Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Author

Bruno Latour (1947–2022), French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher of science. With Michel Callon and John Law, Latour was a principal architect of actor-network theory (ANT) and of the laboratory-ethnography tradition that began with Laboratory Life (1979).

Publication Details

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. 301 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-925604-4 (hardback), 978-0-19-925605-1 (paperback).

Description

The book is Latour's attempt to write a manual for a method he had spent twenty-five years practising and had repeatedly disowned the name of. It is organised as a dialogue: a fictional doctoral student keeps interrupting to ask what, practically, one is supposed to do, and Latour keeps refusing to give the answer sociology usually gives.

That refusal is the argument. Latour distinguishes two uses of the word "social." In the first, the sociology of the social, "social" names a kind of stuff — a context, a force, a structure — that can be invoked to explain why people behave as they do. In the second, which he advocates, "social" is not a material but a movement: a trace left behind when heterogeneous elements are momentarily assembled into an association. On this account there is no social force lying behind action waiting to be discovered. There are only associations, and the analyst's job is to follow them.

Key Ideas

• Actors are whatever modifies a state of affairs. A speed bump, a door-closer, a scallop, a microbe and a bureaucrat can all be actors, because each makes a difference to what happens next. This is the symmetry principle that gives ANT its reputation for treating objects as social participants.
• "Follow the actors themselves." The actors already have their own theories about what connects them. The researcher's task is description, not the substitution of a better vocabulary for theirs.
• The five uncertainties. Latour organises the first half of the book around deliberately unsettling the nature of groups, of action, of objects, of matters of fact, and of the study itself.
• Flattening the landscape. There are no micro and macro levels, only more or less long networks. "Society," "capitalism," and "power" are not larger than a meeting room; they are effects produced and maintained through many small, traceable, costly connections.
• The risky account. A good ANT text is one where the writing is the method. If the report adds nothing to what the actors said, it has failed; if it explains them away, it has failed differently.

Criticism

The standard objections are that ANT's symmetry between humans and non-humans dissolves questions of intention and responsibility; that its insistence on description leaves it unable to criticise; and that networks, described exhaustively, become unmanageable. Latour addresses the second objection directly, arguing that critique that arrives before description is simply the analyst's own politics smuggled in.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

ANT supplies the theoretical grammar for much of what cyborg anthropology assumes without stating: that a phone is not a neutral conduit for a relationship but a participant in it, that infrastructure has agency, and that the human and the technical cannot be separated for analytic convenience. Where Donna Haraway's cyborg is a figure, Latour's network is a procedure — a way of tracing exactly which non-humans are doing what in a given arrangement.

Related Reading

• Bruno Latour
• Actor-Network Theory
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media

External Links

• Latour's own page for the book