human technology

Introduction to Part II: Why is it so Difficult to Trace the

Social?

It should be the simplest thing in the world. We are all bound by social interactions; we all live in a society; and we are all cultural animals. Why do these ties remain so elusive? In the preceding pages, one reason has been offered up as an explanation. The adjective ‘social’ designates two entirely different phenomena: it’s at once a substance, a kind of stuff, and also a movement between non-social elements. In both cases, the social vanishes. When it is taken as a solid, it loses its ability to associate; when it’s taken as a fluid, the social again disap- pears because it flashes only briefly, just at the fleeting moment when new associations are sticking the collective together. Although it seemed at first sight that the subject matter of social sciences was easy to locate thanks to the massive and ubiquitous evidence of the social order, it now appears that it’s just the opposite: there is nothing more difficult to grasp than social ties. It’s traceable only when it’s being modified. Physiologists have shown that for a perception to take place, continuous movements and adjustments are necessary: no movement, no feeling. This is true for the senses of sight and hearing as well as for taste, smell, and touch.200 If you clasp someone’s hand and keep the grasp perfectly still, very soon you no longer feel any- thing but a vague, embarrassing dullness—even if it’s the hand of your beloved. With the absence of movements has come a blurring of the senses. The same is true of the ‘sense of the social’: no new association, no way to feel the grasp.

This is why to renew the feeling for social connections I had to oppose two different types of methods. One that I called ‘sociology of the social’ tries to keep together as firmly as possible and as long as possible elements which it claims are made of some homogeneous

200 See the beautiful experiment with rapid-eye movement and its application in portraits in R.C. Miall and John Tchalenko (2001), ‘A Painter’s Eye Movements: A Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing’.

Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2005. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199256044.003.0009.

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stuff; the other—which I referred to as ‘sociology of associations’— tries to fathom controversies about the range of heterogeneous elem- ents that may be associated together. In one case, we know roughly what the social world is made of—it’s made ‘of’ or ‘in’ the social; in the other, we should always begin by not knowing what it’s made of. Thus, much like the pharmakon of the Greeks, the search for the social becomes either a remedy or a powerful poison depending on the dose and on the timing. Freshly grounded into small and timely doses, it allows the observer to detect the new associations that have to be constantly reshuffled in order to gather once more a collective that is threatened by irrelevance. But if you let the elements that have been bundled together pass their ‘sell by dates’, they will begin to rot. If you persist in ingesting them, they will lead to complete paralysis. You begin to take what has been connected together for a special type of fabric: the social explains the social. You have entered a world that is no longer traceable, a world that is in danger of being quickly invaded by the fairies, dragons, heroes, and witches of critical sociology.

But how is it possible to have two completely opposite meanings for the same adjective? It can be explained, I think, because the social sciences have pursued simultaneously three different tasks: document- ing the various ways in which the social is built by its members’ ingeni- ousness; settling the controversies about the social by limiting the range of entities at work in the world; and trying to solve the ‘social question’ by offering some prosthesis for political action. There is nothing wrong with these goals since sociology, the ‘science of living together’, should indeed be able to fulfill the three following duties: it should be able to deploy the full range of controversies about which associations are possible; it should be able to show through which means those controversies are settled and how such settlements are kept up; and it can help define the right procedures for the composition of the collective by rendering itself interesting to those who have been the object of study. But what is impossible is to try to fulfill those duties simultaneously without paying attention to their succession.

If you confuse the second with the first, for instance, you start thinking that your main task is to restrict—in advance and in the actor’s place—the range of uncertainties in which you are afraid the actors will get lost. This means that you take it upon yourself to narrow down the number of possible social aggregates, to limit the number of agencies that make actors do things, to exclude as many non-human objects as possible, to cling to a strict division of labor between natural and social sciences, and, finally, to maintain a firm belief in sociology as an autonomous scientific discipline. After such a treatment, it is no longer possible to trace the five sources of uncertainty that we have reviewed. Things get even worse when you confuse the third

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duty—that of political relevance—with the other two. For perfectly respectable reasons that are related to the necessity of modernization, to the project of emancipation, and to the sheer difficulties of empirical inquiries, you begin to substitute the actor’s composition of the col- lective with your own definition of what holds them together. You begin to ask what is a society and in which direction is it headed. Although I am sure that such an intellectual strategy might have been productive in the time of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, or Parsons, it has now become disastrous. When a social explanation is proposed, there is no longer a way to decide whether it is due to some genuine empirical grasp, to the application of a standard, to an attempt at social engin- eering, or to mere laziness. With the confusion of the three successive duties of social science, the social has become thoroughly untraceable even though social explanations keep proliferating effortlessly.

To be faithful to the project of a science of a social—now that the words social and science have both been refurbished—we have to overcome the mix-up without abandoning any of the three original duties. After having shown in Part I how we could deploy the actors’ own world-making abilities, and before tackling in the Conclusion the tricky question of political interest, I now have to show that it’s possible to follow the settlement of controversies without confusing such an inquiry with the other two. Yes, controversies are closed and uncertainties are settled, but this is also the labor of the actors them- selves so this too products empirical traces and so it can be thoroughly documented. As soon as we let the actors clean up, so to speak, their own mess, some order can be retrieved which is quite different from the inquirers’ own attempts at limiting controversies in advance.

Unfortunately, if it’s so difficult to deploy the five sources of uncer- tainty, then it’s going to be even trickier to follow the means through which they are stabilized. In this new research I will seem to be even more at loggerheads with ‘traditional sociology’. I will argue that what has rendered the social untraceable is the very existence of society or, more generally, of a social realm. This time the problem doesn’t come fromtheambiguityof thewordsocial,but fromaconfusion,entertained early on in the historyof sociology,betweenassembling thebody politic and assembling the collective. Even though both operations have a lot in common, the two should be kept apart if they are to succeed at all.

To put it broadly, society, this 19th century invention, is an odd transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18th century and the collective of the 21st.201 By asking society to do two jobs at once,

201 On the invention of the very notion of society, see Bruno Karsenti (2003), ‘Auto- rité, pouvoir et société: La science sociale selon Bonald’ and Michel Foucault (2003), ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976.

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that is, to make the collective traceable and to play the role of a substitute for politics, it has never been able to do either of them properly. The supposed existence of a society has precluded the emer- gence of a well-assembled collective as well as thwarted all efforts at defining the odd sort of corporate body that political activities should remain able to form.

Even though it will become clear only at the end of this book, the reason of this double bind can be stated simply: the body politic was supposed, by construction, to be virtual, total, and always already there. There is nothing wrong with this since it had to solve the impossible problem of political representation, fusing the many into one and making the one obeyed by the many. Only political action is able to trace, by a continuous circular movement, this virtual and total as- sembly that is always in danger of disappearing altogether.202 This is what Walter Lippmann had designated by the apt word phantom, the Phantom Public.203 From the myth of the social contract onward, the body politic has always been, as John Dewey put it in his answer to Lippmann, a problem, a ghost always in risk of complete dissolution. Never was it supposed to become a substance, a being, a sui generis realm that would have existed beneath, behind, and beyond political action. What has struck all readers in Hobbes’s sketch of his Leviathan is how fragile ‘this mortal god’ was and how quickly it could dissolve. For all to see, this giant had feet of clay.204

But as soon as you displace the mode of existence of the public into that of a society, so as to save you the immense, contradictory, and arduous task of composing it through political means, its problematic fragility vanishes.205 The body politic transmogrified into a society is supposed to hold up under its own force even in the absence of any

202 On the necessary ‘spin’ of political enunciation, see Bruno Latour (2003b), ‘What if We Were Talking Politics a Little?’ (2003).

203 Walter Lippmann (1927 [1993]), The Phantom Public. I am following here the work of Noortje Marres on Dewey and Lippman’s political philosophies. See Noortje Marres (2005), ‘No Issue, No Politics’. The fragility of political personae is one of the great lessons drawn from Ernst Kantorowicz (1997), The King’s Two Bodies. This is the reason why the state is always the product of a continuing trial. See Dominique Linhardt (2004), ‘La force de l’Etat en démocratie: La République fédérale d’Allemagne à l’épreuve de la guérilla urbaine 1967–1982’.

204 Although he takes it negatively instead of positively, Bourdieu summarizes per- fectly this frailty when defining political representation: ‘So delegation – this originary act of constitution in both the philosophical and political senses of the word – is an act of magic which enables what was merely a collection of several persons, a series of juxta- posed individuals, to exist in the form of a fictitious person, a corporatio, a body, a mystical body incarnated in a social body, which itself transcends the biological bodies which compose it (‘‘corpus corporatum in corpore corporato’’).’ Pierre Bourdieu (1991), ‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’, p. 208.

205 Remember that I have chosen to follow Bauman’s decisive insight about the invention of sociology as a substitute to politics. See Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity.

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political activity.206 Although it remains invisible, the giant body politic is now said to have had its feet solidly fastened to a sturdy pedestal. All the difficulties of grasping the social start from such an impossible feat of metallurgical fiction: the moving shape of the Phantom Public now cast in bronze.

Whereas the body politic was ceaselessly traced by politics, society is there whether we like it or not. And instead of seeing this as a contra- diction or technical impossibility, social scientists will take this ghostly presence as the best proof of its mysterious existence. Only now does the Phantom become a ghoul, the Leviathan turned into a behemoth. But it does not require much effort to see that a virtual and always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the collective to be assembled: if it’s already there, the practical means to compose it are no longer traceable; if it’s total, the practical means to totalize it are no longer visible; if it’s virtual, the practical means to realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view. As long as we detect behind the collective the shadow of society and behind society the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can proceed forward.207 To put it even more bluntly: either there is society or there is sociology. You can’t have both at once as Gabriel Tarde warned his readers when he saw the discipline taking such a wrong turn.

Naturally, all social theorists know this perfectly well and this is why each in his or her own way has made efforts to extirpate their inquiries out of the shadows of a society.208 They all have stated that society is a virtual reality, a cosa mentale, a hypostasis, a fiction. But by maintain- ing it where it was, if only to criticize it, they have never been able to do more than carve a little niche for themselves inside the virtual, total body that they claimed did not really exist. So, through a strange twist of fate, society became at once what was always criticized as a fiction and what was always there nonetheless as the impassable horizon of all discussions concerning the social world.209 Whatever the solution, it remained stranded like a whale, yes a leviathan, beached on a seashore

206 See John Dewey (1927 1954), The Public and Its Problems and his critique of Hegelianism in politics.

207 ‘The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated the public as an immature shadowy executive of all things. The confusion is deep-seated in a mystical notion of society.’ In Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 137.

208 For a recent inquiry into the state of the art, see Nicholas Gane (2004), The Future of Social Theory.

209 Thanks to the illusory power of dialectics, it’s sometimes this very contradictory naturethat is takenastheverycirculardefinitionofsocietyitself.This isclear inCastoriadis The Imaginary Institutionof Societybutalso in thenotionof self-transcendencedeveloped in Jean Pierre Dupuy (1992), Introduction aux sciences sociales. Logique des phénomènes collectifs and in the argument by Luhmann regarding the notion of autopoiesis of Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Although they might all be tracing circles, the body politic, society, and organ- isms do not carry the same entities and are not transported by the same vehicles.

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where Lilliputian social scientists tried to dig it a suitable abode. Of late, the smell of this decaying monster has become unbearable. There is no way to succeed in renewing social theory as long as the beach has not been cleared and the ill-fated notion of society entirely dissolved. To do so we have to extract out of it both the body politic that it has usurped as well as the collective that it keeps hiding.210

That society stands in the way of sociology and of politics is not so surprising for those of us in science studies who saw earlier how nature, too, stood in the way. Both monsters are born in the same season and for the same reason: nature assembles non-humans apart from the humans; society collects humans apart from the non- humans. As I have shown elsewhere at length, both are twin freaks generated to stifle the very possibility of a rightful composition of the collective.211 But if it’s relatively easy to show the political compos- ition of nature, so obvious is the difference between matters of con- cern and matters of fact, society, through some strange perversity, remains more obdurate, more obvious, more taken for granted. The abyss between the social as association and the social as substance seems more difficult to recognize. So much so that even my own efforts at reducing the power of nature have been taken as a reinforce- ment of that of society! The latter seems to be able to reign where the former has been forced to give up some of its sovereignty. Hence the unfortunate success of the notion of ‘social construction’ I scrutinized earlier. And yet, there is no escape. After nature, it is society that has to go. If not, we will never be able to collect the collective.

How can we move on and render the social fully traceable again? By following the same strategy as in Part I. We should deploy the full range of controversies instead of attempting to decide by ourselves what is the best starting point to follow it. Once again, we should be more abstract and more relativist than at first anticipated. This time I will take as our point of departure the very difficulty social scientists seem to have had in locating their inquiries at the right locus. By choosing such a roundabout way, we are going to discover that the two collectors they have chosen are simply not there because one specific problem—how to solve the political relations of the Many and the One—has been confused with another: how to compose the collective. This discovery will allow us to escape once and for all the large shadow still cast by the fast disappearing society and, hopefully, to render the social fluid traceable at last.

210 I will account later with the notion of ‘panorama’ for the reasons why this way of summarizing the social has nonetheless such a powerful grip on imagination, see p. 183.

211 Even though I don’t treat the question of nature as thoroughly here, it’s important to remember that my argument makes no sense if the balance between nature and society is not kept firmly in place.

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