Nowhere are media to be found among the list of beings that Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence has so far discovered. Even the concept of “communication” does not belong to the metalanguage of Latour’s pluralistic ontology. It would seem that these basic concepts of modern social theory are subsumed under the ideas of “association” and “mediation” and thus not a suitable matter for differentiation into networks of their own. However, the list is not complete. The door is open. But the threshold is high. The master himself does not make it easy to get through the door. In order to be acknowledged as a mode of existence, a network must have its own kind of crisis, hiatus, rupture, or breach, that is, there must be some reason, why actors make efforts to associate in a particular way. Furthermore, a network must have its own trajectory or direction of establishing continuity and jumping over the gaps. Legal associations are different from scientific associations, and these again are different from religious associations. Third, a network must also meet certain conditions of felicity or infelicity regarding what counts as “truth” for it. Quite obviously, legal truth conditions are different from religious, political, scientific, or artistic truth conditions. Fourth, networks “institute” beings of a certain mode and they do this for a certain purpose, function, or what Latour calls “alteration.” If a mode of existence, or a being, cannot be identified by these criteria, then it has no place in the list of modes of existence that the AIME project is assembling. Despite these hurdles, we ask if media and communication do not demand to be considered as modes of existence in their own right. Can a future media studies be based upon communication and media as a specific mode of existence?
Category Archives: Actor-Network Theory
Building, Dwelling, Thinking in the Network Society
Heidegger’s definition of space (in Building, Dwelling, Thinking) is unusual and thought provoking. Things don’t exist in space, they are space, that is, they exist by making space. In Heidegger’s view things are not mere objects lying about out there in the world waiting to be stumbled over or discovered, they are active. Things open up places in which humans dwell. Heidegger uses the example of a bridge. The bridge doesn’t merely connect the banks of a river, it lets them appear as banks from out of an anonymous and undifferentiated nature. Not only that, it creates a relation between the banks of the river and the surrounding land. They are “gathered” together as places of crossing, places of meeting, of communication, and of commerce. Such activities, or as architects would say, programs, are made possible by constructions of all kinds; roads, checkpoints, watchtowers, shops, houses, etc. Each thing, each building allows certain activities to “take place.” Buildings create places to live, to do business, to produce or sell goods, to learn, and much more. These constructions are not simply put into an abstract Cartesian space that was somehow already there. Buildings not only take up space, they make it appear and open it up for human dwelling.
The New Media Revolution
The “transcoding” (Manowich) of society along the lines of digital media and computer networks can be considered revolutionary. One of the important consequences of the digital media revolution is the transformation of age-old communication structures. Human society has long been structured by either one-to-one interaction or, as soon as the number of people involved in interaction no longer permits everyone to speak to everyone, by one-to-many, that is, top-down, hierarchical communication. The digital communication revolution may be considered a revolution precisely because asymmetric, one-to-many communication and the hierarchical social structures which for centuries have been a precondition of cooperative action in larger groups is no longer the only means of constructing social order and in many areas is becoming increasingly inefficient. Above the level of face-to-face interaction, that is, on the levels of groups, organizations, institutions, and social systems, communication need no longer be hierarchical. The affordances of digital media modify the spatial and temporal parameters of communication such that it has now become possible for communication to take place in the mode of many-to-many, whereby, as Actor-Network Theory points out, not only human, but also non-human actors participate in communication. This means that social structures must no longer be vertical processes for producing, distributing, and controlling information.
Being-as-Other, the Hermeneutical “as” and New Media
Can one interpret the AIME project (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence www.modesofexistence.org) from the point of view of communication theory?
Latour doesn’t use the term “communication,” – the term doesn’t appear in the Glossary of AIME which is odd considering for both Habermas and Luhmann communication is the very definition of the social – but a link appears when Latour proclaims that “beings utter themselves.” Another word for self-utterance is taken from semiotics, “enunciation,” which in AIME amounts to an “articulation” of continuity under the regime of time, of discontinuity, hiatus, indeed, of being-as-other. The “as” in this foundational term of the AIME metalanguage cannot help but recall the hermeneutical “as” in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Just as for Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur Being is meaning, so for AIME “being and enunciation can almost be taken to be synonymous since it is the nature of a being to utter itself, to exist, to transit, to throw itself forward through the hiatus of existence or expression.”
Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence AIME
The ambitious project of an ethnology of the Moderns that has previously been known as Actor-Network Theory has entered a new phase. The industrious ANT has ceased following the actors through the tedious empirical underbrush and is now AIME-ing high. If not for the stars then at least for a vantage point from which the comparative anthropologist is able to describe the Moderns in such a way that they can find themselves in the description as well as permitting the pre-moderns, non-moderns, and anti-moderns to discover mutual concerns. The purpose is to bring the battling parties in the War of the Worlds, the Clash of Civilizations back to the negotiating table with some hope of success. This is what Gaia wants, global cooperative action on the basis of mutual understanding. There is otherwise no chance of healing the Earth’s wounds and overcoming the ecological threat.
Under the title of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME www.modesofexistence.org) Latour offers an interpretation of Modernity in which the apologetic universalism of Enlightenment, Critique, Science, Technology, Progress, and Democracy that has left the post-colonial world alienated, angry, and without a vision for the future is replaced by a revised and more diplomatic interpretation of Modernity. Instead of demanding the non-moderns to choose between science or superstition, civilization or barbarism, the Moderns – so Latour’s proposal – have reached a self-understanding in which “beings” of all sorts and not merely subjects and objects can inhabit the world. Ontological pluralism now lends cultural pluralism a helping hand. There are many different kinds of beings, not just matter and minds, but beings with strange names like REF, REP, REL, MET, HAB, FIC, TEC, NET, PRE, ORG, LAW, POL, DC, …, 15 in all at present with the prospect of more, since the AIME project is “open source,” that is, all are invited to BYOB (bring your own beings).
If you have become fed up and impatient with post-modern critique, systems theory, and even the fashionable talk about networks, and if you had been wondering Where does it go from here?, What is the next big thing in philosophy?, then this is it. There is no more daring, more novel, more rewarding enterprise at this juncture in the realm of thought than the inquiry into modes of existence. Indeed, there is room for everyone!