Bruno Latour - An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns [2013][A]

Book Description
In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the past twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated--a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to "capital-S Science" as a higher authority. Such modes of extension--or modes of existence, Latour argues here--account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.
Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.

Reviews
[An Inquiry into Modes of Existence] is not just a book; it is also a project in interactive metaphysics. In other words, a book, plus website... Intrigued readers of Latour's text can go online [http://www.modesofexistence.org/] and find themselves drawn into a collaborative project. Collective collaboration--some would call it 'crowdsourcing'--is rare in philosophy, but Latour, a sociologist and anthropologist by training, is used to collaboration with scientists... Latour's work makes the world--sorry, worlds--interesting again. And, best of all, it is a project to which you can attach yourself. (Stephen Muecke Los Angeles Review of Books 2012-12-28)

Magnificent…An Inquiry into Modes of Existence shows that [Latour] has lost none of his astonishing fertility as a thinker, or his skill and wit as a writer…Latour’s main message--that rationality is ‘woven from more than one thread’--is intended not just for the academic seminar, but for the public square--and the public square today is global as never before. Thanks to what Bruno Latour describes as the ‘formidable discoveries of modernism,’ we have come to share a world of material interdependence and incessant communication, just at the time when the threat of climate change gives desperate pathos to our common stewardship of the planet. Latour speaks with urgency when he asks us all to set aside the script of secular modernity--to stop insulting each other and learn to pluralize, apologize and ecologize. We must prepare ourselves for diplomacy, he says: we must talk to one another or die. (Jonathan Rée Times Literary Supplement 2014-01-10)

About the Author
Bruno Latour is Professor at Sciences Po, Paris and the 2013 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize.