Metaphysics of the Common World: Whitehead, Latour, and the Modes of Existence

Author(s): Tomas Weber

Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2016), pp. 515-533
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Metaphysics of the Common World:
Whitehead, Latour, and the Modes of Existence

Tomas Weber
university of cambridge

abstract: We exist only because we inhabit a world in common, embedded within

networks of associations between humans and nonhumans. This is endlessly disclosed
by our experience of the world. And yet, despite its palpability, it is clear that we have
failed to mobilize a notion of the common world into something capable of guiding
our modes of thought and collective forms of activityour attitudes, our affective lives,
our politics. How have we arrived here? Bruno Latours work suggests that an answer
can be found in the common worlds status as informationits self-evidence works to
exclude it from a world of values. What, then, should be done? In his recent work on the
modes of existence Latour develops a pragmatic metaphysics inspired by the speculative
method of Alfred North Whitehead. Metaphysical speculation becomes a tool for moving
beyond the bifurcation of nature through the construction of abstractions with which
to interpret the pluralism of experience. Rather than thinking of the common world as
either a given fact or as a totalizing universal, Latour develops a notion of a common
world out of the messiness of experience and, as such, hopes to transform us into beings
who would be moved to actively pursue and care for such a notion.

keywords: Bruno Latour, metaphysics, common world, Alfred North Whitehead,

radical empiricism

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 30, no. 4, 2016

Copyright 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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516 tomas weber

Introduction: Feeling the Common

That we exist because we inhabit a world in common, a world composed

out of the relations and the impure, incessant mingling of human and non-
human entities, is self-evident. It is betrayed at each and every step of our
experience of existence. Nobody behaves as if it were impossible to form
connections with other beings, nobody speaks as if he or she were isolated
within a mind, and nobody acts as if reality were divided by a wall separating
the realms of nature and the human. The notion that we exist because
of our embeddedness within networks of associations between humans
and nonhumans is endlessly disclosed by our experience of the world. And
yet, just as obvious is that, despite this palpability, we have failed to ade-
quately mobilize a notion of a common world into something capable of
guiding our modes of thought and our collective forms of activityour atti-
tudes, our affective lives, our politics. We have failed to bring the concept to
life in a sustained way; we have been unsuccessful in actively maintaining
it; we have not made of it a living value with the power to consistently and
forcefully affect us. We have not allowed the notion of a common world to
transform us into beings who would be moved to actively pursue, foster,
and care for it. How have we arrived at this position, and what can be done
about it? In what follows, I suggest not only that the recent work of Bruno
Latour offers an account of why we have found ourselves in this strange
position but also, and more importantly, that his work can be seen as an
experimentation with ways of making the notion of a common world more
capable of moving us to develop it, to further its construction.
Latour suggests that a possible answer to the question of why the notion
of a common world remains difficult to feel and to appeal to despite its
unavoidability can be found in the concepts status as informationits very
self-evidence, its inevitability, works to exclude it from a world of values.
The common world can be treated dispassionately because it has become a
ready-made piece of knowledge stripped of the mediation by which knowl-
edge is born. It has been torn away from the processes by which elements
of our experience are transformed into beings worthy of the work of pay-
ing attention. Latours work, of course, has never stopped disrupting the
fact-value distinction: actor-network theory suggested that the processes
through which objectivity is produced cannot be separated from the various
ways in which ideas, processes, and outcomes matter to actors within net-
works. By following these chains of association, of mattering, by tracing

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 517

networks of force and value, the sociologist can show how science is a
passionate, rather than coldly disinterested, practice. He or she can then
dispense with the infamous constitution of the moderns that enforced
a dichotomy of facts and feelings, nature and politics, nonhumans and
humans, by neglecting the work of hybridization, composition, and con-
struction facts require to become themselves.
Developing these ideas, Latours Politics of Nature proposed that the
modern constitution is particularly useless when it comes to a practice
such as political ecology, which, of course, explicitly requires that we experi-
ment with possible ways of combining facts and values, nature and politics.
He proposes that political ecology and, in fact, politics in general, the latter
defined as the entire set of tasks that allows the progressive composition of
a common world,1 abandon the split between facts and values and instead
begin to experiment with alternative ways of articulating and organizing
the hybridity, or we could say commonality, of the world. It is Latours most
recent, and most metaphysical, work, however, An Inquiry into Modes of
Existence, that explicitly takes up the challenge of responding to the ques-
tion How do we compose a common world?2 and the manner in which it
does so will be the focus of this article.
In recent lectures, articles, and a book,3 Latour has begun to employ
James Lovelocks well-known figure of Gaia as a way of characterizing
a responsive and interconnected earth. For Latour, Gaia emerges as a
figure to be reckoned with once the globe of the project of globalization
is discovered finally to have never existed, a situation made clear by the
realizationformally acknowledged during the 2015 Paris climate confer-
encethat there exists no earth capable of satisfying the resource demands
that a universally developed world would have to make on it. Latour pro-
poses the figure of Gaia, then, in order to leave behind such totalizing and
immaterial notions of the global, notions that have little to do either with
either the physical earth system or immediate experience. As such, he
underlines the urgent need for new ways of conceptualizing and living out
our togetherness in the era of the Anthropocene. In this article, however,
I suggest that the Inquirys redefinition of what it means to do schematic
metaphysics can itself be seen as a key component of the project of renew-
ing and transforming the concept of the common world and so experiment-
ing with new forms of experiencing coexistence.
In short, if experimenting with possibilities for coexistence requires
thinking beyond the opposition between facts and values, then metaphysics

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518 tomas weber

can become a tool for speculative and creative resistance to the bifurcation
of nature, the name Alfred North Whitehead gave to the operation by
which, following the Scientific Revolution, reality is split into primary and
secondary qualities: reality as it is in itself and reality as it appears to be.
The cosmology of Whiteheads Process and Reality has the aim of design-
ing abstractions to interpret experience with less bifurcation, and this
is also how the metaphysics sketched out in Latours Inquiry should be
interpreted. What distinguishes Latours metaphysics, however, is its asso-
ciation of practices, of kinds of activity (such as religion, law, science, and
art), with modes of existence, and it is this dimension that allows us to char-
acterize the Inquiry as a pragmatic, empirical, and ethical intensification
of Whiteheads approach to speculative thought. Latour, I argue in what
follows, continues Whiteheads vision of philosophy as the revision of our
modes of abstraction in order to create a notion of togetherness inextricable
from our experience.

The Bifurcation of Nature

In his 1919 book The Concept of Nature Whitehead introduced the notion
of the bifurcation of nature, and in Science and the Modern World, from
1925, he provided a historical account of it. According to Whitehead, the
bifurcation of nature began with Descartess and Lockes theories of pri-
mary and secondary qualities, metaphysical responses to developments in
physical science in the seventeenth century demonstrating the mathema-
tizability of nature. On the one hand, there are the primary, quantifiable
qualities of bodies that exist outside of any relation with an observer. On the
other, there are the secondary, sensory qualities, such as color, sound, and
taste, which exist only within the relation with an observer. As this theory
became a generalized ontology, stripped from the concrete experimental
situations of contemporary physical science and turned into a metaphysical
theory of reality as a whole, as it did with Descartess and Lockes writings,
it became increasingly incoherent. Why? Because a bifurcated reality has
no way of accounting for experience as part of nature. The bifurcation of
nature reinforces a split between nature as it really is, outside of human
perception, and nature as it is perceived. The consequence is that nature
is stripped of everything beyond the motion of material and a gulf is insti-
tuted between matter and the mind: Thus the bodies are perceived as

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 519

with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact
are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should
in truth be reserved for ourselves; the rose for its scent: the nightingale for
his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken.
They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into
odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is
a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of mate-
rial, endlessly, meaninglessly.4 Whitehead celebrates the theory of primary
and secondary qualities insofar as it has been successful as a system of
concepts for the organisation of scientific research.5 The problem begins,
however, when we commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, when
we take what is a system of abstractions for concrete realities,6 when a
theory developed according to specific requirements is generalized into a
totalizing account of reality as such.
The vicious bifurcation7 resulting from the fallacy of misplaced con-
creteness refuses to consider experience as part of nature. But this bifurca-
tion, Whitehead notes, is part of a broader metaphysics based around the
concept of simple location, the theory that all entities occupy a precise, iso-
latable point in space: To say that a bit of matter has simple location means
that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to state that it
is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite
finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of
that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.8
Primary qualities, unlike secondary qualities, are the essential qualities of
substances localizable in a definite area of reality. Secondary qualities, how-
ever, are not: Where could blueness, a quality emerging out of a relation
between an observer and a material entity, be definitively located? Of course,
one could locate blueness definitively in the neuronal processes underly-
ing perception. And yet to do so would be to exclude the idea that the per-
ception of blueness is first and foremost an experience that can in no way
be isolated from a diversity of relations that constitute it, both inside and
outside the human body. It is therefore experience that forces Whitehead to
reconsider the theory that entities occupy isolated points in space and time,
cut off from other entities and other spatiotemporal points. This notion is
an abstraction with no basis in experience: Among the primary elements
of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no ele-
ment whatever which possesses this character of simple location.9 When
we apprehend an entity, we do not apprehend it as essentially disconnected

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520 tomas weber

from other entities or ourselves, occupying an isolated point in space that

could persist beyond the extension of entities themselves. In this way, the
split between primary and secondary qualities, between an entity and the
appearance of that entity to consciousness, is part of a more fundamental
split between an entity as located in a particular, isolated portion of space
and the relations between that entity and other entities. Consequently, in
Science and the Modern World, and more extensively in Process and Reality,
Whitehead develops a systematic metaphysics of relations, events, and pro-
cesses as an alternative to the unfortunate metaphysical consequences of
the development of modern science, the notion that entities can be defini-
tively contained in clearly delineated portions of space without any essen-
tial reference of the relations between them.
It is important to note that for Whitehead such operations are falla-
cious not because they abstract from purer, more intuitive experiences of
nature. This, for instance, is precisely what separates Whiteheads work
from the work of Henri Bergson. Bergson, similarly, proposed alternatives
to the theory of simple location, or to what he termed spatialized time.
Events and entities are not located in well-isolated, fenced-off, and quanti-
fiable parts of space and time but, rather, persist through qualitative and
heterogeneous experiences of duration, continuous and indivisible. Just as
for Whitehead, then, for Bergson the idea that moments of time can be
quantified and entities in space can be clearly isolated is an abstraction and,
consequently, should not be thought of as having any purchase on what
reality is in itself. And yet, for Bergson, spatialization, the transformation
of the durational and qualitative into the quantifiable, is an inevitable con-
sequence of an intellectual or abstract approach to reality. Because of this,
he proposed a new philosophical method, that of intuition, which would be
uncorrupted by the abstraction of the intellect and would therefore serve to
bring philosophy closer to truth, that is, to the experience of duration.
For Whitehead, on the other hand, there is nothing inevitable about
the theory of simple location or the bifurcation of nature. It is simply a
consequence of having taken an abstraction produced in the service of
specific and situated practices for a description of concrete reality in toto.
As Isabelle Stengers writes, Whitehead therefore does not oppose to intel-
lectual knowledge the profound truth of duration, whose experience the
Bergsonian texts try to induce in their readers. . . . Whitehead by no means
criticizes the fact that we pay to certain relations the attention appropri-
ate for actively interpreting their signification . . . that is, for producing

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 521

specialized knowledge. As long as we are not mistaken about what belongs

to nature and what pertains to human approximation.10 Or in Whiteheads
own words, I agree with Bergson in his protest: but I do not agree that
such distortion is a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of
nature. I shall in subsequent lectures endeavor to show that this spatial-
ization is the expression of more concrete facts under the guise of very
abstract logical constructions. There is an error; but it is merely the acci-
dental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.11 For Whitehead
the solution is not to dispense with abstractions of reality in favor of more
direct kinds of intuition or more purified spiritual experiences of nature.
This is because the problem of the division of reality into matter and mind
is not that it is an abstraction (You cannot think without abstractions . . .)
but, rather, that it is an insufficient one, inadequate for accounting for, for
interpreting, the diversity of relations in experience (. . . accordingly, it is
of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of
abstraction).12 As such, a revision of our modes of abstraction should be
performed to render them more coherent, applicable, and adequate to
the interpretation of every element of our experience.13 This redesigning
of abstractions is tackled head-on in Process and Reality, in which the goal is
to design a metaphysical scheme that will allow everything of which we are
conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, [to] have the character
of a particular instance of the general scheme.14 And it is for this reason
that Didier Debaise refers to Whiteheads speculative empiricism15his
ultimate aim is not to say what reality really is like, as it is from nowhere,16
but, rather, to provide more adequate and coherent interpretations of
experience through a method of speculative and descriptive generalization.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness led to the ruin of modern philoso-
phy not simply because of an internal logical incoherence in the modes of
abstraction that it yielded but also, and more importantly, because dividing
the world into mind and substance leads to the reduction of experience to
a secondary phenomenon within the singular relation between the mind
and the world. Whitehead, unlike Bergson, maintains a rationalist hope: I
hold that philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double
one, first of harmonizing them by assigning to them their right relative sta-
tus as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct comparison
with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby promoting the
formation of more complete schemes of thought.17 Whiteheads specula-
tive philosophy, then, is metaphysical, schematic, and systematic because

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522 tomas weber

it is pragmatic, empiricist, and performative: the goal of his cosmology is

not to propose a view from nowhere of the cosmos but to formulate a set of
abstractions to allow experience to be conceptualized without resorting to a
bifurcation that has little basis in that experience.

Networks and the Bifurcation of Nature

Bruno Latours work has deep allegiances with Whiteheads and par-
ticularly with Whiteheads guiding problem, namely, how to resist the
bifurcation of nature. Actor-network theory (ANT), first developed as an
ethnographic method for performing symmetrical anthropology in labo-
ratories, underlines the way in which divisions between nature and society,
object and subject, nonhumans and humans, facts and values, are present
more in the ways in which moderns understand and talk about what they
do than in their practices, than in what they actually do. ANT is first and
foremost a method: chains of association and translation between human
and nonhuman actors are followed with the goal of tracing the processes
by which objectivity is constructed and, consequently, of moving beyond
bifurcating tendencies in social science that would treat construction exclu-
sively as social construction in contrast to a preexisting nonhuman nature.
In a laboratory, for nature to speak in its own voice, for objectivity to be
produced, collections of instruments, funding bodies, libraries, scientific
papers, electrons, laws and regulations, professional and personal animos-
ities, and allegiances all must be actively speaking. If bifurcation is to
be avoided, facts cannot be eliminated from the environment from which
they are progressively isolated and the chains of mediation that make their
isolation possible. In this way, at the same time as it is a method for doing
social science, ANT also offers something like a metaphysics.18 For Latour,
both what we call nature and what we call society are constructed
through interactions between irreducible human and nonhuman actors in
vast networks of associations, translations, and mediations. Something can
be explained by something else only with the risk of effacing the media-
tions that both connect and separate them. As such, there can be no social
explanation of sciencewhat we call the social is itself the result of chains
of connection between humans and nonhumans: Like a mayonnaise that
does not take, it is bound to fail. The socialits actors, its groups, and
its strategiesis too closely identified with human beings to pay heed to

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 523

the feckless impurity and immorality of alliances.19 But neither can there
be a natural explanation of scientific facts without eradicating the actors
of doubtful breeding involved in the creation of objectivity, the crowd
of fools whose help is denied even while it is used.20 No, natures mingle
with one another and with us so thoroughly that we cannot hope to sep-
arate them and discover clear, unique origins to their powers.21 Networks
are global and can all be described in the same way.22 There are no sep-
arate spheres of law, economy, religion, technology, only compositions
and assemblages, loosely linked mixtures that can all, equally, be charac-
terized as networks of relations.23 We have never been modern because we
have always been caught within such networks, in which humans and non-
humans actively maintain, translate, construct, and transform each other.
There are, however, some disadvantages to treating the idea of networks
as a kind of explanatory principle with global reach. The network is a concept
able to resist the bifurcation of nature into subject and object, appearance
and nature. As such, it weakens the power of explanations based around
notions of a pregiven reality opposed to a pregiven illusion. Both what we
call reality and what we call illusion must be constructed through networks
of mediation. And yet, if this is indeed the case, it becomes difficult to jus-
tify the notion of a network as a metaphysics, a general explanation, applica-
ble in every possible scenariolegal, economic, technical, religious, and so
on. After all, extending a situated abstraction for performing social science
into a metaphysical principle capable of replacing other ways of account-
ing for reality, whether economic, legal, or religious, is precisely what
Whitehead meant by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. ANT, by pro-
posing networks as a single means of explaining everything from the magic
of ancient peoples to the legal systems of the societies that colonized such
people,24 leaves itself open to the risk of abandoning mediation precisely
when it is most needed. After all, now every collective can be immediately
described as a network without having to take the risk of following the man-
ner in which particular collectives articulate and differentiate themselves.
In this specific way, ANT repeats the very bifurcation it was intended to do
away with. As a method of tracing networks of relations becomes a meta-
physical principle, it is severed from its pragmatism and empiricism and
becomes an instrument in the service of a bifurcation, treating other forms
of explanation as mere illusions, obstructions to a greater reality. The bifur-
cation has been turned on its head: now, instead of primary qualities as real
and secondary qualities as mere appearances, ANT institutes relations as

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524 tomas weber

primary and transforms stable entities into secondary phenomena. ANT

cannot account for our tendency to efface networks of relations without
transcending networks by reaching for oppositional concepts incompati-
ble with them: belief versus reality, false consciousness versus truth, hope-
lessly deluded subjects versus the stable object that behaves according to
preestablished laws. ANT, then, cannot explain our tendency to overlook or
efface networks without mobilizing notions of illusion, self-deception, and
false consciousness; without opposing reality to mere belief; without, in
short, bifurcation. As such, ANT must be completed,25 that is, supplemented
with other modes of existence beyond networks capable of accounting for
a pluralism of values.

The Radical Empiricism of the Common World

It is this problem with the concept of networksthat it often leads to

a simple overturning of the bifurcation of naturethat leads Latour to
experiment with possible ways of envisaging the coexistence between
diverse modes of being. As such, and from one perspective, the work
of the Inquiry represents a turning away from the process metaphysics
of Whitehead toward the pluralistic approach of tienne Souriaus The
Different Modes of Existence, from which Latour borrows the term.26 And
yet it is nevertheless clear that Latour still owes much to Whiteheadand
in particular to the pragmatist Whitehead of Isabelle Stengerss interpre-
tationinsofar as the Inquiry is a pluralistic response to the problem of
the bifurcation of nature. When developing a set of abstractions capable of
resisting the bifurcation of nature in Process and Reality, Whitehead knew
that, rather than following a principle elaborated out of a singular intu-
ition, what was needed was a schematic philosophy able to account for a
plurality of intuitions. The task of metaphysics, for Whitehead, was there-
fore to construct a schema that could avoid reducing particular elements
of our experience, such as our experience of stable, persistent entities, to
mere illusions produced by a more fundamental nature. Whitehead was
a follower of William James, whose thought, along with that of Bergson,
he tried to rescue . . . from the charge of anti-intellectualism27 and for
whom interminable metaphysical debates between objects and relations,
or permanence and flux, could be resolved with a pragmatic method capa-
ble of showing how both objects and relations form part of the pluralism

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 525

of our experience. For Whitehead, then, in the inescapable flux, there is

something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an ele-
ment that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux;
and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its sub-
mission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can
find no interpretation of patent facts.28 The aim, here, which Latour takes
up from Whitehead, is not to shock common sense but to imaginatively
elucidate it,29 which is another way of saying that speculative philosophy
must include all of experienceit must not exclude particular aspects of
our experience in favor of others. For Latour, as will be shown in more
detail in what follows, it is precisely the speculative elucidation of such
common sense that furthers the composition of a common world. For the
moment, however, it is important to note that Whiteheads schematic phi-
losophy has the aim, in common with Jamess philosophy, of constructing
concepts to experiment with possibilities for making language more capa-
ble of absorbing the pluralism of experience, or common sense. And
Latour frames his inquiry into the modes of existence in a similar way,
characterizing his work as a continuation, in schematic form, of Jamess
radical empiricism: The entire inquiry aspires to extend [Jamess radical
empiricism] in a more systematic way.30
What, then, is Jamess radical empiricism? For James, the problem
with ordinary empiricism was that it failed to capture the diversity of
experience by [doing] away with the connections of things, and [insist-
ing] most on the disjunctions.31 The empiricism of Hume and J. S. Mill
emphasized a vision of sensation as torn from relations,32 whereas, for
James,

the conjunctions are as primordial elements of fact as are the dis-

tinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this
passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life con-
tinues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the
simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoni-
ously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, is, isnt, then,
before, in, on, beside, between, next, like, unlike, as,
but, flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of con-
cretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives
do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new
portion of the stream.33

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526 tomas weber

The neglect of conjunctive relations and the emphasis on disjunction in

empiricism left it up to rationalism or idealism to thread the isolated
elements back together again. And yet, unfortunately, the product of ideal-
isms work of weaving back together was a transcendent unity or absolute
of a different order of truth than that of experience.34 Jamess proposition
of a radical empiricism, then, offers the possibility of a philosophical atti-
tude with which to do justice to the conjunctions and prepositions that
make up experience without, at the same time, turning the movements of
pure experience into an absolute and immovable totality.
In the above quote, James lists a number of prepositions, copulas, and
conjunctions. This is a useful way of understanding why Latour consid-
ers the modes of existence project to be a continuation of Jamess radical
empiricism. This might be surprising: Wasnt ANT, the empirical method
for tracing networks, already in essence a philosophy of relations? James,
however, by emphasizing prepositions, demands not simply that relations
be added to an ordinary empiricism that, up until now, has focused only
on isolated entities. A preposition, after all, does not merely signify the
existence of a relation; it also refers to a particular manner of relating. ANT
proposed relational networks between entities as a fundamental princi-
ple. What it missed was that networks, stripped of their particularity, the
specific ways in which their relations are formed and maintained, are not
part of our experience. What is experienced, rather, is a plurality of ways or
modes of making connections. There is no such thing as a relation outside
of the particular way in which that relation establishes itself; there are no
networks in themselves, only divergent modes in which entities join forces,
connect, and matter to each other. The proposition of the Inquiry, then, is
that the bifurcating tendencies of ANT can be avoided through the specu-
lative construction of a modal philosophy of being: no longer occupied in a
debate about the true nature of reality (relations or entities, constructivism
or direct access?), the goal of the modes of existence project is to construct
a scheme allowing for a plurality of modes of being, rooted in the diverging
practices of the moderns, to be interpreted and spoken about in order to
further a less reductive notion of a common world.
Latour, therefore, fabricates a metaphysics of prepositions from which
emerge distinct modes of existence. The Inquiry proposes fifteen of these
modes of existence, each with its own style of establishing networks and
instituting, or instaurating,35 beings. The modes are reproduction, [REP];
metamorphosis, [MET]; habit, [HAB]; technology, [TEC]; fiction, [FIC];

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 527

reference, [REF]; politics, [POL]; law, [LAW]; religion, [REL]; attachment,

[ATT]; organization, [ORG]; morality, [MOR]; network, [NET]; preposition,
[PRE]; and double click, [DC]. As might be imagined, [NET] and [PRE],
when joined together in a crossing, are the central modes that guaran-
tee the metalanguage of the Inquiry: a collective of beings [NET] linked
through a particular style [PRE] of forming connections and disconnec-
tions is what constitutes a mode and guarantees metaphysical pluralism.
This crossing of networks with prepositions is precisely what characterizes
the Inquirys completion of ANT: to networks have been added a plural-
ity of prepositions, particular styles, modes, of relating. And yet, to ask
whether these fifteen modes are in some way exhaustive or complete
would be to miss the point: Latours conception of metaphysics is not rep-
resentational but pragmatic; he is not trying to paint a picture of the most
fundamental structures and operations of reality as it really is but, rather,
responding to a specific problemthe inadequacy of the bifurcation of
nature as an account of experienceand pursuing a specific aimthe
composition of a common world out of the pluralism of experience. The
concepts mobilized by the Inquiry have no use or function outside of these
ambitions. In the conclusion to the Inquiry, Latour refers to Souriau: As
I believe in the modest advantage of a systematic approach, even though
I am skeptical of the systematic spirit, I consider this number of modes
as the fortuitous effect of a historical contingency among those whom I
study as well as in the inquirer. So I seek no justification other than a lovely
image from Souriau: the colors of the Lascaux cave are quite simply those
that the painter found underfoot; yellow ochre, red ochre; green clay, black
smoke. He has to make do.36 The modes are contingent instruments
Latour found to be useful in responding to a problem that has nothing to
do with representing what reality really is. As such, we can say of Latour
what Stengers writes of Whitehead, that the originality of his answer . . .
was that the aim was not simply to critique specialized abstractions but
to produce different abstractions that would act as lures for an aesthetic
appreciation of our diverging, specialized abstractions, for they are well
worth the same kind of attention, care, and lucidity that engineers devote
to technical equipments.37 Latours aim, we might say, is similarly to pro-
duce an aesthetic experience in his readers; it is not to represent the world
in its entirety but to stage a limited and contingent drama of concepts in
order to incite a feeling of what Stengers terms the extravagant empirical
diversity of the world.38

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528 tomas weber

Returning to the system itself, then, each of the fifteen modes has
its own trajectories, hiatuses, and felicity and infelicity conditions and is
able to join together with other modes in a crossing. What is immedi-
ately striking, after casting an eye over the list of the modes, is that this
schematic metaphysics combines metaphysics with anthropology, the lan-
guage of speculative philosophy with the language of human practices.
Religion and law are found together with concepts such as reproduction
and metamorphosis. And yet, to readers of Latour this should not be
surprising: the modes of existence could not be limited to either human
practices, on the one hand, or nonhuman processes, on the other, with-
out denying that practices always require forming relations with nonhu-
mans. Latour, for instance, gives the example of a hike up Mont Aiguille,
a mountain in the Vercors Massif.39 He is interested in the mode of exis-
tence involved in the emergence of his geographic survey map, namely,
reference, [REF], the mode by which information is carried along a chain
through a series of transformations, the establishment of chains defined
by the hiatus between two forms of different natures and whose felicity
condition consists in the discovery of a constant that is maintained across
these successive abysses, tracing a different form of trajectory that makes
it possible to make remote beings accessible.40 With [REF], remote beings
can be known by establishing chains that produce constants across the gap
between different beings, between, say, humans and mountains. But this
mode of existence does not emerge in a vacuum; knowledge relies not only
on the mode of reference, the production of constants enabling access to
remote beings, but on the modes through which such beings exist as capa-
ble of being accessed, through which they persist or hold through time.41
This, for Latour, is what the mode of reproduction, [REP], character-
izes, the mode through which any entity whatsoever crosses through the
hiatus of its repetition.42 There is, then, no unnavigable gulf between
knowledge of the mountain and the mountain; they coexist because each
has its own modes of existence. And yet they remain distinct: the moun-
tain does not remain unknowable, but neither does the knowledge of the
mountain constitute the mountain. Both the knowledge of the mountain
and the mountain are articulated through ways of forming and maintain-
ing relations between beings. In this way, our knowledge of the mountain
is limited not because of any finitude particular to humans but, rather,
because [REF] is not the only mode of existence; it is not the only way in
which beings enter into relation. Our knowledge is limited because the

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 529

existence of knowledge itself relies on the coexistence of a diversity of ways

of articulating relations. Everything is connected, yes, humans and nonhu-
mans, but everything is not connected in the same way, in the same style.
This is the key to understanding what Latours metaphysics offers, namely,
the possibility of thinking a notion of coexistence irreducible to ready-made
facts as much as it is to a processual value, to a preexisting objective
truth as much as it is to a merely fabricated, subjective, and ethical
truth, to a nature distinct from the experience of being alive. If there are
no facts outside of the gradual work of establishing relations with beings
in particular styles, then neither is there a common world without the step-
by-step work of beings establishing relations with each other in a diversity
of modes.
For Latour, the existence of these modes is dependent on certain felic-
ity conditions proper to each mode, conditions that differentiate and char-
acterize the individual modes of existence:

But what about the felicity conditions that would allow us, as I said,
to define a mode? Can we refer without being ridiculous to the
veridiction proper to Mont Aiguille? Of course we can, since it is
a question of recognizing steps and passes. Maintaining oneself in
existence, being rather than not being, is without question one of the
componentsand perhaps the most important oneof what we usu-
ally call true or false. Consequently, instead of having on the one
hand a language that would say what is true and what is falsebut
without being able to follow the reference networksand on the other
hand things enunciated that would be content to verify the utter-
ances by their simple presence or absence, it is more fruitful to give
up both notions, word and thing, completely, and to speak from
now on only of modes of existence, all real and all capable of truth and
falsitybut each according to a different type of veridiction.43

What the moderns call knowledge, then, is the outcome of the crossing
between reference and reproduction, or, in the style of the Inquiry, [REF
REP]. In this way, there can be no metaphysical split between the moun-
tain as it is in itself and our perception of it. Rather, a contrast between
the mountain and our experience of it is produced through the trials that
the beings supporting the existence of each must encounter, the condi-
tions that they may or may not satisfy. A tree responds to the challenge

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530 tomas weber

of existence by forming relations with and transforming a multiplicity of

beings ([REP]), a jurist pursues a legal means by constructing continu-
ities between facts and principles ([LAW]), and religious beings resist being
reduced to mere words through their power to convert, resuscitate and
save persons ([REL]).44 Indeed, the modes of existence could legitimately
be called the modes of coexistence insofar as they make it impossible to
think existence without coexistence, without the process of forging rela-
tions of diverse kinds with other beings. In this way, both the bifurcation
of nature and an anything goes relativism are resisted: there can be no
existence separated from the mode according to which it is produced. Each
mode has its own particular sense of what existence and nonexistence, or
truth and falsity, would mean. Legal truth is no less binding, no less true,
than the objective truth produced by physics; it is, however, the product of
divergent processes operating according to different aims and conditions.
The Inquirys metaphysics is presented in response to the question
How do we compose a common world? By approaching the activities
of human and nonhuman entities togetherthe tree and the lawyer, the
mountain and the priestLatour develops a notion of human and nonhu-
man coexistence that is rooted in creative processes, a concept of a common
world inseparable from the productive activities of beings. And in this way
the common world becomes continuous with experience in the Jamesian
sense, that is, with experience understood as composed of a diversity of
kinds of activity in which relations between beings are formed, maintained,
and broken, a pluralism of prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions. In
fact, the possible connections between radical empiricism and coexistence
were noted by James himself, who wrote that radical empiricism thus leads
to the assumption of a collectivism of personal lives (which may be of any
grade of complication, and superhuman or infrahuman as well as human),
variously cognitive of each other, variously conative and impulsive, genu-
inely evolving and changing by effort and trial, and by their interaction and
cumulative achievements making up the world.45 The common world can
now, then, be characterized not as either an objective fact, on the one hand,
or an ethical or political proposition, on the other, but precisely as a kind
of pure experience, or experiencing, that makes both objectivity and ethics,
the practice of science as well as the practice of politics, possible.
Of course, the practice of metaphysics is itself one of these kinds of
activity, one of these styles, which is precisely why the concept of the com-
mon world also must be createdwithout the careful work of constructing

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 531

it, the notion would be powerless. Metaphysically speaking, the common

world is constructed through the processes by which existing entities enter
into diverse interrelations. And yet, at the same time, the common world as
a philosophical concept is the outcome of a kind of activity, a particular sort
of process, namely, a speculative philosophical method. And this remains
the case despite the fact that the Inquiry offers no mode of metaphysics
or philosophy. One function of the omission of the mode of philosophy
is, one might imagine, to avoid getting drawn into self-reflexive episte-
mologizing. The style of the metaphysics of the Inquiry is, after all, that
of an adventurous and unselfconscious kind of conceptual creation. And
yet, the lack of a mode for philosophy does not mean that we should be any
less curious about the mode of Latours philosophizing; nor does it mean
that we should isolate our curiosity about the Inquirys method from its
concepts.
The aim of this article was to show something of how Latour develops
a notion of a common world out of the pluralism of experience through his
construction of a metaphysical schema in which cosmological processes of
creation are found alongside the activities of modern practices. Latour is
a speculative philosopher, and yet, unlike the contemporary philosophers
gathered under the banner of speculative realism, he is not interested in
thinking an outside of thought but, rather, in using concepts to dramatize
the pluralism of what James called pure experience in order to advance
as far as possible the ethical proposition that if we have never been mod-
ern, then, equally, there has never been a singular nature or even other
cultures in any fundamental way but, rather, only possibilities for craft-
ing spaces of coexistence, for experimenting with ways of composing and
arranging what is irreducibly common. What the Inquiry ultimately offers,
then, is the sense that the common world, if it is to prove to be useful
as a concept, must be made inseparable, through the conceptual fabrica-
tion effected by speculative metaphysics, from the movements, processes,
beings, and relations that compose the experience of life.

notes
1. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 53.
2. This question is the subtitle of a collaborative website linked to the modes of
existence project. See http://www.modesofexistence.org.

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532 tomas weber

3. See Bruno Latour, Face Gaia. Huit confrences sur le nouveau rgime
climatique (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2015); and Bruno Latour, How to Make Sure
Gaia Is Not a God of Totality? With Special Attention to Toby Tyrells Book On
Gaia, accessed July 19, 2016, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/138-
THOUSAND-NAMES.pdf.
4. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican
Mentor, 1948), 56.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004), 185.
8. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 60.
9. Ibid., 5859.
10. Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 5556.
11. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 52.
12. Ibid., 59.
13. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 3.
14. Ibid.
15. See Didier Debaise, Un empirisme spculatif (Paris: Vrin, 2006).
16. Stengers could not be clearer on this point: Whiteheads proposition does
not address itself to knowledge in the sense that it could be detached from the
situations in which it is operative. It does not constitute a vision of the world or a
new paradigmindeed, this is probably the worst confusion that can occur with
regard to it (Thinking with Whitehead, 23).
17. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 88.
18. See Bruno Latour, Irreductions, in The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan
Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 153212;
as well as Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
(Melbourne: re.press, 2009).
19. Latour, Irreductions, 205.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 2056.
22. Ibid., 206.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. See Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 353.
26. See tienne Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence, trans. Erik Beranek and
Tim Howles (Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
27. Whitehead, Process and Reality, xii.
28. Ibid., 338.
29. Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 59; Whitehead, Process and Reality, 17.

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 whitehead, latour, and the modes of existence 533

30. Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 236.

31. William James, A World of Pure Experience, in Essays in Radical Empiricism,
ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976), 42.
32. James writes: Berkeleys nominalism, Humes statement that whatever
things we distinguish are as loose and separate as if they had no manner of
connection, James Mills denial that similars have anything really in common,
the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John Mills account of both
physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the
general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory,
are examples of what I mean (ibid., 43).
33. William James, The Thing and Its Relations, in Bowers and Skrupskelis,
Essays in Radical Empiricism, 95.
34. James, World of Pure Experience, 44.
35. Latour, in addition to using the term modes of existence, borrows Souriaus
word instauration to characterize a creation that changes the creator as much as
it gives rise to the created. See Souriau, Different Modes of Existence.
36. Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 479.
37. Isabelle Stengers, A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality, in The
Lure of Whitehead, ed. Nicholas Gaskill and A. J. Nocek (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014), 4364, at 50.
38. Isabelle Stengers, Achieving Coherence: The Importance of Whiteheads
Sixth Category of Existence, in Researching with Whitehead: System and Adventure,
ed. Franz Riffert and Hans-Joachim Sander (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2008),
5979.
39. See Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 6996.
40. Ibid., 92.
41. See ibid., 87.
42. Ibid., 9192.
43. Ibid., 86.
44. Ibid., 214, 365, 308.
45. William James, Review of Henry Sturts Personal Idealism, in Essays,
Comments, and Reviews. The Works of William James, ed. Frederick Burkhardt and
Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 54445.

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