Reassembling the banal;Pausing before inventing anew

Abstract

In Fashionable Nonsense (1998), Sokal and Bricmont describe Latour's work as ‘either true but banal, or else surprising but manifestly false’ (92). Using this characterisation of Latour as ‘banal’ as a springboard, this short commentary responds to Blok and Jensen's proposal to reinvent actor-network theory (ANT) by interrogating the stakes and risks of their account of his critics as ‘uninteresting’. Rather than dismissing critique of Latour as uninteresting, this response underscores the value of engaging with strands of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that have a long history of offering rich, provocative, and nuanced critical engagements with Latourian thought and ANT: particularly feminist STS. Drawing upon scholarship in feminist STS that has affinities with ANT, but which also centralises power, inequality, situated knowledges, and exclusion, the commentary ultimately argues that before reinventing Latour or ANT anew it is vital to draw on critical reinventions that already exist.