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Graham Harman

New Literary History, Volume 45, Number 1, Winter 2014, pp. 37-49
(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2014.0007

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 Entanglement and Relation:
A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder
Graham Harman

T
he inherent challenge of responding to the essays of Bruno
Latour and Ian Hodder lies in my different degree of familiarity
with the two authors. While I have known Latour since the dawn
of my career, written frequently and admiringly about his work, and
engaged with him in years of public and private debate, Hodder’s work
is new to me, distinguished archaeologist though he is.1 Nonetheless,
there is sufficient friction between the two essays that it is not hard to
find points of entry into the discussion. This is especially true insofar
as one of Hodder’s critiques of Latour (the price paid by Latour’s un-
abashedly relational model of entities) seems to match one of my own.
Whether Hodder and I make this critique in the same spirit is a question
to be resolved in what follows. Allow me to begin with a very simplified
overview of Latour’s intellectual trajectory, since this will prove relevant
to my remarks on his Holberg Prize lecture found above.

I. “Early” and “Late” Latour

It may be a slight exaggeration to speak of “early” and “late” phases

in Latour’s work, since his apparent late system (recently published in
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence) has its origins in 1986–1987.2 Yet the
results of that project remained secret for twenty years, and Latour
himself treats the “modes” project as a necessary expansion, as a wider
theory containing his earlier work. The basic difference between the two
phases is not hard to grasp. The early Latour showed us that there are
no special distinct zones of reality called “science,” “politics,” “technol-
ogy,” “nature,” or “culture.” Everything in the world—natural, artificial,
human, animal, fictional—is equally an “actor” or “actant.” All it takes
to be an actant is to have some sort of effect on other actants; the
reality principle is impact, with no further distinction or qualification.
In principle, proving the propositions of Euclid is no different from
putting varnish on a canoe, appearing on a talk show, or engaging in

New Literary History, 2014, 45: 37–49

38 new literary history

political conspiracies: all of these actions assemble various actants into

a network. Herein lies the root of both the acclaim and the controversy
that have followed Latour on his path. On the one hand, this theory of
actants, with its avoidance of fuzzy abstract categories like “power” and
“society,” has allowed Latour to give us novel accounts of everything from
the successes of Louis Pasteur to the failure of Paris’s Aramis system to
the making of the law at the Conseil d’État.3 It is the rock on which his
reputation is deservedly built. At the same time, this theory has earned
him unsurprising accusations of reducing science to politics.
In this first phase, all actor-networks are basically alike. But Latour’s
later system of modes of existence reframes these networks as just one
mode of existence among thirteen others that hold force in modern
Western civilization (the fifteenth supposed mode, “Double Click,” is not
really a mode). Latour reached this new standpoint through what seems
to have been searching self-critique. Early in his new book, he asks us to
imagine an anthropologist excitedly discovering Actor-Network Theory
(ANT) and putting it to work. Initial results are exciting, but “to her great
confusion, as she studies segments from Law, Science, The Economy,
or Religion she begins to feel that she is saying almost the same thing
about all of them: namely, that they are ‘composed in a heterogeneous
fashion of unexpected elements revealed by the investigation.’” Latour’s
disarming self-satire continues: “To be sure, she is indeed moving, like
her informants, from one surprise to another, but, somewhat to her
surprise, this stops being surprising, in a way, as each element becomes
suprising in the same way.”4 Out of this quietly scathing critique of his
own earlier work (it would have stung bitterly if written by an enemy),
Latour envisions a wider and more satisfactory project. How can we
recover the various modes of being that were purposely flattened in his
early theory of actors jostling for influence in their various networks?
How can we account for the different conditions of truth pertaining in
such spheres as science, politics, religion, and the law? This new proj-
ect continues as we speak, and is sufficiently broad in scope that one
imagines it will occupy the remainder of Latour’s career.

II. Latour’s Holberg Prize Lecture

Despite his regrets that ANT made everything sound the same, Latour
to this day often returns to his earlier voice, much like the Coca-Cola
Corporation reintroducing Coke Classic to assuage consumers not yet
accustomed to the New Coke. The 2013 Holberg Prize lecture is such
a case. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene” is an ice-cold bottle
entanglement and relation 39

of Latour Classic for his established readership, with little trace of New
Latour to be found, despite the appearance of his new interest in Gaia
as the central character. Far from pinpointing any differing modes for
science, politics, and law, the Holberg Prize lecture stresses an earlier
Latourian lesson: “Before . . . actants are provided with a style or a
genre, that is, before they become well-recognized actors, they have, if I
dare say it, to be brewed, mashed, and concocted in the same pot. Even
the most respectable entities—characters in novels, scientific concepts,
technical artifacts, natural features—are all born out of the same witches’
cauldron because, literally, that is where all of the shape-changers reside.”5
Latour might have uttered the same words in the early 1980s, though
they come three decades later. The central theme of the lecture is en-
tanglement: not between humans and nature as two separate if mutually
dependent zones (this is Hodder’s theme rather than Latour’s), but of
the taxonomical indistinction of all the various actors in the witches’
melting pot. True enough, Latour maintains the modern distinction
between humans and nature just long enough to partake in Michel
Serres’s role reversal of the two: with humans reduced to passivity in
the face of natural calamities, “to be a subject . . . is to share agency
with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy” (5, emphasis re-
moved). But viewed in context, Latour makes this point not in order to
reverse the poles of the old subject-object magnet and redefine nature
as actor, but to repeat his familiar case for the dissolution of these two
modern kingdoms, in the hopes of becoming a “Kant without bifurca-
tion between object and subject; Hegel without Absolute Spirit; Marx
without dialectics” (5). Everywhere, actants of all kinds are entangled.
In agreement with Serres, Latour holds that “the best example of a
contractual bond is Newton’s law of gravitation” (6), thus destroying any
distinction between social and natural. He dismisses Mark Twain’s boast
that no one can tame the mighty Mississippi, since “on the contrary, the
[Army] Corps [of Engineers] has gone to amazing extremes to fix the
Mississippi in its course and to help it resist capture by the other river”
(9). In a brilliant coinage, Latour meets the stale warning not to “an-
thropomorphize” nature with a counterwarning not to “phusimorphize”
actors (10). James Lovelock is praised for “[refusing] to deanimate many
of the connections between entangled agents that make up the sublunar
domain of Gaia. . . . [Since] Earth is neither nature, nor a machine”
(14). There can be no contract between humans and nature, since a
contract implies two separate signatories. And further:

nothing is changed when the two parties that are forcefully united are both
understood as “parts of nature.” Not because this would mark a too cruel “ob-
40 new literary history

jectification” of humans, but because such a naturalization, the imposition of

such a “scientific worldview” would not do justice to any of the agents of geostory:
volcano, Mississippi River, plate tectonics, microbes, or CRF-receptor just as much
as generals, engineers, novelists, ethics, or politicians. Neither the extension of
politics to nature, nor of nature to politics, helps us in any way to move out of
the impasse in which modernism has dug itself so deeply. (15)

The closing lament about the modern impasse is another tasty sip of
Latour Classic. So is the pleasant Latour Litany (“volcano, Mississippi
River, plate tectonics. . .”), Ian Bogost’s term for the long lists of random
objects at which Latour as prose stylist is the world champion.
When Karen Barad speaks of “entanglement,” she is referring (in the
spirit of Niels Bohr) to the inseparability of thought and world.6 Not so
for Latour, whose own use of “entanglement” means the disappearance
of thought and world in the same witches’ cauldron. Also implicit in
Latourian entanglement is that actors are defined by their relations.
Echoing his key early treatise “Irreductions,”7 Latour now intones: “As
long as they act, agents have meaning” (12, emphasis removed). Not
only must agents always be acting, they consist entirely in their acting.
For Latour as for Alfred North Whitehead (whom he so greatly admires)
there is no noun-like substance or thing-in-itself hiding behind actions.
Autonomous matters of fact must be replaced by “matters of concern,”
as defined by the relations between one concerned actor and another
(16). Striking a pessimistic note about recent history, Latour laments
that “contrary to Hobbes’s scheme, the ‘state of nature’ seems to have
a dangerous tendency to follow, and not to precede or to accompany,
the time of the civil compact” (6). What the Hobbesian state of nature
means for Latour is a relative absence of mediations or relations, as Peer
Schouten has shown in a helpful recent article.8 What always saves the
day, in Latour’s eyes, is the following formula: more entanglement and
relationality, less purity and autonomy for supposedly separate actors
that are actually too entangled ever to gain distance from one another.
This is the point on which I have criticized Latour in the past for an
excessively relational conception of actors.9 For it seems to me that in
his powerful critique of modernity as an impossible purification of two
realms called nature and culture, he conflates two separate issues.10
We can only applaud when Latour attacks the twofold taxonomy of a
mechanistic, clockwork nature on one side and the arbitrary customs
and value projections of human society on the other. Contemporary
philosophy has not yet caught up with Latour on this point, though it
has long been a familiar part of the Science and Technology Studies
toolkit. A unified theory of entities is needed, and Latour’s assault on
the modernist dichotomy provides it. My only objection is as follows.
entanglement and relation 41

When Latour seeks a unifying principle for all entities, including natural
and cultural, why does he settle on relational interaction as the unifying
property shared by all beings? The reason is that he proceeds asym-
metrically, thereby violating his own stated method.
In a first movement, he symmetrically eliminates both the cold mecha-
nism of nature and the arbitrary fetishes of society, replacing them with
his unified conception of actants. Hear, hear! But in a second movement,
he proceeds asymmetrically. For Latour has interpreted “nature” not just
as a mechanism with different rules from the human realm, but as a
reality-in-itself beyond human contact. Thus when he eliminates nature as
a separate zone, Latour also eliminates the in-itself. But in asymmetrical
fashion, he does not also eliminate the for-us that is the usual opposite
of the in-itself and replace both with a new third term (as he did with
“actants” in the first move). Instead, he simply expands the scope of the
for-us, so that we are no longer speaking of a special feature possessed by
humans alone: inhuman actants can also negotiate, conspire, and engage
in duels of force. This is already an important forward step, and we can
view the charges of “anthropomorphization” as hollow, since these charg-
es presuppose precisely what is under dispute by assuming in advance
that humans are a separate ontological kingdom from nonhumans. In
principle if not always in practice (Hodder will not be satisfied), Latour
can speak of the relation between two nonhuman entities in the same
terms as the relation between humans and nonhumans, or humans and
humans. What looked at first like another elimination of two opposed
realms in favor of a flat third one encompassing both culminates in the
valorization of a relational nonautonomy that seems to come from one
side of the divide (culture) rather than the other (nature). And thus
we have relation, composition, institution, matters of concern. . . For
Latour as for regular social constructionists the world consists entirely of
social/relational terms, with the sole (though profound) difference that
society is expanded to include pine trees, quarks, cruise missiles, and
cartoon characters along with people. But this relational turn remains
puzzling despite its familiarity. If we eliminate mechanism (nature)
and arbitrary projection (culture) in the same stroke, then why do we
eliminate autonomy (nature) while preserving relationality (culture)?
This is the basic asymmetry in Latour’s philosophy, and the real cause
of what still bothers many scientists about him. From the fact that nature
and culture are ontologically indiscernible and therefore not cleanly
separable (one of Latour’s great insights), it does not follow that an en-
tity and its actions are indiscernible. In fact, entities are no more related
than nonrelated, no more composed than noncomposed. This can be
seen from the consideration that if a given actor were entirely identifi-
able with its actions, there would be no way for it ever to engage in new
42 new literary history

actions. For Caesar to be first on the far side of the Rubicon and then
on the near side implies that Caesar is defined by neither of these rela-
tions to the river; instead, Caesar with respect to the Rubicon is always
an unexpressed or indifferent surplus that shadows whatever relation
to the river he currently has. The rejection of autonomous substances
or things-in-themselves has become such a mandatory commonplace in
the human sciences that my objection may sound retrograde or vulgar.
But without an unexpressed surplus in the heart of any entity, there
will be no principle of change in the cosmos, though change is indeed
what we see.
I find every alternative solution to this puzzle to be unconvincing.
Latour briefly toyed with one of them in his conception of the “plasma,”
similar to the pre-Socratic apeiron in being a giant unformatted mass,
a not-yet-articulate reservoir equally capable of destroying empires,
ending love affairs, and dropping leaves from trees.11 The question of
why a unified plasma would have different effects in different locations
haunts such a theory, just as it haunted the ancient dualist philosophies
of one and many. At other times Latour tries a different alternative,
explaining change by appeal to a conatus or inner drive towards change
in the heart of actors—in keeping with the spirit of the times, which
abhors “stasis” and “essence” and prefers to see everything as locked in
a permanent turbulent dynamism.12 But this solution is too much like
Molière’s famous vis dormitiva, though here it amounts to the claim that
“entities change by means of a changing power,” a tacit claim that haunts
Whitehead’s philosophy as well. Now, it is not a question of holding
that entities are entirely nonrelational, since we encounter relations at
every moment. Instead, the point at issue is whether it makes sense to
convert the entire cosmos exclusively into entangled, relational actants.
One might also attempt to combine these two techniques for avoiding
the autonomous surplus of individual entities, arguing for a unified
cosmos that is simultaneously laced with dynamic fluctuation. This is
done by another of my favorite contemporary theorists, Jane Bennett,
when she recommends that we “understand ‘objects’ to be those swirls
of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long
enough to vie with the strivings of other objects [that is, other swirls of
matter, energy, and incipience] including the indeterminate momentum
of the throbbing whole.”13 Here, two desirable features are simply stipulated
that allow us to get rid of pesky autonomous entities. First Bennett has
a whole, but since wholes tend to be static and monistic, she specifies
that the whole is throbbing rather than static. Left unexplained is why
a whole would ever throb or fluctuate in any manner at all unless it
already had differentiated independent sectors.
entanglement and relation 43

This is not just a finicky dispute over ivory-tower subtleties: the entire
method of actor-network theory is based on its relationist claims, and
if these claims are wrong there may prove to be unnoticed difficulties
with the empirical side of the theory. When Latour asks “where are the
missing masses?” we might ask instead “where are the missing volumes?”14
Where in his theory is the hidden third dimension of things that houses
the surplus of their reality and prevents them from becoming frozen
relational holograms? This is the problem faced not just by Latour, but
by Whitehead, Barad, and any other thinker who leaves room only for
relations. I propose instead that we begin to recover the autonomy of
things occluded by the recent relational turn across the humanities.15

III. Hodder on the Dark Side

In his essay “The Entanglement of Humans and Things: A Long-Term

View,” Ian Hodder also speaks of relationality and entanglement, though
he draws rather different conclusions from Latour. Hodder gives us a
partial roster of recent authors who have returned to things: citing by
name Bill Brown, Don Ihde, and the duo of Steven Shapin and Simon
Schaffer. He tells us (accurately enough) that “in these different ap-
proaches it is accepted that human and thing co-constitute each other.
In these different approaches it is accepted that human existence and
social life depend on material things and are entangled with them; hu-
mans and things are relationally produced.”16 How remarkable that we
hear no astonishment in Hodder’s voice when he identifies the turn to
things with a turn to the notion that things and humans are co-constituted!
This is not due to Hodder, but to the state of affairs he describes: the
supposed turn to things has been, for the most part, a turn to human-
thing interactions rather than to things themselves. But what justice
have we done to things when we treat them as correlates or accessories
whose primary role is to resist human designs?
As already mentioned, Latour’s theory tacitly enables us to place in-
terobject relations on the same footing as those involving humans (this
is his Whiteheadian heritage), though it is hard to deny that the primary
role of nonhumans in Latour’s work is to mediate and stabilize human
affairs. This apparently bothers Hodder even more than it bothers me:
“There is a darker side to the entanglements of humans and things that
is often missed in these relational approaches” (19). He tries to depart
from these relational approaches in several different ways, all of them
contained in his striking reformulation of the entanglement problem: “I
define entanglement as the sum of four types of relationships between
humans and things: humans depend on things (HT), things depend on
44 new literary history

other things (TT), things depend on humans (TH), humans depend

on humans (HH). Thus Entanglement= (HT) + (TT) + (TH) + (HH)”
(19–20).
This is already sufficient to distinguish Hodder’s position from Latour’s
in at least three ways:

1. By treating T (things) and H (humans) as two taxonomically different types

of entities, Hodder drifts back toward the modernist dichotomy that Latour
diagnoses and rejects. Admittedly, Latour sometimes has this tendency himself,
as when distinguishing between “quasi-subjects” and “quasi-objects” in a way
that always strikes me as pre-Latourian, since it gives up the flat field of actors
measured by nothing but their relational effects on other actors.

2. By explicitly including thing-thing (TT) relations in his schema, Hodder burns

into our brains a type of relation for which Latour allows but with which he
does relatively little. There are some golden moments of (TT) in Latour, such
as this one from 1984: “For a long time it has been agreed that the relationship
between one text and another is always a matter of interpretation. Why not ac-
cept that this is also true between so-called texts and so-called objects, and even
between so-called objects themselves?”17 Nonetheless, Latour usually favors examples
in which there is a human somewhere on the scene: perhaps inevitably, since
he does philosophy of science, not philosophy of nature.

3. Most importantly for Hodder’s position, he emphasizes the asymmetry of rela-

tions. Thing-human (TH) is not the same as human-thing (HT), since one term
of the pair can be in a state of dependency on the other without the reverse being
true. Latour handles such cases of dominance differently, merely pointing to a
force differential between two entities without building any polar dominant/
submissive relation into his theory. Moreover, for Latour the respective positions
of dominant and submissive are always reversible, since the weaker party of a
dyad can turn the table suddenly by cutting off the dominant party from its allies.

It is Point 3 where we find the political consequences, and Hodder’s essay

is nothing if not political. No one will ever mistake Latour for a radical
Leftist. Perhaps the chief reason is that the Left is primarily concerned
with exploitations of the weak by the strong, and Latour is unimpressed
by the supposed strength of the strong. Consider the following passage
from 1991, which captures the Latourian spirit even today: “Take some
small business-owner hesitatingly going after a few market shares, some
conqueror trembling with fever, some poor scientist tinkering in his lab,
a lowly engineer piecing together a few more or less favorable relation-
ships of force, some stuttering and fearful politician; turn the critics
loose on them, and what do you get? Capitalism, imperialism, science,
technology, domination—all equally absolute, systematic, totalitarian.
entanglement and relation 45

In the first scenario the actors were trembling; in the second, they are
not.”18 In Latour’s eyes, the gloomy totalities of the anticapitalist Left
are ghost stories that never come to terms with the basic weakness and
reversible symmetry of any assemblage. Stories of Leviathan empires
and oil companies will tend to sound archaic and paranoid if we have
just spent a few hours reading Latour.
The point where Hodder’s essay speaks against this Latourian vision
is that of reversible symmetry, which Hodder does not agree to be uni-
versal. Indeed, some relationships are characterized by asymmetrical
dependence, whether in good or bad ways. Good dependence (or simply
“dependence”) is when humans use tools or symbols for adaptive pur-
poses. Bad dependence (whether “dependency” or “codependency”)
“[occurs] when humans and things cannot manage without each other
and, in this dependency on each other, they constrain and limit what each
can do” (20). From the Latourian standpoint, the mutual limitation and
constraint of actants is the whole point of reality rather than something
to fret about. The fact that Hodder is bothered by such limitation and
constraint stems from his un-Latourian view that dependency relations
are not so easily reversible. For Hodder, dependency “[produces] and
[constrains] human action and leads humans into entanglements from
which it becomes difficult to become detached” (20). Our relations
with things are path-dependent, so that we commit vast investments of
energy simply to maintain things as they are, whether or not the status
quo is sustainable in the long term. The world seems generally stable
only because giant hidden mechanisms are working to keep them that
way: “To get the sugar to the table, to maintain the electricity grid,
and to assure supplies of slippers and bikes, a massive mobilization of
resources, human dependencies is involved” (21). Hodder borrows the
term “enchainment” from Marilyn Strathern to highlight the thing’s
role in a chain of human obligations. He gives the illuminating example
of Christmas lights as things which human society might be able to do
without, if not that a whole network of producers and recyclers is already
enchained to this industry, making it in everyone’s interest to preserve it.
Hodder now begins to take a greater distance from Latour. Actor-
network theory, Hodder says, sees relations clearly but misses entrap-
ment. To speak of “entrapment” implies an inherent dignity in entities
outside their mutual relations, a quality that those relations somehow
crush, suppress, or stifle. Along with humans trapped in reliance on
Christmas lights, Hodder hints at a dignity in nonhuman things. In
Hodder’s words, “to bring everything into [Latour’s] dispersed human/
nonhuman network risks losing one of the main motors of change—the
limited unfixed nature of things in themselves and their relationships
46 new literary history

with each other” (24). Hodder evokes the numerous natural cycles that
persist beyond human control but still impinge on human affairs. This
critique is not entirely convincing, since Latour in his recent work on Gaia
cites numerous examples of such impingement; furthermore, Hodder
no less than Latour seems interested in Gaia primarily in its interplay
with humans. We can appreciate Hodder’s point that objects in their
own right receive too little attention from Latour. But we should note
that this has less to do with Latour’s rejection of nature/culture dualism
than with his relational definition of actors. In other words, contra Hod-
der, the problem is not that Latour ignores nature, but that he ignores
the human-in-itself no less than the nonhuman-in-itself, since everything
for Latour exists on the playing field of relations.
Hodder now draws political consequences from the dispute, and
speaks longingly of a time before we became entrapped: “You could
place on a small table all the material belongings of a man or woman
twenty thousand years ago. They had very little stuff. . . . But then,
relatively suddenly, about ten thousand years ago in the Middle East,
the amount of stuff in people’s lives increased dramatically” (28). The
process accelerates; humans become entrapped and lose the chance to
withdraw from the game: “As we fix one thing, so we get drawn into
another thing . . . More stuff requires more investment by humans in
more stuff” (30). The situation is grave: “it is very difficult for humans
to become less entangled because of the costs that have been invested
in existing technologies and material and social worlds, and because
unraveling one part of an entanglement often involves disentangling
too many other parts” (32). In the Anthropocene Era we have become
entrapped by the environment as a whole, “itself an artifact needing
care, fixing, and manipulation” (33).
This leads Hodder to a concluding proposal whose understated tone
cannot mask its utterly radical character:

codependence, as we have seen, leads ineluctably to dependency and more

entanglement. So to fiddle and fix, as we always have done, seems to be the
only solution. But we have perhaps come close to the end of the sustainability
of this human impulse. Perhaps we need to face the possibility that fixing our
technologies of codependency only increases rather than resolves the problem.
The long-term perspective of increased entanglement offered by archaeology
and human evolution suggests the need to look deep inside ourselves and into
what it means to be human. (34)

Already a significant demand! But one senses that Hodder has reached
provisional solutions that are even more demanding, given his admiring
references to hunter-gatherer autonomy from things, his dismayed report
entanglement and relation 47

that an iPhone uses more energy per annum than a mid-sized refrigerator,
and his view that to engage in any entanglement with things is to tread
on the slippery slope to constant micromanagement of a hypersensi-
tive, hyperunstable environment as a whole. This vision could hardly be
more different from that of Latour, whose compositionist behest that
we learn to compose the collective of Gaia takes “fiddling and fixing”
to the planetary scale.
When reviewing and contrasting two authors, it is always good man-
ners to agree halfway with each. But I am now led to do so by the facts
of the case even more than by manners. My critique of Latour’s position
was as follows. He begins by heroically destroying the modern taxonomy
of nature and culture by replacing both poles with a single class called
“actants.” But as concerns the unstated duality between in-itself and
for-us, Latour destroys the in-itself while retaining the for-us, though
modifying it considerably so that the “us” might mean any actor, not
just a human. The needless elimination of the in-itself of autonomous
things (which he conflates with his justified elimination of nature as a
freestanding mechanistic zone) leads Latour to a radically relationist
model of reality. I have already suggested that such a model, however
widely celebrated in the human sciences today, makes it impossible to
account for change. Hodder joins me in insisting on a certain autono-
mous character of both humans and natural beings, one that for him is
too often suppressed through various entrapments. Here we see a grain
of philosophical realism on Hodder’s part—not just the more popular
“materialism,” which fits too well with relational models in which human
and world are exhaustively defined by their interplay.
Yet when it comes to the political side of the question, I can only side
with Latour: with his “fiddling and fixing” call to action on Gaia, rather
than with Hodder’s hints at an ultraradical sustainability platform that
seems to appeal not just to the deep ecology criticized by Latour, but to
a “deep anthropology” in which the human essence became tarnished
beyond a certain historical watershed.19 For here it is Hodder who makes
an important conflation, identifying the autonomy of humans (their ability
and right to withdraw from given relations and enter others) with some
particular natural state of humans defined by a low-technology point in
the historical past. At least that seems to be the gist of his dissatisfaction
with “fiddling and fixing,” since that is precisely what would be required
by any reinvention of what it means to be human, rather than the simple
rediscovery of the predependent human of whom Hodder speaks so
admiringly. Yet it is hard to see how we can truly rethink what it means
to be human by again treating the human as a taxonomical sphere that
must be purified from the nonhuman sphere: an antimodern twist on
48 new literary history

the modernism attacked by Latour. Whereas Latour rejects the nature/

culture taxonomy of modernism while upholding a harmful relationism,
Hodder does exactly the opposite: calling for a partly nonrelational con-
ception of things, while endorsing the modern taxonomy and drawing
from it an apparently radical antitechnological politics.
Hodder’s final sentence runs as follows: “The moral choice is sub-
stantial: to change what it is to be human, to become something other
than ourselves” (34). If Latour has ontological difficulties in explaining
change, it seems to me that his model is more politically equipped than
Hodder’s to explain it. After all, do we become something other than
ourselves by withdrawing into human nature from as many entanglements
as possible, or instead by renegotiating the entanglements? Despite Hod-
der’s useful examples of entrapment, it seems to me that he overstates
the difficulty of renegotiation, the asymmetry of dependency, and the
perilous character of fiddling and fixing: the only technique on which
any reinvention of the human can draw.

American University in Cairo

Notes

1 See Graham Harman, “The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy,” Cultural
Studies Review 13, no. 1 (2007); Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and
Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009); and Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and Peter
Erdélyi, The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE (Winchester, UK: Zero Books,
2011.) Somewhat earlier was a newspaper article on the occasion of Latour’s visit to the
American University in Cairo: Graham Harman, “Return of the Reality Principle,” Al-Ahram
Weekly, December 11–17, 2003, Issue 668, Cairo, Egypt. Available online at http://weekly.
ahram.org.eg/2003/668/op17.htm
2 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Cath-
erine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013.) For Latour’s own history of
the project see Latour, “Biography of an Inquiry: About a Book on Modes of Existence,”
trans. Catherine Porter, Social Studies of Science 43, no. 2 (2013): 287–301.
3 See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1988); Latour, Aramis, or The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine
Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996); Latour, The Making of the Law: An
Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat, trans. Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage (Cambridge, UK:
Polity, 2010).
4 Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, 35.
5 Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” (hereafter cited in text).
6 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007).
7 “Irreductions” can be found as an appendix to Latour, The Pasteurization of France.
8 Peer Schouten, “The Materiality of State Failure: Social Contract Theory, Infrastructure
and Governmental Power in Congo,” Millenium—Journal of International Studies 41, no. 3
(2013): 553–74.
9 See the second half of Harman, Prince of Networks.
entanglement and relation 49

10 See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1993).
11 See especially Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
12 See my exchange with Latour on pp. 95–96 of Latour, Harman, & Erdélyi, The Prince
and the Wolf.
13 Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy
Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 227. Emphasis added.
14 Latour, “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,”
in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe Bijker and
John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
15 For one treatment of this theme, see Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK:
Zero Books, 2011).
16 Ian Hodder, “The Entanglement of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” (here-
after cited in text).
17 Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 166.
18 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 125–26.
19 Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004).