Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

6. Proliferation

6 Proliferation Latour’s vital, metaphysical minimum might also be summarized in terms of the following, deeply non-theistic maxim: ‘‘replace the singular with the plural everywhere’’ (PN 29). Where, traditionally, a metaphysician would assume an underlying macro-unity or background compatibility , Latour assumes instead an irreducible and uncountable metaphysical plurality. Rather than axiomatizing the One, he axiomatizes the many. An experimental metaphysics, rather than preformatting the world, encourages the untidy proliferation of as many objects and actors as the universe (or, better, pluriverse) can muster. The result is that the world becomes ‘‘an immense, messy, and muddy construction site’’ (PN 161). ‘‘There are more of us than we thought’’ (PF 35). This messy proliferation of the multitude does not, however , result in chaos. This assumption—that the multitude, without the imposition of some preformatted unity, could 15 only ever amount to chaos—typifies what Latour takes to be the classical, metaphysical prejudice. The pluriverse doesn’t lack coherent formatting, it just lacks any formatting that is not produced locally and provisionally by the interactions of the multitude itself. Methodologically, this means that an experimental metaphysics involves a lot more work than a ‘‘religious’’ metaphysics of reduction. For the ‘‘convenient shorthand’’ of a reductionism that operates by dismissing the majority of objects as passive vehicles for some more substantial macro-force, ‘‘one has to substitute the painful and costly longhand’’ of the researcher who stands among, rather than above, the multitude (RS 11). Where ‘‘the first solution draws maps of the world which are composed of a few agencies , followed by trails of consequences which are never much more than effects, expressions, or reflections of something else,’’ Latour’s approach ‘‘pictures a world of concatenations of mediators where each point can be said to fully act’’ (RS 59). Methodologically, this is the defining feature of an experimental metaphysics: it does not substitute, it concatenates. But how does such an approach know who to add to what—and in what order? How does it decide how to organize its additive, concatenated strings? The simple answer is that an experimental metaphysics doesn’t decide how to organize the additive strings that compose the world’s tangled and fragile networks. Rather than leading objects back to their respective, substantial origins, Latour recommends that we simply follow them. Here, ‘‘the only viable slogan is to follow the actors themselves’’ (RS 227). We must follow them because ‘‘we do not know who are the agents that make up our world. We must begin with this uncertainty if we are to understand how, little by little, the agents defined one another’’ (PF 35). 16 Proliferation This initial, axiomatically imposed ignorance is not debilitating but enabling. It doesn’t seal us off from understanding , it opens our ears to hear what the objects themselves have to say about who they are, how they relate to one another, and what they are trying to do. We have to trust, from the start, that the objects are fully capable of telling their own stories: The fact that we do not know in advance what the world is made of is not a reason for refusing to make a start, because other storytellers seem to know and are constantly defining the actors that surround them— what they want, what causes them, and the ways in which they can be weakened and linked together. These storytellers attribute causes, date events, endow entities with qualities, classify actors. The analyst does not need to know more than they; he has only to begin at any point, by recording what each actor says of the others. He should not try to be reasonable and to impose some predetermined sociology on the sometimes bizarre interdefinition offered by the writers studied. The only task of the analyst is to follow the transformations that the actors convened in the stories are undergoing. (PF 10) Rather than trying to be reasonable, the experimental metaphysician must try to be faithful. Latour’s approach has a leveling effect. Rather than distributing objects out onto different, predetermined levels of reality, he levels all such predeterminations in order to follow how the objects distribute themselves. Flat strings of concatenation replace pyramids of substitution, though, again, this style of ‘‘flat’’ metaphysics produces an ironic effect. ‘‘This flattening does not mean that the world of the actors themselves has been flattened out. Quite the Proliferation 17...