Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing

Associations*

The argument of this book can be stated very simply: when socialscientists add the adjective ‘social’ to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon. There is noth- ing wrong with this use of the word as long as it designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous assump- tion about the nature of what is assembled. Problems arise, however, when ‘social’ begins to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was roughly comparable to other terms like ‘wooden’, ‘steely’, ‘biological’, ‘economical’, ‘mental’, ‘organizational’, or ‘linguistic’. At that point, the meaning of the word breaks down since it now designates two entirely different things: first, a movement during a process of assem- bling; and second, a specific type of ingredient that is supposed to differ from other materials.

What I want to do in the present work is to show why the social cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the project of providing a ‘social explanation’ of some other state of affairs. Although this earlier project has been productive and probably necessary in the past, it has largely stopped being so thanks in part to the success of the social sciences. At the present stage of their devel- opment, it’s no longer possible to inspect the precise ingredients that are entering into the composition of the social domain. What I want to do is to redefine the notion of social by going back to its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again. Then it will be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences but

* A shortened reference format is used in the notes; the complete bibliography is at the end. This somewhat austere book can be read in parallel with the much lighter Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, which tries to cover much of the same ground through a succession of photographic essays. It’s available online in English (Paris the Invisible City) at http://bruno.latour.name.

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 5 . O U P O x f o r d .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

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with tools better adjusted to the task. After having done extensive work on the ‘assemblages’ of nature, I believe it’s necessary to scrutin- ize more thoroughly the exact content of what is ‘assembled’ under the umbrella of a society. This seems to me the only way to be faithful to the old duties of sociology, this ‘science of the living together’.1

Such a project entails, however, a redefinition of what is commonly understood by that discipline. Translated from both the Latin and Greek, ‘socio-logy’ means the ‘science of the social’. The expression would be excellent except for two drawbacks, namely the word ‘social’ and the word ‘science’. The virtues that we are prepared nowadays to grant the scientific and technical enterprises bear little relation with what the founders of the social sciences had in mind when they invented their disciplines. When modernizing was in full swing, sci- ence was a rather powerful urge to be prolonged indefinitely without any misgivings to slow its progress down. They had no idea that its extension could render it almost coextensive with the rest of social intercourse. What they meant by ‘society’ has undergone a transform- ation no less radical, which is thanks in large part to the very expan- sion of the products of science and technology. It is no longer clear whether there exists relations that are specific enough to be called ‘social’ and that could be grouped together in making up a special domain that could function as ‘a society’. The social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. So, neither science nor society has remained stable enough to deliver the promises of a strong ‘socio-logy’.

In spite of this double metamorphosis, few social scientists have drawn the extreme conclusion that the object as well as the method- ology of the social sciences should be modified accordingly. After having been so often disappointed, they still hope to reach one day the promised land of a true science of a real social world. No scholars are more aware of this painful hesitation than those who, like me, have spent many years practicing this oxymoron: ‘sociology of science’. Because of the many paradoxes triggered by this lively but more than slightly perverse subfield and the numerous changes in the meaning of ‘science’, I think time has come to modify what is meant by ‘social’. I therefore wish to devise an alternative definition for

1 This expression is explained in Laurent Thévenot (2004), ‘A science of life together in the world’. This logical order—the assemblies of society after those of nature—is the exact opposite of how I came to think about it. The twin books—Bruno Latour (1999), Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the reality of science studies and Bruno Latour (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy—were written long after my colleagues and I had developed an alternative social theory to deal with the new puzzles uncovered after carrying out our fieldwork in science and technology.

2 Introduction

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‘sociology’ while still retaining this useful label and remaining faith- ful, I hope, to its traditional calling.

What is a society? What does the word ‘social’ mean? Why are some activities said to have a ‘social dimension’? How can one demonstrate the presence of ‘social factors’ at work? When is a study of society, or other social aggregates, a good study? How can the path of a society be altered? To answer these questions, two widely different approaches have been taken. Only one of them has become common sense—the other is the object of the present work.

The first solution has been to posit the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon variously called ‘society’, ‘social order’, ‘social practice’, ‘social dimension’, or ‘social structure’. For the last century during which social theories have been elaborated, it has been important to distinguish this domain of reality from other domains such as eco- nomics, geography, biology, psychology, law, science, and politics. A given trait was said to be ‘social’ or to ‘pertain to society’ when it could be defined as possessing specific properties, some negative—it must not be ‘purely’ biological, linguistic, economical, natural—and some positive—it must achieve, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or subvert the social order. Once this domain had been defined, no matter how vaguely, it could then be used to shed some light on specifically social phenomena—the social could explain the social— and to provide a certain type of explanation for what the other do- mains could not account for—an appeal to ‘social factors’ could ex- plain the ‘social aspects’ of non-social phenomena.

For instance, although it is recognized that law has it own strength, some aspects of it would be better understood if a ‘social dimension’ were added to it; although economic forces unfold under their own logic, there also exists social elements which could explain the some- what erratic behavior of calculative agents; although psychology de- velops according to its own inner drives, some of its more puzzling aspects can be said to pertain to ‘social influence’; although science possesses its own impetus, some features of its quest are necessarily ‘bound’ by the ‘social limitations’ of scientists who are ‘embedded in the social context of their time’; although art is largely ‘autonomous’, it is also ‘influenced’ by social and political ‘considerations’ which could account for some aspects of its most famous masterpieces; and although the science of management obeys its own rules, it might be advisable to also consider ‘social, cultural, and political aspects’ that could explain why some sound organizational principles are never applied in practice.

Many other examples can easily be found since this version of social theory has become the default position of our mental software that takes into consideration the following: there exists a social ‘context’ in

Introduction 3

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which non-social activities take place; it is a specific domain of reality; it can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the residual aspects that other domains (psychology, law, economics, etc.) cannot completely deal with; it is studied by specialized scholars called socio- logists or socio-(x)—‘x’ being the placeholder for the various discip- lines; since ordinary agents are always ‘inside’ a social world that encompasses them, they can at best be ‘informants’ about this world and, at worst, be blinded to its existence, whose full effect is only visible to the social scientist’s more disciplined eyes; no matter how difficult it is to carry on those studies, it is possible for them to roughly imitate the successes of the natural sciences by being as objective as other scientists thanks to the use of quantitative tools; if this is impos- sible, then alternative methods should be devised that take into ac- count the ‘human’, ‘intentional’, or ‘hermeneutic’ aspects of those domains without abandoning the ethos of science; and when social scientists are asked to give expert advice on social engineering or to accompany social change, some sort of political relevance might ensue from these studies, but only after sufficient knowledge has been accumulated.

This default position has become common sense not only for social scientists, but also for ordinary actors via newspapers, college educa- tion, party politics, bar conversations, love stories, fashion magazines, etc.2 The social sciences have disseminated their definition of society as effectively as utility companies deliver electricity and telephone services. Offering comments about the inevitable ‘social dimension’ of what we and others are doing ‘in society’ has become as familiar to us as using a mobile phone, ordering a beer, or invoking the Oedipus complex—at least in the developed world.

The other approach does not take for granted the basic tenet of the first. It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is no social dimension of any sort, no ‘social context’, no distinct do- main of reality to which the label ‘social’ or ‘society’ could be attrib- uted; that no ‘social force’ is available to ‘explain’ the residual features other domains cannot account for; that members know very well what they are doing even if they don’t articulate it to the satisfaction of the observers; that actors are never embedded in a social context and so are always much more than ‘mere informants’; that there is thus no meaning in adding some ‘social factors’ to other scientific specialties; that political relevance obtained through a ‘science of society’ is not necessarily desirable; and that ‘society’, far from being the context ‘in which’ everything is framed, should rather be construed as one of the

2 The diffusion of the word ‘actor’ itself, which I will keep vague until later—see p. 46—, being one of the many markers of this influence.

4 Introduction

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many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits. With some provocation, this second school of thought could use as its slogan what Mrs Thatcher famously exclaimed (but for very different reasons!): ‘There is no such a thing as a society.’

If they are so different, how could they both claim to be a science of the social and aspire to use the same label of ‘sociology’? On the face of it, they should be simply incommensurable, since the second position takes as the major puzzle to be solved what the first takes as its solution, namely the existence of specific social ties revealing the hidden presence of some specific social forces. In the alternative view, ‘social’ is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors. Whereas sociologists (or socio-economists, socio-linguists, social psychologists, etc.) take social aggregates as the given that could shed some light on residual aspects of economics, linguistics, psychology, management, and so on, these other scholars, on the contrary, consider social aggregates as what should be explained by the specific associations provided by economics, linguis- tics, psychology, law, management, etc.3

The resemblance between the two approaches appears much greater, however, provided one bears in mind the etymology of the word ‘social’. Even though most social scientists would prefer to call ‘social’ a homogeneous thing, it’s perfectly acceptable to designate by the same word a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements. Since in both cases the word retains the same origin—from the Latin root socius— it is possible to remain faithful to the original intuitions of the social sciences by redefining sociology not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of associations. In this meaning of the adjec- tive, social does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social.

At first, this definition seems absurd since it risks diluting sociology to mean any type of aggregate from chemical bonds to legal ties, from atomic forces to corporate bodies, from physiological to political as- semblies. But this is precisely the point that this alternative branch of social theory wishes to make as all those heterogeneous elements might be assembled anew in some given state of affairs. Far from being a mind-boggling hypothesis, this is on the contrary the most common experience we have in encountering the puzzling face of the

3 I will use the expression ‘society or other social aggregates’ to cover the range of solutions given to what I call below the ‘first source of uncertainty’ and that deals with the nature of social groups. I am not aiming especially here at the ‘holist’ definitions since, as we shall see, the ‘individualist’ or the ‘biological’ definitions are just as valid. See p. 27