Reading Latour 4: Society and Culture

Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005.

Before I forget, talking of the admittedly awkward label, actor-network theory, Latour observes (p. 9):

I was ready to drop this label for more elaborate ones . . . until someone pointed out to me that the acronym A.N.T. was perfectly fit for a blind, myopic, workaholic, trail-sniffing, and collective traveler. An ant writing for other ants, this fits my project very well!

And ants, we know, leave chemical traces wherever they go. They navigate their world by following those traces.

For use larger-brained animals, the process of thinking leaves chemical traces in our brains.

Process and Upkeep

It’s become obvious that Latour is reacting against the reification of ‘the social’ into a metaphysical substance with inherent causal properties (p. 35):

Whereas, for the sociologists of the social, the great virtue of appeals to society is that they offer this long lasting stability on a plate and for free, our school views stability as exactly what has to be explained by appealing to costly and demanding means. . . . The great benefit of a performative definition [is that] it draws attention to the means necessary to ceaselessly upkeep the groups and to the key contributions made by the analysts’ own resources.

I’m a bit skeptical of that last clause I’d like examples of continuing social groups brought into being through the scrutiny of analysts—but otherwise, yes.

It has become obvious to me though my thinking about the cultural evolutionary process that, while “evolution” tends to denote change (of a certain type? through a certain mechanism?), that stability is the first requirement. That is, whenever / however fully human culture first emerged, it’s first ‘task’ was to achieve stability, reliable transmission of cultural patterns from one generation to the next. Prior to this achievement, culture would ‘drift’ aimlessly from one generation to the next. Once stability had been achieved—can we see this in hand axes?—well, then it takes real ‘work’ to create cultural change. Cultural change, ‘evolution’ in the ordinary sense of the term, becomes a problem to be explained. And the rapid change of cultural forms in the West over the past half-millennium, how odd! And yet we’ve come to see it as the norm.

How odd!

Is ANT a sociology of cultural evolution?

Culture Evolves Among the ANTS

p. 66:

The main advantage of dissolving the notion of a social force and replacing it either by short-lived interactions or by new associations is that it’s now possible to distinguish in the composite notion of society what pertains to its durability and what pertains to its substance. Yes, there may exist durable ties, but this does not count as proof that they are made of social material—quite the opposite. It’s now possible to bring into the foreground the practical means to keep ties in place, the ingenuity constantly invested in enrolling other sources of ties, and the cost to be paid for the extension of any interaction.

To revert to my continuing example, graffiti, what do graffiti writers have to do to maintain their expressive activity in the face of ‘buffing’ by the authorities, and in the face of arrest? And, to the extent that such socio-cultural work, whatever it is, has become central to ‘graffiti culture’, how is that culture threatened by the sporadic legitimization of graffiti culture, as expressed in the recent exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art?

On the next page (67):

Sociologists will claim that when they appeal to the durability of social ties they bring in something that really possesses the necessary durability, solidity, and inertia. it is ‘society’, or ‘social laws’, or ‘structures’, or ‘social customs’, or ‘culture’, or ‘rules’, etc. they argue, which have enough steel in them to account for they way it exerts its grip over all of us and accounts for the unequal landscape in which we are toiling. It is, indeed, a convenient solution but does not explain where their ‘steely’ quality is coming from that reinforces the weak connections of social skills.

There did you see it? Social customs, culture, rules—the ’stuff’ of culture. Of course Latour mentions these as inadequate proposals, but the culture of cultural evolution is not a metaphysical substance, it is precisely a delicate meshwork of neural connections, distributed through many brains, that must be maintained through constant socio-cultural effort.

To use my favorite metaphor, the busy bees in my brain, and the busy bees in your brain, must buzz around just so if they are to keep us in touch with other through the medium of a common culture.

 
Mimi & Eunice courtesy of Nina Paley.