This was the first book I’ve read by Latour himself: I’d approached his work before through Graham Harman, another author I’d recommend. I’m studying ANT as part of my PhD project.
Latour is the best thinker on the subject of associations (as he explains, perhaps this just is what “social” means) that I have ever read. A perfect counterpoint to object-oriented ontology, this interdisciplinary and transformative method of focus on relations known as actor-network theory can, I am convinced, in the hands of a good researcher, trace the relations between anything and anything else in a network. It does this by erasing the nature/social dichotomy, reducing Nature to a preformatted concept irreconcilable with any real phenomenon, which in turn reopens the discussion of what Society even means: if there is no Nature, then what we call “the social” doesn’t mean what we thought.
Now, Latour is not the only thinker who posits that Nature is a myth and even a dangerous mistake in terms of ecology/society. Dark ecology and OOO also say this convincingly. But whereas Tim Morton is obscurely metaphorical-mystical about it, and Harman is not excited about arguments pertaining to a product of holistic religion that has little to do with his main arguments. Latour makes his point clearly, thoroughly and effectively, that sans Nature, “social” simply means that which pertains to any association at all, whether human, nonhuman, or hybrid, and thus more data is made available (because it hasn’t been bracketed off as “merely social” and therefore somehow less real than, for example, hunger or sex or “the selfish gene”). The social includes the physical, as long as the physical does anything pertaining to a collective, and the non-physical (again, by its ability to act on others through whatever agency) is also the Real. This intervention could, very plausibly, set all the social sciences—and the popular understanding of the natural sciences as well—on a much more empirically informed and justified track.
Latour’s prose is wonderful. I find him similar, as a writer, to Aldous Huxley at his best: conversational, playful, treating writing as an art form. Even when writing polemically about his enemies, he does so in a warm, jovial, only gently derisive way that pokes as much fun at himself as at his targets and invites them to return to the table where we can all go back to being imperfect again.
Latour has been attacked a lot for being “obscurantist”, but I’m convinced that people who can actually read (and not just “surf” pages to find something they basically already agree with) will find the opposite. Beware of reviewers who failed in theory and so have to reduce it by claiming it has no relevance to the real world: given what ANT says, these people are unsurprisingly Latour’s enemies. They don’t do anyone else any favors either.
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MattKranke
Buch in unglaublich guter Qualität
Reviewed in Germany on February 19, 2016
