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Toni ÄŒerkez is a Lecturer of International Relations at the Institute of Social Sciences at Tallinn University.

'Relational IRT consists of multifaceted perspectives on the ontology and politics of relations. One point of agreement between these perspectives is the attempt to move away from Cartesian binaries of mind and body, nature and culture, most famously espoused by Bruno Latour. Latour's move, followed by most relational IRT, is to think amodernity - a monist paradigm - against dualist modernity. For Latour, this is an emancipatory step away from European-style thought that does justice to events such as climate change, which complicate Cartesian forms of thinking, as well as helping us think de-colonial forms of life.

Bringing Hannah Arendt into a critical conversation with Latour on modernity, I argue that Latour's amodernity, and consequently most relational understandings thereof, fail to appreciate that the problem in modernity is no longer thinking after dualism (i.e., dualism vs. monism). With Arendt, I posit that the problem is thinking plurality because dualism has already been surpassed by cybernetics and contemporary algorithmic technologies, which are relational. Failure to deal with this opens relational IRT and Latour to cooptation by advanced machines of capital, including neural algorithms and Big Data, thus reproducing modern tendencies of domination and exploitation Latour wanted to counter with his project of amodernity.'

Discussants: Liisi Keedus, Georg Sootla ja Martin Aidnik

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