Illuminating the grey box: Unpacking and moving beyond Latour

Abstract

This engagement piece continues the dialogue initiated by Anders Blok and Casper Bruun Jensen, re-examining Latour's work in light of the challenges and possibilities this exchange brings to the fore. I begin by asking why conversations with Latour's followers often feel laborious, addressing this through a close reading of Blok and Jensen's interpretations and emphases within Latour's oeuvre, set against the broader backdrop of Latour-inspired debates in sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Along the way, I weave in insights from the commentaries in the dialogue that resonate with my own experiences and observations. In closing, I take up Richie Nimmo's provocation – what does ANT struggle to do, or fail to do altogether, that other traditions may address more effectively? – and consider how ANT might be more productively mobilised in substantive dialogue with these complementary approaches.

This contribution to the dialogue initiated by Blok and Jensen (2024) comes from Finland, the peripheral location which has provided the opportunity to observe discussions from multiple linguistic regions and scholarly traditions from a suitable distance throughout the history of the social sciences. However, at times, certain approaches gain a stronger foothold than others. At present, Latourian ANT (LAT-ANT) stands out as one of the most influential approaches, occupying a strong position in Finnish social science. As a recent example of this, one of the country's leading journals in the field, Sosiologia, honoured Latour's passing by publishing a special double issue dedicated to his thought and studies based on it.

The expansion of LAT-ANT in Finland is linked to the establishment of Science and Technology Studies (STS)-inspired research approaches within qualitative social sciences and the consolidation of the approach at the core of the Finnish STS field. I have followed this rise closely and with interest, actively engaging with Latour's work and familiarising myself with LAT-ANT's various turns and reiterations, while also dissecting and, to some extent, employing its fundamental elements (e.g. Silvast and Virtanen, 2023, Virtanen et al., 2022). I have also contemplated LAT-ANT themes in my academic teaching and followed studies and discussions around the approach, especially in my role as an editor for the Science & Technology Studies journal. Moreover, my research covers themes characteristic of LAT-ANT, such as making do with our climate relationship through voluntary carbon off-setting, the consolidation of green values and valuations, and the development of energy infrastructures (e.g. Karhunmaa et al., 2023, Lehtimäki and Virtanen, 2024, Silvast et al., 2024).

Despite these correlations, engaging in dialogue with Latour's followers, the ‘Ants’ (hereafter Lat-Ants), has proven challenging. But why does dialogue with Lat-Ants seem laborious? To ponder this question, I focus on Blok and Jensen's interpretations and emphases on Latour's oeuvre, connected to my broader perspective on Latour-driven discussions in sociology and STS as its backdrop. I also draw on elements highlighted in some of the commentaries, particularly those that resonate with my own experiences and observations. The text concludes by taking up Nimmo's (2024: 82) call to reflect on ‘[w]hat 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 to address this?’

At first glance, talking past each other – as some commentators did, as evidenced by Blok and Jensen's reply – appears to stem from differences that are difficult to bridge, given their deep roots in fundamental premises. Consequently, to explore the possibilities for dialogue with Lat-Ants, it is essential to illuminate the metatheoretical groundings of their approach. Blok and Jensen (2024: 64–66) summarise some of these in their opening piece, but I would like to begin with yet another iteration to clarify my own interpretation of LAT-ANT.

The approach draws on three mutually reinforcing metatheoretical pillars, the first of which is a nondualist philosophy of knowledge and reality (inspired by Serres and Dewey). The second pillar is a distinct semiotic tradition (Greimas) grounded in materialist signification and circulating reference (Deleuze). Third and last, LAT-ANT draws on a combination of material constructivism, derived from the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation's engagement with engineering sciences and strands of sociology (notably Tarde and Garfinkel) that emphasise the continual making of the social, contrasted to the mainstream ‘sociology of the social’ that explains events by invoking a pre-existing, substantial notion of ‘the social’ (Latour, 2005).

While LAT-ANT is not a theory in the axiomatic or abstracting sense, it is by no means philosophically indifferent; rather, it is both combinatory and minimalist in its orientation. This approach adopts an onto-methodological stance, a kind of pragmatic-methodological ontology. Instead of classical metaphysics conceived as the ‘furniture of the world’, it thus embraces a minimalist, ‘experimental’ or ‘empirical’ metaphysics – one that aims to reopen the world in conjunction with and through empirical research (Hämäläinen and Lehtonen, 2016). Reality, for a Lat-Ant, is constantly enacted through the assembling, disassembling, and reassembling of heterogeneous associations. The distance between observation and the ongoing, contingent unfolding of the world is suppressed – no conceptual mediation is permitted. Concepts are tightly bound to real-world processes, and Lat-Ants attend to phenomena as they unfold in concrete, situated ways. For example, ‘translation’ refers to an actual process of transformation, not only its interpretation; ‘network’ or ‘assemblage’ refers not to a conceptual framework but to the symmetrical unfolding of sociomaterial relationships in real time.

Lat-Ants’ empirical inquiries are not merely descriptive tracings of ongoing processes but productive interventions that generate new and unpredictable ontologies of sociomaterial networks composed of diverse actants and objects, enacted as multiple, interconnected and constantly shifting. As has become increasingly evident, entrenched modern ways of living and theorising have contributed to destructive outcomes, leading to planetary distress and highlighting the need for alternative approaches. Lat-Ants are therefore tasked with first elucidating and then dismantling the problematic metaphysics of modernity. They ‘speak well’ of the Moderns and their experiences, yet without adopting the vocabulary the Moderns themselves employ. They follow the Moderns in order to expose their problematic commitments, reorganise their flawed modes of living and cure the metaphysics through which they describe themselves. In Lat-Ants’ inquiries, the conceptual consistently points towards the empirical; yet, as concepts are employed as tools to do and enact LAT-ANT, they also carry a deconstructive and reassembling capacity.

For a Lat-Ant, constant world-building is inherently a normative task: it is about building a better world. Since concepts are not representations but building blocks of the world, the normative process of demodernisation and reassembling its fragments becomes a tangible and practical task. The old world is dismantled, and a new, more viable one is assembled by replacing the distortedly bifurcated modern mode with a unifying eco-ethico-political orientation.

Even though its metatheoretical commitments are many and meaningful, LAT-ANT functions more as a distinctive intellectual sensibility – or a normative movement of like-minded researchers – than as an axiomatic system, unified research programme or strict methodological framework. The approach functions as a kind of ‘grey box’, resisting being ‘black boxed’ into a rigid, standardised framework or research method that could obscure the situatedness and openness of inquiries in relation to the empirical and foreclose their political potential. Yet, it is not a ‘white box’ either; its premises, as well as its conceptual and methodological operations, remain far from fully transparent (Silvast and Virtanen, 2023).

This reluctance to pin down LAT-ANT's theoretical groundings and commitments is both intentional and understandable, as it serves to guard against the tendency of conceptual maximalism to subsume the porous and unpredictable empirical under a predefined conceptual apparatus. As Blok and Jensen (2025: 102) write, ‘descriptions become good only when sensitised and facilitated (not overdetermined) by theory, understood as so many virtual grids of possibility selectively actualised in concrete situations’. At the same time, reluctance to explicate its key premises prevents LAT-ANT from becoming entrenched. Centring the approach on fixed conceptual principles and methods to closely guide the inquiries could risk stagnating its development. In other words, keeping the approach intentionally loose and unsettled – what Heinich (2024: 76) critiques as the ‘interminability of the investigative work’ – is precisely what sustains its vitality as a continuously evolving intellectual mode, capable of extending across a wide range of research fields. The productive ambiguity is thus also central to LAT-ANT's enduring appeal: the grey box is flexible enough to accommodate various research designs, making the approach easily adaptable and transferable across diverse research domains while remaining sufficiently coherent to be recognisable (cf. Blok and Jensen, 2024: 64).

Lat-Ants have not absorbed the fundamental premises, core modes of working or ultimate aims from a LAT-ANT textbook. Instead, they have struggled to grasp the distinct mode of inquiry and its novel, often opaque, vocabulary that implicitly carries foundational assumptions and shapes research conduct accordingly. While working through a dense body of often obscure texts, they learn to affirm their grey box, which makes LAT-ANT easy to defend and difficult to engage with in dialogue.

First, the looseness of LAT-ANT renders the approach largely immune to critiques that point out internal contradictions. For instance, the ahistorical actualism of constantly evolving networks and assemblages – the starting point of Lat-Ants’ inquiries – is allowed to coexist harmoniously with the postulation of 15 distinct and historical modes of existence. Similarly, anti-essentialism – another key premise of the approach – sits comfortably alongside efforts to grasp the ‘essence’ of phenomena such as law. Grand theoretical vistas are categorically discouraged, except for the grandest ones, such as the Anthropocene or Gaia. Natural science and its results are at once relativised and dismissed as scientism, while simultaneously invoked to raise alarms about ecological catastrophes and shield against denialism. These seemingly incompatible elements – LAT-ANT's internal dualisms – are absorbed into its pliable and amorphous framework.

Moreover, a wide range of critical comments can be dismissed as external to the intellectual mode itself. We learn that Malm’s (2018) thorough critique of what he terms ‘hybridism’ is ‘only “devastating” to dualists. For the rest of us, the opposite of dualism is multiplicity – and what matters is exploration of critically important transformative relations, for example relating to climate change’ (Blok and Jensen, 2025: 99). I fully agree on the importance of exploring such relations, but I am left wondering: Who is undertaking this exploration, and in what capacities? These kinds of questions concerning the observer – about who we are and what commitments we bring – can be productively explored in dialogue with thinkers such as Malm without resorting to predefined labels such as ‘dualism’.

Lat-Ants have learned to defend themselves by mocking others for employing problematic ways of thinking. Along with dualisms, this pertains to grand and totalising abstractions, such as the ‘Capitalocene’, which, as Blok and Jensen (2025, 101) point out, leaves ‘precious little room … theoretically for anything besides Capitalism itself’. Yet paradoxically, Lat-Ants have adopted and developed their intellectual mode into a totalising approach of their own, marked by a limited capacity to engage with ‘theories originating from elsewhere’. Consequently, what Nimmo (2024: 82) terms a ‘blinkering mode of engagement’ – as opposed to an ‘open and modest’ reciprocal dialogue – appears woven into the LAT-ANT DNA.

However, since there was ultimately an aim for dialogue based on ‘inventing around’ and experimenting with Latour's work ‘in the mode of metamorphosis’ in response to ‘a planet in distress’, I would, in closing, like to affirm Blok and Jensen’s (2024) orientation. Their call to slow ‘down theory sufficiently to learn from … multiple sites’ serves, in my view, as a compelling ‘starting point for developing an approach adequate to the problems posed by the Anthropocene event and an irritable, ticklish Gaia’ (Blok and Jensen, 2019: 1209). To this end, and partly in line with Blok and Jensen (2024), I will focus on climate change and its ongoing absorption by market mechanisms, most clearly manifested in the practice of voluntary carbon offsetting, which enables the commodification of emissions and the shifting of responsibility to specific actors.

Blok and Jensen (2024) advocate for employing Latour’s (2013) modes of existence to address these kinds of issues and offer examples of how this might be done. This is surprising, given that the modes have ‘sunk like a stone in social science’, perhaps because they are ‘experienced as too clunky and rigid to work around’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024: 64). An alternative explanation, however, is that sociology as a discipline has long precisely addressed these questions – experiences, values and institutions of modernity – through conceptually more robust and historically grounded frameworks than those offered by LAT-ANT. But let us begin with the aim of the modes inquiry to ‘redistribute the Economy between organisational scripts, passionate attachments, and moral scruples’, in which ‘attachments [formally shortened as ATT] refer to the diverse passionate interests that animate desires towards things (whether in the marketplace or elsewhere), organisation [ORG] captures the framing of interactions, both human and non-human, required by any market exchange’, and ‘[s]ince market exchanges always activate judgments of fairness, morality [MOR] is also always at work’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024: 68).

When advocating multiplicity and investigating multiple sites, why focus specifically on the economy to assess ‘where markets are stronger or weaker and where things might unravel’ (Blok and Jensen, 2024: 68)? When adopting a broader lens to trace its entanglements and possibilities for redirection, we learn, first from Beck (1992), that risks intensify when the economy becomes decoupled from its modern composition – particularly its political and legal constraints. Yet, rather than being set free once and for all, the economy is actively fostered through ongoing political shifts and legal transformations that bring new elements, such as carbon emissions, into the fold of marketisation.

Through voluntary carbon markets, emissions and climate impacts are attributed to companies and individuals, reinforcing the notion that each entity ‘owns’ its emissions and may choose to offset them. However, this attribution is not automatic. The [ORG] of the voluntary carbon offset market requires both the technical shaping of [ATT] and [MOR] formatting. First, the commodification of emissions relies on the perception that all emissions are equivalent. However, this equivalence is not self-evident; it is the outcome of extensive scientific, technical, institutional and political work, drawing on both environmental economics and atmospheric science. Second, coordinating emissions and redistributing them through market mechanisms – often outsourcing offset projects to the Global South – enacts a distinct moral engagement. Thus, attachments-creating marketisation does not dismiss morality; rather, it embeds and expresses a distinct moral form through market-based justification (Lehtimäki et al., Accepted).

This [ATT]–[ORG]–[MOR] assemblage is neither immediately tangible nor overtly visible; it demands conceptual work to sharpen our awareness of its presence, material effects and historicity. Although we approach it as an empirically situated phenomenon, the assemblage is not entirely context-specific and need not be reinvented from scratch with each new instance. Instead, conceptual analysis must oscillate between close attention to particularities and recognition of broader patterns, attending both to actual configurations and to their virtual potentials. Such an approach allows us to trace the co-production of observable assemblages alongside what Farías (2014) calls ‘virtual attractors’ – the generative forces that invite or necessitate actualisation through specific, situated practices, yet extend beyond them.

To analyse these kinds of marketising entanglements – and to detect where they might begin to unravel – we need to slow down the pace of both case studies and the invention of novel conceptual tools within particular approaches, such as LAT-ANT. We must take multiplicity seriously and look further afield towards unfamiliar theoretical territories. Rather than striving for a single, comprehensive social theory for a planet in distress, what is needed is more ambitious and genuinely dialogical engagement across diverse theoretical traditions. The outline above, for instance, integrates insights from ANT-inspired economic sociology and the French pragmatic sociology of engagements, complemented by Luhmannian systems theory to avoid the infinite regress of proliferating context-specific case studies.