11 Reading – ANT

Oh boy.

Alright, so, I knew the reading this week was going to be a bit of a slog. So here we go.

Bruno Latour has (very kindly) taken it upon himself to clear up some of the misunderstandings that have arisen over the actor network theory. Considering I lack general understanding, I feel like I’m a couple of steps behind, but onwards and upwards!

The first mistake, Latour contends, would be describe a network in a purely technical sense, like a train or telephone network. He also sort of gives a definition, which is lovely of him: “exclusively related yet very distant elements with the circulation between nodes being made compulsory through a set of rigorous paths giving to a few nodes a strategic character”.

The second misunderstanding, Bruno asserts, is that the ANT is a study of social networks. WRONG! It “concerns themselves with the social relations of individual human actors… ANT aims at accounting for the very essence of societies and natures”. One can assume that he isn’t referring to the love lives of our favourite Hollywood stars. Or maybe he is! He probably isn’t.

                    Actor Network Theory in action.

Moving on…

“ANT has been developped by students of science and technology and their claim is that it is utterly impossible to understand what holds the society together without reinjecting in its fabric the facts manufactured by natural and social sciences and the artefacts designed by engineers. As a second approximation, ANT is thus the claim that the only way to achieve this reinjection of the things into our understanding of the social fabrics is through a network-like ontology and social theory.”

That was a big chunk of quote, but bear with me. I could be completely off topic here, but it seems like what our buddy Bruno is saying is, in a very basic extrapolation, is that the only way to understand the ‘network’ of society is to apply a sort of scientific analysis to it, to view it through this “network-like ontology and social theory”. I don’t know! My thinking box hurts!