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Long abstract:

This paper revisits Latour's seminal and much-cited Berlin Key study (2000) to reflect on the empirical foundations of ANT. Latour argues that the material properties of the Berlin key mean that the object operates as a social actor that shapes people's lives. However, an easily missed footnote hints that the study is not actually an empirical case but a narrative construction, with Latour fabricating characters to illustrate his story. The Berlin key is thus counter-intuitively a 'story-centric' object where its physical properties are subordinate to its role as being emblematic of 'materiality'. This revelation aligns with the discussions around Langdon Winner's bridges (1980), where later critics point out that it was Winner's narrative craftsmanship that gave the bridges their politics, rather than being built into the artefacts (Woolgar & Cooper, 1999). This paper suggests that these stories prompt an opportunity to re-empiricise ANT. By actually engaging with people who still use Berlin keys today, a much richer and funnier picture of everyday mishaps emerges, which contrasts with Latour's language of hard constraint. This paper proposes that there are dangers in these pedagogical parables and that future ANT needs to move beyond simulated empirical encounters to focus on ethnographic field-devices such as 'disconcertment' (Verran 2023) to better prepare researchers to tell reflexive stories about the world.

Latour (2000) The Berlin key or how to do words with things

Verran (2023) How to use disconcertment as ethnographic field-device

Winner (1980) Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Woolgar & Cooper (1999) Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence?

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It is frequently reiterated that ANT is not a theory nor a methodology but rather an ontology (Latour 1999) or a sensitivity (Mol 2010). Consequently, reading ANT literature is often discouraging as it seldom contains practical guidelines, thus precluding its wider use. While it is simpler to adhere to ANT than to take the trouble of translating a non-intuitive theory into a methodology, this paper argues for the possibility of forming transformative guidelines even with a consistent reflection on the foundations of ANT. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, aiming to evaluate the impact of a participatory radio campaign on its listeners, this contribution combines a theoretical refinement of ANT principles with an exemplary methodological proposal, formulating four principles of ANT4D methodology.

Since the seemingly effortless stability of actor-networks signifies non-self-evident exertion of power, the first principle questions why and how actor-networks hold together. The second proposition focuses on how the relations are fixated, emphasising the so-called symmetry between non/human actors. ANT views everything as relational, describing how translations between actors, their aims, and identities occur; the third principle thus determines the project’s success by assessing translations on a scale from adaptation to distortion. Finally, the last principle invites the use and complementation of field-specific theories while avoiding predefined categories. In the case study, these insights allowed for the reconceptualization of development as attachment (Donovan 2014) rather than being freed from bonds, highlighting the importance of deploying robust networks to enhance people’s ability to mobilise other actors or resources.

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Actor-Network Theory claims a symmetry between human and non-human actors. ANT as the study of how technology is society made durable was a ground-breaking approach at the time, as it highlighted the involvement of non-human actors in the construction of social collectives. In this perspective, technology acts as a semiotic reference to the situations and contexts of its making and allows to trace processes of societal stabilization. However, this focus also creates an asymmetry, as human actors are not theorized the same way. While the design, enactment, and inscription processes of technology are described in many case studies, the aspect of human socialization is not as present. This especially poses a challenge to the transformation of ANT into a theory of differentiated societies, as it is laid down in Modes of Existence (Latour, 2013). I will illustrate these challenges in the discussion of Latour’s understanding of law. Latour provides an interesting description of the Conseil d’Etat. Yet, the approach of following the references in the enactment of law paradoxically hides important moments in the making and doing of law. This includes e.g. the training of legal scholars, where a collective understanding of law is constructed. Based on this example I argue that in order to reconstruct the complex organization of social collectives in their different modes of existence, it might be more productive to radicalize the semiotic approach in Latours theory, conceptualizing humans also as references to situations of socialization.

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Actor-network theory heuristics and methodology have traveled quite a bit outside of STS. Media Studies, in its differing styles of thought, is a case in point. Within my contribution, I am going to contextualize a still recent constellation between ANT and German Media Studies. How did crucial elements of the French anthropology of technology (Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Georges Haudricourt, Gilbert Simondon) become a common ground for both actor-network theory and the Germanophone research on cultural techniques? What can be learnt for future STS network methodologies from intertwining ANT with Media Studies of cultural techniques?

From the vantage point of cultural techniques, ANT might have lacked a critical, historicizing perspective on its own foundations and mode of operation. It generalized Leroi-Gourhan's operational chains into sociotechnical networks. Yet programmatic initiatives for historicizing and criticizing networks were not wanting—for instance, Michel Serres’s ”History of Scientific Thought” or Bruno Latour’s ”We Have Never Been Modern.” But for ANT, everything that could be described analytically as a network (or “worknet”) qualified as an actual network. Claims were bolstered by the self-evidence of the lifeworld (and academic practice) of the 1980s and 1990s. ANT could only come about because of the flourishing sociotechnical networks of the day. In contrast, subsequent, more historically oriented studies of cultural techniques—and of the history of infrastructure and science, technology, and society—demonstrate reserve by stressing the material grounding of networks, their metonymic character, situatedness, and specificity. Networks have genealogies within a “Connectivity of Things,” but they are not themselves genealogies.

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The 2020 (2021) Taipei Biennial, co-curated by Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard, is titled "You and I don't Live on the Same Planet." Latour visited Taiwan in September 2019 to called up domestic artists and STSers to join this ANT 'show' in which he especially tried to duplicate a Negotiation Theatre (NT), as he had done at Nanterre, France in 2015. This 'from ANT to NT' performance created an opportunity to demonstrate ANT on the opposite side of the Earth. However, because of the pandemic and his health conditions, Latour could finally realize it remotely in the end of 2021. It is a 'successful' ANT performance, for just looking at the example of a group of engineering students from the south of Taiwan (epistemologically and physically far away from ANT) to act in a scene of NT in the most prestigious fine art Museum of Taipei. This late-latourian performance consists of three elements of ANT for its future implications in East Asia: ontological consistency, epistemological discontinuity and methodological plurality. Heterogeneous assemblage is not strange to East Asians: their dynamic worldview is consistent with ANT's ontological presupposition. However, ANT's challenges to modernity were hardly recognized as it is still a modern process of knowledge production. Fortunately, Latour's re-orientation of ANT to an art-based method softened the rigid settings of scientific methodology. In short, this ANT show shows its potentials for emancipating disciplinary constraints, enlarging scope of public issues, enlisting more domestic actors and enforcing art power in the East Asian region.

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Current climate problems are a challenge for the humanities and social sciences, which require consideration of how to study today's reality, of which these problems are a fundamental part. How to talk about them and how to approach them is an open question at the moment. In the paper, I will show that Latour's Actor-Network theory can be expanded, for example using a postphenomenological perspective, in order to shape a critical approach in the area of ecophilosophy.

Latour deprives man of his monopoly on relationships, building a theory in which both human and non-human entities enter into them. The symmetry of entities, characteristic of the Actor-Network Theory, has been and is subject to criticism, just like the anti-essentialism presented by Latour. It changes the understanding of materiality and consciousness, it also changes the balance of forces between entities, building its own way of understanding the world as interdependent actants. Adopting the perspective of the Actor-Network Theory makes it necessary to rethink our approach to relationships, society, and nature.

Latour's criticism of the nature-culture divide, reinforced by the assumption that relations take place not only between people, but also involve both human and non-human beings, also changes a lot in the field of environmental research. The effects of questioning traditional ontological dichotomies can bring many benefits, including: for the discussion on the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. In the paper I will focus on the potential functionality of Latour's flat ontology in the context of environmental research.

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In our paper, we would like to re-examine Bruno Latour's ‘Circulating Reference…’ (1999) case study from Boa Vista. The aim is to re-empirice some of these classic ANT studies to situate Latour’s contribution culturally and politically to ANT. As Latour saw in the work of botanists and soil scientists a pretext for a story of circulating reference, we, after a second "re-visit," would also like to see other stories. Following Witold Kula's historical work on the measures (Kula 1986), we will inquire about the political entanglement of the scale at the micro and macro levels. We want to ask how Latour in the Boa Vista Forest can spot discussions about epistemology (and Kant) and misses political metrology. Using the Boa Vista case study, we will introduce the concept of "circulating metrological/ontological politics" (Alder 1995) and the systemic and networked politics of artifacts (Winner 1980) to highlight issues of politics and scaling in ANT.

Re-empiricing this classic case study opens questions about the politics of methods in ANT: How and when do we decide to ‘cut’ the scaling process? Who and what can we leave out? How can we use these reflections to create a future ANT?