From ANT to Pragmatism: A Journey with Bruno Latour at the CSI*

Bruno Latour and Antoine Hennion have been travelling companions for a long time. In order to discuss concretely the possible relationship between the humanities and Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, this article retraces exchanges that actually occurred at the CSI, in a common effort to rebuild links between political, scientific, and artistic representations that had been disconnected by the traditional disciplines. Under the heading of a “return to the object,” Hennion draws a kind of partial archeology of the Inquiry by confronting in particular his own work on music, amateurs, and attachments and the actor-network-theory developed at the CSI. The review of reciprocal exchanges is woven between problems to do with science and technology, on the one hand, and culture, on the other, allowing him to address concepts and issues such as mediation and its contrast with translation, the question of attachments, the criticism of Bourdieu’s critical sociology, and the revival of pragmatism in social inquiries.