Preliminaries

Philosophers trying to give retrospective accounts of their careers usually do one of two things: either they claim it's all been one big project all along, motivated by one basic idea or set of ideas; or they mark off phases of development where they got interested in something new. But Latour does neither! Instead he tells a story sort of like Descartes' in Discourse on Method, of doggedly trying to follow a single method (which, he reminds us in Reassembling the Social, means "travel") and the sorts of people he's encountered by using this method, and the ways he's pissed them off, forcing him to explain himself. In other words, he says that he has been trying to do one thing all along, but he has been continually waylaid by people confused by his method. The thing he's been trying to do, apparently, is "philosophy." And "Coming Out as a Philosopher," as I read it, is his explanation of everything he's found it necessary to accomplish before beginning to do philosophy.

To summarize quickly for those who haven't read it: in "Coming Out as a Philosopher," Latour claims to have adapted his method of following chains of translations from the Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann. He then started using this method, originally developed for exegesis of scripture, on the inscriptions of science and technology. The intention behind this wasn't to debunk or refute science — it just endeavored to show how science constructed itself as real through a long process of trasnlation, with the hope of being able to use the method to show how regimes of enunciation other than science do the same (and thus ultimately refute positivism or naturalism: there's nothing special about science or nature's reality; it's knitted together very well, but so are other modes of existence). This, on Latour's account, is what he was doing in Laboratory Life and Science in Action.

The plan, apparently, was to do this first for science and technology, and then move on to other modes of enunciation (law, religion, etc.). Science, as I understand it, really has no priority for Latour: he's not a philosopher of science, he's a philosopher with an intense interest in scientific method (again like Descartes). But, before he could keep traveling along his merry methodical way... lots of people objected! The science wars broke out! Scientists assumed he was using "society" in order to debunk science/nature (in other words, they accused me of being a social constructionist/anti-realist). So he had to prove he wasn't, not by genuflecting to science and reassuring everyone that it actually is real after all, but by showing "sociology" and "society" to be as ad hoc and constructed as science and nature are. (Fast-forward a little to Reassembling the Social; but this is also what he's doing in early articles like "Unscrewing the Big Leviathan.") And this move, of course, pissed off sociologists (Bourdieu, among others) — although thus far Latour doesn't seem to care too much about that.

OK, well and good. But, at the same time, even as Latour engaged in what are basically high-level methodological debates with scientists (both social and natural), he got an idea for a second project, one which would help explain why everyone got so angry at him to begin with. This is his "anthropology of the moderns" — initiated with We Have Never Been Modern and ultimately including stuff like Iconoclash and some chapters of Pandora's Hope. This is not Latour arguing with anybody (despite the rhetorical pointedness of his style) but rather providing narratives of why there are so many people around who want to argue with him. (And if he engages with philosophers in WHNBM, it's probably because philosophers are the champion arguers in our societies and they influence intellectuals more generally, not because he's really trying to intervene in philosophy.) As opposed to stuff like Science in Action and Reassembling the Social, which are both basically how-to books for social scientists and say nothing about what exists but just about how existence is constructed, We Have Never Been Modern is, if not an anthropology or an ontology, at least a proposal for one. It's asking: how did we get to a place where we think that "science" and "society" are the only things that are real?

In "Coming Out as a Philosopher," all of this previous work — We Have Never Been Modern included, which one might have thought was his "coming out" party back in 1991 — appears as just so much ground-clearing, or preparatory work, for what Latour has in fact really wanted to do all along: use this method of following the actors and so on to describe other regimes of enunciation besides "science" and "society," and thus reveal those other modes of existence that the scientists and the sociologists have claimed don't really exist. And that's what he is now promising to do. We move, as it were, from method to modes: all this time Latour's basically been arguing that a single method can be applied to everything that exists, but he has applied it only to "science" and "society"; now he's finally doing the more properly philosophical work of saying what there is that methods can be applied to.

So, to sum up, as Latour sees it he's had three major intellectual projects going more or less simultaneously:

1. A methodology for "following" the construction of truth via chains of translations
2. An anthropology of the moderns (or, Why does everybody insist on arguing with me?)
3. A secret philosophical system, which he's going to unveil in his next book (An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence)

I'm going to stop there, though I want to talk about how Harman sees what Latour is doing; that will involve looking a little bit at his essay on "The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy" and Prince of Networks. Harman makes the rather different claim that Latour has been doing philosophy all along. My rather broad question is: does it make a difference to how we read Latour — and in particular to how we read him vis-à-vis speculative realism — if we see all the work published up to this point as preliminary to philosophy, versus reading it as philosophy? Or does this not really make a difference at all?