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Humans and Non-Humans and the Proliferation of Hybrids (Sep 2001)
De-Differentiation
Serre (1995) proposes the social is always already materially heterogeneous, and it is the object that stabilises sociality. Latour (1999a) draws out a collective of humans and non-humans, extending sociality to objects. Purity, or pure form, is replaced by a proliferation of hybrids (Latour 1993).
Recalling the notion of a continuum, Callon and Latour (1992:348) claim that their "general symmetry principle is thus not to alternate between natural realism and social realism but to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity… network building."
Actor Networks
Differentiation has always been part of modernity, but so too have transversal connections (de-differentiations): linkages and networks across the divisions which create relative stabilities (Latour 1993).
According to Latour (1999a), social interactions are actively localised by objects, framed by associations between humans and non-humans. And these frames comprise convoluted networks, constructed simultaneously by hybrids of human, technological, natural and material elements. Latour's actor/actant is something that acts or to which activity is granted; defined by what it does, by its performances. And actions may be understood as factishes: part fact, part fetish, performed and always emerging.
Translation
An actor/actant must be made relevant to others (interessement), be made indispensable to others (translation), and be granted consent by others (enrolment).
Translation refers to "all the displacements through other actors whose mediation is indispensable for any action to occur… chains of translation refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and contradictory interests" (Latour 1999a:311). Immutable mobiles allow new translations and articulations, while simultaneously keeping other relations intact.
As such, actor networks are characterised by constant transformation through performative practices. They do not seek to explain what is between local pockets of order, but to claim that there is nothing in between them, nothing but networks. Spatiality/sociality is transformed into associations between actors and between networks; scale is understood in terms of connections.
Bibliography
Callon, M. and B. Latour. 1992. Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley. In A. Pickering (ed) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 1999. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Serre, M. 1995. Genesis. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press.
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