The issue and its publics: Latour,Durkheim and object-oriented politics

Abstract

Drawing loosely upon observations made during the COVID-19 crisis, the paper discusses how democratic publics form and collide around political issues in Western democracies. Inspired by Bruno Latour's political philosophy, I demonstrate the advantages of an object-oriented perspective on democratic practice. Then, I endeavour to show the deficits of this perspective, with support from an unexpected source: Émile Durkheim’s late works. Reinterpreting Durkheim's ideas of ritual, I suggest that we might usefully complement the object-oriented perspective on the formation of publics with a more traditional notion of collectivity. In the first part of the paper, I examine Latour's popular work during the initial stages of the pandemic. I then dig into his object-oriented concept of the political, and I criticize the one-sidedness of his approach to the collective aspects of democratic life. In the second part of the paper, I show how Durkheim's concept of ritual may complement the Latourian conception.

Introduction

The present paper develops a novel theoretical framing of democratic life. Asserting the fruitfulness of a so-called ‘object-’ or ‘issue-oriented’ perspective when describing contemporary Western democratic culture, it discusses how ‘publics’ form around political ‘issues’. I will draw upon French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour and his political philosophy, yet attempt to balance a certain one-sidedness to Latour's object-oriented conception by bringing in an admittedly selective reading of Émile Durkheim's late work (1995). Especially, I hope to show how the object-oriented perspective may benefit from drawing in Durkheim's descriptions of the collective sacralization of objects. Throughout, drawing loosely on both my own and Latour's observations made during the COVID-19 crisis, I explore how object-oriented and collectivist perspectives can be combined and used empirically.

Latour, inspired by Dutch political and digital sociologist Noortje Marres’ (2007) object-oriented reading of American democratic thinkers John Dewey (1954) and Walter Lippmann (2011), sketches a distinct analytical approach to democratic culture and political ‘speech’ (e.g. 2005b, 2007, 2013, 128ff., 327–355). Constructing the democratic public as an ‘actor-network’, he seeks to enforce a form of rich empirical description that investigates how all the ‘actors’ or ‘actants’ in a network contribute to its emergence, its stabilization and its extension. Notably, to really enforce close analysis of these entanglements, Latour insists on allotting due attention to the co-constitutive role of non-human agencies in these relations. And in political life, a given issue – the central theme of a democratic ‘controversy’ – is a prominent non-human actor. It contributes to the assembling of the network, the collective, the political public around itself.

Such object-oriented perspectives have become popular in recent years in ANT-inspired political research and theorizing (e.g. Harman, 2014; Marres, 2007) and in digital sociology and STS-inspired ‘controversy research’ (e.g. Birkbak, 2017; Marres, 2007, 2015, 2017; Rogers, 2019; Venturini and Munk, 2022). The controversy perspective is apposite to how the conceptual articulation of an issue – its (further) construction, enactment, development – is animated by debate, and the perspective gains relevance as Western political culture becomes ever more centred on strongly polarizing issues in an increasingly digital, social media-saturated public sphere.

Another string to Latour's political philosophy, less explored by the controversy scholars, ushers in a more experiential appreciation of non-purposive, affective and creative engagement with issues in political speech and mobilization. In my view, this approach is particularly conducive to the development of a new object-oriented phenomenological perspective on democratic practice. ¹

And yet, a major reservation curbs my enthusiasm towards the issue-oriented perspective: it is decisively anti-collectivist, whereby I define collectivity in line with Randall Collins’ (2004) and Anne Rawls’ (2004) interactionist reconstruction of late Durkheim (1995). It seems to me that the object-oriented scholars deliberately downplay the significance of traditionally conceived collective dynamics in politics today. This downplaying may be motivated by some reservations towards how these dynamics have traditionally been explained. Already Dewey was sceptical about the explanatory appeal to ‘gregarious instincts’ in political matters (1954: 10), ² and the main critical thrust of Latour's sociology (2005a) is directly against such prefabricated explanatory concepts of the collective and what holds it together. A question is, then, whether appeals to emphatic collectivity must lean on such strong explanatory measures. As will become clear, I do not think so.

The first part of this paper introduces the object-oriented perspective, demonstrating both its strengths and its limitations. Departing from Latour's popular writings during the first phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, I highlight the fruitfulness of his approach but also how and why, for theoretical reasons, it must ignore important collective aspects to phenomena. I then delve into Latour's account of political ‘speech’ and show why it, for all its phenomenological strength, remains equally reductionist. I end this first part of the paper with a critique of Latour's central concept of ‘relation’ (or ‘association’). In the second part, I turn to Durkheim. I explain how a Durkheimian perspective highlighting the emphatically collective accommodation of issues yields a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the formation of publics. Finally, I seek to demonstrate how the two approaches may be brought together to complement each other. The dynamics of the COVID-19 crisis need to be viewed from a perspective capable of deploying traditional insights about collectivity without sacrificing the phenomenological strengths of issue-related analysis. This is what I seek to accomplish in the present paper.

Latour and the COVID-19 crisis

To understand the object-oriented perspective on politics, it is useful to observe how it would deal with a topical empirical issue. In this case, I have chosen the COVID-19 pandemic, inclusive of the political measures it sparked and the public reactions to these measures.

During the first months of lockdown, effectuated in the United States and most European countries in March and April 2020, Latour published a number of popular articles and interviews about the pandemic (e.g. 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d). The following paragraph is illustrative:

The state of society depends at every moment on the associations between many actors, most of whom do not have human forms. And of course, in spite of the noise surrounding a ‘state of war’ against the virus, it is only one link in a chain where the management of stocks of masks or tests, the regulation of property rights, civic habits, gestures of solidarity, count exactly as much in defining the degree of virulence of the infectious agent … The pandemic is no more a ‘natural’ phenomenon than the famines of the past or the current climate crisis. Society has long since moved beyond the narrow confines of the social sphere. (Latour, 2020b)

The virus is not ‘natural’ in the sense of belonging to the independent ontological realm of ‘nature’. Instead, the agency of the virus, its ‘degree of virulence’, is enacted in a ‘chain’ comprising all kinds of technologies, economic and scientific practices, institutions and policies, civic habits, and law making. The perspective is ‘relationalist’: the virus enacts these other elements, and it is in turn enacted by them.

But what role do traditional collective affects play in these enactments? Despite that Latour notes the existence of ‘gestures of solidarity’ in the initial phase of the pandemic, he has little eye for the central role of emphatic collectivity in the enactment of the virus. He sees the formation of mediated solidarity as only a reaction, with no contribution to make to the construction of the virus and its dangers. Suddenly, it is the coronavirus that alone gathers the crowd of humans:

[The coronavirus] has the capacity to link ‘all humans’ by passing by way of our apparently inoffensive droplets from coughing. Germs are super-globalisers: when it is a matter of resocialising billions of people, the germs make short work of it! (Latour, 2020c)

The action moves in one direction: from the objective towards the collective. The virus seems to have monopolized the action.

At other occasions, Latour seems to reduce solidarity to a mere expression of state biopower necessitated by the advent of the virus, as when he marvels at the teaching of ‘millions of humans … how to “social distance” at the blow of a whistle, to space themselves for greater solidarity, to stay home so as not to overload the hospitals’ (2020c). Through uniting with state power, the virus has ‘resocialised’ us top-down, aligned ‘millions of people’, orienting us all in the same direction (2020c). And yet, in Latour's account, this collective alignment around the virus does not contribute to the virus’s agency. Though he does remind the reader of the sense of solidarity and unity that, at least in Europe, characterized the first weeks of lockdown, these collective sentiments carry no weight in terms of outcome. This is because Latour's idea of ‘alignment’ has no immanent element. The crowd is curated top-down. At any rate, the solidarity or absence of controversy in the initial phase of the crisis is attributed by Latour to control and subjugation rather than to a collective sentiment or energy keeping controversies at bay.

Latour's parliamentary philosophy

It is worth consulting Latour's more theoretical work on politics at this stage. His complex reflections on the different ‘chambers’ in a new ‘parliament of things’ (2004) do examine the institutionalization of controversies surrounding emerging ‘hybrids’ (such as the COVID-19 virus). Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, we find little room for emphatic collective enactment here either. Latour rather wishes to extend disagreement. Following Dewey, he believes that expanding adversarial debate leads to a more comprehensive ‘articulation’ of any issue. Moreover, for all his metaphysical reconfigurations, Latour bases the legitimacy of his hypothetical new parliament on rather traditional deliberative and procedural concepts: democratic decisions arrived at through ‘due process’ will constitute a just and predictable ‘composition of a common world’. ³ Apparently, as long as due process is observed, all parties will back the (preliminary) ‘closure’ of a debate. Certain ‘facts’ will then be ‘instituted’, and interlocutors ‘will stop challenging the state of things that now have clear boundaries, precise definitions’ (2004: 104, 156). A new collective that includes the new facts in a somewhat agreed-upon ontological form will crystallize. This sketch remains highly idealized. ⁴

Latour's parliamentary philosophy does not adequately explain the initial phase of the 2019 pandemic and does little better measured against the later, more controversy-ridden phase. ⁵ Politics of Nature, written in 2004, gives little workable advice as to how to handle this pandemic's emergent cultural and social polarization around the status of science, scientific objects, and ‘established’ political institutions. ⁶ In the first phase of the crisis, which, according to Latour, ought to have been characterized by ‘perplexity’ and ‘controversy’, we experienced quite a lot of agreement and community building. Conversely, in the second phase, which ought to have been characterized by ‘closure’ of debate and ‘institutionalisation’ of ‘facts’, we found intense ontological controversy. A spectacular compartmentalization of information circulation took place, and a counter-public united around anti-establishment and anti-scientific attitudes emerged. A major cleavage gained saliency in the Western public sphere: between, on the one side, a minority who invested strong collective energy into refusing to wear face masks, spruiking the dangers of vaccination, and insisting that there was no pandemic but that the naïve populace was being misled by mainstream media; and, on the other side, a majority who stressed the danger of the virus, sought to prolong the sense of urgency and alarm, and pushed for continued lockdown, calling the opposing faction ‘conspiracy theorists’. Obviously, this polarization was ripe with emphatic collectivity on both sides. Real-life controversy is fuelled to a high degree by processes of border drawing, abject creation and mutual polarization. ⁷

To sum up, we could say that Latour neglects both that human collectivity is a powerful articulation mechanism in its own right and that it is highly present also in situations of controversy. The polarization of the later phase of the pandemic may thus be reconstructed as two interdependent ‘echo-chambers’ (Sunstein, 2007), instrumentalizing each other for (internal) collective purposes. ⁸ In fact, such affective polarization excels in dynamics of articulation: each side explodes in production of stereotypes and negative hyperbole regarding their adversary – a dynamic that further deepens and unfolds ideological differences at the same time as it enforces collective sentiment through border drawing on both sides. Hence, this ‘echo-chamber’ does more than just ‘echo’. It should rather be thought of as a kind of ‘articulation-chamber’, a space where affective collectivity is enacted both through emphatical enrichment and development of the issue in question and through negative enactments of adversaries and their prominent objects and issue-constructions.

Gathering a public: Politics as a mode of existence

We have yet to attend to the, for us, most important string in Latour's political theory, which is about speech and political rhetoric and mobilization (2003, 2005b, 2007, 2013: 129–136, 327–355). This line of enquiry adds new facets to Latour's view on collective affect and allows for a more phenomenological perspective. This ‘experiential’ perspective is characteristic for a period in Latour's work that culminates in the programmatic Enquiry Into Modes of Existence from 2013. Here Latour seeks to work out a system of different ‘modes’ of object-relation pertaining to different institutional or practical areas. Much to the reader's surprise, given the privative status of emphatic collectivity in the earlier works, Latour now actively promotes the political mode as the collectivist mode par excellence (Harman, 2014: 85).

For every mode one has to ask the same question: without it, what would be missing in the set of values to which we hold? The case of the political mode is actually simple enough: without the Circle, there would be no groupings, no group, no possibility of saying ‘we’, no collecting, quite simply, and thus no collective, either. All the other modes thrust themselves into being and alteration. This one … this one alone, comes back to assemble those who otherwise would disperse. (2013: 350, original emphasis)

The political mode enacts the ‘we’. Latour's account of political speech is replete with ‘groups’, ‘crowds’, ‘agoras’ and ‘masses’. And yet, as will soon be clear, Latour does not allow these collectives any emphatic form of synchronization or convergence on their own terms. They have no ability to instigate action. The reason why the politician must constantly come back to recreate or reassemble the ‘group’ is that it will ‘disperse’ as soon as it is left to itself. The ‘Circle’ Latour writes about (e.g. 2003: 149–152; 2013: 339) is a movement between an active principle – the politicians or spokespersons who ‘represent’ and gather the group – and a passive principle – the ‘represented’, the assembled group who can only ‘obey’ or ‘dissent’ (or reform or dissolve).

Start with a multitude that does not know what it wants but that is suffering and complaining; obtain, by a series of radical transformations, a unified representation of that multitude; then, by a dizzying translation/betrayal, invent a version of its pain and grievances from whole cloth; make it a unified version that will be repeated by certain voices, which in turn – the return trip is as least as astonishing as the trip out – will bring it back to the multitude in the form of requirements imposed, orders given, laws passed; requirements, orders, and laws that are now exchanged, translated, transposed, transformed, opposed by the multitude in such diverse ways that they produce a new commotion: complaints defining new grievances, reviving and spelling out new indignation, new consent, new opinions. (Latour, 2013: 341)

At the outset, there is nothing but a formless ‘multitude’ – no inherent convergence or synchronization. It is the politician who assembles the group by telling it ‘what it wants’. Granted, politicians have to be sensitive to the ‘suffering and complaining’ of the multitude, but these grievances are merely diffuse and distinct dissatisfactions. It is the politician's exclusive enactment of the issue that draws the crowd. Thereupon, with her crowd behind her, the politician convinces other politicians to back the articulated issue, which is then circled back to the group in the form of new ‘requirements’, ‘laws’ and ‘orders’. The crowd then (partly) ‘obeys’ these directives, which nevertheless regenerate dissent and dispersal, that is, produce new forms of ‘suffering and complaining’, and the movement can start all over again (2003: 150–151). At all these stations, the crowd remains merely reactive. It does not make the ‘Circle’ turn. It possesses no unifying powers and must constantly be reassembled from above. Latour states again and again that ‘neither the public, nor the common, nor the “we” exists; they must be brought into being’ (2013: 352).

Object-oriented political rhetoric

Let us move closer to Latour's depiction of the objective enactment typical of the political sphere. According to Latour (2005b, 2007, 2013), political speech is as object-oriented as any other practice. To engage listeners, political speech must be engaged by an object; it must be sparked by ‘matters’ of great ‘concern’.

But for [people] to be in a position to express themselves politically, they must be addressed in a certain way: Thrown. It is prudent to assume that, with few exceptions, we have nothing to say that is politically interesting until we are seized by this very particular form of political summons … [T]he strange property of political statements is that their task – an eminently temporary, risky, fragile task – is to produce those who formulate them! (Latour, 2019a: 2, original emphasis)

Max Weber talked in equally object-oriented terms about total ‘devotion’ to the political ‘cause’ (Schiermer, 2019a; Weber, 2009). In my view this perspective is still viable even in times of extreme professionalization of political communication. If the person speaking politically is not ‘seized’ by the ‘political summon’ she makes; if it is not important to her; if it does not breathe life and importance into her voice and animate her speech, she convinces no one. ⁹ Despite all the cynicism, it is not possible to go through a life in politics without being interested in and affected by political issues.

In this sense, an issue – if it has seized a good spokesperson – not only helps to ‘produce’ that spokesperson, but also the collective it engages.

So many issues, so much politics. Or, on the forceful slogan proposed by Noortje Marres: ‘No issue, no politics!’ It is thus above all because politics is always object-orientated … that it always seems to elude us. As though the weight of each issue obliged a public to gather around it – with a different geometry and different procedures on every occasion … It is because we disagree that we are obliged to meet – we are held to that obligation and thus assembled. (Latour, 2013: 337)

In articulating the issue – and being articulated by the issue – political speech assembles a public. However, we should note that Latour's concept of assembling or ‘meeting’ leaves plenty of room for division and debate. In Latour it is not agreement but ‘disagree[ment]’ that ‘holds’ us, or ‘obliges’ us ‘to assemble’.

A body that is not one; unity that does not harmonize; unity that disperses immediately; dispersal that must be assembled at once; different issues every time, around which people have to assemble because they don’t understand one another. (Latour, 2013: 351)

The point of reviving this old etymology [of the ‘Thing’ as a political assembly] is that we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together, but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement. (Latour, 2005b: 23)

In such passages as the above, Latour seeks to distance himself both from sociological, imitational, or suggestive notions of collectivity and from Habermasian consensus-prone notions of deliberation. However, these passages show how far he must go to avoid acknowledging emphatic collectivity as a co-constitutive element. Readers should ask themselves whether it is really possible to imagine a crowd which is exclusively held together by disagreement and which falls apart as fast as it gathers, a crowd whose fractions do not generate collective affects. Granted, it is reductionist to claim that politics is solely explained by a ‘wish to fuse together’ without an object-oriented impetus; still, it is no less reductionist to claim that the collective energies and sentiments generated through such forms of ‘fusion’ are of no consequence. The public may be no organic ‘body’, but nor is it a mere ‘phantom’ (2005b: 37–40) – and especially not so to the politician who is actually speaking – and speaking well – at the agora.

Latour speaking at the agora

Latour sees political rhetoric as a means to further construct crucial ‘matters of concern’ in the hope of engaging followers, expanding a crowd.

[I]n the heart of the agora, with urgency, in the middle of the crowd, it is always a matter of responding on the fly, without full knowledge of the ins and outs of the issue, at a series of questions in which the life and death of the collective is at stake. (Latour, 2013: 133)

At this juncture it seems that Latour himself has difficulty keeping to his claim that collective emotion in politics is always and exclusively result, that it can only be allowed as explanandum, never as explanans. At any rate, there is ample collective energy in this description. Isn’t the energizing experience of being ‘in the middle of the crowd’ part and parcel of being at the ‘heart of the agora’? Isn’t old-school collective ‘effervescence’ intrinsic to politics? Well, Latour does not think so. Read attentively, he still hinders these energizing experiences from animating and actualizing what goes on. The perspective remains individualistic and intellectualist. This should not be misunderstood. Latour's perspective is not idealist or cognitivist in the sense that it rules out affect and emotion – Latour's concept of (political) rhetoric deliberately entangles the cognitive and affective – yet it is intellectualist in its insistence that the affective element, the excitement, urgency, energy of the situation, does not exist except as a result of intense and stressed political deliberation – as if the existential importance of an important political ‘question’ is not equally heightened by the presence of collective energies around it.

Let me again exemplify by considering the empirical case of the COVID-19 pandemic. The communication of politicians dealing with the rapid spread of the virus in the initial phase of the pandemic was certainly permeated by felt urgency. It is less certain, however, whether the epistemic and existential insecurity felt in the face of the virus may fully account for the sense of urgency and imminent danger sensed by many people on the eve of lockdown. At times like these, the very sensation of the importance of the given issue, its construction as a shared problem, and its being a matter of ‘life and death’ are equally collectively enacted.

This collective element becomes even more salient if we look at Latour's own political activism. Latour was quick to see the COVID-19 restrictions as an occasion for a political awakening. Under the heading ‘Is This a Dress Rehearsal?’ (2020b), he compares life in lockdown to the possible privations Westerners will have to undergo if the ‘real’ catastrophe, the impending ecological disaster, is to be avoided. Latour wants to engage his readers. He wants to make us see the true political-ecological potential of such privative measures. Now, this is a good example of political speech according to Latour's own criteria (see also Harman, 2014: 83; Latour, 2013: 339ff.): Latour wants to make ecological matters urgent and to mobilize us for a good cause. He wishes to assemble a collective. But doesn’t he speak into an already ignited ambience? Don’t his own texts both transmit and enact a sense of participation in something greater, a sense of us all sharing a fatal, climactic moment in history? To be sure, this ‘we’ is not just a ‘result’; this engaged and listening ‘we’ predates Latour's efforts in ‘Is This a Dress Rehearsal?’. It helps him and carries him and breathes importance into his articulations from their outset – articulations that in turn further animate collective sentiments. ¹⁰

Still, nowhere in or around his political work does Latour make concessions to such dynamics. Just as inclined as he is to distribute agency to issues and objects, so he is reluctant to admit any entrainment with other humans around these issues.

Ultimately, we now see, Latour's politician does not really speak at the agora. His separation of the moment of utterance from the moment of collective reception constitutes the decisive theoretical mistake. According to Latour, it is exactly because the crowd is not yet brought into being – because a ‘hiatus’ or a ‘discontinuity’ must be ‘transcended’ (Latour, 2013: 347) – that political rhetoric is needed in the first place. It is this constitutive decoupling of speaker and crowd that makes ‘crooked’ speech necessary and political communication distinct in the first case (2013: 354). Political rhetoric for Latour is never the result of being in a crowd that was already there, let alone a result of being carried away by the object one already emphatically shares with this crowd. Radically insisting that the crowd must exclusively be resultant, Latour ends up with implausible or manifestly one-sided remarks such as the following:

The only way of making the circle advance, of ‘cooking’ or ‘knitting’ politics, of producing (re)groupings, consists in never ever starting with established opinions, wills, identities and interests. It is up to political talk alone to introduce, re-establish and adjust them. (2003: 159)

Again, the reader should ask whether it is really possible, even for the greatest sophist, to gather a ‘we’ that does not already help in the very speaking act. Don’t politically speaking persons feel the energies this ‘we’ throws back at them? Don’t they plug into these energies as they help them grow? I think they do. With the goal of developing a more relationalist perspective, we need to consult Durkheim.

Excursus: Collectivity in Latour beyond the political

However, before I consult Durkheim, a short excurse is in order. I have focused on the most collective mode in Latour's late sociology, the political mode, and still found it wanting in understanding of the collective aspects to object formation in the political sphere. But what about the collective aspects to other forms of gathering around other types of objects? How does Latour, if at all, treat collective moments beyond the political sphere? If the political mode is the collective one, what common features do other modes or object-oriented networks share that make them less collective? As it turns out, when we pause for a moment to contour how Latour treats the collective and affective in other sectors, we gain a deeper and broader appreciation of the impoverished nature of collective sentiment and energies across Latour's oeuvre. ¹¹

In the late work, there are several other modes that possess interesting affective and collective aspects. One mode is the emotive. Following Latour, positive commerce with (difficult) emotions may take place through the traditional invention of ‘idols’ or ‘icons’ – Latour highlights how premodern or non-Western cultures have accommodated these objects or ‘beings’ through rituals and religious techniques – but also through the more modern and individualized means of progressive ethno-psychiatry (2013: 165–166, 181–205). A neighbouring mode, the religious, deals with love and its existential and personal interpellations (2013: 296–325). And yet, though these modes are highly affective in the way they engage with their objects, they do not bear any traces of emphatic collective affect in the sense we reserve for that concept here. Symptomatically, in Latour, emotional or religious ‘beings’ are not ever emphatically ‘instaurated’ together with other humans.

The most collective mode besides the political one in Latour's increasingly complex edifice is probably the economic one. Indeed, Latour wishes to transform traditional economics wholesale and turn it into a science of ‘passionate interests’ (Latour, 2013: 413–441; Latour and Lépinay, 2009). He has no patience with usual prejudices which understand economic relations as ‘cold’ and ‘alienating’. To the contrary, the development of calculative behaviour – made possible by all the technology, metrology and formatting invented by the science of economics – enacts ‘passionate’ attachments rather than blocks them. Now, are these collective passions also at least partly collectively produced in the emphatic sense? Latour's answer is negative. They simply grow along or alongside the lines of diffusion made possible, amplified and energized by an increasing ‘economization’ of these relations. It is the increasing connectedness, the formatting and the technologies of measurability – now immensely enhanced by the digital revolution – that drive and expand the affective economy. Economic objects are enacted and diffused through all kinds of increasingly digitalized ‘value-meters’, interfaces and infrastructures which at one and the same time expand the realm of the calculative and ‘amplify’ the affective attachment to them (Latour and Lépinay, 2009: 40, 61–63). Yet we find no passionate sharing of these objects, no emphatically collective production of affect in Latour's economy. No dynamics of collective convergence; no collectivity driven fashions, no emphatically collective consumer trends, no hysteric fads, crazes or panics on the market, at the stock exchange, or in the trading room.

Why is this so? Why are affective relations never – beyond the political mode – emphatically collective in Latour's work? Latour's account of the economic mode provides the answer, I think. The reader should note its individualizing, or, maybe better, its ‘de-collectivising’ character. Citing Gabriel Tarde, Latour states that affective relations spread and grow stepwise along narrow and transitive channels:

From salesman to client, from client to salesman, from consumer to consumer and from producer to producer, whether competing or not, there is a continuous and invisible transmission of feelings … (Tarde in Latour and Lépinay, 2009: 39)

Thus, according to Latour, desire is enacted exclusively inside of these ‘point-to-point networks’ which connect ‘link by link, individual by individual’ (Latour and Lépinay, 2009: 75, see also p. 9). In fact, Latour constantly emphasizes the narrowness and the transitive nature of his networked connections, even beyond the economic sphere.

I shall sum up this excursus with two interrelated observations: one is that the relations constituting the central infrastructure in Latour's ‘sociology of association’ (2005a) are simply not spatial enough to allow for the truly dynamical character of collectively generated affects. There is not sufficient room for a crowd gathering around an object inside Latour's narrow galleries. The second is that, as Durkheim had already seen in his critique of Tarde (Durkheim, 1966: 123–128), a transitive, unidirectional concept of imitation cannot produce a real ‘social bond’ (1966: 123). Emphatically sharing or developing an object together with others implies reciprocal forms of ‘entrainment’ (Collins, 2004). Excluding relational reciprocity on the conceptual level means excluding emphatic collectivity on the empirical level. This critique can be turned against Latour too. ¹² His basic topology forces him to falsely ‘de-collectivize’ not only the economy, but all networked relations.

Durkheim on ritual and totemism

It is now clear to us that we need to make room for more energetic and collective forms of object-instauration. This, finally, brings us to the late Durkheim. However, a new reading of Durkheim needs to be prepared before we can really deploy his concepts. Admittedly selective, this reading will diverge from the standard textbook interpretation. Inspired by the ‘interactionist’ interpretations of Durkheim by Rawls (2004) and especially Collins (2004), I find in Durkheim's later descriptions of ritual behaviour traces of an entirely different ontology of the social than in his early work (cf. Durkheim, 2013[1895]). Take the following excerpts:

Probably because collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits harmony and unison of movement, these gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and dances … Boomerangs are knocked against each other; bull roarers are whirled. The original function of these instruments, used widely in the religious ceremonies of [Indigenous] Australia, probably was to give more satisfying expression to the excitement felt. And by expressing this excitement, they also reinforce it. (Durkheim, 1995[1912]: 218)

It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, and performing the same action in regard to the same object that [Indigenous Australians] arrive at and experience agreement. (232)

The cause we are capturing at work is not exclusive to totemism. There is no society in which it is not at work. Nowhere can a collective feeling become conscious of itself without fixing on a tangible object; but by that very fact it participates in the nature of that object and vice versa. (238)

Instead of the social being reduced to a ‘societal’ structure of norms and rules existing prior and ‘externally’ to the (sole) individual, as happens (often) in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 2013[1895]), the above descriptions fetched from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995[1912]) entangle individuals with each other. Individuals reciprocally imitate one another by performing ‘the same action in relation to the same object’. They ‘entrain’ (Collins, 2004). In other words, they actively (though not necessarily wittingly) cultivate and articulate the same foci, invest in the same interests, develop the same opinions, turn their bodies in the same directions, and engage with the same artefacts and the same practices in the same way. Instead of passively having in common a ‘culture’, ‘language’, class ‘background’, or ‘normative structure’ that are inscribed in the ‘habitus’ or the body of each, they actively share an object. ¹³ There are participation, contribution and engagement. In such a processual and concrete understanding of ritual, the collective is actively created and maintained by the participants. In this sense, contrasting with the social ontology of his early work (Durkheim, 2013), there is nothing ‘external’ or thingy to the social in Durkheim's late work.

Second, my reading of Durkheimian collectivity highlights the ritual participants inextricable entanglement with materiality and objectivity. While at other points his descriptions give the impression of a somewhat detached and vacant ritual space for the cultivation of collective sentiment, which is then, post hoc, ‘projected’, ‘superimposed’, or ‘added to’ fortuitous objects (Durkheim, 1995: 230–231), in the first passage above, Durkheim has an acute eye for the tools, techniques and technologies used to produce and ‘reinforce’ collective sentiment (fire, boomerang, bull roarer, rhythm, musical instrument, totemic symbol, dance), even while he maintains the privilege of the ‘object’ at the centre of the crowd's attention. ¹⁴

This hybrid reading of late Durkheim is closer to the materially ‘equipped’ and object-oriented interactionism of Latour than to the norm-centred, externalist and puristic social ontology of the younger Durkheim. ¹⁵ Crucially, instead of remaining obstinately focused on Durkheim's collectives’ hegemony in the ‘social construction’ of the totemic object and the subordinate role of this object's natural or material properties in this construction (Rawls, 2004: 167–170; Latour, 2005a: 72–74; 2014: 263–264), the reading proposed here foregrounds the active role of objects in Durkheim's account of ‘mimetic ritual’ – a form of ritual which sensitively mimics its object, typically a totem animal or plant (Durkheim, 1995: 331–337). Granted, when an object merely works as a symbol and recipient of collective energy that was somehow already cultivated in the imaginary lands of the pure social, then indeed ‘any object can play this role’ (Durkheim, 1995: 230). Yet there is another Durkheim. This is the Durkheim who insists that all ‘the other rites’ ‘are no more than variations of the fundamental [mimetic] rite’ (1995: 391). This Durkheim sees that there are mimetic elements – think about tattooing, painting, or otherwise emulating an object – even in the ritual charging of completely ‘conventional’ or non-figurative totemic signs (e.g. 1995: 234). To be sure, it may be that the collective selection of the object is largely contingent; it may be that the powerful experiential characteristics allotted to the object might have little to do with its actual material properties. This is not important to us. What is important is that actual ritual practice is mimetically directed – that is, oriented – by the shared object, at least in glimpses or key moments. In this sense, the choice of object may be underdetermined by the object's inherent contours or physical characteristics, even so the experience of it, yet this does not make the actual practice with the object less object-oriented. It rather makes it more object-oriented, more constructive. No rite is totally without sensitivity towards its pragmatic/material object, towards what we do together. Indeed, a purely formal ritual, as Collins observes, feels ‘empty’ (2004: 51–52). Strangely, Latour does not seem to recognize this in his reading of Durkheim.

Third, before reconsidering the political sphere, just allow me to note that this object-oriented reading in no way contradicts Durkheim's phenomenology of the sacred. Durkheim is right in insisting that an object changes its appearance as a result of its being emphatically shared. ¹⁶ The object gains in its abilities to attract attention and to help participants assemble. It gains power and agency, and therefore its contributions to the ritual are magnified. Among the Indigenous Australians Durkheim writes about, the ritual enactment of the object is so strong that they start to feel that they ‘participate in the nature of [the] object’ or even ‘merge’ with it (Durkheim, 1995: 238). Helping each other collectively to ‘become’ the totem animal, they become extremely sensitive to the imitation of it – and vice versa. Durkheim then generalises this pattern. Also modern political militants ‘help’ each other to become sensitive towards the object, to become consumed or ‘seized’ by the issue fought for by talking up its importance and urgency together. Just as the Australians receive ‘shocks’ and ‘electric charges’ from their sacred objects (1995: 192), so many a modern individual will feel the energy exuding from popular political leaders or from famous people. If they come physically close to them, they will ‘act accordingly’, which is to say that they might ‘take special precautions’, use ‘different gestures’ and speak ‘another language’ than is normal for them (1995: 215). Or maybe, they will, to use a modern expression, become ‘starstruck’. As Durkheim clearly sees, such forms of collective instauration both constructs subjects and objects.

Latour and Durkheim on fetishism

Thus constructed, Durkheimian fetishism is not about ‘projection’. The enactment of collective relations intensifies the relation to the object, it takes place around an object, it is centred on an object – whether it be a football match, a joke, a religious being, a celebrity, a gadget, a fashionable object, or a political issue such as the handling of a virus. This Durkheim does not separate the collective and the objective. He tells us that our being-with other humans invests us in the world, just as the world turns us toward these other humans. ‘Matters of concern’, borrowing Latour's phrasing, are always enacted collectively and the collective is enacted by matters of concern.

Still, this idea about a self-enforcing relation between collective animation and objective animation seems to fall between two chairs. It does not obey the distinction Latour (2005a) makes between ‘relational sociology’ (hybrid collectives of humans and non-humans) and traditional ‘sociology of the social’ (uninterested in our co-constitution with the non-human). This conceptual ambivalence is tangible in Latour's critique of Durkheimian totemism: while rather uncompromising in his dismissal of Durkheim's sociology of religion in his recent writings (see Latour, 2014), Latour seems a little less secure in the earlier Assembling the Social (2005a), especially when it comes to his assessment of Durkheimian totemism. Under the heading ‘Durkheim having a Tardian moment’, Latour poses the following short but pertinent question to Durkheim:

Does the totem express the group, facilitate its cohesion, or is it what allows the group to exist as a group? (Latour, 2005a: 38)

In the first case, the totem-object is merely instrumentalized by the ‘group’, facilitating the coherence of the already constituted (human) collective. In this case objects are reduced to ‘malleable’ ‘transporters’ or ‘intermediators’, the mere function of which is to circulate collective sentiments among humans (2005a: 37–42). In the second case, objects contribute constitutively to gather, form and shape these relations. The group did not exist beforehand. The objective dimension contributes to the structuring of its communicative and affective economy.

But why do we have to choose between these two scenarios? Pace Latour, it should be possible for objects to be both ‘intermediaries’ and ‘mediators’ (2005a: 37–42), that is, conducers for collective energies and also co-constitutive contributors to any collective assembling. These functions are not mutually exclusive. Many of the objects that Latour, with an expression borrowed from French philosopher Michel Serres, calls ‘quasi-objects’ – God is a case in point, but so is death, the fashionable item, money, a feared virus or any other prominent collective object – also work as mere ‘intermediaries’, in the sense that their capacity to ‘assemble the social’ sets in motion collective affects which then further enhance their objective powers. A political issue may become immensely more important by being constructed and enacted together with likeminded militants. And so may a football match or God.

So, what status does the sacred object in Durkheim really possess? The spectre that surfaces here is the anthropological concept of fetishism, a term repeatedly criticized by Latour (2010), who sees the very idea of fetishism as a cunning way of robbing powerful objects of their agency (by understanding their actions as mere ‘projections’ of (collective) energies of humans upon them). Such a notion of projection explains away relational agency and reinstalls a separation between the collective and the objective. Admittedly, Durkheim's text is open to such a critique (see e.g. 1995: 225–230), and so are any of his interpreters who take Durkheim's one-way construction of the object to mean that ritual practice is not object-oriented. In my view, Rawls’ interpretation (e.g. 2004: 14, 167, 170) makes this misstep. ¹⁷ However, as I have shown, another reading of Durkheim is possible which instead acknowledges the concrete construction of collective energies together with other, equally objectively and materially entangled human beings.

Participants in collective practice develop the shared object together, simultaneously enacting it and being enacted by it, gathering around it and being gathered by it – with or through the competent use of all kinds of more or less transparent tools, techniques and technologies belonging to the particular collective practice in question.

Durkheim on political speech

In contrast to Latour's speaking politicians, Durkheim's are subject to the collective dynamics they instigate themselves (Durkheim, 1995: 215; see also Collins, 2004: 85). The following passage by Durkheim is classic:

In the same way, we can also explain the curious posture of a man [sic] who is speaking to a crowd – if he has achieved communion with it. His language becomes high-flown in a way that would be ridiculous under normal circumstances; his gestures take on an overbearing quality; his very thought becomes impatient of limits and slips easily into the extreme … Sometimes, he even feels possessed by a moral force greater than he, of which he is only the interpreter. This is the hallmark of what has often been called oratorical inspiration. This extraordinary surplus of forces is quite real and comes to him from the very group he is addressing. The feelings he arouses as he speaks return to him enlarged and amplified, reinforcing his own to the same degree. The passionate echoes that he arouses re-echo in turn in him, and they increase his dynamism. (Durkheim, 1995: 212)

Feeling interest and enthusiasm coming from the crowd boosts a speaker's ability to enact the issue. Inversely, it is extremely draining to speak, let alone to speak well, in any collective realm if one is not met with positive attention from the audience (Collins, 2004: 53). A ‘bad’ audience curtails the speaker's ability to ‘speak the object’. It hinders speakers in setting in motion all the agencies they utterly depend on when speaking about anything. When talking to uninterested students, I experience difficulty in becoming interested. The object vanes. Its contours become slippery. It refuses to hold me and guide my speech, and I am thrown back upon myself. I start to focus on me instead of the theme I must talk about. The lecture implodes.

Like teachers or lecturers, politicians need to share their issues emphatically with their publics. Granted, the coronavirus is fundamentally co-constitutive for the public it gathers around itself. Of course, it aids the politician in its own articulation: ‘no issue, no politics!’ (Marres, 2007; see also Latour, 2013: 337). Yet the object-oriented perspective alone neither does justice to the relation to the object nor the dynamics of experience of it. A receptive public helps the politician in enacting the objective dimension. This collective further invests what is talked about with agency and urgency. In this sense, indeed, it enacts the politician through the object. The ‘unity’ of the group is just as constitutive of the enacted issue as the issue is the generator and cohesive substance of the group. The one-sidedness of Latour's account of political speech must be amended.

However, Durkheim's phenomenology of political speech is equally one-sided. The crowd does not simply enact the politician's rhetorical ‘creativity’, rather, as we see, it enacts the relation to the object. In as much as action is always relational and object-oriented, it is the concrete issue that ‘possesses’ the politician, not, as Durkheim means, a ‘moral force’ or an ‘oratorical demon’. These are subject-centred expressions. Rather, Durkheim should have drawn on his concept of mimetic ritual here. At any rate, shared emphatically with others, the political issue starts to vibrate and will suddenly and unexpectedly show new and important facets that must be addressed, be articulated even better, be spelled out with all their urgent consequences and illustrated in even more glaring colours. In actual practice, when actually addressing the crowd, it is the collectively enacted issue that prescribes what needs to be done.

Ultimately, we have to hash out a compromise. On the one hand, the collective should be a consequence. The crowd should be observed to grow, gaining strength and self-consciousness as a result of the politician's engagement with the political object. On the other hand, the collective should be conceded a dimension of objective enactment. It should be allowed to enforce and amplify the (hold the) object (has upon us). Setting this self-enforcing circle in motion is the goal of political rhetoric. Successful political rhetoric distinguishes itself by concurrently giving both the crowd and the object what they want. Effective rhetorical practice at the heart of the agora mediates the objective and the collective. The good speaker does not enforce a pregiven object upon the crowd. She does not insist on an object regardless of what the crowd wants to hear. Nor, however, does she tell a pregiven crowd anything it wants to hear regardless of the objective contours of the issue in question. Instead, she lets her feel for the actually present crowd lead her to better articulate the issue, and she lets the issue lead her to a stronger articulation of the crowd.

This orbitual definition of political rhetoric gives due credit to Durkheimian insights without pre-presupposing a collective as one harmonious public existing apart from the multitude of issues which co-constitute, compartmentalize and polarize our political lives. Latour is right to insist that there is no public without an issue. And yet, patently, there is no political issue without a crowd either. Crowds emerge with their issues. The collective is not a ‘phantom’ that will only materialize in future or virtual scenarios. It is no mere result. Nobody speaks properly – especially not in politics – without emphatically sharing the object with their audience. As Sloterdijk (2000) has forcefully demonstrated, without positive interaction with a present collective there is neither politician, political speech, nor agora.

This concrete crowd already present at the agora is no danger to object-oriented politics. To the contrary, the present crowd helps the speaking politician in becoming more object-oriented. It allows a political speaker to immerse herself in an object, attach to and passionately articulate an issue – and ultimately to become (spoken by) it. In sum, successful political speech mobilizes the collective through the issue and the issue through the collective. As Gustave Le Bon already saw, the most paradigmatic instances of political rhetorical practice – as glorious or as frightening as these examples are – are steeped in the explosive mixture of the objective and the collective.

Conclusion

I have argued that Latour's sound inclusion of non-human contributions in our practices leads him to neglect the co-constitutive importance of collective sentiment and affect. This results in analytical deficits and in an inability to account for important empirical phenomena. I use the global COVID-19 crisis loosely as a case study to show how Latourian notions of ‘articulation’ and ‘object-oriented’ action need to be complemented, especially in the political field, with a new sensitivity to forms of emphatic collective enactment of the political issue in question. A comprehensive understanding of current political reality must entail an appreciation of how emphatic collectivity can both stabilize and destabilize issues, how it co-animates the agencies and intensities of said issues and sparks discursive developments and ramifications of them.

I have sought to contour a novel theoretical appreciation of this emphatic collective and its role in democratic life through an object-oriented reading of Durkheim's account of ritual. The validity of the Durkheimian perspective is that, in contrast to other crowd theoretical approaches, it makes explicit the objective intermediation of collective sentiments. I develop the phenomenology of this perspective further by showing – with Durkheim – how emphatic collective sharing enacts and intensifies the issue shared. In my view we cannot understand the object-oriented aspects of political life, our relation to important issues or charismatic political leaders, without this Durkheimian framing.

At the same time, I have sought to avoid all reductionism. This effort has two prongs. One is that, against the interactionist and ritual-centred reading of Durkheim, we should circumvent all sociologism. People do not come together because an obscure external collective force or an object-less inclination towards ‘entrainment’ or ‘interaction’ compels them to fortuitously assemble. They assemble around objects. The object, moreover, is not an excuse for a desire to collectivize. Instead, we emphatically share objects because they are important to us. In my reading, Durkheim's account of the mimetic aspects of ritual provides the folio for an object-oriented understanding of ritual wherein collective animation is always-already objective animation. Indeed, if there is one archetypical modern character who instinctively understands this, it is the politician who succeeds in mobilizing others for a cause.

The other prong is that, in approaching Latour, we need to selectively avoid a too radical anti-sociologism. The political mode is highlighted by Latour as the most collective, but he does not go far enough. Somewhat tentatively, he tries to make room for human crowds and animated publics inside the political network, and yet he cannot resist separating the politician from the crowd, the utterance of an issue from the sharing of it with an assembly. Insisting that the issue always predates the crowd, Latour effectively detaches issue-formation from crowd-formation. Ultimately, the agora remains empty while the politician speaks. This is unplausible. Granted, Latour correctly describes politically mobilized people as connected through their issues, yet he does not allow them to emphatically enforce these issues, nor the sentiments, thoughts and affects that circulate around them, together. Only if we allow for some degree of Durkheimian ‘effervescence’ inside the Latourian account of the political circle, and allot these sentiments a co-constitutive role, can we really conceptualize issue-formation and collective-formation as entangled processes.

This integration is only possible if we, on a somewhat deeper or more generic level, manage to re-collectivize Latour's central concept of ‘relation’ or ‘association’. As we saw, Latour has taken on some basic theoretical prejudices from Tarde which remain insufficiently digested. All too often, in Latour's work, we are dealing with narrow and unidirectional ‘strings’, ‘rays’, ‘threads, or ‘chains’, which cannot accommodate the collective nature of our practices. Sadly, this de-collectivizing topology circumscribes all Latour's work. His networks do not form circuits but ‘narrow’ galleries, channels and ‘trajectories’ reminiscent of Tarde's imitational ‘rays’. In this paper, I have shown that we must allow more transversal room for manoeuvre inside the Latourian network. We need to explain less neatly linear processes, in real collective settings with conglomerations of human actors centring around nodes, settings filled with emphatic synergy and reciprocity, and the collective talking-up or talking-down of objects and attachments. The network topology must allow us sufficient space to accomplish at least some of our objective entanglements together – and allow us to enjoy the energies and affects produced through such emphatically collective accomplishment of the objective.

Finally, it is important to stress the non-harmonistic nature of my reading of Durkheim. It is clear that the pervasive ‘gestures of solidarity’ characteristic of the first weeks of COVID-19 lockdown were extraordinary and short-lived. But it is also clear – against the grain of much ‘Durkheimian’ theory – that those collective energies and sentiments of unity are crucial in explaining why and how that one organic public quickly fell apart. In this paper, I hope to have sketched how an emphatically collectivist, yet unmistakably object-oriented, sociology of democratic practice can be of decisive help in understanding and theorizing these consecutive scenarios. I also hope to have shown how such a hybrid perspective may contribute to a more general understanding of the volatility and instability of the (digitalized) public in contemporary polarized and compartmentalized Western democracies.