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Symposium
On Interobjectivity
BRUNO LATOUR
Centre de Sociologie de 1' Innovation
The Lessons of Simian Societies
The discovery of the social complexity of primate societies other than Homo sapiens, although
it was made some 20 years ago, does not yet seem to have been fully taken on board by social theory
(De Waal, 1982; Kummer, 1993; Strum, 1987). Violent arguments for or against sociobiology have
taken center stage, as if it were necessary to defend the autonomy of the social against the danger of
excessive reduction to the biological. In fact, the development of sociobiology, as of ethology,
indicates quite another path: the extension to animals, even to genes, of classical questions of political
philosophy about the definition of the social actor, the possibilities of rational calculation, the
existence or not of a social structure standing above the level of interactions, the very defmition of
interaction, the degree of intelligence necessary for social life, and the role of power and dominance
relationships. Far from being displaced from all these questions by a biology presumed triumphant,
sociological theory must play its part and must to new ends tackle the problem of the defmition of
society, extending its comparative base to other than human sociallives.
1
To say that primates other than humans have a rich social life simply means assuming that no
primate actor can achieve any goal without passing through other interactions with partners. Instead
of imagining a presocial being motivated solely by instinct, reactions or appetites and seeking
immediate gratification of its goals-assuaging hunger, reproduction, power-the new sociology of
simians, on the contrary, depicts actors who cannot attain anything without negotiating at length with
others.
2
The simplest case is that of a chimpanzee that does not dare to continue eating at a rich food
source it has discovered because the troop is moving on and it cannot stay behind alone. Or again, that
of a male baboon that cannot copulate with a female in heat, without first verifying that she will
cooperate--a cooperation that had to have been obtained over the course of a period of friendship
during times when she was not in estrous. Since each actor's every action is interfered with by others,
and since succeeding in one's aims is mediated by continual negotiation, one can talk of this in terms
of complexity-that is to say in terms of the obligation to take into account a large number of variables
at the same time. As described by primatologists, the state of social feverishness, the constant attention
to others' actions, the painstaking sociability, Machiavellianism and stress all indicate, then, an
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already complex sociality in the "state of nature. "
3
Or, at least, this is the simplified and in part mythical
version that can be used as an alternative base line from which to tackle social theory afresh.
Social insects have always served as a means of calibrating models of human sociology. But they
offered, at least up until the emergence of sociobiology, the archetypal case of superorganisms, in
which questions of the individual, interaction, calculation and negotiation could not be posed
4
The
effect of the sociology of primates is quite contrary. It precisely does not permit thinking of the social
structw:e as a superorganism, but only in terms of a chain of interactions. We will fmd in the state of
nature a degree of social complexity that corresponds, more or less, to the forms of sociability
described by interactionism. However, there is no language, little technology.
5
It seems that there is
not even any representation of self, nor a model of the other,
6
and that the cognitive competencies
necessary to bring out this complexity remain very basic. By finding already present "in nature" such
a high level of sociability, human sociology finds itself freed from the obligation to found the social,
contrary to the hoary tradition in political philosophy and to theories of the social contract Complex
social interaction preceded humanity, and by a long way.
In the sociological literature, social interaction presupposes the presence of several constitutive
elements. There must be at least two actors; these two actors must be physically copresent; they must
be link1ed by behavior that entails an act of communication; and fmally, the behavior of each must
evolve as a function of modifications brought to bear on the behavior of the other in such a way that
there is an emergence of unexpected properties that are more than the sum of the competencies in use
by the :JICtors before this interaction.
7
The sociology of simians, in this sense, becomes the limiting case
of interactionism, since all the actors are copresent and engage in face to face actions whose dynamic
depends continually on the reaction of others. This is a paradise of interactionism; it is a paradise in
another sense too, since the question of social order doesn't seem to be able to be posed for simians
other tllan in terms of the progressive composition of dyadic interactions, without any totalizing or
structwrating effects. Although there are complex interactions, it does not seem that one can say that
they live "in" a society, or that they develop a social structure.
8
The question of the exact role of
interacltion, and its ability to compose all society is already posed at the level of primates, and possibly
only at that level.
uncertainty of primatologists as to the existence or not of a social structure beyond
interacltions seems to be shared by the monkeys themselves if we grant them the minimal reflexivity
needed to be a member and not a "cultural dope" according to Garfinkel's request For all behavior
patterns that presuppose some totalization, primates other than humans have to conduct a series of
trials, that need to be ever again begun anew in order to ensure the duration of collective effects.
Deciding the direction to be followed by the troop, for example, presupposes an evaluation of the
movements of all by all, whence emerges, at the beginning of the day, an order that no one member
has given, and that none can claim as their own. The same holds for dominance relationships, which
must put to the test again each time a new event occurs, and for membership relationships, which
need to be "repaired" after any, albeit momentaneous, separation. Since the effects of the composition
of the social depend on work by individual actors that is continually being started over, one could draw
the conclusion that the social life of monkeys is apparently an etlmomethodological paradise.
9
Social
constfUiction literally depends solely on the work of the actors themselves to hold things together, and
depends crucially on their categories alone. Each action is mediated by the action of partners, but to
effect this mediation, it is necessary that every actor composes for themselves the totality in which they
are situtated, a variable totality whose solidity must be reverified each and every time through new
trials.
On
Bruno Latour
229
Before there was a significant simian sociology, human sociology made social life begin with
humans, or used social insects, even polyps, to demonstrate the universality of forms of aggregation
and the ubiquity of superorganisms.
10
But we are now able to count on a chain of complex individual
interactions that precedes human sociology. In these interactions, actors have to constantly construct
and tend to the collective structures that emerge from their interactions. Society does not begin like
Hobbes' with preformed human bodies, with brains capable of calculation, with distinct individuals
who choose to agree together through the mythology of the social contract. As far as we can understand
through this calibration of our origin stories with the example of primates, the humanization of our
bodies and brains was on the contrary shaped by a fme tissue of complex social interactions whose
matrix precedes us by several million years. The portmanteau word "socio-biology" has inversed its
normal meaning when one takes into account that human life has been immersed for such a long time
in a social world, and that we have become physically and intellectually more and more human so as
to adapt ourselves better and better to our original environment constituted in a large part by complex
sociality .n
By allowing us to find already in nature a complex sociality, interactions, individuals and social
constructions, simian sociology frees us from the need to make these the province of human sociology
alone. Complex social life becomes the shared property of all primates. Just like baboons and
chimpanzees, we engage in it, without even thinking, in all our actions. And yet we are neither baboons
nor chimpanzees. If the complexity of our social life can no longer suffice to explain this difference,
we must find another source. For that, we have to understand to what extent the concept of human
individual actors engaged in interactions, such as interactionism describes, constructing the social
through its own categories that must be regularly tested {the ethnomethodological version) does not
account well for most human situations, even though it forms the common basis for our competencies.
Whereas for monkeys it constructs social life step by step, one could say that, for humans,
interaction was never more than a residual category. Not, as the tenants of the existence of a social
structure affrrm, because an interaction "takes place in" a society that is greater than it, but quite simply
because for an interaction to take place one must frrst reduce the relationship so that it does not, step
by step, mobilize all social life, with which it would otherwise end up being co-extensive. It is only
through isolating it by a frame that the agent can interact with another agent, face to face, leaving out
the rest of their history as well as their otherpartners.
12
The very existence of an interaction presupposes
a reduction, a prior partitioning. Now how to explain the existence of these frames, partitions,
hideaways, frre-doors that are free of contagion from the social? Interactionists are silent about this,
merely using the word "frame" metaphorically. Advocates of social structure, the usual opponents of
interactionists, cannot explain it any better, since they perceive at all points the total and complete
presence of social structure. Now it is just this suspension that one needs to understand, this partial
interruption, this cubbyhole within which interaction can be deployed without being interfered with
by everyone else. Interactionism 's adversaries often reproach it with not being able to compose all of
the social-and indeed the very force of interaction lies in its ability to locally and momentarily
suspend interference.
That Little "Je ne sais quoi" that Dislocates Interaction
Something prevents human interaction from proliferating outside and from being interfered with
inside by all the other partners. Is this two-way membrane immaterial like a frame {here taken in its
metaphorical sense) or material like a partition,a wall, or a framework (here taken in its literal sense)?
230
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In order first to intuitively grasp the answer to this question, one must have seen a troop of some 100
baboons living in the midst of the savannah, looking incessantly at each other so as to know where the
troop is going, who is with whom, who is grooming whom, who is attacking or defending whom. Then
you mu:st carry yourself away in your imagination to those scenes beloved of interactionists where a
few people, most often just two, are interacting in cloistered spots hidden from the view of others. If
"hell is other people," as Sartre said, then baboon hell differs from human hell, since the continuous
presence of all creates a pressure quite other than that of the closed-doors of interactionism-to such
a degree that a distinction must be drawn between two entirely different meanings of the word
interactiion. The frrst, as given above (pp. 229, paragraph 2) applies to all primates, including humans,
whereas the second applies to humans alone. In order to retain the usual term, it is necessary to talk
interactions. The only difference between the two derives from the existence of a wall, a
partition, an operator of reduction, a "je ne sais quoi" whose origin remains, for the time being, obscure.
is another difference between simian interaction and what one observes of human
interactions. For the latter, it is very difficult to obtain the simultaneity in space and time that are the
province of the frrst. We say, without giving the matter too much thought, that we engage in "face-to-
face" interactions. Indeed we do, but the clothing that we are wearing comes from elsewhere and was
manufactured a long time ago; the words we use were not formed for this oocasion; the walls we have
been leaning on were designed by an architect for a client, and constructed by workers-people who
are absent today, although their action continues to make itself felt The very person we are addressing
is a product of a history that goes far beyond the framework of our relationship. If one attempted to
draw a spatia-temporal map of what is present in the interaction, and to draw up a list of everyone who
in one form or another were present, one would not sketch out a well-demarcated frame, but a
convoluted network with a multiplicity of highly diverse dates, places and people.
13
Those who believe
in social! structures often make the same criticism of interactionists, but they draw quite another lesson
from it They suggest that nothing happens in interactions that is not an activation or materialization
of what is already completely contained elsewhere in the structure, give or take a few minor
adjustments. But interaction does more than adjust, it constructs; we learned this from the monkeys
as well as from Goffman and from the ethnomethodologists. However, it displays contradictory forms:
it is a framework (which permits circumscription) and a network (which dislocates simultaneity,
proximity and personality). Where can those contradictory qualities in humans come from, and why
are they so different from interaction as understood byprimatologists with respect to naked, co-present
monkeys?
It impossible to answer this question insofar as one pits interaction against something else,
for exarnple social structure, by affirming that the former is local whereas the latter is global. For
monkeys, as for example for baboons, this opposition does not hold, since beyond a few dyadic
interactions, baboons, just like primatologists, lose trace of interactions and begin to compose the
remainder in vaguer terms like "troop," "clan" or "group." It could be rightly said that for baboons
social life is composed entirely of individual interactions laid end to end like the successive segments
of mechanical solidarity.
14
Interestingly enough, when primatologists go one step further and refer to
rank, order, families and caste, they always do this after having instrumentalized their
observaltions. This allows them precisely to escape from extreme interactionism through the fabrica-
tion of a large number of panoptica and through elaboration, on computers, of a large number of
statistical correlations.
15
In doing this they get closer to the human condition, but they doubtless get
further alway from the manner in which monkeys get to cluster their interactions without the benefit
of these instruments, panoptica, markers and calculators.
On Interobjectivity
Bruno Latour
231
Even though it may not constitute a proof of this, the case of the primatologist's own scientific
work constitutes a valuable indication. In order to go from interactions to their sum, you need an
instrument, some tool capable of summarizing and summing up. Those who believe in social structures
always presuppose the prior existence of that sui generis being, society, which is then "manifested"
through interactions. Now the only proof that we have for the existence of this being emerges from the
impossibility of carrying out a face to face interaction without the immediate arrival with it of a jumble
of relationships with other beings from other places and other times. Only the weakness of face-to-face
interaction forces the invention of a framework defmed as that which is always already present in the
structure. Now it does not follow from the fact that an interaction presents the contradictory form of
a local framework and a network of heterogeneous relationships, that there is thereby a need to leave
behind the solid terrain of interactions in order to shift to the "higher level" of society. Even if these
two levels really existed, there would be too many steps between them missing. Take the example of
dominance relations in male baboons, which quite clearly brings out the flaw in the reasoning here.
There are many trials of aggression between males to decide who is strongest. If one wanted in fact
to construct an ordered relationship going from the strongest to the weakest, one could not do it except
at the price of shortening observation time to a few days!
16
But what does it mean to have a hierarchy
that fluctuates on a daily basis? How can you say that a baboon has "entered on" or is "ascending a"
dominance scale, if that scale has to be recalculated every three days? This probably means that
sociology passes too quickly from interaction to structure, in the case of baboons as wells as for
humans. Each monkey poses itself the question of knowing who is stronger or weaker than itself, and
develops trials that permit it to decide the matter. But as good ethnomethodologists, none uses the
concept of rank or hierarchy to do this. The primatologist manages to do so of course, but only with
the help of numerous calculations, instruments and graphs. Should we forget the presence of this
equipment for primatologists and its absence for baboons?
There is in all sociological theories a gulf between the (framed) interaction of individual naked
bodies and the structural effects that impinge on them in the manner of a transcendent destiny that no
one has willed. The question for any theoretician is to decide what social operator best spans this gulf.
Is it by means of events induced by interaction itself that would thus transcend the previsions of
actors?
17
Can the gulf be spanned by involuntary changes caused by perverse effects emanating from
an always bounded rationality?
18
Or through a phenomenon of self-transcendence that brings
collective phenomena into play, in the same way as order emerges from chaos?
19
Or do we need to posit
a contract, which reduces dispersed actions to a single totalitarian action by a sovereign who is nobody
in particular?
20
Or on the contrary, if the gulf cannot be spanned, should we accept the prior existence
of a sui generis entity that is always present and which contains interactions like so many specialized
cells in an organism?
21
Or again, should we pose that there is between the two extremes a set of
intermediaries which permit the transportation into action of the social "field" through the vehicle of
the "habitus"; and thus render to structure, by way of individual action, what had been taken from it?
22
There are not very many ways of answering these questions, even if one is allowed to innovate by
reworking the small number of available models into new combinations.
23
In any event, these theories
presuppose the prior existence of the question that they are seeking to resolve: that there is a yawning
gulf separating the agent from structure, the individual from society. Now if there is no gulf, then
sociological theory would fmd itself in the rather odd situation of having tried to provide ever more
refined solutions to a non-existent problem.
By setting out before our very eyes the paradise of interactionists and ethnomethodologists,
simian sociology demonstrates for us a social life in which interaction and structure are co-extensive.
There is no framed interaction here, since no relationship is protected from sometimes very rapid
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
Volume 3, No.4 1996
I ;r-
contagion from all the others. But neither is there a jot more structure-since each interaction must,
locally and on its own account, test all over again the set of relationships without being able to sum,
nor to enter into a determined role or function that would hold by itself without the aid of physical
bodies. However, monkeys do indeed offer a demonstration of what a social society would be-that
is to say one conforming to the demands of social theory requiring a passage from the individual to
the sociial"level'' by a series of operators that are themselves social. But we could not extract from such
a group life (framed) interaction or society or agency or structure. All we could get is the impression
of an extremely dense and tightly woven but nevertheless plastic and soft tissue that remains always
flat As a consequence, the gulf that, according to sociologists, separates the individual from society
is not some primitive given. If we take simian social lives as a partially mythical base line, this abyss
remains invisible. Something else is needed to have dug it oul Social life, at least in its human form,
must <kpend on something other than the social world.
Priimatologists attempting to compile structural effects have to instrumentalize their observations
with e<;luipment that becomes ever more central to the task at hand. In order to frame an interaction,
we need partitions and hideaways. In order to follow an interaction, we need to sketch a quite
heterogeneous network that mixes up times, places and actors, and which forces us to ceaselessly
travel'Sie the fixed framework. Thus every time that we go from the complex social life of monkeys to
our own, we are struck by the multiple causes that at once come into play to dislocate co-presence from
social relationships. In passing from the one to the other, we do not go from a simple sociality to a
one, butwedo go from a complex sociality to a complicated one. The two adjectives, although
they have exactly the same etymology, will allow us to differentiate two relatively different forms of
social1existence. "Complex" will signify the simultaneous presence in all interactions of a great
number of variables, which cannot be treated discretely. "Complicated" will mean the successive
presen<;e of discrete variables, which can be treated one by one, and folded into one another in the form
of a bla.ck box. Complicated is just as different from complex as simple is.
24
The connotations of these
two words allow us to fight the evolutionists' prejudices, which always paint a slow progression from
monkeys to humans on a scale of increasing complexity. Let us say, to the contrary, that we descend
from monkeys to humans, falling from high complexity to high complication. A teach point, our social
life appears always less complex than that of a baboon, but it is almost always more complicated.
Fr:amed interaction is not local by itself-as if the individual actor, that necessary ingredient for
social life with whom one then has to construct the totality, had existed for all time. We will not find
that actor amongst the monkeys (who nevertheless live in the paradise, or rather the hell, of
interac:tionism). Amongst humans, on the other hand, an interaction is actively localized by a set of
partitions, frames, umbrellas, fire-breaks, which permit passage from a situation that is complex to one
that is merely complicated. While I am at the counter buying my postage stamps and talking into the
speaking grill, I don't have my family, colleagues or bosses breathing.down my neck. And, thank
heavens, the server doesn't tell me stories about his mother-in-law, or his darlings' teeth. A baboon
could not operate such a felicitous channeling. Any other baboon could interfere in any one interaction.
Inversely, structure is not global just by itself, as if it had existed for all time as a sui generis being
from whose body individual actor gradually detached itself. We never find among the monkeys (who
have nl() framed interaction) any social structure: the very thing that according to social theory is
necessary to balance interactions. For humans, on the other hand, we actively globalize successive
interacltions through use of a set of instruments, tools, accounts, calculations and compilers. These
allow us to pass from one complicated and in the end isolatable relationship to other complicated
relationships, which are in the end linked to iL
25
In the evening, the post office official can do her
On
Bruno Latour
233
accounts and compile summaries that enable an overview of the interesting parts of all the framed
interactions that took place at every grill Baboons cannot calculate such overviews: what is missing
is precisely summaries and traces. They only have their bodies with which to compose the social, only
their vigilance and the active engagement of their memory to "hold" relationships together.
Since for monkeys there is no difference in kind between interaction and society, there is neither
(framed) interaction nor structure. For humans, an abyss seems to separate individual action from the
weight of a transcendent society. But this is not an original separation that some social theory concept
could span and which might serve to distinguish us radically from other primates. It is an artifact
created by the forgetting of all practical activities for localizing and globalizing. Neither individual
action nor structure are thinkable without the work of rendering local-through channeling, partition,
focusing, reduction-and without the work of rendering global-through instrumentation, compila-
tion, punctualization, amplification. One cannot get anywhere in sociological theory if one is forced
to start from the substantial existence of either individual action or structure. But, more curiously, one
cannot make headway either if, trying to be reasonable, one decides to work simultaneously from the
two opposite poles of the actor and the system in order to then work out an intermediary formula for
arranging the two.
26
The combination of two artifacts could only produce .a third, yet more annoying,
one. To take .advantage of the comparative basis that simian societies offer us, we don't have to work
from interaction or structure or from between the two-but from the work of localization and
globalization, which has been up to the present beyond the pale for social theory, which apes and
monkeys seem incapable of, .and which forces us to have recourse to elements that do not at ftrst sight
appear to belong to the social repertoire.
Must Sociology Remain Without an Object?
As against the social interaction of monkeys, the social interaction of humans always appears to
be more dislocated. There is no simultaneity norcontinuity nor homogeneity. Far from limiting oneself
to bodies that are co-present by way of their attention to each other and their continual work of vigilance
.and construction; for humans one must appeal to other elements, other times, others places and other
actors in order to grasp an interaction. Of course for baboons certain relationships can extend over
decades and thus demand, in order to be understood, an allusion .to past events.
27
But these latter
brought to bear other bodies that were present, and are only transported into the current situation by
the living memory or the genetic embodiment of those same bodies. For baboons, the social is always
woven with the social: hence its lack of durability and the considerable work that is necessary to make
it, despite everything, hold together. By contrast, human social life appears to be lopsided. In order to
describe this .quality, this diSlocation, this constant appeal to other elements that are absent form the
situation, we often appeal to symbols and the tricky notion of symbolism. Indeed symbols take the
placeofsomethingelse.thatisnotthere,butwhichonecanrefertobyallusion. Thustheargumentgoes
that the absent structure makes itself felt through symbols. By this means humans distinguish
themselves from monkeys, or at least such is the usual line of reasoning. We need, it is said, to
supplement primate social links with human symbolic links. However, this hypothesis does not hold,
in the literal meaning of the work-for what do symbols hold on to? If the .social is not solid enough
to make interactions last-as examples from simian societies show-how could signs do the job? How
could the brain alone stabilize that which bodies cannot?
28
In order to get from a complex social life to a complicated one, we need to be able to timeshift,
dislocate, make lopsided and delegate the present interaction so as to make it rest provisionally on
something else, while waiting to take it up again. But what other thing? On the social itself? Yes, in
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
Volume 3, No.4 1996
....
part. since monkeys do this enthusiastically. The interlacing of interactions certainly offers them that
relatively durable matter on which they can in effect base themselves. Could it be based on symbols?
This is not very probable, since they in their turn must be held something other than the memory
or the mind or the naked brain of primates. Symbols could not be fundamental. When they are
sufficimtly sustained, when cognitive capacities are sufficiently instrumentalizedheavy enough, then
it will be possible to provisionally attach meaning to them, but not before.
29
Why not appeal to
something else-to those innumerable objects that are absent for monkeys and omnipresent for
humans-whether localizing or globalizing an interaction? How could you conceive of a counter
without a speaking grill, a surface, the door, walls, a chair? Do not these, literally, shape the frame of
the intt::raction? How could you compute the daily balance of an office without formulae, receipts,
accounts, ledgers-and how can one miss the solidity of the paper, the durability of the ink, the etching
of the chips, the shrewdness of staples and the shock of a rubber stamp? Is it not these things that enable
totaliuttion? Are not sociologists barking up the wrong tree when constructing the social with the
social or patching it up with the symbolic, whilst objects are omnipresent in all the situations in which
they are looking for meaning? Why does sociology, in their hands, remain without an object?
It is always difficult to appeal to things in order to explain either durability, extension, solidity and
structUlres or localization, reduction, the framing of interactions. Indeed, for the human sciences, things
have untouchable since, with the exact sciences, they became ''objective." After this split,
the modem period, between an objective world and a political world, things could notserve
as comrades, colleagues, partners, accomplices or associates in the weaving of sociallife.
30
Objects
could only appear in three modes: as invisible and faithful tools, as the determining superstructure and
as a prcdection screen. As tools they faithfully transmit the social intention that traverses them, without
taking .anything from them or adding anything on to them. As infrastructures, they interconnect and
form a 1continuous material base over which the social world of representations and signs subsequently
flows. As screens, they can but reflect social status, and serve as a basis for subtle games of distinction.
As a tool, the speaking grill, for instance, would serve only to prevent customers from attacking the
staff, and its function goes no further; it does not influence the interaction, only facilitates or hinders
iL As an infrastructure, the speaking grill is directly connected to walls, partitions and computers so
as to compose a material world that, it is said, completely shapes the remainder of the relationship just
as a waffle iron molds a waffle. As a projection screen, the same speaking grill doesn't have any glass
or wood or orifice or matter left-it a sign, different from plate glass, barriers, bay windows,
landscaped offices and thus signaling a difference in status, or signifying the modernization of public
service. Slave, master or substrate of a sign-in each case the objects themselves remain invisible, in
each case they are asocial, marginal, impossible to engage in detail in the construction of society.
31
Do we need to compose the social world with individual actors, or on the contrary begin with a
society that is always already there? Do we need to consider objects as determining the social world,
or should we, on the contrary, work from interactions alone? These two questions come down to a
single one that traces a kind of cross: Structure, Interaction (from top to bottom) and Objective, Social
(from left to right). Whence comes then the problem of the actor and the system? From the obligation
to choose a point of departure, either in structure or in individual action or from the two extremes at
once. But these points of departure are not primitive-we learned this from the monkeys, since
interaction has to be framed and structure has to be structured, globalized. The point of departure, if
there is: one, must rather be situated "in the middle," in an action that localizes and globalizes, which
dislocates and action that simian societies seem to be able to do without. However, in
order to situate this locus, we need to be able to share the social with things, which seems equally
undoable-not of the abyss that separates the actor from the system, but because of the no less
On Interobjectivity
Bruno Latour
235
significant break that separates the objective world from the political world, the exact from the human
sciences, nature from culture. As a result of this break, objects cannot irrupt into the social world
without denaturing it.
32
And, symmetrically of course, society cannot invade the sciences without
corrupting them.
33
One can understand the dilemmas of sociology since it is faced with finding its
essential resource at the pit of this double abyss, this double impossibility. It is because it is stretched
horizontally between the objective and politics that sociology has no place for things. And therefore
it fmds itself tom vertically between the actor and the system. Forgetting artifacts (in the sense of
things) has meant the creation of that other artifact (in the sense of illusion): a society that has to be
held in place with just the social. However, the operator, exchanger, agitator, and animator that is
capable of both localizing and globalizing sits right in the center of this cross. It can weave the
properties of objects with those of the social. But what is it?
Too often sociology remains without an object Like many human sciences, it has constructed
itself so as to resist attachment to objects, which it calls fetishes. It has taken the ancient admonition
of the prophets against gods, merchandise, consumer goods and objets d'art to heart: "Idols have eyes
and yet do not see, mouths and yet do not speak, ears and yet do not hear." According to them something
else animates these lifeless bodies, dead statues: our belief, the social life that we project onto them.
The fetishes do not count for anything in themselves. They are merely a projection screen. However,
they do indeed add something else to the society that manipulates them: objectification. Like so many
overhead retroprojectors, these idols reverse the sense of action-leaving the poor humans who have
given them everything they have the impression that their force comes from them alone, and that it is
this force that renders humans impotent, which makes them act, which alienates them. The human
sciences have for a long time been trying to reverse this reversal. Through a retroprojection
symmetrical with the first, they reveal the labor of humans and their multiple animation in the lifeless
body of the fetish.
34
The deontology of sociologists demands this anti -fetishism of them. Thus it is clear
why reintroducing the objects, speaking again of the weight of things, according inanimate beings real
social forces is for them an error: the error of returning to objectivism, naturalism, or belief. However,
we cannot make a place for objects without modifying the deontology of the social sciences, and
without accepting a certain dose of fetishism.
35
Objects do do something, they are not merely the
screens or the retroprojectors of our social life. Their sole function is not merely to "launder" the social
origin of the forces that we project onto them.
If we want to give a role back to objects in this manufacturing of the social link, then we must of
course also abandon anti-fetishist reflexes, just as we must abandon the other role given by the human
sciences to objects-the objectivity of natural forces-as well. Everything seems to lead to a position
where sociology oscillates between two definitions of the object: the "bad object" or the fetish and the
"good object" or the force. The former must be fought by showing that it is nothing but a substrate,
an inverter, a dissimulator of beliefs. The latter must be discovered, through the application of
appropriate methods, underneath the beliefs, opinions, passions and activity of humans. With these
two roles for the object, the human sciences critique popular belief and seek to imitate (what they
imagine to be) the natural sciences.
36
Sociology has for a long time alternated between these two roles
for the object-neither of which permit it to become a complete social actor. Either objects do nothing
except deceive or they do too much. Either they are totally manipulated by humans; or it is them, on
the contrary, which manipulate unsuspecting humans. Either they are caused or they cause. "Ordinary"
actors are always taken by surprise, whether believing in fetishes or thinking themselves free. In both
cases, the science of sociology reveals the actors' peregrinations, and traps them between "bad
objects" that they falsely believe in and "good objects" that make them act despite themselves. Critical
236
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
Volume 3, No.4 1996
sociology has been fed for centuries by scientism on the one hand and the denunciation of fetishism
on the (Jtther.
37
Toolmaking, constructing the social, acting, interacting, localizing, globalizing, determining,
constraining-all these verbs rest not only on a certain model of the individual or collective, human
or non-human actor but also on the definition of action. If it seems impossible to give objects that
remain simply "objective" their place in society. it seems even more difficult to integrate them as the
mere fabrication of an all powerful actor. In order to render them usable by sociological theory we must
modify on the one hand the objective nature of objects and on the other hand the concept of action. Now
normal anthropological usage presupposes in action a "making-be" for which it induces, by extension,
a subject with appropriate competencies and an object, which thanks to the actor has now gone from
potentiality to actuality. Nothing in this schema seems to be reusable by a social theory interested in
sharing sociality with things. Indeed action cannot be the point of origin except at the price of stopping
the circ111lation. or the series of transformations whose movement continually traces the social body.
The competencies of the actor will be inferred after a process of attribution, pause. abutment or
focusing. These must not be confused with the idea that the actor acts. as if actualizing some
potentiality. But neither the concept of transformation, nor that of circulation can, without being
altered. replace the idea of an action with a point of origin. In order to amend them, we need to consider
any point as being a mediation. that is to say. as an event. which cannot be defined in terms of inputs
and outputs or causes or consequences. The idea of mediation or event enables us to retain the only
two characteristics of action that are useful, i.e.. the emergence of novelty together with the
impossibility of ex-nihilo creation. without in the process conserving anything of the Western
anthropological schema that always forces the recognition of a subject and an object. a competence
and a a potentiality and an actuality.
normal theory of the actor is no more salvageable than that of action. As soon as one affirms
that an actor. whether individual or collective. cannot be the point of origin of action, then it seems that
actors must be immediately dissolved into fields of force. Now to act is to be perpetually overtaken
by what one does. "Faire c'estfaire." To do is to make happen. When one acts. others proceed to action.
It follows that one can never reduce or dissolve an actor into a field of forces. or into a structure.
38
One
can only share in the action. distribute it with other actants.
39
This is as true for its manufacture, as for
its manipulation. It is a tired old joke against sociologists to pretend that their actors are like puppets
in the h:ands of "social forces." This is a very good example, but it proves the exact contrary of what
is generally supposed. If you talk with a puppeteer. then you will find that he is surprised
by his puppets. He makes the puppet do things that cannot be reduced to his action, and which he does
not the skill to do, even potentially. Is this fetishism? No, it is simply a recognition of the fact that
we are exceededby what we create. To act is to mediate another's action. But what holds upstream for
manufacture also holds downstream for manipulation. Let us suppose that something else is.
metaphorically. pulling the strings of our puppeteer -a social actor. the "artistic field," the "spirit of
the time:s," the "epoch," "society" and so forth. This new actant, behind him. can no more master him
than he can in turn master the puppet. One can only associate mediators, no one of which. ever, is
exactly the cause or the consequence of its associates. Thus it is not the case that there are actors on
the one side and fields of forces on the other. There are only actors-actants-any one of which can
only ''proceed to action" by association with others who may surprise or exceed him/her/it.
How difficult social theory is! Social complexity. once the province of humanity, is now to be
shared with other primates. and thus its evolution must be traced over millions of years. Interaction
On Inte.robjectivity
Bruno Latour
237
cannot serve as the point of departure, since for humans it is always situated in a fmmework that is
always erased by networks going over in all directions. As for the opposite pole, that famous so-called
sui generis society, it only holds together through heterogenesis, and it seems rather to be the ever
provisional point of arrival of compilation and summation work that requires a lot of equipment, and
weighty tools. The new cognitive capacities owe their extension less to the powers of symbols than
to those of the instruments that hold them. It is impossible to work from a-collective or individual-
actor, since the attribution of a skill to an actant always follows the realization by that actor of what
it can do when others than itself have proceeded to action. Even the everyday usage of"action" cannot
serve here, since it presupposes a point of origin and a transport of force, both of which are completely
improbable. Not action, nor the actor, nor interaction, nor the individual, nor the symbol, nor the
system, nor society, nor their numerous combinations can be redeployed. There is nothing astonishing
in this, since sociological theory (no more than physics or geology can) should not expect to find the
terms that it needs in everyday usage-above all if, ceasing to be modernist, it reverses the Great
Divide and takes responsibility for the "social life of things." Follow the actors themselves, is the
slogan of our sociology; indeed, but it is not said how to follow them.
From the Study of the Soul of Society to that of its Body
Monkeys almost never engage with objects in their interactions. For humans it is almost
impossible to fmd an interaction that does not make some appeal to technics.
40
Interactions can
proliferate for monkeys, calling into play, gradually, the whole troop. Human interaction is most often
localized, framed, held in check. By what? By the frame, precisely, which is made up of non-human
actors. Do we need to appeal to determination by material forces or to the power of structure to go from
interaction to its framework? No, we simply transport ourselves to the places and times where the
frame has been conceived and built. The example of the counter will once again serve to elucidate this
point. If we let our attention slide from the interaction that is provisionally holding us together, the post-
office worker and I, across to the walls, the speaking grill, the rules and formulae then we need to go
elsewhere. We do not suddenly land in "society" or in the "administration." We circulate smoothly
from the offices of the post office's architect, where the counter model was sketched and the flux of
users modeled. My interaction with the worker was anticipated there, statistically, years before-and
the way in which I leaned on the counter, sprayed saliva, filled in forms, was anticipated by
ergonomists and inscribed in the agency of the post office. Of course they didn't see me standing there
in the flesh, any more than they saw the worker. But it would be a serious mistake to say that I was not
there. I was inscribed there as a category of user, and today I have just carried out this role and have
actualized the variable with my own body. Thus I am indeed connected from the post office to the
architect by a slender but solid thread that makes me go from being a personal body in interaction with
a worker to a type of user represented on a blueprint. Inversely, the framework sketched out years ago
remains, through the intervention of Portuguese workers, concrete, carpenters and fiberglass, the
framework that holds, limits, channels and authorizes my conversation with the post office worker. As
soon as the objects are added in, it will be seen that we must get used to circulating in time, in space,
across levels of materialization-without ever coming across familiar landscapes nor face to face
interaction nor some social structure that, it is said, makes us act.
41
Nor, of course, do we encounter
the yet more familiar and murky landscape of attempted compromises between these two models of
action.
The interactionists are right when they say that we should never leave interactions-but if one
follows human interactions then one never stays in the same place, nor ever in the presence of the same
238
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
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actors :and never in the same temporal sequence. Herein lies the complete mystery that made their
advers:mes say that they did not take "structural effects" or "the macro" into account By dislocating
interaction so as to associate ourselves with non-humans, we can endure beyond the present, in a matter
other than our body, and we can interact at a distance, which it is difficult for a baboon or a chimpanzee
to do. As a common shepherd all I have to do is delegate to a wooden fence the task of containing my
flock--then I can just go to sleep with my dog beside me. Who is acting while I am asleep? Me, the
carpenters, and the fence. Am I expressed in this fence as if I had actualized outside of myself a
competence that I possessed in potential form? Not in the slightest The fence doesn't look at all like
me. It ils not an extension of my arms or of my dog. It is completely beyond me. It is an actant in its
own right. Did it appear all of a sudden out of objective matter ready to crush my poor fragile, sleepy
body with its material constraints? No, I went folding myself into it precisely because it did not have
the sante durability, duration, plasticity, temporality-in short the same ontology-as me. By folding
myself into it, I was able to slip from a complex relationship that demanded my continual vigilance
to a me:rely complicated relationship that dido 't demand any more of me than to padlock the gate. Are
the sheep interacting with me when they bump their muzzles against the rough pine planks? Yes, but
they are interacting with a me that is, thanks to the fence, disengaged, delegated, translated and
multiplied. There is indeed a complete actor who is henceforth added to the social world of sheep,
although it is one that has characteristics totally different from those of bodies. Any time an interaction
has temporal and spatial extension, it is because one has shared it with non-humans.
42
If we want to analyze not only baboon but also human societies, then we must hear the word
interac:tion differently. This expression does not only signify that in all points of society action remains
local, and that it always surprises those who engage in it. It signifies that action must be shared with
other kinds of actants dispersed in other spatio-temporal frameworks and who exhibit other kinds of
ontology. At timet, I fmd myself in contact with beings who have acted at t-1, and I fold the situations
so that I myself will act under another form at t+ 1. In situation s, I find myself attached to
situations s-1, and I act such that downstream situations s+ 1 come to be associated with mine. On top
of this disengagement, this dislocation in time and in space, interaction operates an actantial shifting-
out
43
Any ego chosen as the reference point fmds itself pre-inscribed by the set of egos available to
it in the diversified form of durable things. None of these distances proves the existence of another
"level," or of a social structure. We always go from one point to another. We never get away from
interaction. But this latter forces us to follow numerous instances of shifting out How can an actor
endure in the midst of this diversity? Through the work of narrative creation that permits an "I" to hold


How is this narrative construction itself maintained? By the body, by that old basis
of primate sociality that renders our bodies skillful in maintaining interactions.
If interactions are framed by other actants dispersed in space and time, attempts to aggregate are
no less so. The life of Parisians, for example, is perhaps made up only of successive interactions, but
we should not forget the multiple panoptica that strive each day to sum up Parisian life. Control rooms
that traffic lights; panels at all points of the water distribution network; huge synoptic tableaux
allowing French electricity board officials to calculate down to the second the end of a film being
broadcast on Channel First; computers calculating the routes and loads of garbage trucks; sensors
permitting a count of the number of visitors to a museum. In a single day and from a single person many
small"'I"s are collected-statistical"I''s because she has used her car, flushed her toilet, turned off her
television set, put out her rubbish bin or visited the Orsay museum. For all that, do those who have
collected, compiled and computed constitute a social structure above her? By no means. They work
in control rooms that are themselves just as localized, just as blind, just as framed as that person is at
any moment of her day. How then can they sum up? In the same way that that person can limit herself
On lnterobjectivity
Bruno Latour
239
k@ J4 .
at any instant to an interaction. Because sensors, counters, radio signals, computers, listings, formulae,
scales, circuit-breakers, servo-mechanisms need to be added in; it is these that permit the link to be
made between one place and another, distant, one (at the price of installing some costly equipment).
You can't make a social structure without this compilation work. However, you can explain
structuration effects with it Thousands of people in Paris strive to locally structure Parisians-each
using their own equipment and their own categories. This is the profound truth of ethnomethodology.
All that remains is to restore to it what it had itself forgotten: the means of constructing the social world
If you set yourself the task of following practices, objects and instruments, you never again cross
that abrupt threshold that should appear, according to earlier theory, between the level of "face-to-
face" interaction and that of the social structure; between the "micro" and the "macro." The work of
localization, like that of globalization, is always carried out by bodies in times and places far apart from
others. Sometimes it is a question of, at great cost, constructing continuity in time for an individual
actor; sometimes summarizing, at great cost, the interactions of a more or less large number of actors.
You do not have to choose your level of analysis at any given moment: just the direction of your effort
and the amount you are willing to spend. Either you can, intensively, know much about little, or,
extensively, little about much. Social worlds remain flat at all points, without there being any folding
that might permit a passage from the "micro" to the "macro."4S For example the traffic control room
for Paris buses does indeed dominate the multiplicity ofbuses, but it would not know how to constitute
a structure "above" the interactions of the bus drivers. It is added on to those interactions. The old
difference oflevels comes merely from overlooking the material connections that permit one place to
be linked to others and from belief in purely face-to-face interactions.
In founding sociology, believers in social structure immediately denied it the practical means of
understanding localization and globalization, the shifting out of an individual actor as well as the
knitting together of interactions. Or rather, they all saw that it was essential, in order to distinguish
ourselves from monkeys, to take material means-things-into account. But they treated these means
as mere intermediaries, as mere transfers of a force which had to come from another source-from a
sui generis society or from aggregated individual rational humans. This relative contempt for means
was exercised three times: firstly on machines, then on control technology, and fmally on intellectual
technologies. They imagined that at root we were monkeys to which had been added by a simple
prosthesis, buildings, computers, formulae or steam engines. However, objects are not means, but
rather mediators-just as all other actants are. They do not transmit our force faithfully, any more then
we are faithful messengers of theirs. By picturing a social society which had found a material body by
chance, they once again exercised, despite their will to be materialist a new form of spiritualism. In
speaking of the social body they only spoke in fact about its soul. They took humans for monkeys
surrounded by things. In order to deal with the social body as a body, we need: a) to treat things as social
facts; b) to replace the two symmetrical illusions of interaction and society with an exchange of
properties between human and non-human actants; c) to empirically follow the work oflocalizing and
globalizing.
Notes
The current version of this paper was translated by Geoffrey Bowker. I also thank him for his efforts in
making my social theory less idiosyncratic. A shorter version of this paper has appeared in French: (1994 ). Une
sociologie sans objet? Note theorique sur l'interobjectivite. Sociologie du travail, 36(4), 587-607. This article
owes a lot to a long collaboration with Shirley Strum and Michel Calion. The baboons of the former and the actor
networks of the latter people each page.
240
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Mind, Culture, and Activity
Volume 3, No.4 1996
t .&MLUJ at . : t .. nu; w ;, .. ;n m t ' HIJ:ll!#i!1iliPfMMU4$Mi4illi4Mit&.MMiilli&iiiliik& aut a L t a
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Bruno Latour, CSI, ENSMP, 62 Boulevard
St. Michel, 75006 Paris, France.
1
For a first attempt, see Latour and Strum (1986).
2
See the numerous descriptions of "diffracted" interactions in Strum (1987) and Cheney and Seyfarth (1990).
3
The e.xpression "Machiavelian intelligence" comes from Byrne and Whiten (1988).
4
The comparison between Wilson (1971), who still uses the concept of superorganism and Wilson (1975), who
does not use it any more is a good marker of the turn in sociobiology that calls for the composition of groups of
bodies or ants through individual actions. The assimilation of a body to a marketplace may shock, but it does
usefully dispense with metaphors of the social body that we have used profusely since the Roman fable of the
"stomach and the organs."
5
This is the case at least in baboons. The situation is much more complicated with chimpanzees. See McGrew
(1992).
6
This iis a disputed question in Cheney and Seyfarth (1990) and Dennett (1987, p. 237).
7
Such have been the specifications of interaction since at least Goffman (1959).
8
On this controversial question see Strum and Latour (1987).
9
See, for instance, the now classic rendering of Heritage (1984).
10
See 1he fascinating organicist, or rather sociobiological. metaphors in Durkheim (1984).
11
This is the meaning of"Machiavellian intelligence": an intelligence born as a secondary adaptation to the hard
conditions of social life (Byrne & Whitten, 1988).
12
See Goffman (1974) for the notion of frame taken as a metaphor of social focusing. It will be taken here also
in its literal meaning.
13
For the dislocation of interaction as soon as one tries to designate the precisenetworkitsketches, see Law (1992)
and above all his latest book (1993).
14
In the classical definition provided by Durkheim.
15
Few primatologists would accept this way of presenting their work, since they use the same sociological theory
for themselves as for their favored subjects. The work of scientific construction is absent from their description.
It only becomes visible when certain results from the sociology of science are accepted. For an introduction, see
Latour (1987). For a discussion of the advantages of reflexive sociology for the case of dominance relations see
Strum (1987).
16
See Strum ( 1982). One cannot calculate stable dominance relationships for baboons except for females whose
relationships can last several decades. See Fedigan (1982) for a general discussion and Haraway (1989) for the
environment of all those debates.
17
Such is the claim of interactionism (Goffman, 1959) and of symbolic interactionism more generally.
11
This is the claim of methodological individualism whose most extreme militant expression can be found in
Boudon (1992).
On Interobjectivity
Bruno Latour
241
PLJ AI JQ
19
See Dupuy (1992), who is using self-organization as the main biological metaphor instead of economics, as is
the case of most sociobiology.
20
As in the powerful metaphor of the social contract of Hobbes (1651/1961).
21
See Durkheim (1984).
22
This is of course the solution ofBourdieu (1972; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), which allows him to criticize
both types of social theory by using habitus as the dialectical operator in the middle.
23
The rich diversity of these positions is omitted here in order to bring out the common pattern of their reasoning,
which necessitates posing frrst the "problem" of social order and of the individual. See Latour and Strum (1986)
for a classificatory principle for these models.
24
I am here summarizing the main argument of Strum and Latour (1987).
25
On this theme, which entails considering most structural effects as the performative resultofpractices of writing
and instrumentation, taken widely, see, of course Goody (1977). For science see Latour and De Noblet (1985),
and for accounting, Power (1995). For the case of State statistics see Desrosieres (1993) and Porter (1995).
26
This is the limiting case of dialectical solutions like that of Bourdieu's habitus or more recently Friedberg
(1993). The dialectic is always impotent in that it hides a problem that needs resolving under the pretense of
"overpassing" it; it is even more troubling when trying to overpass an artificial contradiction.
n See Strum's article in Latour and Lemonnier (1994).
21
This argument has taken a new weight from the recent refoundation of cognitive anthropology by Ed Hutchins
(1995) since his theory of dissemination of representational states through different media does not require the
symbolic defmition of symbolism.
29
Human societies do not permit a study of ''naked" cognitive capacities any more than they permit an analysis
of a primitive complex social life. It is impossible to study the intellect without looking at "intellectual
technologies." See the works of Don Norman (1993), Ed Hutchins (1995), Jean Lave (1988), and those of
sociologists of science (see a beautiful recent example in Goodwin [1995]).
30
I am using here the symmetric anthropology argument made in Latour (1993). The situation is changing rapidly
with the end of modernity, thanks to the two pronged attack of the sociology of techniques on the one hand (see,
for instance, Bijker and Law, 1992) , and on the other, the reobjectification of economics (see Appadurai, 1986,
and more recently, Thomas, 1991 ). The comparative anthropology of technology is also evolving rapidly; see an
excellent state of the art example in Lemonnier (1993).
31
The debate in archeology between form and function used to reflect this state of affairs. For a recapitulation
of the arguments and their recent evolution, see Latour and Lemonnier (1994 ).
32
To get an idea of the horror triggered by this position even in smart sociologists, see Collins andY earley (1992).
33
This is the classical epistemological position that has been dismantled by science studies, but which makes
people believe that science studies are "anti-science" whereas they have, in effect, depoliticized the sciences from
the obligation of holding the moral order.
34
One can recognize here the mechanisms studied by Marx for the economy and Durkheim for religion, which
were popularized by Bourdieu for all objects to which common sense could in error become attached. See in
particular Bourdieu and W acquant (1992) for the deontology of the "profession of sociologists." For a partial
retort, see Hennion and Latour (1993).
242
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35
The job of fetishes is precisely to render the two meanings of the word fact compatible: what is fabricated, and
what is lrue. By using the notion of fetish we are forced to always ask our questions as a contradiction: Is it
fabricated? or is it true?
36
The iuuption of the sociology of science completely changed this obligation to imitate the exact sciences, since
the latter no longer resemble the myths developed by epistemology. On the contrary, since they produce new non-
humans to construct the collective with, the sciences become once again imitable, but they are too mixed up with
the soci:lll sciences to be able to be ordered in a hierarchy with them. They become imitable in their subject matter,
not in their form, and, of course, not in their epistemology.
n On the recent shift between critical sociology and the sociology of criticism see Boltanski & Thevenot(1991).
31
The weakness of structuralism is to have sought rules beyond appearances, and to have imagined that some
entity could simply "occupy a position" whereas it perpetually recreates one around itself, that it mediates. Hence,
the oppclsition that proved fatal to this system of thought between asubject and the "death of the subject" dissolved
into a field of forces (Dosse, 1991, 1995). But there are no subjects to dissolve, nor are there any fields of force
to dissolve subjects in, since there exist no transport of force. There are only translations.
39
The word "actant," which comes from semiology, permits widening the social question to all beings who
interact in an association and who exchange their own properties, but it has its own defect. For a critique, see
Latour, 1996.
'"' I am using the word here to refer to a modus operandi, where "artifact" or "object" designate the outcome of
that op:ration.
41
This position has been taken in practice by the work of many symbolic interactionists. See Star (1989 & 1995),
especially her notion of boundary objects. What the present theoretical note does is simply to take away the notion
of interaction and that of symbolism!
42
See Latour (1994) on this example and the theory of the social that goes with it.
43
Semiotics recognizes three kinds of shifting out: in time, in space, and in a new actant. One example is a story
that begins with: "Once upon a time, in fairyland, a dwarf was one day walking calmly along .... "The notion
of shifting out has the advantage of helping us to do away with the idea that technology is "efficient action on
matter.'''
44
The work necessary to produce the continuity of an ego is especially visible in the narrative theories ofRicoeur
(1990).
45
For the necessity of not choosing a scale to go from the micro to the macro in order to understand relative
differences in size, see Callon and Latour (1981).

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