The possibility of inclusion

On 5 February 2008, in the Graham Wallas Room of the London School of Economics’ Old Building, a small group of researchers gathered to listen to Graham Harman discuss the book he had devoted to the work of Bruno Latour – the latter himself being present. It was a meeting destined to occur: since 1999, when he published his first article on the French thinker, Harman had never ceased to attempt to articulate the seemingly antagonistic thoughts of his two favourite thinkers: Latour and Heidegger. When he wrote Prince of Networks, the monograph in which he explained his understanding of the work of Latour, the form taken by this articulation was finally complete, although it remained controversial – a form in which Latour was only able to half-recognise himself. Or so he told Harman, who heard it. The book that was eventually published from the manuscript discussed at the London School of Economics differed in many respects from its original version – yet, Harman persisted in maintaining the main thesis defended in it. According to this thesis, the thought of Latour was caught in a process of infinite regress, since its primary object was the network of relationships in which things have access to something like an essence or a being. For Harman, this was a paradox that he refused, nevertheless, to regard as a flaw or a weakness – a paradox that could be formulated as a question: what is a network, if not a thing whose being, if one was to follow Latour's argumentation, should be considered in terms of relations? Even if it was a thought centred on ontological tolerance, Latour's metaphysics stumbled against the fact that there were beings excluded from this tolerance – or rather beings that this tolerance included in a form other than the form of being. To this objection, Latour's response was easy: if networks did not belong to the realm of beings, it was because being could be said in multiple ways, and because that multiplicity included an ontological ‘class’, a ‘mode of existence’, which was precisely that of the network.