Chapter 5: Removing Some Speech Impediments – From an Ethnography of the Moderns to the Ontology of Networks

Author: John W. Wright, Point Loma Nazarene University

So far in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour has thickened a program found in much of his previous writings. He has combined the philosophical categories developed in We Have Never Been Modern (1993) with his ethnographic method developed with Steve Woolgar in Laboratory Life (1979). The program, however, begins to shift in chapter 5. Latour now introduces concerns recorded in “Irreductions” (1993): “Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (The Pasteurization of France, p. 158). He slowly builds conduits to circulate us within veridiction conditions for a pluralistic ontology of modes of existence.