An inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns Labour, Bruno

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Trusting Institutions Again?

Part I: How to Make an Inquiry into the Modes of Existence of the Moderns Possible

Chapter 1 Defining the Object of Inquiry
Chapter 2 Collecting Documents for the Inquiry
Chapter 3 A Perilous Change of Correspondence
Chapter 4 Learning to Make Room
Chapter 5 Removing Some Speech Impediments
Chapter 6 Correcting a Slight Defect in Construction

Part II: How to Benefit from the Pluralism of Modes of Existence

Chapter 7 Reinstituting the Beings of Metamorphosis
Chapter 8 Making the Beings of Technology Visible
Chapter 9 Situating the Beings of Fiction
Chapter 10 Learning to Respect Appearances

Conclusion, Part II: Arranging the Modes of Existence

Part III: How to Redefine the Collectives

Chapter 11 Welcoming the Beings Sensitive to the Word
Chapter 12 Invoking the Phantoms of the Political
Chapter 13 The Passage of Law and Quasi Subjects
Chapter 14 Speaking of Organization in Its Own Language
Chapter 15 Mobilizing the Beings of Passionate Interest
Chapter 16 Intensifying the Experience of Scruples

Conclusion: Can We Praise the Civilization to Come?

In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the last twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.

Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides, a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis
(Translate by Catherine Porter)

(http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724990)