Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour, and the CSI.

Abstract

When Nicole Nelson asked me to write a short piece on Latour and my work with him and Michel Callon articulating Actor Network Theory, I have to admit that I was a bit embarrassed, because this is not really how I remember my first years at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI). When I arrived at the end of 1983, Bruno Latour had been there at Michel Callon’s invitation for a year, but they had begun their collaboration a few years earlier. They were attempting to evangelize the French social sciences to the emerging field of STS, chiefly by translating and publishing several collections of articles on the history and sociology of science and the history of technology from journals such as Social Studies of Science and Technology and Culture (Callon & Latour, 1982, 1985; Latour, 1985). Their proselytizing did not meet much success, but these collections became canonical for the young researchers transiting through CSI. They had also published their article on Leviathan, which proposed nothing less than to re-found sociology on a new basis (Callon & Latour, 1981). However, I did not feel—nor do I think others felt—that we were participating in the elaboration of a theory, at least not in the sense of a more or less closed set of hypotheses and concepts aimed at proposing an explanation of certain phenomena, let alone of the entire world. What we shared was rather something like a way of looking at and describing the world: a kind of a priori agnosticism as to the nature and intensity of the forces at work, and an equal attention to humans and non-humans (according to the established expressions of the time). Moreover, it did not arouse so much astonishment or discussion, in contrast to the outraged reactions of some outside researchers. The reason for this may be that, at the time, those who landed at the CSI came from a wide variety of backgrounds: engineering, history, business schools, development studies, urban planning; in