Modes of existence,capitalism,and lived socio-ecological struggles: Whither actor-network theory in a world in crisis?

Abstract

In response to the forum article ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’, this piece takes up the suggestion that a fruitful way forward for actor-network theory (ANT) would be to engage with ideas ‘originating from elsewhere’, such as from other theoretical traditions. Examining this, I suggest that the version of ANT brought into such dialogue matters, and that – contrary to the suggestion of the forum article – Latour's late ‘modes of existence’ project is not the most conducive for this purpose. I then assess the prospects for a productive cross-fertilisation between a less meta-ontological articulation of ANT and other theoretical repertoires, identifying an obstacle to this in the tendency of ANT to use other traditions of social thought largely as a foil against which to define itself, which mitigates against proper engagement with the strengths of those traditions. Taking a lead from the examples discussed in the forum article, I flesh this out by highlighting some of the shortcomings of ANT, relative to political ecology for instance, as a way of understanding socio-ecological relations and conflicts, in part because of its habitual disdain for certain sorts of ‘grand abstractions’, in particular, ‘capitalism’. I argue conversely that such abstractions not only speak to the lived realities of historically embedded structural violence and dispossession at the heart of socio-ecological struggles, but are crucial for situating people's lives in the context of wider relations and processes, something one might well deem a key purpose of sociology.

The invitation to respond to the article ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory? Inventing Around Latour on a Planet in Distress’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024) came at a serendipitous moment, providing an opportunity and motive to think through my own relation to Latour and actor-network theory (ANT). I knew this had shifted in recent years, from that of an enthusiast, admirer, and practitioner of ANT in much of my own research (Nimmo, 2010, 2011, 2016), to something more ambivalent and qualified. As this was not a self-conscious change of mind so much as a shifting affective orientation, it still needed to be properly and explicitly thought through. Consequently, though I won’t indulge in writing in too overtly self-referential a register, this response is also something of a reckoning with my own recent intellectual repositioning or reorientation.

To begin from the forum theme, the question about the fate of ANT after the passing of Bruno Latour, though a natural and timely one, seems rooted in a mistaken premise. The project of ANT has already evolved and fragmented into multiple post-ANT currents and successor projects, influenced in diverse ways and to differing degrees by elements of what we might call the ‘classic ANT’ of the 1980s and 1990s (Michael, 2016). This sort of trajectory is, of course, true to some extent of all major theoretical currents – they inevitably become translated and transformed, for better or worse, and these translations take on a life of their own, with effects that are at least semi-autonomous of the ‘original’. But ANT has shown itself to be particularly fertile to such reinvention and rearticulation. I would venture that this is partly a product of the relative ambivalence of its exponents in the face of the various reinventions of the ANT wheel that have proliferated over the years, the lack of time and energy expended, relative to other traditions, on protecting the intellectual genealogy, and the lack of enthusiasm for theoretical empire-building. This has helped to create the conditions for the influence of ANT to circulate very widely, albeit too frequently unrecognised or unattributed. The upshot of this diasporic circulation of ANT ideas and sensibilities over several decades, is that the passing of Latour, though arguably its chief architect and predominant exponent, likely makes little difference to its ongoing development and metamorphosis. Things will no doubt continue largely as before. In this light, I feel that the three scenarios sketched in the article in question are inseparable and will no doubt play out all at once. Yet I am broadly in agreement with the authors on the most interesting way in which ANT might be taken forward, at least hypothetically, which they suggest is through creative cross-fertilisation with ‘ideas and situations originating elsewhere’. The key recognition here I think is the need for engagement with other theoretical traditions, conceptual repertoires, and ways of thinking.

The question arises as to what ‘version’ of ANT we mean, however, as there are obviously multiple ways of doing ANT. I am sceptical of the value of making Latour's late ‘modes of existence’ project central to the ANT which we might seek to bring into dialogue with other theoretical traditions. My own view is that there are good reasons why An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) did not resonate in the way that earlier ANT work did. I cannot do justice to this here, but crudely, AIME is easily read as an overly systematising and meta-ontological project, which in that respect runs against the grain of key currents in ANT thinking in the years between We Have Never Been Modern (1993) and Reassembling the Social (2005), not least in the work of John Law and Annemarie Mol (Law, 2004; Law and Mol, 2002; Mol, 2003). Arguably, the enduring value and legacy of ANT consists in its methodological insights as a set of loosely connected conceptual tools for thinking about complex socio-material assemblages in ways that are less blinkered by dualist categories rooted in modern ontology. In this reading, ANT is at its most effective when mobilised as an ensemble of techniques for un-thinking and problematising modern assumptions, and sensitising us to the making, reproduction and dissolution of materially heterogeneous relations. It is this methodologically oriented and non-dogmatic version of ANT, in my view, that can most productively be brought into meaningful dialogue with other traditions.

But what precisely can ANT gain by engaging with other traditions in social thought, over and above more grist for the mill of ANT scholars? What is it that is missing or deficient in ANT which cross-fertilisation might help to remedy or address? There is obviously no singular answer, though I have my own suggestions. Before outlining these, I want to foreground a potential obstacle to any such engagement. Its proponents and practitioners have often remarked with some justification upon the tendency for critics of ANT to conjure a straw person caricature as the object of their critique, based on rather lazy misunderstandings and a lack of proper engagement with the ideas in question. Some of the most prominent caricatures and misrepresentations are outlined in ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’. What is less often acknowledged is that ANT itself has often engaged in similar caricatures and misrepresentations of other social scientific traditions. Indeed, particularly in Latour's work, large swathes of social theory, especially critical social theory, are treated as a foil against which to define ANT, in a way that fails to seriously engage with the diversity, depth, and sophistication of the scholarship pursued under this broad umbrella. If there is to be fruitful dialogue and cross-fertilisation between ANT and ‘ideas originating elsewhere’, then this rather blinkered mode of engagement must be superseded by something altogether more open and modest, without descending into theoretical turf wars.

On the question of what ANT might gain from a dialogue and cross-fertilisation with other traditions, among the best ways to identify potential oversights in any way of thinking is by means of comparative evaluation against the strengths and weaknesses of others. This is obvious, but is seldom done in the necessary spirit of intellectual honesty. What does ANT do poorly or fail to do at all, which other traditions do well or better? And how might ANT be mobilised alongside or in productive dialogue with those traditions in order to address this? My answer runs parallel but contrary to the argument of ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’ where the authors refer to as ‘deep-seated and increasingly virulent modernization drives’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024), and ‘dramatic clashes and ruptures […] between economy and ecology’ (2024). Though the latter phrase is too anodyne, a powerful case can, of course, be made that the conflict between ‘economic’ processes and the web of life, as manifest in sociogenic climate change and the precipitous decline of biodiversity, is – along with the spiralling social inequalities from which it cannot be disentangled – the key global crisis facing today's world, which presents the most urgently pressing problem for social thought. For the authors, Latour's AIME can contribute to this by furnishing the tools to de-naturalise market economies and rethink market situations as uneven constellations of multiple modes of existence, specifically attachments or affects, organisational framings of interaction, and moral judgements. Thus the ‘Economy’, or rather, markets, can be shown to be relatively precarious, far from immutable, and riven with tensions and contestation, effectively turning AIME into a ‘weapon against markets understood in the reductive sense of modern economists’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024). In this way, the authors contest what they regard as the caricature of an ‘uncritical’ ANT, and propose that what is missing in Latour's account is not a critical perspective or an adequate account of power or political economy, but a proper reckoning with the role of non-modern modes of existence, such as belief systems which conjure immaterial nonhumans, earth spirits, ancestral beings and other entities and concerns existing beyond the register of the modern whilst becoming important agents in socio-ecological conflicts. They suggest that this might begin to be remedied partly by a cross-fertilisation with anthropologies of ‘uncommon worlds’, with the philosophy of Isabelle Stengers, and from environmental activism, Indigenous thinking, or science fiction (Blok and Jensen, 2024). Whilst I support some of this in the context of the need to ‘decolonise’ ANT, I think the wider argument here overlooks the shortcomings of ANT relative to the critical tradition as a way to think about and analyse the contemporary socio-ecological crisis, its drivers, dynamics, impacts, and the forms of politics it gives rise to, both concretely and potentially.

It is telling that ‘What Next for Actor-Network Theory?’ refers to capitalism as a ‘grand abstraction’, which by implication is obfuscatory in appearing to have already explained what, in fact, needs to be examined in detail. The authors argue that ANT provides us instead with the tools to trace what must be in place for the operation of markets, and especially what modes of existence are brought into play, and into tension, when markets are extended and imposed upon expanding terrains of socio-ecological life via modernisation projects. Yet it is surely inconsistent to scare quote ‘capitalism’ whilst using the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’, a far grander and certainly more questionable abstraction, as though it is unproblematic (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2015). Moreover, the notion that by studying the local and specific ontological politics of markets we obviate the need for theoretical abstractions like ‘capitalism’, is, in my view, deeply mistaken. Not only is capitalism irreducible to markets, something every critical political economist understands, but without the concept of capitalism, we struggle to understand much of world socio-ecological history since the 16th century (Moore, 2016). Capitalism of course is not just the imposition of markets in modernising projects, but is an ensemble of political, technical, legal, and epistemic relations, processes and techniques. Grasping the interconnections between these elements, though necessarily an empirical question in specific cases, also requires a grasp of how they are assembled, driven and reproduced by the imperative for ever-expanding surplus value and accumulation through the exploitation and appropriation of human and nonhuman sources of labour and bio-physical work or energy. This derives of course from the ecological Marxist tradition. But whether it marks a recourse to what the authors dismiss as ‘the false protection of certified theory’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024), or rather constitutes a theoretical insight into a ‘real abstraction’ (Toscano, 2008), that is, an abstract logic which infuses and materially shapes social relations and processes, is a question deserving of proper consideration.

In my own experience, having skirted around or backgrounded the spectre of capitalism for much of the time that I was working in and with ANT, preferring to talk about the ontological politics of particular markets wherever consideration of economic relations became unavoidable, I eventually arrived at the belated recognition that one has to do rather a lot of conceptual gymnastics in order not to utilise this abstraction as a highly compelling way of understanding many of the relations and dynamics that surround us. As a theoretical exercise, this can be fun, no doubt. But to what end? Since the result of such contortions is an increased difficulty in thinking clearly and analytically about very significant dimensions of our social reality, including exploitation and inequality, social and environmental injustice, the neocolonial appropriation of land and resources, and the accelerating degradation of ecosystems. I do not dispute that ANT, in some form, does have something to add to our ways of understanding these phenomena, but it is far from sufficient in-itself to account for or explain them without being stretched beyond credulity. Falling back on vague metaphors of capitalism as a ‘deadly ailment’ which has ‘affected nearly all the cells of a body powerless to resist’ (Latour, 2013: 384, cited in Blok and Jensen, 2024), and such like, only underlines this. In contrast, though there is no space here to enter into a summary of the many contributions and insights of the field of political ecology, for example, which is not a Marxian field per se but does engage in earnest with Marx's analysis of capital, I would point to its empirical, historical and theoretical richness, breadth and sophistication in the analysis of dynamic imbrications of capital-nature, capital-labour, and core-periphery relations (Bridge et al., 2019; Bryant, 2015). One might similarly highlight the considerable strengths of urban political ecology as a way to approach these sorts of questions, given the second case study discussed by the authors concerns socio-ecological conflicts in Bangkok. The point here is not to devalue ANT, which has and will I believe continue to make highly innovative and insightful contributions, not least to social understandings of science and technology, knowledge-practices, and the more-than-human turn in social thought. Rather, it is to establish that any productive dialogue with a prospect of fruitful cross-fertilisation between ANT and other traditions can only be taken forward alongside the honest recognition that, just as ANT has a particularly rich and fine-grained approach to certain dimensions of social life, some other traditions have a conceptual and analytical depth and acuity currently lacking in ANT when it comes to other dimensions.

A related problem is that ANT, particularly in its ‘modes of existence’ incarnation, tends to translate socio-ecological conflicts into problems for a kind of abstract ontological diplomacy or cosmopolitics. Conflicts of interest and lived socio-ecological struggles are metamorphosed into dilemmas of ‘co-existence’ which are potentially soluble through a cosmopolitics that can work out how the collectives involved can best live together. This is a nice vision at a purely abstract level, but clearly very far removed from the lived realities of colonial capitalism and its destruction, degradation, and exploitation of human and nonhuman bodies, communities, and ecosystems around the world. These realities cannot be grasped authentically and persuasively, I would suggest, without some conception of conflicts which are entangled with but irreducible to ontological differences, and which revolve around material and corporeal struggles over land, labour, health, food and water, housing and resources, as well as beliefs and ways of living. To imagine that these are soluble via a form of cosmopolitical diplomacy rather brushes over the core logics of capitalist and colonial extraction which underpin such conflicts and is tantamount to theoretically hollowing out the visceral experiences of violence, domination, dispossession and in some cases genocide, which are the reality for those at the sharp end of these struggles.

In eschewing ‘grand abstractions’, the authors further suggest that Indigenous nature-defenders are not motivated by opposition to ‘capitalism’ but by their specific local attachments, beliefs and values (Blok and Jensen, 2024). But it would be a mistake to underestimate the political and economic savviness of Indigenous activists and their capacity and willingness to connect their local and regional struggles to world-historical relations and processes of coloniality, domination and extraction, whatever names these are given. I would turn the authors’ attitude on its head and argue that certain abstractions speak to lived realities of structural violence and dispossession, whilst others have a self-referential, distancing and devitalising effect, turning flesh and blood conflicts into rarefied philosophical puzzles. Indeed, it is not ultimately a question of whether to deploy abstractions, for we inevitably will and do, but rather of which abstractions provide the most veracious and compelling framework for understanding and situating people's lives and struggles in the context of wider relations and processes. I would defend this as a key purpose of sociology.