Latour's greatest hits, reassembled: Review of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Abstract

It seems peculiar that a non-theory, anti-method has managed to become canonical, but that is what Bruno Latour will introduce you to in his book; the post-pluralist, post-humanist attitude called Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). Drawing together heaps of controversial research, Latour resuscitates ANT after its 1999 death (see Law and Hassard 1999). Like Graham Harman’s book about Latour, The Prince of Networks (2009), Reassembling the Social is the outcome of various lectures and seminars, and must be read as such. Readers looking for the second incarnation of Science in Action (1987) or a follow-up to The Pasteurization of France (1988) will be sorely disappointed because Latour’s offering here is more akin to Politics of Nature (2004) or We Have Never Been Modern (1993) in that the audience gets a repetitive synthesis peppered with apercu rather than reams of deep empirical analysis, as Gubert (2007, 603) has also suggested. Conceivably, the book might be the classroom workhorse for Latour’s new transnational teaching and research project “Mapping Controversies,” which is running simultaneously in six institutions (see http://www.demoscience.org/).