Bruno Latour, Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione (con una nota di Jacques Fontanille), Aracne, 2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17388
application/pdf
2038-3460
17388
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Alvise Mattozzi
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Bruno Latour, Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation (with a note by Jacques Fontanille), Aracne, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
240-244
TS
Alvise Mattozzi
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17388
240
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
2038-3460
2
en
244
Bruno Latour, Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation (with a note by Jacques Fontanille), Aracne, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17388/16248
8
240                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

fixed as the reality – the accepted facts, the known events, the shared
truths – also constitutes the experiential and cognitive limit of the inquir-
er, marks the boundaries of the hitherto known world, and the nature
and quality of social interaction. And what is called reality coincides with
the place and time in which the practice of reflexivity gets suspended” (p.
265).
    Just as the keyword of Thurston Moore’s album is not so much
“Rock’n’roll” as “consciousness”, so the keyword of Giovan Francesco
Lanzara’s text is not “practice”, “technology” or “innovation” but rather
“reflection”. And reflection (like music) is never-ending.



                                    ***

    Bruno Latour
Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione (con una nota di Jacques Fontanille)
[Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation (with a note by Jacques Fontanille)], Ro-
ma, Aracne, 2017, pp. 68

Alvise Mattozzi Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

     Providing an autonomous format to Bruno Latour’s 1999 article “Pic-
cola filosofia dell’enunciazione” [Tiny Philosophy of Enunciation] with
both the original French version and the already published one in Italian,
was the right move. Now that some years have passed since the publica-
tion of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) (Latour 2013), it can
result extremely useful to have at hand one of the sources, and one of the
steps towards, AIME, in order to better understand and appreciate
Latour’s trajectory in its entirety.
     This new version of Latour’s article is accompanied by a useful after-
word – in Italian and in French – by French semiotician Jacques Fon-
tanille – “Dagli atti di enunciazione ai modi di esistenza” [From acts of
enunciation to modes of existence] (pp. 43-52 and pp. 53-63). In such
afterword, Fontanille clarifies the closeness and the distance between
Latour’s proposal and the original theory of enunciation, from which
Latour draws, in order to track and describe the relations giving way to
different modes of existence.
     “Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione” (PFE; Latour 1999) has been ini-
tially published in a festschrift dedicated to Paolo Fabbri, semiotician
who introduced Latour to semiotics and with whom Latour signed his
first science studies article. Fabbri, who is now the director of the Centro
Internazionale di Studi Semiotici [International Center for Semiotic Stud-
Book Review                                                             241
ies] of Urbino, has decided to republish it within the book series of the
Center, in order to give visibility to the relevance enunciation had in this
first version of Latour’s system of “modes of existence” or “regimes of
enunciation”.
    In PFE, Latour indeed explores, for the first time in a general system-
atic way, the descriptive and comparative possibilities of the enunciation-
al model developed within Greimassian semiotics and already used by
Latour in more focused studies of science, technological artifacts, religion
and law that have lead to AIME.
    As Fontanille underlines in the final part of his afterword (p. 49 and
p. 60), in between PFE and AIME, Latour discovers the French philoso-
pher of modes of existence Etienne Souriau, thus replacing “regimes of
enunciation”, concept that appears in PFE, with “modes of existence”.
Consequently, in AIME acts of enunciation do not prime anymore and
“enunciation”, though not absent, is replaced by “instauration”, another
concept proposed by Souriau. For Fontanille such “ontological turn” is
problematic not only because puts semiotics – which has had a key role in
Latour’s construction – in the shade, but especially because puts into the
shade, behind existences, signification processes (semiosis) and the sensi-
tive experience, which, for Fontanille, are directly connected to enuncia-
tion intended as production of signification (p. 45 and p. 55).
    Since the first formulation of the concept by French linguist Emile
Benveniste, theories of enunciation have been elaborated in order to tack-
le the articulation of the relations between what is in a sentence or in a
text and the situation of its production or of its reception. Greimas and
his collaborators have proposed a general model of enunciation in order
to describe and analyze these relations and their various shiftings, not on-
ly for verbal language, but also for gestures, images, artifacts, etc.
    Since at least the end of the ‘80s, Latour has found Greimas’ model
very useful in order to account for acts of mediations, or “sending” or
“delegation” or “passing” (pp. 10 and pp. 26). Such model is articulated
in three basic instances:
     1. the enunciation, or “pass” for Latour
     2. the enunciate, or message or “what is passed”, the “quasi-object”
          in the case of Latour, in which traces of the enunciation can be
          tracked
     3. the relation between an enunciator (3a), the sender, or
          “who/what passes”, and an enunciatee (3b), the receiver, “to
          whom/to which is passed”.
    This last relation is mediated not so much by the enunciate, the mes-
sage, like it would be in communication models, but by the enunciation,
by the pass.
    Besides these instances, the Greimassian model, and hence the
Latourian’s one, considers two main dynamics: disengagement (shifting-
out) and (re)engagement (shifting-in). In the first case something – an
242                                                         Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

enunciate for Greimas, a quasi-object, for Latour – is produced, given
existence or “instaurated”, by detaching it from the enunciation; in the
second case, there is a return to 3), the relation between the enunciator
and the enunciatee.
    Latour, by exploring the combinatorial possibilities of the previous
features, tracks and describes nine “regimes of enunciation”, which make
up the blueprint for the first nine “modes of existence” of the fifteen con-
sidered in AIME – mind that the names chosen for these first nine “re-
gimes of enunciation” described in PFE are not always the same used for
the first nine “modes of existence” described in AIME, although their
configuration is basically the same.
    In PFE, Latour starts by considering “regimes” that do not exploit all
the instances: “Reproduction”, in which a being (enunciator) passes itself;
“Substitution”, in which there are only passes without termini, nor quasi-
objects; “Omission” or “Belief”, in which only the quasi-object takes
place, without basically any pass.
    Then, Latour considers those “regimes” that present a full-fledged ar-
ticulation of the three instances: “Technique”, in which the quasi-object
is completely disengaged from the relation between enunciator and enun-
ciatee; “Fiction”, in which there is a disengagement of the delegates of
the enunciator and the enunciatee and their world in a quasi-object; “Sci-
ence”, in which, alongside the disengagement of “Fiction”, a complete
reengagement, up to the relations between the enunciator and the enun-
ciatee, is required.
    Finally, Latour considers those “regimes” which are more concerned
with the relations between enunciator and enunciatee, the quasi-subjects:
“Politics”, through which a collective “we” is disengaged and reengaged;
“Religion” or “Love”, in which continuous reengagements toward the
enunciator or the enunciatee are carried out, producing an effect of ex-
treme presence; “Law”, which is concerned with the multiplication of the
marks left by the traces of the enunciation. They allow connecting the
quasi-object to various enunciations.
    As Fontanille notices (p. 44 and p. 54), Latour’s way of working is in-
trinsically semiotic. Nevertheless, Fontanille criticizes Latour for not be-
ing as radical as semiotics, i.e. for not completely discarding metaphysics
and Being, something Latour could have done by focusing only on the
“the stream of existence” (p. 44 and p. 54, my translation).
    However, what Latour does is exactly this. By considering being (in
lowercases in AIME) always as being-as-other, he tackles it only in “alter-
ation”, only as the result of multiple streams of becoming other. Given
that, as also Fontanille acknowledges (p. 45 and p. 55, my translation),
“alteration” is the only ground needed for semiosis to take place, it seems
to me that also the second criticism Fontanille makes, about Latour for-
getting signification processes in AIME, lapses. Latour, indeed, extends
signification processes to all modes of existence, something that he ex-
Book Review                                                                  243
plicitly says in AIME: “a sign [as] something that stands in place of some-
thing else […] remains a very general property that could define all types
of senses and meanings, even the invisible beings that we have learn to
capture in order to sketch the trajectories of being” (Latour 2013, 254).
    By reading the dialogue at distance between the two French scholars
we can then see various misunderstandings unfolding, which allow as-
sessing the mismatch that today exists between Greimassian semiotics (or,
at least, Fontanille’s version of it) and Latour’s ANT. Such mismatch
stems from the different philosophical backgrounds of the two scholars:
phenomenology for Fontanille; pragmatism for Latour.
    I deem that the value and interest of republishing PFE does not reside
so much in the fact that a reference to semiotic categories is more explicit
there than in AIME or that in PFE Latour is more attentive to meaning
processes – which, as we have seen, are relevant also in AIME. The value
and interest of republishing PFE resides, instead, in the fact that by its
conciseness and by the consequent continuous reference to the enuncia-
tional model, PFE clearly shows Latour’s method of inquiry. The latter is
the product of the same descriptive methodology he has always used,
which is grounded in semiotics: a set of categories, forming what he calls
an “infra-language”, that are “first of all negative […] [and] do not des-
ignate what is being mapped, but how it is possible to map” (Latour
2005, 174). Through these categories, in this specific case provided by the
Greimassian enunciational model, he is able to map the way in which cer-
tain beings circulate by passing from one situation to another. Thus,
Latour’s classification has nothing substantive and the various “regimes
of enunciations” Latour is able to track and describe do not have any-
thing to do with fields or social systems as, for instance, those outlined by
Pierre Bourdieu or Niklas Luhmann, although some of their names could
allow such analogy. Simplifying, I could say that Latour’s one is an opera-
tion that takes into account only the syntactic level, leaving the semantic
one to the situated enactments of the actors. Therefore, it radically differs
from the way Luhmann, for instance, singles out social systems, on the
base of semantic dichotomies like legal/illegal or possession/non-
possession.
    Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione (con una nota di Jacques Fon-
tanille) is a must-read for those interested in AIME, in Latour's thought
or in Actor-Network Theory as a material semiotics and it could result
stimulating for anyone interested in understanding how to describe and
analyze complex relations, given the reflections the book provides on this
matter, through both Latour’s and Fontanille’s contributions.

References
Latour, B. (1999) Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione, in P. Basso and L. Corrain
       (eds.), Eloqui de senso. Dialoghi semiotici per Paolo Fabbri, Genova, Co-
       sta & Nolan, pp. 71-94.
244                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-
       Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the
       Moderns, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.



                                    ***

    Tiago Morera
Science, Technology and the Ageing Society, London and New York,
Routledge, 2017, pp. 240

Roberto Lusardi University of Bergamo

    In this book, Tiago Moreira makes an interesting operation. He takes
the concept of ageing – not exactly part of the most popular STS vocabu-
lary – and then breaks it into its parts and analyses the processes connect-
ed using the STS gaze. Recalling a metaphor always effective (and dear to
the STS world), he “opens the black box” of ageing and the book wit-
nesses what he found.
    First, Moreira says that ageing is not just a demographic, medical, or
economic concern. It is a repertoire of practices and an institutional setup
that the author calls “ageing society”. He makes clear his interpretative
proposition: that the ageing society “is first and foremost a collective pre-
dicament, a swelling uncertainty concerning how to deploy procedures of
scientific research and technological innovation in addressing ageing as
an issue” (p. 1).
    As STS scholars know very well, every collective predicament, every
controversy – regardless of whether it concerns political, environmental,
or health issues – implies sociotechnical arrangements, expert knowledge,
power relations, and economic interests. The demographic data is not
secondary, of course. The United Nations set the threshold of popula-
tion’s sustainability to 7% of people being 65 or older in any given coun-
try. In Italy, according to the last ISTAT report on the national popula-
tion, the percentage of people being 65 or older has overcome that mark
by far and is at 22%.
    The same phenomenon is affecting all the so-called Western nations,
albeit in different percentages. This means that the demand for
healthcare services and funding of health insurance is increasing, as are
the pressures on systems of formal care and on processes of informal care
within families and communities. Finally, the demographic trend affects
the political and cultural attitudes of society, which tend to become more
