Bruno Latour’s Mode(s) in Situations

Abstract

With such an explicit title, the intention of L’appel des entités fragiles: Enquêter avec des modes d’existence de Bruno Latour is more than clear: referring to the conceptual toolbox devel­ oped in Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, the book aims to “listen to the call” of nonhuman entities to recognize them as important elements in the different “modes” in which modern human existence manifests itself. The term modes of existence, borrowed from Étienne Souriau (2015) and used by Latour as a framework for his own anthropology of modernity, upgrades the notion of “mediation” used in his previous works, which was too ambiv­ alent and often mistaken for inferring that nonhuman entities are simple intermediaries that only convey a message without transforming, reshaping, and rebuilding the old situation into a new one. Latour’s new terminology attempts to identify how seemingly universal “modes”—such as politics, law, technol­ ogy, or fiction—are sustained only by complex networks of interaction between humans and nonhuman entities. The book continues Latour’s theoretical efforts, further emphasizing the necessity for humans to recognize nonhumans’ existence, which is often weakened (fragilisé) by omnipotent modern discourses that often disqualify and reduce any other “voices” to silence. Each chapter focuses on a particular mode—from “[FIC]tion” to “[POL]itics”—tracing the affordance of non­ humans in sustaining them in specific settings. B o o k R e v i e w