ROGER SANSI

The Latour event: history, symmetry

and diplomacy

This paper discusses the use of the concept of ‘event’ in Latour’s work, in relation to how the term has been
used in philosophy and anthropology. My contention is that ultimately, there is a tension between two strands
of Latour’s work: one more firmly based on history and the event, and another more focused on symmetry,
hybridity and diplomacy.

Key words Latour, event, history, symmetry, hybridity

Introduction

The impact of Bruno Latour’s thought in anthropology is not a new thing. On the
contrary, he has been quite influential for more than a decade. I first encountered
Bruno Latour in the late nineties, when I was a graduate student at the University of
Chicago. Marshall Sahlins had invited him to teach at Chicago for a term. Sahlins
had recently published an essay where he was proposing a ‘Native anthropology of
Western cosmology’ (Sahlins 1996). There he discussed a common theme of ‘Western
cosmology’, the notion of a dual humanity, divided in a human individual ‘nature’
driven by desire and need, as opposed to a constructed, artificial society, built to
domesticate, repress and contain this human nature. His objective was to show the
pervasive influence of this theme in contemporary social theory, not just in naturalist
or evolutionary approaches, but even in supposedly constructivist and critical ones,
like Bourdieu and Foucault, who for Sahlins, deep down, still held this Western vision
of society as a repressive artifice built to control human nature and desire.
Latour was also very critical of the reductionism of ‘critical’ authors like Bourdieu,
and Sahlins hoped to find in him an alternative to the pervasive influence of dualist
theories. Could he be the next ‘big thing’ after critical theory, an ‘event’ in the history
of anthropology?
And yet, this encounter did not result in a common project; there was from the begin-
ning a very clear difference between Sahlins and Latour. For Sahlins is a passionate
defender of the notion of culture, while for Latour it doesn’t make any sense to question
‘nature’ if we maintain its symmetrical opposite, ‘culture’: we have to do away with both;
we can’t discuss the multiplicity of cultures or cosmologies while ignoring or simply
‘bracketing out’ questions of truth and access to the real. Anthropologists needed to ‘cross
the courtyard’ and discuss with physicists. But Sahlins, Latour regrets, wasn’t much inter-
ested in the opinion of scientists across the courtyard (Latour 2007: 18). Sahlins, on the
other hand, was a bit disappointed with Latour’s dismissal of the notion of culture.
In any case, Latour and Sahlins still have a quite courteous and respectful relation,
and they reference each other normally in positive terms: Sahlins mentions Latour’s

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critique of the Western mismatch between nature and culture (Sahlins 2005), while Latour
acknowledges that Sahlins didn’t just celebrate or defend the diversity of cultures, but he
also described the emergence of ‘new’ cultures (Latour 2007: 15). In fact Sahlins and
Latour had more things in common than differences. As Sahlins often says, plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose. What I want to show here, first of all, are these commonalities.
Beyond the nature–culture debate, Latour’s initial engagement with history, and his
understanding of events, may not be that far from Sahlins’. The main focus of this paper
will be Latour’s use and understanding of history and the very notion of the ‘event’.
But my intention is not just to show the affinities between Latour and Sahlins. This
article focuses on three ‘moments’ in the relationship between Bruno Latour and
anthropology. First, it will show the continuities between Latour and anthropology
before him. This exposition enables us to make the next step, which is to address
how anthropology has changed along with Latour. In this second moment, we can
see how, as Sahlins also says in the opposite sense, plus c’est la même chose, plus ça
change, the more things seem to be the same, the more they change. By saying changed
along, I don’t want to argue that these changes are solely due to Latour: he himself has
always been adamant to situate his research in much wider collective projects, like
Science and Technology studies, or actor-network theory (ANT). In anthropology,
his work is often compared with that of Marilyn Strathern, Viveiros de Castro or Roy
Wagner, and mentioned as a precedent of what has been called the ‘ontological turn’.
After discussing what has changed along with Latour, we can move to consider what
anthropology may become after Latour. And for that purpose it may be necessary to
make a deeper critical assessment of his work. It is my contention that ultimately, there
is a tension, even a certain contradiction between two strands of Latour’s work: one more
firmly based on history and the notion of the event, and another focused on notions of
symmetry, hybridity and diplomacy. In my view, the first one is more interesting for an-
thropology today, while the second could be a throwback to the old dualisms we have
been trying to overcome for decades, like the entrenched belief in the ontological separa-
tion between ‘Moderns’ and ‘Others’. This criticism could be extended to other authors
beyond Latour – those who I mentioned along him, like Strathern or Viveiros de Castro
– but that general criticism would fall beyond the scope of this article. In any case I think
that Latour’s work is particularly interesting, precisely because it can be read in very dif-
ferent directions. In the next sections, I will go through each step by focusing on specific
concepts, like culture, agency, event, fetish and mode of existence. The concept of the
event, in particular, will be central to my argument throughout.

Culture

First of all, what is the problem with ‘culture’? Latour’s questioning of anthropology
is based on his rejection of the nature/culture divide, where ‘nature’ would be one,
and ‘cultures’ many. For anthropology, he argues, the backdrop of a unified nature made
the diversity of cultures more easily identifiable: different kinship systems, for example,
could be readily compared as different constructs against the background of a natural,
given biology. The only culture that would be excluded from analysis would be modern
culture, or more specifically, modern scientific culture, since in that case, ‘nature’
appeared in its full truth, not in ‘symbolic’ terms like in other cultures, which would
be constructed systems of beliefs totally alien to nature itself.

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Latour’s project starts with the aim of building a ‘symmetrical’ anthropology: an

anthropology of the moderns in symmetry to the classical anthropology of the non-
moderns. He acknowledges that he started his career as a faithful critical thinker, want-
ing to show that scientific culture was a system of belief too, just like other cultures.
Yet, working with scientists, he realised that this wasn’t so easy to say, since scientific
work does have an effect on the world; it isn’t separated from it, it does produce truth.
In this sense, the aim of a symmetric anthropology could not be just to show how
‘made up’ modern scientific culture is. Furthermore, what Latour found to be true
for science would also apply to ‘other’ cultures: they also have an effect on their world,
they are not just isolated, self-referential systems of beliefs and symbols. And yet the
‘natures’ that these cultures produce may be of a totally different sort than Western
nature: natures may also be multiple (Viveiros de Castro 2005). ‘Symmetrisation’
explodes the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as two separate and incommen-
surable realms of being, where culture is multiple, internal, subjective and ‘made’ by
humans, while nature is unified, external, objective and ‘given’ before human culture.
For Latour, ‘natures’ are as multiple and as ‘made’ as cultures; in fact, Latour used
the very term ‘nature-cultures’ (Latour 1993) to describe this plurality.
This means that all ‘nature-cultures’ are ‘hybrid’: they are one thing and the other
at the same time. The big difference between the Moderns and the Others is that the
modern project pretends to separate both realms in a process of ‘purification’. But such
a project is doomed to failure, in fact it ends up producing more ‘hybrids’ than the non-
moderns, who have no problem in acknowledging their hybridity (Latour 1993: 12).
Following this line of thought, the task of the anthropologist could not start from a
position of superiority, looking at the multiplicity of cultures from the certainties of the
unity of nature. To the contrary, the anthropologist would have to take up a much
more humble position, as a mediator between natures-cultures, a sort of diplomat.
The question, however, is whether indeed anthropologists did address ‘culture’ in
these terms? Latour’s vision of anthropology as the comparison of ‘multiple’ cultures
against the backdrop of a unitary nature fits well with 19th-century evolutionist
anthropology and its comparative method. And yet, evolutionism and the
comparative method were strongly criticised more than a hundred years ago by Boas.
Cultural relativism is certainly based on the notion that cultures are multiple, but not
exactly in the terms defined by Latour: for Boas, cultures aren’t separate entities against
the backdrop of a common nature, but historically relative constructs in a continual
process of transformation, never clearly bounded, constantly being ‘acculturated’,
changing in relation to external events, including the influence of other cultures
(Stocking 1982; Bashkow 2004).
Cultures are in a continuous process of mutual contact; more than as isolated uni-
ties. One could say that Boas describes them as networks, regularly borrowing from
each other. Furthermore, events in this network don’t have predictable outcomes; cul-
tures don’t necessarily change in predictable ways, like effects do not necessarily have
the same causes (Boas 1887: 485). Cultural relativism is a non-linear theory of history,
perhaps not that far away from recent topological approaches (De Landa 1997).
‘Relativism’ here may not mean separation from a common background, but
relation – all cultures are made in relation to external events, like other cultures. They
are built on the premise of difference. Cultures are not single, isolated entities against
the background a common, external ‘nature’, but different points of contact in a
multiple historical process. Lévi-Strauss, who explicitly embraced the Boasian

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understanding of culture and history (Lévi-Strauss 1963), described in his

Mythologiques the myths of the peoples of the new world as ‘translations’, at the point
of articulation of one culture with other cultures. According to Viveiros de Castro, in
this late work Lévi-Strauss would have a notion of structure close to Deleuze’s
rhizome, as an operator of divergence, a modulator of continuous variation, an open
differential multiplicity (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 181). Following Boas and Lévi-
Strauss, when Sahlins talks about the production of ‘new’ cultures, he is actually not
saying anything ‘new’: for Sahlins, cultures are always made anew – they are constantly
being reconfigured by the historical events that transform them.
Terms like process, network, translation and event are not that far from the termi-
nology that Latour uses; perhaps his understanding of how ‘nature-cultures’ work is
not that far from how anthropologists studied ‘cultures’ before him. Cultural relativism
would not be substantially different from the ‘relativism’ that Latour defends: ‘the
mundane process by which relations are established between viewpoints through the
mediation of instruments’ (Latour 1999: 310), although he claims this notion to be an
exclusive innovation of Science Studies.
In fact, Latour’s proposal for a ‘symmetric’ anthropology may run the opposite
risk of reifying the difference between ‘nature-cultures’, as if they really were separate
wholes: if they are both ‘multiple’, why should they be paired one to one, as in one na-
ture, one culture? Didn’t we have to give up both the notions of nature and culture, not
just to hyphen them? This hyphenisation of nature-culture is a central example of the
ambiguities of Latour’s work, in regards to the wider question of ‘hybridity’. The very
notion of hybrid, as an ambiguous, sterile mixture of two radically different and irre-
ducible, pre-exiting entities, ultimately runs against the very argument that Latour is
making: if there has never been a purified separation between nature and culture, there
has never been a hybrid of both – or on the other side, everything is a hybrid; either
way, the term loses any meaning. In fact Latour has grown increasingly weary of using
this term, but this fundamental ambiguity has remained present in his work.
Furthermore, isn’t it contradictory to question the ‘dualism’ between nature and
culture, while we still hold the ‘dualism’ (the symmetry) between Moderns and Others?
Isn’t the whole point that these ‘multiples’ aren’t separate, but they are already histor-
ically interconnected and mutually constitutive, in fact they are in many ways ‘transla-
tions’ of each other – they are already in common? Also quite problematic is the notion
that there is any need for a ‘diplomat’ to help these nature-cultures build a common
world. Why the need for a diplomat, if cultures are already in common?
I will come back to these points on symmetry, hybridity and diplomacy later on.
But by now, we could start with a first, provisional proposal: Boas’ or Sahlins’ model
of ‘cultures’ constantly being produced through historical events may not be so distant
from what Latour is doing; this model may only need to be addressed in a larger frame-
work, which does not distinguish nature from culture, since for Latour, ‘History is no
longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of things as well’ (1993: 82).

Agency

At this point we should question one quite common, but also quite superficial, under-
standing of Latour’s work. He is often referenced amongst a host of authors who in the
last two decades have proclaimed the ‘agency’ of ‘things’ (Jansen 2013). The rise of

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‘things’ in recent social theory has the emancipatory undertones that giving agency
back the ‘subaltern’ had a generation earlier (Holbraad 2011). Back then, for Ortner
(1984) ‘agency’ counteracted the oppressive power of impersonal systems over people,
in the dominant structuralist paradigm of the time. Practice theory, as opposed to
structuralism, would be interested in how agency transforms structure. Along these
lines, the task of theorists of ‘things’ in the next generation has been to extend this
journey of liberation of structure from people to things, further away from systemic
determinations.
But Latour’s argument is not just, or not quite, to give agency back to things. In
fact he is quite ambivalent about these notions. First of all he questions the very divi-
sion between people and things; it is not just the case that people ‘distribute’ their
agency, that somehow humans recognise intentions in things: for Latour, different
kinds of beings (human and non-human) can become ‘actants’, acting beings, in a given
situation. An actant is defined by its capacity to have transformative effects upon other
beings in that given situation (Latour 2005: 71). The concept of ‘thing’ itself, for
Latour, has a particular meaning: the old Germanic term Thing or Ding designated a
form of ancestral assembly or gathering, where matters of concern were discussed;
the ‘thing’ would be in this sense an ‘assembly’, or gathering of beings (2005: 13), not
just a material object, but ‘some thing’ that happens, an event where actants emerge.
‘Agency’ in this sense is more an outcome than a premise. It is a quality that one
reads upon actants once they have already acted, rather than something we presuppose
before action. For Latour, the emergent aspect of action is central to define an actant.
Actants are not defined by their intentions, but by their actions. The distinction be-
tween natural event and human action becomes irrelevant. In his own words: ‘an actor
that makes no difference is not an actor at all. An actor, if words have any meaning, is
exactly what is not substitutable. It’s a unique event, totally irreducible to any other’
(Latour 2005: 153).

The event in anthropology

In these terms, the notion of event would be more central to define an actant, in Latour’s
terms, than agency. In fact, it is not just the case that actants emerge out of events but
events and actants are coextensive: an actant is a unique event. However, that may not
be the case just for Latour: the very distinction between structure and agency, which
according to Ortner (1984) was at the basis of practice theory, may be better described
as a distinction between structure and event. Before ‘practice theory’, Lévi-Strauss wasn’t
defining structure in relation to agency, as in determination versus free will, but in relation
to events. Structure for Lévi-Strauss was not exactly an imposed ‘system’ or institution
that didn’t allow any margin of agency to individuals, but a device through which events
are organised by putting them in relation to other events. What Lévi-Strauss didn’t
address, though, was the question whether events transformed structure. It was a
generation later that anthropologists like Sahlins (1981, 2000) argued that structures are
constantly transformed by the conjuncture: ‘Practice, rather, has its own dynamics – a
“structure of the conjuncture” – which meaningfully defines the persons and the objects
that are parties to it’ (Sahlins 1981: 35).
How would Sahlins’ ‘structure of the conjuncture’ be different from Latour’s no-
tion of the event? One of the genealogies of the term ‘event’ for Latour comes from

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science studies. Fleck (1981) refused to make a distinction between social conventions
and scientific facts, subjective versus objective. Instead he proposed to understand
scientific experiments as unique historical events that produce truth – since truth is
not a convention but an event in the history of thought (Latour 2005: 114).
So for Latour, scientific experiments are events, not just discoveries. The emblem-
atic case for Latour is the ‘pasteurisation’ of France. Pasteur’s experiments showed that
fermentation is initiated by previously unknown living organisms: bacteria. The exper-
iment was not just the result of the will of the scientist, Pasteur, who ‘wanted’ to
discover bacteria: it was the result of a complex process that required action from all
sides: from Pasteur, but also from the bacteria to actually initiate fermentation, the
Academy of Science, which accepted the results of the experiment, and a host of other
human and non-human actants. They worked together, ‘Mutually exchanging and
enhancing their properties’ (Latour 1999: 124). The experiment has transformative
effects – not only over the ‘matter’ of the experiment, but also for the experimenter
and the academy.
‘Actants are events’ does not mean that entities such as Pasteur, bacteria or the
Academy did not exist before the event, but they did not exist in the same way, as
actants; the event transforms them in relation to each other; there is a before and an af-
ter. ‘No event can be accounted for by a list of the elements that entered the situation
before its conclusion’ (Latour 1999: 126). After the experiment, the emergence of these
new actors results in a truth that is more than the sum of the elements that composed it:
a world peopled by microbiological entities that requires new sciences and scientists,
new industries, new policies; the ‘pasteurisation’ of France. ‘An experiment is an event
and not a discovery, not an uncovering, not an imposition, not a synthetic a priori
judgment, not the actualization of a potentiality, and so on’ (Latour 1999: 126). In
other words, events do not unveil a hidden truth, they don’t discover truth, but they
make truth happen.
Like Latour, Sahlins’ writings on the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ are obviously
beyond the notion of ‘discovery’. Take the often-cited example of the travels and even-
tual sacrifice of Captain Cook in Hawaii; the English did not ‘discover’ Hawaii, Hawaii
existed a long time before the 18th century. But Hawaiians and English were meeting
for the first time, and this unprecedented event produced a particular entanglement,
which resulted in new definitions of the persons and objects that were parties of it.
Cook was identified with the god Lono, and as a result of the events that led to his
death, the mana of the kings of Hawaii ‘became British’ (Sahlins 1981: 202).
Both Sahlins and Latour insist on the transformative effects of historical events.
But they describe these effects at different levels. Sahlins addresses these changes in
terms of meaning – the meaningful definition of the persons and objects involved.
For Latour instead what history does is not just a meaningful redefinition, but the pro-
duction of truth. We cannot ‘bracket out’ questions of truth and access to the real. In
other terms: his project pursues questions of being, not just meaning. The issue is
not just how natives think or represent the world. ‘Things happen’, they don’t just rep-
resent the world. In that sense, Latour’s project goes well beyond extending cultural
relativism to include nature as well, as I proposed in the previous pages. His aim is
to move beyond a semiotic discussion of meanings to an ontological description of
beings: to describe how things come to be, not just what they come to mean.
In fact, this criticism of Sahlins’ notion of the event was already put forward many
years before by Marilyn Strathern (1990). Latour, along with Strathern, Viveiros de

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Castro and a host of their students (Henare et al. 2007) have been at the forefront of
what in the last few years has been called the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, a turn
from questions of meaning to questions of being. As in any ‘turn’ or revolution, there is
a risk of, to use a saying often cited by Latour, throwing the baby out with the bath-
water. By stepping aside notions of culture and meaning, one risks throwing away all
the work that has been done on reading cultures as historically relative and subject to
change. If we simply replace culture by ontology, we run the risk of falling back in
old traps, for example seeing ‘other ontologies’ as given substances, like ‘other cultures’
may once have been, instead of relational processes generated in events (Carrithers
et al. 2010). Some of the proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ are well aware of this risk
when they affirm that ‘there are as many ontologies as there are things to think
through’ (Henare et al. 2007: 27). Latour should be a good example of this understand-
ing of ontology as event rather than substance. And yet his radical ontological plural-
ism (Latour 2013) runs the risk of getting lost in the very multiplicity it proposes: if
every ‘thing’, every event, is an ontology, where do we start – and in particular, where
do we stop? Where do we cut the flow (Strathern 1996)? Or to see it in other terms:
How is history articulated after the ‘ontological turn’?

The event in philosophy

To understand this point further we have to consider another of the main philosophical
influences in Latour’s understanding of the event, Alfred North Whitehead. With
Whitehead, Latour aims to overcome the limitations of a history of sciences
constrained by the notion of ‘discovery’, which gives all the credit to the (human)
discoverers and none to the thing discovered. Whitehead’s notion of the event instead
focuses on the historicity of objects as nothing but elements of events. When Latour
defines an experiment as an event, his objective is to show that this ‘event has conse-
quences for the historicity of all ingredients, including nonhumans, that are the circum-
stances of the experiment’ (Latour 1999: 306). It is important to point out that for
Whitehead, and also for Latour, there is nothing exceptional about events, on the con-
trary: events are the very stuff of reality. Also partially inspired by Whitehead, Deleuze
would say that what characterizes an event is precisely extension. ‘Events are fluvia’
(Deleuze 2006: 90), they flow; they are an intensification in a process of becoming that
already exists, an actualisation of a potentiality. In this sense events are not a radical
break or a departure from the past,1 but in continuity with it.
Particularly problematic from this point of view is the notion of revolution, as a
radical historical break. The very notion of revolution is explicitly rejected by Latour
since We Have Never Been Modern (1993), where he, quite rightly, identified
Revolution as a core notion of the narrative of modernity. Accepting the risk of being
called a conservative, Latour set his task as a counter-revolution, which would propose
to shift the discussion in the social sciences ‘from essences to events, from purification
to mediation, from the modern dimension to the non-modern dimension, from

1 Alain Badiou presents a theory of the event radically different from Whitehead, Deleuze and Latour
based precisely on the notion of event as a radical break with the past. Badiou clearly defines history
in opposition to nature. (Badiou 2005: 174). For Badiou events are beyond what is – the given, nature.
The subject is constituted by the event, but they are not confused. This is precisely the opposite of what
Latour intends, by questioning the separations between history and nature, actor and event.

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revolution to the Copernican counter-revolution.’(Latour 1993: 89). Of course the

contradiction in this argument is that Latour seems to have, still, a very ‘modern’ take:
in spite of himself, Latour proposes a radical rupture with the past. He can be read as a
‘modern’ prophet, an iconoclast in spite of himself. After all, a counter-revolution is
still a revolution.
I will come back to this prophetic character of Latour’s narrative at the end of this
paper. By now, I shall point out one more specific issue. In spite of rejecting the narra-
tive of ‘discovery’, the historical cases that Latour explains, like Pasteur’s, involve
changes, conflict, contradictions. They jump, they don’t just flow, and in that sense
they are difficult to fit in a Deleuzian philosophy of becoming. In fact, for Harman,
Latour clearly focuses on the emergence of specific, individual entities; Latour’s is a
philosophy of occasions (Harman 2011: 295), while Deleuze is not interested in the
emergence of individual entities, but in the flux of becoming. Latour himself, in his un-
derstanding of the event, questions Deleuze’s notion of ‘actualization of a potentiality’:
‘if history is conceived in this way, there is no event, and history unfolds in vain’
(Latour 1999: 303).
So events for Latour are not revolutions. But they are not just intensifications in a
process of becoming either. One possible way of understanding this middle ground
where Latour’s theory of the event stands is by addressing one of the kinds of ‘actants’
that Latour identifies: black boxes. An actant is ‘black boxed’ when it’s so stabilised
that it is taken for granted; it is congealed, objectified, as if indeed it was ‘substance’.
But if we open the black box, we will find the loose threads of the network again. So
what is seen as cause (substance) is actually an outcome of the event. Things are retro-
actively endowed with a competence or potential (Harman 2009: 46). Bacteria appear
through the event of Pasteur’s experiments, and eventually they become ‘black-boxed’,
but everything happens as if they had always been there. For Harman, Latour elabo-
rates a ‘retroactive theory of time’ (Harman 2009: 86). Each performance presupposes
a competence (Latour 1987: 89), each event works back upon a presupposed structure.
All that is, again, not far away from what other anthropologists like Strathern or
Sahlins said in reference to events of ‘first encounter’, where ‘natives’ understand the
arrival of the Europeans as a ‘return’ (Strathern 1990). Once again, plus ça change, plus
c’est la même chose: an event makes things emerge, but these things were already there:
Cook was Lono, bacteria were around before Pasteur. But then, by this very act of
rendering evident things that were already there, in the long run everything changes:
France becomes ‘pasteurised’, Hawaii becomes British … plus c’est la même chose, plus
ça change.
We might even take this principle to the very ‘discovery’ of Latour in anthropology.
This ‘retroactive’ theory – like bacteria – was already there; what the ‘Latour event’ has
done is to expand this ‘retroactive’ theory well beyond the history of culture to the history
of things in general, turning it into a metaphysics.

Fa ctish es and hybrids

So far I have discussed the continuities between Latour and anthropology before him,
and how the discipline has changed along with Latour. At this point we should move
along to make a deeper critical assessment of his approach. For that purpose, this sec-
tion will discuss a particular example of an ‘actant/event’; the fetish. Latour wrote a

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book on the subject (2010 [1996]) partially inspired by Pietz (1985). Both were ex-
tremely influential in my own work on the history of the term in the Atlantic world
(Sansi 2007, 2011). But at the same time, it was also with this book that I started to no-
tice some contradictions in Latour’s approach, mainly between his theories of the event
and his use of notions of hybridity.
According to Pietz, the fetish originated in the coasts of West Africa in the early
colonial period. It was neither specifically European nor African, but it came out of
the colonial encounter, as a translation and/or misunderstanding. The word ‘fetish’ comes
from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning magical spell (Sansi 2007, 2011). But European
travellers called the object-gods of Africans ‘fetishes’, ignoring the Portuguese
(and hence, European) origin of the term. These African ‘Fetishes’ were scandalous for
Europeans at various levels: they were Gods, but they were made by humans; they were
artifacts, made up things, but at the same time they were supposed to have power over the
people who made them; they were found by chance, and they were unaccountable,
people had as many fetishes as they fancied; and they didn’t ‘represent’ anything, they
were not symbols or icons of a divinity, but ‘self-contained entities’, with an active force;
the thing was the god itself, irreducible to anything else. For Pietz, the fetish, as a concept
and a thing, ‘is always a meaningful fixation of a singular event; it is above all an
‘historical’ object, the enduring material form and force of an unrepeatable event’ (Pietz
1985: 12).
Through the notion of the ‘fetish’, Europeans explicitly accused Africans of
confusing people and things, gods and artifacts, the product with the producer, cause
and consequence, facts and fictions, nature with culture; of being slaves of false gods,
artifacts and fictions of their own making. On the opposite, modern, Enlightened
Europeans would describe their civilisation as based on science and rational economic
behaviour, the separation or ‘purification’ of nature from culture, fact from fiction,
product from producer, etc. This radical rejection of the fetish is what Latour calls
the ‘antifetishism’ of the moderns, their suspicion of hybrids.
Latour wonders if it is possible to overcome this ‘antifetishism’, the distinction be-
tween social fictions and real facts, going back to the roots of the problem of the fetish.
For him, Africans didn’t really make a distinction between facts and fictions, ‘real’ and
‘invented’ things: for them fetishes were autonomous entities with their own agency,
even if they made them with their own hands. Latour called this hybrid of fact and fic-
tion the factish. Starting from here, his programme is not to reveal the hidden truth of
the artifice of social life, dissecting fact from fetish, looking for the dark secrets of
human nature, but to follow the factish, seeing how things are made into autonomous
entities, with their own agency.
Is Latour thus rehabilitating the much criticised notion of the fetish? His position
is quite ambiguous by developing a hybrid term, ‘factish’. It is a bit of a mystery why
Latour would see the need to invent this term, when in fact, the fetish itself is the
actant/event he is looking for, since it already brings together fact and fiction, nature
and culture. Moreover, and a bit paradoxically, Latour seems to take for granted the
separation between Africans and Europeans (or ‘Moderns’ to use his terms) in an exer-
cise of ‘symmetrical anthropology’, when in fact this radical separation is more a result
of the fetish than its premise. It could be argued that the discourse of the fetish helped
the Europeans in building a discourse of radical purification from Africans, as well as
their own image as ‘moderns’. By the same token, this event of purification denied
the very existence of a colonial Atlantic society, either European or African, which like

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the fetish itself didn’t represent anyone. After the fetish, colonial societies would be set
apart as impure hybrids that wouldn’t quite fit in either one of the parts of the world
that the fetish had divided (Sansi 2007, 2011). But these supposed ‘hybrids’, just like
the ‘fetish’, were not simply unstable mixtures: they were historical events. Like in
his use of the term ‘hybrid’, and in his insistence on symmetrisation, Latour’s explora-
tion of the ‘factish’ seems to take for granted the old distinctions of Moderns and
Others, which in fact the very problem of the fetish is putting in perspective.

Fr o m t h e h i s t o r y o f s c i e n c e t o t h e m o d e s o f e x i s t e n c e

Since the late nineties, the ‘event’ has progressively disappeared from Latour’s work.
Latour has left behind the specific field of science studies to engage in the broader
project of a general descriptive sociology. In this context, the general concern with
history has faded away. In spite of some hesitation (1998), Latour embraced ANT
as the collective framework of his project. ANT proposes to look at social life as as-
semblages: ‘The social is a fluid that becomes visible only when new associations are
built’ (2005: 113). This approach is defined by Latour as a ‘flattening’ sociology – all
elements have to be analysed at the same level of reality, not through the prism of
scale or representation, or through the hierarchies of critique. This approach is quite
Deleuzian – as a matter of fact, Latour, would rather call ANT ‘Actant-rhizome on-
tology’ (Latour 1991). Latour has explicitly rejected identifying ANT with geogra-
phy (Latour 1996), but the ‘flattening’ approach of ANT is still one of mapping
and tracing connections, describing landscapes, even if conceptual ones, rather than
unfolding narratives like a history of events (l’histoire événementielle) would do.
ANT seems to work in very different terms from what we normally describe as
history of events. History through ANT would be a ‘structural history’, a history
of the longue durée, like Ferdinand Braudel’s (Latour 1996) in which seas and ships
are central characters as much as sailors. And yet this is very different from what
Latour actually did in his previous historical work, which was much more focused
on unfolding particular events and cases, like the ‘pasteurisation’ of France. When
discussing scientific experiments as events, as we have seen, Latour had explicitly
rejected reducing them to ‘fluvia’ or ‘actualisations’ of potentialities. As Harman says,
in Latour’s work there is a tension between events and trajectories that he never fully
resolves (Harman 2009: 65). But still in his work, the unfolding of particular events
and actants has progressively given place to the description of long-term processes,
trajectories and general landscapes.
This change is quite explicit in his last work, in which he proposes a very ambitious
Enquiry on the Modes of Existence of ‘The Moderns’ (Latour 2013). This project is in
direct contrast to We Have Never Been Modern, which Latour explicitly describes as
a ‘negative’ work, because it only focuses on ‘what we haven’t been’ (Latour 2013:
23). This time around he would do the opposite, addressing the questions: what have
we been? Through which means have we made ourselves? In this monumental volume,
Latour traces a master narrative of ‘the Moderns’, which he himself defines as a work of
‘historical anthropology’ (Latour 2013: 23). But this is certainly not a history of events,
but a history of the longue durée. In fact, a history of biblical proportions and tone: the
long journey of the Moderns across the desert, from seeing themselves confronted with
‘nature’, as an external matter that they had to control through the Economy, to

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recognising that there is no such thing as nature, but Gaia, our planet as a living actant,
which cannot be objectified simply as matter, but as our common house. In this con-
text, Economy and Modernity have to be replaced by Ecology. This is a geological his-
tory, the history of the Anthropocene, the age when humans have affected the very
conditions of life on Earth. The objective of the Enquiry is to give means for the Mod-
erns to build a ‘house’ in which they can finally stop and rest, from their long journey
in the desert; a Noah’s ark, as it were (Boltanski 2012). But for that end, the Moderns
would have to start by seeing themselves as what they really are, not in a dualist oppo-
sition to Nature, but in their ontological pluralism, composed by multiple ‘Modes of
Existence’, or regimes of truth. For that end, Latour claims that a lot of ‘diplomacy’ will
be required. The task of the anthropologist, as a mediator between worlds, would be
precisely to undertake this diplomacy.
In the book Latour identifies no less than fifteen of these modes of existence,
amongst them religion, politics, fiction, law, politics … He traces an extremely com-
plex, rich and deep landscape, partially bringing together his previous work, but also
proposing new ideas. The Modes of Existence may be confused with Bourdieu’s theory
of fields, or any general sociological theory of the division of social labour. But Latour
is adamant to avoid this confusion. In spite of the correspondence of most of them with
separate fields of modern social life, like religion or law, some modes of existence don’t
correspond to any specific domain: for example, economics is composed of several
modes of existence. Would modes of existence then be like structures? The answer is
an emphatic NO again: for Latour there is a fundamental ontological opposition be-
tween structures and modes of existence. The structure is what lasts, while the elements
that compose it just pass through; while in the modes of existence, what lasts is caused
by what passes through.2 This distinction presupposes a rather restrictive notion of
structure as timeless and unchangeable. But as we have discussed before, this under-
standing of structure was already reversed by practice theory.
What is more questionable, on the other hand, is that in the name of multiplicity,
we come back to some of the same conundrums we used to have when structuralism
was well ‘black boxed’. Modes of Existence appear as ‘given’, one would be tempted
to say, as if they had been always there. In their ensemble, they constitute the world
of the Moderns, this wandering people. But since when? And how come? How are
we making the distinction, not only between one mode and another, but more impor-
tantly, what qualifies for being inside or outside the house of the Moderns? Is the
‘ontological pluralism’ limited to ‘the Moderns’? Is the pluralism outside the ‘house
of the Moderns’ of a different kind? And most importantly: if ‘we have never been
modern’, as the original manifesto said, why would there still be a ‘Modern’ that needs
to be described? Who is this ‘we’ – the ‘Whites’ that Latour sometimes makes reference
to? As opposed to whom or what? Wasn’t the whole point to say that there had never
been a West in ontological opposition to the Rest in the first place?
Well, apparently not. And that may be the basic contradiction of putting a
symmetric anthropology together with a philosophy of the event. If we are meant
to question a set of distinctions – nature vs culture, object vs subject, and so on, why
don’t we start by the basic one, Western vs Other, us vs them? It could be argued, as
it often is (Carrithers et al. 2010), that the enduring duality between ‘our ontology’

2 See note on ‘Structure’ at http://www.modesofexistence.org/index.php/render/book, last read on

16/3/2013.

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vs ‘their ontology’ is an heuristic device; of course nobody is really saying that the West
is a Substance … or the Other to the West is a Counter-Substance… But weren’t we
supposed to think differently, through things, not through representations, not
through these ‘heuristic devices’ that presuppose a given ontological divide between
us and them? Weren’t we going to shift our point of view from substances to events,
from looking at the things that people have (‘Western Ontology’), to things that
happen (‘the fetish’)? Weren’t we going to address things as they happen, not taking
any models or dualisms for granted?

Conclusions: on diplomacy

This paper has proposed a particular reading of the relationship between Latour and
anthropology. First I have looked at the actual continuities between Latour and
anthropology before him, in particular around the notion of event. I reached the
provisional conclusion that in many ways Latour’s use of a theory of the event is not
that far away from previous anthropological theories, like Sahlins’. Both Sahlins and
Latour insist on the transformative effects of events. But they describe these effects at
different levels: Sahlins addresses these changes in terms of meaning, while for Latour
events do not just result in a meaningful redefinition, but they produce new truths, new
beings, new ‘actants’.
In this sense, Latour is one of the main referents of what has come to be known as the
‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. This ontological turn has radically questioned old
dualisms, like nature and culture, fact and fiction.... And yet, some dualisms seem more
questionable than others. In the case of Latour, the rejection of the old dualism of
Moderns and Others is a bit ambiguous; his work starts with the premise that ‘we have
never been modern’, but then the proposal of an ‘anthropology of the Moderns’, or a
‘symmetrical anthropology’, throws us back into the old duality: after all, any exercise
of symmetry needs two sides that stand still, mirroring each other but not mixing.
This is a paradoxical point, since most of the theorisation on the event in anthro-
pology points towards processes of change and exchange, rather than mirroring or
symmetry. As I mentioned, these theories of the event are based on the notion that
all cultures are made in relation to external events, like other cultures. Cultures are
different points in contact in a multiple historical process. If we are not happy with
the term ‘culture’ here, we may replace it with ‘nature-culture’, or ‘ontology’; in any
case all are based on a model of relational multiplicity. Either as cultures or ontologies,
these ‘multiples’ aren’t separate, but they are historically connected and mutually
constitutive; in fact, they are in many ways ‘translations’ of each other – they are
already in common. Including the ‘Moderns’, the ‘West’, you name it. Notions of
symmetry or hybridity, on the other hand, don’t seem to fit very well in this model.
This leads me to my last point, on diplomacy. As we have seen, for Latour the
notion of the anthropologist as a diplomat between modes of existence is quite
important in his late work. But why diplomacy? If one takes a relational approach,
‘ontologies’ don’t need diplomats or mediators: they are themselves translations, or
transpositions of each other. ‘The common world’ that ‘has to be composed’ according
to Latour (2013) is already there; it isn’t the given world of nature, but the transient
world of history. Perhaps the exercise of the anthropologist is not to build bridges
between ‘ontologies’, like the job of the historian is not to build bridges between the

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present and the past: it is history itself that builds these bridges. The task of the anthro-
pologist, like the historian, is much more humble than diplomacy: she is only being
asked to be the scribe of these ongoing events. Latour’s ambition to build a common
house where all ‘modes of existence’ can live together is paradoxically reminiscent of
the prophetic dreams of the moderns he otherwise constantly questions, all these
modern architects, economists and experts who have spent the last centuries making
projects for the ‘future’ of everyone else. Perhaps we don’t need to disguise ourselves
as experts in cultural translation; we could simply come back to a history of events that
can trace the quickly changing circumstances of our common world, rather than
building yet one more big narrative of the longue durée.

Roger Sansi
Department of Anthropology
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
United Kingdom
r.sansi-roca@gold.ac.uk

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