I was reading your previous comment above mine (the one with the Littleton, CO shootings example) and combined with your more recent response I think you’re right; my partial reading isn’t enough to fully get a handle on what Latour is doing. Part of my frustration while reading “Reassembling the Social” is the lack of citations typical to most French social theory.. I find the same when I read Bourdieu, Foucault, sometimes Derrida, although he’s not quite so bad. I see snippets of previous thinkers (and critiques of them) all through Latour’s work that he doesn’t feel the need to acknowledge, perhaps because he assumes that his readers will have already read all that stuff previously, and more likely because he feels he’s doing something totally different (ie, trying to totally escape from the structuralist/post-structuralist/anti-structuralist conversation that has dominated French thought post WWII… as if he’s trying to force a Kuhnian revolution, but I remain doubtful that these things can simply be willed into existence.. there’s a certain degree of spontaneity and outside forces to any revolution in thought that cannot be authored).

I think his expansion of agency to include non-human actors is really a good move, and I applaud him for that. I also agree with him in that “he’d reject the idea that we have established an unquestionable “map of unconscious forces” that does this work.” I think there are significant resources available, but I also think we’re just beginning to understand unconscious drives and desires, and perhaps will never be able to fully map out that territory.

Where it becomes tricky for me is here: “His aim is not to uncover the “true motivations” behind action – to reveal the real forces that make actors act. On the contrary, his aim is to trace the vehicles (the immutable mobiles, the circulating inscriptions) that provisionally stabilize particular accounts of what makes actors act.” Immutable mobiles and circulating inscriptions are just too abstract for me, although I think I have a grasp of provisionally stabilized accounts.

To refer back to your concrete example of the Columbine murders, you drew from this the conclusion that “depending on which of these agencies we collectively decide are responsible for the shooting, how we organize ourselves–how we compose our common world–will vary. We might end up banning violent video games; we might end up putting the parents in jail; we might end up exiling Marilyn Manson, etc. In short, I think the point is that how we settle controversies over competing accounts of what acts in the world helps determine what we will include in, and exclude from, the collective.”

I think that the multiple causality model here is very important, as typical accounts focus on one, or at very most, two or three ‘reasons’ (or actors) for what caused the event. The more complicated scenario– all these intersecting–possible contributors is much more plausible. But here again, my initial concerns –that I may not have expressed well enough above– are still present. There is always a rush to judgement, especially in actions such as these where there is so much emotional trauma and destruction of human life, that inevitably there must be punishment, retribution, blame, guilt, fear, avoidance, etc. etc. that demand to be addressed before understanding is complete- assuming it ever could be.(If, in a libertarian society like the USA (at least if we’re speaking of its ‘ideal ego’) we start including Manson and video games as ‘actors’ or ’causes’ you can bet on it that there will be massive and comprehensive efforts to censor these elements, as you rightly indicate and that is a Pandora’s box I would hate to see open again… why? we need only think how of how many kids play as many video games or listen to violent lyrics as Dylan Klebold who don’t turn into murderers.)

Social scientists are looked to for answers to these questions as well– they’re called as expert witnesses in courts or in the media, they’re assumed to have knowledge of social systems the layperson doesn’t– and Latour says in the book somewhere..I paraphrase, because I don’t have it in front of me currently– that before we get to the reconstructing of the social we need first to follow the paths, trace all the lines, and this could take a very, very long time. We don’t have the luxury as social scientists, that some ‘physical’ or natural scientists do, of (relatively) disinterested, laboratory-driven research, because of our implication and immersion in the very field we’re tracing. To put it differently, he seems to want to abscond from the political and moral responsibility that is, as I see it at least, just inherently demanded of any kind of social theorizing. This means that we almost always must take the risk of acting on partial knowledge even as we continue to work toward more complete and accurate accounts. He talks about the reversal necessary to Marx’s injunction about “the point being to change the world, not to understand it”, but I think this quote has been widely misunderstood. I think Marx fully felt that a “simply” was implied between the “not” and the “to”… knowledge (contra ideology) was the royal road to changing the world to a more just one, and therefore the two go totally hand-in-hand. So if Latour is saying we need to separate knowledge from action, analytically or temporally– that we need to have more rigorous accounts of what constitutes the social today *before* we can intervene, I’m not in agreement. There’s not time for that: the bad guys (multinationals, gov’ts) will take away our democracies, our human rights, our gains on the feminist, GLBT, animal rights fields, workers rights and unions, all the things that constituted whatever progress we saw in the modern period, if we pause in the fight. If I’m misunderstanding, and he does see an epistemology-action unity (praxis) then I am on board!

Cheers,
C.

First, you suggest that Latour is “very uncomfortable with uncertainty.” This could hardly be more incorrect; this is precisely what Latour is interested in – and, indeed, what he insists on. It’s at the heart of his concept of “matters of concern.” (Read The Politics of Nature and see if you still think Latour is “uncomfortable with uncertainty.”)

The objective of actor-network theory, at least in Latour’s treatment of it, is to trace the resolution of controversies over what constitutes the “natural” and the “social.” His aim is not to uncover the “true motivations” behind action – to reveal the real forces that make actors act. On the contrary, his aim is to trace the vehicles (the immutable mobiles, the circulating inscriptions) that provisionally stabilize particular accounts of what makes actors act.

Latour is completely aware of the “unconscious forces” that you bring up here. Indeed, the appeal to the unconscious is a perfect example of an account of agency that has circulated and has, in particular places and particular times, come to establish the “facts” about what constitutes the social. In other words, it’s a perfect example of the kind of circulating account that actor-network theory aims to trace.

Latour would certainly agree with the Freudians that individuals aren’t fully conscious of what makes them act; however, he’d reject the idea that we have established an unquestionable “map of unconscious forces” that does this work. He’d also, of course, reject the idea that the “social” can be assumed to be the realm of the human alone; this purification, too, is simply the outcome of various circulations.

What actor-network theory aims to do is something entirely different than what Freudian or Marxian social theory aims to do, but casual readers routinely miss this. I’d recommend that you read much more of Latour’s work (starting with Science in Action and We Have Never Been Modern) before you rush to judgment about what he’s doing.

Latour’s desire and conviction that all can be apparent on the surface and through experimental and historical analysis without *any* presuppositions or ‘a priori’ factors is totally naive: one must sometimes work ‘backwards’ and deduce effects that aren’t apparent from causes that can only appear through constructing credible models and judging whether the evidence is there to support them (eg, judging that there is more to Tea Party rhetoric and Obama-hatred than simply what is being said on the surface about policy, about identifying as patriots, etc. One must postulate that racism and even minimal fascist desires are at work, and are either unacknowledged by the agents because not even openly admitted by themselves, or unspoken due to fear of reprisal, the power of political correctness– and indeed, hate speech laws– over freedom of speech, etc.)

It seems to me that Latour is very uncomfortable with uncertainty, and is looking for what constitutes the social in rather too much positivist, apparent, observable, and hopeful ways. His resistance to the dialectic is symptomatic of a kind of naive utopian vision where causes and motivations can once and for all be made clear and from this, we can build the ‘good society’.

I don’t think Latour’s point is that ANT seeks to break down abstractions like “peer pressure” into specific causal factors like media, relatives, etc. I take that to be the aim of traditional (positivist) sociology.

I read Latour to be saying, instead, that an ANT account starts by assuming a fundamental, intractable uncertainty about agency. In other words, the social scientist can never say with any certainty who or what the “real” actors are in any situation, just as the actors can’t. (He critiques critical sociology in part for its presumption to be able to solve the problems of “who or what is acting,” while ordinary people can’t.)

I’ll need to go back and reread this, but I think that what Latour is urging “scientists of the social” to do is to examine and trace controversies about agency–that is, to follow competing accounts of who/what is doing the acting or causing the action, and to see how these controversies are or are not resolved. (I understand this to be what he was doing in his earlier work on Pasteur.)

So with respect to the example you gave, Latour might ask us to examine competing accounts of what causes teenagers to take up smoking–to look at how different accounts mobilize different sets of actors and try to institute different “common worlds” as a result. Another constructive example might be the multiple competing accounts of what caused the Littleton high school shooting. A few might have claimed that the two boys were acting by themselves, but other accounts claimed that, for instance, the boys’ parents, Marilyn Manson, bullies, violent video games, Nazis, or the NRA were also acting when the shots went off. Now, depending on which of these agencies we collectively decide are responsible for the shooting, how we organize ourselves–how we compose our common world–will vary. We might end up banning violent video games; we might end up putting the parents in jail; we might end up exiling Marilyn Manson, etc. In short, I think the point is that how we settle controversies over competing accounts of what acts in the world helps determine what we will include in, and exclude from, the collective.

Thanks again for the thoughtful review, which I enjoyed reading.