What Next for Actor Network Theory? Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress

Abstract

This is a reflection piece on the theme ‘what will happen to actor-network theory (ANT) after Latour?’ We distinguish three scenarios but focus on the one we see as the least probable but most interesting for sociology and related disciplines. With inspiration from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, we think of this third scenario as a way of “inventing around” Latour. In this scenario, classical ANT tenets are prolonged and refracted through Latour's later work on modes of existence and critical zones. This mutant ANT is subject to further transformations through encounters with empirical situations and concepts from many other places. We use two brief cases for illustration. The first considers the empirical potentials and possible pitfalls of Latour's modes of existence in relation to the emergence of carbon markets as a form of Anthropocene politics. The second examines recent urban upheavals and transformations in Bangkok through the lens of urban critical zones, which make visible problems of co-existence that shade into pluriversal cosmopolitics because the city is full of beings that are both modern and amodern. These cases point the way to a scenario in which ANT is still unfinished, and far from “uncritical”. It is an “indisciplinary” scenario, where ANT with sociology and adjacent disciplines venture into complex landscapes of planetary ecological disruptions and postcolonial tensions without any false protection from certified theory and pre-defined politics.

Now that Latour has passed away, what comes next for actor-network theory (ANT) and the rest of his vast oeuvre? We can think of three broad answers. Two are pretty easy to predict but not terribly interesting. We are mostly interested in a third possibility, which is more exciting but less probable.

In the first scenario, not much happens; or rather, what is already happening keeps happening. Latour and ANT, so closely associated with his name, are well established in many parts of sociocultural research (Blok et al., 2020). He will continue to be adored by many and disliked by many others. ANT will still be applied to this and that. Somebody will write a monograph about Latour and X, Y, or Z. Another handbook will be published. As one would expect.

In the second scenario, controversies arise about Latour's legacy—which parts to keep and which to discard, by whom, in what form? Today, nonhuman agency, which used to be so controversial, has become commonsense in new materialism, more-than-human anthropology, and environmental humanities—though often in a watered-down version compared with the original. Sociology is still playing catch-up. Meanwhile, Latour remains a favorite target for critical scholars who see his work as apolitical, neoliberal, or anti-scientific. We can safely expect these controversies to continue.

The premise of the third scenario is captured by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's (2002: xiv) remark that the fruitfulness of ideas is measured in terms of their capacity to produce different ideas. Whereas failed knowledge produces only ideas that resemble itself, generative knowledge changes as others “invent around” (xv) it, and make it travel (Mohácsi and Morita, 2013). In this scenario, still underexplored potentials in Latour's work are catalyzed as conceptual change agents through interactions with ideas, problems, and situations originating elsewhere.

Latour left us with a large body of work, so there are many untapped potentials. But we focus on two conceptual zones. The first has to do with the modes of existence developed in Latour's (2013) philosophical magnum opus. While the modes have been a source of fascination to some philosophers and theologians, they have sunk like a stone in social science. Apparently, they are experienced as too clunky and rigid to work around. What might be required to turn them into more flexible, empirical resources? Our second area of interest is where eco-concepts like Gaia (Latour, 2017) and the critical zones (Latour and Weibel, 2020) shade into what anthropologists call the pluriverse (Escobar, 2020) and the uncommons (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017; Jensen, 2017).

We use two cases to reflect on these challenges and possibilities. The development of carbon markets allows us to ponder the implications of the modes of existence (Latour, 2013) for grappling with Anthropocene transformations in non-Western parts of the world. With reference to urban change in Bangkok, we test the powers and limits of critical zones in situations that are profoundly shaped by changing climates but also by many other agents that are neither human nor natural.

These selections are motivated by our own long-standing interests in environmental and infrastructural issues, in the agency and politics of nonhumans, and in the transformative potentials of practical ontologies beyond nature and culture. They gain urgency with the experience of living on a planet where eco-geological processes change very quickly from human-induced pressures, while eco-political transformations that might address such disruptions continue to happen very slowly. This situation requires transformations both of Latour's ideas and of science and technology studies (STS), sociology, anthropology, the environmental humanities and the sciences. Borrowing a phrase from Isabelle Stengers (2024), it calls for fidelity to Latour's work, but not for servility. We imagine an in-disciplinary ecology of knowledges and practices—not without discipline(s) but more fluid, attentive to possibilities for mutual learning and ontological openings (Blok, 2020; Blok and Jensen, 2023).

From here, we proceed in three quick steps. First, we sketch what ANT was, or used to be. Second, we briefly comment on the standard critiques and caricatures of ANT. Finally, we use the cases just mentioned to consider some possible in-disciplinary futures of post-ANT (Gad and Jensen, 2010) or near-ANT (Blok et al., 2020).

What was ANT?

ANT emerged from the combined efforts of Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon, and Bruno Latour in the 1980s at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation of the École des Mines in Paris, with strong assistance from John Law across the Channel. During an extraordinarily creative period in the 1980s and 1990s, they developed a vocabulary and way of thinking, which came to play an important role in the emerging field of STS and eventually traveled far and wide. To paraphrase Annemarie Mol (2010), ANT has since become a voluminous book, held together by shared sensibilities and enduring tensions. But it is worth recalling that ANT was once a more specific intervention.

The starting point was a dissatisfaction with dominant explanatory frameworks used to analyze techno-scientific innovation and change. Drawing eclectically on semiotics and ethnomethodology, ANT constructed an image of fluctuating networks comprised of human and nonhuman actors, who were fully constituted by their mutual relations. Though it has remained controversial (not least in sociology) this sociology of translations completely changed our understandings of the construction of facts and machines.

Studied up close, innovation processes and scientific discoveries were full of social interests and relations, political wranglings, and negotiations. But crucially, they were also full of interactions that crossed the barrier between people and things. Thus, engineers and economists regularly changed their models and plans, not just due to interventions and objections made by their colleagues, but also due to the misbehavior of machines (Akrich, 1993). People and things were hopelessly mixed up, with new relations happening all over the place, all the time. The early ANT sought to make sense of those hybrid techno-scientific situations.

The actor-network theorists picked up the social constructivist principle of symmetry, which required that what we presently take to be true (scientific) and false (ideological or superstitious) statements are explained by the same sociological causes. They generalized this principle by insisting that human and nonhuman actions, too, should be explained in the same way (Callon, 1986). A girl and her bicycle ride to school. A manager and his laptop make decisions. Airlines rather than airplanes fly, and laboratories rather than scientists make facts. It was this focus on how networks of heterogeneous actors make realities through continuous negotiations and mutual transformations that gave rise to the nickname of a sociology of translations.

Techno-scientific innovation was re-cast as involving the construction, stabilization, and extension of vast sets of relations. Michel Callon (1986) described four phases of translation, from the making of a problem to the eventual mobilization of heterogenous actors in a network. Latour (1987) elaborated this argument, depicting scientists who constantly tried to enroll and mobilize other actors. Success is the effect of scientists managing to become ‘spokespersons’ for the nonhumans. Analogously, the laboratory emerges as fact-making factory, producing all the diverse kinds of inscriptions with which scientists represent ‘nature.’ Turning inscriptions into ‘immutable mobiles’ and traversing vast territories with various world-building effects, laboratories become ‘obligatory passage points’ that allow scientists and others to ‘act at a distance.’

In these descriptions, power is the effect of successfully translating the interests of heterogeneous actors and turning them into allies in a network. As a relational effect, rather than a substance or quantity, power cannot be hoarded and neither it nor truth reaches any further than the weakest link in a network. Thus, while early actor-network studies were often criticized for their focus on powerful scientific entrepreneurs, and for turning everything into power, they were equally exhibits of the precarity of power. This probably accounts for the complementary accusation that ANT lacks any analysis of power. But the crucial point is that, in a network, power is always at risk.

These analyses also exhibited an entirely new conception of scale and scaling (Callon and Latour, 1981; Jensen, 2007). Conventionally, sociology distinguishes between micro, meso, and macro scales. The assumption is that different phenomena, events, and processes belong to each scale, and each has its own appropriate methods and theories. In contrast, ANT examines how actors, entities, or projects change scale, grow or shrink, lose or gain reality, in consequence of their success or failure at making relations. As a reflexive corollary, the social scientist no longer appears as a detached observer who simply represents social facts (analogous to how scientists were imagined to simply capture natural facts). They are also involved in making relations that may (or not) scale particular versions of society up and down (Latour, 1988).

We find in Latour's (e.g., 1998, see also Blok, 2007) work a consistent emphasis on the need to ecologize both sociology and politics. However, rather than a single pathway or type of solution, we are confronted with shifting responses to changing problems. It is important to bear in mind both the continuity and the transformations. Thus, although his later work on Gaia, critical zones and modes of existence modified or even seemed to discard much from the early ANT, in our view the signature moves sketched in this section are still crucial to what sociologists and others may get from Latour—and how they might extend and invent around him. That, of course, is quite a different perspective from those who would rather see his work dead and buried.

Critiques and caricatures

The philosopher Graham Harman (2009) once approached some of Latour's arguments through a reflection on what it might mean to “de-Kant” philosophy, by which he meant abolishing the influence of Immanuel Kant from contemporary intellectual discourse. What would happen, Harman wondered, if it turned out that the famous critiques were fake, or an elaborate joke? He concluded that these revelations probably would not make much difference. Kant's ideas are now so deeply embedded in philosophical infrastructures that they cannot be removed without bringing down the whole edifice.

With Latour, we find something like an inversion of this dynamic. Here we encounter a set of critiques so firmly established through force of repetition that it is hard to imagine that they will ever disappear. It will not take long for attentive readers of the secondary literature to notice a pattern—critics keep vigorously demolishing straw men. ¹ Unable to recognize ANT as a variable empirical philosophy, critics keep seeing it as an arrogant universalizing theory or, in a mirror image, as a bland atheoretical empiricism. Humanists keep reproducing an image of generalized symmetry as a reduction of living, embodied, intentional agents to the level of inert things. And a loud choir keeps denouncing Latour for a lack of politics, a poor politics, a neoliberal politics, or worse. ² Ironically, these iterations perfectly illustrate one of ANT's most disliked (‘Macchiavellian’) arguments: the clarity, sophistication, and substance of ideas are insufficient to determine intellectual outcomes because too many other powerful forces are usually in play.

We will not spend too much energy on the caricatures. But in preparation for the redistribution of critique (Blok and Jensen, 2020) that follows, we comment on some major lines.

There are divergent views about just what the trouble with ANT's politics is. To those who see ANT as an empirical tracing of network relations, it is simply apolitical. This is often ‘proved’ by pointing to the absence of usual critical concepts: structural violence, hegemony, and so on.

According to another hard-hitting critique, ANT has bad politics. This can be traced (at least) to Olga Amsterdamska's (1990: 501) review of Science in Action, which argued that ANT combined an epistemology where ‘might makes right’ with a sociology that ‘eliminates all distinctions between the various means that can be used to achieve control over things or people.’ Echoing this view, Donna Haraway (1997: 34) later described Science in Action as working by ‘relentless, recursive mimesis,’ in a world where power politics is ‘the only game imagined.’ ³ The notion that might makes right arises because ANT is descriptive and conceptual—focusing on how relations are made, something that happens in a great many ways—rather than evaluative: focusing on how they ought to have been made in accordance with a normative framework.

The tendency to confuse description and endorsement is compounded by the difficulties many critics have in telling ANT and social constructivism apart. Amsterdamska (1990: 497) turned Latour into a kind of ultra-Durkheimian for whom ‘things are what we collectively represent them to be, nothing more and nothing less’. The real social constructivists clearly understood that nonhuman agency moved in a very different direction. But they strongly rejected what they perceived to be the implication, a kind of ‘naïve realism’ in ANT that gave scientists full power and freedom to define reality (Collins and Yearley, 1992; Bloor, 1999).

To see where this takes critics, we can consult Rebecca Lave's (2015) ‘Reassembling the Structural: Political Ecology and Actor-Network Theory’, which conveniently combines the confusions. First, Lave (2015, 216) characterizes Latour as a repentant social constructivist who saw the errors of his ways after encountering climate denialism. In fact, generalized symmetry was a matter of unlearning taken-for-granted notions of what distinguishes humans from other actors. This allowed Latour to bypass the hoary distinction between ‘purely, socially constructed’ and ‘completely, objectively real’. ‘Why has Critique Run Out of Steam’ (Latour, 2004) extended this mode of thought with the argument that alternatives to critique might emerge from paying due attention to the articulation of controversial ‘matters of concern’ such as climate change.

Lave then objects to ‘Latour's denial of society and structural power … the relations of dominance that political ecologists consistently analyze are explicitly excluded from ANT analyses’ (218). This sounds awful, as if he somehow did not care about violence and repression. But what Lave interprets as a lack of political acumen and empathy is simply the distance that separates Latour's conceptual vocabulary from that of conventional critical theory. She fails to recognize that ANT offers a comprehensively different way of making sense of what she calls structural power and dominance.

The nonhumans are indeed the crux of the matter. Lave (2015: 218) approvingly cites Elaine Hartwick (2000: 1181) who found:

the notion of nonhuman actants, such as fax machines, having as much of an active role as workers intensely, deeply troubling. What sort of ‘radical’ politics does this produce? A union for fax machines? ‘Fax machines unite, you have nothing to lose but your electrical cords’?

The objection is identical to Olga Amsterdamska's (1990: 501): Latour eliminates all differences between human and nonhuman actors. After laughing at the radicalized fax machines, Lave explains that ANT's concept of actors is neoliberal to the core (Lave, 2015: 218). Yet, this is a surprising conclusion. For after all, fax machines mainly send faxes, and hardly ever get involved in deregulation or privatization of the public sphere. ⁴ So, did Lave forget straightaway that she was discussing fax machines? Or is the problem perhaps that she just cannot imagine nonhumans as anything but projection screens for human ideology and politics?

ANT does not eliminate ‘the difference’ between humans and nonhumans. Instead, it rejects that there is a single, generic difference, which is always more profound than the differences between anything else (fax machines and soil fluxes, gabardine and lutetium). Rather than a reduction of human subjects to nonhuman objects, which leads inexorably to an uncritical indifference to human plight, the effect is an a-critical redistribution of matters of concern and a renewed appreciation of the differentiated powers of all the agents. Latour (2019) himself came to affirm that he was for critique as practiced in critical proximity with the heterogeneous empirical matters of concern that animate publics across the earth.

Learning to speak well: inventing around Latour on a planet in transition

We turn now to our third scenario, where untapped Latourian potentials are catalyzed by encounters with new concepts and situations. We take inspiration from Marilyn Strathern's (2002: xv) observation that when it comes to theory ‘the real test lies less in the adequacy of its claims … than in the potential of the further work the methods generate’.

Activating modes of existence for de-economizing worlds?

While sparking some philosophical interest, Latour's (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) has been greeted with deafening silence among empirical social scientists. And not entirely without reason. After all, it is not so obvious what to make of his grand attempt to ontologize the experience of European modernity at large.

Isabelle Stengers (2024) presents AIME as Latour's attempt to come to terms with the anger and frustration with which his earlier work was met, especially in the science wars. From a distance, much of the furor seems to concern difficulties of reading across intellectual traditions and thought styles. As pragmatists, we must nevertheless accept that Latour and ANT generated affects that were real in their consequences. And some were negative. In particular, Latour could not prevent the term ‘constructivism’ from having an effect on many natural scientists similar to a red shirt dangled in front of a bull.

In the Inquiry, Latour gave up on the language of construction. Instead, he began with a ‘charitable fiction’ (Latour, 2013: 15): the moderns, scientists included, have many treasures. Only, they have never articulated what those treasures are, and why they are valued. Thus, ‘learning to speak well’ of modern treasures will be the task of the Inquiry. This is quite a challenging task, but until the protagonist comes across the Economy the ‘charitable fiction’ seems to work. But does it make any sense, as Stengers (2024) asks, to want to learn speaking well of the one domain of existence before which the moderns require everyone, including themselves, to prostrate and demean themselves? Latour seeks to redistribute the Economy between organizational scripts, passionate attachments, and moral scruples. To see how far this takes us, let us briefly turn to the development of carbon markets.

Since the early 2000s, actors involved in building so-called Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) have been embroiled in continuous controversies (Callon, 2009; Blok, 2011). Brazilian eucalyptus plantations that support the EU climate compliance of Scottish coal plants were ferociously opposed by Indigenous groups. And when Indian farmers replaced diesel pumps with human-powered water treadles to prop up Western carbon accounts, activists from New Delhi's Center for Science and Environment (CSE) accused rich countries of ‘showing their garbage on developing countries’.

With AIME, the situation can be understood in terms of deep-seated and increasingly virulent modernization drives. In a passage that could have been written by Marx, Latour (2013: 384) refers to the ‘deadly ailment’ we know by the name Capitalism: ‘a monstrous product of history that has affected nearly all the cells of a body unequipped to resist’. But in accordance with his ‘charitable fiction’, he seeks a way of redistributing the elements of the Economy in a way that might remove its monstrous power. The carbon markets permit a glimpse of how this might happen through attachments, organizational scripts, and moral scruples.

While attachments [formally shortened as ATT] refer to the diverse passionate interests that animate desires toward things (whether in the marketplace or elsewhere), organization [ORG] captures the framing of interactions, both human and non-human, required by any market exchange. Since market exchanges always activate judgments of fairness, morality [MOR] is also always at work.

The benefit of this approach is to facilitate differentiation and specification of what makes an economic situation. Compared with grand abstractions like ‘Capitalism’ it becomes easier to examine where markets are stronger or weaker, and to detect where things might unravel. Indigenous groups in Brazil did not become activists to struggle against Capitalism but against the eucalyptus plantations that threaten their existential attachment [ATT] to the forest. The strategy of Indian activists does not immediately problematize Capitalism either, but rather attacks CDMs as they appear from the point of view of morality [MOR], what these days is called climate justice.

As this suggests, we can activate AIME as a weapon against markets understood in the reductive sense of modern economists (and their loyal opposition, the critical social scientists). They are conglomerates held together by bits and pieces from many modes of existence. Each ‘economic’ site now appears as an ontological battleground in potentia, where several modes of existence accompanied by different spokespersons, diplomats, or mercenaries might seek dominion or part ways, as circumstances permit (Blok, 2013; Jensen, 2023).

Nevertheless, as Isabelle Stengers (2024) notes, it is as if Latour's three modes [ATT, ORG, MOR] arrive on the scene already formatted and distorted by the very Economy they are meant to reconfigure. Accordingly, it only takes a small shift in perception to turn the felicity conditions of these modes into ‘criminal charge sheets’ against the modern Economy.

It is, for example, a felicity condition of organizational scripts that they can be renegotiated, as needed, to get a fresh start on intractable problems. But while free renegotiation may be possible when children play, the exact opposite seems to be the case for modern organizations that will usually fight to the death to protect their scripts. Learning to speak well about passionate attachments is probably equally esteemed by modern and nonmodern people. But what uniquely defines the moderns, Stengers (2024) suggests, is that their attachments are captured and mobilized by consumerism. This leaves us with moral scruples as the best candidate for rethinking the Economy—as was indeed the position taken by the Indian activists mentioned above. But since moral considerations are explicitly excluded by the laws of modern Economics, their chance of success will increase only if the assemblage ceases to be modern.

This does not sound very promising. Yet, we should not rule out the possibility that one consequence of galloping climate change and biodiversity loss might be involuntary de-modernization (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). In that case, we might expect to see dramatic clashes and ruptures not only between economy and ecology (Latour, 1998; Blok, 2011) but also between these two and all other modes of existence.

Crucially, as Stengers indicates, such struggles will not be confined to the level of intra-modern skirmishes as presumed by Latour's modes. Rather, they will extend to all sorts of contentious encounters between modern, non-modern, and ex-modern collectives, from resource-extractivist networks to Indigenous groups, scientists, activists, and others (see e.g., de la Cadena, 2015). As we turn to explore Latour's late interest in ‘critical zones’ as a way of situating the Anthropocene (Latour, 2014; Latour and Weibel, 2020), we bring with us the feeling that this is an important direction for future inventions around Latour and the modes of existence.

Urban critical zones and uncommon worlds

In the eco- and geosciences, critical zones designate the ‘fragile skin of the earth’ (Brantley et al., 2017: 307; Latour, 2014). The fragile skin is very significant because it is the only place where living organisms can survive. Notably, the critical zone is situated at the exact point where Latour left the modes for the study of Gaian eco-geo-sciences (e.g., Latour, 2017, 2018). Stengers (2024) suggests this abandonment might have to do with his realization that the treasures of the moderns require a world that can no longer be taken for granted due to climate change and ecological disruptions.

But the critical zone is also situated at another threshold. Though critical zones grapple with conditions all over the planet, they belong to Western practices of science. Since most of the planet is not Western and does not see itself primarily through the lens of science, it is very likely that the claim of critical zone research to have planetary implications will generate controversies about cosmopolitics—which world do we live in? And how is it possible to negotiate co-existence across difference? In our view, the concept of the critical zone is better equipped to keep such questions open than Latour's (2017, 2018) Gaian writings because it is more situated (see also Blok and Jensen, 2023).

These kinds of questions emerge vividly in Bangkok—and other non-Western mega-cities. With help from critical zones, such cities can be understood as composed of many flows that sustain or undermine numerous ‘slices of existence’ and their forms of life, from upscale malls to slum worlds, parks, rivers, and dirty canals (Jensen and Sangkhamanee, 2024). Bangkok has, of course, been modeled as modern in many ways, and many people have modern aspirations. But the city is also deeply amodern, inhabited by multiple beings including animals and spirits whose interactions make uncommon worlds (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017; Jensen, 2017).

Planetary transitions have threatening implications for both modern and nonmodern forms of life, which are keenly felt across Bangkok's critical zones. The city floods regularly, air pollution is sky-high, and the city is slowly sinking into the marshlands on which it was built. The nonhuman population of birds, fish, lizards, and dogs is continuously squeezed by intense development. At the same time, the younger generation has grown up disillusioned, governed by an archaic military junta representing the worst of both worlds: an all-too-modern commitment to resource extractivism combined with a premodern (lack of) orientation to civil liberties.

During the early days of COVID-19, high school students began campus demonstrations against the outdated curriculum and rigid rules. Soon the streets became colorful protest sites featuring anime hamsters, rap against dictatorship, and feminist street theater. On Twitter, people from all walks of life began to post political messages: vague and radical, dreamy and pragmatic. As the topics kept expanding, a decade of political apathy and disillusion washed away. When the Move Forward Party swept the 2023 national election, political change seemed a real possibility. Junta-appointed senators refused to ratify the winners, but discontents still simmer right under the surface.

Thailand's first attempt at urban rewilding, in Benjakitti Park, began at the same time. This much quieter affair, which sought to undo some of the tremendous ecological damage wrought by modernization, is also quite radical. Not only does the park occupy a large tract of extremely valuable land, but rewilding also seeks to make space for wild animals from insects and birds to reptiles and pythons at the heart of Bangkok.

While the protests were criticized by mainstream pundits for not having a coherent platform, the rewilding initiative was criticized both for not being a real park and for not being really wild. Critical zones, however, allow us to perceive in both cases the emergence of new interfaces and problems of co-existence, relating to human living conditions in the case of the protests, and nonhuman ones in the case of the park. By focusing on heterogeneous flows of water, air, people, and much else, the zones generate a new image of the more-than-human city (Franklin, 2017). This is crucial for making sense of the urban cosmos in the Anthropocene.

The Inquiry, as Latour left it, offers little help when it comes to problems of co-existence involving Bangkok's ancestors, ghosts, gods, and other important actors. All these non-modern beings are lumped together by as an undifferentiated mass in the mode of metamorphosis [MET]. However, relying as it does on a materialist ontology, critical zone research also reaches a dead-end, for regardless of the sensitivity of one's barometer, the activities of these beings are unmeasurable.

Thus, we need instruments with different kinds of sensitivities. Some of these instruments are found in the toolkit of the anthropologists of uncommon worlds (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017). Some can be gleaned from the philosophical speculations of Isabelle Stengers (2005, 2024), who was always important to Latour. And some will surely come from yet other times and places, including from within worlds of environmental activism, Indigenous thinking, or even science fiction (Blok and Jensen, 2020). In the spirit of inventing around Latour's untapped potentials, we think it is important to experiment with all these registers—and others, including from unorthodox sociology—in relation to the modes and zones.

In the mode of metamorphosis

The Anthropocene is confusing. There is obviously only one Earth, which is under severe and growing pressure. But there are also a multiplicity of collectives and people who experience, imagine, conceptualize, and problematize the world and its problems in very different ways. Latour is also confusing (Blok, 2020; Jensen, 2020). There was obviously only one Latour, yet his work proliferated in all directions, sprouting here, being abandoned there, and metamorphosing in encounters with philosophy, anthropology, geology, the arts, and more.

With inspiration from Marilyn Strathern (2002), we have taken the capacity for metamorphosis as a sign of intellectual generativity rather than a lack of rigor. It supports mutual learning and sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge through reciprocal challenge and transformation, rather than the propagation of straw men and caricatures. It allows others to keep working with and inventing around Latour's ideas and those of ANT.

Of course, we also have views about which elements have been, and are likely to be, most interesting and relevant. From the early ANT, we keep generalized symmetry and its treatment of nonhuman agency, which opens variable and changing relations of power, and different scalings (up and down) of agents and forms of reality. Practical ontologies multiply all over the place. This runs directly counter to the standard critique of ANT for giving all relations the exact same form—of the network.

This is also why our relation to the modes of existence is slightly strained. We can follow Stengers’ (2024) diagnosis of Latour's need to learn to speak well of scientists who felt insulted and still doubt the efficacy of the solution. For in social science practice, at least, the multiplication of the modes has so far not enriched empirical inquiry. The modes seem too clunky and fixed to work around—the exact opposite, in this sense, of the principle of generalized symmetry which was so generative because it was fluid and indeterminate.

Still, there might be something to gain from the modes. Where several modes intersect, danger signs are flashing: we are ourselves in the vicinity of colliding worlds and ways of living at risk. As Stengers (2024) argues, it is not very realistic that either scripts or scruples can fundamentally change the modern Economy—she likens the approach to putting band-aid on a wooden leg. But freed from the Economy, these modes might be transformed into other kinds of treasures, oriented to the mutual sensitization among the heterogeneous collectives that make up our ecology of practices. This would open a whole other path for learning to speak well, in sociology and beyond.

Early ANT was widely criticized for being agnostic and ironic about the reality claims of the sciences. In the early years, Latour developed an analysis of how scientific facts gained and lost credibility that did not rely on the distinction between real and constructed. But although climate change and denialism did not suddenly turn Latour into a conventional realist, his later transformations were again quite radical. Coming to terms with the failure of his efforts to give a meaning to constructivism, which would not be experienced as insulting, he searched for ways of speaking well of the sciences. For better or worse, this transformed his characteristic irreverence into a rhetoric of admiration. In our view, a less acceptable price was diminished attention to non-scientific collectives and their matters of concern (see also Blok and Jensen, 2023).

Among those non-scientific collectives are other modern ones, like environmental youth activists, or urban NGO opponents of carbon markets. But there are also nonmodern ones that live in the presence of earth beings (de la Cadena, 2015), in crystal forests (Viveiros de Castro, 2007), or in worlds where pythons and angry ghosts in the neighborhood are equally troublesome (Jensen and Sangkhamanee, 2024). Situations where co-existing yet incongruent worlds make an uncommons are particularly interesting, since they activate different questions of cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2005). Inventing around Latour and attuning to a richer set of relations will be important for learning cosmopolitical diplomacy in the Anthropocene.

Thus, our scenario for what should happen to Latour's work is one where new intersections, interfaces, and pathways in the ecology of practices are encouraged, explored, and invented around (also Blok and Jensen, 2020). In this mode of metamorphosis [MET], to speak with Latour, sociology and adjacent disciplines including the environmental humanities and sciences venture boldly into complicated landscapes of planetary ecological disruptions and postcolonial tensions. Crucially, they do so without the false protection of certified theory and pre-defined politics. This is of course wildly unrealistic. But it could be important for sociology. Not to mention for our planet, which is in a very critical condition.