Chapter 13: The Passage of Law and Quasi Subjects

In this chapter, Latour returns to the existential mode of law, in an effort to provide a
rigorous accounting of the the Modern experience of the legal domain. Unlike the previously
examined domains of this inquiry, the domain of law has not been complexly enmeshed into the
tangled networks of Modern life, but rather, offers a satisfying correspondence between a
domain, an institution, and a contrast whose specificity, technicity, and centrality seem to have
been recognized by everyone (358). For this reason, Latour can feel confident in trusting the
explanations offered by his informants, as the division between practice and theory remains
remarkably close. All of the domanial elements that we are usually required to manually uncover
are, for law, apparent on its surface: most crucially, laws mode of veridiction is both a central
feature of its practical function and also universally acknowledged as capable of distinguishing
truth from falsity in its own way (359). Where in previous chapters we have laboured to account
for what exactly we mean when we say were speaking technologically or religiously, there is
very little ambiguity when one says that one is speaking legally.
While it is clear that the domain of law occupies a well-defined and sharply-bordered
space, Latour suggests that it is the isolated nature of the domain of law that renders it difficult to
completely grasp: When lawyers are asked to define what they do, they string together long
sentences in which they unfailingly use the adjective legal to qualify everything they say,
without troubling to define it further, without even realizing that they are caught up in a

tautology (359). In this way, the domain of law comes to be defined by its own existence: one is
either inside the domain of law and can define it only in its own terms, or one is outside the
domain of law and therefore never really required to fully understand it anyway. This is not to
say that those outside the domain of law arent required to follow laws, but rather that those not
indoctrinated into the domain are unable to understand, fully, the apparatuses that produce legal
truth (recall the explanation of means in chapter one). Crucially, unlike the mode of science,
the mode of law is always understood as a distinct mode of existence: while scientific truths are
regularly conflated with objective truths (even by those outside of science, who dont fully
understand how that truth was produced), legal truths are always understood as such. As Latour
opines, Law thus benefits precisely from the form of respectful difference that would have
protected all the modes of veridiction we have been reviewing here (360). The project for this
chapter, then, is to examine the autonomous position that the moderns have given the mode of
law, leaving it exclusively in the hands of of specialists, who in turn keep the interpretive key of
law as a kind of gnostic secret. Latour endeavours to discern why, for legal experts, it is perfectly
obvious why something is legally true or false, while for those external to the machinations of
the law, it is often unclear, such that it is a total surprise to see that law can both take on so much
importance and take up so little space (361).
It is this element of surprise, which is a defining feature of the average Modern citizens
experience of the law, that leads Latour to suggest that the legal domain is, at its most basic,
superficial and formal (361). The superficiality is essential (as will be discussed below) as it
points to the necessarily reductive transformation that the law applies to any given situation such

that it can fit with previous situations (i.e., a new case will often appeal to a precedent set by a
previous, similar case). The degree to which law is formal, though, requires a more elaborate
definition. For Latour, law is formal because it depends on forms in order to produce continuity
through seemingly vast hiatuses of discontinuity. Each new legal case becomes gradually
assimilated into a predetermined form, such that the domain of law, through its superficial
renderings of the cases it handles, doesnt so much iteratively evolve into the Modern era as it
iteratively extends itself, fitting new legal situations into itself. The domain of law, in this sense,
is not innovatively reproducing itself into the increasingly complex world of modernity, but
rather, innovatively fitting the increasingly complex world of modernity into itself.
This understanding of the law as a separate and expansive domain is further complicated
by the practical flexibility that it exhibits in its ability to absorb injunctions from many other
domains. As Latour describes, legal experts themselves understand this fact quite well, which
leads him to suggest that not only is law superficial and formal, but also a rather clumsy
disguise for inequalities. Tell me what you want to get out of this and Ill find you the legal
wrappings that will do the job (362). In this way, Latour highlights a central problem of the
modern domain of law: it is understood as a mysteriously separate entity for the average modern
citizen, and it can use this mysterious separateness to obscure the potentially exploitative
dynamics of power in modern society. So while the domain of law appears to be an easy domain
to identify (i.e., we can always tell when someone is speaking legally), the real labour of this
inquiry is in discerning how other modes are handled through law, such that we can peel them

back, or as Latour suggests, we have to begin by unburdening La Fontaines ass carrying relics
and ask it to transport only itself (363).
So, how is continuity achieved within the domain of law? As explained in chapter one,
the interpretive key of the domain is its means: when lawyers discuss the available means of a
given case, they are trying to discern how exactly to produce continuity between otherwise
discontinuous phenomena. The actual material manifestation of these means, Latour opines, is a
series of dossiers whose content, size, and composition vary according to the stage reached by
the affair in question (364). These dossiers offer a clear representation of the superficiality
mentioned above: through the mechanisms of bureaucracy, complex material entanglements can
be reduced to their legally relevant components, such that they can be effectively integrated into
the domain of law. Crucially, this metamorphosis from raw experiential phenomena to
quantifiable legal data has a unidirectional flow: as Latour opines: [t]he legal professionals are
not looking for novelty or for access to remote states of affairs; they are seeking only to stir up
this fact in every direction in order to see what principle could actually be used to judge it; they
are seeking only to stir up all the principles until they find the one that could perhaps be applied
also to this fact (364). This is the trick that keeps law so isolated from the rest of the modern
world. It is homeostatic, not seeking to collaboratively adapt along with the rest of the larger
world, but rather, it is gradually fitting small pieces of the larger world into its prefabricated legal
forms.
It is this homeostatic quality that makes law such a unique domain of the modern world.
Unlike other modes, whose iterative subsistence through time necessarily forces them to adapt to
the changing world, law is able to perpetuate itself while also ensuring the reattachment of its

frames of reference after each iteration. But, as Latour warns, this reattachment comes at a price:
its strict adherence to its forms ultimately produces subjects who are sustained, continuously,
through their obligations to the law. As Latour explains, law brings of the miracle of proceeding
as through, by particular linkages, we were held to what we say and what we do (370). Unlike
the mode of politics, where subjects are iteratively produced in relation to an adaptive set of
values, legal subjects are produced and sustained through their static attachment to the law.
Crucially, recall the superficial manner through which legal professionals reduce phenomena to
their legally relevant qualities: what this all suggests is that law offers no actual informational
content, but is primarily concerned with the networking of phenomena in its own terms. That is
to say, law is primarily a mechanism of networking: it links phenomena through a series of
reductive and necessarily superficial apparatuses, thus effectively sustaining itself through the
sheer nodal volume. As Latour explains, law "manages to circulate everywhere, to mobilize the
totality of law for every case, but with the draconian condition attached: it must say almost
nothing, except that there have been attachments- of one utterance to another, one enunciator to
another, one act to another, one text to another (370). Through law, subjects are produced not
through informational substance, but through obligation to other subjects. In this way, Latour
presents a novel explanation for laws role in modern social cohesion: it mutely tethers
phenomena to each other, iteratively producing subjectivities that are not based on any notion of
internal space, but rather, defined by their networked obligation to other iteratively produced
subjectivities.

Chapter 14: Speaking of Organization it its own Language

In this chapter, Latour addresses the master discourse (383) of Modern life: The
Economy. Throughout this inquiry, Latour has attempted to give a rigorous accounting of the
ontological modes through which the Modern subject and the Modern society arise, although, he
now admits, he has ignored the plain fact that when he tells any of his Modern informants that he
is inquiring into their various modes of existence, they dont think about the exact weight of
divinities, gods, microbes, fish, or pebbles, but rather about the way they themselves earn their
living, their subsistence (382). That is to say, while each of the modes previously discussed
contribute, to varying degrees, to the construction of the Modern subject, it is through the
Economy that the Moderns experience the world (Latour goes so far as to call The Economy a
second Nature(383)). With this in mind, Latour now endeavours to account for the primacy of
the Economy in the Modern world.
To do this, Latour first searches for an angle from which the Economy can be examined
in isolation. Initially, this seems like a straightforward task, as our globalized market appears to
provide a universal calculus through which the whole of the earth can be understood. As Latour
observes, The Economy offers the analyst such a powerful metalanguage, its investigation might
be concluded at once, as if everyone, from one end of the planet to the other, were now using the
same terms to define the value of all things (383). Through the mechanism of currency,
everything can be understood and quantified. This is a tempting notion, especially in contrast to
the complex apparatuses laid out so far in this inquiry. Unfortunately, the universal metalanguage
of The Economy bears an unsettling resemblance to the amalgamation of representation and
reference through which the moderns mistakenly conflate statements about the world with the
world itself (recall, in chapter four, the inability of the map to fully represent the mountain). Just

as an uncritical faith in the institution of science has rendered the natural world unknowable to
the Moderns, our devotion to The Economy has reduced the world to a flat set of quantifiable
resources, valued primarily (and often exclusively) in terms of capital. As Latour opines, [i]f
The Economy is universal, it is because of the deadly ailment, the unpardonable crime known as
Capitalism, which continues to be a monstrous product of history that has infected nearly all the
cells of a body unequipped to resist it (384). In this way, The Economy is schizophrenically
positioned as both a universal language of a globalized network, and a cancerous infection
systematically destroying the earth. Faced with these two narratives, Latour seeks to
diseconomize his inquiry, such that he can grasp the experiential weight of what his informants
tell him without inflecting it with the seemingly contradictory role that The Economy plays on
our planet.
With this in mind, Latour goes on to identify a tripartite gap between The Economy and
our experience of it. The first feature of this gap is one of temperature. In theory, the economy is
understood as the ice-cold, rational, coherent, and continuous manifestation of the calculation of
interests alone (386). In practice, though, the phenomena through which The Economy is made
manifest are hot, violent, active, rhythmic, rapid, [and] discontinuous (386): Latour describes
the irrational impulses that inform materialist trends like fashion, or the lives lost at sea as
labourers are forced to emigrate overseas in pursuit of employment. A gap emerges as we are
unable to reconcile the cold calculus of economics with fiery human passions through which it is
made manifest.
Latour identifies second feature of the gap between economic theory and practice in the
level of discourse surrounding the increasingly complicated mechanisms for distributing goods

and resources on a global scale. As Latour explains, his informants tell him that the central
question of The Economy consists in dividing up rare good, in parceling out scarce materials,
benefits, or goods, or, on the contrary, in making the largest number profit from a marvellous
horn of plenty debited from one resource or another (386). In theory, then, one would expect to
find a crowed agora, or a robust discourse on how exactly the increasingly scarce resources of
the earth can be used to benefit the largest amount of people. In practice, this is not the case. In
fact, Latour suggests that [t]he very pale where everything must be decided and discussed, since
these are matters of life and death for everyone and everything, appears to be a public square
entirely emptied of all its protagonists (387). In practice, it appears that the Economy functions
on a kind of autopilot: the big picture decisions are not discussed and debated openly in the
agora, such that the fiery passions of humanity emerge only when the structures are already in
place.
The third feature of the gap between economic theory and practice is its institutional
solidity. In theory, The Economy is comprised of solid and continuous structures. Latour
anticipates

defined,

durable,

circumscribed

entities

called

enterprises,

apparatuses,

arrangements, perhaps even nation-states (387). In practice, though, The Economy appears to
be much more ephemeral than one would expect. Actants come and go in a perpetual state of
reorganization. What appears to be a stable corporate entity capitalizing on the resources of a
specific region can suddenly dissolve, leaving nothing behind but an empty mineshaft. Latour
admits, there is no way [one] could ever define the borders of these entities that keep on
expanding or contracting like accordions (388). The immaterial theoretical structure of The

Economy makes its material manifestations impossible to fully define in any sustainable way. By
identifying the three aspects of the gap between theory and practice in The Economy, Latour
provides three distinct threads through which we can begin to account for The Economy on its
own terms. In this chapter, Latour focuses on the practical ephemerality of the apparatuses that
iteratively constitute The Economy, through a new mode which he terms Organizations (or
[ORG])1. Latour endeavours to use this mode to produce a theoretical framework through which
we can understand the perpetual expansions and contractions that characterize the apparatuses of
The Economy.
To give a full accounting of the mode of Organization, Latour starts with a simple practical
course of action: Let us take a meeting between two friends. Paul: Ill meet you tomorrow
afternoon at 5:45 at the Gare de Lyon under the big clock. Ok? Peter: Ok, see you tomorrow.
Cheers. (390). Latour explains that what this exchange establishes is a scenario in which both
Paul and Peter have projected themselves into the near future. This is essentially a kind of
fiction: They have told each other a story about the future, and are now mutually obligated to
fulfill the story, by actually showing up at the designated time and place. In this way, their little
story serves as an organizational mechanism. The felicity conditions for these stories hinge on
wether or not they are actualized: Peter and Pauls scenario is felicitous when they fulfill the
obligation enacted by their fictional counterparts. This is fairly straightforward, but it is
complicated by the fact that, in practice, we are always in the process of fulfilling (and
occasionally not fulfilling) many narratives. That is to say, the various obligations of our daily
lives produce a set of fictional versions of ourselves, the sum total of which produce a kind of
1 The other two aspects of this gap are dealt with in the following chapters

network of obligation through which we are forced to navigate. This complicates our original
interpretation of the Peter and Paul scenario: the addition of this new narrative produces fictional
versions of Peter and Paul with new spatial, temporal, and actantial trajectories. These
trajectories must then be superimposed over a whole set of previously established obligations:
Peter may have also scheduled a dentist appointment earlier that day, and Paul might have
already agreed to spend the day working on an article for a friends blog. In this way, each new
organization is also a disorganization: [t]o organize is to pick up, along the way and on the fly,
scripts with staggered outcome that are going to disorganize others(393). Here we have found
the hiatuses that must be iteratively traversed to provide continuity within this mode: the act of
organization is constantly interrupted through the accumulation of new scripts. Each new script,
then, creates a hiatus that the subject must traverse: each new fictional Peter iteratively produces
a new actual Peter with a reorganized set of obligations.
Crucially, this theory of organization should not be understood as a definitive answer to
the question of free will: Peter and Paul are not forced to follow the narratives they produce, nor
are the production of these narratives to be understood as an expression of Peter and Pauls
agency. Rather, the compounded trajectories of these various scripts iteratively define the
margins for maneuver (399), or the indeterminate space within the broadly defined conduits of
their scripted obligations. As Latour explains, all these scripts end up merging into an
undifferentiated mass that resembles a phenomenon of a different order[b]ut it is only a matter
of resemblance. If Peter and Paul both sigh and curse Paris life, consumer society, and perhaps
life in general, this in no way implies that what they are designating made made of some other

matter than their meeting at the train station (399-400). That is to say, the mode of organization,
and the network of scripted fictional entities that it produces, are not made of the material world
that they organize, but rather, provide a broad structure through which it can be made manifest.
Here we might see how this can be tied back to the discussion of The Economy: the apparatuses
through which The Economy is iteratively sustained are not, in themselves, The Economy.
Rather, they are objects that represent an actualization of a particular iteration of The Economy.
In this way, The Economy is sustained through its aggregation of new scripts, leaving a
seemingly discontinuous set of objects in its wake.