His main push, as I read him, is simply to put humans and
nonhumans in the same networks of social processes. And
secondarily, to undo the radical distinction between cultural
artifacts and natural material objects/entities, which tends to
prevent them from having roles in our analyses of the same
networks of actions.
Perhaps people not trained in sociology, or fields such as social
communication theory, will not realize how totally social systems
have been defined as systems of relations among people, and
people only. Forget tools, architectural affordances, ... and
bacteria. This insistence on categorial homogeneity of relations
is just like that of the natural sciences, which are basically
only about the relations of nonhumans to nonhumans -- leaving out
the role of the human viewpoints, actions, and relations to
other humans -- a bias of which most of us are highly critical.
So also, studies which do include artifacts, as in some areas of
engineering, tend to exclude the 'natural' (like bacteria).
Latour is at least saying that we can't make sensible accounts of
the history of science and technology without considering
heterogeneous networks of relations among humans and both
'cultural' and 'natural' nonhumans. He probably believes that
this is true for our analyses of most every sort of phenomenon,
in one way or another. I certainly do.
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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