In the mode of metamorphosis: ANT and Latour after Latour

Abstract

This short piece responds to five commentaries to our own suggestions on ‘What Next for Actor Network Theory?’ after Latour's passing. Charting a path through very heterogenous ideas, we attempt to re-scenarise what we consider the wheat of fruitful theoretical questioning and extensions from the chaff of worn-out adversarial gestures around actor-network theory (ANT) in sociology and beyond. Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress, we affirm with our commentators, certainly brings ANT into fruitful dialogues with broader strands of feminist Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, alongside the kinds of more-than-human anthropology that we ourselves brought to the table. At stake, we believe, is the willingness to extend ANT's descriptive capacities in new directions, at the limits of Western social theory's current conceptual preoccupations with Capital and Nature.

Who said that constructive, convivial dialogue in sociology would be easy (Inglis et al., 2024)? Certainly not actor-network theorists. As Bruno Latour once put it (2004: 455), adversaries seldom come to agree on opinions. And like all the social sciences, sociology has plenty of adversity. Still, to paraphrase Latour, realities and worlds keep shifting, forcing into existence new sociological viewpoints, new relations, and new types of adversity too.

We are grateful to the commentators for their responses to our opening gambit on ‘What Next for Actor Network Theory? Inventing Around Latour on a Planet in Distress’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024). We find in the responses many traces of shifting realities that we, too, think it is important to engage intellectually. Yet, we also find many well-known types of adversity and some doses of polemics that we would rather have been without. Evidently, a few commentators would also have preferred not to deal with either actor-network theory (ANT), or us, or both. Maybe dialogue is sometimes overrated? Perhaps mutual indifference is sometimes enough to push along polyphonous sociologies and shifting worlds.

Antoine Hennion (2024) admits to hesitating about the ‘dogmatic tone’ he adopts in his response to what he (mis-)reads as our ‘annoyed’ and ‘polemical’ style. His self-reflection is certainly well taken. Tonality matters to any dialogue – it also mattered to Bruno Latour. So does genre, we might add. Hennion scolds us, in splendid abstraction, for failing to engage more elaborately with (what he appears to see as) serious critiques of ANT. This has, of course, been done innumerable times already, including by ourselves (e.g. Blok and Jensen, 2019). With reference to our short examples, which are also elaborated in significant detail elsewhere, he lectures us for treating cases as ‘illustrations’, since for Latour, theory is never ‘illustrated’. Unfortunately, he fails to grasp what is ‘illustrated’ in our text. For it is not Latour's ‘theory’ but our own argument about preferable routes ahead for ANT after Latour.

Hennion, therefore, has nothing substantial to say about our argument. He is, instead, fully engaged with the question of ‘tone’, and ours is dismissed with reference to an idiosyncratic account of Latour's practice of criticality. This principle is characterised in the following way: ‘Either the positions criticised were not interesting and should be ignored, or they were well-argued, and then, even and especially in order to criticise and refute them … they require real critical work’. Hennion goes on to depict us as zealots shrugging indignantly at critics while mindlessly aping Latour's words without grasping his ideas. After chaperoning our ‘tone’, he suggests in the span of a few pages that we are: dogmatic, groupies, irrelevant, categorical, contradictory, and embarrassing. Having often found inspiration in Hennion's work, we would have preferred that he took his own advice and just ignored our piece.

At the risk of speculating, the condescending attitude might be related to Hennion's own influence and his aspirations relating to Francophone debates about the legacy of Latour and ANT. We return more constructively to this topic in response to Nathalie Heinich's (2024) remarks. As for Hennion's approach, it seems myopic, as if oriented to a conversation in an insulated environment.

Environments, academic or otherwise, are rarely insulated. Just witness the surprise appearance of Philippe Stamenkovic (2024), a belated science warrior, who entered this ‘dialogue’ armed to the teeth, and ready to fight windmills abandoned by others long ago (among our inspirations are, e.g. Callon, 1999; Stengers, 2000; Smith, 2005). He wonders why anybody takes Latour seriously, since the work has been debunked by Sokal, Bricmont, and himself. At least in his own mind.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that Stamenkovic repeats several of the inanest caricatures. While none of it has much to do with Latour and ANT, the comments offer instructive glimpses into the mind of a dualist. Unable to comprehend ways of thinking that are not structured dichotomously, such minds imagine that the only alternative to duality is identity. We can call this the dualist fallacy. Thus, confronted with ANT's refusal of a general dichotomy between humans and nonhumans, and between nature and culture, Stamenkovic concludes (against all available evidence) that for Latour there is no difference. Likewise, unable to conceive of agency except for humans (and thereby mistaking ANT for social constructivism), he attributes to Latour the duly insane view that nature is just ‘what we decide it to be’. ¹ Therefore, there can be no climate crisis. QED. But Andreas Malm's (2018) critique of ‘hybridism’ only appears ‘devastating’ to dualists. For the rest of us, the opposite of dualism is multiplicity – and what matters is exploration of critically important transformative relations, for example relating to climate change.

Stamenkovic is not required to be a specialist in the matters at hand, nor of course to be sympathetic to Latour. Still, having decided to join a ‘dialogue’ about Latour's work, one could have hoped for a bit more than a catalogue of fallacies. In view of how he refuses to consider what might be the reasons for even the most basic moves of ANT – and that he admits to finding our text very hard to understand – we must, again, wonder why he bothered to respond.

After these less-promising openings for dialogue, Eva Haifa Giraud's (2024) commentary is a breath of fresh air. Though critical, she is attentive to what we actually wrote – and generous in offering extensions. Her response hinges on our initial framing of three scenarios, of which, as we said, two were ‘not terribly interesting’. She observes that such a glib dismissal might lead to a fight of caricatures with caricatures, and reminds us of a history of ‘rich, provocative, and nuanced critical engagements’, not least from feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), which remains vital to future reinventions.

A few words on the ‘not terribly interesting’ seem in order. Although the phrasing proved unfortunate, we did not intend to dismiss critical engagement in general. Far from it. In the context of the invitation to reflect on Latour's legacy, it merely signalled our disinterest in repeating all the old discussions. If we chose to sketch the caricatures, then, it was to give a sense of what we felt, and feel, must be left behind to make room for something else. Unfortunately – as it now appears – the section became too long and unbalanced during the process of review and editing. Hence Giraud's very sensible question – what about all the sophisticated, proximate critics? We are quite happy to accept her helping hand. For, clearly, nobody on her list – Susan Leigh Star, Annemarie Mol, Donna Haraway, John Law and Vicky Singleton, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Anna Tsing – offered mere caricatures. Their scholarship has inspired us, as it also inspired Latour.

Among other things, their subtle analyses of power facilitate critique of ongoing, multi-dimensional planetary destructions without imagining capitalism as a totalising system. This is why Giraud is rather skeptical of our attempt to rehabilitate the modes of existence. As Richie Nimmo (2024) also indicates, the modes seem to introduce unnecessary complications, although the problems are already well understood. More about this later.

Giraud further suggests that if there is a more pressing need to ‘invent around’ Latour than feminist STS, it might be because the latter has gone further than the former precisely in dealing with issues of power. Regardless of how one evaluates that situation, this formulation suggests that it might be advantageous to reach a point of closure where ‘inventing around’ is no longer needed. That differs from our premise, following Strathern (2002), that theories are likely to be generative to the extent that they work against stasis, in whatever form. We would like to see mutual re-inventions flowing in both directions between feminist STS and (feminist?) ANT – as thankfully there have for a good while.

Nathalie Heinich's (2024) commentary is in some sense most difficult to respond to, although in an affirmative sense. It works as a richly textured, proximate (‘French’) recounting of Latour's intellectual biography, and articulates some of Heinich's own concerns and critiques. Among those, some, like the observation that theological themes run deep in Latour's work, do not come as a surprise – indeed we have attempted a sort of reinvention through Japanese materials (Jensen and Blok, 2013). Others we find interesting, although we do not fully agree on all points.

We read that our articulation of ANT with environmental questions gives rise to a ‘strangely distorted vision’ of Latour. Here, we feel the need to dig our heels in. Although we detect more-or-less ecological themes in ANT earlier than Heinich seems to do, our crucial point is not really about getting the intellectual biography right. Most significantly, the period in the 1990s, where Latour, according to Heinich, was an ‘attentive interactionist’, was also the time of some of his best work on environmental issues (Latour (1998) is one highlight). Against the foreshortened view of a Latour that became openly, even theologically, ecological in his later years, we are interested in keeping these prior ANT-style commitments and statements alive. We note also that this might be one way of narrowing the gap identified by Heinich (but not unproblematically, as we touch on below) between ‘detailed empirical investigation’ and ‘theoretical speculation’ regarding environmental issues.

Richie Nimmo (2024) paints a germane picture of a heterogeneous ecology of knowledges populated by ‘multiple post-ANT currents and successor projects’. Indeed, we agree, Latour and ANT have proven ‘particularly fertile’ to ‘reinvention and rearticulation’ (see Blok, 2020; Jensen, 2020). So much is this the case, Nimmo affirms, that ‘the passing of Latour, though arguably its chief architect and predominant exponent, likely makes little difference to its ongoing development and metamorphosis’. Hence, like us, he is especially interested in emerging relations between Latour/ANT and what we called ‘theories originating from elsewhere’. In Nimmo's estimation, however, such fruitful engagements have too often been impeded by Latour's tendency to use ‘large swaths of social theory’ as a ‘foil against which to define ANT’. We note in passing that this is quite the opposite of how Hennion depicted Latour's critical practice.

Nimmo is, of course, right. All readers of Latour can pull out a tendentious misreading of their favourite – Derrida, Marx, Nietzsche – or how about ‘a pinch of Lyotard, a pinch of Baudrillard might be good, but a whole meal of salt?’ (Latour cited in Crawford, 1993). Bourdieu, to whom Heinich also refers, has been bashed repeatedly by Latour – and Hennion. Walter Benjamin was far from ‘well-argued’, according to Hennion and Latour (2003), but apparently still well worth writing about. As a matter of intellectual honesty, Nimmo encourages transforming this ‘blinkered mode of engagement’ into something more ‘open and modest’. Like Giraud, he is favourable to partial connections and extensions, but skeptical of our attempt to activate the modes of existence. Why, again, struggle with these modes to make sense of climate destruction, when the critiques and analyses from political ecology, feminist technoscience, and elsewhere, already provide convincing explanations? (Striking a similar note, but giving it a broader scope, Heinich refers to ‘the interminability of the investigate work’ as ANT's ‘major flaw’).

But there are some interesting differences. Where Giraud highlights feminist elaborations and improvements, Nimmo affirms ANT's value, but still presents us with a series of stark contrasts. He describes ANT as a kind of ‘conceptual gymnastics’, a purely ‘theoretical exercise’ oblivious to ‘exploitation and inequality, social and environmental injustice, the neocolonial appropriation of land and resources, and the accelerating degradation of ecosystems’. Cosmopolitical diplomacy, we read, creates ‘rarefied philosophical puzzles’ that disregard ‘flesh and blood conflicts’ and ‘visceral experiences of violence, domination, dispossession and in some cases genocide’. We wonder if these loaded dichotomies do not, again, mistake the characteristic lack of certain critical terms in ANT for a disinterest in the realities the terms are meant to evoke.

Giraud and Nimmo also both take issue with how we refer to Capitalism as a ‘grand abstraction’ while seeming to give the Anthropocene a free pass. But when Jason Moore's world ecology (2016: 3) turns the Capitalocene into the centrepiece in a ‘new synthesis’ of universal history, precious little room is theoretically left for anything besides Capitalism itself (Blok and Jensen, 2019). How is this supposed to work with critiques of epistemic colonialism, universalisation and homogenisation?

This bears on two related issues that emerge in the commentaries. The first concerns Nimmo's call for unblinkered engagement with diverse theories. The second has to do with how the relation between theory and description appears in light of that engagement – as we already saw with Heinich. Both issues can be elicited from what our commentators fail to notice about our sites of ‘inventing around’. For they are where we explore the limits of Latour's theorisations, but also of Western social theory more broadly.

Thus, we ended our discussion not by salvaging the modes of existence but by suggesting, with inspiration from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski, that global planetary change might lead to new forms of de-modernisation that eventually transform the entire set of relations the modes assume and embed. This would also, and simultaneously, destabilise the relations embedded in the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene (see, again, Blok and Jensen, 2019).

On the second issue, the relation between the conceptual and the empirical, we must resist Heinich's splitting of Latour into two (acknowledging again our active re-reading): on the one side a ‘great ethnologist’ who practices ‘the inductive method with unequalled brilliance’, and on the other a fascinating but ultimately dubious theory ‘prophet’. If the modes of existence are of interest it is precisely because of their ambiguous configuration of theory and description. This makes them open to metamorphosis through exchanges with nonmodern thought collectives that, in turn, might configure those relations very differently. With respect to Nimmo's timely reference to the horrors of genocide, for example, it is far from obvious that existing critical theories and practices have made much analytical or practical difference. This is why some closer to ANT have begun calling for a thorough overhaul of political imaginaries, or an alter-politics (Hage, 2015).

The exploration of cosmopolitics in Bangkok elicits other problem with Heinich's sharp distinction between ‘theory’ and ‘exploring the real world’. Perhaps exploring the ‘real world’ means engaging Bangkok's problems through the lens of political ecology, as Nimmo and Giraud recommend. That is certainly pertinent, and it has been done with respect to many issues like flooding, heat islands, congestion, air pollution, and deprivation – surely all ‘real life’ issues. But what is thereby sidelined as merely theoretical gymnastics are all those entities and relations that are also very influential in Bangkok but which do not conform to the Western ontology of nature-culture dualism, such as hungry ghosts, naga, and other more-than-human beings.

To grapple with problems of co-existence among these heterogeneous beings, it is necessary, as Latour insisted, to have good descriptions. Such descriptions might indeed be thought of as the sociologist's claim to (cosmo-)political relevance. But descriptions become good only when sensitised and facilitated (not overdetermined) by theory, understood as so many virtual grids of possibility selectively actualised in concrete situations. In places like Bangkok, they require conceptual awareness of multiplicities not excluding but exceeding Capitalist exploitation.

We might say that there is no need to conceive of the Anthropocene as essentially homogenising, for after all the Anthropos can be understood as a multiplicity. Accordingly, cosmopolitical diplomacy for a planet in distress involves learning to perceive and engage with the anthropo-not-seen (de la Cadena, 2015) – all those things that fall between the cracks when Western Nature and Capital are taken for the final horizons of theory. This is why inventing around Latour – experimenting with his work in the mode of metamorphosis – can help us go somewhere else.