chaîne signifiante) and ushers in the time of the ‘rhizome’ as an anti-structuralist war machine that makes structure take flight according to a machinic apparatus that desymbolizes or desutures its real-abstraction so as to animate it from the outside. But following Guattari, this outside is nothing other than the machination of the subject qua ‘anti-signifier’ (Guattari, 2013c: 161). Or, to put it another way: it is by identifying the critique of the structure with an absolute deterritorialization and socialization of the (concept of) subject that ‘transformation’ will confront its real ontological dimension, in a single but mixed semiotic plane of immanence. ‘Signs work flush to the real’ (les signes travaillent à même le réel – Guattari, 1977: 250) is the leitmotiv of the Guattarian scaffoldings and the key formula in Molecular Revolution’s 1977 toolbox. This animates the rhizome with the principles of connexion and heterogeneity, performing ‘transformational multiplicities’ in such a way that enunciation – the enunciation at work in the transformation of the subject into a ‘collective agent of enunciation’ – escapes from the structuralist temptation. ¹¹ Enunciation means semiotization, making ‘the collective assemblages of enunciation function directly within [concrete and abstract] machinic assemblages’, making it ‘impossible to make a radical break between regimes of signs and their objects’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b [1980]: 7–8). ‘Getting out of language’ (Sortir de la langue) ¹² through a radical critique of linguistics conducted on behalf of a pragmatic ontology of signs (projecting a ‘diagrammatic’ Hjelmslev against structuralism ‘and its fondness for the signifier’) ¹³ will occupy a full third of A Thousand Plateaus, and will mobilize, again and again, the schizoanalytic ‘meta-modelizations’. It is definitively the real ‘introduction’ into the rhizome and to a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization, as the extreme transdisciplinary condition necessary to attain a politics of multiplicities that is totally oriented towards experimentation with the complexity of the real. The real is not the impossible, Guattari says somewhere, but the field of the possible, correlative to the deterritorialization of the sign. Or, more provocatively, in the mood of the sign’s mad constructivism: if ‘the genesis of enunciation is itself caught up in the movement of processual creation … the process precedes the heterogenesis of being’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 107–8).

This ‘schizo-ontology’ or ‘onto-logic’, developing the logic of a ‘transversal ontology’ (all Guattari’s terms), will inevitably denounce Science (with a capital S) and the received disciplinary models of scientificity. ¹⁴ It reads as an anti-Althusserian motto: ‘We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are with ideology: all we know are assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 25). Equally, they will involve ‘the psyche, human societies, the living world, machinic species and, in the last analysis, the Cosmos itself’, in a mecanosphere intertwined with the biosphere. This is a very ANT (Actor-Network Theory) or ARO (Actant-Rhizome Ontology) catalogue, as is confirmed by Guattari’s declared interest for the ‘sociological school around Bruno Latour’, because ‘there is no pure conceptual scientific object that could be separated from its [social, economic, contextual] components’ (Guattari, 2013a [1992]: 138). The conclusion is also strangely Latourian in its phrasing: ‘such a “transversalist” enlargement of enunciation should lead to the fall of the “Ontological Iron Curtain” that the philosophical tradition erected between mind and matter’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 108). ¹⁵ It will be understood that the insistence on ‘the machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 109), the very notion of a ‘non-human enunciation’ and the plane of machinic interfaces from which ‘Being crystallizes through an infinity of enunciative assemblages’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 58), calls into question all disciplinary boundaries, short-circuited now by the formula PROCESSUAL MONISM = PLURALISM OF ASSEMBLAGES.

Do we not therefore also reach here the adisciplinary limit of transdisciplinarity, where ‘disciplines’ are attacked qua the ‘control principle over the production of discourse’ highlighted by Foucault in ‘The Order of Discourse’ (Foucault, 1981 [1971]: 61), and deconstructed at its highest level by Guattari as signifying the exclusion of ‘trans-semiotic and amodal enunciative compositions’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 104)? If the Guattarian formulation of a transfer from scientific paradigms to an ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ (developed in Chaosmosis in a kind of meta-physics of the rhizome) ¹⁶ is not the most convincing position on this question, Guattari nevertheless insists that the strengthening of the heterogeneity of components in a process of heterogenesis, supporting a new ‘politics of science’ upon what he calls an ‘ecology of the virtual’, depends on considering science in terms of the specificity of ‘its scientific assemblage, of its partial enunciators, of the scientific plane of reference, with introduction of systems of limits, of coordinates’. It is after this passage, directly derived from the ‘scientific’ chapter of What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 [1991]: 117–133) that Guattari affirms: ‘This is the condition that will allow us to position science in a non scientistic way’ with regard to these ‘praxical objects’ (Guattari, 2013a [1992]: 138–9 [transl. modified]), conditioning a constructivist opening up of the fields of virtuality and new modalities of a computer-aided subjectivation. ¹⁷

We may read here a radical alternative to the ‘expanded Galileism’ linguistically extended to new objects (‘un galiléisme de la langue’ – Milner, 1995: 92–7) ¹⁸ promoted by Althusserian-Lacanian structuralism. And we can see that Guattari’s critical movement overlaps Foucault’s ‘Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie’ (i.e. to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse), when the latter deconstructs the ‘epistemological extrapolation’ and the ‘formalizing illusion’ that imagines ‘that science is established by an act of rupture and decision, that it frees itself at one stroke from the qualitative field and from all the murmurings of the imaginary by the violence … of a reason that founds itself by its own assertion’ (Foucault, 2012 [1968]: 331). And yet, still in parallel with Foucault’s ‘regional analysis’, we should also note the forced rearticulation of A Thousand transdisciplinary Plateaus with the redisciplinarization of What Is Philosophy?, which Guattari projects as a ‘chaosmosis’ taking over, ontologically and politically, from the socially expanded field of forces and trajectories from which disciplines constitute themselves. Ontologically, before and beyond the regional differences between ‘activities’, the superposition of the immanence of infinity and finitude onto the machinic point of negotiation between complexity and chaos, upstream, will let loose the ‘Universes of references’ into a ‘mutant creationism’ promoting ‘different enunciative assemblages, different semiotic recourses, an alterity grasped at the point of its emergence’ (Guattari, 1995 [1992]: 117). In their extreme meta-physical modalities (in the most difficult pages of Chaosmosis, in Chapter 6, ‘The New Aesthetic Paradigm’), these ‘Universes of references’ will exceed the sectorization and binarization of values’ transcendent autonomized pole of reference, from the key heterogenetic position of a machinic transversality translated into the ‘new aesthetic paradigm’. But the point is that this whole process, which necessarily associates the ‘aesthetic machine’ with technoscience’s machinic creativity and the machinic dimensions of subjectivity, cannot really develop consistency politically, at the level of an ‘ecology of practices’ (to use Isabelle Stengers’ locution in resonance with the Guattarian articulation between ‘social experimentation and action-research’), without permanently addressing and confronting its institutionally stabilized modes of existences into disciplines, which are also, historically, the over-determined ‘regional’ configuration of the most speculative thought. ¹⁹ As we shall see, a similar kind of difficulty awaits Bruno Latour.

Latour: From ‘Actant-Rhizome Ontology’ to a New Politics of Institutional Forms

Let us return to the rhizome and to its pragmatic development in terms of an actor-network theory self-critically re-presented, against its managerialist reduction to the multinational enterprise ANT, as ARO (Haro sur l’ANT – Death to ANT?!): actant-rhizome ontology. In the introduction to a collective work published in 1999 under the heading Actor Network Theory and After, John Law makes sense of this equivalence, coming back ruthlessly to the ‘two stories’ generating and articulating the theory. Semiotics of materiality, translated into relational materiality, is the name of the first one. ‘It takes the insight of semiotics, that of the relationality of entities, the notion that they are produced in relations, and applies this ruthlessly to all materials – and not simply to those that are linguistic’ (Law, 1999: 4). ²⁰ But it is performatively that the ‘inherent qualities’ and ‘essentialist divisions’ have to be ‘thrown on the bonfire of dualisms’: since entities are not only located in the relations of which they are the effects (structural topology), they perform and ‘are performed in, by, and through these relations’. Performativity, performance, happening or event (événement: a word used by Latour) is the second ‘story’ that translates the intentionally oxymoronic ‘actor-network’ into the local problematizations of its onto-semiotic principle of heterogeneity (Law, 1999: 4–5). Bruno Latour, in the same book, starts his article by saying that ‘there are four things that do not work with ANT: the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the coffin!’ (Latour, 1999: 15). The word network, the ‘double click’ information-system (the Evil Genius of 2013’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence) is caricatured as the ‘pet notion of all those who want to modernize modernization with the most frightening of the slogans: “Down with rigid institutions, long live flexible networks”’. This new capitalistic scenography is immediately opposed to the Deleuzo-Guattarian use of the term network, identified with a rhizome meaning a ‘series of transformations’ (Latour adds: ‘translations, transductions’) which is not only opposed to the current web-engineering of a transportation of information without deformation: it cannot ‘be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory’. The conclusion reads: ‘I don’t think we should use it anymore, at least not to mean the type of transformations and translations we want to explore’. The rhizomatic motto means a pragmatist, processual and relational ontology that refuses the bifurcation into subject/object and any perspective of reconciliation (since it is a complete artefact), as well as any dualism of material/social, individual actor-agency/structure, micro/macro, local/global, etc. That is, it means ‘following circulations [rather] than … defining entities, essences or provinces’ (Latour, 1999: 20). A circulating molecular transdisplinarity is the key to this processual constructionism, which will ‘nail’ the two other terms nominally configuring ANT. It is a way to travel from one spot to the next, learning from the most heterogeneous actants and their world-building associative capacities; a method not for a theory, but for a research protocol empirically correlated with an irreductive ontology, proposing that actantiality is not what an ‘actor’ does but what provides human and non-human actants with their inter/actions, their assemblages in continuity/discontinuity among modes of action, and their ‘subjectivity’.

If actor/actant and network/worknet are two faces of the same process reflecting its movement beyond the great bifurcation material/social or society/nature, a fully deterritorialized subjectivity is ready to drift from the fold between the sociology of science’s laboratory (the new transdisciplinary discipline largely invented by ANT case studies and located in science and technology studies (STS) as an institutional meta-discipline) and the anthropology of social sciences, into a ‘monist or a symmetric anthropology’ (the subtitle of We Have Never Been Modern, 1991) ‘abandoning simultaneously the use of Nature and the use of Society’ (Latour, 2005: 93, 109). ²¹ What is at stake here is a radical deconstruction of the structural divides of modernity (in there/out there). While invoking the general dispositif of Anti-Oedipus, ²² it works from the ‘circulation of transformations’ (Latour, 1999: 22) deploying each ‘thing’ as a multiple through local effects of absolute concreteness in a non-modern (but not a postmodern) situation. It is this pluriverse, to use William James’s expression, that is to be defined ontologically as a unique plane of immanence animated by a chiasmatic double movement: ‘the more we have “socialized” so to speak “outside” nature, the more “outside” objectivity the content of our subjectivity can gain’ (Latour, 1999: 23). This double movement mediating ANT transdisciplinarity ungrounds (effonde) western metaphysics – from the Aristotelian-Thomistic substantia to the transcendental subject – to determine a politics of collectives which would allow political relevance stricto sensu to be redefined within a ‘relocation of the extraordinary originality of political circulation’ (Latour, 1999: 23). With reference to Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics, and the way she affirms the ecology of practices as political apprenticeship and speculative thought, in a very para-Guattarian movement, Latour concludes his article by referring to the political perspective that is supposed to take place after (après/d’après) ANT, as the major task of a ‘collective philosophy’.

It is interesting to notice that a bit later, in Reassembling the Social (2005), Latour will kindly ‘apologize’ for his former critical position about ANT (‘four nails in a coffin’) and will resuscitate the acronym (a perfect ‘trail sniffing and collective traveller’: ‘an ant writing for other ants, this fits my project very well’) from the distinction between the ‘sociology of the social’ and the ‘sociology of associations’ (or associology), reciprocally and historically referring to the quarrel between Durkheim and Tarde. Because ‘he does not respect any border between nature and society, and because he does not stop at the borders between physics, biology and sociology’ (Latour, 2002: 4), Gabriel Tarde and his neo-monadology is rediscovered as the ‘forefather’ of ANT in a world made of differences, differential associations or collectives, mixing humans and non-humans, a world without which politics, as the continuous/discontinuous composition/assembling of one common world, would be impossible (Latour, 2005: 250–53). It is this common world that cannot be properly divided in ready-made disciplinary domains, but only in terms of the different skills or operations applied to one and the ‘same domain’ (Latour, 2005: 254); a domain that in turn cannot exist without its associations with all the other domains that make the former escape from the regular mechanisms it institutes and constitutes. Collectively translated and redesigned, the ‘magic formula’ PLURALISM = MONISM presents itself as a kind of politics of transdisciplinarity in which each discipline, while extending and testing the entities it mobilizes, enters into an inter-problematization of the modes of assembling its assemblages, liberated from the modern meta-language of the epistemological bifurcation human/non-human, or, more classically, nature/culture (or nature/knowledge, following Whitehead’s deconstruction of ‘the bifurcation of nature’).

Transdisciplinary ecologization versus disciplinary modernization: this is the crossing zone Latour and Guattari may share in the un/common emergency of a hybrid political ontology, denouncing the division between primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities as the forclosure of an ontological politics redefined by ‘the progressive composition of a common world’. ²³

This rough schematization had no other goal than the tracing of associations (to the detriment of the differences) with the Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome to better suggest a provisional framework from within which it would be possible to apprehend, by contrast, the ‘categorial diplomatic’ turn of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). ²⁴ If it envelops politics in a positive anthropology of the Moderns, it is in the agora – supported by a Web 2.0 participative dispositif, building upon the possibility afforded by technological networks to ‘follow up interactions in a detailed way’ ²⁵ – that the ontological categorization of the experience of the values related to the plurality of the modes of existence, which are not taken into account by networks, is supposedly developed. At this point, we can grasp the very different meaning of this ‘after’ actor-network theory, since the network is no longer the (processual machination of) being but one mode of existence among many others, one that will be criticized because of its non-diplomatic monotony. Monotony in ‘saying almost the same thing about all [the domains/disciplines]: namely, that they are “composed in a heterogeneous fashion of unexpected elements revealed by the investigation”’ (Latour, 2013a: 35). ²⁶ For having ‘retained some of the limitations of critical thought’ (Latour, 2013a: 64) and being exclusively focused on the ‘relations of forces’ (Latour, 1988 [1984]: 12), ²⁷ the network is regressing to the expression of a phenomenal empiricism, and seems to lose the ontological-rhizomatic plane of immanence that, for Deleuze and Guattari, not only had to be ‘followed’ but always had to be constructed in complex semio-machinic processes of production of specific multiplicities, constantly addressing the capitalistic deterritorialization/reterritorialization machinery as its constitutive field of forces. Although it is not without possible analogies with the passage from A Thousand Plateaus to What Is Philosophy?, the terrain of the Inquiry is nevertheless very different (and very different from its Guattarian chaosmotic reinvestment). The question becomes that of the heterogenetic reconstruction (or the ‘ontological history’) of the disciplines, given their dependence on the metaphysical categorization of ‘values’ (associated with the prepositions commanding each mode of existence) and their transdisciplinary crossings in a purely ‘regional ontology’. Latour’s formulations ‘are supposed to allow each mode to enter into resonance with all the others, but also to be differentiated from the institution that has often betrayed it, as well as from the domain that encloses it’ (Latour, 2013a: 480). The disciplines are, after all, destined to be diplomatically renegotiated, to redefine the Moderns but with a chance to gain their agreement, since we are taking into account ‘what they cherish’: ²⁸ a positive and respectful anthropology of the Moderns. ²⁹ If multiplicities have to be made in the making (compare the Deleuzo-Guattarian formula: le multiple, il faut le faire), they have to be redirected towards this new figure of universality (l’universel, il faut le faire) ³⁰ that activates and mobilizes the diplomat in his hope for a common world in the postnatural/postcultural age of ‘Gaia’. (It would be extremely interesting to compare the Latourian diplomat with Stengers’ first model of the diplomat at the end of Cosmopolitics, which opens with the will ‘to diagnose new immanent modes of existence’). ³¹

Gaia, or the truly other Other, becomes the support for a philosophical anthropology of Being-as-Other that, through its ontological pluralism, mediates the possible pacific coexistence of modes of existence, from the open space between the value of experiences, the diverging modes of valorizations of Being, and the institutional translations/reductions of their proper transcendences. But the fact that Gaia – or the incarnation of the Monism of the Other in the Inquiry – being the mode of existence sui generis and the ‘mix up of all the mix ups’, is neither a mode of existence like the ‘others’, nor properly analysed with regard to the ontologico-political recompositions required by its ‘anthropocenic’ insistence and its incompatibility with capitalistic logic, ³² may encourage a practical-metaphysical – and perhaps vaguely scholastic – reading of this new philosophy of mediation, compensating Gaia’s original religious Stimmung. ³³

One cannot deny the fantastic transdisciplinary redistributions operated by a new image of thought where – as Patrice Maniglier puts it – ‘psychology becomes a kind of sorcery, language a sort of fiction (and not conversely), technology something that long precedes humanity and so on’ (Maniglier, 2014: 41). Nevertheless, transdisciplinarity as such is less constructively problematized after ANT, as the ‘speculative question of an ecology of practices’ (Stengers, 1997b: 119), than openly mediated by a very institutional political play, inseparable from its own putting into form (mise en forme). ³⁴ So that the ‘sovereign’ tension between the ‘experimental metaphysics’ claimed by the Inquiry and the reality principle of a new kind of ‘institutional analysis’ (to use the Guattarian appellation, transformed here into an ironic mode) makes all its actuality.