These notes are the ninth in a series of fifteen lecture for my class Culture and Communication.

Latour, Bruno Reassembling the social. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. (Particularly chapters 2, 4, 5, 7)

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on the 'thinginess' of culture and the activity of things

Another take at bringing together the material (physical, ecological, biological) and the cultural (languages, discourses, rituals, customs, laws), and thus to go beyond the old debates between, say, Marx and Weber on "which comes first," or "which is more fundamental" in shaping the life of individuals, and particularly in opening and closing possibilities about "what to do next" and then "what to do about that which I will have done." And above all, letting detailed observations of what human beings do do, together with each other and the physical world, guide our generalizations about the opening and closing of possibilities.

1. Moving beyond culture as a mental process and recapturing its materiality
   1. from a (cognitive, emotional, evaluative) property of individuals (selves, character, identities)
      1. as in Fiske's statement "Culture is concerned with meanings, pleasures, and identities" (1981: 1)
   2. to an aspect of the facts (materials, things) that individuals encounter
2. A brief history of the material in culture and culture in the material
   1. Precursors, who made facts that are still with us (anthropologists and related)
      1. Rousseau (The origin of inequality, opening of second part)
      2. Marx: "Men themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence." ( 1970 [1845]: 42)
      3. Wittfogel, Geertz, etc.: irrigation, political organization, and the organization of complex irrigation systems (e.g. in Bali)
   2. Some attempts at reintegration
      1. Lévi-Strauss
      2. Bateson on "second-order" learning or "learning how to learn" ([1959] 1972: 249). Bateson's argumentation is quite complex as he attempts to erase the distinction between the "physical individual" and "contexts." The body and its (physical, interactional, cultural) tools constitute one system that is so organized as to be continually evolving and not controllable by any of its units ([1959] 1972: 267-9).
3. The sociology of science
   1. from pragmatism (Kuhn, Kaplan)
   2. to ethnomethodology: Garfinkel, Goodwin, Latour
4. an example:
   1. Measuring the world: the kilogram and the difficulty of preserving the arbitrary: this is a kilogram. and "we" (everyone whom I say should be part of this "we") must accept it, or else ... they are not legitimate participant in the world of commerce and science and should be punished.
5. Latour and "assembling the social" into things (facts) that are conditions (resources) for further action (including the construction of future facts)
   1. a form of radical "ethnographism": "... find order ... after having let the actors deploy the full range of controversies" (p. 23)
      1. "groups are not silent things, but rather the provisional product of a constant uproar." (p. 31) that is, one can claim "a group" until one has heard people scream "this is the group I/we belong to/fight, and here are the lines that constitute this group (p. 33).
      2. the ongoing work of sociability: "a grouping is not a building in need of restoration but a movement in need of continutation." (p. 37)
      3. "an actor is what is made to act by many others (p. 46)
   2. people and objects, that is people/objects (or is it object/people?)
      1. "objects have agency" (p. 63) -- Latour most famously controversial statement
         1. e.g. can one "hit a nail without a hammer, ... run a company without bookkeeping"? (p. 71) ... "no science of the social can begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored" (p.72).
            1. think of the quip "to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
         2. "we have to take non-humans into account only as long as they are rendered commensurable with social ties and also to accept, an instant later, their fundamental incommensurability" (p. 78)
            1. the issue is to notice discontinuities ("something has happened") rather than attempt to deduce what an object (including a set of regulations [check Latour's discussion of methods to slow cars]) 'does'. Objects appear, like groups, in the history of making the social.
            2. as Latour implies in the footnote about Weber, it is not the case that objects are "given meaning" as a property but that particular objects make particular differences at particular times ("making a difference" is, of course, "meaning" in the structuralist traditions). Once the object stops making a difference, then it has no meaning.
6. and another extended example
   1. given a small, or large, collectivity ("community," "polity," "field," "participatory structure") in New Orleans, is there any reason to distinguish between:
      1. a river
      2. a levee
      3. the administrative acts justifying this levee as a "flood-control" levee
      4. the engineering acts building and maintaining this levee
      5. the political conversations that may re-justify levees, or their destruction
7. BUT
   1. note that what is being assembled is also an object for what happens next: a bureaucracy (e.g. "Homeland Security") is indeed "already there" with its peculiar properties when one approaches those who stand for it (e.g. immigration officers at Kennedy airport).
   2. no "culture" -- that is no confrontation with the "arbitrariness" of what is being done