Latour For Architects
Latour For Architects
Latour For Architects
Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his
contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories ‘flourished’
in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new
concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past
decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity
among researchers in the field of architecture.
Latour for Architects is the first introduction to the key concepts and ideas of
Bruno Latour that are relevant to architects. First, the book discusses critically
how specific methods and insights from his philosophy can inspire new thinking
in architecture and design pedagogy. Second, it explores examples from
architectural practice and urban design, and reviews recent attempts to extend
the methods of ANT into the fields of architectural and urban studies. Third, the
book advocates an ANT-inspired approach to architecture, and examines how its
methodological insights can trace new research avenues in the field, reflecting
meticulously on its epistemological offerings.
Drawing on many lively examples from the world of architectural practice, the
book makes a compelling argument about the agency of architectural design and
the role architects can play in re-ordering the world we live in. Following Latour’s
philosophy offers a new way to handle all the objects of human and nonhuman
collective life, to re-examine the role of matter in design practice, and to redefine
the forms of social, political and ethical associations that bind us together in cities.
Editorial Board:
Jonathan A. Hale, University of Nottingham, UK
Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven, Netherlands
David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Architects have often looked to philosophers and theorists from beyond the
discipline for design inspiration or in search of a critical framework for practice.
This original series offers quick, clear introductions to key thinkers who have
written about architecture and whose work can yield insights for designers.
‘Each unintimidatingly slim book makes sense of the subjects’ complex theories.’
Building Design
Latour
for
Architects
Albena Yaneva
iv
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Series editor’s preface x
Acknowledgementsxii
Are we modern? 7
The promises of symmetrical anthropology 13
Non-modern architects 16
5. Actor-Network Theory63
vii Contents
viii
7. Invisible cities88
viii Contents
ix
List of illustrations
ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
x
Adam Sharr
Architects have often looked to thinkers in philosophy and theory for design
ideas, or in search of a critical framework for practice. Yet architects and
students of architecture can struggle to navigate thinkers’ writings. It can be
daunting to approach original texts with little appreciation of their contexts.
And existing introductions seldom explore a thinker’s architectural material in
any detail. This original series offers clear, quick and accurate introductions to
key thinkers who have written about architecture. Each book summarises what
a thinker has to offer for architects. It locates their architectural thinking in the
body of their work, introduces significant books and essays, helps to decode
terms and provides quick reference for further reading. If you find philosophical
and theoretical writing about architecture difficult, or just don’t know where to
begin, this series will be indispensable.
Books in the Thinkers for Architects series come out of architecture. They
pursue architectural modes of understanding, aiming to introduce a thinker to
an architectural audience. Each thinker has a unique and distinctive ethos, and
the structure of each book derives from the character at its focus. The thinkers
explored are prodigious writers and any short introduction can only address a
fraction of their work. Each author – an architect or an architectural critic – has
focused on a selection of a thinker’s writings which they judge most relevant to
designers and interpreters of architecture. Inevitably, much will be left out.
These books will be the first point of reference, rather than the last word, about
a particular thinker for architects. It is hoped that they will encourage you to
read further, offering an incentive to delve deeper into the original writings of
the thinker at stake.
The Thinkers for Architects series has proved highly successful over more than
a decade, expanding now to eighteen volumes dealing with familiar cultural
Acknowledgements
xii Acknowledgements
xiii
xiii Acknowledgements
xiv
1
CHAPTER 1
Over the course of their work architects often facilitate the production of social
relations and help shape societies. Therefore, knowledge in sociology (the study
of social life, social change and the factors that impact human behaviour) is
crucial for designers. A Latourian sociological approach is relevant to architects
for a number of reasons: first, there is a growing realisation of architecture as
a social practice, recognising the social nature of the outcomes of architectural
production (Till 2009); second, architectural professionals increasingly question
understandings and beliefs in relation to knowledge production, innovation and
creativity that are commonly taken for granted; and third, there is a tendency to
acknowledge the active role of objects, materials and technologies in the process
of design and inhabitation (for instance the role of scale models in the design
process). Therefore, it is not a coincidence that Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
associated with the name of Latour, has gradually gained popularity among
researchers in the fields of architecture and design studies within the past two
decades.
Unlike other volumes that have provided an introduction into Latour’s theory as a
philosopher (De Vries 2016; Harman 2009), or offered an intellectual biography
of the author (Schmidgen 2014), or a comprehensive summary of his key ideas
(Blok and Jensen 2011), this book aims to introduce his work to architects. It
2 Introduction
3
The book is organised into nine chapters. Each chapter makes three essential
moves: first: it presents key ideas and concepts from Latour’s philosophy; second:
it deploys some of these ideas with the help of specific examples; third: it offers
reflections on the relevance of these concepts and methods for architecture,
sketching possible avenues for research and engagement with the profession.
Chapter 1 introduces Bruno Latour as a thinker and the aims and the structure
of the book. Chapter 2 spells out Latour’s critique of modernity and provides
a reflection on the meaning of ‘modern’ and ‘nonmodern’ in architecture.
Chapter 3 presents the key findings from Latour’s anthropology of science and
how they can inform research in architectural studies. It also discusses a method
for analysing and mapping architectural controversies. Chapter 4 reviews the
socio-technical approach to innovation, the role of technology and objects in
social life and the concept of technical failure. It also reflects on the active role
of objects in design/dwelling practices. Chapter 5 introduces Actor-Network
Theory as a method and elaborates on how it can be used in architectural
research. Chapter 6 analyses Latour’s understanding of process and introduces
the concept of spacing in opposition to space. Chapter 7 offers a pragmatist
agenda for the study of cities; the case of Paris is discussed at large along with
the role of urban artefacts in city life. Chapter 8 scrutinises the concept of
politics orientated around objects and reflects on the meaning of cosmopolitical
design for architectural professionals. Chapter 9 discusses Latour’s theory of the
new climatic regime and a possible architectural response to climate change. The
writing style, truthful to Latour, is based on careful analysis of specific examples.
The illustrations are redrawn from classic diagrams and figures included in
key works of Latour and are further reinterpreted architecturally for a design
audience.
3 Introduction
4
4 Introduction
5
CHAPTER 2
or an experiment.
Nature Society
Existence
Figure 2.1 The Modern Constitution.
Illustration by Alexandra Arènes.
Here we should clarify Latour’s understanding of some key terms from what he
imagines is the Modern Constitution. The term Society refers to the result of the
modern settlement that, for political reasons, artificially divides things between
the natural and the social realms. Like Society, the idea of Nature is the result
of a highly problematic settlement. This settlement, moreover, has a political
origin: the separation of politics from science, of political and epistemological
representation.
Are we modern?
But how is this debate about Modernity, and the divides between Nature and
Society/Culture, relevant to our practice as architects? Let us take a simple
example. How often do we open the pages of architectural magazines and
read about controversial buildings? Every day. Here is the Disney Concert Hall
designed by Frank Gehry in Los Angeles, stainless-steel, aesthetically ‘beautiful’
and iridescent, changing colours depending on where the sun is. Yet, it is also
This glare example illustrates what Latour defined as the paradox of modernity,
and namely that modernity requires a constant work of purifying nature from
culture, the more that purification happens and the more it attempts to prevent
the production of hybrids, the more it actually creates the conditions for the
growth of hybrids. By hybrid, he means complex imbroglios (entanglements) in
which it is impossible to disentangle nature from culture (Figure 2.2), in the same
way that it is impossible to disentangle, in the glare story above, the issues of
sunlight from those of social responsibility to neighbours and other legal issues.
In most contemporary situations of crisis and controversy (dispute), but also in
most ‘modern’ practices, we encounter hybrids. Following controversies, like the
First dichotomy
Nature Society/culture
WORK OF
PURIFICATION
1 2
Second dichotomy
WORK OF
TRANSLATION
3
Hybrids
Networks
glare ones, wherever they take us, navigating through the world, we rely on the
work of translation that draws us into hybrids, or networks.
and forth between Chicago and its hinterland at the end of nineteenth century
(the grain travels from the Great West farms all the way to the city markets of
Chicago, the lumber travels from the Great West forests, making the forest
disappear, the meat travels from the villages to Chicago, to its meat-packing
corporations), Cronon showed how the boundaries of a new Nature’s metropolis
emerged. This city was not made by powerful men, but it took shape as it traced
many intricate relationships with pine, lumber, meat, wheat, corn, and other
crops, with nature. Thus, a non-modern approach foregrounds the entangled
production of Nature and Society/Culture, the explicit and collective generation
of hybrids. It allows us to see the composition of the world in a different way.
Modernity also implies another asymmetry between Cultures and their access
to Nature. Another Great Divide, then, emerges from within the divide between
Nature and Culture, a divide between what has been called the West and the
Rest. As Latour wrote:
So the Internal Great Divide accounts for the External Great Divide:
we are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and
Culture, between Science and Society, whereas in our eyes all the others
whether they are Chinese or Amerindian, Azande or Barouya – cannot
really separate what is knowledge from what is Society, what is sign from
what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures
require.
(Latour 1993a, 99)
Rejecting the Modern Constitution, as that which confers power to the western
scientific and industrial world, Latour stated that premodern societies are self-
consciously aware of the interrelation of nature and society, a self-consciousness
that is considered by moderns as paralysing. In other words, while premodern
societies still confuse nature and society, moderns have managed to ‘escape’
from that by introducing a partition between Nature and Society (Figure 2.3)
Internal External
Divide Divide
Nature natures/societies
Society
‘Us’ ‘Them’
Modern Premodern
through which they are able to distinguish themselves from those that have not
yet modernised.
if the unity of nature is in front of us, not behind us, then multiplicity of
cultures can’t be obtained by dissolving contact with a privileged point
of view. None of us, I believe, would be happy to have just ‘one vision
among others’ of the world.
(Latour 2007a, 18)
Amerindians, as well as all the ancient cultures, to which we can add the
ever-growing collection of new cultures. Each of them is in search for a home
or a new place in today’s globalising world. They all signal that the West, as
a category, does not exist any longer. And as the Europeans had invented
modernity, it is important that they are able to ‘recall’ it now – that is, to
engage in an inquiry into what has gone wrong with modernity and to return
to its founding principles. Recalling modernity for Europeans would mean that
they will finally become aware of their responsibility to the cultures they have
colonialised for centuries without abandoning their ambitions and will devise
a new ‘peace offering’. This requires professionals (scientists, engineers,
architects, among others) to act as diplomats to engage in redefining
and rephrasing the requirements and wishes of different peoples. Such a
diplomacy will allow us all to reanalyse our own differences without referring
to either the unity of Nature or the diversity of Cultures. Each culture should
be allowed to express contrasts in their own terms, according to their own
categories, which will enable them to resume more egalitarian relations with
the ‘others’.
The diplomatic and symmetrical anthropologist, first, tends to use the same
conceptual lens to explain the true and the false, the winners and the losers;
second, simultaneously studies the making of humans and nonhumans (the
principle of general symmetry) and thus traces the generation of new beings, of
‘hybrids’ of nature and culture; third, takes a middle ground position between
the traditional and new territories of studies without assuming differences
between the West and other cultures that have suffered from the dominating,
colonising ambitions of the West.
Non-modern architects
this thin pellicle of the Earth. It is not possible to say any longer ‘I will
be building in the environment’. There is no environment, there is no
exterior; the exterior is in the interior, the context is the content. The
architects have no relation with space any longer. What will happen
if we tell an architect ‘You don’t have the space anymore! You don’t
master it!’ […]
(Koolhaas and Latour 2016)
Of all the architects of his time he could have chosen to engage with, Latour
picked Koolhaas, the ‘never been modern’ architect par excellence. Koolhaas’s
work has celebrated the energy and rigour of Modernism while also revealing
its underlying controversial characteristics. His recuperation of modernity ranged
from the sensuousness of Mies van der Rohe to the brute force of Russian
Constructivism. Moreover, in his writings, Koolhaas considered the canonical
histories of modern architecture to be mythologies (Koolhaas, 1978) and has
discussed, in numerous books on the evolution of the contemporary metropolis,
the consequences of modernity – endless infrastructures, neutral façades,
and generic spaces. His firm OMA is, in a sense, a practice that has radically
questioned modernism, redefined the social tasks promoted by classical (heroic)
modernism through the amplification of the functional imagination. In each OMA
project the notion of ‘modern architecture’ is distorted and pushed to its limits.
‘out there’ and relied upon to explain Nature, cities, and other phenomena.
Hence the importance of Koolhaas’s immortal ‘context stinks’. Each time we
design, whether it is a library in Seattle or a skyscraper in Beijing, everything is
rethought, both the ‘content’ and the ‘context’. That is the work of translation
or hybridisation. We witnessed it in the glare example where the design content
of a new steel building was defined alongside the new vision of Birmingham.
Everything is ‘in the making’.
CHAPTER 3
relations.
Surpassing these dualisms, Laboratory Life described the routine work carried
out in one laboratory – the lab of Roger Guillemin at the Salk Institute for
Biological Studies (1965) in La Jolla, California. Basing their findings on material
gathered from in situ monitoring of scientists’ activity, Latour and Woolgar
argued that the many aspects of science depend on the routinely occurring
minutiae of scientific activity. Historic events, breakthroughs, and competitions
are examples of phenomena which occur over and above a continual stream
of ongoing scientific activities. This approach is defined as ‘anthropological’ as
it attempts to apprehend as ‘strange’ those aspects of scientific activity which
are readily taken for granted. The uncritical acceptance of the concepts and
terminology used by some scientists has had the effect of further enhancing
the mystery that surrounds the doing of science. Attempting to demystify this
activity, the authors argued that ‘adequate descriptions can only result from an
observer’s prolonged acquaintance with behavioural phenomena. Descriptions
are adequate, according to this perspective, in the sense that they emerge
during the course of techniques such as participant observation’ (Latour and
Woolgar 1979, 37). Thus, capitalising on the experiences of ethnographic
observation of the Salk laboratory in situ, by being close to localised scientific
practices, the observer has a situated viewpoint from which to understand how
scientists themselves produce order and how their daily activities lead to the
construction of facts.
Challenging the idea that facts are things discovered by scientists that reflect an
objective reality, Latour and Woolgar argued that facts are instead manifestly
and socially made, they are artefacts constructed by scientists themselves. The
distinction between ‘the social’ and ‘the scientific’ is itself an artful contrivance
of scientists: a strategy they use in the social production of facts. Thus, matters
of fact are not, as in common parlance, what is already present in the world, but
a rather late outcome of a long process of negotiation and institutionalisation.
They are themselves social. This does not limit their certainty but, on the
contrary, provides all that is necessary for matters of fact to become indisputable
and apparent. To be indisputable is the end point, the outcome, and therefore,
not the outset, the beginning. Matters of fact do not pre-exist attempts to
know them. The anthropologist observes the process of the construction of
facts and the reasoning processes in science noting its similarity to common
sense discourse, and thus accounts for the intense collective work required to
stabilise a fact. Yet, once stabilised as facts, all traces of practices and human
agency (the actions and interventions of people generating effects) involved in
their production, are systematically stripped away. The facts seemingly stand on
their own. In addition, scientists work not only to establish facts as facts, but
also to cast doubt upon the facticity of other scientists’ statements. Rather than
focusing on the theories of the actors, or their place within a specific paradigm,
Latour and Woolgar produced a concrete and detailed ethnographic account of
how scientists behave, how they talk with one another, how they interact with
their technological devices, and how facts need to travel outside of the lab in
order to exist. This type of sociology of science shows that the actual practice of
science is radically different from the dominant accounts of science that focus
upon the public relations of science and offer idealised accounts of its theoretical
structures.
In Science in Action (1987), Latour further developed a programme for the study
of scientific activities. He argued that the sociology of science should not be
confused with the sociology of scientists, their careers, professions, citations.
Instead of being interested in the ideology, ideas, the explanation of the errors,
or the ‘social aspects’ of scientific truth, and instead of analysing scientific
thought and spirit, Latour’s agenda was to study the practices, instruments,
objects, and the knots of the networks of practice, just like he did in Laboratory
Life. That is, to pay attention to the collective, distributed and situated practices
of science making.
wave in French thought, this method is based on what people do, the
actions they undertake and assume, their discourse (the way they explain and
conceptualise what they do). It takes seriously the practices and languages of
all members of society rather than searching for what social forces are ‘really’
acting behind them.
To illustrate the juxtaposition between the two approaches, the critical and the
realist/pragmatist, Latour used the double-faced Janus (Figure 3.1). On the left,
stands ready-made science: it is serious (like the facial expression of the left
Janus!), certain, formal and restrained, and as it is ready-made, static, and mute,
it is easily explained through social dimensions; on the right, stands science ‘in
the making’: it is alive, uncertain, informal, changing and cannot be explained
with a given Society or reduced to social factors. To be understood, it needs to
be followed as it is in the making.
Formulating the rules of the realist method, Latour invited us to analyse facts
and technologies that are in the process of their making, that is, to follow
the process through which they are black boxed, closed up, completed. Black
boxing is an expression from the sociology of science that refers to the way in
which scientific and technical work is made invisible once the final product is
successful. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled,
no one pays attention to its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more
science and technology succeed, the more opaque they become. That is why,
Latour argued, we need to follow facts when they are disputed, before they
become settled, cold.
technical and social. The more something is technical and specialised, the more
social it becomes: it gathers more allies and critics and by so doing increases
the number of associations. The term association refers to a different regime
of connecting humans and nonhumans that shape heterogeneous collectives
in place of the concept of Society that exists as a substantial social body that
precedes and organises what happens in social relations.
talk on their own. Latour argued that ‘in practice, there is not much difference
between people and things: they both need someone to talk for them’ (Latour
1987, 72). The scientist is able to be a representative of the natural world
through the experimental set-up and the inscription devices that give her the
power to speak on their behalf. The strength of the spokesperson of a virus
comes from the fact that she does not speak on her own, but always in the
presence of those represented.
A new object in the lab does something which is registered by the instruments
which read it and produce inscriptions. This in turn becomes the basis of
scientific texts. Before it becomes a thing, an endorphin, for instance, is a
readable list of performances registered with the instruments in the lab. The list
of actions of that object shapes its existence; it is named after what it does –
i.e. TRF thyrotropin-releasing factor – as a result of local trials in a specific lab.
Thus, in their emerging state, objects are defined by trials, by experiments of
various sorts in which new performances are elicited. Defining objects by what
they do under laboratory trials, science studies thus focus on the complex and
controversial nature of what it is for them to come into existence, to act, and
become actors.
between actants, ‘having to do with narrative syntax’ and actors, which are
‘recognisable in the particular discourse in which they are manifested’ (Greimas
1987, 106). Both Greimas and Latour treated actants as relational beings that
gain strength through associations with other actants. This term also designates
the lack of source of agency. Action is not merely related to a particular agent or
explained by enduring historical structures and systems; it rather passes through
all actants who receive it and transmit it to others. Inspired also by Greimas’s
ideas of narrative analysis, is also the ability to write descriptions that let act
whatever acts and show relations in their making. While Greimas restricted his
analysis to literature, Latour extended it to the world itself, as a way to analyse
and describe scientific and engineering practices.
demands of nonhumans.
Yet, exploring science and technology in the making can lead to redefining
the composition of social groups, and to modifying the state of things by
questioning the nature of alliances and associations, and the nature of the social
link between them.
The problem of the builder of ‘fact’ is the same as that of the builder of
‘objects’: how to convince others, how to control their behaviour, how
to gather sufficient resources in one place, how to have the claim or the
object spread out in time and space.
(Latour 1987, 131)
Following scientists and engineers at work, one can witness how they recruit and
mobilise a great number of allies, most of whom do not resemble humans at all.
Tracing the trials of strength, one can witness the specific ways a controversy is
resolved (instead of its easy closure through the ‘voice’ of Nature). Thus, what
constitutes Nature is the result of a controversy and not its judge; reality is what
resists (as the Latin word res indicates) all efforts at modification. And it remains
reality ‘at least for as long as the trials of strength are not modified’ (Latour
1987, 93). At a certain point, no contesting actor can modify the form of an
object that is realised and gains reality in a relational way. Thus, no one lives in
a Culture or belongs to a Society before being confronted by others; culture or
society only gain a precise meaning in the process of a controversy and as long
as it lasts and according to the force exercised by those involved.
Drawing on the analysis of Louis Pasteur’s work (Latour 1988a), Latour engaged in
debunking the very notion of scientific discovery as simplistic and human-centric. That
is, the assumption that everything was there (microbes, electrons, DNA structure,
gravity, Diesel engine) and an individual found it, revealed it, discovered it, made it
appear in public. One individual, in a miraculous moment of inspiration had the idea
to do it. Questions of how to allocate influence, priority, and originality among great
scientists, and whom to attribute the discovery have preoccupied history of science
debates for a long time. The only reasonable explanation of novelty for them lies with
the initiator, the one who first had the idea and whose genius gains mythological
dimensions. Criticising this view, Latour argued that the assumption that an individual
possesses ideas is absurd and the assumption that a society forms the milieu in which
an idea can be developed and diffused is losing currency:
the diffusion model now invents a society to account for the uneven
diffusion of ideas and machines. In this model, society is simply a medium
of different resistances through which ideas and machines travel.
(Latour 1987, 135–136)
The belief that there is a society out there at a great distance from science
and technology is an artefact of the diffusion model (Figure 3.2). In this
model, society is made of social groups that have interests; these groups
resist, accept or ignore both facts and machines, which have their own
inertia. In consequence, we have science and technology, on one hand, and
a society, on the other. This process of purification leads either to social or
technical determinism. There is an expectation that Society (social factors)
is capable of influencing, directing, and even shaping the course of science
and technology. When something goes wrong, the appeal to Society or
social factors becomes more prominent, to seek a cause or an explanation in
Society or in Nature. To restore symmetry, Latour suggested that the studies
of science and technology should rather start by deconstructing the concepts
of ‘ideas’ and ‘society’. It is not enough to produce a social explanation of
the development of scientific or technical ideas because
Society
Scientist
Lab
we are never confronted with science, technology and society, but with a
gamut of weaker and stronger associations; thus understanding what facts
and machines are is the same task as understanding who the people are.
(Latour 1987, 140–141)
It is because they know about neither that they are so busy trying out
new associations creating an inside world in which to work, displacing
interests, negotiating facts, reshuffling groups and recruiting new allies.
(Latour 1987, 142)
It is commonly believed that scientists inhabit an internal bubble cut off from
the social factors on the outside. The divorce between society and science,
and context and content, is often called the ‘internal–external division’. Latour
claimed that there is a danger in separating the study of the external factors
in scientific activity such as budgets, political support, from the study of the
internal achievements and results in science. If we follow the first series of
actors, we will meet politicians, businessmen, ministers, sponsors, professors and
lawyers; if we follow the second series, we will meet materials, concepts, facts,
and prototypes. In this logic, the first series is necessary for the second one.
The main consequence of this way of seeing, however, is that whatever we can
learn about one of the series does not teach us anything about the other. This
complete separation, this radical divorce between two sets of incommensurable
information, shapes the internal–external debate in the sociology of science.
Depending on which side we choose, we can tell two different stories; we
see either scientists or politicians. Yet, this model, according to Latour, is
unsustainable and its credibility doubtful. If we follow science in the making,
we will be able to witness both the formation of the interested groups and the
formation of chains of heterogeneous associations, of assemblages. Scientists
produce both the social context and the things in the context, just as engineers
produce both the market and the products in the market. The coproduction of
Thus, instead of talking about Science and Technology (as ready-made), to better
account for all elements related to scientific contents even if they appear less
clear, unexpected or strange, Latour suggested the term technosciences (science
in action/technology in action), always in plural. Just like the actors we follow, we
do not know the limits, the composition and the ingredients of technosciences:
This will allow us to understand how they, the actors, establish limits,
boundaries, and how they, the actors, purify the ingredients; following the
two sides simultaneously, we should be able to draw a list, as long and as
heterogeneous as it might be, of all those who contribute to the work. This will
lead us to follow an entire network. A network ‘indicates that resources are
concentrated in a few places – the knots and the nodes – which are connected
with one another – the links and the mesh: these connections transform the
scattered resources into a net that may seem to extend everywhere’ (Latour
1987, 180). If, according to the diffusion model, there are only a few scientists
working, debating and sharing ideas because they are unique, talented,
‘superhuman’, in the model of translation, if there are only a few scientists, it
is because there is a network that prolongs their work. There are other actors,
and missing masses, who help them, or divert them. The notion of networks
helps us understand how so few actors manage to cover the world; for instance,
telephone or meteorological networks could cover the entire world. The
emergence of a ‘society’ or a ‘culture’ is a consequence of the construction of
longer networks that make us cross paths followed by others.
Following the paper trail of the dossiers circulating in the Council, Latour argued
that the only way of preventing the lawyer from interrupting the efficiency of a
decree that is contested by his clients is ‘to ensure that the bond that physically
attaches the constituted authorities of the Republic to the text is not broken’
(Latour 2010a 33). He unpacked the logic of these movements and attachments,
and the specific form of continuity that allows legal arguments to travel from
one text to another. Following the slow fabrication of a file, tracing how the
cardboard folders grow and expand, fold and unfold, and pile up in cupboards,
offices, corridors, cellars, armchairs or desks, does not mean neglecting, for a
moment, the intellectual and cognitive foundations of the law. Instead, it allows
us to trace how law follows a procedure.
which impact on, disturb and suspend the making of law. Law is thus mixed with
everything, rather being a pure domain. Thus, there is no clear-cut distinction
between what resembles the social and that which could be called law. The analysis
of law follows the direction explored by Latour in the first studies of science and
technology by abandoning the sociology of the social for that of association.
Cultures.
Mapping controversies
we will irreversibly alter the meaning of the word ‘social’: it is the outcome of
all the trials that the actors undergo. Thus, shifting scholarly attention from
the study of ‘social’ factors (and class struggle/nationalism/gender relations) to
the study of ‘associations’, as per Latour’s invitation, will get us closer to the
complexity of architecture. Mapping controversies in architecture (Yaneva 2012,
Yaneva and Heaphy 2012, Kourri 2022) is also fuelled by recent developments
in computational design and can be used to produce innovative visual accounts
of different architectural processes without referring to external factors. These
accounts can greatly enrich the descriptive analytical techniques of architectural
researchers.
CHAPTER 4
Our everyday lives are constantly shaped by interactions with objects, and yet
objects in our life stories tend to be told and interpreted in two ways: either
through their intrinsic materiality (that would define them as real, objective and
factual) or through their more aesthetic or ‘symbolic’ aspects (that would define
them as social, subjective and lived). Latour’s philosophy helps us navigate this
division which is modernist in origin. In the pragmatist perspective that guides
Latour’s approach to objects, the divide between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’
is abandoned in favour of the idea of mediation. Technology plays an important
role in mediating human relationships. We cannot understand societies, argued
Latour, and how they work, without an understanding of technologies and how
they shape our everyday life. We cannot imagine a society that is not built by
things – IT technologies, trains, telegraph cables, cars, but also – we might add –
buildings and infrastructure.
In the 1980s, Latour, and his collaborators from the Centre de Sociologie de
l’Innovation (CSI) in Paris, Madeleine Akrich and Michel Callon developed
a number of what might be called socio-technical studies of innovation
(Akrich, Callon and Latour 2002; Callon 1986b). To illustrate the social
dimension of technology and tackle the material aspect of societies, let us
look at an iconic example from Latour – the Berlin key (Latour 1991). The
Berlin key (Schließzwangschlüssel) is a forced-locking key for a type of door
lock designed to make people close and lock their doors, usually a main
entrance door or gate leading into a common yard apartment block. This
wonderous surrealistic key has two identical symmetrical blades at each
end rather than the usual single blade (Figure 4.1). Invented by the Berliner
locksmith Johannes Schweiger at the end of nineteenth century, the Berlin key
was produced by the Albert Kerfin & Co company starting in 1912. It was a
solution to the problem of access via communal doors of such blocks (Lovell
2017). With the advent of more recent locking technologies, this kind of lock
and key is less common.
The key is used as follows: first, you push the key in the keyhole (action
1) to unlock the door from the outside; you turn it anti-clockwise by 270°
(action 2) and the door opens, inviting you to enter the courtyard of this
Berlin apartment block. You think that you can quickly recover your key and
enter, but you find with dismay, and eventually anger, that you cannot! You
Courtyard
Courtyard
Courtyard
Courtyard
Street
Street
Street
Street
unlock
enter
Normal key
1 2 3 4 > Door open
Courtyard
Courtyard
Courtyard
Courtyard
Street
Street
Street
Street
try to withdraw the key (action 3) after having bolted the door by a 270°
rotation, as per the habit you have with other keys, but with the Berlin key it
remains stuck within the lock. After some struggle and trial-and-error, trying
to pull the key out, trying to turn it in different directions, you find out that
you have to push the key through the hole, sliding it gently through the
door (action 4). The key protrudes from the inside of the door, reminding
you that ‘it’s not over’! You pull it, but the key manifests its disobedience,
again. It will not come out of the keyhole; it resists your attempts to remove
it. However, eventually you learn, that it is only by bolting the door on the
other side of the door, on the courtyard side, that you are able to recover the
key. At last, the door is closed and locked behind you, and you are finally in.
This mechanism requires a tedious ritual of entry. It makes it impossible for
you to forget to lock the door behind you, without also forgetting the key
in the lock. It also makes it impossible to lock an open door. But, this is only
how the key functions during the night. During the day it works differently;
the door remains open permanently as the concierge is usually there to
monitor it. The concierge has a different key. It has no groove, is thinner,
and has only one bit; they can bolt and unbolt the door as they want in the
usual way, just as with all keys in the world. This allows the concierge to
open and close the door when needed for the delivery people, mail carrier,
doctors, guests, etc.
Latour’s encounter with the Berlin key happened before 1989, and before
the great upheaval of the fall of the Berlin Wall (the first version of the essay
on ‘The Berlin key’ was published in 1991). The changing socio-political
climate in Berlin dominated the public imaginary of the time, begging to
frame the interpretation of the unusual design technological functioning of
this key. To dramatise two possible interpretations of the key, Latour engaged
in an imaginary dialogue with an academic colleague, a social scientist (an
archaeologist, more precisely). A possible interpretation of this distinctive key
is the symbolic one. Faced with the key, we might be tempted to produce
an interpretation of the symbolic meaning that would consist in saying: ‘In
West Berlin, before the fall of the Wall, people felt divided, they felt locked-in
and threatened, so much so that they started doubling the number of doors,
barriers, and even bits on their keys’. This double-sided Berlin key is just another
wall built in the city, but a subtle one, as it remained invisible, hidden within a
key. And we could continue this line of interpretation of the hidden meaning
of German technological objects. The archaeologist would definitely endorse
this interpretation. Through this lens, the key emerges as a passive, projective
surface for various symbolic meanings (of social division, the political climate,
fear, domination, ideology, and segregation). The key, one might say, following
the archaeologist, perfectly reflects Berlin and Germany’s social climate at that
time. The material world is a mirror of social relations, and technology, thus
nothing more than a material embodiment of discourse. The archaeologist
does not see the object itself, but habits, behaviours, actions, meanings and
symbols that can be read from it. The assumption embraced in this line of
interpretation is that objects carry meaning, and receive and reflect it, but can
never fabricate it. It is assumed that Society is made elsewhere, and with social
means only (therefore, not with objects, tools, or technologies). Engaging
in a critique of this explanatory framework (i.e. critical theory-informed
anthropology, economy, archaeology, sociology), Latour offered an alternative
way to understand technology. If, instead of unravelling the hidden meaning
of objects, we follow their functioning, specific constraints, and exigencies,
if we unravel the daily web of use of particular technologies, we will be able
to understand how precisely they relate to society, and we will witness their
‘programme of action’.
visitors
residents
thieves
Key controversy
Programme
Anti-programme concierge
owners delivery
people
cats
between tenants and owners, inhabitants and thieves, the concierge and
intruders.
Going back to the example of the Berlin key, the ‘script’ of the key would
read: ‘please, bolt the door behind you during the night and never during the
day’. It has a very practical programme of action that differs from a symbolic
representation of a divided Berlin. It is durably and faithfully fulfilling actions that
hold Berliners together. In addition, it can hardly be replaced by words, signs,
or warnings such as ‘Lock the door’! that can easily be bypassed or ignored.
In contrast to the fragile world of signs, the key as an object is durable and
reliable. Of course, up to a point, because the key can, as we saw above, also
be inserted into an anti-programme; it can be manipulated to perform other
actions that may go against its original programme of action. Berlin inhabitants
are not always trustworthy or reliable and are likely to diverge from a given path,
and not open or close the door in the right way; they too need to be disciplined,
and if they are unreliable, we can substitute the ‘trust’ in the people to behave
correctly or follow signs, with another delegated human character whose only
function is to open and close the door, the concierge. Once in place, he can
filter people and exercise control with verbal warnings and tiresome reminders.
Yet, to do this in a reliable manner he needs to be disciplined as well: he needs
to make sure he gets to work on time, that he remains in his position watching
the door, filtering people into the building. And if humans have to be constantly
disciplined to be able to control and discipline other humans, the symmetrical
key performs this action in a smooth and reliable way, without verbal reminders.
Of course, nonhumans too can fail to regulate human actions. For instance,
red lights are usually respected, at least when they are sophisticated enough to
integrate traffic flows through sensors; the sign ‘policeman’ is often respected
even though it has no whistles and body to enforce it. Social rules do not exist
on their own but are often delegated to people and to things that will act on
their behalf.
Taking away our attention from the world of signs and meaning, the sociology
of technology developed by Akrich and Latour (1992) aims at rendering visible
how technical objects (rather than simply mirroring meanings and symbols)
produce modes of social, political and ethical organisation.
The object does not reflect the social. It does more. It transcribes and
displaces the contradictory interests of people and things.
(Latour 1992, 153)
Thus, objects never simply adopt the political or social will, but generate a
dynamic web of political, ethical or social relations. These ideas can be easily
transferred into architecture where the object could be a building, a design
project, a master plan. With the Berlin key, we are neither in the world of signs,
nor altogether in the realm of social relations. Rather, we are in a world that
is made of very specific relations, or chains of associations, between humans
(H) (concierges, Prussian Locksmiths, know-how, skills, behaviour, and habits)
and nonhumans (NH) (keyholes, steel, key, teeth, grooves, etc.). Chains of
associations of humans and nonhumans (H-NH-H-NH-H-NH-H-NH) replace the
absolute distinction between objects and subjects. There are only trajectories and
dispatches, paths, and trails of relations to study. If we consider things, we will
find humans; if we consider humans, we are by that very act interested in things.
Watching carefully the actions of opening the door in that Berlin building, we
witness, following Latour, that it is neither the user nor the key that unlocks a
door, it is rather the chain of mediators that opens a door: good social behaviour
and practical know-how and the concierge and the key lock and the door, all
mobilised in a network.
a network.
The term mediator is used to emphasise that objects are participants in the
course of action that is overtaken by other agents. The mediator is an actor that
cannot be defined by its input and its output; it always exceeds its conditions.
An intermediary, in contrast, is fully defined by what causes it. While an
intermediary is a black box that transports meaning without transformation,
a mediator can transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning; it is
unpredictable and does not serve as a reification of the social like many faithful
and predictable intermediaries do.
If the Berlin key was studied as an intermediary, it would express, reify and
reflect Berlin Society; the key would be an object of discourse and of the
social, which both are made elsewhere. However, in the many entanglements
of practice, in the process of opening and closing doors, the Berlin key gains
the status of a mediator. This means that the social relations between residents
and owners, inhabitants and thieves, or inhabitants and delivery people are
mediated – which is to say translated and transformed – by the key and the
lock. The Berlin key, the door and the concierge, the inhabitants and the
external visitors are all engaged in a ‘bitter struggle for control and access’
(Latour, 1991, 18). Everything changes if the object is treated as a mediator.
Latour wrote:
How would this impact how we define the role of planners and architects
as those who participate in the making of social relations with architectural
and spatial means? The distinction between intermediary and mediator
in architecture studies could inform further thinking: how can we study
design and cities if a key is not a simple tool, if a door is not a simple
wooden material, if a building is not a simple construction, but that they
all rather assume the role of active mediators, of ‘active form’ (Easterling
The speed bumps indeed impose on humans the need to slow down, to
be cautious. But this also makes us ethical beings and socially responsible
citizens. The material world pushes back on us because of its physical structure
and design; in addition to speed bumps, many other urban artefacts and
environments mediate our lives in cities. Fences, heavy doors, bicycle covers,
fountains, and barriers all prescribe behaviour: they authorise and forbid,
give permission or hold promises in a dense urban context. Not passive and
indifferent frames for subjective passions, but active agents contributing to the
flexible networks that constitute a city.
Just like the use of the Berlin key in a divided Berlin in the 1980s, the seat belt in
our cars has been delegated with a specific programme of action. It is supposed
to politely make way for us when we open the door and is supposed to strap
us in firmly when the door is closed. There is no escape from the belt! ‘The only
way not to have the seat belt on is to leave the door wide open, which is rather
dangerous at high speed’ (Latour 2008, 152). It imposes on us the injunction:
‘Don’t crash through the windshield’! which is a translation of ‘Don’t drive too
fast! It is dangerous’! As an artefact, it takes on the (sometimes contradictory)
wishes and needs of both humans and nonhumans, the car and the driver, the
road and the traffic controllers. Once in the car, a sound reminds us to use the
seat belt; it is impossible to start the car before you buckle it. All these measures
make us disciplined, ethical drivers. It has become almost morally unbearable to
see a driver without a seat belt.
To maintain order and safety on the roads, we could either discipline human
drivers (with verbal warnings and instructions) and remind them to drive carefully
and put their seat belt on, or delegate to nonhumans and technology this very
function (the ergonomic design of the car, door signals, the impossibility of
starting the engine as well as numerous urban artefacts and road signals). Here
again, the technical delegation is more reliable than the verbal warning, which
can easily be forgotten or overlooked. Moreover, where the belt has to strap us
firmly inside the car but also, in case of accident, it should be able to be easily
unbuckled to get out of a crashed car. The designer has the difficult task to
make sure to ‘re-inscribe’ all these contradictory usages, to think simultaneously
of the programme of action and any possible anti-programmes.
Translated into architecture, designers plan for all different kinds of uses and
misuses of their buildings and designed environments, and anticipate, when
possible, various anti-programmes. Architects know well how important it is
to factor in that possible gap between the prescribed user and the actual user
(Hill 2003; Cupers 2013). They are also fully aware that there are many possible
anti-programmes and that their buildings will be used in surprising ways. They
know how difficult it is to accommodate and fit together the many contradictory
demands and desires of the many different groups that are involved in the
making and designing of buildings, a colossal task that, when successful, will
result in good buildings and smart spatial solutions.
If the power of things is much more effective than the power of words, as Latour
suggested, what does this mean for the things produced by designers and
architects? A Latourian sociology of mundane artefacts inspires us to think of the
capacity of the built environment to replace and shape human action. If mundane
objects and large-scale technologies can mould the decisions we make, influence
the effects of our actions, and change the way we move through the world, so
When it comes to analysing the question of agency (the power to act, to ‘do’
things with a purpose), some clarifications are needed. First, agency is not
initiated by a specific subject or by a specific object (neither the seat belt nor
the driver starts the action of fastening a seat belt). It rather emerges and
is performed by the collective of H-NH (seat belt and diver, concierge and
key). In the heat of action, the subject is decentred as many other actors take
part; all agents per-form each other in that process of shaping the collective.
Second, agency is not related to the intentional and reflexive action of
humans. Often, we have the tendency to attribute agency to humans who
have intentions. Instead, agency, for Latour, differs from strategic, wilful
intention, but expresses itself in fragmented actions. It is related to the
different parts of the hybrid collective and subsequently to the different
arrangements of materials and people (H-NH-H-NH-H-NH-H-NH). Third, one
has the tendency to attribute agency to a single person or a specific localised
point that does not move. However, agency can be possessed by a field or
a process that moves and travels progressively. Agency is distributed, not
localisable. Fourth, there is a tendency to distinguish between the world and
words, but the text and the context shape each other mutually. What matters
is the chain of translations between things, texts, people. Machines, objects,
people and texts resist, act and react, they cannot be reduced to
language. It is precisely the movements of resistance and translation that
matter and tell more than the words on their own are capable of saying.
Thus, agency is nonstrategic, distributed and decentred (Callon and
Law 1995).
Accounting for the agency of buildings (just like Latour did it for mundane
artefacts) would mean witnessing what buildings do and grasping their
pragmatic meaning (Kärrholm 2012; Yaneva 2009a) rather than employing
an analytical frame of mind. If we follow, for instance, dwelling as it unfolds,
we witness that users do not stand for social forces, or symbolically represent
order or divisions of labour, but that they perform the social as they dwell and
connect to each other (Bouzarovski 2015; Jacobs, Cairns and Strebel, 2007;
Rose, Degen and Basdas 2010; Strebel 2011; Yaneva 2009a). They all remain
linked through design. A socio-technical perspective to design cuts across
the subjective–objective dichotomy. Mobilising this approach in architectural
studies can lead to explorations of the simultaneous genesis of buildings
and their environments, and to do justice to the many material dimensions
of things without limiting them in advance to pure material properties or to
social symbols.
As a prototype, Aramis was at the mercy of its makers – a diverse group, ranging
from industrial kinematicians and satellite engineers to sympathetic bureaucrats
and the Mayor of Paris. They could not agree on what Aramis was supposed to
do and their views as to what killed Aramis ranged from fundamental technical
failures to cynical political manoeuvring. After 50 interviews and a year of
fieldwork, the author gathered not only one explanation but at least 20 different
interpretations of the project that remain inseparable from the project itself.
The irony of the Aramis case is that the main engineers behind the project
really believed in the epistemological (of how we can know the outside
world) myth of a technology fully independent from society. Latour
demonstrated that this is a pragmatic absurdity. To end the dualism of
Society and Technology, and the partition between materialist and culturalist
or sociological accounts, he engaged in a symmetrical anthropology of
technology. In this enquiry, the object/objective substratum is no longer
the unproblematic matter onto which cultures and societies add their view
(Figure 4.3). When the attention shifts to the network of practices, the
very notion of ‘social meaning’ fades away. Following this network and the
trail of actors involved with Aramis, Latour concluded that Aramis was not
deliberately ‘killed’. There was no perpetrator, no guilty party. There was no
Aramis affair, scandal, or public controversy. Rather, its trajectory ‘depends not
on the context but on the people who do the work of contextualizing’ (Latour
1996b, 50). The individuals and the interest groups involved in its conception
and creation failed to ‘love’ it, they stopped the negotiations, the research,
and they abandoned it; or, in other words, they failed to engage with the
concept of Aramis in a fashion that would make it a dynamic actor within the
network of practice (Figure 4.3).
bureaucrats and the politicians do not know how they want to shape Aramis,
and the software engineers do not know if they will be able to accommodate the
contradictory wishes of different interest groups. As long as it exists, the technical
object is the institutionalised transaction between humans and nonhumans
through which elements of the actors’ interests are reshaped and translated,
while nonhuman competences are upgraded, shifted, folded or merged.
the thing we are looking for is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman
thing. It offers, rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange,
between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It
translates the one into the other. This thing is the nonhuman version of
Former Former
SOCIETY/ NATURE/ society/subject pole Nature/object pole
SUBJECT OBJECT
LOCUS OF ENQUIRY
technical parts.
CHAPTER 5
Actor-Network Theory
It might be time to put Marx’s famous quote back on its feet: ‘Social
scientists have transformed the world in various ways; the point, how-
ever, is to interpret it’. But to interpret, we need to abandon the strange
idea that all languages are translatable in the already established idiom
of the social.
(Latour 2005b, 42; emphasis mine)
64 Actor-Network Theory
65
Therefore, Latour argued against the habit of linking the notions of ‘society’,
‘social factor’, ‘power’, ‘structure’ and ‘context’ with vast arrays of life and
history in order to reveal, behind the scenes, some dark powers pulling the
strings. He claimed that instead of doing these jumps from ‘society’ to an
empirical reality, that ‘the time has come to have a much closer look at the
type of aggregates thus assembled and at the ways they are connected to one
another’ (Latour 2005b, 22), that is, to engage in tracing the composition of the
social. Instead of a homogenous substance, the social is a way of connecting
heterogeneous actors and environments; it is to be composed, made up,
constructed, established, maintained, and assembled. It is far from being a
synonym of society.
First, there are uncertainties surrounding the nature of groups: one can belong
to many different groups at the same time and can gain an identity in different
ways. From an ANT perspective it is important not to settle on one privileged
grouping, but to acknowledge that there are lots of contradictory group
formations, and processes of enrolment into groups. In addition, there is no
privileged language to study groups, but ANT prefers to use what could be
called an infra-language; this is a way for the vocabulary of the actors to be
heard loud and clear instead of translating this language into the jargon of social
scientists. Social aggregates are then not the object of an ostensive definition –
like mugs, cats, and chairs that can be pointed at by an index finger – but
only of a performative definition – of following the actors as they relate to
one another, as groups take form, and also in terms of how they understand
themselves and their relations with others.
65 Actor-Network Theory
66
acting? How many agents are also present? How come I never do what I want?
Why are we all held by forces that are not of our own making?’ (Latour 2005b,
43). Action does not take a simple route, but is overtaken, taken up by others,
and shared with the masses. It is mysteriously carried out and at the same time
distributed to others. We are not alone in the world. Avoiding all determinations,
Latour emphasised the under-determination of action, the uncertainties and
controversies about who and what is acting when ‘we’ act. This source of
uncertainty can reside in the analyst or in the actor. The actor is never alone in
acting, but is rather part of a thick imbroglio where the question of who or what
is carrying out the action is indeterminate. Like an actor in a theatre play, she
needs support personnel, lighting, scripts, a backstage crew, reactions from the
audience, partners, etc. Unfolding the play-acting metaphor, Latour outlined
the way the term ‘actor’ directs our attention to a complete dislocation of the
action, warning us that it is not a coherent, controlled, well-rounded, and clean-
edged affair. Action is dislocated. ‘An “actor” in the hyphenated expression
actor-network is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast
array of entities swarming toward it’ (Latour 2005b, 56). If action is dislocated,
it does not pertain to any specific site; it is distributed, variegated, multiple, and
remains a puzzle for the analysts as well as for the actors. To understand the
nature of action and how it is distributed, ANT researchers should ‘follow the
actors themselves’.
Latour outlined the way the term ‘actor’ directs our attention to
Third, there is uncertainty around the nature of objects: the type of agencies
participating in an interaction themselves are indeterminate. For ANT, the
definition of the term social does not designate a domain of reality, but
rather points to a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation,
an enrolment, and an association between entities which are in no way
recognisable as being social (e.g. the microbes of Pasteur or the Berlin Key).
66 Actor-Network Theory
67
If we follow the actors in their weaving through things, what renders the
constantly shifting interactions more durable are the objects, numerous objects.
ANT considers objects as potential participants in the course of actions. Thus,
starting from the controversies about actors and agencies, anything that makes
a difference is an actor, and there is a trail that allows someone to detect this
difference. Objects are actors as they leave traces behind and they modify states
of affairs; they make a difference.
once you realize that any human course of action might weave together
in a matter of minutes, for instance, a shouted order to lay a brick, the
chemical connection of cement with water, the force of a pulley unto
a rope with a movement of the hand, the strike of a match to light a
cigarette offered by a co-worker, etc. Here, the apparently reasonable div-
ision between material and social becomes just what is obfuscating any
enquiry on how a collective action is possible.
(Latour 2005b, 74)
67 Actor-Network Theory
68
objective world is one that we should never try to bypass or overcome, argued
Latour, but rather ignore.
Objects, by the very nature of their connections with humans, quickly shift from
being mediators (that translate and modify meaning) to intermediaries (that
transport meaning without transformation). This is why specific tricks have to be
invented to make them talk, that is, to offer descriptions of themselves and to
account for what they make us do. Where can we see this happening? We can
study innovations in the artisan’s workshop, the engineer’s design department,
the scientist’s laboratory, the marketer’s trial panels, the user’s home, and the
many different controversies that unfold at these places. On these sites, objects
live a complex life through meetings, plans, sketches, regulations, and trials.
There, objects can be maintained longer as visible mediators actively translating
and transforming meaning – due to their uncertainty – before becoming
invisible, asocial intermediaries. That is where agencies are made to express
themselves. Another way: when users approach objects and technologies,
their ignorance and clumsiness can also render objects visible as mediators.
Accidents, breakdowns, and strikes can offer other occasions to witness the
role of mediators, where, suddenly, completely silent intermediaries become
full blown mediators, forcing actors to re-group and re-assemble to deal with
them. Objects can also be brought back from archives. Documents, memoirs,
museum collections, can be made to act as mediators through historians’ and
archivists’ accounts (Mitchell 2022). My study of architectural archiving, based
on ethnography at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal
and the archive of Álvaro Siza in Portugal, demonstrated how in the process of
collecting, processing and conserving architectural objects, archival materials
become active mediators in the crafting of knowledge of importance to the
discipline of architecture (Yaneva 2020). Finally, the resources of fiction can
turn the solid objects of today into fluid entities where their connections with
humans may make sense. These are possible empirical sites of research that ANT
invites us to explore in order to renew empiricism.
Fourth, there is uncertainty around the nature of facts: the links of natural
sciences with the rest of society are sources of continuous disputes. Latour
68 Actor-Network Theory
69
69 Actor-Network Theory
70
a durability thanks to the tiny cables laid out on the ocean that linked its far-
flung locations. Kelvin’s science creates, in part, the Empire, which is no longer
in the background but is made to exist through telegraph wires. The cables, in
other words, operate as mediators. It is this reversal in causality that ANT tries to
register.
I can now state the aim of this sociology of associations more precisely:
there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist
translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations.
(Latour 2005b, 108)
effect(s).
Tracing associations, we witness a shift from the world of matters of fact to the
worlds of matters of concern, highly uncertain and disputed agencies, taken
as gatherings, as associations, and not as self-sufficient objects. Engaging in
exploring and mapping scientific controversies about matters of concern, ANT
renders untenable the divide between one unified reality, intact and remote, and
many possible subjective interpretations or social explanations of it.
Lastly, the fifth uncertainty is about the type of studies done under the label of
a science of the social as it is never clear in which precise sense social sciences
can be said to be empirical. The solution to relativism, for Latour, is always more
relativity. Therefore, ANT written accounts should foreground the relations and
the tracing of the social, its process of reassembling, reiterated Latour. ‘I would
70 Actor-Network Theory
71
define a good account as one that traces a network’ (Latour 2005b, 128). Thus,
a good ANT description offers a narrative where all the actors do something;
instead of transporting effects without transforming them, ‘each of the points in
the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of a new translation’
(Latour 2005b, 128). This will require treating actors as mediators (not
intermediaries) and rendering the movement of the social visible to the reader
in a way that the network will showcase the ability of each actor to make other
actors do unexpected things. The task of ANT accounts is to deploy (not just
describe or reveal the social forces behind) actors as networks of mediations –
hence the hyphen in the composite word ‘actor-network’. By doing so, a good
account does not simply narrate the social, it performs the social in the precise
sense that some of the participants in the action will be assembled and collected
together.
These five uncertainties help to reveal: What is the social made up of? What is
acting when we are acting? What sort of grouping do we pertain to? What do
we want? What sort of world are we ready to share? All those questions are
raised not only by scholars, but also by the actors themselves.
Yet, if we trace how fisherman and scallops, Kelvin and cables relate to one
another, how do we go from local interactions to global entities and meaning?
How do we move from the micro to the macro? The global, Latour argued, is
to be relocated so as to break down the automatism that leads from interaction
to ‘context’, from the micro to the marco (Figure 5.1). The latter, for instance,
no longer describes a wider or a larger site in which the former would be
embedded, but another equally local, equally ‘micro’ place, which is connected
to many others. ‘What is now highlighted much more vividly than before are all
the connections, the cables, the means of transportation, the vehicles linking
places together. This is their strength but also, as we are going to see, their
frailty’ (Latour 2005b, 176). Thus, the macro is neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’ the
interactions but added to them as another connection. It is when we replace
actors of whatever size by local and connected sites, instead of ranking them
into micro and macro categories, that we witness actor-networks. But not only
is the global an abstraction that has to be localised, but face-to-face interaction
71 Actor-Network Theory
72
Plasma,
Uncharted territory
heterogeneous aggregates
assembled, composed
macro-level
jump
micro-level
Figure 5.1 Plasma.
Illustration by Alexandra Arènes.
For Latour, the social world occupies a very different position from the
one that traditional social scientists attribute to it. It is not behind the
scenes, above our heads, or before the action, but after the action, below
the participants, and smack in the middle of the foreground. It neither
encompasses nor explains; it circulates, coordinates, and requires explanation.
In fact, the social world explored so far is the equivalent of the London
tube network on the map of London. There is a vast territory that is not yet
formatted, measured, socialised, engaged in metrological chains, and covered
over. This is what Latour called plasma (Figure 5.1): ‘The plasma would be the
rest of London, all its buildings, inhabitants, climates, plants, cats, palaces,
horse guards’ (Latour 2005b, 244). ANT invites us to explore this uncharted
territory, the plasma.
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An ANT approach in the field of architectural history and theory will inspire
tracing and carefully accounting for urban and design realities (Cronon 1991;
Doucet 2015; Zitouni 2010), rather than quickly explaining them. Follow the
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74 Actor-Network Theory
75
Tracing architecture in the making with care, caution and respect to all
participants, we witness buildings that are not made by powerful minds (star
architects, demiurges, those powerful ‘Gods’), but architecture that emerges
as it traces many intricate and hesitant relationships with materials and
technologies, skills, bodies and institutions.
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How often does the work of designers also stand between freedom and
determinations? If we follow design in the making, a sociology of factishes, of
mediations, will better reveal its inner working dynamics. Models, software,
sketches, and programming all make designers act, think and create in a
specific way. It is neither the model nor the designer but that very specific
attachment between them that acts in a design process. Architects remain
constantly attached to these beings, and the proliferation of visual tools in
design creates more sources of attachment. In the heart of design action, we
are no longer thinking of what acts and what is made, what is active and what
is passive. In the process of design, we are (just like writers, musicians, and
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We all have multiple attachments, argued Latour, and we often substitute one
attachment with another, but the attribution of a clear source of action is not
possible (it is neither me, nor my sketch!). As Latour wrote, ‘As powerful as
one might imagine a creator, he will never be capable of better controlling his
creations than the puppeteer her puppets, a writer his notebooks, a cigarette
its smoker, a speaker her language. He can make them do something, but he
cannot make them’ (Latour 1999a, 28). We are never the masters of our tools,
of our creations.
Who has ever seen a builder actually master his building? Where is the
creator who feels himself capable of controlling his creature? What
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robotician thinks he’s the master of his robots, what marionettist isn’t
taught amazing tricks by his marionettes?
(Latour 2013, 143)
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CHAPTER 6
‘It’s sunny, this morning on the Neuchâtel lake, and windy and cold. What’s that
bright little shape out there?’ (Latour 1997, 173). That is how Latour began a
seminal essay on the fabrication of space and time. It turns out that the bright
little shape out there is a surfboarder moving fast in the wind. Getting close to
the observer sitting at the edge of the water, the face of the surfboarder becomes
visible. He seems to enjoy himself; he does not see time passing by. Is he moving
like an arrow in ‘lived’ time and space? Unlikely. ‘Lived’, Latour argued, is one of
these empty words. Often, lived time and lived space is set in opposition to the more
‘accurate’ definition of a timeless and space-less instant and place. An opposition
between the richness of a lived experience of time and space and the empty
Cartesian grid. Yet, Latour claimed that following the moves of the surfboarder
there is no point in opposing and comparing lived time to real time, or subjective
experience to objective experience. The calculation of speed and the apparatus to
extract speed from the surfboarder are both inside the world where he sails fast.
Objective experience is not the ‘depth’ feature on which his own psychological
world or subjective experience would be built. The ‘lived’ is not just a false decorative
layer coated upon a bleak reality made of measurements. Watch the surfboarder:
he is grinning, moving quickly towards the beach, turning unpredictably, bending
swiftly, enjoying himself, guided by the waves. His brisk veers, the movements of the
wind, and the sides of the lake you notice while watching him all paint a picture of
his experience. Getting closer to this experience, Latour wrote,
ways of being, alterations, and if I want to calculate his speed, I can, but
I won’t define the depth of his world, the backdrop of all existence.
(Latour 1997, 174)
In other words, there is no need either to turn back to the objective calculation
of time or towards the psychologically colourful lived experience. To find
richness, we should simply ‘turn towards the world itself’, to the wind, the
foam, the sun, the snow-capped mountains in the back of the Swiss lake, the
earnest miniature city behind the harbour, the glowing face of the surfboarder.
This would mean to immerse ourselves in the process of surfing, where we are
neither just in time nor just in space. ‘Process is a third term, as if the surfboarder
were moving into ways of being, exploring its alterity, its alterations’ (Latour
1997, 174). Following processes, we escape landing on both the solid shores
of objective or subjective interpretations. This would mean to explore fully all
mediations in practice (as a surfboarder moves or a designer creates) without
falling into the trap of subjective or objective explanations.
by thorns and ferns. We witness her struggle, and her suffering, surrounded by
other suffering bodies, vines, grass, and trees. She remembers every bit of this
excruciating experience as each stretch of the trip is traversed and won over
through a complicated ‘negotiation’ with other entities, the mud, humidity,
branches, wild animals that she comes across.
In comparison with this struggling twin, her twin brother sits comfortably in
a train. Sat quietly in his air-conditioned carriage, relaxing, listening to music,
reading a newspaper, paying no attention to the number of places crossed by
the speeding train, this twin remains ignorant of the jungle struggles of his sister.
He does not age more than the two hours of the trip. His body does not bear
any trace of the voyage. He will have no recollection of this trip except having
boarded the train. The travel remains invisible, unmemorable as no negotiations
with strange creatures – mud, animals and uneven terrain – were needed along
the way. An uneventful trip, nothing to mention.
Comparing these two twins and the way they age, Latour directed our attention
to the mechanics of fabrication of times and, in particular, the relation between
transportation and transformation. If the woman traveller is modified and ages
more than a bit, the male traveller is not modified by the trip at all. Thus, the first
traveller will equate transportation (or displacement) with modification, aging,
history, transformation, metamorphosis. For the second one, in contrast, there
will be two apparently different phenomena: moving through space in time, on
the one hand, and aging, living, suffering, and participating in events, on the
other hand. Immersed in the process of travelling, the jungle voyager does not
differentiate space, time, and aging, whereas her twin brother distinguishes
what is displaced from the immutable framework in which it is displaced. It is the
relation between transportation and transformation that differs in both cases,
and therefore, the production of times and spaces will be entirely different.
Situating his understanding of times and spaces within the Leibnizian tradition,
Latour stated that instead of the classic opposition between time and space,
we witness, as we follow the processual trajectory of the jungle traveller – just
like we followed the surfboarder on that sunny morning on the Neuchâtel
lake or designers and engineers at work trying to solve the glare problem in
Birmingham – a varying range of entities, beings and events. Thus, both time
and space appear as consequences of the ways in which bodies relate to one
another. Space and time are not abstractions; they rather express some specific
relation between the entities themselves. We can generate as many spaces and
times as there are types of relations. The difference between the two voyagers
comes from the number of others one has to take into account, and their
nature (if they are passive, docile intermediaries or active mediators). Timing
depends on that sort of ontological difference, not on the mind’s apperception;
the more entities we need for our existence, the more time and space will
proliferate. The speed of the train and the uneventful trip of the passenger
are entirely dependent on the complete obedience of the places that are
traversed and also, of course, on the smooth functioning of the train companies,
organisation, engineers, the rail network, etc. If all of them work, if the train
does not breakdown, if the railway line is maintained, if a crowd of protesters
do not block its way, they remain invisible; this is another important dimension
to take into account (in addition to the relation between transportation and
transformation) when tackling space and time construction: the relative visibility
of the work to be done in order to obtain a displacement.
which bodies relate to one another. Space and time are not
Spacing
Our civilisation has long had a fixation on how best to transport something
without de-forming it, to generate constants that can be carried around and
we should not speak of time, space, and actant but rather of temporali
zation, spatialization, actantialization (the words are horrible) or more
elegantly, of timing, spacing, acting.
(Latour 1997, 178)
Figure 6.1 Spacing.
Illustration by Alexandra Arènes.
time, space, and action and reassembled again in a place. Thus, a building
we might argue, following this way of thinking, occupies space, creates a
landscape, becomes a landmark, etc, not because it is a spot in space, but
because it is itself the event connecting multiple interactions on a large
spread of space-time actants. Conceptualising buildings not as simple
obedient objects we design and insert into an empty space, but rather as
events, will require a total rethinking of both architectural practice and users’
experience.
space-time actants.
Space and time do not frame entelechies [actualities]. They only become
frameworks of description for those actants that have submitted, locally
and provisionally, to the hegemony [domination] of another. There is
therefore a time of times and a space of spaces, and so on until everything
has been negotiated.
(Latour 1988a, 165)
Thus, one thing cannot be reduced to another, one actor to another; reduction
is not productive because it shows less of the world or of experience. If we
believe that one actor may contain the others, we start to believe that we ‘know’
something, that there are equivalences, that there are simple deductions, that there
is some order in advance. Latour adopted the opposite principle, of irreduction, that
claims that nothing can be reduced to anything else. Things are linked together
symmetrically; they form knots, bodies, machines, and groups. Since there are no
‘natural’ equivalences, the kind of ties that hold things together can only be of one
kind: groping, testing, translating. When we accept the principle of irreducibility,
we admit that there is nothing more than trials of strength and weakness, work to
be done, gestures.
space is actively dissected and observed, folded and unfolded, as reports and
technologies, measurements and tests circulate. Space appears as more than
a container, an object or a social construct. Following Latour, we can trace
design and construction processes, as sets of movements sculpting networks,
of processes that create various kinds of spaces and times. How often do we
encounter a site, a place, a space that is simply ‘out there’: physical, static, and
passively awaiting the intervention of an adventurous designer? Conversely, how
often is a site a pure social construction: a cultural product that is fabricated
alongside another cultural constructions, a building or type of infrastructure?
Latour helps us move beyond the stubbornness of a site as plane surface, and
against the relativity of a site as social construct, not by adding them as two
absolutes, but by focusing on what is frequently forgotten: how site/space
matters in design, planning and construction processes and the work that is
needed to fabricate spaces and times, the spacing and timing of the world.
More studies are needed to unpack specific situations where the work of
spacing, timing, placing and siting becomes visible (Yaneva and Mommersteeg
2019). Tracing these moves will allow a better understanding of the malleable
urban networks of a city, as a way of questioning simultaneously the site and the
built, nature and culture, building technologies and meaning.
CHAPTER 7
Invisible cities
Paris. The city of lights. The city of dreams. The city of intellectuals. Paris
has this image for all of us. Yet, Latour argued that Paris is an invisible city.
‘Invisible’ echoes Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974). In a rather unorthodox
book, in its design, form and style – entitled provocatively Paris, Ville Invisible
(1998) and co-authored with photographer Emilie Hermant – Latour offered
an unusual account of Paris that could be read as a pragmatist agenda for the
study of cities. He set the tone of an intriguing enquiry on urban life, but also
simultaneously, on social life; a tone very different in style from the one known
to urban and architectural scholars. It is a book two times bigger than the usual
size of a typical academic book. A book you do not simply read, but rather
amble through, just like you would stroll through the large and narrow streets of
a city to capture its character. Different sized fonts re-calibrate our attention to
the reading; different sized images focusing on specific details of these journeys
trough the city skilfully guide us through this meandering-reading. Text and
visuals combine to craft the arguments reminiscent of the very crafting of urban
space. From the start we are in a design register of experience, an intended
effect by the authors.
How many are we in the city of Paris? A Paris just for two? Like Eugène de
Rastignac, famously proclaimed from the heights of the Père Lachaise Cemetery,
looking down upon the faint city: ‘À nous deux, maintenant!’ (‘It’s between you
and me now!’). But what if it is not a Paris just for two? But a Paris for millions?
And as we find ourselves in a Paris for millions, what is it that holds us together?
How are dispersed groupings assembled on such a surface? How does a city work
and how, by tracing its workings, is a better understanding of social life,
of togetherness obtained? These are the key questions that the Paris of Latour
implies, one much different indeed from the Paris of the nineteenth-century
fictional character Rastignac from the novel of Honoré de Balzac. To comprehend
what defines Paris today, we commonly think of explorations of the ego (that is,
identity, expressed with ID cards, records of civil status, testimonies by neighbours),
the hic (that is, place, expressed as cadastral plans, maps of Paris, guidebooks,
signposts) and the nunc (that is, time, expressed as sundials, watches, the electronic
voices emitting from speaking clocks on the metro). These are three possible
starting points for an exploration of the social. Yet, none of them can simply point
to a Society (and a city) in which we have a role, a place and a time. Instead, ‘the
social’ has its own movement. By ‘the social’, Latour designated a certain form of
circulation of traces, ‘a weird way of moving about, tracing figures, like unknown
writing on rice paper painted with an invisible brush’ (Latour and Hermant 1998,
27). To understand and to grasp Paris, we need to follow and track the ‘slipping
token’ of the social. By so doing we never meet the acclaimed figures of the
individual and the system but find ourselves following a movement that bears no
relation to either actors or social contexts and that is the movement that Latour and
Hermant invited us to follow. More specifically, there are four moves that become
important: traversing, proportioning, distributing, and allowing.
the acclaimed figures of the individual and the system but find
Traversing
Paris is a city of totalisation. It loves its viewpoints and terraces, panoramas and
vistas, reflected as if through a gallery of mirrors, seeking an all-encompassing
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perspective. The panoramas, as the origin of the term suggests, allow you to see
everything. Yet, panoramas also see nothing as they only show an image painted
(or projected) on the tiny wall of an enclosed room on which a completely
coherent scenery is projected. The metaphor comes from those rooms invented
in the early nineteenth century. Yet, none of those pictures survey ‘the whole’.
Latour encouraged us to forget about this obsessive totalisation, and to
abandon the panoramic and ‘panoptic’ ways of looking at Paris (seeing the
whole at one view). Forget about the heights of Montmartre or Père Lachaise
where Rastignac was standing, and the Montparnasse Tower or the Eiffel Tower
viewing platform! You believed that Paris can be seen from up there? But, it
cannot! You thought the picture you have taken from up there has captured
Paris as a whole, its character, its charm, its essence. But it does not! It is hard to
embrace it from a distance. From the Montparnasse Tower we can barely see the
Sacré Coeur basilica, from the Arc de la Défense we can barely see the silhouette
of the Arc de Triomphe. All these images are partial and static, just like the
projected images in those nineteenth-century cinema rooms. It becomes hard
to understand what makes this big metropolitan city vibrant; each new total
viewpoint blocks the previous. Paris remains invisible. Hence, Latour’s proposal:
‘Let’s move and then, suddenly, Paris will begin to be visible’. That is the first
move: Traversing the city. We need to stroll in the city, to meander through its
streets. No big jumps, no double clicks from the top of the Eiffel Tower! We
move from one visible site to another; we discover one aspect after another.
Through this movement, Paris becomes progressively visible.
The initial point of view doesn’t count; all that counts is the movement
of images. All the images are partial, of course; all the perspectives are
equal: that of the baby in its pram is worth as much as that of the Mairie
de Paris.
(Latour and Hermant 1998, 53)
It is the movement that matters, not the point of departure; the movement takes
us, and we follow all little transformations, without jumping or skipping a single
one. The visible Paris, thus, neither resides in an isolated image (a glorious view,
a postcard) nor in something external to the images (French Society, context),
but in a montage of images, a circulation between different sites, a trajectory,
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To truly see and understand Paris, we should abandon all of the sites where
we talk of Paris ‘as a whole’ (the panoramic ones), sites where we believe we
can see Paris at a glance, and focus instead on the small sites, the very situated
perspectives, where very little of Paris can be seen, but it can be seen well.
That is how Latour’s Paris differs from Rastignac’s Paris; he is not up there,
on the hill, but rather on the ground. Those earthly sites are fundamentally
invisible; they are oligopticons. By this neologism, constructed in opposition
with panopticon, Latour designated the ‘narrow windows through which, via
numerous narrow channels, we can link up with only some aspects of beings
(human and nonhuman) which together comprise the city’ (Latour and Hermant
1998, 173). The panopticon, as every reader of Michel Foucault knows, is
an ideal prison allowing for the total surveillance of inmates imagined at the
beginning of the nineteenth century by Jeremy Bentham. Nothing, it seems,
can threaten the absolutist gaze of the panopticon, and this is why it is loved
so much by those sociologists who dream to occupy the centre of Bentham’s
prison. Yet, unlike most sociologists, instead of looking for utopia, Latour looks
for places on earth that are fully assignable. The oligopticons are just those
sites since they do exactly the opposite of panopticons: they see much too little
(‘oligo’ – little, not everything), but what they see, they see it well (Figure 7.1).
As Latour stated, ‘to refresh a space and make it a little more realistic, it’s not
a map that we need, irrespective of the number of pixels, but oligopticons’
(Latour 2011, 91).
The oligopticons are just those sites since they do exactly the
not everything), but what they see, they see it well (Figure 7.1).
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92 Invisible cities
93
93 Invisible cities
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None of these oligopticons are larger than 4 × 3 m. Yet, the dimension of what
we look at stems not from the size of the sites but from the connections they
establish and the rapidity of the circulations. Circulating everywhere, exploring
the oligopticons, studying their practitioners at work, we witness how other
elements of the social world emerge: water, gas, telephone, prices, stars,
neurons, colonnades, wrought-iron banisters, speed bumps, votes, traffic, and
fire. The term social designates what binds us together and connects us to all
these beings through instruments, laboratories, templates and dossiers. The
elements involved in its composition a century ago (e.g. individuals, crowds,
mass movements, classes, trades, professions, cultures, structures and laws) are
not the same today.
All these rare and fragile places in which the full power of the oligopticons is
concentrated are situated down below, not high up, under our feet, not over
our heads, or in our imagination; they are all scattered throughout the city. We
can visit them, scrutinise them and account for their specificity. They prevent
Paris from becoming a single block, a distant scenery seen from a hill. If we
are able to study the oligopticons, it is thanks to the tracks they leave behind
them, and to the closed premises that we can visit, explore, photograph and
sketch. The many different interactions that constitute each of them, the entries
and exists, ins and outs, makes them gain the shape of a star, a web, a fine
network. And, if we studied one of the oligopticons summing up a part of the
whole of Paris we would draw the same star, on the way there and on the way
back. Thus,
Due to this versatile and starry interlaced web that emerges as we explore
oligopticons, not only is it impossible to capture Paris at a glance, but it is
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If we follow this method, we realise that in fact, we can never see the
totality of a city. Equipped with the many eyes of cameras, notebooks, pads,
sketches, mapping software, we always see a little, but we see it well. Our
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And as we stroll and wander, capturing traces and making this passage
observable, we follow a movement that is neither related to the context,
to that stable frame of the city, nor to the individual, that famous flâneur
who saunters around observing Society. We rather find ourselves in a
terra incognita, a plasma, full of corridors, offices, instruments, files, rows,
alignments, teams, vans, precautions, watchfulness, attention, and warnings.
Here, we do not find a Society, following Latour, but we track the token
of the social.
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Proportioning
When there is a strike of metro workers, or when a bus breaks down, everyone
learns quite quickly – walking, ageing and experiencing the city, just like the
twin sister in the jungle – that the social world is flat and fragile, and that
it requires being composed and maintained piece by piece. As we stroll in
Paris, all of the sites and oligopticons appear equally flat; they connect and
superimpose like spiders’ webs: water, electricity, telephone, traffic networks.
Impossible to distinguish what is bigger and smaller, what is the ‘macro’
and the ‘micro’, we engage in a work of putting them in relation to one
another. This is the second important move: Proportioning. Instead of sticking
either to that panoramic vision of Paris from the hill of Montmartre or that
individual picture of the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris taken from the window
of my chambre de bonne in the 5th arrondissement, we rather engage in
proportioning. The work of proportioning, measuring and relating, is added to
the work of tracking while traversing the city. All views of Paris are connected
and superimposed like so many spider webs; there is no way they can be
arranged by order of magnitude, from the encompassing to the encompassed,
from the enveloping to the enveloped. The meteorological map is inter-imposed
to the pollution map that laid alongside the map of the electricity network,
which itself, is next to the map of the television cables; the intergalactic space
produced in the Astrophysics Institute is added to that of the weather report
compiled in the Météo-France offices in the Moutsouris park, which in turn is
added to the map of pollution peaks published this morning in Le Petit Parisien.
They do not overlap and cannot be reduced to each other. No camera will ever
be able to zoom gradually from cable to sewer, from electricity to weather. They
all matter and co-exist.
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prices and votes. Yet, how can all these scattered groupings be summed up?
To understand how life in the big city can be brought together, Latour shifted
attention to ordinary urban objects.
Distributing
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These urban objects are the delegates of absent forces and actors. For example,
spikes, benches, and fences replace policemen, guards, and patrollers. But they
make some social rules durable in the city. They have two faces: on one side,
they multiply the possibility of existence of humans; on the other, they replace
and multiply the occasions for them to be absent. ‘Anthropogenic on the one
hand; sociogenic on the other’ (Latour and Hermant 1998, 107), they form this
fine network that holds us together in a city by distributing action. All these
nonhumans make it possible to share Paris and organise a particular way of
living in the city together.
I’m neither in control nor without control: I’m formatted. I’m afforded pos-
sibilities for my existence, based on teeming devices scattered throughout
the city.
(Latour and Hermant 1998, 101)
Indeed, the individual is exceeded, but not by the Force of Society, that abstract
force that Latour criticised in Reassembling the Social (2005b), but by many
other beings and it is important to make sense of the multiplicity of these beings
in a city. Paris is not just experienced in various subjective experiences, but is
encountered in its urban interobjectivity, the tiny channels of the networks
traced by urban objects.
Allowing
Two versions of Paris are possible: a cold Paris of succession, of memory, of history,
and an actual Paris, an everyday Paris, a lighter city where the tight networks of
surveillance cameras, electronic codes, patrols, dogs, guards and police officers no
longer smothers the passer-by. Time is often defined as ‘the series of successions’
and space as ‘the series of coexistences’. Time goes forward; space spreads
out. The belief in history, in the linear series of successions has dominated social
sciences, fuelling the hope that a great revolutionary gesture, a Giant Leap Forward,
would sweep away the past and replace everything with a better existence. This is
what constitutes a Paris of memory, of symbols, a historical Paris. But rather than
understanding the city historically, Latour explored how a city could be grasped and
defined spatially, geographically, as a ‘series of coexistences’ and not of successions.
A Paris of movements not in time, but in connections, in networks, of oligopticons.
This would mean that instead of the modernising gestures that so easily trigger
succession, we would rather highlight the role of the countless intermediaries who
participate in the coexistence of millions of Parisians. Economics, sociology, water,
electricity, telephony, voters, geography, the climate, sewers, rumours, metros,
police surveillance, standards, sums and summaries: all these circulate in Paris,
through the narrow corridors of the oligopticons. They cannot serve as frame or
context, because they circulate. Allowing intermediaries to be part of our world, we
increase the series of coexistences. Paris is not the result of historical processes, but
constant result of work, of maintenance, of keeping things together. And if history
has ended, argued Latour, perhaps coexistence can begin.
In Paris, Ville Invisible (1998), Latour explored the actual Paris, to demonstrate
that social theory can bring us closer to the city’s ordinary life. In that everyday
on the paths into and out of it, following the routes that
link humans with the natural world, the subjective with the
objective, the built with the unbuilt, the small with the big.
This approach can inspire urban scholars and designers to perfect their ‘art of
describing’ cities, and to produce accounts that trace and measure the flow
and multiplicity of urban life without replacing the specific with the general,
the concrete with the abstract. This can also allow us to reinvent the narrative
techniques that help us gain access to the particular and grasp the unique.
Equipped with various tools of description, both discursive and visual, the
accounts of urban scholars and design practitioners informed and inspired by
Latour’s philosophy, should deploy cities as networks, instead of unveiling in a
critical fashion, what is behind them: the cultural, political, economic or social
forces at work. To deploy means to account for the socio-material work of
the thousands of architects, engineers, planners, policemen, meteorologists,
civil servants and inhabitants, performed in many oligopticons, that make a
city visible. Thus, a Latourian approach places both architectural research and
practice right within the heart of urban life.
CHAPTER 8
can only be conceived if it can freely traverse the now dismantled border
between science and politics, in order to add a series of new voices to the
discussion, voices that have been inaudible up to now, although their
clamour pretended to override all debate: the voices of nonhumans.
(Latour 2004b, 69)
should include the voices of nonhumans. Of course, this does not mean that
things speak ‘on their own’, since nothing has the capacity to speak on its
own, but always through something or someone else, through intermediaries
or mediators. Millions of subtle mechanisms coming from the sciences are
capable of adding new voices to the chorus of public life. Thus, refusing to
restrict politics to humans, subjects, or ‘freedom’, on the one hand, and Science
to objects, nature and ‘necessity’, on the other, we will be able to follow the
work of ‘stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them
articulable and to make them speak’ (Latour 2004b, 89), procedures common
both to politics and to the sciences. Thus, politics, in Latourian terms, is what
allows many heterogeneous resources to be woven together into a social link
that becomes increasingly harder to break (just like the microbes at the time
of Pasteur redefined what society is made up of, who acts and how). It makes
central the process by which the cosmos is collected into one liveable whole.
is constructed in societies. Let us patch the two back together, and the
political task can begin again.
(Latour 1993a,144)
Parliament is a technical term for Latour that indicates the political act of making
things public, a way of producing voices and connections among people. In
the parliament of things, scientists talk on behalf of natures and politicians
talk on behalf of citizens and societies, both doubting the faithfulness of these
representatives and their representations. In parliament, there are no naked
truths, on one hand, and naked citizens, on the other. Instead, the mediators,
the imbroglios and networks have the whole space to themselves. And, most
importantly, they are the ones that have to be represented; it is around them
that the parliament of things gathers. And if the job of the philosopher is to
explain the need for such a gathering, ‘others will be able to convene the
Parliament of Things’ (Latour 1993a, 145). These could be artists, designers,
architects or other art professionals. Their varied expertise is needed to better
visualise the procedures of parliamentary assent and dissent.
Object-oriented politics
For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters of fact. Yet
how often do we encounter transparent, unmediated, and stable facts? It is
hard to provide indisputable proof, to convince publics of the presence of a
controversial phenomenon or of a looming danger. Instead, more and more, we
are confronted with disputed facts, or matters of concern, issues that draw us
together. Matters of concern, as a term, points to highly uncertain and loudly
discussed, real, atypical and interesting agencies, that are taken as gatherings
(and not as objects). We assemble around such disputed facts, not because we
agree, but because these divisive matters of concern bring us together. That is
the reason why Latour revived the old meaning of the word ‘Thing’ (or the Latin
res) that for many centuries has recalled the issue that brings people together
because it divides them. He suggested to bring things back to the political
arena as politics has been for long emptied of things and filled only with human
passions, beliefs and values. The res, the thing, designates both those who
assemble because they are concerned as well as what causes their concerns and
divisions. Bringing things into politics however disrupts our traditional spaces or
forms of politics. They will, instead, create hybrid forums, spaces of conflict and
negotiation between actors (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthes 2011), a parliament
of things. These are spaces in which various groups can meet and debate
different issues and the technical choices of importance to the community. They
are hybrid, moreover, because the people involved and their representatives are
heterogeneous: experts, politicians, and concerned lay people. Hybrid, also,
because the questions to be tackled are of a different nature: from political and
ethical concerns through to technical and scientific. Bringing things into these
hybrid forums creates new kinds of gatherings of humans and nonhumans, new
ways of associating. Reflecting on the importance of an object-oriented politics
(Joerges 1999; Winner 1980) in architecture can bring new awareness to the
ways in which global infrastructure networks can become mediums of politics
(Easterling 2014), architecture can be political at the level of design, construction
and inhabitation practices (Yaneva 2017; Mommersteeg 2020), and to the
different architectural and urban sites of political action (Jaque 2020).
The scale of ecological crises, Latour claimed, forced us to realise that politics has
always been object-oriented and that every kind of politics has always been a
cosmopolitics, a politics of the cosmos, a politics that turns around the question
of what our common world consists of (Latour 2005c). To designate the
politics of a cosmos, Latour (and Isabelle Stengers (2010a, 2010b)) introduced
the term cosmopolitics, which differs from cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan,
cosmopoliticum, is a very old term, that comes from the ancient philosophy
of the Stoics and Immanuel Kant’s theory of international relations, which
designates historically the citizenship of those who pertain to the world, to
the networks of the great cities, and to the need for a common global culture
and a universal citizenship. For this philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism,
the individual is a global citizen of the world which might become their polis
(cosmopolis). In this form of European internationalism, moreover, nature and
the cosmos, is unified, singular, and without history. Issues of war and peace
involve a struggle between different views of and perspectives on the world.
Cosmopolitanism is thereby a desire to reach a global consensus of perspectives,
a coming-together of cultures.
Complication and
Nature Society controversies
New
nonhumans
?
Collective in
the process
of exploring
?
COLLECTIVE WITHOUT
OUTSIDE RECOURSE
Figure 8.1 The political model with two houses; The model of the collective.
Illustration by Alexandra Arènes.
borrowed from the American pragmatist philosopher William James (1996) and
coined in opposition of universe). While cosmopolitan thinkers reflect on the
characteristics and the ‘subject’ of the cosmopolitan age at the beginning of the
third millennium, the preoccupation of cosmopolitical scholars is rather different:
to open up to the diversity of the world and to acknowledge the existence of all
the entities composing it.
Cosmopolitical design
they should also be composed in order to design one common world. Thus,
key Latourian questions – like How many are we? How can we live together?
How do we assemble aggregates of humans and nonhumans to form a liveable
world? – must be tackled by the various skills of scientists, politicians, artists,
moralists, economists, legislators, but also, architects, and designers. If we are
to be ‘cosmopolitically correct’ as Latour suggested (Latour 2007b), we need to
portray the zone between the natural and the social sciences and reinvent them
both. We need to build and deploy the hybrid networks, the imbroglios, caused
by ecological mutations, by scientific inventions, by resource extractions, etc.,
and to reinvent both politics and the arts to be able to fully apprehend these
complex transformations and contribute to change.
Key Latourian questions – like How many are we? How can
climate change, and offering new compositions, new local adjustments that
would craft the cosmos differently without resorting to political speeches or
activism.
collective life (Latour 1998) which require a new form of political activity adapted
to the study of their networks.
The cosmogram (Tresch 2005, 2007) is an image of a world in which one wants
to live. Confronted with the challenges of the Anthropocene, architecture is
required more than ever to address the primordial question of what it means
to live together in peace, and thus to design new cosmograms, to imagine and
speculate about new forms of co-existence between humans and nonhumans,
of how to share a common world. Architectural design can contribute
to reshaping the co-existence of different entities, and ultimately to the
re-architecting of the cosmos. Latour’s philosophy invites us to rethink the role of
design in the new climatic regime of planetary thinking.
CHAPTER 9
Confronted by the ecological crisis and the mutations of the Earth and our
leaving conditions, we, humans, feel so powerless. What does it mean to be
morally responsible at the time of the Anthropocene, when the Earth is shaped
by us, when we have become a geological force, by our irresponsibility, a
disregard for the consequences of our actions, uneven consequences that are
difficult to grasp, to locate, to pin down… and that even the loop connecting
our collective action to its consequence is thrown into doubt? This climate
question is, according to Latour, at the heart of all geopolitical issues: ‘all forms
of belonging are undergoing metamorphosis – belonging to the globe, to the
world, to the provinces, to particular plots of ground, to the world market, to
lands or to traditions’ (Latour 2018b, 16). Migrations, increasing inequality,
environmental and social injustice, and this new climatic regime are one and the
same threat. The global pandemic of 2020 also confirmed Latour’s fears, which
played out as a rehearsal for what is to come:
The first lesson the coronavirus has taught us is also the most astounding:
we have actually proven that it is possible, in a few weeks, to put an eco-
nomic system on hold everywhere in the world and at the same time, a
system that we were told it was impossible to slow down or redirect. To
every ecologist’s argument about changing our ways of life, there was
always the opposing argument about the irreversible force of the ‘train
of progress’ that nothing could derail ‘because of globalisation’, they
would say. And yet it is precisely its globalised character that makes this
infamous development so fragile, so likely to do the opposite and come
to a screeching halt.
(Latour 2020, 1)
geopolitical issues.
This moment of the global ecological crisis has disturbed how we, as humans,
understand our place in the world and in history: it has been described as
the ‘end of history’, or positions us at the ‘ends of the world’, disrupting
how we understand our finality and finitude; but it has also made us rethink
how humans relate to others, or what it means to be human at all, qualified
as ‘post-human’. But Latour has gone so far as to call it ‘post-natural’ as
Nature is no longer what is embraced from a faraway point of view where the
observer could ideally jump to see things ‘as a whole’, but is an assemblage of
contradictory entities that have to be composed together. Just like the category
of the ‘human’, the category of ‘Nature’ does not adequately correspond to
this state of affairs. In place of Nature, Latour, building from the hypothesis
formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis –
that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to
form a self-regulating complex system that maintains the conditions for life
on the planet – offered the figure of Gaia (Latour 2017b). Gaia is named after
the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology and
the spirit of our planet. Unlike Nature, Gaia is not indifferent; she is local, she
cares and feels for us, reacts to us, and might, eventually, get rid of us. Gaia
as a figure allows us to not de-animate Nature as Gaia undoubtedly acts and
reacts. However, Gaia is also a scientific concept that seeks to capture the
‘living Earth’ as a reciprocal and entangled relationship of various entities that
each have their own interests, and importantly for Latour, without imposing
a totality over them. Gaia is a secular figure for Nature, and has no place in
the Nature–Culture schema. She is neither ontologically unified, nor a super-
organism endowed with a unified agency, and that is why she is politically
interesting:
Following Lovelock and Margulis’s thesis, Latour argued that something has
been totally overlooked when the Earth is considered from the outside (as
in Galileo’s discovery that the Earth moved around the Sun). Earth as Gaia is
incredibly reactive to our actions, not only that the Earth moves around the Sun
but that it is being moved by us, modified from within, and ‘for that reason
escapes all our hopes of dominating it’ (Latour 2018a, 223) compared to Nature
which was seemingly indifferent to our actions, and for that reason could be
mastered. The limited, restricted, local, active, and reactive Gaia is freed from the
concept of Nature. Latour’s thinking on nature developed in Politics of Nature
(2004b) gained a different direction with Gaia. Gaia is the occasion for a return
to Earth that allows for a differentiated version of earthbound sciences, politics,
and religions. Whether we are dealing with the idea of the Anthropocene, the
theory of Gaia, or the notions of historical actors like Humanity or Nature taken
as a whole, the danger is always the same: we have the temptation to explain
everything within a coherent and unified whole.
the Earth moves around the Sun but that it is being moved
by us, modified from within, and ‘for that reason escapes all
Latour distinguished between the concepts of Land and Globe, both of which are
wholly different both scientifically and politically. ‘The figure of the Globe authorises
a premature leap to a higher level by confusing the figures of connection with
those of totality’ (Latour 2017a: 130). The Globe with a capital ‘G’ simultaneously
delineates scientific, economic, and moral horizons, the Globe of globalisation
(Figure 9.1). Under the Globe of globalisation what had to be abandoned in order
to modernise was the Local, the Land. When we move forward to the Globe, we
are considered progressive, in all senses of the world (Left); and when we move
backward toward the land, we are considered reactionary (Right).
Yet, if we consider the planet as a Globe, this means that we imagine ourselves
in some sort of godlike position. A view from nowhere. It is from this imaginary
viewpoint that we can consider local attachments to the Land, to the ‘Heimat’,
as limited, regressive, and archaic (the recent rise of the far-right in Europe or
Trumpism in the USA witnessed for this trend). For us, those ‘who live on the
land surveyed by this all-powerful gaze, the Globe appears as an infinite horizon,
GLOBAL
ft
Le
Ah
ea
d
t
gh
t
gh
Be
Ri
Ri
hi
nd
Modernization Front
ft
Le
LOCAL
Figure 9.1 Modernisation front between global and local.
Illustration by Alexandra Arènes.
epistemological dispute.
It is important, stated Latour, that we step aside and find ‘a place to land’ in order
to escape the front of modernisation. There is nothing that authorises us to re-use
the old markers of politics such as ‘Right’ and ‘Left’, ‘liberation’, ‘emancipation’,
‘market forces’, or even the markers of space and time that have appeared self-
evident for so long, the ‘Local’ or ‘Global’, ‘future’ or ‘past’. Everything requires
being mapped out anew and at new costs. This is an urgent task that must be
carried out before we rush forward, and lose what we care about. We need
to take stock of what matters to us, of what we are attached to, to develop a
balance-sheet of where we are at (cahiers de doléances, a list of grievances).
Redirecting attention from Nature towards the Earth, Gaia or the Terrestrial, we
need to ask ourselves: ‘Are we Moderns or Terrestrials?’ (Latour 2018b, 55). In
this way, we can begin to apprehend more clearly the premises of a new affect
that would reorient the forces at work in a lasting way. This might also put an
end to ‘the disconnect that has frozen political positions since the appearance of
the climate threat and has imperilled the linking of the so-called social struggles
with those we call ecological’ (Latour 2018b, 82). We cannot act politically,
argued Latour, without having surveyed and measured, being by being, person by
person, the stuff that makes up the Earth for us. Now more than ever, alternative
descriptions, accounts and visualisations of the Earth need to be generated. This
would also mean engaging in local experiments (Latour and Weibel 2020) in what
it means to inhabit an Earth after modernisation, with all those, humans and
nonhumans, displaced and affected by its course. These collaborative experimental
projects with artists are important to address the environmental crisis as the arts
offer a variety of modes of description through theatre, visual arts, design, and
architecture. The School for Political Arts established by Latour at Sciences-Po
(SPEAP) is an example for such an interdisciplinary endeavour.
Reflecting on the new climatic regime, designers can help produce alternative
descriptions of the Earth. An ambitious agenda for architecture at the time of
Anthropocene can be set: to rethink design through a theory of human and
material coexistence. Designers are the first to test different ways of assembling,
harmonising and re-composing the world; they can also rethink techniques,
sites, scales, and aesthetic devices to acknowledge the agency of entities and the
relationships among them.
Atmosphere
Top soil
Rocks
flow ways o
flow duration
2
from center Ra
to periphery
‘geostories’ take us into the thick of the Earth: into the middle of the ocean,
of oil extraction infrastructure, melting icebergs, and waste management.
Addressing critical questions of deforestation and resource extraction, these
parliaments of things are very different from the purified concept of the Globe
and the romantic Nature. They also seek to rethink multispecies cohabitation and
make explicit the fragile connections between humans and nonhumans with
different ontologies.
This new regime of visualisation suggests that we live within Gaia and interact
with it, that we weave a web of connections that might hurt or repair its
balance. Instead of geography, an inventive Gaia-graphy is at stake, which
can reveal the composition of troubled territories and actively trace the moves
of Gaia within them. In these visualisations the human does not appear as a
separate layer on top of other geological or biological phenomena, but rather
as a switch, a shape shifter among the other phenomena. Mapping and
visualising the ‘intrusions of Gaia’ (Stengers 2015) in politics in a compelling
way requires the intelligence of the analytical and visual tactics that are so
essential to architecture. At a time when both the concepts of Globe and Land
are scientifically and politically loaded, Latour’s invitation to move sideways
and explore, account, and visualise the Earth could offer a unique opportunity
for architects to register the earthly mappings of Gaia’s moves. As such,
Latour’s philosophy can promote a new role for architectural design: as a
powerful apparatus for re-diagramming, re-thinking and re-imagining a new
cosmopolitical order.
This charts without any doubt, a future shaped by a radically new engagement
of designers with the environmental issues and the fate of the planet Earth. As
Latour famously stated, ‘Neither Nature nor the Others will become modern. It
is up to us to change our ways of changing’ (Latour 1993a, 145). There is no
better way of concluding this book than by extending an invitation to architects
and design scholars to read and engage with the philosophical oeuvre of this
earthly giant, hoping this will inspire new designerly ways to change our ways of
changing.
Further reading
In addition to reading the selection of Bruno Latour’s works cited in this book
and the series of ethnographies of architectural practices that followed suit,
I would recommend reading a short article of Latour, initially delivered as a
keynote lecture, where he addressed explicitly issues of design and invention
that might be relevant for architects and scholars in design studies:
For those interested in how some of Latour’s ideas have travelled to the field of
planning, the work of Jonathan Metzger provides excellent insights:
Finally, for readers curious to learn more about the ways the global pandemic
that unfolded in 2020 has affected humans, cities and territories and made us
rethink issues of globalisation and climate change, read:
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Index
138 InDeX
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139 INDEX
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140 InDeX