Week 11 Readings: “Actor Network Theory”, Bruno Latour

This weeks reading came with a warning, which I much appreciated because yes, it was hard yakka.

Here are some take aways I managed to glean from the opening of Latour’s piece.

There are common misconceptions about Actor Network Theory. Firstly, the word network poses a problem as ANT may lack all the characteristics of a technical network – it may be local, it may have no compulsory paths, no strategically positioned nodes. Secondly, ANT looks at ‘world actors’ rather than individual actors and is consequently not a study of social networks. Where social networks are concerned with humans in a social and natural world untouched by analysis, ANT attempts to account for the ‘essence’ of societies and natures.

At first approximation, the ANT claims that modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structure, systems. It aims at explaining the effects accounted for by those traditional words without having to buy the ontology, topology and politics that goes with them.

To be continued…