It is always something of a challenge to try and capture the central ideas and contributions of social theorists in a short blog. This is especially the case with a thinker like Bruno Latour. I am indebted here to Steve Matthewman’s (see ref) summary account as much to my own reading and understanding, and he opens his account by citing Harman’s claim that there are four points that represent Latour’s principles:
- Actors – everything that exists is an actor, and all must be treated in the same way.
- Irreduction – nothing xan be reduced to or replaced by something else.
- Translation – as there can be no replacements, real work is required to influence other entities.
- Association – strength or weakness is a function of alliances and associations, and it is the task of social science to expose and trace these connections.
Latour’s project began as a challenge to the sociology of science but, Matthewman argues, has since travelled to challenge the very enterprise of social science itself.
Early on Latour argued that the social sciences had come to neglect material objects and their properties. Technologies were seen as ‘neutral’, as (mere) things, rather than mediators exercising agency. Thus, non-human agency is introduced, and as a consequence social science needed to be recalibrated. This was to become pivotal for what became known as ‘actor-network theory’ (ANT).
The core insight of ANT is that scientific research and the disputes it generates come down to the generation of narratives and the recruitment of non-human as well as human allies to the cause. ‘Nature’ cannot resolve scientific disputes, but is rather a function of the settlement of scientific controversies.
Society is the consequence not the cause of stability. It acquires stability only when humans and non-humans are linked to form networks, or ‘durable chains of association’. Irrational is a label applied to those ‘enemies’ who impede ‘network formation’.
As Matthewman puts it: ‘ANT eschews the subject-object dichotomy and their setting within something called society. In their place, Latour proposes associations of humans and non-humans within a collective … Instead of thinking about essential differences in binary opposition, ANT’s explanatory framework stresses the stability and durability of actor-networks. This explains what keeps society together.’
We must, Latour insists, confront the thingness of things. Society is an ‘assemblage’ of people and things in combination. Social control is down to things as well as humans: consider drivers, the law and speed bumps for example:
‘If a cyclist falls off his bicycle because he hits a rock, social scientists confess, they have nothing to say. It is only if a policeman, a lover, an insurance agent or the Good Samaritan enter the scene that a social science becomes possible, because we are now faced … with a string of socially meaningful events. Not so for (ANT) practitioners, who deem sociologically interesting and empirically analysable, the very mechanisms of the bicycle, the paving of the roads, the geology of rocks, the physiology of wounds and so on, without taking the boundary between matter and society as a division of labour between the natural and the social sciences’ (Latour, writing in the BJS in 2000).
These are the bare bones of ANT, if my extreme brevity here can be forgiven. But if these are the primary and relatively enduring themes running through Latour’s work, even he would not claim consistency in his writings. He has left and returned to the ANT fold more than once. There have been innumerable critiques. It has been contended that ANT does not amount to a theory. Critics have suggested that it comprises a method – a toolkit – rather than a theory.
They have also maintained that there are essential differences between humans and non-humans: when all’s said and done, technologies lack intentionality and do not act. Steve Fuller has argued that ANT donates too much power to technology, and in addition serves to reinforce the notion of the heroic inventor/engineer. In typically Fuller fashion, he suggests that ANT stories smack of ‘flexible fascism’ by focusing on the triumph of the wills of technicians and the ongoing project of imposing visions of order on others by means of omnipotent technologies.
Another criticism is that ANT disciples almost invariably focus on those networks favour rather than those they exclude, and networks of course impose on the excluded too. Donna Haraway makes the related point that ANT mostly ‘tells great tales of men and their machines, while other non-scientist humans and non-human non-machines are marginalised’ (Matthewman). Latour and associates have nothing to say about the likes of class, gender and race, she protests, which can be interpreted as network effects and as the products of technoscience.
What is my own view? I would draw an analogy with postmodernism (notwithstanding the all-embracing generality of that word). Why? I have argued elsewhere that – what now seems assuredly like the passing cultural phase of – postmodernism was disinhibiting and not, as was repeatedly asserted at the time, emancipatory. Moreover it was disinhibiting much as alcohol is disinhibiting. How come? Postmodernism was undeniably a type of cultural relativism (and as Habermas noted, as such it camouflaged a form of political neo-conservatism by functioning to underpin the status quo and undermining any and all rationally compelling manifestos for alternative futures). ANT strikes me as disinhibiting rather than radical/emancipatory too, in so far as it demands greater reflexivity in relation to the taken-for-granted premises of contemporary social science and sociology without itself offering a credible alternative framing. It’s value is as a heuristic device: like many postmodern tracts, its service is to shake up our preconceptions (‘things’ and ‘thingness’ matter). Maybe indeed the intrusion of ‘things’ has been neglected, not factored into theory or practice. BUT things don’t act, don’t have agency in the sense that humans do. Footballs, nets, stadia and so on are critical for a sociology of soccer, but footballs themselves don’t’ exercise any kind of meaningful agency (however much it can appear otherwise when England play Germany).
To close with a personal preference, I would favour a critical realist frame for theorising the simultaneous causal power – and potential for impacting on events – of natural, biological, psychological and social mechanisms. Each of these strata of mechanisms is irreducible to another; but the concept of ‘emergence’ helps explain the ways in which, for example, one’s DNA and/or personality or aptitude can help one in graduating to the England soccer XI and performing in an explicitly social event, the World Cup. But this is another story, and one I have written and blogged about in detail!
Reference
Matthewman,S (2017) Bruno Latour. In Ed Stones,R: Key Sociological Thimnkers (3rd Ed). London; Palgrave.