Actor-network theory
Explanation
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a current developed from the late 1970s and 80s by Bruno Latour (1947-2022), Michel Callon, John Law and others, especially in the social studies of science and technology. Foundational works: Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979), Science in Action (Latour, 1987), We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1991), Reassembling the Social (Latour, 2005).
The central thesis of ANT is that social processes (and also scientific, technical, economic ones) are sustained by heterogeneous networks in which not only human actors but also non-human actors participate: instruments, machines, documents, animals, microorganisms, cities, electrical grids, etc. Each entity in the network is an actor (or rather, an actant, following a terminology from semiotics): something that can modify others, cause effects, mediate, transform.
This breaks with the traditional duality nature/society, humans/non-humans, subjects/objects. A microbe is an actor as much as a researcher; a traffic sign as much as the driver; a regulation as much as the official. Without these quasi-things, quasi-persons (Latour), the social fabric would not exist. The modern world, far from being purely human, is woven by myriads of non-human actors that actively participate in the processes.
The famous Latourian analysis of Pasteur's discovery of the rabies vaccine (in The Pasteurization of France, followed by Irreductions, 1984) shows how Pasteur did not triumph individually but by recruiting heterogeneous allies: the microbe itself (docile to a certain experimental protocol), veterinarians, livestock breeders, newspapers, the laboratory, the institute. Scientific truth is the effect of this network; the human and non-human cooperate in its production.
ANT has been applied in multiple fields: science and technology studies (Steve Woolgar, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Donna Haraway), technological innovation (Wiebe Bijker), organisation of work, urban planning (Annemarie Mol, in medicine), political ecologies (how ecosystems are networks of human and non-human actants). It has profoundly renewed social theory and the philosophy of science. Latour's idea of a parliament of things, a space where not only human interests but also those of non-humans would be represented, has been especially influential in ecological politics.
For the theory of consciousness, ANT has profound implications: consciousness and cognition are not properties locked inside individual skulls, but emergent effects of networks that include bodies, objects, places, technologies. When I write with a pen in a notebook, in a café with music, with a book beside me, the resulting thought is of the whole network, not just my isolated brain. This anticipates and articulates with the theses of extended cognition (Andy Clark, David Chalmers, 1998), distributed cognition (Edwin Hutchins), 4E philosophy of mind (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended). ANT has contributed to decentring consciousness from the isolated subject, making it part of complex socio-technical networks. As a profoundly relational and heterogeneous ontological vision, it is one of the most influential legacies of contemporary social sciences.
Strengths
- Symmetric ontology that challenges modern dualisms.
- Empirically productive in concrete studies.
- Dialogue with ecology, philosophy of the object, perspectivism.
- Relevance to contemporary problems (climate, AI).
Main critiques
- Risk of diluting the specificity of human consciousness.
- Idiosyncratic terminology.
- Difficulties in theorising power and asymmetries.