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Bruno Latour

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) 1st Edition

by Bruno Latour (Author)

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Part of: Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (12 books)

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Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the "social". Bruno Latour's contention is that the word "social" as used by Social Scientists has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as "wooden" or "steely".

Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling: and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why "the social" cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a "social explanation" of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of "the social" to redefine the notion and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the
"assemblages" of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a "sociology of associations" has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network-Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.

ISBN-10

0199256055
ISBN-13

978-0199256051
Edition

1st
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

October 25, 2007
Language

English
Dimensions

9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
Print length

301 pages
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Editorial Reviews

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"Valuable...richly rewards close reading."--Contemporary Sociology

About the Author

Bruno Latour is a Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. Having been trained as a philosopher, then an anthropologist, Bruno Latour specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work, and published works on philosophy, history, sociology, and the anthropology of science. He is the author of Laboratory Life (Princeton University Press), We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press), and Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard University Press).

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (October 25, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 301 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199256055
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0199256051
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #263,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #290 in Sociology (Books)
- #12,292 in Social Sciences (Books)

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Nicholas J. Perry-Guetti

My favorite thinker of the last 50 years.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 8, 2020

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This was the first book I’ve read by Latour himself: I’d approached his work before through Graham Harman, another author I’d recommend. I’m studying ANT as part of my PhD project.

Latour is the best thinker on the subject of associations (as he explains, perhaps this just is what “social” means) that I have ever read. A perfect counterpoint to object-oriented ontology, this interdisciplinary and transformative method of focus on relations known as actor-network theory can, I am convinced, in the hands of a good researcher, trace the relations between anything and anything else in a network. It does this by erasing the nature/social dichotomy, reducing Nature to a preformatted concept irreconcilable with any real phenomenon, which in turn reopens the discussion of what Society even means: if there is no Nature, then what we call “the social” doesn’t mean what we thought.

Now, Latour is not the only thinker who posits that Nature is a myth and even a dangerous mistake in terms of ecology/society. Dark ecology and OOO also say this convincingly. But whereas Tim Morton is obscurely metaphorical-mystical about it, and Harman is not excited about arguments pertaining to a product of holistic religion that has little to do with his main arguments. Latour makes his point clearly, thoroughly and effectively, that sans Nature, “social” simply means that which pertains to any association at all, whether human, nonhuman, or hybrid, and thus more data is made available (because it hasn’t been bracketed off as “merely social” and therefore somehow less real than, for example, hunger or sex or “the selfish gene”). The social includes the physical, as long as the physical does anything pertaining to a collective, and the non-physical (again, by its ability to act on others through whatever agency) is also the Real. This intervention could, very plausibly, set all the social sciences—and the popular understanding of the natural sciences as well—on a much more empirically informed and justified track.

Latour’s prose is wonderful. I find him similar, as a writer, to Aldous Huxley at his best: conversational, playful, treating writing as an art form. Even when writing polemically about his enemies, he does so in a warm, jovial, only gently derisive way that pokes as much fun at himself as at his targets and invites them to return to the table where we can all go back to being imperfect again.

Latour has been attacked a lot for being “obscurantist”, but I’m convinced that people who can actually read (and not just “surf” pages to find something they basically already agree with) will find the opposite. Beware of reviewers who failed in theory and so have to reduce it by claiming it has no relevance to the real world: given what ANT says, these people are unsurprisingly Latour’s enemies. They don’t do anyone else any favors either.

8 people found this helpful

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chaim noy

I really enjoyed reading the book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2013

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I really enjoyed reading the book, and I congratulate Latour for its publication. I see the book as more or less basic text that conveys the main ideas with which Latour has been playing for some while now. The book is highly accessible and thought-provoking (i.e. inspiring), and I found myself marking more and more lines and citations therein while reading. So I liked it and it got to me; mainly this is the social-material or social-technological re-assemblage idea that Latour has been promoting, and it allowed me to freely so systems as complex and hybrid in a way that I didn’t see/phantom before. So it helped me in terms of my own conceptualization and academic writing on these topics. Also in terms of the distribution of agencies across times and places, and across human and non-human agents. So all this is good an inspiring for intellectual and scholarly research. At least this is how I found the book.
Finally, I think that academic and related books are, or at least can be, scholarly inspiring not only in terms of what they have/contain or give in a direct and positive sense; but also in terms of how they enrich my academic wonderings. One way for me to note this is how I’m excited by reading the book, how many (new) ideas come to my mind, and if they infiltrate my scholarly daydreaming – if I can call it this way. And this manuscript has certainly done all this work. So I like it and recommend it.
I should say that I got to read it after being quite familiar with the literature and having researched and published myself. So in this senses it’s hard for me to say how the book would be understood and received by, say, undergraduate audience, or even graduate audiences who are not familiar with the topics.

6 people found this helpful

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ingonyama

another model for a non-Durkheimeian sociology

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2008

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This is a book which deserves a wide reading in the social sciences for its brazen and determined effort to deeply problematize the notion of the "social."

At the same time, as I read the first few chapters, I had a sense of deja vu. The program Latour is putting forth--at least initially-- appears not so different from that of Fredrik Barth -- not Barth's early transactionalist stuff, but his later work on the anthropology of knowledge. Specifically,

Barth, F.
1992 Towards greater naturalism in conceptualizing societies. In Conceptualizing Society. Kuper, A., eds. Pp. 17--33. : Routledge.

and

Barth, F.
1993 Balinese worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

put forth a very similar approach to the "social." Barth himself is a great admirer of Latour (see his praise for Laboratory Life and Science in Action in his 2002 piece in Current Anthropology) but Latour--at least here--doesn't seem to be reading Barth....

Latour is also taking great pains to distance himself from Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and from critics who would label ANT as postmodernist. Highly recommended if you're interested in this sort of thing.

27 people found this helpful

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Bee

"Introduction" ANT it is not.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 26, 2014

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The audience for this book seems to be one of two groups: People already familiar with ANT and theorists. In this sense the title is misleading. Those looking for a more clear introduction to the concept and method are likely to be frustrated and see themselves in the dialog offered in the middle of the book. I often found myself asking how I could actually use this with little answers.

That said, its commentary on the state of sociology, and in particular its call to ask us to slow down and reconsider the things we take for granted is a noble effort. However, it is one made only more frustrating by its lack of practicality. I would recommend it to any sociologists, but with some slight hesitation as I think it benefits those who are much more interested and well versed in theory than the title would imply.

9 people found this helpful

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Chris Bateman

Confused as to whether this is the book you need to understand actor-network theory (ANT)?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 20, 2014

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The answer to the headline question depends upon how familiar you are with Bruno Latour's work. I would not advise this as a point of entry (as another reviewer suggests "We Have Never Been Modern" is the easiest place to start), but it is an excellent - although frustrating - treatise on how Latour and other actor-network theorists have re-imagined the role and methods of the social sciences.

"Reassembling the Social" is a companion piece to Latour's "The Politics of Nature", also published in 2005, and is perhaps easier to understand in that prior context. But even coming to these books in that order, I swung between enrapture and teeth-gnashing ire at the circuitous way that the ANT concepts are deployed here. From Latour's perspective, this is the necessary way to frame his argument to avoid misunderstandings: I do not think most readers will agree, although this hardly means Latour is in error. The problem is that ANT is not a sociological method so much as it is a negative thesis about where social sciences fail because of a confusion between politics and science, and between facts and truth - both points being far more clearly developed in "The Politics of Nature".

While I ultimately loved this book, completing it did not eliminate my frustrations with its awkward structure. Promised that its winding journey would lead to practical standards by which to judge Latour's view of 'the social' and of 'science', in the end I fully comprehended the first but was left wanting on the second. As a philosopher whose interest was not sociological, I can live with this - but a trained sociologist is likely to be running out of hair by the time they reach the conclusion! Part of the problem is that Latour is indebted to (and reliant upon) philosophy that he never discusses or explains - he channels Deleuze in almost every thought, and constantly presents Kant as his silent opponent. Nonetheless, like Kierkegaard attacking Hegel, "Latour doth protest too much" - if you have no idea why Kant is still important, you cannot possibly appreciate Latour's position against him. This is why "We Have Never Been Modern", with its explicit assault on Kant's critiques, is a far better place to start.

So in summary:
- If you've never read any Latour, start with "We Have Never Been Modern".
- If you know Latour but don't know his position on the relationship between the sciences and politics, go to "The Politics of Nature" first.
- If you're a sociologist, read this as a polemic intended to make you critically question your concepts, or as a means of understanding the motives behind ANT and science studies.
- If you're a philosopher, read this only if ANT is specifically useful to your work in some way.
- If you're familiar with (yet confused by) ANT, this may help set out the purpose and methods of the approach.

Best of luck with your travels with Latour! He is one of the most invigorating - and irritating - thinkers at work today.

31 people found this helpful

Mark JT

Society is what we write

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 30, 2020

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Okay, its a bit academic, but the people likely to buy this book will academically minded. Stick with the book as it will change the way you think about society and your world view. If you are of a logical/rational mindset, jog-on as this book isn't for you, but if you are open to see the world from alternative paradigms read-on - Enjoy!

Steven Charlton

Fascinating read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 27, 2018

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An interesting read, although the concept is a little abstract so not something I'd recommend as a first dive into Actor Network Theory. Watch a few videos on youtube prior to reading at you'll develop a much better understanding. It's a little waffly and takes awhile to get to the point but it's a seminal piece and well worth a read.

John Harbord

A really good read, replete with humour and lively examples

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 19, 2018

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A really good read, replete with humour and lively examples, and very clear about the agenda it is pursuing. It exposes the very misuse of the concept of the social forces/social context in contemporary sociological/philosophical thought

Alex Chalk

Binding is garbage

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 24, 2019

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Terrible binding on the paperback edition - pages practically falling out of the book upon first reading. Find another edition if you can.

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