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The Actor network theory (ANT) was developed by Bruno Latour back in 80s. The idea comes from a sociologic point of view, where Bruno Latour distinguishes the traditional meaning of social (=human, community focussed) adding to it other non-human "actors" like objects or activities like law, science, technology, etc. | The Actor network theory (ANT) was developed by Bruno Latour back in 80s. The idea comes from a sociologic point of view, where Bruno Latour distinguishes the traditional meaning of social (=human, community focussed) adding to it other non-human "actors" like objects or activities like law, science, technology, etc. | ||
*Latour proposes two positions which distinguishes traditional sociology from the ANT perspective. The first one could be compared with Niklas Luhmann social systems and the other with Deleuzian rhizomatic systems. | |||
*Latour proposes three test cases to define ANT approach to social: 1) should include non-humans, 2) shouldn't explain the state of affairs, and 3) reassemblance of social instead of deconstruction | |||
“Especially since the publication of Latour’s Science in Action (1987), ANT has dominated theoretical discussions in STS [science and technology studies], and has served as a framework for an enormous number of studies. Its successes, as a theory of science, technology, and everything else, have been mostly bound up in its relational materialism. As a materialist theory it explains intuitively the successes and failures of facts and artifacts: they are the effects of the successful translation of actions, forces, and interests. As a relationalist theory it suggests novel results and promotes ecological analyses: humans and non-humans are bound up with each other, and features on neither side of that apparent divide can be understood without reference to features on the other. Whether actor-network theorists can answer all the questions people have of it remains to be seen, but it stands as the best known of STS’s theoretical achievements so far.”(Sismondo 2010) | “Especially since the publication of Latour’s Science in Action (1987), ANT has dominated theoretical discussions in STS [science and technology studies], and has served as a framework for an enormous number of studies. Its successes, as a theory of science, technology, and everything else, have been mostly bound up in its relational materialism. As a materialist theory it explains intuitively the successes and failures of facts and artifacts: they are the effects of the successful translation of actions, forces, and interests. As a relationalist theory it suggests novel results and promotes ecological analyses: humans and non-humans are bound up with each other, and features on neither side of that apparent divide can be understood without reference to features on the other. Whether actor-network theorists can answer all the questions people have of it remains to be seen, but it stands as the best known of STS’s theoretical achievements so far.”(Sismondo 2010) | ||
“In the course of the book we will learn to distinguish the standard sociology of the social from a more radical subfamily which I will call critical sociology.7 This last branch will be defined by the following three traits: it doesn’t only limit itself to the social but replaces the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations; it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors who need to live under the illusion that there is something ‘other’ than social there; and it considers that the actors’ objections to their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations are right. | “In the course of the book we will learn to distinguish the standard sociology of the social from a more radical subfamily which I will call critical sociology.7 This last branch will be defined by the following three traits: it doesn’t only limit itself to the social but replaces the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations; it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors who need to live under the illusion that there is something ‘other’ than social there; and it considers that the actors’ objections to their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations are right. | ||