Department of Sociology

Lancaster University
.
. We are grateful to Michel Callon for his permission to publish his paper on our pages.
Please note that the copyright of this paper remains with the author. If you do quote
from it, please follow the usual academic conventions for references.

This is a draft. The final version will be published in

John Law and John Hassard (eds),

Actor Network Theory and After, Blackwell, 1998

Bruno Latour
Keynote Speech: 'On Recalling ANT'
'Actor Network and After' Workshop, Keele University,
July 1997

Author's address:
Bruno Latour
Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation
École des Mines de Paris
6º Bvd Saint-Michel
F-75006 Paris
Email: [email protected]

Thank you for asking someone who never used the word actor-network to
speak at the introduction of this meeting.

I guess that the division of labor between John and I is that, according to the
title of the conference, since he has talked about `ANT' , thus my topic must
be `and after'.

Hopefully there is a life after ANT and, like Antony I can say `I am not here
to praise ANT but to bury it'. Let us do it properly so that from the ashes
something else can ressuscitate.
There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word
actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the
coffin.

The first nail in the coffin is I guess the word `network' as John as already
mentioned. This is the great danger of using a technical metaphor slightly
ahead of everyone's common use. Now with the Web everyone believes they
understand what a network is. 20 years ago there war still some freshness in
the term.

What is the difference between the older and the new usage? Network at the
time clearly meant a series of transformations -translations, transductions-;
now, on the contrary, it clearly means a transport without deformation, an
instantaneous, unmediated access to every piece of information. That is
exactly the opposite of what we meant. The double click has killed the last bit
of critical edge left in the notion of network. I don't think we should use it
anymore.

The second nail in the coffin is the word actor in its hyphenated connection
with the notion of net. From day one, I objected to the hyphen because
inevitably it would remind sociologists of the agency/structure cliché, or
`pont aux ânes' as we say in French.

The managerial, engineering, machiavelian, demiurgic character of ANT has

been criticized many times and by many people in this room. More exactly,
critiques have alternated, quite predictably, between the two poles one turned
around the actor, the other turned around the network; the first critiques have
insisted on the demiurgic, male like, hairy gorilla character; the second on the
dissolution of humanity into a field of forces where morality, humanity,
psychology was absent; demiurgy on one side; death of man on the other.

No matter how prepared I am to criticize the theory, I still think that these
two symmetrical critiques are off target. The idea was never to occupy a
position into the agency/structure debate, not even to overcome this
contradiction. Contradictions should not be overcome, but ignored or
bypassed. But I agree that the hyphenated term made impossible to see
clearly the bypass operation that has been attempted.

Let me take a few minutes to refocus the argument. Let us abandon the actor
and the network altogether and pay some attention to two operations, one of
framing and one of summing.
Social sciences have always alternated, yes, but not so much between actor
and system, or agency and structure. The alternation is different; it is a
dissatisfaction with the micro level that forces the attention away to
concentrate on what has made the situation what it is; then when we move
the attention to society, norms, values, culture, etc., there is a second
disatisfaction; the asbtraction of those terms seem too great, and then, by a
second move, attention is shifted away to the micro level, to the incarnated,
in the flesh practice.

It seems to me that ANT is simply a way to pay attention to these two

disatisfactions not again to overcome them or to solve the problem, but to
follow them elsewhere: may be the social has this bizarre property not to be
made of agency and stucture at all, but to be a circulating entity. The double
disatisfaction is thus the results of trying to picture a trajectory, a movement,
by using a couple of opposition between two notions, micro and macro,
individual and structure, which have nothing to do with it.

Then, if this bypass is accepted, a few things are clarified: actantiality is not
what an actor does -with its consequence for the demiurgic idea of ANT- but
what provides actants with their actions, with their subjectivity, with their
intentionality, with their morality. When you hook up with this circulating
entity, then you are partially provided with consciousness, subjectivity,
actoriality etc. I will come back to those in a moment.

Now what about the macro-social? The network pole of actor-network does
not aim at all to designate Society, this Big Animal. It designates something
entirely different which is the summing up of interactions through some sort
of devices, isncriptions, forms, etc into a very local, very practical, very tiny
locus. This is now well known through the study of accounting, managerial
practice, panoptica, economics, anthropology of markets. Big does not mean
really big or overall or overaching, but connected, blind, local, mediated,
related.

The topology of the social, John is right, is rather bizarre, but I don't think it
is fractal. Each locus can be seen as framing and summing up. `Actor' is not
here to play the role of agency and `network' to play the role of society. Actor
and network -if we want to still use the terms- designates two faces of the
same phenomenon, like wave and particles, the slow realisation that the
social is a certain type of circulation that can travel endlessly without ever
encountering the micro-level -there is never an interaction that is not framed-
nor the macro-level -there are only local summing up.

To have transformed the social from a surface, from a territory, from a

province of reality, to a circulation, is what I think has been the most useful
contribution of ANT. But the benefit are not clear yet because of a third
difficulty.

The third nail in the coffin is the word theory. As Mike Lynch said sometimes
ago, ANT should really be called `actant-rhyzome ontology' but who would
have cared for such a horrible mouthful of words, not to mention the
acronym ARO? Yet, he has a point. If it is a theory, it is a theory of what?

John and Anne Marie Mol have used the word fluid. Adrian Cussins the word
trails. Charis Cussins the word choreography. All of these words designates
in my view what the theory should be and what the overdiffusion of the
`double-click' networks has rendered unretrievable: it is a theory that says
that by following circulations we can get more than by defining entities,
essences or provinces.

ANT is not a theory of the social, it is a theory of a space in which the social
has become a certain type of circulation. But then, the consequence is that
there is now room for other types of circulations, plenty of places.

Let us have a quick look at the modernist predicament. The whole theory of
society is enmeshed into a much more complex struggle to define a
pscyhology -an isolated subjectivity still able to comprehend the word out
there; an epistemological question about what the world is like outside
without human intervention; a political theory of how to keep the crowds in
order without them intervening with passions and ruining social order; and
finally a rather repressed but very present theology which is the only way to
guarantee the differences and the connections between those domains of
reality. It is this whole package that is in question.

ANT is not a theory of the social, no more than it is a theory of the subject, or
a theory of God, or a theory of nature. It is a theory of the space and fluids
circulating in a non-modern situation. What other type of connection can be
established between those terms, than the systematic modernist solution?
This is, I think clearly the direction of what is `after' ANT and what could
begin to solve several of the worries of many of the papers here -I am
thinking especially of Hans Harber's piece.

Let us not forget that the first thing we made circulate is nature and the
reference, that is the left side terriotry in the diagram. I was struck to see that
none of the papers for this conference mentioned social constructivism and
the recent Science Wars as even an issue. Obviously, the entry into the
collective of scientific reality under the aspects of a circulation of
transformations -is it even necessary to say real, social and narrative at
once?- is now, if not taken for granted at least clearly articulated. If ANT can
be credited for something it is to have developped a science studies that
entirely bypasses the question of `social construction' and the
`realist/relativist debate'. It is not, it never was a pertinent question.

What I call the `second wave' of science studies has done (is doing) to the
other sphere -on the right- the same sort of treatment. Subjectivity,
corpolrality is no more a property of humans, of individuals, of intentional
subjects, than being an outside reality is a property of nature. It is so well
represented in the papers for this meeting, that it is no use here to develop the
point. Subjectivity seems also to be a circulating capacity, something that is
partially gained or lost by hooking up to certain bodies of practice. Madeleine
Akrich work, the paper by Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion for this
meeting -the work I am doing on ehtnopsychiatry- have all the characters of
redistributing outside so to speak the subjective quality -but of course, it is a
totally different `outside' now that epistemology has been turned into a
circulating reference. The two movements -the first and the second wave, one
on objectivity, the other on subjectivity, are closely related: the more we have
`socialised' so to speak the `outside' nature, the more `outside' `obejctivity'
can the content of our subjectivity gain. There is plenty of room now for
both.

What is next? Clearly political theory as indicated by a small but growing

body of work -witness the paper by Dick Pels. Not a single feature of our
definition of the social escapes the pressure of epistemology and psychology.
If we could elicit the specificity of certain type of circulation that is turning
the Body Politic into one, that is, some type of circulation that `collect' the
collective, we would have made an immense step forward. We would have
freed politics from science -or more exactly from epsistemology- a result that
would be quite a feat for people who are still often accused to have
politicised science beyond repair! From the recent work in political ecology,
or in what Isabelle Stengers call `cosmopolitics', I am rather confident that
this will soon come to fruition. The poltiical relevance that academics always
search somewhat desperatly, cannot be attain without a relocation of the
extraordinary originality of political circulation.

What about the half hidden sphere above, that has been used as a guarantee
for the rest of the modernist systems? I know this is a very risky territory
since there is worse that dabbling with non-humans, it is to take theology
seriously. This line of work is not represented at all, I agree, in the meeting.
Yet I think that it is in theology that the notion of circulation is the most
rewarding, precisley because it rejuvenates, in an incredibly fast way, a tissue
of absurdities, what has become a tissue of absurdities because of the shadow
cast by the notion of a Science and by the notion of Society. Morality that
seems totally absent from the engineering dreams of ANT, may be very
 abundant if we care to take it also for a certain type of circulation.

There are of course many other types of circulation, not an infinite number I
hope. Michel Callon is studying for this meeting one equally specific and that
connects and coordinates action through the mediations of goods. It is also
largely and unknown territory in spite of the mass of economics and
socioeconomics done. I have mysefl charted several others.

The point on which I want to conclude is somewhat different from that of

John. He appealed to limit ANT and to tackle seriously and modestely
complexity and locality. As several of us, he is somewhat terrified by the
monster that we have begot. But you cannot do to ideas what auto
manufacturer do with badly conceived cars. You cannot recall them all by
sending advertisement to the owners, retrofit the cars with the improved
engines or parts and send them back again, all for free. Once launched in this
unplanned and uncharted experiment in collective philosophy there is noway
to retract and be modest again. The only solution is to do what Victor
Frankestein did not do, that is not abandon the creature to its fate but
continue all the way to develop its strange potential.

Yes, I think there is life after ANT. Once we will have strongly pushed a
stake into the heart of the creature safely buried in its coffin -thus abandoning
what is so wrong with ANT, that is `actor', `network', `theory' without
forgetting the hyphen!- some other creature will emerge, light and beautiful,
our future collective achievement.
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