I've just finished reading this book. I have been trying to get
it finished for months and finally managed to get the reading time in
the last week or so. I can't remember quite how I got onto it except
that it was something to do with finding ways to look at culture in a
post-structuralist way and finding Latour's name cropping up. Having
read it I can see why and am interested to note that the approach he
outlines is very resonant for me. This chunk from the review on the
Amazon page for the book begins to capture why:
Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again.
In
essence Latour reckons that the way that a lot of sociologist employ
the term 'social' has, in effect, detached it from actual relations and
turned it into a kind of 'something' independent of the actual links,
ties, relational transaction and mediations that in reality constitute
the social. Latour relativises the social and flattens it. It's like a
shift from a container view of space to a relativistic one: instead of
the social being a kind of container space which allows social action to
take place, he advocates that we need to approach things by seeing the
'social space' being constituted moment to moment by the relating of
actants; the relating creates the social-space out of nothing. This is
the network in the title of the theory: the 'web' of relating that
constitutes or mediates actants.
'Actants'
(Actors) is the other thing that Latour looks at in this case by
expanding the category. And for my interest in cultural studies is a
significant thing. Actors or actants are not just human but anything
that acts within the social arena by transforming meaning; there's a big
play made of the difference between translation and mediation and the
significance is that the latter effects changes in whatever it is that
is passed on. This means that the artefacts and texts in the human world
can have their own agency and it enables them to exert their own
influence, have their own messages and even purposes.
All
of this means that ANT encourages the study of the social (or cultural,
for that) by paying attention to what is actually happening and not
simply trying to find exemplars of social theories or predefined
phenomena. I like this because it seems to me that the fun in cultural
studies is paying attention to what is going on, how people are actually
relating, using things, making meaning and how the stuff affects,
changes and influences the culture created.
This
is a powerful approach to anything that has a social dimension and I
will no doubt continue to develop the fundamental insights in my own
thinking and hope to read more based on this approach.
I think too that it relates to my thinking about corporisations, principalities and powers etc. What first got me moving beyond Walter Winks 'Naming the Powers' was the question of how one addressed the powers. This led me to considering that the localisation and the means of communication is important and in so doing we have to recognised the 'physiology' and 'psychology' of corporate powers and in a sense this becomes the same concern as ANT articulates to pay attention to the 'transactions' (my choice of word) which constitute the entity and its interaction with the wider world rather than being transfixed and misled by the 'big shadow' it casts on the 'spiritual' plane or even the social. An ANT-inspired approach to the spiritual would see the spiritual not as a separate but fully interconnected realm (a kind of version of the Faery land in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) but as the flip-side of the coin of the material realities we most easily perceive.
What Latour doesn't go into, but I kept expecting, was emergence which combined with his bottom up approach would re-enable, I think, talk of social entities (or spiritual reflexes thereof) which nevertheless remains importantly describable in terms of careful observation of actualities in their own right unimpeded by theoretical or ideological construals which may or may not be helpful...
I think too that it relates to my thinking about corporisations, principalities and powers etc. What first got me moving beyond Walter Winks 'Naming the Powers' was the question of how one addressed the powers. This led me to considering that the localisation and the means of communication is important and in so doing we have to recognised the 'physiology' and 'psychology' of corporate powers and in a sense this becomes the same concern as ANT articulates to pay attention to the 'transactions' (my choice of word) which constitute the entity and its interaction with the wider world rather than being transfixed and misled by the 'big shadow' it casts on the 'spiritual' plane or even the social. An ANT-inspired approach to the spiritual would see the spiritual not as a separate but fully interconnected realm (a kind of version of the Faery land in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) but as the flip-side of the coin of the material realities we most easily perceive.
What Latour doesn't go into, but I kept expecting, was emergence which combined with his bottom up approach would re-enable, I think, talk of social entities (or spiritual reflexes thereof) which nevertheless remains importantly describable in terms of careful observation of actualities in their own right unimpeded by theoretical or ideological construals which may or may not be helpful...
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