Chapter 9: Situating The Beings of Fiction

In this chapter, Latour attempts to provide a rigorous account of Modern language usage.
Following his arguments from chapter four, Latour returns to the notion of the Moderns'
bifurcation of the world and statements about the world. Having first dealt with the
problematic Modern understanding of the world", Latour turns his attention to the language,
noting: we still do not know how to treat in any sense of the word the symmetrical
obsession with a speaking subject (234). For this reason, the project of this chapter is the
disamalgamation of the mode of language, such that we can establish its preposition (or what
Sara Ahmed would call language's orientation). This is an important task, as our efforts to
dislodge ourselves from the material world (which is a tough enough task on its own) will be in
vain if we remain unequipped to situate ourselves within the representational world produced by
language.
To do this, Latour follows a similar model used to account for the first half of this
bifurcation. Latour reminds us that the reign of matter and amalgam of reproduction,
reference, and also politics over the realm of primary qualities has obliged the Moderns to
group together somewhere all the secondary qualities on which subjectivities, feelings, meaning,
in short, lived experience, rely (235). That is to say, by relegating the primary qualities of the
world wholly outside of the Moderns' actual lived experience, the Moderns are forced to produce
a secondary symbolic reality, one that is essentially cobbled together with the things that didnt
fit into the primary reality (i.e., all of the non-quantifiable data that Science doesnt know what
to do with). For this reason, the lived experience of the Moderns is rendered increasingly

meaningless by the institution of Science. This is a problem, but not an unresolvable one: Latour
suggests that, in order to reinvigorate our lived experience with meaning, we must first draw an
explicit distinction between sense and sign. Latour encourages us to recall that the primary
project of this inquiry is to account for the prepositions of different modes such that they can be
effectively grappled with in relation to each other. The goal of our engagement with experience,
then, is to track the movement from the preposition to what that preposition indicates. With this
in mind, Latour suggests that term sense indicates the direction or trajectory that is traced by a
mode and that defines both the predecessors an the successors of any course of action
whatsoever, as well as the path that has to be navigated in order for something to persist in being
(236). That is to say, sense is the medium that produces continuity between the discontinuous
iterations of a given mode. In contradistinction to this, a sign is a particular representational
relationship that arises within a given mode. A sign is something internal to a mode, whereas
sense is the medium that facilitates the production of the mode. This distinction is important if
we are to avoid falling into the category mistake of taking signs for sense: the trick will be
discerning what kind of sense facilitates the signs that produce our symbolic world.
With this distinction in mind, Latour turns to the mode of fiction, or [FIC], suggesting
that this term does not direct our attention toward illusion, toward falsity, but toward what is
fabricated, consistent, real (238). This statement can be understood through the distinction
drawn between sense and sign: the beings of fiction, or the invisible forces that produce a
symbolic world are real in the sense that they are internally consistent with the mode in which
they are produced. On some level, we intuitively understand this: the connection we feel to

fictional characters serves as evidence that they can and do affect us. As Latour points out, we
dont have to work terribly hard to convince [ourselves] that the beings of fiction, like those of
law, indeed possess full and complete reality in their genre, with their own type of verification,
transcendence, and being (239). We understand, at least in principle, that if a given statement is
prefaced with an adverb like fictitiously, what we are dealing with is not inherently and
objectively false, but rather a specific form of reality, with its own set of felicity conditions.
Latour advises that as long as we remain cognizant of this, we shouldnt have too much trouble
discerning the nature of fictions preposition.
Unfortunately, this again serves to highlight the disparity between theory and practice for
the Moderns: while we can at least conceive of fiction as a separate mode of existence, we very
rarely do so in practice. Our celebration of art almost always engages with it as a reflection of the
real world (i.e., consider the appeal of a genre like realism), thus suggesting that art is not
practically understood as a mode in its own right, but rather a style of symbolic representation
within a different mode (and this mode is, of course, the world of matter that our dogmatic
devotion to Science has essentially forced us to accept as primary and objective). For this reason,
we only really grant existence to beings of fiction through a suspension of disbelief. But
consider what this term actually means: when we suspend our disbelief, we are not coaxing the
beings of fiction into existence, but rather, we are coaxing ourselves out of our default mode of
existence (and the particular style of sense that facilitates continuity within that mode) such that
we can gain access to a different mode: the mode of fiction in which these beings are always
already waiting. As Latour suggests, [the beings of fiction] come to our imaginationno, they

offer us an imagination that we would not have had without them (240). So when we speak of
our subjective interpretation of a given work of art, we are saying more about ourselves than
we are about the art. The beings of fiction, then, are not ours, but rather, work with us such that
we can understand them. The beings of fiction create their own networks within which we are
nodally incorporated: in our engagement with them, we are implicated into their production of
meaning.
With this in mind, we must endeavour to find the particular sense or interpretive key
through which the beings of fiction can be understood. Latour points out that, unlike other modes
of existence, fiction is defined by hesitation, vacillation, back-and-forth movements, the
establishment of resonance between successive layers of raw material from which are drawn,
provisionally, figurations that nevertheless cannot separate themselves from this material (244).
Just as the mode of technology is able to combine the novelty-generating process of
metamorphoses with the persistence of representation to produce wholly new and innovative
objects, fiction, through its vibrational correspondence with subjective interpretations,
perpetually iterates itself into new and novel articulations. This correspondence is what renders
fiction such a demanding mode for which to provide veridiction: the interplay between the work
and the individuals that engage with it produces a growing network of subjective
interpretations. This seems to be how Latour understands the engaged audience member:
subjectivity, in the mode of fiction, is an individual who has gained access to the specific reality
of a work of art, and is engaging with it on its own terms. The condition for veridiction, then, is
the sum total of the quality of engagement achieved by the subjective perspectives. This is why,
for example, it is so jarring for audience members when actors in a theatre production suddenly

break the forth wall: we have gained access to the fictional mode, and therefore a violation of the
rules of that world feel like a violation of our world. As Latour describes, we go onto another
level, in a triple shifting that is spatial, temporal, and actantial (to borrow from the jargon of
semiotics) (247). The question then becomes: who sends us there?
Latour suggests an answer. He points out that our transportation into the mode of fiction
is not facilitated entirely by the flesh-and-blood author (247), nor is it entirely facilitated by the
reader herself (i.e., I cant be forced into engaging with a work, nor can I force myself to be
engaged). Rather, suggests Latour, it is the work itself that does the transportation: in its
articulation, it iteratively produces us as part of itself. The reader of a fiction, in the act of
reading, allows the work to articulate its own world, and articulate the reader as a being within
that world1. As Latour explains, for each level of articulation two new levels are immediately
generated, the one ahead of you, beyond, what is expressed, level n+1, and the other, beneath,
behind, but also ahead, level n-1, that of the virtual addressee (248). It is through this iterative
manner of articulation that the work is able to create its reader within its own mode. It is through
exactly this manner of articulation that we can understand not only works of fiction, but also the
production of all of our symbolic modular frameworks: In telling ourselves that we belong to a
specific political party, for example, we iteratively produce a narrative in which we are a part of
that party. Similarly, our aesthetic evaluation of depends on a similar transportation to a position

1 Crucially, this is not to say the reader is somehow implicated into the narrative frame, but something
more subtle: the reader is articulated into the fictional and abstract position of audience, and thus
positioned, by the work, as an entity within the mode of fiction.

of a virtual spectator. As Latour explains, [i]f you find a this mountain landscape spectacular, it
is because you are grasping the beings of reproduction as if their arrangement were a work
projecting around itself a virtual arranger who has set up for you, a virtual spectator, a series of
planes each of which plays the role of material for a form that cannot be detached from it (250).
In this way, Latour provides a mechanism through which symbolic modes of representation can
be understood and evaluated.

Chapter 10: Learning to Respect Appearances

In this chapter, Latour directly addresses the mechanism through which ontological continuity is
achieved. For much of the book thus far, Latour has insisted that our reality is essentially
produced through a series of iterations, each separated by a hiatus. This is further complicated by
the fact that, in our our daily lives, we Moderns are almost perpetually shifting existential modes:
in one day, a Modern citizen can travel from home, to church, and to her job as a lawyer. As we
have seen, each of these domains requires its own distinct mode, and yet we are able to shift
from mode to mode in a manner that feels basically continuous, despite the fact that separate
modes can often be demonstrated to be, in theory, incompatible (i.e., the mechanisms of science
have often been used to discredit many of the stories in the Bible, and yet many scientifically
literate people are able to fully and seamlessly transition into the mode of Religion with very
little difficulty). With this in mind, Latour reminds us that this inquiry does not consist simply in
highlighting the modes but also in identifying for each one the inflections that come up
throughout with it would be appropriate to call their ontological historywith apologies to the

real historians (261). This is to say, we must identify the mechanism that allows for the fluid
experiential transition between modes.
To do this, Latour advises that we need to familiarize ourselves with a new mode, one
that will make it possible to account for the apparent continuity of action (262). As a precedent
for this new mode, Latour turns to the work of Socrates, who, in his own inquiry into modes of
existence, asserted that this continuity of experience was enabled by the essence of a practice,
and so he endeavoured to force practitioners to explain to him their ti esti?. As Latour points
out, he was disappointed every time by the practitioners inability to express what they were
doing (262). Within the context of Latours own inquiry, we can see why this method of
questioning was ineffective: the question of knowledge of a practice is itself bounded to a
specific and singular mode (recall chapter threes distinction between the world and
knowledge about the world), such that any answer would always already be bounded by its
chain of reference (i.e., knowledge claims are always supported and limited by their
epistemological framework, and so by definition cannot transcend their own framework). Latour
opines that while the Socratic method fell too quickly into the trap of knowledge claims, the
impulse toward some kind of transcendent essence" that allows experiential continuity seems
like a productive place to start. With this in mind, Latour announces the project of this chapter:
we now have to ask ourselves the question of the modes of existence of essence (264).
To locate this mode, Latour returns to the notion of preposition, or the mechanism that
allows us to discern the direction of a trajectory (i.e., thus allowing us to fully account for
knowledge claims within their epistemological framework). Latour notes that while the

prepositions indicate a point of origin for a trajectory, they dont actually describe the nature of
the trajectory (much in the same way that a genre of a book tells what kind of book it is without
actually determining what, specifically, is in the book). The real meaning that can be drawn from
the preposition is facilitated by a new branding, the one that makes it possible to add a
continuation to what the prepositions merely indicated (265). That is to say, the identification of
this new mode is the second half of a mechanism that will allow us to both fully describe a
knowledge claim as well as fully account for the epistemological framework that enables its
intelligibility. Latour terms this new mode in reference to William James: habit, blessed habit
(265).
The nature of this new mode is both complex and completely familiar, and Latour
describes our interaction with it through the crossings of different modes. For example, the
intersection of Technology and Habit is evident in what is traditionally understood as muscle
memory: [a]s long as I am unskilled at putting up cinder-block walls, I feel the rapid passage of
the technological upsurge, but once the subtle arrangements of the muscle and nerve reflexes in
relation to each tool and material have been established, I line up the sequence of works and days
without even being aware of it, as if I were totally adjusted to my task (265). In this sense, the
essence" of any practice can be understood not as an abstract and perfected form that can be
discerned and disseminated, but rather, the highly specific mode through which a conscious set
of actions is converted into a subconscious and continuous flow. Without the mode of Habit, we
would be limiting ourselves to the prepositions of different modes without producing the
trajectory to which they lead. The actions would remain discontinuous and, ultimately, no

domains could be formed. As Latour opines, [w]e would be a little like Narcissus mistaking the
contemplation of his navel an incontrovertible signature left by the most initial of the
prepositions for life itself (266).
With this new mode in mind, Latour points out that we can now distinguish between two
different types of category mistake: being mistaken about the mode of the one hand and on the
other limiting ourselves to the search for the right mode without advancing toward what it
indicates (266). This is a tricky idea, as it seems to complicate Latours previous notion that
each mode is already defined by its unique series of hiatuses through which it rearticulates itself,
whereas Habit (and the advancement toward Habit) seems to entirely smooth over these hiatuses
such that each mode can be experienced fluidly. In response to this, Latour offers a slight
adjustment to his original notion of mode, suggesting that these hiatuses, or minitranscendences are glossed over by Habit as an effect of immanence (266), such that the
immanence of essence does not contradict the notion transcendence, but rather it is a necessary
contrast that actually enables it: the hiatuses are, in this sense, filled by Habit 2. Latour offers a
helpful metaphor, suggesting that our experience of reality is similar to the phenomenon of the
motion picture: when we watch a movie, we know that what we are actually watching is a
series of rapidly articulated still images that produce the effect of motion. In the same way, we

2 and not to further complicate things, but it is also important to recall that Habit is an exclusively
ontological mechanism, in contradistinction to the previously discussed interpretive keys: the
interpretive key of a given mode (e.g., the use of means in Law) also produces continuity, but it is the
continuity of the mode itself, whereas Habit produces the continuity of our experience of that mode.

can acknowledge the hiatuses that iteratively articulate our experience of any given mode while
also acknowledging that Habit will smooth these hiatuses out of our experience.
Crucially, this is not to say that habits function as a kind of existential auto-pilot: After all, even
our most habitual practices can be disrupted if we notice something is off. My morning routine of
making coffee and walking my dog can be altered on the fly in response to bad weather, thus
suggesting that while the process follows a continuous flow, there is still something awake,
anticipating change. This anticipation is where Latour suggests we can root out and exfoliate bad
habits. Here he inserts another useful metaphor: Lets say that bad habits are to good ones what
spam is to electronic messagesPhilosophy has always conceived of itself, and rightly so, as an
anti spam apparatus (270). In this sense, problematic practices (and here we can think about
things like institutional racism, institutional sexism, etc.) can be exfoliated when the experiential
inertia that supports (or rather conceals) their continuity is properly accounted for using the
mechanisms described in this inquiry: we must account for the preposition and habitual mode
that sustain our bad practices, such that we can expose them and, ultimately, replace them.