4.1 Starting from Débrayage/Embrayage

The concept of enunciation plays a decisive role in the development of Latour’s theoretical reflection and, as anticipated in the first chapter, it already appears in the first fundamental article dedicated to the rhetoric of the scientific text. This notion, although less widespread within the ANT compared to those of actant and actor, actually turns out to be the object of constant discussion and a theoretical investigation that are particularly significant for a reflection on the logic of the production and circulation of meaning. As highlighted in the previous chapters, even in the case of enunciation, Latour’s move is indeed divided into two phases. On the one hand, his action consists in resorting to a pre-existing and very detailed theoretical and methodological framework, that of structuralist semiotics, extending its application. On the other hand, this expansion on the side of application is progressively accompanied by a proposal for terminological revision that affects both the methodological dimension and the more properly theoretical one of the investigation into the ways in which meaning is articulated and manifested.

The presence of a constant dialogue with semiotic theory focused on the category of enunciation, is particularly evident in an essay from 1988 titled “A Relativist Account of Einstein’s Relativity”. The premise from which the work begins is that, as the first studies on the tactical and persuasive use of language in scientific texts have shown, scientific discourses lend themselves to being analysed, at least in part, in the same terms with which the functioning of literary discourse is investigated. In this perspective, the objectivity of the scientific fact is indeed rethought as objectification, that is, as a meaning effect generated by the ability to stratify the text in levels, to construct internal reference chains. Consistent with the perspective advanced by Greimas, according to which the functioning of the scientific text is based on the ability to produce an objectifying camouflage through the cancellation of the traces that refer to the instance responsible for its construction, Latour does not hesitate to resort to the categories of débrayage/embrayage, recognized as one of the basic tools for the analysis of texts, conceiving Einstein’s text in terms of a true and proper narrative.

The recourse to the semiotic perspective on enunciation is clearly manifested in this work, particularly in the passage which states that “if there were no shifting, there would be no way of ever escaping from the narrow confines of hic et nunc, and no way of ever defining who the enunciator is. There would be utter silence” (1988: 9). And again: “This is the basis of what has been called the ‘semiotic turn’: nothing can be said of the enunciator of a narration if not in a narration where the enunciator becomes a shifted-out character” (1988: 27). This basic assumption thus allows us to examine the work of the scientist in terms defined by the analysis of narrative programs.

Latour’s aim, however, is not merely to apply the semiotic methodology and concepts to the specific case of a scientific narrative, what interests him is rather to highlight how in the text the operations of débrayage and embrayage are used in order to focus the reader’s interest, to catalyse his/her attention. In particular, he observes how in Einstein’s text the functioning itself of the scientific description consists in subjecting the actants to a series of displacements, to a sequence of changes in position between different reference planes that proves functional to involve the reader in a targeted way. Thus, at one point in the text, the débrayage of an element can be used to shift the recipient’s attention to what happens to an actant in a defined space and time, while the reverse operation (embrayage) that enables the return to a previous position, the one where the subject responsible for the description is located, contributes decisively to produce the referentialization of the text, the meaning effect of “reality”.

The conclusion that Latour reaches is that in his text, Einstein does not so much describe the laws of nature, as rather what makes possible the functioning of any type of description, that is the procedures of shifting, mediating and delegating actants.

4.2 From Signs to Things, from Things to Signs

The use of the theory of enunciation as a decisive tool for the critical analysis of modernity characterizes the start of a reflection that therefore, not by chance, is focused on the logics of functioning of scientific texts. In this first phase the consolidated categories of débrayage and embrayage are used by Latour in substantial coherence with the semiotic perspective on narrativity.

A significant shift is instead realized in the moment in which there is an expansion on the side of the phenomena investigated, with the growing attention paid to objects, and the material manifestation that the construction of scientific facts assumes. Latour’s reflection thus focuses on the so-called problem of reference in science, that is to say on the issue relating to the relationship that is established between the forms of scientific discourse and the object of research, between the words of science and the phenomena to which they refer. In particular, the stated objective now consists in questioning the assumption on which the theory of scientific realism is based, that is the idea that there is a fundamental discontinuity between language and reality, an irreconcilable separation between the words of science and the (supposed) truth of the world.

The terms of the question are proposed in a clear and provocative way in Pandora’s Hope in which Latour questions the peculiarities that distinguish the procedures of referentialization at play in the experience of daily life from those constitutive of scientific discourse.

If I say that “the cat is on the mat,” I may seem to be designating a cat whose actual presence on said mat would validate my statement. In actual practice, however, one never travels directly from objects to words, from the referent to the sign, but always through a risky intermediary pathway. What is no longer visible with cats and mats, because they are too familiar, becomes visible again as soon as I take a more unusual and complicated statement. If I say “the forest of Boa Vista advances on the savanna” how can I point to that whose presence would accord a truth-value to my sentence? How can one engage those sorts of objects into discourse; to use an old word, how can one “educe” them into discourse? (Latour, 1999: 40).

A first possible answer to these questions could consist in highlighting once again what emerged from the earliest studies dedicated to the rhetoric of the scientific text, that is the capacity of the latter to resort to a multitude of textual forms (diagrams, graphs, equations, maps etc.), to mobilize an internal referent, in short, to exhibit its own truthfulness to convince the recipient. However, as seen previously, this solution seems inevitably destined to clash with the practices of validation of scientific utterances that require proving the reliability of what is represented in the rich and complex iconographic apparatus commonly used to describe the phases of research. What do diagrams and tables in a scientific article actually refer to? Isn’t it necessary to reintroduce an external referent as the only guarantee of their verifiability? And if this external referent exists, how is it possible to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the two ontological domains of language and nature?

It is around these questions that Latour’s proposal takes shape, intent on demonstrating that it is not necessary to resort to an external referent to account for the functioning of scientific discourse. The thesis he intends to prove is that there is no constitutive gap between things and signs, rather the link between nature and its representations is formed by the effect of a complex logic of mediation in which referentialization does not consist in a simple referral “from signs to things” but in a process of circulation that takes shape within a chain of translation operations. The expression introduced to indicate this processual vision of enunciation is circulating reference.

The methodological premise from which Latour’s proposal begins is that the best way to understand how scientists relate to the natural world is to follow what they do best, and which is widely encoded in protocols recognized as a guarantee of the validity of research, that is to describe the details of the scientific practice, thus joining a team of field specialists. The expedition in question is composed of experts in pedology, a discipline that studies soil formation. The choice of the scientific field is far from marginal, since at this stage Latour is interested, as an anthropologist of science, in shifting attention from the preconstituted space of the laboratory, emblematic space of a stabilized science, whose operation inevitably relies on an “indefinite sedimentation of other disciplines, instruments, languages, and practices” (1999: 30), to the field expedition of a scientific discipline still in its debut, subject to hesitations and therefore fragile, “forced to create itself from scratch in a direct confrontation with the world” (ibid).

The account of the expedition, aimed at understanding the scope of the transition process underway in an area of Brazil between the spaces occupied respectively by the forest and the savannah, thus takes the form of a detailed scientific narrative, a diary designed to document and reconstruct, with the help of numerous photographs, the sequence of the various phases that make up the work on the territory and which here is useful to quickly retrace.

In the start-up part of the research project, the scientists, after having chosen the area to examine, affix numbered labels on the trees, preparing the natural space of the forest to transform into a real open-air laboratory. In particular, a portion of land is circumscribed, divided into squares, to demarcate the space of the experiment. Subsequently, in order to obtain soil samples, holes are dug in the ground and the relative distances are measured with the aid of a wire instrument, the topofil.

The next step consists in taking a series of leaf and soil samples within each square. The selected organic material is then subject to further treatment, it is inserted inside a square wooden structure composed of a series of compartments, which we have mentioned earlier: the pedocomparator. The placement of the soil samples in the case is not random but, thanks to the use of the numbered labels and the topofil, faithfully reproduces the square structure of the entire forest area chosen to conduct the experiment. In this way the technical object makes visible something previously imperceptible, representing the composition of a natural element (the soil) through the mediation of the artificial delimitation of a portion of territory.

At this point the instrument and the content that inside takes a structured form, thanks to the comparison of the various samples, are ready to be transformed into a diagram and this, in turn, to be stated in textual form in the scientific article.

The observation of the functioning of an apparently “mute” instrument, such as the pedocomparator, actually reveals a wealth of implications for a reflection aimed at demonstrating how science can be “at the same time realist and constructivist, immediate and intermediary, reliable and fragile, near and far” (1999: 30).

This device, with its handle, wooden frame, and padding, at first glance seems nothing more than a tool designed to ensure the orderly conduct of a research protocol. However, the regularity of its squares, the abstract organisation of its structure, the arrangement of space in rows and columns endow this object with a capacity for signification: to give an order and a meaning to the material it contains, in other words, they allow it, at the same time, to act as a ‘sign’. Or rather, Latour specifies, it is through the “cunning invention of this hybrid” device that the world of things can translate into a sign, assuming a form that allows it to express a meaning. In other words, the artifact reveals itself to be invested with a semiotic pertinence and relevance.

This transition from a state of the world to its representation through the action exerted by an artificial instrument proves crucial to extend the reflection on enunciation. It is here, in fact, that Latour proposes to consider, alongside the traditional modes of débrayage and embrayage that in a narrative allow a given actant to leave the initial coordinates (I, here, now) by projecting himself forward or to return to the starting point, a new type of operation: the material shifting.

This expression is introduced to describe the specific ways in which technical enunciation operates, that is, the repositioning, in a series of progressive reference frames, of the human and non-human elements that make up, in their concatenation, a device. Observing researchers in action in the field and taking part in the experiment, Latour notes how in every phase of scientific practice a transformation of the involved elements takes place, precisely a transition from the dimension of the concrete materiality to that of its abstract representation. The ground object of the study, in its concreteness, becomes something else, once housed by the scholars in the cardboard cubes. “[…] the earth becomes a sign, takes on a geometrical form, becomes the carrier of a numbered code, and will soon be defined by a color” (1999: 49).

This type of transition from thing to sign is called shifting up, and plays a decisive role in the sequence of transformations that define experimental practice. In every phase, any element involved in the description of the study

belongs to matter by its origin and to form by its destination; it is abstracted from a too-concrete domain before it becomes, at the next stage, too concrete again. We never detect the rupture between things and signs, and we never face the imposition of arbitrary and discrete signs on shapeless and continuous matter. We see only an unbroken series of well-nested elements, each of which plays the role of sign for the previous one and of thing for the succeeding one (1999: 56).

Thus, if on the one hand the operation of shifting up operates a detachment from the materiality of things, or more precisely from their substance of expression, on the other hand it enables significant gain on the level of knowledge of phenomena which consists in compatibility, standardization, textualization, and measurability through calculations.

Returning to the role played by the pedocomparator, which at this point can be understood in all respects as a non-human actor endowed with agency, it can be noted how its status changes in function of translation operations that in the course of the experiment put it in relation with what precedes it (the ground) and with what follows it (the various forms of representation, such as a two-dimensional diagram). If in the first passage the technical object gives a shape to the organic matter, in the second it itself goes through a process of abstraction and its functioning is conveyed by a new vector which consists of a new type of inscription, in this case a new elementary form of mathematical thought.

This process of moving from the concreteness of matter to the abstraction of its formal representation consists in a real trajectory that can also be travelled in the opposite direction, allowing evidence of the transformations performed during the experiment to be recovered and thus ensuring the value of scientific research. The reverse movement from signs to things is symmetrically called shifting down and in the case of the research carried out by the scientists it manifests in the process of returning to the substance of the expression of heterogeneous materials, such as the paper used to draft the project reports, the wooden box, the pieces of wire of the topophile, the tools used to dig the soil and extract the samples or leaves.

A relevant consideration on the theoretical level is that the concatenation of elements can potentially be extended indefinitely on both sides of the process. This means that, regardless of the ability to trace back the chain of transformations involved in the construction of a device, one never returns to a final external referent. In this sense, reference is no longer understood as the property of a linguistic act of referring to a plane of reality, but rather as the characteristic of an observed phenomenon to remain constant through the chain of transformations that take shape from its study. In this processual vision of the relationship that is established between nature and its representations, defined with an effective metaphor as a “long cascade” (1999: 58), the possibility for an element to endure over time, to be transported further and faster, increases in relation to its capacity to overcome a sequence of trials, to undergo transformations at each stage. The scientific procedure followed by the team working in the Boa Vista forest thus enabled them not only to transform a natural element (soil samples) into something transportable (pedocomparator, graphs etc.), but to keep track of the entire process, maintaining constant some information about the object of analysis (the composition of the soil). The wooden box and the documents that originate from it are not only material inscriptions in which the content conveyed by the elements that precede them is translated, but they act as “immutable mobiles” making possible, in their concatenation, the circulation of the reference, that is to say the enunciation of nature.

The idea of reference is thus radically rethought in terms of a chain of translations that involves a series of referents internal to scientific practice. This does not mean at all to argue that everything is language and that without a system of representation it is not possible to perceive the real world, but rather that the ability to produce meaning around nature cannot disregard a process of delegation and mediation between multifaceted elements.

How can we qualify this relation of representation, of delegation, when it is not mimetic yet is so regulated, so exact, so packed with reality, and, in the end, so realistic? Philosophers fool themselves when they look for a correspondence between words and things as the ultimate standard of truth. There is truth and there is reality, but there is neither correspondence nor adequatio. To attest to and guarantee what we say, there is a much more reliable movement—indirect, cross wise, and crablike—through successive layers of transformations [...] At each step, most of the elements are lost but also renewed, thus leaping across the straits that separate matter and form, without aid other than, occasionally, a resemblance that is more tenuous than the rails that help climbers over the most acrobatic passes (1999: 64).

The attack on realist epistemology is now more explicit than ever. There is no longer a need for an external referent because there is no great void to fill between text and context. If the reference is what remains constant through a series of controlled transformations, the level of reliability of the discourse on nature can only manifest itself in the quality of the chain of translations that characterizes the practices of scientific description.

4.3 A Little Philosophy of Enunciation

The centrality of the notion of enunciation becomes even more evident in an article published in 1999,Footnote 1 titled Petite philosophie de l’énonciation, in which Latour explicitly proposes to extend his reflection on the modes of meaning production beyond the boundaries defined by Benveniste’s linguistic theory and structuralist semiotics, while recognizing the validity of some basic assumptions.

Once again, the starting point is Greimas’ theory that clearly distinguishes the enunciation as it is installed, inscribed in the discourse in the form of a series of marks that help the competent speaker make sense of the utterance and which constitute the object of semiotic analysis, from the enunciation considered as a concrete act of discourse production, as a situation preceding its realization. This perspective therefore does allow us to disregard enunciation as an act of discourse, refusing to include in the analysis the social, economic, material, psychological or pragmatic factors that circumscribe the utterance.

While recognizing the importance of detaching the study of signification from its context which “like the ether of physicists, is a superfluous hypothesis” (my trans.; 2017: 10), Latour however explicitly distances himself from a restrictive notion of enunciation, that is, from an approach to the analysis of the phenomenon circumscribed solely to forms of textual manifestation of meaning. What interests him, in particular, is to try to go beyond the semiotic perspective that conceives of enunciation as the first sending, as the passage from a syncretism in the presence of ‘I-there-now’ to the text, following rather the trajectories of other forms of transmission, modes of passage that regulate regimes of enunciation that are not necessarily of a linguistic kind and that may also turn out to be very different from those with which the analysis of narrative texts has been measured from the beginning.

The project of a philosophy of enunciation takes shape exactly here, from the consideration that there is room for manoeuvre to extend the reflection from the field of analysis traditionally relevant for the theory of signification, that is, the narrative, to a much wider plane of relevance, that of existence and the various ways in which it forms and manifests itself.

The first move then consists in starting again from the etymology of the word enunciation (ex-nuncius) which refers to the action of sending a messenger, a nuncio. In this sense, enunciation is therefore understood as a process, a movement. The figure used to clarify this approach is that of the passage in ball games, here evoked to highlight the presence of a binding property of the concept which consists in the primacy assigned to the transfer, to the transformation, to the substitution. This example is used to clarify the ontological postulate on which the rethinking of enunciation is based, which consists in assuming that what we start from is a continued and risky existence and not an essence (I-here-now), a presence and not a permanence. This position implies the refusal to accept as a starting point any being that has not emerged from the relationship itself. This approach therefore does not operate at the level of the utterance, it does not aim to find in the text (level n) the traces of an author logically presupposed (level n-1). Rather, the enunciation is conceived as a way to go beyond the established figures of the enunciator and the enunciatee, to break their consistency, their apparent solidity, both with reference to anthropomorphic individual actors (the subject) and collective actors (the institutions).

In these terms, it is evident how the transition that occurs in Greimas’ semiotics between an instance of external enunciation—responsible for the foundational act of constructing the utterance—and the installation within it of spatial, temporal, and actorial coordinates is considered too broad and discontinuous.Footnote 2 The postulate of a syncretism of I-here-now as the starting stage of enunciation is thus abandoned, in its place comes the idea of the “continuity of a force exerted” that manifests within a series of relationships that extend beyond those circumscribed to the presence of human beings, to language mediation, to communication.

The second move made by Latour thus consists in starting from an elementary definition of relation, elaborated since the origins of philosophical thought:

[...] as a certain mixture of same and other: A is B [...] is the passage, the transformation, the substitution, the translation, the delegation, the signification, the sending, the embrayage, the representation of A through B. All these terms are equivalent, that is, they designate in their own way the movement of passage that maintains presence (my trans.; 2017: 11).

The first regime of enunciation thus consists of a non-anthropomorphic type of relationship in which not only is the message absent, but the asymmetry between the roles of enunciator and enunciatee, which is instead a necessary condition for the constitution of communication, is completely lacking. This minimal form of débrayage, seemingly so bizarre and “alien”, is actually the most common, it is in fact the Reproduction among living beings.

The distinctive characteristic of this form of enunciation consists in the ability of an enunciator (the living being) to transfer itself into a simile or near simile to realize a passage without message from body to body, the outcome of which is duration. Where then to find the marks of this passage-transfer so far from the familiar forms of the utterance, in which dialogue is completely absent and the elements involved are as numerous as they are continuous? Latour’s answer is in lineages (lignées)or more precisely in genealogies, traces of a discontinuous process that is always at risk of discontinuity (generation, death, and birth).

The mode of existence of reproduction is also extended to another category, that of the Inert, which Latour, recovering Whitehead’s concept of inheritance, considers as the category of “living beings who choose to maintain their presence without going through the risky intermediary of another body” (2017: 67). Here, the passage-transfer does not occur through another body, but in the form of a continuous line of force that ensures its duration.

In the second regime of enunciation, even more peculiar than reproduction, the passage-transfer no longer occurs between similar entities but consists of a series of substitutions that involve heterogeneous, dissimilar, unrecognizable elements. The exemplary manifestation of this atypical regime, in which there is neither enunciator nor enunciatee and it is not even possible to clearly distinguish between a plane of the utterance and one of the enunciation, is the unconscious.

The analyst in listening, hears the unmentionable speaking in a more tangled way than the Pythia on her tripod. The marks of this very particular regime are found in the unpredictable ramifications that replace one form with another, witticisms, various Lacanianisms or, more seriously, terrifying metamorphoses (2017: 69).

The traces that this modality generates are the free associations.

The third type of passage, still very distant from the forms of enunciation at work in a narrative, is defined as Belief or Omission and what seems to paradoxically distinguish it, is being indifferent to the enunciation itself. What defines belief is indeed primarily the emphasis on the utterance and not the recourse to the conditions of its realization. Two common utterances like “I firmly believe”, “I really walked” are useful to Latour to define a regime that is marked by the absence of passage-transfer, in which no one says anything to anyone and the effectiveness of the utterance, its “truth” does not depend on the subjects involved in its circulation nor, even less, on the spatial and temporal conditions in which the belief manifests. In this atypical mode of enunciation, the utterance circulates without it being possible to identify its origins, without it being attributed to an original source, or traced back to some subjectivity. In other words, the strength of this mode of existence lies in appearing completely “natural”,Footnote 3 in the ability to seem autonomous from the context in which it reveals itself. The outcome of a belief is indeed to perpetuate itself over time, to remain unchanged, and in this sense this regime of the “denied” enunciation does not generate real traces but essences that do not presuppose any temporality.

In the functioning of the regimes which follow in this philosophical reflection on the modes of existence, a significant shift is realized as the distinction between the plane of enunciation and the plane of the utterance is reintroduced, as well as the figures of the enunciator and the enunciatee. In particular, there are six different modes of enunciation that are grouped into two large categories: the regimes that focus on the quasi-object (Technique, Narrative, Science) and those focused on the quasi-subjects (Religion, Politics, Law). The term quasi-object or token refers to the work of Michel Serres (1987) and is used by Latour to designate the operation through which an enunciator is able to project himself temporarily into a dissimilar body, for example an object, transferring to it a capacity for action that remains even after he has withdrawn and that is exercised towards the enunciatee with whom the thing comes into contact. This kind of transfer is typical, for example, of the enunciative regime of Technique.Footnote 4

To describe this kind of passage-transfer, the case of a very common technical object such as a woven basket is proposed, which, although not resembling in any way the weaver who made it, prolongs her presence in another form, in another place and at another time, by transferring the action to another subject, the apple picker, for example. The description of this kind of technical passage highlights a decisive difference between this regime of enunciation and the previous ones. The necessary conditions for the figures of the enunciator and the enunciatee to manifest, for an asymmetry between these two positions to be created in the enunciation, emerge precisely at the moment when non-humans enter into play in the mediation process, participating in the chaining of relations, as seen, for example, in the case of the Berlin key.

The outcome of this passage mediated by non-human actors consists thus in bending the relationship between the lineages of humans. Unlike what happens in reproduction, duration is not in this case ensured by duplication or permanence but by a translation- transformation: indeed, nothing can force the apple picker to become a basket weaver.

The role assumed by the token thus becomes decisive, it is only thanks to its presence and its materiality that it is possible to trace back to the enunciator; in this sense, it therefore acts literally as a place holder, that is, as a presence that represents by delegation an absentee: the human actor. The term identified to account for the traces produced by this type of débrayage is braids (tresses) or combinations and designates the transition from an interaction between similar bodies to one between dissimilar bodies that allows “fragile human bodies” (ivi, p. 71) to extend their duration and range of action thanks to a series of composite links with non-human actors. With the regime of Fiction, enunciation finally makes its entrance into the natural language and the logic of narrativity. Here Latour explicitly recognizes how the relevant legacy of the semiotics of narrativity consists in the possibility of rethinking the relationship between author and reader by shifting attention towards the dimension of textuality, to the figures of the enunciator and the enunciatee, understood as roles inscribed in the space of the narrative starting from the débrayage as defined by Greimas. The trail left by the sending operation is defined as populations of figures, where the term figure is chosen precisely because of the breadth of its meaning, being sufficiently vague to be applied both to actors characterized by the presence of a human form and to those who lack it. Continuing the philosophical exploration on enunciation, the regime of Science is outlined where the reflections which emerge from the work of Bastide (1985a, b) are taken up and further systematized. In particular, the peculiarity of the way in which science is enunciated is reiterated, which consists in a transfer/mediation procedure distinct from the canonical operations of débrayage/embrayage because it does not operate so much through sending as rather through alignment:

If this transfer-passage were followed, an enunciator would be found, then one would travel in the wake of the delegates, then one would return on a convoy of figurines kept stable through the crudest transformations, then one would end up on the starting sender and then pass into the hands of the enunciatee (my trans.; 2017:19).

The marks of the enunciative regime of science owe their recognizability to the fact that the alignment procedure is articulated on three different levels integrated with each other which consist in: the alignment of the different planes of the utterance with each other; the alignment of the utterance, as a whole, to the last plane n − 1; and finally the alignment of the enunciatee to the enunciator. Here are found, as traces of scientific enunciation, the immutable and combinable (because they are formed by links between humans and non-humans, scientists and instruments) mobiles previously described, which Latour now designates with the term references,Footnote 5 to underline their ability to report something to an enunciator, to refer back to him, making him capable, thanks to the concatenation of their mediation, to extend in space and time.

The last three regimes are focused, rather than on the token (quasi-object), on the ways in which what circulates allows for the formation and management of the relationships between enunciators and enunciatees. These are therefore modes of enunciation centred mainly on the quasi-subjects.

The first of these regimes is that of Politics, whose meaning must be sought not so much in the utterances that circulate, but rather in the fact that what circulates is primarily functional to define the number and roles of the actors who contribute to forming a collective identity. From this perspective, politics is considered as the outcome, subject to continuous negotiations, of

an insoluble topological problem: how does a multitude maintain the form of a whole? It is a 'singular plural' that must be constantly repaired by resolving at every point the One/All question. I say what you say, so I represent you. You say what I say, so you obey me. We are different from them. He is another (my trans.; 2017: 21).

The mode of political enunciation thus owes its peculiarity to the fact that it must ensure the continuous maintenance of the collective subject. In this sense, the vagueness of the message is the effect of a continuous pressure that requires the relationship between individual and multitude to be incessantly recomposed, in continuously representing the strength of a union that is in fact constantly at risk. The frequent indeterminacy of the utterance, “this vague, insignificant, ambiguous, variable character that allows it to circulate well and to be a good tracer” (ibid) thus implies that the marks of the regime of political enunciation are rather difficult to identify. The name assigned to the figures emerging from the logic of compromise that guides the ongoing work of recomposing the collective, understood as ‘singular-plural’, is: assemblies or groupings.

In the second regime that revolves around quasi-subjects, the enunciation does not consist, as in previous cases, in a process of sending through the tokens, but rather in the reverse movement,Footnote 6 in the return to level n − 1, where the positions of the enunciator and the enunciatee are again occupied by real people. This is the enunciation at play in Religion or in Love, in which the mediation of the tokens allows the enunciator and the enunciatee each time to celebrate their union, renewing it, as when the subject embodies with his/her own presence otherwise empty words like “I”, “you”, “now”, “here” repeated as in an eternal first time (2017: 23). The presence of the relationship thus sanctions the permanence of existence. “If it is not the first time that I say ‘I love you’, I do not love. In love the ‘I love you’ is repeated for all the times that the relationship between two enunciators is established as a relationship of this, and not another, here and not elsewhere, now and not yesterday or tomorrow” (my trans.; 2017: 21).

To designate the peculiar ability of religious enunciation to renew each time the presence of what is absent, Latour uses the term procession (or tradition) highlighting that what these traces transmit, in terms of utterances, is meaningless until the moment when the enunciators and the enunciatees do not install themselves at the n − 1 level, thus evoking the ego, hic et nunc of the event.

If enunciation consists of the set of absent actors whose convocation is necessary for an utterance to acquire a meaning, there is a final mode of discourse that distinguishes itself from all the others precisely because it has a peculiar way of gathering, defining and associating people and utterances in a detailed manner. It is the Law, a mode of existence that responds to the need to trace promises and enforce commitments, multiplying “inside and around the statement the marks, the brands, the signatures and the seals that allow the reconvening of the absent” (my trans.; 2017: 23).

The marks of this type of passage-transfer are the concatenations (or chains), traces that hold together sequences of enunciators, utterances and enunciatees.

4.4 From Enunciation to Modes of Existence

The work of rethinking and expanding the notion of enunciation finds fulfilment in the publication of Inquiry into modes of existence. An Anthropology of the ModernsFootnote 7 (2013), a work of great theoretical and methodological relevance that represents the most advanced point of the reflection dedicated by Latour and his research group to the paradoxes implied in the idea of modernization. As the title suggests, this is a highly articulate and original research not only in terms of the field in which it unfolds, that is, the different domains in which the social (Religion, Law, Science, Economy etc.) is articulated, but also for the form taken by the research project. The genre of the inquiry is indeed expressed under a dual configuration: the rather unusual one of a paper and provisional research report, devoid of notes and bibliographic references, in which the main results which emerged during fieldwork are reported in a synthetic form, and the digital one constituted by an “augmented” version of the book.Footnote 8

The latter is designed to simplify and at the same time enhance the reader’s experience and for this purpose presents three distinctive features in the form of columns.

The first consists of an interactive vocabulary of the terms used in the work that allows for an in-depth study of their meaning. The second concerns the possibility of accessing all the documentation—absent in the material version of the book—used during the research. These are materials as heterogeneous as possible in form and format (bibliographic references, photos, videos) to which a section is added that allows artists to share relevant works regarding the theme of the research and therefore useful to extend its scope. The third finally allows readers to provide their own contribution in the form of criticism or to share documentation complementary to the existing one. In all respects, the digital platform thus constitutes an extension of the book and represents an attempt to shape a collective and continuously evolving body of research.

The aim of this section is certainly not to describe in detail the functioning of such a broad and complex anthropological study, but rather to highlight how, despite the progressive distancing from the lexicon of semiotics explicitly used in previous works, the theory of signification is in any case implied in some of the salient aspects of this innovative research project, testifying to a relationship that has never been interrupted. The purpose of AIME in particular is to further extend the scope of the reflection advanced in a series of previous works, particularly in We have never been modern, demonstrating how, in the face of an increasingly marked coexistence between humans and non-humans, stimulated by the evolution of scientific knowledge and techniques, our modernity masks the functioning of its own modes of existence, adopting a myopic perspective that manifests itself in a thought based on a very tenacious dichotomy, that between subject and object. The difficulty of such a research project lies in the fact that, as the well-known anthropologist Philippe Descola summarizes (2013: 53), moderns unlike premoderns “neither do what they say nor say what they do”, stubbornly refusing to recognize the unstoppable multiplication of hybrids in whose production and circulation they are inevitably involved.

One of the most significant consequences of this denial is that the modes of existence that regulate the concatenations of the heterogeneous entities of our present reveal themselves as fragile, vulnerable. The paradox of the moderns can therefore be summarized in the fact that they believe in the total separation between humans and non-humans while at the same time nullifying it, as in a famous children’s game.

If you turn round suddenly, as in the children’s game ‘Mother, may I?’, they will freeze, looking innocent, as if they hadn’t budged: here, on the left, are things themselves; there, on the right, is the free society of speaking, thinking subjects, values and of signs. Everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks, but this space does not exist, it has no place. It is the unthinkable, the unconscious of the moderns (Latour, 1993b: 37).

Returning to the investigation into modes of existence,Footnote 9 the option advanced by Latour is to focus the research around a series of large areas in which contemporaneity is articulated, rethinking them as collectives whose functioning is based on the coexistence and the mixture of humans and non-humans, of living and non-living entities, which reveal themselves to be no less numerous and diversified than those around which the experience of the premoderns takes shape.

The theoretical starting point of the investigation is the concept of “modes of existence”, which Latour does not take from semiotic theoryFootnote 10 but rather from the philosophical thought of authors like Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) and especially Étienne Souriau (1892–1979), whose work is part of the empiricist perspective developed by William James (1842–1910) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).Footnote 11 As Jacques Fontanille (2017) observes, reading Souriau’s work allows Latour to make two significant transformations on the theoretical level, compared to what is presented in Petite philosophie de l’énonciation.

The first evolution concerns the relevance assigned to the ontological dimension. The theory presented in the 1999 article, focused as it is on existence understood as a process based on acts of enunciation-delegation, seems to presuppose a rejection of ontology, emphasizing the departure from Being. However, “if nothing else, these small plural ontologies, sometimes confused with the planes of immanence, seemed reconcilable with a semiotic approach. At least the multiple ‘existential delegates’ could pass for efficient simulacra” (my trans.; Fontanille, 2017: 49). Conversely, in AIME there is a change of perspective, what becomes relevant is not the multiplicity of acts of enunciation nor of the delegates, but rather the modes of existence which, although plural, are still ontologies. “Thus, we move from a small philosophy of enunciation to a modal anthropology” (my trans.; Fontanille, 2017: 50).

The second change is instead on the empirical level and consists in the explicit recourse to radical empiricism that can be summarized in Latour’s statement, inspired by William James: “Nothing but experience but no less than experience”.

This philosophical current plays a decisive role in the development of the project to investigate the anthropology of the moderns, because in the effort to understand experience, to give it meaning, it recognizes the primacy of the relationship and the mediation over the mere sensory data, claiming the need to consider everything that forms the experience, thus overcoming that stubborn “bifurcation of nature” that manifests itself precisely in the Subject-Object dichotomy.

For Souriau, who in turn takes up William James, what characterizes the fundamental experience are indeed the alterations that manifest themselves in the process of existence. In this sense, the modes of existence do not constitute

a disengaged spectacle, a sort of cinema that would project 'alternative worlds' onto the screen of Being. They are not even a spectacle in which we would be immersed, but worlds of meaning that aggregate and take shape directly around the sensible experience we have of the alteration of existential processes and of the solutions that ensure their persistence (my trans.; Fontanille, 2017: 50).

The influence of this philosophical perspective is clearly manifested in the explication of the postulate that assigns two characteristics to the modes of existence: ontological pluralism and contingency. The definition of a mode of existence in fact depends on the specific ways in which it is established, the specific trajectory that ensures its persistence. Each mode thus distinguishes itself from the others because it elaborates within itself its own conditions of truth (veridiction).

To clarify what the project of an inquiry into modes of existence consists of Latour thus resorts to a series of questions that are useful to briefly report

what are the beings we are likely to encounter if we ask ourselves the question of their existence? What are their ways of being? What is their ontology? And, in particular, how does one detect their own requirements? On the basis of what hesitation, what category mistake, what crossing? And, finally, what do they leave in their wake when we follow their particular trajectory through the numerous networks ([NET]) in which we are able to detect them?Footnote 12

The different keys of interpretation identified to try to account for the anthropology of modernity are fifteen, among these some take up what was outlined in Petite philosophie de l’énonciation and explicitly refer to the work of Souriau:

  • Reproduction [REP]

  • Reference [REF] which characterizes the domain of science

  • Metamorphosis [MET], typical of therapeutic devices in which operate invisible beings “that bear psyches, each of which is capable of influencing us, moving us, messing us up, upsetting us, carrying us away, devouring us, or, on the contrary, making us do something we didn’t know we were capable of doing, something that inhabits and possesses us from then on” (Latour 2013: 196)

  • Fiction [FIC]

  • Religion [REL]

  • Law [LAW]

  • Technique [TEC], which stands out for its ability to “interrupt, bend, deflect, cut out the other modes of existence, and thus by a clever ploy introduces a differential of materials” (2013: 228).Footnote 13

To these modes of existence, others are added:

  • Politics [POL]

  • Attachment [ATT], one of the constitutive modes of the economy, which concerns the relationship between human beings and goods, and manifests itself in situations such as consumption, purchase, sale, production

  • Another constitutive mode of the economy and institutions is that of the Organization [ORG], whose actors enact “a very particular alteration that defines frameworks, limits and ends to action which thus gives a feeling of being “inside“ something more durable and stable, even though this interior is obtained by the regular path of scripts to which “nothing need be added”Footnote 14

  • Morality [MOR], which does not concern the ethical dimension of action, but rather the set of estimates that can be made taking into account the goals set and the means used to try to ensure continuity on the plane of existence.

  • The mode of habit [HAB], which consists in creating the impression of a smooth and uniform existence, without discontinuity.

  • The mode of the network [NET], which consists in associating heterogeneous elements in order to guarantee their continuity on the plane of existence. This mode plays a decisive role because it is transversal and hierarchically superior to the others, in particular the network is what can allow a collective to overcome an obstacle that threatens its persistence thanks to the openness towards other modes of existence.

  • Another mode that plays a fundamental role in the structure of the inquiry into the anthropology of modernity is that of the preposition [PRE]. This term, which Latour borrows again from Souriau, indicates an alteration of experience that determines the formation of a mode of existence. The preposition plays a role of orientation in understanding the world, defining the type of relationship necessary to make sense of the experience.

    If you find yourself in a bookstore and you browse through books identified in the front matter as “novels,” “documents,” “inquiries,” “docufiction,” “memoirs,” or “essays,” these notices play the role of prepositions […] they engage the rest of your reading in a decisive way since, on every page, you are going to take the words that the author puts before your eyes in a completely different tonality depending on whether you think that the book is a “made-up story,” a “genuine document,” an “essay,” or a “report on an inquiry” (2013: 57).

  • Finally, the “double click” [DC], an expression that Latour borrows from the casual gesture of using a tool like the mouse, indicates the illusion that what you are looking for, the information, is at hand, directly accessible. This mode is defined as “evil genius” because it gives the illusion that in accessing the experience any mediation, transformation, discontinuity is missing.

An important aspect that emerges during the work of research and analysis of the different modes of existence concerns, in particular, their interrelation. These overlaps, described in terms of crossings, produce a harmonic combination in some cases, while in others they can take the form of a real conflict (interpolation). This is the case for the crossing [REF. REL] in which the mode of existence of religion and the truths on which faith is based are judged from the perspective of science. The advancement of Latour’s research on modernity, compared to the typology of modes of enunciation examined in the 1999 article, is thus revealed in the development of a classification table organized in a series of categories. Without going into detail here about the overall articulation of the scheme, we report below some of the most relevant terms that make up the metalanguage of this vast (and open) research project. The hiatus consists of the small discontinuities and interruptions that any mode of existence presupposes, the overcoming of which guarantees its permanence. This dynamic can be clearly observed in the logic of combination and recombination of heterogeneous elements that characterizes scientific practice, as highlighted by Couégnas and Fontanille (my trans.; 2017: 3), drawing on Latour’s work in Laboratory life.

Within the realm of science, for example, actual practice allows for the combination of completely heterogeneous elements such as the mood of the researcher […] a malfunction of an experimental device, the performance of a new microscope, this or that discovery that an experiment allows to validate, the editorial policy of a journal and a publication relevant to research. But these disparate elements, which the network [NET] allows to assemble without it being possible to clearly identify the actants to whom to firmly distribute roles, will still give the impression that something circulates in a perfectly fluid and pure way, something we designate with the term science and which is similar to a thematic isotopy. Therefore, on the one hand, a discontinuous face of the network, based on the hybrid nature of the associated elements, which is revealed in practice. And on the other hand, an impression of continuity, theoretical, made possible by the good functioning of the network and legitimized by the effectiveness of the practice itself.

This example is useful to highlight how the identification of a hiatus plays a decisive role in the detection of modes of existence. It is indeed only thanks to the identification of interruptions that risk stopping an action program that it is possible to reconstruct its presence and articulation retrospectively. It is only the overcoming of obstacles that allows the unfolding of a course of action to be observed. In this, it is once again revealed, although implicitly, the proximity with the semiotic perspective on meaning that identifies one of the preconditions for the emergence of signification in the polemic confrontation between multiform agents.

The overcoming of obstacles is therefore made possible by passages, mediations that ensure continuity of action within an area. The relationship between modes of existence and passages is symmetrical, to each key of interpretation of modernity corresponds in fact a specific type of mediation. This is what is outlined in the case just described of the research practice in the laboratory, in which what characterizes the mode of existence of science [REF], distinguishing it from the others, is the passage that consists in the scientific proof. In this sense, ontological pluralism necessarily implies a pluralism of passage-mediations (Famy, 2017). The outcome of the series of passages that intervene within a course of action is finally defined as trajectory, a term that explicitly refers to John Austin’s theory of speech acts (1962).