Architecture readings and a 300-word comment
Based on the attached readings, and write a 300-word comment related to texts
Introduction: How to Resume
the Task of Tracing
Associations*
The argument of this book can be stated very simply: when socialscientists add the adjective social to some phenomenon, they
designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may
be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is noth-
ing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is
already assembled together, without making any superfluous assump-
tion about the nature of what is assembled. Problems arise, however,
when social begins to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was
roughly comparable to other terms like wooden, steely, biological,
economical, mental, organizational, or linguistic. At that point,
the meaning of the word breaks down since it now designates two
entirely different things: first, a movement during a process of assem-
bling; and second, a specific type of ingredient that is supposed to
differ from other materials.
What I want to do in the present work is to show why the social
cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the
project of providing a social explanation of some other state of
affairs. Although this earlier project has been productive and probably
necessary in the past, it has largely stopped being so thanks in part to
the success of the social sciences. At the present stage of their devel-
opment, its no longer possible to inspect the precise ingredients that
are entering into the composition of the social domain. What I want to
do is to redefine the notion of social by going back to its original
meaning and making it able to trace connections again. Then it will
be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences but
* A shortened reference format is used in the notes; the complete bibliography is at
the end. This somewhat austere book can be read in parallel with the much lighter Bruno
Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, which tries to cover much of the
same ground through a succession of photographic essays. Its available online in
English (Paris the Invisible City) at http://bruno.latour.name.
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with tools better adjusted to the task. After having done extensive
work on the assemblages of nature, I believe its necessary to scrutin-
ize more thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under
the umbrella of a society. This seems to me the only way to be faithful
to the old duties of sociology, this science of the living together.1
Such a project entails, however, a redefinition of what is commonly
understood by that discipline. Translated from both the Latin and
Greek, socio-logy means the science of the social. The expression
would be excellent except for two drawbacks, namely the word social
and the word science. The virtues that we are prepared nowadays to
grant the scientific and technical enterprises bear little relation with
what the founders of the social sciences had in mind when they
invented their disciplines. When modernizing was in full swing, sci-
ence was a rather powerful urge to be prolonged indefinitely without
any misgivings to slow its progress down. They had no idea that its
extension could render it almost coextensive with the rest of social
intercourse. What they meant by society has undergone a transform-
ation no less radical, which is thanks in large part to the very expan-
sion of the products of science and technology. It is no longer clear
whether there exists relations that are specific enough to be called
social and that could be grouped together in making up a special
domain that could function as a society. The social seems to be
diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. So, neither science
nor society has remained stable enough to deliver the promises of a
strong socio-logy.
In spite of this double metamorphosis, few social scientists have
drawn the extreme conclusion that the object as well as the method-
ology of the social sciences should be modified accordingly. After
having been so often disappointed, they still hope to reach one day
the promised land of a true science of a real social world. No scholars
are more aware of this painful hesitation than those who, like me,
have spent many years practicing this oxymoron: sociology of
science. Because of the many paradoxes triggered by this lively but
more than slightly perverse subfield and the numerous changes in the
meaning of science, I think time has come to modify what is meant
by social. I therefore wish to devise an alternative definition for
1 This expression is explained in Laurent Thevenot (2004), A science of life together
in the world. This logical orderthe assemblies of society after those of natureis the
exact opposite of how I came to think about it. The twin booksBruno Latour (1999),
Pandoras Hope: Essays on the reality of science studies and Bruno Latour (2004), Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracywere written long after my colleagues
and I had developed an alternative social theory to deal with the new puzzles uncovered
after carrying out our fieldwork in science and technology.
2 Introduction
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sociology while still retaining this useful label and remaining faith-
ful, I hope, to its traditional calling.
What is a society? What does the word social mean? Why are some
activities said to have a social dimension? How can one demonstrate
the presence of social factors at work? When is a study of society, or
other social aggregates, a good study? How can the path of a society be
altered? To answer these questions, two widely different approaches
have been taken. Only one of them has become common sensethe
other is the object of the present work.
The first solution has been to posit the existence of a specific sort of
phenomenon variously called society, social order, social practice,
social dimension, or social structure. For the last century during
which social theories have been elaborated, it has been important to
distinguish this domain of reality from other domains such as eco-
nomics, geography, biology, psychology, law, science, and politics. A
given trait was said to be social or to pertain to society when it could
be defined as possessing specific properties, some negativeit must
not be purely biological, linguistic, economical, naturaland some
positiveit must achieve, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or
subvert the social order. Once this domain had been defined, no
matter how vaguely, it could then be used to shed some light on
specifically social phenomenathe social could explain the social
and to provide a certain type of explanation for what the other do-
mains could not account foran appeal to social factors could ex-
plain the social aspects of non-social phenomena.
For instance, although it is recognized that law has it own strength,
some aspects of it would be better understood if a social dimension
were added to it; although economic forces unfold under their own
logic, there also exists social elements which could explain the some-
what erratic behavior of calculative agents; although psychology de-
velops according to its own inner drives, some of its more puzzling
aspects can be said to pertain to social influence; although science
possesses its own impetus, some features of its quest are necessarily
bound by the social limitations of scientists who are embedded in
the social context of their time; although art is largely autonomous,
it is also influenced by social and political considerations which
could account for some aspects of its most famous masterpieces; and
although the science of management obeys its own rules, it might be
advisable to also consider social, cultural, and political aspects that
could explain why some sound organizational principles are never
applied in practice.
Many other examples can easily be found since this version of social
theory has become the default position of our mental software that
takes into consideration the following: there exists a social context in
Introduction 3
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which non-social activities take place; it is a specific domain of reality;
it can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the residual
aspects that other domains (psychology, law, economics, etc.) cannot
completely deal with; it is studied by specialized scholars called socio-
logists or socio-(x)x being the placeholder for the various discip-
lines; since ordinary agents are always inside a social world that
encompasses them, they can at best be informants about this world
and, at worst, be blinded to its existence, whose full effect is only
visible to the social scientists more disciplined eyes; no matter how
difficult it is to carry on those studies, it is possible for them to roughly
imitate the successes of the natural sciences by being as objective as
other scientists thanks to the use of quantitative tools; if this is impos-
sible, then alternative methods should be devised that take into ac-
count the human, intentional, or hermeneutic aspects of those
domains without abandoning the ethos of science; and when social
scientists are asked to give expert advice on social engineering or
to accompany social change, some sort of political relevance might
ensue from these studies, but only after sufficient knowledge has been
accumulated.
This default position has become common sense not only for social
scientists, but also for ordinary actors via newspapers, college educa-
tion, party politics, bar conversations, love stories, fashion magazines,
etc.2 The social sciences have disseminated their definition of society
as effectively as utility companies deliver electricity and telephone
services. Offering comments about the inevitable social dimension
of what we and others are doing in society has become as familiar to
us as using a mobile phone, ordering a beer, or invoking the Oedipus
complexat least in the developed world.
The other approach does not take for granted the basic tenet of the
first. It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is
no social dimension of any sort, no social context, no distinct do-
main of reality to which the label social or society could be attrib-
uted; that no social force is available to explain the residual features
other domains cannot account for; that members know very well what
they are doing even if they dont articulate it to the satisfaction of the
observers; that actors are never embedded in a social context and so
are always much more than mere informants; that there is thus no
meaning in adding some social factors to other scientific specialties;
that political relevance obtained through a science of society is not
necessarily desirable; and that society, far from being the context in
which everything is framed, should rather be construed as one of the
2 The diffusion of the word actor itself, which I will keep vague until latersee
p. 46, being one of the many markers of this influence.
4 Introduction
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many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits. With
some provocation, this second school of thought could use as its
slogan what Mrs Thatcher famously exclaimed (but for very different
reasons!): There is no such a thing as a society.
If they are so different, how could they both claim to be a science of
the social and aspire to use the same label of sociology? On the face of
it, they should be simply incommensurable, since the second position
takes as the major puzzle to be solved what the first takes as its
solution, namely the existence of specific social ties revealing the
hidden presence of some specific social forces. In the alternative
view, social is not some glue that could fix everything including
what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many
other types of connectors. Whereas sociologists (or socio-economists,
socio-linguists, social psychologists, etc.) take social aggregates as the
given that could shed some light on residual aspects of economics,
linguistics, psychology, management, and so on, these other scholars,
on the contrary, consider social aggregates as what should be
explained by the specific associations provided by economics, linguis-
tics, psychology, law, management, etc.3
The resemblance between the two approaches appears much greater,
however, provided one bears in mind the etymology of the word
social. Even though most social scientists would prefer to call social
a homogeneous thing, its perfectly acceptable to designate by the
same word a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements.
Since in both cases the word retains the same originfrom the Latin
root socius it is possible to remain faithful to the original intuitions
of the social sciences by redefining sociology not as the science of the
social, but as the tracing of associations. In this meaning of the adjec-
tive, social does not designate a thing among other things, like a black
sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between
things that are not themselves social.
At first, this definition seems absurd since it risks diluting sociology
to mean any type of aggregate from chemical bonds to legal ties, from
atomic forces to corporate bodies, from physiological to political as-
semblies. But this is precisely the point that this alternative branch of
social theory wishes to make as all those heterogeneous elements
might be assembled anew in some given state of affairs. Far from
being a mind-boggling hypothesis, this is on the contrary the most
common experience we have in encountering the puzzling face of the
3 I will use the expression society or other social aggregates to cover the range of
solutions given to what I call below the first source of uncertainty and that deals with
the nature of social groups. I am not aiming especially here at the holist definitions
since, as we shall see, the individualist or the biological definitions are just as valid. See
p. 27.
Introduction 5
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social. A new vaccine is being marketed, a new job description is
offered, a new political movement is being created, a new planetary
system is discovered, a new law is voted, a new catastrophe occurs. In
each instance, we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was
associated together because the previous definition has been
made somewhat irrelevant. We are no longer sure about what
we means; we seem to be bound by ties that dont look like regular
social ties.
The ever shrinking meaning of social
There is a clear etymological trend in the successive variations of the
social word family (Strum and Latour 1987). It goes from the most
general to the most superficial. The etymology of the word social is
also instructive. The root is seq-, sequi and the first meaning is to
follow. The Latin socius denotes a companion, an associate. From
the different languages, the historical genealogy of the word social
is construed first as following someone, then enrolling and allying,
and, lastly, having something in common. The next meaning of
social is to have a share in a commercial undertaking. Social as in
the social contract is Rousseaus invention. Social as in social
problems, the social question, is a nineteenth-century innovation.
Parallel words like sociable refer to skills enabling individuals to
live politely in society. As one can see from the drifting of the
word, the meaning of social shrinks as time passes. Starting with a
definition which is coextensive with all associations, we now have, in
common parlance, a usage that is limited to what is left after polit-
ics, biology, economics, law, psychology, management, technology,
etc., have taken their own parts of the associations.
Because of this constant shrinking of meaning (social contract,
social question, social workers), we tend to limit the social to hu-
mans and modern societies, forgetting that the domain of the social
is much more extensive than that. De Candolle was the first person
to create scientometricsthe use of statistics to measure the activity
of scienceand, like his father, a plant sociologist (Candolle 1873/
1987). For him corals, baboons, trees, bees, ants, and whales are also
social. This extended meaning of social has been well recognized by
socio-biology (Wilson 1975). Unfortunately, this enterprise has only
confirmed social scientists worst fears about extending the meaning
of social. Its perfectly possible, however, to retain the extension
without believing much in the very restricted definition of agency
given to organisms in many socio-biological panoramas.
6 Introduction
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Thus, the overall project of what we are supposed to do together is
thrown into doubt. The sense of belonging has entered a crisis. But to
register this feeling of crisis and to follow these new connections,
another notion of social has to be devised. It has to be much wider
than what is usually called by that name, yet strictly limited to the
tracing of new associations and to the designing of their assemblages.
This is the reason why I am going to define the social not as a special
domain, a specific realm, or a particular sort of thing, but only as a very
peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling.
In such a view, law, for instance, should not be seen as what should
be explained by social structure in addition to its inner logic; on the
contrary, its inner logic may explain some features of what makes an
association last longer and extend wider. Without the ability of legal
precedents to draw connections between a case and a general rule,
what would we know about putting some matter into a larger con-
text?4 Science does not have to be replaced by its social framework,
which is shaped by social forces as well as its own objectivity, because
its objects are themselves dislocating any given context through the
foreign elements research laboratories are associating together in un-
predictable ways. Those quarantined because of the SARS virus pain-
fully learned that they could no longer associate with parents and
partners in the same way because of the mutation of this little bug
whose existence has been revealed by the vast institution of epidemi-
ology and virology.5 Religion does not have to be accounted for by
social forces because in its very definitionindeed, in its very name
it links together entities which are not part of the social order. Since
the days of Antigone, everyone knows what it means to be put into
motion by orders from gods that are irreducible to politicians like
Creon. Organizations do not have to be placed into a wider social
frame since they themselves give a very practical meaning to what it
means to be nested into a wider set of affairs. After all, which air
traveler would know the gate to go to without looking anxiously and
repeatedly at the number printed on her boarding pass and circled in
red by an airline attendant? It might be vacuous to reveal behind the
superficial chats of politicians the dark hidden forces of society at
work, since without those very speeches a large part of what we under-
stand to be part of a group will be lost. Without the contradictory
4 Patricia Ewick and Susan S Silbey (1998), The Common Place of Law and Silbeys
contribution to Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (2005), Making Things Public: Atmospheres
of Democracy.
5 Although the study of scientific practice has provided the main impetus for this
alternative definition of the social, it will be tackled only later when the fourth uncer-
tainty has been defined, see p. 87.
Introduction 7
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spiels of the warring parties in Iraq, who in the occupied or liberated
Baghdad will know how to recognize friend from foe?
And the same is true for all other domains.6 Whereas, in the first
approach, every activitylaw, science, technology, religion, organiza-
tion, politics, management, etc.could be related to and explained by
the same social aggregates behind all of them, in the second version of
sociology there exists nothing behind those activities even though they
might be linked in a way that does produce a societyor doesnt
produce one. Such is the crucial point of departure between the two
versions. To be social is no longer a safe and unproblematic property, it
is a movement that may fail to trace any new connection and may fail
to redesign any well-formed assemblage. As we are going to learn
throughout this book, after having rendered many useful services in
an earlier period, what is called social explanation has become a
counter-productive way to interrupt the movement of associations
instead of resuming it.
According to the second approach, adherents of the first have
simply confused what they should explain with the explanation.
They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one
should end with them. They believed the social to be made essen-
tially of social ties, whereas associations are made of ties which are
themselves non-social. They imagined that sociology is limited to a
specific domain, whereas sociologists should travel wherever new
heterogeneous associations are made. They believed the social to be
always already there at their disposal, whereas the social is not a type
of thing either visible or to be postulated. It is visible only by the traces
it leaves (under trials) when a new association is being produced be-
tween elements which themselves are in no way social. They insisted
that we were already held by the force of some society when our
political future resides in the task of deciding what binds us all to-
gether. In brief, the second school claims to resume the work of con-
nection and collection that was abruptly interrupted by the first. It is
to help the interested enquirers in reassembling the social that this
book has been written.
In the course of the book we will learn to distinguish the standard
sociology of the social from a more radical subfamily which I will call
6 We will see only in Part II, p. 238, how to reformulate this opposition in a more
subtle way than an inversion of cause and effect.
7 For the distinction between critical sociology and sociology of critique, see Luc
Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot (forthcoming) On Justification; Luc Boltanski and Laur-
ent Thevenot (1999), The Sociology of Critical Capacity; and especially Luc Boltanski
(1990), Lamour et la justice comme competences. If I find it necessary to establish some
continuity with the sociology of the social, I will have to be more confrontational with
critical sociology and its illusion of an illusion.
8 Introduction
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critical sociology.7 This last branch will be defined by the following
three traits: it doesnt only limit itself to the social but replaces
the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations;
it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors
who need to live under the illusion that there is something other
than social there; and it considers that the actors objections to
their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations
are right.
To clarify, I will call the first approach sociology of the social and
the second sociology of associations (I wish I could use associology).
I know this is very unfair to the many nuances of the social sciences l
have thus lumped together, but this is acceptable for an introduction
which has to be very precise on the unfamiliar arguments it chooses to
describe as it sketches the well-known terrain. I may be forgiven for
this roughness because there exist many excellent introductions for
the sociology of the social but none, to my knowledge, for this small
subfield of social theory8 that has been calledby the way, what is it to
be called? Alas, the historical name is actor-network-theory, a name
that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be
kept. If the author, for instance, of a travel guide is free to propose new
comments on the land he has chosen to present, he is certainly not
free to change its most common name since the easiest signpost is the
bestafter all, the origin of the word America is even more awkward.
I was ready to drop this label for more elaborate ones like sociology of
translation, actant-rhyzome ontology, sociology of innovation,
and so on, until someone pointed out to me that the acronym A.N.T.
was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and
collective traveler. An ant writing for other ants, this fits my project
very well!9 Ideally, the word sociology should work best, but it cannot
be used before its two componentswhat is social and what is a
sciencehave been somewhat revamped. As this book unfolds, I will
use it more and more often though, reserving the expression soci-
ology of the social to designate the repertoire to which other social
scientists, in my view, limit themselves too readily.
8 A recent guide is presented in John Law (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science
Research. Andrew Barry (2001), Political Machines. Governing a Technological Society and
Anne-Marie Mol (2003), The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Science and
Cultural Theory) may also be taken as a good introduction along with Bruno Latour
(1996), Aramis or the Love of Technology.
9 I have to apologize for taking the exact opposite position here as the one taken in
Bruno Latour (1999c), On Recalling ANT. Whereas at the time I criticized all the
elements of his horrendous expression, including the hyphen, I will now defend all of
them, including the hyphen!
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10 See http://www.lancs.ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm.
How to find ones way in the literature under the heading Actor-
Network-Theory
Most of the relevant bibliography can be found on the excellent
website the Actor Network Resource maintained by John Law.10
The origin of this approach can be found in the need for a new social
theory adjusted to science and technology studies (Callon and
Latour 1981). But it started in earnest with three documents (Latour
1988b; Callon 1986; Law 1986b). It was at this point that non-
humansmicrobes, scallops, rocks, and shipspresented them-
selves to social theory in a new way. As I will explain on p. 87
when reviewing the fourth uncertainty, it was the first time for me
that the objects of science and technology had become, so to speak,
social-compatible. The philosophical foundation of this argument
was presented in the second part of (Latour 1988a) although in a
form that made it difficult to grasp.
Since then it has moved in many directions, being reviewed and
criticized by many papers listed on Laws website. Although there is
no clear litmus test for ANT membership, some ad hoc and make-
shift ones may be devised. Needless to say, this interpretation of
ANT represents only my view. This book does not aim at a more
collective presentation, only at a more systematic one. Here are
some of the tests that I have found most useful.
One of them is the precise role granted to non-humans. They
have to be actors (see the definition on p. 64) and not simply the
hapless bearers of symbolic projection. But this activity should not
be the type of agency associated up to now with matters of fact or
natural objects. So if an account employs either a symbolic or a
naturalist type of causality, there is no reason to include it in the
ANTcorpus even though it might claim to be. Conversely, any study
that gives non-humans a type of agency that is more open than the
traditional natural causalitybut more efficient than the symbolic
onecan be part of our corpus, even though some of the authors
would not wish to be associated in any way with this approach. For
instance, a biological book (Kupiec and Sonigo 2000) could pertain
to ANT because of the new active role given to the gene.
Another test is to check which direction the explanation is going
in. Is the list of what is social in the end the same limited repertoire
that has been used to explain (away) most of the elements? If the
social remains stable and is used to explain a state of affairs, its not
ANT. For instance, no matter how enlightening it has been for all of
us, the Social Shaping of Technology (Bijker 1995) would not be part
10 Introduction
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http://www.lancs.ac.uk/FSS/sociology/css/antres/antres.htm
Its true that in most situations resorting to the sociology of the
social is not only reasonable but also indispensable, since it offers
convenient shorthand to designate all the ingredients already accepted
in the collective realm. It would be silly as well as pedantic to abstain
from using notions like IBM, France, Maori culture, upward mo-
bility, totalitarianism, socialization, lower-middle class, political
context, social capital, downsizing, social construction, individ-
ual agent, unconscious drives, peer pressure, etc. But in situations
where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain,
when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the
sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors new associ-
ations. At this point, the last thing to do would be to limit in advance
the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations. To the
convenient shorthand of the social, one has to substitute the painful
and costly longhand of its associations. The duties of the social scien-
tist mutate accordingly: it is no longer enough to limit actors to the
role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to
grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the
social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit
of the corpus since the social is kept stable all along and accounts for
the shape of technological change. But McNeill (1976), although he
is in no way an ANT author, would qualify for inclusion, since what
is to be associated is being modified by the inclusion of rats, viruses,
and microbes into the definition of what is to be collected in an
empire. In this way, a book like Cronons (1991) is certainly a
masterpiece of ANT because no hidden social force is added to
explain the progressive composition of the metropolis itself. The
same would be true of the work done in distributed cognition
(Hutchins 1995). This is also what has made much of the history
of science and technology important for our program, and why
sociology of art has been a continuous companion, especially
through the influence of Hennion (1993).
A third and more difficult test would be to check whether a study
aims at reassembling the social or still insists on dispersion and
deconstruction. ANT has been confused with a postmodern em-
phasis on the critique of the Great narratives and Eurocentric or
hegemonic standpoint. This is, however, a very misleading view.
Dispersion, destruction, and deconstruction
