Reassembling the
Social
An Introduction to
Actor-Network-Theory
Bruno Latour
1
On the Difficulty of Being an
ANT: An Interlude in the Form
of a Dialog
An office at the London School of Economics on a dark Tuesday
afternoon in February before moving upstairs to the Beaver for a
pint. A quiet but insistent knock is heard. A student peers into the
office.198
Student: Am I bothering you?
Professor: Not at all. These are my office hours. Come in, have a seat.
S: Thank you.
P: So . . . I take it that you are a bit lost?
S: Well, yes. I am finding it difficult, I have to say, to apply Actor
Network Theory to my case study on organizations.
P: No wonder! It isn’t applicable to anything.
S: But we were taught . . . I mean . . . it seems like hot stuff around
here. Are you saying it’s useless?
P: It might be useful, but only if it does not ‘apply’ to something.
S: Sorry, but are you playing some sort of Zen trick here? I have to
warn you that I’m just a straight Organization Studies doctoral student,
so don’t expect . . . I’m not too much into French stuff either, just
read a bit of Thousand Plateaus but couldn’t make much sense of it . . .
P: Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say anything cute. Just that ANT is first of
all a negative argument. It does not say anything positive on any state
of affairs.
S: So what can it do for me?
P: The best it can do for you is to say something like, ‘When your
informants mix up organization, hardware, psychology, and politics
in one sentence, don’t break it down first into neat little pots; try to
follow the link they make among those elements that would have
198
A version of this dialog has appeared in The Social Study of Information and Communication
Technology, edited by C. Avgerou, C. Ciborra, and F.F. Land, Oxford University
Press, 2004, pp. 62–76.
looked completely incommensurable if you had followed normal procedures.’
That’s all. ANT can’t tell you positively what the link is.
S: So why is it called a ‘theory’ if it says nothing about the things we
study?
P: It’s a theory, and a strong one I think, but about how to study
things, or rather how not to study them—or rather, how to let the
actors have some room to express themselves.
S: Do you mean that other social theories don’t allow that?
P: In a way, yes, and because of their very strengths: they are good at
saying substantive things about what the social world is made of. In
most cases that’s fine; the ingredients are known; their repertoire
should be kept short. But that doesn’t work when things are changing
fast. Nor is it good for organization studies, information studies,
marketing, science and technology studies or management studies,
where boundaries are so terribly fuzzy. New topics, that’s what you
need ANT for.
S: But my agents, I mean the people I am studying at the company,
they form a lot of networks. They are connected to a lot of other
things, they are all over the place . . .
P: But see, that’s the problem! You don’t need Actor-Network to say
that. Any available social theory would do. It’s a waste of time for you
to pick such an outlandish argument simply to show that your informants
are ‘forming a network’.
S: But they are! They form a network. Look, I have been tracing their
connections: computer chips, standards, schooling, money, rewards,
countries, cultures, corporate boardrooms, everything. Haven’t I described
a network in your sense?
P: Not necessarily. I agree this is terribly confusing, and it’s largely
our fault—the word we invented is a pretty horrible one. But you
should not confuse the network that is drawn by the description and
the network that is used to make the description.
S: Come again?
P: Surely you’d agree that drawing with a pencil is not the same thing
as drawing the shape of a pencil. It’s the same with this ambiguous
word: network. With Actor-Network you may describe something that
doesn’t at all look like a network—an individual state of mind, a piece
of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a
network—subways, sewages, telephones—which is not all drawn in
an ‘Actor-Networky’ way. You are simply confusing the object with the
method. ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says
nothing about the shape of what is being described with it.
S: This is confusing! But my company executives, are they not
forming a nice, revealing, powerful network?
P: Maybe, I mean, surely they are—but so what?
142 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
S: Then I can study them with Actor-Network-Theory!
P: Again, maybe yes, but maybe not. It depends entirely on what you
yourself allow your actors (or rather, your actants) to do. Being connected,
being interconnected, or being heterogeneous is not enough.
It all depends on the sort of action that is flowing from one to the
other, hence the words ‘net’ and ‘work’. Really, we should say ‘worknet’
instead of ‘network’. It’s the work, and the movement, and the
flow, and the changes that should be stressed. But now we are stuck
with ‘network’ and everyone thinks we mean the World Wide Web or
something like that.
S: Do you mean to say that once I have shown that my actors are
related in the shape of a network, I have not yet done an ANT study?
P: That’s exactly what I mean: ANT is more like the name of a pencil
or a brush than the name of a specific shape to be drawn or painted.
S: But when I said ANT was a tool and asked you if it could be
applied, you objected!
P: Because it’s not a tool, or rather, because tools are never ‘mere’
tools ready to be applied: they always modify the goals you had in
mind. That’s what ‘actor’ means. Actor Network (I agree the name is
silly) allows you to produce some effects that you would not have
obtained by some other social theory. That’s all that I can vouch for.
It’s a very common experience. Just try to draw with a lead pencil or
with charcoal, you will feel the difference; and cooking tarts with a gas
oven is not the same as with an electric one.
S: But that’s not what my supervisor wants. He wants a frame in
which to put my data.
P: If you want to store more data, buy a bigger hard disk.
S: He always says: ‘Student, you need a framework.’
P: Maybe your supervisor is in the business of selling pictures! It’s
true that frames are nice for showing: gilded, white, carved, baroque,
aluminum, etc. But have you ever met a painter who began his masterpiece
by first choosing the frame? That would be a bit odd, wouldn’t
it?
S: You’re playing with words. By ‘frame’ I mean a theory, an argument,
a general point, a concept—something for making sense of the
data. You always need one.
P: No you don’t! Tell me, if some X is a mere ‘case of’ Y, what is more
important to study: X that is the special case or Y which is the rule?
S: Probably Y. . . but X too, just to see if it’s really an application
of . . . well, both I guess.
P: I would bet on Y myself, since X will not teach you anything new.
If something is simply an ‘instance of’ some other state of affairs, go
study this state of affairs instead. A case study that needs a frame in
addition, well, it is a case study that was badly chosen to begin with!
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 143
S: But you always need to put things into a context, don’t you?
P: I have never understood what context meant, no. A frame makes a
picture look nicer, it may direct the gaze better, increase the value,
allows to date it, but it doesn’t add anything to the picture. The frame,
or the context, is precisely the sum of factors that make no difference
to the data, what is common knowledge about it. If I were you, I would
abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at
hand.
S: ‘Just describe’. Sorry to ask, but is this not terribly naive? Is this not
exactly the sort of empiricism, or realism, that we have been warned
against? I thought your argument was, um, more sophisticated than
that.
P: Because you think description is easy? You must be confusing it,
I guess, with strings of cliche´s. For every hundred books of commentaries
and arguments, there is only one of description. To describe, to
be attentive to the concrete state of affairs, to find the uniquely
adequate account of a given situation, I myself have always found
this incredibly demanding.
S: I have to say that I’m lost here. We have been taught that there are
two types of sociology, the interpretative and the objectivist. Surely
you don’t want to say you are of the objectivist type?
P: You bet I am! Yes, by all means.
S: You? But we have been told you were something of a relativist! You
have been quoted as saying that even the natural sciences are not
objective. Surely you are for interpretative sociology, for viewpoints,
multiplicity of standpoints and all that.
P: I have no real sympathy for interpretative sociologies. No. On the
contrary, I firmly believe that sciences are objective—what else could
they be? They’re all about objects, no? What I have said is simply that
objects might look a bit more complicated, folded, multiple, complex,
and entangled than what the ‘objectivist’, as you say, would like them
to be.
S: But that’s exactly what ‘interpretative’ sociologies argue, no?
P: Oh no, not at all. They would say that human desires, human
meanings, human intentions, etc., introduce some ‘interpretive flexibility’
into a world of inflexible objects, of ‘pure causal relations’, of
‘strictly material connections’. That’s not at all what I am saying.
I would say that this computer here on my desk, this screen, this
keyboard are objects made of multiple layers, exactly as much as you
sitting here are: your body, your language, your worries. It’s the object
itself that adds multiplicity, or rather the thing, the ‘gathering’. When
you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you
always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add:
144 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
‘But of course there also exists ‘‘natural’’, ‘‘objective’’ things that are
‘‘not’’ interpreted’.
S: That’s just what I was going to say! There are not only objective
realities, but also subjective ones! This is why we need both types of
social theories . . .
P: See? That’s the inevitable trap: ‘Not only. . . but also’. Either you
extend the argument to everything, but then it becomes useless—
‘interpretation’ becomes another synonym for ‘objectivity’—or else
you limit it to one aspect of reality, the human, and then you are
stuck—since objectivity is always on the other side of the fence. And
it makes no difference if the other side is considered richer or poorer;
it’s out of reach anyway.
S: But you wouldn’t deny that you also possess a standpoint, that
ANT is situated as well, that you also add another layer of interpretation,
a perspective?
P: No, why would I ‘deny’ it? But so what? The great thing about a
standpoint is that you can stand on it and modify it! Why would I be
‘stuck with’ it? From where they are on earth, astronomers have a
limited perspective. Take for instance Greenwich, the Observatory
down the river from here. Have you been there? It’s a beautiful place.
And yet, they have been pretty good at shifting this perspective,
through instruments, telescopes, satellites. They can now draw a
map of the distribution of galaxies in the whole universe. Pretty
good, no? Show me one standpoint and I will show you two dozen
ways to shift out of it. Listen: all this opposition between ‘standpoint’
and ‘view from nowhere’, you can safely forget. And also this difference
between ‘interpretative’ and ‘objectivist’. Leave hermeneutics
aside and go back to the object—or rather, to the thing.
S: But I am always limited to my situated viewpoint, to my perspective,
to my own subjectivity?
P: Of course you are! But what makes you think that ‘having a
viewpoint’ means ‘being limited’ or especially ‘subjective’? When
you travel abroad and you follow the sign ‘Belvedere 1.5 km’, ‘Panorama’,
‘Bella vista’, when you finally reach the breath-taking site, in
what way is this proof of your ‘subjective limits’? It’s the thing itself,
the valley, the peaks, the roads, that offer you this grasp, this handle,
this take. The best proof is that, two meters lower, you see nothing
because of the trees and two meters higher, you see nothing because of
a parking lot. And yet you have the same limited ‘subjectivity’ and you
transport with you exactly the very same ‘standpoint’! If you can have
many points of views on a statue, it’s because the statue itself is in
three-dimensions and allows you, yes, allows you to move around it.
If something supports many viewpoints, it’s just that it’s highly
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 145
complex, intricately folded, nicely organized, and beautiful, yes, objectively
beautiful.
S: But certainly nothing is objectively beautiful—beauty has to be
subjective . . . taste and color, relative . . . I am lost again. Why would we
spend so much time in this school fighting objectivism then? What
you say can’t be right.
P: Because the things people call ‘objective’ are most of the time the
cliche´s of matters of facts. We don’t have a very good description of
anything: of what a computer, a piece of software, a formal system, a
theorem, a company, a market is. We know next to nothing of what
this thing you’re studying, an organization, is. How would we be able to
distinguish it from human emotions? So, there are two ways to criticize
objectivity: one is by going away from the object to the subjective
human viewpoint. But the other direction is the one I am talking
about: back to the object. Positivists don’t own objectivity. A computer
described by Alan Turing is quite a bit richer and more interesting than
the ones described by Wired magazine, no? As we saw in class yesterday,
a soap factory described by Richard Powers in Gain is much livelier
than what you read in Harvard case studies. The name of the game is to
get back to empiricism.
S: Still, I am limited to my own view.
P: Of course you are, but again, so what? Don’t believe all that crap
about being ‘limited’ to one’s perspective. All of the sciences have been
inventing ways to move from one standpoint to the next, from one
frame of reference to the next, for God’s sake: that’s called relativity.
S: Ah! So you confess you are a relativist!
P: But of course, what else could I be? If I want to be a scientist and
reach objectivity, I have to be able to travel from one frame of reference
to the next, from one standpoint to the next. Without those
displacements, I would be limited to my own narrow point of view
for good.
S: So you associate objectivity with relativism?
P: ‘Relativity’, yes, of course. All the sciences do the same. Our
sciences do it as well.
S: But what is our way to change our standpoints?
P: I told you, we are in the business of descriptions. Everyone else is
trading on cliche´s. Enquiries, survey, fieldwork, archives, polls, whatever—we
go, we listen, we learn, we practice, we become competent,
we change our views. Very simple really: it’s called inquiries. Good
inquiries always produce a lot of new descriptions.
S: But I have lots of descriptions already! I’m drowning in them.
That’s just my problem. That’s why I’m lost and that’s why I thought it
would be useful to come to you. Can’t ANT help me with this mass of
data? I need a framework!
146 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
P: ‘My Kingdom for a frame!’ Very moving; I think I understand your
desperation. But no, ANT is pretty useless for that. Its main tenet is
that actors themselves make everything, including their own frames,
their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics,
even their own ontologies. So the direction to follow would be more
descriptions I am afraid.
S: But descriptions are too long. I have to explain instead.
P: See? This is where I disagree with most of the training in the social
sciences.
S: You would disagree with the need for social sciences to provide an
explanation for the data they accumulate? And you call yourself a
social scientist and an objectivist!
P: I’d say that if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a
good description, that’s all. Only bad descriptions need an explanation.
It’s quite simple really. What is meant by a ‘social explanation’
most of the time? Adding another actor to provide those already
described with the energy necessary to act. But if you have to add
one, then the network was not complete. And if the actors already
assembled do not have enough energy to act, then they are not ‘actors’
but mere intermediaries, dopes, puppets. They do nothing, so they
should not be in the description anyhow. I have never seen a good
description in need of an explanation. But I have read countless bad
descriptions to which nothing was added by a massive addition of
‘explanations’. And ANT did not help.
S: This is very distressing. I should have known—the other students
warned me not to touch ANT stuff even with a long pole. Now you are
telling me that I shouldn’t even try to explain anything!
P: I did not say that. I simply said that either your explanation is
relevant and, in practice, this means you are adding a new agent to the
description—the network is simply longer than you thought—or it’s
not an actor that makes any difference and you are merely adding
something irrelevant which helps neither the description nor the
explanation. In that case, throw it away.
S: But all my colleagues use them. They talk about ‘IBM corporate
culture’, ‘British isolationism’, ‘market pressure’, ‘self-interest’. Why
should I deprive myself of those contextual explanations?
P: You can keep them as shorthand or to quickly fill in the parts of
your picture that make no difference to you, but don’t believe they
explain anything. At best they apply equally to all your actors, which
means they are probably superfluous since they are unable to introduce
a difference among them. At worst, they drown all the new
interesting actors in a diluvium of older ones. Deploy the content
with all its connections and you will have the context in addition.
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 147
As Rem Koolhaas said, ‘context stinks’. It’s simply a way of stopping
the description when you are tired or too lazy to go on.
S: But that’s exactly my problem: to stop. I have to complete this
doctorate. I have just eight more months. You always say ‘more descriptions’
but this is like Freud and his cures: indefinite analysis.
When do you stop? My actors are all over the place! Where should
I go? What is a complete description?
P: Now that’s a good question because it’s a practical one. As I always
say: a good thesis is a thesis that is done. But there is another way to
stop than just by ‘adding an explanation’ or ‘putting it into a frame’.
S: Tell me it then.
P: You stop when you have written your 50,000 words or whatever is
the format here, I always forget.
S: Oh! That’s really great. So my thesis is finished when it’s completed.
So helpful, really, many thanks. I feel so relieved now.
P: Glad you like it! No seriously, don’t you agree that any method
depends on the size and type of texts you promised to deliver?
S: But that’s a textual limit, it has nothing to do with method.
P: See? That’s again why I dislike the way doctoral students are
trained. Writing texts has everything to do with method. You write a
text of so many words, in so many months, based on so many interviews,
so many hours of observation, so many documents. That’s all.
You do nothing more.
S: But I do more than that. I learn, I study, I explain, I criticize, I . . .
P: But all those grandiose goals, you achieve them through a text,
don’t you?
S: Of course, but it’s a tool, a medium, a way of expressing myself.
P: There is no tool, no medium, only mediators. A text is thick.
That’s an ANT tenet, if any.
S: Sorry, Professor, I told you, I have never been into French stuff;
I can write in C and even C þþ, but I don’t do Derrida, semiotics, any
of it. I don’t believe the world is made of words and all of that . . .
P: Don’t try to be sarcastic. It doesn’t suit the engineer in you. And
anyway I don’t believe that either. You ask me how to stop and I am
just telling you that the best you will be able to do, as a PhD student, is
to add a text —which will have been read by your advisors, maybe a
few of your informants, and three or four fellow doctoral students —to
a given state of affairs. Nothing fancy in that: just plain realism. One
solution for how to stop is to ‘add a framework’, an ‘explanation’; the
other is to put the last word in the last chapter of your damn thesis.
S: I have been trained in the sciences! I am a systems engineer—I am
not coming to Organization Studies to abandon that. I am willing to
add flow charts, institutions, people, mythologies, and psychology to
what I already know. I am even prepared to be ‘symmetric’ as you teach
148 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
us about those various factors. But don’t tell me that science is about
telling nice stories. This is the difficulty with you. One moment you
are completely objectivist, perhaps even a naive realist—‘just describe’—and
the other you are completely relativist—‘tell some nice
stories and run’. Is this not so terribly French?
P: And that would make you so terribly what? Don’t be silly. Who
talked about ‘nice stories’? Not me. I said you were writing a PhD thesis.
Can you deny that? And then I said that this so-many-words-long PhD
thesis—which will be the only lasting result of your stay among us—is
thick.
S: Meaning?
P: Meaning that it’s not just a transparent windowpane, transporting
without deformation some information about your study. ‘There is
no in-formation, only trans-formation.’ I assume that you agree with
this ANT slogan? Well, then this is surely also true of your PhD thesis,
no?
S: Maybe, but in what sense does it help me to be more scientific,
that’s what I want to know. I don’t want to abandon the ethos of
science.
P: Because this text, depending on the way it’s written, will or will not
capture the actor-network you wish to study. The text, in our discipline,
is not a story, not a nice story. Rather, it’s the functional equivalent
of a laboratory. It’s a place for trials, experiments, and simulations.
Depending on what happens in it, there is or there is not an actor and
there is or there is not a network being traced. And that depends
entirely on the precise ways in which it is written—and every single
new topic requires a new way to be handled by a text. Most texts are
just plain dead. Nothing happens in them.
S: But no one mentions ‘text’ in our program. We talk about ‘studying
the organization, not ‘writing’ about it.
P: That’s what I am telling you: you are being badly trained! Not
teaching social science doctoral students to write their PhDs is like
not teaching chemists to do laboratory experiments. That’s why I am
teaching nothing but writing nowadays. I keep repeating the same
mantra: ‘describe, write, describe, write.’
S: The problem is that’s not what my supervisor wants! He wants my
case studies to ‘lead to some useful generalization’. He does not want
‘mere description’. So even if I do what you want, I will have one nice
description of one state of affairs, and then what? I still have to put it
into a frame, find a typology, compare, explain, generalize. That’s why
I’m starting to panic.
P: You should panic only if your actors were not doing that constantly
as well, actively, reflexively, obsessively. They, too, compare;
they, too, produce typologies; they, too, design standards; they, too,
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 149
spread their machines as well as their organizations, their ideologies,
their states of mind. Why would you be the one doing the intelligent
stuff while they would act like a bunch of morons? What they do to
expand, to relate, to compare, to organize is what you have to describe
as well. It’s not another layer that you would have to add to the ‘mere
description’. Don’t try to shift from description to explanation: simply
go on with the description. What your own ideas are about your company
is of no interest whatsoever compared to how this bit of the
company itself has managed to spread.
S: But if my people don’t act, if they don’t actively compare, standardize,
organize, generalize, what do I do? I will be stuck! I won’t be
able to add any other explanations.
P: You are really extraordinary! If your actors don’t act, they will
leave no trace whatsoever. So you will have no information at all. So
you will have nothing to say.
S: You mean when there is no trace I should remain silent?
P: Incredible! Would you raise this question in any of the natural
sciences? It would sound totally silly. It takes a social scientist to claim
that they can go on explaining even in the absence of any information!
Are you really prepared to make up data?
S: No, of course not, but still I want . . .
P: Good, at least you are more reasonable than some of our colleagues.
No trace left, thus no information, thus no description, then
no talk. Don’t fill it in. It’s like a map of a country in the 16th
century:
no one went there or no one came back, so for God’s sake, leave it
blank! Terra incognita.
S: But what about invisible entities acting in some hidden ways?
P: If they act, they leave some trace. And then you will have some
information, then you can talk about them. If not, just shut up.
S: But what if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P: Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without bringing
in the proof of their presence. That proof might be indirect, farfetched,
complicated, but you need it. Invisible things are invisible.
Period. If they make other things move, and you can document those
moves, then they are visible.
S: Proof? What is a proof anyway? Isn’t that terribly positivistic?
P: I hope so, yes. What’s so great about saying that things are acting
whose existence you can’t prove? I am afraid you are confusing social
theory with conspiracy theory—although these days most of critical
social science comes down to that.
S: But if I add nothing, I simply repeat what actors say.
P: What would be the use of adding invisible entities that act
without leaving any trace and make no difference to any state of
affairs?
150 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
S: But I have to make the actors learn something they didn’t know; if
not, why would I study them?
P: You social scientists! You always baffle me. If you were studying
ants, instead of ANT, would you expect ants to learn something from
your study? Of course not. They are the teachers, you learn from them.
You explain what they do to you for your own benefit, or for that of
other entomologists, not for them, who don’t care one bit. What
makes you think that a study is always supposed to teach things to
the people being studied?
S: But that’s the whole idea of the social sciences! That’s why I’m
here at the school: to criticize the ideology of management, to debunk
the many myths of information technology, to gain a critical edge over
all the technical hype, the ideology of the market. If not, believe me,
I would still be in Silicon Valley, and I would be making a lot more
money—well, maybe not now, since the bubble burst . . . But anyway,
I have to provide some reflexive understanding to the people . . .
P: . . . Who of course were not reflexive before you came to honor
them with your study!
S: In a way, yes. I mean, no. They did things but did not know
why. . . What’s wrong with that?
P: What’s wrong is that it’s so terribly cheap. Most of what social
scientists call ‘reflexivity’ is just a way of asking totally irrelevant
questions to people who ask other questions for which the analyst
does not have the slightest answer! Reflexivity is not a birthright you
transport with you just because you are at the LSE! You and your
informants have different concerns—when they intersect it’s a miracle.
And miracles, in case you don’t know, are rare.
S: But if I have nothing to add to what actors say, I won’t be able to be
critical.
P: See, one moment you want to explain and play the scientist, while
the next moment you want to debunk and criticize and play the
militant . . .
S: I was going to say: one moment you are a naive realist—back to
the object—and the next you say that you just write a text that adds
nothing but simply trails behind your proverbial ‘actors themselves’.
This is totally apolitical. No critical edge that I can see.
P: Tell me, Master Debunker, how are you going to gain a ‘critical
edge’ over your actors? I am eager to hear this.
S: Only if I have a framework. That’s what I was looking for in
coming here, but obviously ANT is unable to give me one.
P: And I am glad it doesn’t. I assume this framework of yours is
hidden to the eyes of your informants and revealed by your study?
S: Yes, of course. That should be the added value of my work, not the
description since everyone already knows that. But the explanation,
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 151
the context, that’s something they have no time to see, the typology.
You see, they are too busy to think. That’s what I can deliver. By the
way, I have not told you yet, at the company, they are ready to give me
access to their files.
P: Excellent, at least they are interested in what you do. It’s a good
beginning. But you are not claiming that in your six months of fieldwork,
you can by yourself, just by writing a few hundred pages, produce
more knowledge than those 340 engineers and staff that you
have been studying?
S: Not ‘more’ knowledge but different. Yes, I hope I can. Shouldn’t
I strive exactly for that? Is this not why I am in this business?
P: I am not sure what business you are in, but how different is the
knowledge you produce from theirs, that’s the big question.
S: It’s the same kind of knowledge as all the sciences, the same way of
explaining things: by going from the case at hand to the cause. And
once I know the cause, I can generate the effect as a consequence.
What’s wrong with that? It’s like asking what will happen to a pendulum
that has been moved far from the equilibrium. If I know Galileo’s
law, I don’t even need to look at any concrete pendulum anymore;
I know exactly what will happen—provided I forget the perturbations,
naturally.
P: Naturally! So what you are hoping for is that your explanatory
framework will be to your case study what Galileo’s law is to the fall of
the pendulum—minus the perturbations.
S: Yes, I guess so, though less precisely scientific. Why? What’s
wrong with that?
P: Nothing. It would be great, but is it feasible? It means that,
whatever a given concrete pendulum does, it will add no new information
to the law of falling bodies. The law holds in potentia everything
there is to know about the pendulum’s state of affairs. The
concrete case is simply, to speak like a philosopher, the ‘realization of
a potential’ that was already there.
S: Isn’t that an ideal explanation?
P: That’s just the problem. It’s an ideal squared: the ideal of an ideal
explanation. I doubt somewhat that your company’s subsidiary behaves
that way. And I am pretty confident that you can’t produce the
law of its behavior that will allow you to deduce everything as the
realization in concreto of what was already there potentially.
S: Minus the perturbations . . .
P: Yes, yes, yes, this goes without saying. Your modesty is admirable.
S: Are you making fun of me here? Striving for that sort of framework
seems feasible to me.
P: But even it were, would it be desirable? See, what you are really
telling me is that the actors in your description make no difference
152 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
whatsoever. They have simply realized a potential—apart from minor
deviations—which means they are not actors at all: they simply carry
the force that comes through them. So, my dear Student, you have
been wasting your time describing people, objects, sites that are nothing,
in effect, but passive intermediaries since they do nothing on their
own. Your fieldwork has been simply wasted. You should have gone
directly to the cause.
S: But that’s what a science is for! Just that: finding the hidden
structure that explains the behavior of those agents you thought
were doing something but in fact are simply placeholders for something
else.
P: So you are a structuralist! You’ve finally come out of the closet.
Placeholders, isn’t that what you call actors? And you want to do Actor
Network Theory at the same time! That’s stretching the limits of
eclecticism pretty far!
S: Why can’t I do both? Certainly if ANT has any scientific content,
it has to be structuralist.
P: Have you realized that there is the word ‘actor’ in actor-network?
Can you tell me what sort of action a placeholder does in a structuralist
explanation?
S: That’s easy, it fulfills a function. This is what is so great about
structuralism, if I have understood it correctly. Any other agent in the
same position would be forced to do the same.
P: So a placeholder, by definition, is entirely substitutable by any
other?
S: Yes, that’s what I am saying.
P: But that’s also what is so implausible and what makes it radically
incompatible with ANT. In my vocabulary, an actor that makes no
difference is not an actor at all. An actor, if words have any meaning, is
exactly what is not substitutable. It’s a unique event, totally irreducible
to any other, except, that is, if you render one commensurable with
another one by some process of standardization—but even that requires
a third actor, a third event.
S: So you are telling me that ANT is not a science!
P: Not a structuralist science, that’s for sure.
S: That’s the same thing, any science . . .
P: No! Organization Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Business
Studies, Information Studies, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology,
whatever the field, they cannot rely, by definition, on any
structuralist explanation since information is transformation.
S: ‘Systems of transformations’, that’s exactly what structuralism is
about!
P: No way, my friend, since in structuralism nothing is really transformed,
it’s simply combined. You don’t seem to fathom the abyss that
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 153
exists between it and ANT. A structure is just a network on which you
have only very sketchy information. It’s useful when you are pressed
for time, but don’t tell me it’s more scientific. If I want to have actors in
my account, they have to do things, not to be placeholders; if they do
something, they have to make a difference. If they make no difference,
drop them, start the description anew. You want a science in which
there is no object.
S: You and your stories. Eventful stories, that’s what you want! I am
talking about explanation, knowledge, critical edge, not writing
scripts for soap operas on Channel 4!
P: I was getting to that. You want your bundle of a few hundred
pages to make a difference, no? Well then, you have to be able to prove
that your description of what people do, when it comes back to them,
does make a difference to the way they were doing things. Is this what
you call having a ‘critical edge’?
S: I guess so, yes.
P: But you would agree that it wouldn’t do to provide them with an
irrelevant appeal to causes that make no difference to what they do
because they are too general?
S: Of course not. I was talking about real causalities.
P: But those won’t do either because if they existed, which I doubt
very much they do, they would have no other effect than transforming
your informants into the placeholders of other actors, which you call
function, structure, grammar, etc. In effect, they wouldn’t be actors
anymore but dopes, puppets—and even that would be quite unfair to
puppets. Anyway, you are making actors out to be nothing: at best
they could add some minor perturbations like the concrete pendulum
that only adds slight wobbles.
S: Huh?
P: Now you have to tell me what is so politically great about transforming
those you have studied into hapless, ‘actless’ placeholders for
hidden functions that you, and you only, can see and detect?
S: Hmm, you have a way of turning things upside down. Now I am
not so sure. If actors become aware of what is imposed on them, if they
become more conscious, more reflexive, then is their consciousness
not raised somewhat? They can now take their fate into their own
hands. They become more enlightened, no? If so, I would say that
now, and in part thanks to me, they are more active now, more
complete actors.
P: Bravo, bravissimo! So an actor for you is some fully determined
agent, plus a placeholder for a function, plus a bit of perturbation, plus
some consciousness provided by enlightened social scientists? Horrible,
simply horrible. And you want to apply ANT to these people!
After you have reduced them from actors to placeholders, you want to
154 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT
add insult to injury and generously bring to those poor blokes the
reflexivity they had before and that you have taken away by treating
them in a structuralist way! Magnificent! They were actors before you
came in with your ‘explanation’. Don’t tell me that it’s your study that
might make them so. Great job, Student! Bourdieu could not have
done better.
S: You might not like Bourdieu very much, but at least he was a real
scientist, and even better, he was politically relevant. As far as I can
tell, your ANT is neither.
P: Thanks. I have been studying the links between science and
politics for about thirty years, so I am hard to intimidate with talks
of which science is ‘politically relevant’.
S: I have learned not to be intimidated by arguments of authority, so
your thirty years of study makes no difference to me.
P: Touche´. But your question was: ‘What can I do with ANT?’
I answered it: no structuralist explanation. The two are completely
incompatible. Either you have actors who realize potentialities and
thus are not actors at all, or you describe actors who are rendering
virtualities actual (this is Deleuze’s parlance by the way) and which
require very specific texts. Your connection with those you study
requires very specific protocols to work—I guess this is what you
would call ‘critical edge’ and ‘political relevance’.
S: So where do we differ? You, too, want to have a critical edge.
P: Yes, maybe, but I am sure of one thing: it’s not automatic and
most of the time it will fail. Two hundred pages of interviews, observations,
etc. will not make any difference whatsoever. To be relevant
requires another set of extraordinary circumstances. It’s a rare event. It
requires an incredibly imaginative protocol. It requires something as
miraculous as Galileo with his pendulum or Pasteur with his rabies
virus.
S: So what should I do? Pray for a miracle? Sacrifice a chicken?
P: But why do you want your tiny little text to be automatically more
relevant to those who might be concerned by it (or not) than say a
huge laboratory of natural sciences? Look at how much it takes for
Intel2
chips to become relevant for mobile phones! And you want
everyone to have a label ‘LSE2
inside’ at no cost at all? To become
relevant you need extra work.
S: Just what I need, the prospect of even more work!
P: But that’s the whole point: if an argument is automatic, across the
board, all-purpose, then it can’t possibly be scientific. It’s simply
irrelevant. If a study is really scientific, then it could have failed.
S: Great reassurance, nice of you to remind me that I can fail my
thesis!
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT 155
P: You are confusing science with mastery. ‘Being able to lose the
phenomenon is essential to scientific practice.’199
Tell me, can you
imagine one single topic to which Bourdieu’s critical sociology, which
you are so fond of, could possibly not apply?
S: But I can’t imagine one single topic to which ANT would apply!
P: Beautiful, you are so right, that’s exactly what I think.
S: That was not meant as a compliment.
P: But I take it as a true one! An application of anything is as rare as a
good text of social science.
S: May I politely remark that, for all your exceedingly subtle philosophy
of science, you have yet to tell me how to write one.
P: You were so eager to add frames, context, structure to your ‘mere
descriptions’, how would you have listened to me?
S: But what’s the difference between a good and a bad ANT text?
P: Now, that’s a good question! Answer: the same as between a good
and a bad laboratory. No more, no less.
S: Well, okay, um, thanks. It was nice of you to talk to me. But I think
after all, instead of ANT, I was thinking of using Luhmann’s system
theory as an underlying framework—that seems to hold a lot of promise,
‘autopoiesis’ and all that. Or maybe I will use a bit of both.
P: Hmmm . . . .
S: Don’t you like Luhmann?
P: I would leave aside all ‘underlying frameworks’ if I were you.
S: But your sort of ‘science’, from what I see, means breaking all the
rules of social science training.
P: I prefer to break them and follow my actors. As you said, I am, in
the end, a naive realist, a positivist.
S: You know what would be real nice? Since no one around here
seems to understand what ANT is, you should write an introduction to
it. That would ensure our teachers know what it is and then, if I may
say without being rude, they might not try to push us too hard into it,
if you see what I mean . . .
P: So it’s really that bad?
S: See, I’m just a PhD student, but you’re a professor. You have
published a lot. You can afford to do things that I can’t. I have to listen
to my supervisor. I simply can’t follow your advice too far.
P: Why come to me then? Why try to use ANT?
S: For the last half hour, I have to confess, I’ve been wondering the
same thing . . .
199
See Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s Program, p. 264.
156 On the Difficulty of Being an ANT