http://ant.sagepub.com/
Anthropological Theory
http://ant.sagepub.com/content/11/2/135
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/1463499611407398
2011 11: 135Anthropological Theory
Olli Pyyhtinen and Sakari Tamminen
anthropos
We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at:Anthropological TheoryAdditional services and information for
http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:
http://ant.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
http://ant.sagepub.com/content/11/2/135.refs.htmlCitations:
What is This?
- Jun 30, 2011Version of Record>>
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Anthropological Theory
11(2) 135–152
! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1463499611407398
ant.sagepub.com
Article
We have never been only
human: Foucault and
Latour on the question of
the anthropos
Olli Pyyhtinen
University of Turku, Finland
Sakari Tamminen
University of Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Today, the impact of the work of both Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour is increasingly
evident in anthropology, most notably in the subfields of medical anthropology and the
anthropology of science and technology. However, so far the oeuvres of these two
thinkers have not been compared in a systematic fashion in the secondary literature.
The present consideration intends a sustained comparison of their work to the end of
problematizing the notion of the human or the anthropos. We suggest that both Foucault
and Latour provide us with vital means to question human exceptionalism. Instead of
calling upon the essence of human subjectivity by drawing on the notion of intentionality,
for instance, they break open the interiority and autonomous hidden essence of the
human. While Foucault does this mainly with his notion of the death of Man, Latour’s
work calls human essence into question by asserting the respective birth of non-humanity.
We argue that it is especially the two thinkers’ mutual concern with relationality that
makes their work central to recent discussions of ‘posthumanism’ by proposing a form of
‘ahumanism’. However, at the same time Foucault and Latour tend to neglect the ‘outside’
of relations, although both see it as providing the resources for every assemblage.
Keywords
anthropos, Foucault, intentionality, Latour, non-humans, posthumanism, relationism
Introduction
Today, the impact of the work of both Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour is
increasingly evident in anthropology, most notably in the subfields of medical
Corresponding author:
Olli Pyyhtinen, Department of Social Research, University of Turku, Finland
Email: olsapy@utu.fi
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
anthropology and the anthropology of science and technology. In addition to a
vast body of secondary literature discussing their work (see, for example, Kendall
and Wickham 1999; Keller 2005; Schroer 2008), there are also various scholars
working within the field of anthropology as well as science and technology studies
(STS) who have applied Latourian and Foucauldian notions and juxtaposed them
with one another (see for example Haraway 1989, 1992, 1997; Gomart and
Hennion 1999: 221; Law 2002: 91–2; 2004: 35–6; Jensen 2008: 361–3).
However, we feel that, so far, not only are the oeuvres of Foucault and Latour
lacking a sustained and systematic comparison but also the enormous potential
they together have as regards rethinking the presuppositions and basic assumptions
of anthropology remains to be discovered or at least made more explicit. In the
work that follows, we set out to compare the theoretical endeavours of Foucault
and Latour in the light of the question of the human or the anthropos.1
We contend
that both thinkers provide posthumanist anthropology and philosophy with vital
means to challenge human exceptionalism – and this despite the fact that both
Foucault and Latour bracket the question of the human in their work and seem to
lack even interest in examining the boundary-making practices by which the human
is distinguished from its ‘others’ (animals, plants or things, for example). We will
argue more fully later that it is in their a-humanism, that is, in their manner of
breaking open the interiority and autonomous hidden essence of the human,2
that
the importance of Foucault and Latour to posthumanist anthropology lies.
Of course, we acknowledge that a detailed comparison of Foucault and Latour
may be questioned down to even its sense, on account of the several obvious differences
between the two in their work. Firstly, while Foucault focused exclusively on
games of truth where the object of knowledge is man, Latour’s concerns are not
confined to the boundaries of the human sciences. Instead, he characteristically studies
the ‘hard sciences’ by focusing on laboratories, microbes, technology and the like.
Indeed, Latour regards Foucault as a rather traditional epistemologist, although at
the same time he admits that Foucault might have become absorbed in his thinking
more than he has recognized and acknowledged (Latour and Crawford, 1993).3
Secondly, the research strategies of the two thinkers are quite different. While
Foucault worked mainly in the field of historical studies by using textual sources –
that is, ‘on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have
been scratched over and recopied many times’ (Foucault 2000b: 369) – Latour carries
out anthropological studies by doing ethnographic fieldwork, having worked at sites
such as laboratories, the Boa Vista rainforest in the Amazon, and the Conseil d’Etat.
Thirdly, there is also a considerable difference in scale between Foucault’s and
Latour’s explorations. If the first, especially in his early work, looks for the conditions
of the possibility for knowledge and truth in the epistemic structure encompassing
a whole era (see Foucault 2003), for the latter these conditions are situated in
much more limited settings or in the local connections creating networks – which can
be considered as ‘micro-epistemes’ of a sort – in various sizes and shapes.
Given the differences mentioned, it is perhaps not at all surprising that the
theoretical endeavours of Foucault and Latour have not received systematic
136 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
treatment in the secondary literature. However, at least when it comes to the question
of the anthropos, it is their differences rather than their similarities that are
crucial, as the perspectives of the two thinkers prove to be complementary.
Stressing the complementary nature of their research projects is central to our
argument in this article.
We begin with the very question of the anthropos and how the perspectives of
Foucault and Latour contribute to our understanding of it. We claim that, for both
Foucault and Latour, human subjects are defined not by some autonomous essence
but by the specific networks in which they participate. In his archaeology of knowledge,
Foucault links the question of ‘man’ to various historical knowledge practices.
Latour in his symmetrical anthropology, by contrast, sheds light on the
production of the human in the present tense with his explorations of the nonhumans
participating in our collective life. Accordingly, both view humans as
compounds of relations. The second section of the present article sets out to undermine
the human-centred notion of action by examining intentionality as a product
of the coming together and interchange of both human and non-human elements.
The discussion of the relational composition of the human leads to the third theme
of the article – the relationism integral to the work of both Foucault and Latour.
At the same time, we come to pose the question of the nature of the outside of
relations. Notwithstanding their relationism, neither Foucault nor Latour holds
that relations would exhaust the whole of the real. We argue that for both Foucault
and Latour it is the outside of associations that ultimately provides the resources
for every action and also for every compound of the human, but, equally, both of
them also fail to do this justice. We conclude the article by reassessing Foucault’s
and Latour’s possible contribution to the recent discussion of the forms of the
human today, which in its most radical form can be formulated as the question:
Have we ever been only human?
The anthropos
In his work, Foucault casts systematic doubt on anthropological ‘universals’,
whether concerning man’s biological, mental or social features. He is wary of all
assumptions of an autonomous inner essence of man or self-enclosed homology of
humanity. Instead, he regards the human as contingent and temporary, for it is
dependent upon relations and their changes. It is in The Order of Things (2003) that
this idea finds its most radical expression. In the book, Foucault famously
asserts that, while the notion of the essence of human subjectivity has underlain
the analysis of everything that can be given to our experience from Kant until the
present day, Man as the capitalization-accorded figure who appears as the basis
and measure of things is someone from whom we are already departing. Thus the
well-known Foucauldian prophecy, according to which Man is bound to ‘be
erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 2003: 422).
Now, decades after the high tide of structuralism, it seems that Foucault’s
prophecy was clearly exaggerated, if not even completely mistaken. Man has not
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 137
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
disappeared entirely. On the contrary, to some extent, Man is still an integral part
in the logoi of contemporary thinking every time the essence or intrinsic faculties of
human beings are invoked or sought (Rabinow 2003), as is the case when humans
are distinguished from animals, plants and things, and culture is set apart from
nature. However, that Foucault’s announcement about the death of Man was
perhaps premature does not render his account erroneous or futile. It is not so
much as an epochal claim as it is as a methodological principle that the idea has
significance. Namely, it draws our attention to the production of the human in its
various entanglements with forces and forms outside it. From the constitutive
human subject, it turns to the ways in which the human has been constituted.
Accordingly, in his work Foucault shows us again and again how the form of
‘man’ is produced at the intersection of the historical conditions of knowledge and
the relations of power. In The Order of Things, for example, he depicts how the
form of Man appeared at the threshold of modern knowledge through Life,
Labour and Language: man was not only one who lives, labours and speaks but
also one who can be known only insofar as he lives, labours and speaks and, finally,
one who experiences and has knowledge of life, labour and language (Foucault
2003: 341, 383). The very empiricity in man – that is, the fact that he lives, works
and speaks – became the transcendental foundation of knowledge. Thus, Life,
Labour and Language appeared as ‘quasi-transcendentals’ (Foucault 2003: 272).
The lesson to be learned here is that the characteristic of modern knowledge is
therefore not the application of objective scientific methods (to man), as classical
rationalism maintains, but instead the emergence of such a figure of Man who is at
once both the object and subject of knowledge – literally an ‘empirico-transcendental
doublet’ (Foucault 2003: 350). However, because they persistently adhere to the idea
of constitutive Man, for Foucault modern forms of thought have come to their end
in the sense that they no longer render knowledge possible. The generative relations
that constitute the figure of the human have been removed and replaced with the
reified Man that assures the human sciences the basis of their knowledge. Their belief
in the truth granted by the cogito is only one historical form of knowledge in the
order of truth games (see Foucault 2003: 351).
However, in his analyses Foucault does not answer the question of to which
forces the human is connected today. It is not possible for the Foucauldian archaeology
of knowledge to describe our contemporary preconditions; because its own
speech is always already conditioned and restricted by them, it is always already
from within them that it speaks (see Foucault 2004: 146). Foucault’s manner of
study is based upon a ‘discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer
say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice’ (Foucault 2004: 147).
That is why it is possible for Foucault to describe only those discourses and practices
that have ceased to be our own, and at most draw sketchy lines of embryonic
assemblages not yet in full operation.
It is here that the work of Latour significantly complements Foucault’s analyses
by shifting the focus from the archaeological and genealogical past to the anthropological
present. In this sense, Latour can be lined up with thinkers such as
138 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway and key Foucault interlocutors Paul Rabinow and
Nikolas Rose. In Foucault (1999: 102, 108), Deleuze asks, having noted the limitations
of Foucault’s analysis, with what forces the human enters into a relation
now, and what kind of compound emerges as a result, if it is not the Man-form any
more than the God-form. For Deleuze, we are constituted by our relations with
information technology and computers instead of thermodynamic machines, with
silicon instead of carbon, with the chains of the genetic code instead of the organism
and with modern literature instead of the sovereignty of the signifier (Deleuze
1999: 109; 1995: 180). Haraway (1989, 1997) has suggested something quite similar
to this, as she has examined subjectivity as a cybernetic compound of a biological
body, information networks, cells and silicon in the form of concretely materialized
information.4
Finally, Rabinow and Rose have postulated the transformation of
the anthropos ‘from ontological to artificial’ in the practices of ‘biopolitics’, ‘biopower’
or ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow and Rose 2003, xxxi; see also Rabinow 1992;
Rabinow and Rose 2006; Rose 2006).
While sharing with them the belief that humans are shaped by forces ‘other’ to
them, Latour holds a perspective on the form of the human that nevertheless differs
greatly from the above-mentioned thinkers. He does not seek any distinctive features
or forces that would define our whole era or the present stage of man.5
On the
contrary, he studies empirically the concrete ways in which humans are enmeshed
with what he terms non-humans. According to Latour (2002), various non-humans,
such as technology, things and natural phenomena, are an integral part of our
existence. This is so to the extent that ‘the human [. . .] cannot be grasped and
saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is restored to it’
(Latour 1993: 136). We are significantly dependent on the capabilities of various
non-humans in our everyday existence. For example, in order to be able to type
these words, we must join forces with a heterogeneous network or assemblage of all
kinds of other forces, ranging from word processors, email messages and books to
the tiny components of our laptop computers, electricity, ancestors within the
Indo-European language group and even food. And, while the present-day conception
of hygiene is close to being phobic of bacteria, they too are necessary in the
production of several joys of life (such as wine, beer and cheese), and we need
swarms of bacteria just to keep our skin sufficiently moist.
By contrasting active humans to assumedly passive non-humans a priori, Latour
thinks, we are in danger of losing our understanding not only of humans but of
non-humans as well: ‘The human is not a constitutional pole to be opposed to that
of the non-human. The two expressions ‘‘humans’’ and ‘‘nonhumans’’ are belated
results that no longer suffice to designate the other dimension’ (Latour 1993: 137).
Humanity and non-humanity are inextricably enmeshed.
Given that, according to Latour, humans owe their agentic capability to a
coming together of a large number and variety of elements, agency should be
‘distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field’ (Bennett 2010: 23).
Latour holds that action is not an intrinsic trait of entities, such that we, for
example, could assign only human subjects the ability to act, and what entities
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 139
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
are capable of is defined, according to him, in sets of ‘trials’ in the mutual relationships
of entities. He defines action in terms of influence or effects on others. In
Pandora’s Hope (1999: 122), he insists that ‘there is no other way to define an action
but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed or created by
the character that is the focus of attention’. Therefore, for Latour, the capacity to
act ‘implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor humans in
general’ (Latour 1996). Non-humans – such as houses, airplanes, mobile phones,
foodstuffs, plagues or missiles – do not merely form the background, foundation,
transparent means or passive object of human actions; they too are capable of
producing effects and making something happen. Floods, tornados and tsunamis
occasionally cause suffering and misery to tens or even hundreds of thousands of
people; erupting volcanoes can bring the flight traffic of a whole continent to a halt;
catching a virus makes us sick, but when a virus becomes a pandemic, it may lead
nations to close their borders and equally make lots of money for the companies
producing vaccination; and the food we eat can make us not only slimmer or larger
but happy or depressed, energetic or tired.
To come back to the relation between Foucault and Latour, while Foucault’s
archaeological analysis of the historical contingency of Man as a figure of knowledge
succeeded in decentring the notion of an autonomous subject, it fell short in at
least two respects. First, because of the historical distance that it necessitates, the
Foucauldian archaeology can only state, in a negative manner, our difference from
the assemblages and forms that no longer constitute our present. Here Latour’s
studies of the concrete ways in which human and non-human elements fold into
one another complement the Foucauldian announcement of the death of Man
significantly. Second, the power that Foucault assigns to the materials alien or
other to the human subject ultimately remains relatively restricted. In his archaeology
of knowledge, discourses appear as the historical conditions of possibility
and boundaries of subjectivity, and even in his genealogical studies Foucault
assigns explicit agency only to humans. In his work, humans are not surprised by
the actions of things. Latour, by contrast, suggests that the actions of humans
depend on these humans’ ‘allies’, so to speak: humans owe their agentic efficacy
and capabilities to the larger assemblage of elements that they are part of. In the
next section of the paper, we look more closely at how both Foucault and Latour
undermine the all-too-human notions of action by questioning any direct links
between agency and intentionality.
Prostheses of intentionality
Needless to say, the Latourian idea of non-human agency poses a challenge to the
human-centred notions of action. Therefore, it is also bound to face the obvious
objection that, even though non-humans may produce effects, the intentionality
behind their action nonetheless remains entirely human. After all, action is usually
considered to necessitate intentionality, purposefulness, will and the like. While
video cameras, airplanes and freezers, among other things, admittedly enable
140 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
humans to do things they would not be able to do without them (e.g. capture
moving images, fly and keep foodstuffs fresh and edible), one might still object
to the idea of non-humans as actors or ‘actants’ (Latour 1996, 1999) in their own
right. One might argue that, no matter what, the supposed actions of these nonhumans
are possible only because of humans, for it is humans who have designed
and built them for a specific purpose.
This argument, however, suffers from two flaws. First, there are various nonhumans,
such as animals, plants and bacteria or such as earthquakes, meteors and
storms, that do not need humans before being effective. On the contrary, it would
be an insane case of human hubris to assume that all natural disasters are ultimately
caused by human actions. In fact, it is quite safe to assume that, as argued
by Jane Bennett (2010: 151–2, note 38), ‘humans need nonhumans to function more
than nonhumans need humans, for many nonhumans – from a can rusting at the
bottom of a landfill to a colony of spores in the Arctic – fester or live beyond
the proximity of humans’. In other words, while humans initiate and/or mediate
some of the actions of non-humans, practically all human actions are mediated by
non-humans.
Second, not even human-made things are sheer passive and transparent means
of human action. On the contrary, there is an element of surprise in all action.
We are always to some extent surprised by what things do. But not only that: ‘That
which acts through me is also surprised by what I do’ (Latour 1999: 281). Often we
are even surprised by what we ourselves do; our own actions are not always crystal
clear to us (as psychoanalysis famously stresses). Nevertheless, the point is that no
entity is a perfectly loyal, passive instrument of action; on the contrary, each
modifies, transforms and mutates what it mediates, transports and transmits.
Or, to draw on Latourian parlance, all these ‘mediators’ bring about a ‘translation’
(Latour 1986: 267–8).
The import of anthropology (and sociology), against simple materialisms, is,
without doubt, the insight that material objects are only rarely nothing but brute
matter. Rather, often they also embody social relationships. A wedding ring ties
spouses to one another, a ball has significance only as part of a game and a sacramental
object mediates the relation of believers to their god. It is only when
completely detached from human actions, perception and existence that materiality
is all that there is to objects. One of Latour’s instructive examples of how material
objects are not only material is the speed bump found on the campus:
In artifacts and technologies we do not find the efficiency and stubbornness of matter,
imprinting chains of cause and effect onto malleable humans. The speed bump is
ultimately not made of matter; it is full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers,
commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and
standard calculation. (Latour 1999: 190)
In the speed bump, various intentions and goals – to reduce road deaths,
ensure obedience to traffic regulations and thereby guard public morality, for
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 141
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
example – are folded into concrete. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as to say
that the agency of the speed bump would be reducible to human intentionality. It is
no neutral carrier of human will. On the contrary, by translating the respect for law
and for the life of students into concern over the suspension of one’s car, it fundamentally
modifies and shapes the initial enunciations. First, it brings about an
‘actorial’ shift: the speed bump is not a policeman, nor does it resemble one (even
though in French it is called a ‘sleeping policeman’). Second, it forges a ‘spatial’
shift: ‘on the campus road there now resides a new actant that slows down cars (or
damages them)’. Finally, it accomplishes a ‘temporal’ shift: the bump is constantly
present and acts, day and night, independent of the engineers, the policemen and
the lawmakers who have disappeared from the scene (Latour 1999: 188).
In the rest of this section, we try to loosen the notion of action from its strings to
intentionality even more by looking at how human intentionality itself may be
produced in and by the interplay of human and non-human elements. Both
Foucault and Latour challenge the idea of autonomous intentionality. They distribute
intentionality over the relational field of networks. For them, intentionality
is carried and supported by various extra-somatic materials instead of being an
activity confined within the human mind alone.
Let us begin with Foucault. His archaeology of knowledge sets out to open a
new manner of examining the history of thought. It studies knowledge and
thought free from the theory of subject and the principle of the knowing subject.
Instead of the knowing, intentional subject, it explores the knowledge (savoir)
that occurs in discursive practices and that makes it possible for something to
appear to the consciousness of a subject. In other words, instead of asking how
our knowledge is theoretically conditioned, Foucault poses the question of how
our theories and the knowledge that we know (connaissance) are conditioned by
certain historical apriorisms. By focusing on discourses, Foucault dethrones the
sovereign subject: knowledge becomes something that nobody knows and thinking
is something that nobody has thought; it does not presuppose the knowing
and thinking subject (see Foucault 2003: xiv–xv; 2004: 14, 17, 61). This becomes
evident already in his manner of defining ‘thought’ as ‘the act that posits a
subject and an object’ (Foucault 2000b: 459): the subject of a discourse is not
identical to an ‘author’ but merely ‘a particular, vacant place that may in fact be
filled by different individuals’ (Foucault 2004: 107). For the speaking individuals,
discourses offer different subject positions and define who is allowed to use certain
language (for instance, medical language) and whose speech is taken for real
in its statements.
For Latour, intentionality and thought (or reflexive intentionality) owe their
power to a successful mobilization of a multiplicity of elements. In The
Pasteurization of France (1988: 218), for example, he rejects the whole idea
of there being any special activity called thought: ‘When we talk of ‘‘thought’’,
even the most sceptical lose their critical faculties. Like vulgar sorcerers, they let
‘‘thought’’ travel at high speed over great distances.’ Latour’s point is that
thought should be seen not as an activity attributed to the mind only but as a
142 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
coming together of heterogeneous human and non-human elements. As he notes
of science in his first book, Laboratory Life ([1979] 1986), co-authored with Steve
Woolgar, it is crucial ‘to try sociologically to understand what is all too frequently
transformed into stories about minds having ideas. A useful maxim is Heidegger’s
observation that ‘‘Gedanke ist Handwerk’’: thinking is craftwork’ (Latour and
Woolgar 1986: 171).
Latour refutes the common criticism according to which non-humans, because
they lack intentions, cannot ‘act’. According to Latour, neither do humans have
intentionality: ‘Purposeful action and intentionality may not be properties of
objects, but they are not properties of humans either. They are properties of institutions,
of apparatuses, of what Foucault called dispositifs’ (Latour 1999: 192). In
other words, intentionality, for Latour, is a property of networks. One is reminded
here of Foucault’s conception of power, not least because Latour himself makes the
reference to Foucault’s notion of the dispositif (to which we shall return in the next
section). Foucault (1990) thinks that power is at once ‘intentional’ and ‘asubjective’.
While constantly being injected with aims, purposes and calculation, power is
not reducible to the ambitions and decisions of any individual subjects. Nowhere
can one find an all-powerful individual, a master under whose control the workings
of power might be.
However, instead of claiming, as Latour does, that humans do not possess
intentionality, it is perhaps more accurate to say that they do but that their
intentionality is only possible thanks to interrelations with various non-human
elements. On this account, intentionality would be seen as a product of the
interfolding of human and non-human forces (Bennett 2010: 31). This is precisely
the point Bernard Stiegler makes in The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), the first
volume of his Technics and Time. Stiegler suggests that the use of stone tools
gave rise to our ancestors’ psychological interiority. Prior needs were articulated
with the stone of the tool, which thus gave recollection to the previous use of the
tool. Not dissimilarly, Gregory Bateson (1972) has maintained that the ‘mind’ is
immanent only in a system of relations and becomes operational by particular,
material relations of exteriority upon which it can act both symbolically and
materially. Bateson’s famous quotation about a blind man’s mind and action
illustrates this point nicely:
But what about ‘me’? Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap.
Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it
bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip
of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which
transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to
draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways
which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of
behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will
need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round.
(Bateson [1972] 2000: 465)
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 143
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
So, we feel that, to challenge the reduction of action and agency to intentionality
and will, it is not enough to examine how experience and knowledge are historically
conditioned by certain discursive practices, as Foucault does, nor to deprive
humans of intentionality by saying that only networks possess it, as Latour does.
Both Foucault and Latour remain too indifferent for the question of human capabilities.
It would be necessary to examine in a manner more explicit than Foucault
and Latour apply (and more along the lines of Stiegler and Bateson, for instance)
how human intentionality emerges in and by the association of human capabilities
with non-human forces.6
The outside
There is a strong relationism in both Foucault’s and Latour’s work. Many commentators
have acknowledged this. Foucault examines not just man as a relational
compound; Deleuze (1999: 102) notes that Foucault’s general principle is that every
form is a nexus of relations among forces. Graham Harman (2009: 80), in turn,
claims that for Latour entities ‘come to birth only on the occasion of their associations’
and are transformed whenever they leave associations or enter new ones.
For Latour, actants receive their efficacy by allying themselves with others. An
actant is ‘not the source of action but the moving target of a vast array of entities
swarming toward it’; it ‘is what is made to act by many others’ (Latour 2005: 46).
The relational emphasis of Foucault’s thought is betrayed by, for instance, the
notion of the dispositif, which was mentioned in the previous section, and the
central position it holds in his later works. It would not require too much imagination
to consider the ‘actor-network’ a certain kind of dispositif and vice versa.
In fact, actor-network theorists themselves have remarked upon this (see Gomart
and Hennion 1999; Callon 2008). As does the dispositif, an actor-network embodies
various elements from science and technology to equipment, buildings, infrastructures,
legal frameworks, ethical codes and black-boxed truths. And, similarly to the
actor-network, a dispositif, as Foucault (1980: 194) puts it, is a ‘system of relations’,
which can be set up between elements of different types. In addition, dispositifs and
actor-networks are neither coherent nor stable structures – they change and move:
in both cases, the relations that make up the network are in a state of ceaseless
association and differentiation. The relations among the elements that make up
dispositifs or actor-networks are also different across various situations and locations
in the societal field.7
Notwithstanding their relationist emphasis, neither Foucault nor Latour would
say that there is no ‘outside’ to the networks of relations. Therefore, both would also
be likely to reject the idea of the human subject being reducible to one’s relations.
In the case of Foucault, the interpretations of his work often fail to acknowledge the
existence and importance of the outside. Of course, Foucault does stress that there is
no outside to power relations in the sense of there being any sense in trying to
eliminate them or reach beyond them. Foucault (2000a: 291–2) stresses that
144 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
power is present in every human relationship, whether communicational, amorous,
institutional, epistemic or economic, as a strategic element. Nevertheless, in The
History of Sexuality (1990), he pictures life, which is at the same time within and
outside power, as a resource of resistance. According to Foucault, with the birth of
‘bio-power’, life becomes the new aim or object of power, as bio-power seeks to
govern life, to optimize, reinforce, control and organize its forces (Foucault 1990:
136). However, at the same time, life resists power. Life cannot be completely integrated
into the techniques that control and administer it; instead, it ‘constantly
escapes them’ (Foucault 1990: 143): life is that which is unknown, unformed; it is
not yet governed, not yet measured and not yet administered. In fact, in his last piece
of writing, entitled ‘Life: Experience and Science’ (2000b), Foucault even proposes a
reformulation of the theory of the subject in line with the vitalism of which we get a
glimpse in The History of Sexuality. In ‘Life: Experience and Science’, Foucault
specifies that the radical feature of life is ‘that which is capable of error’ (Foucault
2000b: 476): ‘Should not the whole theory of the subject be reformulated, seeing
that knowledge, rather than opening onto the truth of the world, is deeply rooted in
the ‘‘errors’’ of life?’ (Foucault 2000b: 477).
Neither does Latour claim that entities are nothing apart from and beyond their
relations. He seems to be merely suggesting that we should only study them in their
relations. Latour acknowledges the existence of a vast hinterland of material that is
simply unconnected. He calls it the plasma (see Latour 2002, 2005: 241–6). With the
term, in Latour’s own words, he refers to ‘that which is not yet formatted, not yet
measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, not yet covered,
surveyed, mobilized or subjectified’ (2005: 244). So Latour does not think that
there would be no outside to the relational grid. Rather, he admits that the networks
of relations do not cover all of the real. In fact, if we are to believe Latour,
networks cover only a small part of the real. According to him, if the social terrain
would occupy as much room as the London tube network, the plasma would
amount to the rest of London (Latour 2005: 244). Provided that we can know
entities only in their relations – in their relations to us, a ‘correlationist’ (see
Meillassoux 2008) would say – there is a lot to the world that is simply unknown.
‘The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties,
but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized
forms’, Latour (2005: 245) maintains.
Accordingly, both Foucault and Latour would probably have it that ultimately
the ingredients of any action must come from the outside – that is, from life or
plasma. For example, Foucault stresses that, vis-a` -vis power, resistance comes first,
and Latour notes that the plasma ‘provid[es] the resources for every single course of
action to be fulfilled’ (Latour 2005: 244). Overall, one could argue that there must
exist something in relation before, or at least simultaneously when, relations are
spun. Nevertheless, for us, both of the two thinkers equally fail to give the outside –
whether pictured in terms of life or as plasma – its due. Neither Foucault nor
Latour succeeds in providing a detailed and comprehensive account of life/
plasma itself and of its share in network relations.
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 145
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
One of the problems associated with the gesture of dissolving anything in relations
is the inability to account for singularity. While individual objects do exist for
Foucault and Latour (instead of being fully dissolved into a global system of relations),
they nonetheless appear individual only as individual sets of relations (see
Harman 2009: 161 for Latour) – an idea widely used as an analytical tool in current
relational anthropology (see e.g. Strathern 2005).8
Accordingly, it seems that both
Foucault and Latour would deny the idea of the ‘virtual’ (despite Latour’s flirtation
with the notion here and there). For Foucault, each age says everything it can
say according to its historical a prioris laid down for its statements (Foucault 2004:
134–5, 138; Deleuze 1999: 46), and for Latour, there is no virtual dimension to
entities, and they are fully defined by their actual relations at every given moment –
the reality is ‘flat’ by its actual beingness.
We feel that here the Foucauldian and Latourian perspectives would need to be
supplemented with a Deleuzian philosophy of the virtual, for example. According
to Deleuze (1991: 96), the virtual is something ‘real without being actual, ideal
without being abstract’. There is a virtual dimension to entities that is not reducible
to their actual relations. What is more, with his thinking concerning ‘a life’, which
amounts to virtuality, Deleuze (2001) succeeds in addressing haecceities not of
individuation but of singularization.
Another conceptual tool of use in trying to fathom the outside of relationality
beyond the horizons of Foucault and Latour would be that of noise as employed by
Michel Serres (1995, 2007). With the notion of noise, Serres aims to consider in
positive terms a state that is usually described only negatively, as a lack or absence
of order – that is, disorder. Noise designates chaos, the static, perturbation and
interruption. It is that which comes before any systems, forms, language, logic,
even the word. Any order can be brought about only through exclusion of noise;
this is the precondition for undisturbed communication, pure understanding,
smooth production, uniform community and the equilibrium of any system.
No system can be absolutely inclusive, since sooner or later noise would block it
completely and make it collapse. At the same time, noise can never be removed
completely, for as soon as there is a channel, there is noise. Oral communication is
always exposed to the perturbations of dialect, speech defects or unclear articulation,
for example, just as the message of a text may be blurred by poor writing,
spelling errors or unclearly reproduced graphic signs (see Serres 1982: 66). The total
elimination of noise would therefore require that one eliminate the channel as well.
Communication, understanding and the collective are therefore possible thanks to
noise, not without it – in contrast to what Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver
(1949) assume in their famous transformation model of communication.
Accordingly, Serres claims that all forms (including language, logic and social
formations) spring from noise:
Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not
at rest, it may be that it is not in motion, it may be that our being is disturbed. The
background noise never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging. It
146 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
has itself no background, no contradictory. How much noise must be made to silence
noise? (Serres 1995: 13)
When compared to the perspectives of Foucault and Latour, Serres’s philosophy
of noise has two considerable strengths when attempting to come to terms with
the outside. First, Serres’s work illustrates well how noise, while representing the
other or the absolute outside of a system, is still an integral part of the functioning
of any system. Second, whereas for Foucault and Latour the way in which life or
plasma participates in agentic assemblages ultimately remains relatively unclear
and vague, Serres provides an accurate account of what it is that noise actually
does. Noise intervenes, interfering and disturbing the normal functioning of a
system. Thus any successful relation requires the exclusion of noise. But at the
same time noise may also generate a new, more complex system (Serres 2007:
14). It is both the ground and the interruption of connections.
Concluding remarks: Foucault’s and Latour’s posthumanism
In this article, we have pursued two general aims. On the one hand, we have set out
to compare how Foucault and Latour link to one another in their conceptual
apparatuses and research strategies. At the same time, we have tried to explicate
how the two thinkers provide tools for reconsideration of the anthropos and how,
in particular, they prove to be complementary in this task.
The deconstruction of the essence and inherently fixed properties of humanity
required that we find a novel place from which to think on the human and reflexive
intentionality as well as rearrange and redefine their respective spheres. Foucault and
Latour share the bid to study the human without the intellectual baggage that comes
with anthropological thought. Both stress that the human cannot be defined by invoking
an essence, or by appealing to any ideas of mental structures, personality or
identity, any more than one can understand agency or knowledge by reducing these
to the human subjects who act and think. Quite to the contrary, both Foucault and
Latour conquer the whole interior/exterior division regarding the form of man: the
anthropos appears as an unstable assemblage of manifold inner and outer forces of
which he or she is constituted, as an always already artificial product of relations.
Therefore, in contrast to claims made in many versions of so-called posthumanism
(Hayles 1999; Fukuyama 2000; Badmington 2003), which more or less adopt
an evolutionary frame, or those predicting a transformation into an artificial
anthropos (Rabinow 1992; Rose and Rabinow 2003; Rose 2006),9
Foucault and
Latour do not suggest that, in a historical succession and because of recent technological
developments (the genome project, global warming, genetically modified
organisms, pharmacogenomics, information theory, artificial intelligence, cybernetics
etc.), we have moved from an ontologically defined human to an artificial one.
Instead, the perspectives of Foucault and Latour are much closer to the posthumanism
of, for example, Serres (1995, 2007) and Karen Barad (2007), who consider
posthumanism to be not something that comes after humanism but, rather, a way of
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 147
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
being attentive to the production of the human in its various entanglements with its
‘others’.10
For Serres, objects always participate in our collectives. ‘Humanity begins
with things; animals don’t have things’, he notes in conversation with Latour (in
Serres with Latour 1995: 166). Elsewhere, he also suggests that, despite there being
no inherent properties of man as ‘givens’, ‘one can still think of man, universally. But
this universal is empty and blank’ (Serres 1995: 47). Humans are quasi-subjects,
produced in and by confederations of relations. As for Barad, she notes that her
take on posthumanism ‘is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while
being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential
positioning of the human among other creatures’ (Barad 2007: 136).
In a manner not very dissimilar to that of Serres or, more recently, Barad (whose
work is not without influences of both Foucault and Latour), Foucault and Latour
problematize the very matter of whether we have ever been only human in the first
place. Denouncing any grounding in Man, Foucault and Latour propose a posthumanism
or, rather, an ahumanism and call into question the grounds for any
claim about the inherently determinate properties or capabilities of the human.
Here, analysis based on the historical trajectory of the human sciences (what is
the moment of humanism and what comes after it) or technoscientific development
(scientific facts and their entanglement with the non-humans that enact them) must
not be confounded with the radical onto-politics Foucault and Latour suggest. The
human and the non-human have always been outcomes of reasoning and products
of meticulous cultural and material practices (scientific or not), not points of departure
as pure, stable and clear-cut categories from which these proceed. There is no
escape from the radical connectedness of the human with its relations of exteriority
– it is only that these relations have been radically reworked in our present contemporaneity.
This is the ‘ontological’ (or, should one say, the ‘ecological’?) condition
of the anthropos in its corporeal immanence of thought.
In posing our challenge to the division into human and non-human (or the
world) as distinct ontological zones, our purpose has not been to engage in the
old anthropological practice of ‘brutalization’, which Rabinow (2008: 14) specifies
as the act of treating something ‘viciously, without care’. Instead, as Foucault,
Latour and anthropologists of the contemporary such as Rabinow suggest, we
have only tried to reinstate the old question of ‘what logos is appropriate for
anthropos’ (Rabinow 2008: 14) and answer it with perhaps more care, more reflexivity
and more humility than applied before. We feel that this is crucial when one is
faced with today’s complex and materially mediated problems, such as the ecological
sustainability of our way of life.
Notes
1. Our choice of thinkers is in no way intended to celebrate the revolutionary character of
white male thinkers within the domain of anthropology or in science and technology
studies. It would be equally possible to examine the work of Isabelle Stengers, Donna
Haraway or Karen Barad, for example. However, we feel that discussion of Foucault
and Latour is of special importance in attending to the question of the production of the
148 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
human, as their work is so widespread and has influenced much of the current research
in these fields.
2. For a project fairly similar to ours, see Michael (2000), who draws on Latour, Haraway
and Serres.
3. For Latour’s comments on Foucault’s work, see, for example, Latour and Crawford
(1993) and Latour (1993: 137; 1999: 192, 262; 2005: 76, 86, 161, 212, 213).
4. Of course, the figure of the cyborg is only one of her tools in analysis of what Haraway calls
the technoscientific present. Others include non-human figures such as the OncoMouseTM
(Haraway 1997) and, more recently, ‘companion species’ (Haraway 2004).
5. In fact, Latour discards the very idea that our own present time would somehow be
radically different from the past. He does not picture history in terms of the sort of total
ruptures with which Foucault and the authors mentioned above frame it. For Latour
(1993: 85), by contrast, ‘we are still in the Dark Ages or, if you prefer, we are still in
the world’s infancy’. Latour’s conception of time and his critique of modernity
are clearly influenced by the philosopher Michel Serres, who thinks that nothing is in
fact more ancient than the gesture of presuming a revolution that made way for a new
era. Modernity merely repeats this gesture that has been repeated so many times in the
history of Western thought (Serres with Latour 1995: 144). Therefore, for Serres, ‘[w]e are
ancient in most of our actions and thoughts’ (Serres with Latour 1995: 138).
6. See also Callon (1998) for an account of how agents become calculative thanks to their
entanglements in a web of relations. According to Callon, calculating is a complex
practice which is not reducible to the brain of human beings nor to their culture or
social institutions, but involves the use of various ‘equipment’.
7. Latour himself has also made a connection between Foucault’s notion of the panopticon
and his concept of the laboratory. In an interview, Latour avows his debt to Foucault in
this respect: ‘the panopticon is the very sort of intellectual technological dispositif which
interests me. In that sense, the dissemination of laboratories, their ability to reverse
scale, to completely reverse micro and macro order, is very much a confirmation of
Foucault’s tradition’ (Latour and Crawford 1993: 253). Nevertheless, the laboratory
differs from the panopticon in that it is not an all-encompassing assemblage but a
small, more localized and specific one. What is more, Latour goes as far as to deny
the very possibility of a ‘panoptic’ view. According to Latour, ‘All . . . images are partial’
(Latour and Hermant 2006: 29): the totality of things ‘cannot be captured at a glance’
(Latour and Hermant 2006: 1), since ‘we have no access to the divine view, the view from
nowhere’ (Latour and Hermant 2006: 9, cf. Haraway, 1988). Accordingly, Latour
replaces the Foucauldian notion of the panopticon with that of the ‘oligopticon’: instead
of being seen entirely in one view, Latour thinks that any totality can be grasped only in
a montage of images (Latour and Hermant 2006: 29), hence the necessity of moving
from place to place and examining many specific ‘micro-epistemes’.
8. Marilyn Strathern (2005: 12) addresses the problem of relationism by claiming that
‘[w]hether entities pre-exist relations or are brought into existence by them is another
way of referring to the contrast between applying the creative work of the relation (invention)
or uncovering its prior status (discovery). But this does not exhaust the interest of
conceptual relations: above all they can be invested with creative or generative power’. Her
acknowledgement opens up two different ways of taking an ontological stance on ‘materiality’
of ‘things’ within relationist thinking and makes more explicit the wavering stances
both Foucault and Latour take on the issue.
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 149
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
9. For the forms of posthumanism that stress the transition of the human, see, for example,
Thacker (2003).
10. Donna Haraway too has recently distanced herself from the concept of the posthuman for
its evolutionary beliefs. She worries that the ‘human/posthuman is much too easily appropriated
by the blissed-out, ‘‘‘Let’s all be posthumanists and find our next teleological
evolutionary stage in some kind of transhumanist technoenhancement.’’ Posthumanism
is too easily appropriated to those kinds of projects for my taste’ (Haraway in Gane 2006:
140).
References
Badmington N (2003) Theorizing posthumanism. Cultural Critique 53: 11–27.
Barad K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bateson G (2000) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Callon M (1998) Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics.
In: Callon M (ed.) The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell/The Sociological Review.
Callon M (2008) Economic markets and the rise of interactive agencements. In: Pinch T and
Swedberg R (eds) Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and
Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze G (1991) Bergsonism, Tomlinson H and Habberjam B (trans). New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze G (1995) Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze G (1999) Foucault, Hand S (trans). London/New York: Continuum.
Deleuze G (2001) Pure Immanence. Essays on A Life, Rajchman J and Boyman A (trans).
New York: Zone Books.
Foucault M (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977
(ed. by Gordon C). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Foucault M (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, Hurley R (trans). New
York: Vintage Books.
Foucault M (2000a) Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. I, Rabinow P (ed.).
London: Penguin Books.
Foucault M (2000b) Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault
1954–1984, Vol. II, Faubion J (ed.). London: Penguin Books.
Foucault M (2003) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London/
New York: Routledge.
Foucault M (2004) Archaeology of Knowledge, Sheridan-Smith AM (trans). London/New
York: Routledge.
Fukuyama F (2000) Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gane N (2006) When we have never been human, what is to be done? Interview with Donna
Haraway. Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8): 135–158.
Gomart E´ and Hennion A (1999) A sociology of attachment: Music lovers, drug addicts.
In: Law J and Hassard J (eds) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell.
Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege
of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies 14: 575–599.
150 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Haraway D (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science. New York: Routledge.
Haraway D (1992) The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d
others. In: Grossberg L, Nelson C and Treichler PA (eds) Cultural Studies. New York:
Routledge.
Haraway D (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse:
Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.
Haraway D (2004) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Harman G (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.
Hayles NK (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jensen CB (2008) Power, technology and social studies of health care: An infrastructural
inversion. Health Care Analysis 16(4): 355–374.
Keller R (2005) Wissensoziologische Diskursanalyse. Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms.
Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag.
Kendall G and Wickham G (1999) Using Foucault’s Methods. London/New York: Routledge.
Latour B (1986) The powers of association. In: Law J (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New
Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Latour B (1988) The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (1996) On actor-network-theory: A few clarifications. Soziale Welt 47(4): 369–381.
Latour B (1999) Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Latour B (2002) Morality and technology: The end of the means. Theory, Culture & Society
19(5/6): 247–260.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/
New York: Oxford University Press.
Latour B and Crawford HT (1993) An interview with Bruno Latour. Configurations 1(2):
247–268.
Latour B and Hermant E (2006) Paris: Invisible City, Carey-Libbrecht L (trans). Available
at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/PARIS-INVISIBLE-GB.pdf.
Latour B and Woolgar S (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts,
2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Law J (2002) Objects and spaces. Theory, Culture & Society 19(5/6): 91–105.
Law J (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London/New York: Routledge.
Meillassoux Q (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Brassier R
(trans). London/New York: Continuum.
Michael M (2000) Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature. From society to
Heterogeneity. London/New York: Routledge.
Rabinow P (1992) Studies in the anthropology of reason. Anthropology Today 8: 7–10.
Rabinow P (2003) The Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Rabinow P (2008) Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Rabinow P and Rose N (2003) Introduction: Foucault today. In: Rabinow P and Rose N
(eds) Essential Foucault. New York: New Press, vii–xxxv.
Pyyhtinen and Tamminen 151
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Rabinow P and Rose N (2006) Biopower today. Biosocieties 1(2): 195–217.
Rose N (2006) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst
Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schroer M (2008) Vermischen, Vermitteln, Vernetzen. Bruno Latours Soziologie der
Gemenge und Gesmiche im Kontext. In: Kneer G, Schroer M and Schu¨ ttpelz E (eds)
Bruno Latours Kollektive. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Serres M (1982) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, Harari JV and Bell DF (eds).
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Serres M (1995) Genesis, James G and Nielson J (trans). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Serres M (2007) The Parasite, Schehr LR (trans). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Serres M and Latour B (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Lapidus R
(trans). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shannon C and Weaver W (1949) A Mathematical Model of Communication. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Stiegler B (1998) The Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Beardsworth R
and Collins G (trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Strathern M (2005) Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Often a Surprise.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thacker E (2003) Data made flesh: Biotechnology and the discourse of the posthuman.
Cultural Critique 53: 72–97.
Thompson C (1998) Producing reproduction: Techniques of normalization and naturalization
in an infertility clinic. In: Franklin S and Ragone H (eds) Reproducing Reproduction:
Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Olli Pyyhtinen, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in sociology at the Department of Social
Research, University of Turku, Finland. His research interests lie within social
theory, process philosophy, object-oriented sociology, economic sociology, science
and technology studies, and the study of art. He has published a number of articles
on social theory and a book titled Simmel and ‘the Social’ (Palgrave Macmillan,
2010). He is currently conducting an ethnography on the creation of value within
the art market.
Sakari Tamminen gained his PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland, where
he graduated in social psychology and social anthropology. His research interests
lie in the exploration of human-nonhuman boundaries, new genetic technologies
and the insights these provide for rethinking social theory. He also holds a
Licentiate of Technology degree in Usability and User-Centered Design from
Aalto University, where he acted as University Lecturer for a number of years.
He has published on new genetics and society as well as edited (with Niki
Vermeulen and Andrew Webster) an upcoming book on new objects of life titled
Bio-objects: Life in the 21st Century (Ashgate).
152 Anthropological Theory 11(2)
at Masarykova Univerzita on September 15, 2014ant.sagepub.comDownloaded from