Open comments on Blok & Bruun Jensen's paper ‘What next for actor network theory? Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress’

Abstract

My comment mostly underlines the inadequacy of the tone of the paper, very critical about the way Latour has been criticized on one side, and somehow dogmatic on the other, in the way the authors present. Latour's propositions, from Actor Network Theory (ANT) to the Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (IME), though himself conceived them as proposals to be discussed, modified, criticized, something himself and Callon had done very early about ANT, in 1999.

The text I was invited to comment (Blok and Jensen 2024) on is very curious, in that while it is highly polemical, its argumentative developments seem to me to be too short to convince the reader. What's more, it is written in a slightly ‘annoyed’ tone, or let's say polemical and indignant, as if the authors were shrugging their shoulders in shock at the paucity of the readings criticising Latour. By the same token, this leads them to caricature them or oversimplify them – even though Latour, on the contrary, has always listened with more interest to his detractors than to his groupies. This indignation seems to me neither relevant nor fruitful. Moreover, this categorical tone adopted against authors who have discussed Latour is completely at odds with Latour's own practices. Either the positions criticised were not interesting and should be ignored, or they were well-argued, and then, even and especially in order to criticise and refute them, even if it means choosing the most elaborate, they require real critical work, not an indignant shrug of the shoulders. Taking counter-arguments seriously allows you to formulate your own arguments better, and Latour did a lot of this, preferring to discuss with authors who were more reticent about his positions than with readers who were already won over.

The same applies to the ‘cases’ presented. They are treated as short examples, quickly given as empirical illustrations of Latour's arguments. Apart from the fact that this usage leads to a certain lightness of argument, it seems to me to contradict Latour's own method in a more embarrassing way, since these cases are not so much developed as given as automatic products of a general approach as if Actor Network Theory (ANT) or Inquiry into the Modes of Existence could be ‘applied’ to any situation. No, we don't ‘apply’ Latour, either by doing it well (as the authors would have it) or by doing it badly (as, following them, many others would have it). You couldn't be more at odds with the idea that the ‘actors themselves’ and their objects are formed and forged by their cross-fertilisation. Every experiment calls for its own way of extending its proposals and extending them through investigation: this is, moreover, the position that the authors rightly defend in Latour's theory, but they do not hold it themselves. The way in which they mobilise these examples is hardly compatible with the very idea of enquiry, either in Dewey's sense or in the very radical reworking of it proposed by Latour in Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. The idea of illustrating Latour as ‘a thought’ (even if they rightly show that it has evolved from ANT to modes of existence) through cases described in two pages contradicts the very project thus ‘illustrated’.

This is a criticism that Callon, Latour and Law themselves were quick to make of ANT, in a rather ironic way, when they realised that it had become the fashionable new sesame for science and technology studies (STS) researchers. In ANT & After, back in 1999, all three of them did so in a way that was as acerbic as it was radical (criticising the word actor, the word network, the word theory … and even the hyphen!). Criticism in the good sense of the word: without the need to either defend or reject it, just to show and go beyond its limits. And indeed, Callon and Latour went on to take new paths, which were themselves quite divergent: the former to reconstruct an economy from its material devices, from below; the latter to operate, on the model of the STS and the radical version that Callon–Latour–Law had proposed, but well beyond science and technology alone, an analogous redefinition of the empirical ways of understanding our realities, henceforth focusing on the plurality of modes of existence.

To sum up, while insisting on the fact that this is only a personal reaction, I find that the tone of this text is too often that of an indignant professor who would make big eyes at all authors who have not understood Latour, as if there was a need to defend a new Bible. However, if there is an open way of thinking that needs to be used, modified, translated according to the situation, not applied but always reworked, it is Latour's thinking. It does not need to be defended by the guardians of the temple – no less Latourian than this! On the contrary, it needs to be shaken up, put to the test, taken up again and thus betrayed by proposals that are always to be made according to experience and empirical situations, coming up against the resistance of the things and beings concerned. This presupposes taking these re-readings, these sometimes contradictory re-readings, seriously, with the participants, and not using them as vignettes to illustrate a theory, either to criticise it or to defend it.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the dogmatic tone of my criticism myself, but that's precisely the problem with this text, in my view: an overly dogmatic approach to a thought that is itself so opposed to dogmatism.