Abstract

Actors, Relations and Agency. Ontology in Bruno Latour and New Materialism Many new materialist theories are strongly influenced by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. This article reconstructs how the conceptual framework of the latter has come to inform the ontologies of the former. This helps identify an ontological inconsistency. Both define entities in exclusively relational terms while also maintaining that entities have agency. I show why these ideas are incompatible, and argue that Latour’s work contains promising conceptual resources to remedy the problem.