Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour

Author:Bruno Latour [Latour, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199256044
Google: AbQSDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2007-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

From Panopticon to Oligopticon

Myopic ANT scholars have a great advantage over sharp-sighted all-encompassing overseers. Not only can they ask gross and silly questions, they can do so obstinately and collectively. The first kind of clamp is the one obtained by this rather naive query: ‘Where are the structural effects actually being produced?’ I am aware that this geographic question shows a terrible lack of manners, but I am a science student and so, for any piece of scientific knowledge, I am used to supplying its indispensable conditions of production.223 For example, even linguists need a room, an office, an institution, a department, boxes of archives, a place to stay, a coffee pot, and Xerox machine so as to gather all the elements, which have been extracted from thousands of local interactions and millions of speech acts, and carefully fabricate a linguistic structure.224 And the same is true of lawyers: the system of law is compiled using folders, libraries, meetings, etc.225 Even Karl Marx in the British Library needs a desk to assemble the formidable forces of capitalism. No more than language or law, physiology lives a mysterious and ethereal life: it is always produced somewhere, in such and such laboratory at the Royal College of Surgeons, in a freshly revised textbook, in a doctor’s cabinet, after a consensus meeting has modified the standard procedure for taking care of sprained ankles. Culture does not act surreptitiously behind the actor’s back. This most sublime production is manufactured at specific places and institutions, be it the messy offices on the top floor of Marshal Sahlins’s house on the Chicago University campus or the thick Area Files kept at the Pitts River museum in Oxford.226

Other sociologists may ignore these production sites as so many transparent intermediaries since, according to their epistemology, they play no other role than to reveal the ‘fundamental structures’ of human actions, but historians and sociologists of science pay close attention. Ever since we decided to follow how matters of concern are generated by the various disciplines, we have to take into account the practical ways through which the knowledge of others’ actions is being daily produced. Is this relativism? I hope so. If no signal travels faster than light, no knowledge travels without scientists, laboratories, and fragile reference chains. Our interest for those humble means is not dictated by suspicion about the true efficacy of those structures or by some reflexive urge. It is simply that they offer ideal tracers for discovering what sort of relationship may exist for good between the micro and the macro. If the whole of physical space and physical time had to be reshaped because of the realization that no two signals are really sent simultaneously, then how much more social space and time will have to be reshuffled once every structural feature is brought firmly back inside its local conditions of production?

And sure enough, as soon as the local sites that manufacture global structures are underlined, it is the entire topography of the social world that is being modified.

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