What happens to the narrative of modernity – what do we learn – when we make an inquiry into what centres of modernism (science, technology, law, urbanism, religion, politics) discard from themselves? Clearly, this question is nothing more than a restatement of Latour’s in this video. In asking this question I don’t necessarily want to just attach my interests to Latour’s work in general or to his project in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) (Latour 2013) specifically. However, my hypothesis – very tentative – is that perhaps asking this question actually illuminates something(s) passed over or missed in the AIME project.My hypothesis is triggered by remembering Harman’s claim that Latour has an ‘industrial model of truth’:

Truth is best described not by the optical or pictorial metaphor of copying a true state of affairs in our mind, but by…