Latour’s Re-Assembling the Social may have marked the last hurrah for Actor-Network theory, but despite the fact that ANT grew in evolved in ways that drew it far from its orignal naissance, there are still many parts of Re-Assembling the Social that are useful for those people who want to try to understand and analyze technology.
For starters, Latour’s idea of a sociology of associations remains an important tool for those people interested in studying online interaction. Rather than the social being conceptualized as a thing which is out there influencing human interaction, Latour suggests that we look at the connections between people, and thus constitute the realm of the social within those connections. In Internet research, sometimes it feels as though all we have are connections between actors. In this cyberspace, the social becomes ephemeral at best. But a sociology of associations, which studies interaction and identifies the network of influences present in every subject and object places the social both on and offline, and can take into account also, those connections that are neither simply online nor offline, but rather occur across different media.
Secondly, scholars of technology can benefit from Latour’s assertion that we 1) take objects into account and 2) objectify human actors in the sense that we really take the time to listen to objects and determine their needs in the world. There are a multitude of associations within objects like computers and the Internet. As such, it is impossible to understand the effects of these devices on the social world if we study them in a vaccuum. Online activity does not exist in a magical dematerialized space where inequality, race, class, and gender do not exist. By tracking the associations present in every interaction, ANT begins to allow us to make sense of online life in a more holistic way.
This is the biggest stregnth of Re-Assembling the Social. Latour not only re-assembles the social, but re-materializes it as well. This is especially important in the study of social networks, both on and offline. Objects (like the computer you use to access your social network, or the social network program itself) are not neutral, but are made up a long history of associations. These associations inform the resulting social interactions. Latour may even say that they do so in such a way that power can be enacted or reinforced in the process. But taking the role of object into account, the one shortcoming of Re-Assembling the Social is the fact that it does not adequately address the human side of power.
Latour suggests that we must interrogate objects in different ways in order to determine their role as social actors, but he ignores the power that gives some people more right than others to speak for objects. He also ignores the power that gives some objects more authority than others, and neglects to say who makes the decision about what objects or people are allowed to speak, and how these power structures are enforced. In addition, Latour ignores the embodied experiences of gender, race, and disability in his analysis. Its as though his analysis includes only a white male subject and the objects that form the social world around that white male subject. Through omission, the different experience of the gendered or racialized body (a body made different, but not through objects) is erased.
This is not to say that Latour is useless for a feminist critical analysis of technologies such as the Internet. In fact, his call for a sociology of associations can be quite helpful in that regard, however, it is up to scholars to ensure that the corporeal reality of those within the associations are taken into account. We must “objectify” humans, as Latour says, and we must do this in order to draw attention to the different associations that have been a part of human material existence, as gendered, racial, non-able-bodied, feeling, living subjects.
