Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-network theorist

Bruno Latour

Reported by Drew Margolin & Anna Li

Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the history of science department of Harvard University. He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris where he is also the vice-president for research of that school.

Professor Latour’s lecture combines a discussion of the core themes in Actor Network Theory with insights regarding the enormous quantities of data that are now being produced and made available to researchers.  Using a broad array of examples, including Isaac Newton, the Space Shuttle Disaster, and a comparison of Marcel Proust’s childhood to the world faced by youth today, Latour explains and elaborates on the idea notion networks should replace objects as our locus of attention.  In particular, Latour recalls the insights of Gabriel Tarde and his criticism of the idea that there exists “a society” which is an object separate from individuals.

Latour argues that the notion of society was invented to compensate for the lack of data available to researchers in earlier eras.  Social theory, he suggests, is a function of the “datascape” — what we can record about behavior.  Today we have access to enormous amounts of data, and it is a mistake to try to fit our treatments of these data into traditional constructs such as “the individual” and “society.”  Instead of trying to understand individuals, who are irreducibly complex, we should focus attention on the networks through which they distribute action.  Unlike the notion of society, these networks are simplifications rather than aggregations.

Latour ends the lecture by pointing to two challenges that face researchers.  First, he argues that we must confront the technical and theoretical challenge posed by the new mass of data.  Second, he cites Walter Lippman and his concern with controversy and the fragility of public discourse.  Latour addresses these remarks in particular to the climate change controversy and the role that scholars could play in re-inventing the newspaper.