Law & Society Review readers are likely to have heard the news that Durkheim is dead. Yet Durkheim-style thinking persists. Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra tried to make us realize that if we no longer believe in God as the guarantor of order and meaning, we cannot continue to imagine that phenomena can be neatly categorized as effects of larger causes, with causes in turn organized in a coherent if mobile system. Zarathustra's words fell on deaf ears, however. Today, we may have learned that the world is neither static nor orderly, but we have not looked at our thinking tools to see which ones assume an order behind phenomena.
Some who did hear Nietzsche's message decided to throw away all tools, in postmodern despair. Others buried their noses in concrete particulars (e.g., the historical turn). But mainstream sociologists, believing that scholarly raw material comes only in two currencies, facts and concepts, continue making the world—revisioned as sets of data—fit pre-given categories.
Bruno Latour's critique of structuralist-influenced sociology does not take up the tired slogan about facts being socially constructed; on the contrary, it leaves facts to one side, concentrating on critiquing concepts. American audiences, often merging all things French into a single Rorschach blob, have not realized that Latour is adamantly opposed to the cultural-studies folk who came to believe that deconstruction (a method for analyzing texts) could replace both politics and social science. For Latour (as for Foucault, an affinity repeatedly recognized in this book), Durkheimian sociology has to be abandoned not because it is hopelessly positivist—though it is—but because it is not scientific enough. Invoking an alternative social science tradition, one that begins in Durkheim's forgotten rival Tarde and goes through Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to science studies, Latour's book is curiously optimistic: it is an anti-Durkheimian “rules of sociological method.”
So just what is the new method, and why should legal scholars care? For Latour, the task of scholars begins by taking up a scientific skeptical stance and swearing never to use prepackaged abstract notions—or at least, to use them only after acknowledging that they are black boxes that could and should be opened at some point. One can then study how various actors interact in a particular setting, and how they help or hinder each other to generate a more or less durable result: the germ theory of disease, a new subway train, a legal doctrine, etc., with these accounts being notable by the absence of sociology's familiar concepts.
Durkheim's claim to fame was that, unlike other late-nineteenth-century writers on issues such as crime and madness, he did not talk about hybrid entities such as degeneration, but rather began by positing and enshrining the social. For Latour, this attempt to purify a social realm is as problematic as its opposite, biological reductionism. And while Latour may be somewhat unfair in stating that contemporary sociology treats the social as a kind of stuff, his criticism of sociology's founding move is on the whole apposite.
Latour debunks not only society but even “the social,” through an actor-network approach. Contrary to some caricatures, actor-network approaches do not fight sociology by proclaiming a contrary religion in which objects and scallops are mysteriously endowed with agency: they simply refuse to ignore, a priori, large realms of activity. Close empirical observation—and not only ethnography, incidentally—may reveal that objects, animals, plants, theories, chemicals, texts, and people may be jostling and pushing in ways that escape observers who already know that the truth lies under the facts, in fields, class structure, etc. What is or is not an actor is a matter for empirical investigation; there is no general theory.
This is highly relevant to law-and-society scholarship, which often falls into the lazy habit of explaining legal processes by referring to some underlying social reality—a reality that is often nothing but an abstract model built by previous academic or commonsense sociology. Terms such as globalization cannot be used as explanations—Latour argues—if we have indeed admitted that Durkheim is dead. Statements about the global, and about the local, for example, are simply meaningless (as analytic philosophy would point out if anybody consulted it, but that is another story). For Latour, the task is to painstakingly trace the “associations” that are all that we can ever know of our world. If “the word social is not used to replace one kind of stuff with another but it used instead to deploy the associations that have rendered some state of affairs solid and durable, then another social theory might become audible at last” (p. 93).
Of particular interest is Latour's observation that actor-network analysis is not necessarily best used to study processes that happen to look like networks (e.g., a laboratory, the Internet). A network in Latour's usage “does not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points … It is nothing more than an indicator of the quality of the text about the topics at hand” (p. 129). “Network is a concept, not a thing out there” (p. 131). “The consequence is that you can provide an actor-network account of topics which have in no way the shape of a network—a symphony, a piece of legislation.” (p. 131; emphasis added).
For those already familiar with actor-network scholarship, Reassembling the Social does not break any new ground—with the exception of the emphasis on actor-network analysis being a way to write an account more than a theory (or a method of collecting data). I found it highly repetitive, and in places annoyingly didactic. However, I know from teaching theory that new approaches can only be explained by multiplying trivial examples and repeating the same point in different words. Thus, as an introduction to actor-network approaches to social research, this book, written in Latour's signature faux-folksy style, will be of great use.
