Bruno Latour starts his book with his concerns about the use of ‘social’ as an adjective to nominate assumptions about the nature of what compose social assembling. Comparable to adjectives like wooden, biological and mental, the social is being used to designate something material, a kind of ingredient within social domain (1). His proposal is to reconstruct the meaning of social by revisiting the roots of this concept.
To investigate the nature of ‘assemblages’ (2), Latour suggests initiating by examining what is assembled under the concept of ‘society.' For him, the sociology, or the ‘science of social,' is not delivering a consolidated sociology. Latour is searching for what he called “…the promise land of a true science of a real social world.”(2). To find this “place” and to answer all questions that appear within this process, Latour points to some solutions. The first one is about to clearly define the specificities of the field of sociology to distinguish it from any other science domain (3). The author argues that to postulate sociology distinction is necessary not to use 'social’ to deal with subjects that other domains are not able to deal with. All social, political and economic interests are using ‘social’ concept and its variations as common sense to define a range of undefined things connected. The second approach denies the existence of ‘social context’ or ‘social dimension’ (4). Thus, there is no social to explain the residual issues other domains cannot afford.
What Latour suggests is to understand what connect social elements together instead of investigating what is this “connected thing” itself (5). For him it is crucial to consider what associate things and to understand how this connection happens between heterogeneous elements; this is what Latour called as “tracing of associations” (5). In the first view, every social organization can be explained by the aggregates behind them. In the second approach, there is nothing behind them, only connections or associations. What Latour called social is not a well-formed assemblage, it is a movement made of social and non-social ties (8). The social is only visible through the traces it leaves doing associations. To be clear, the author named the first approach as ‘sociology of the social’ and the second branch as ‘sociology of associations’ (9).
Latour distinguishes the mainstream sociology of the social from a more radical proposal of sociology, what he called ‘critical sociology’ (9). One of the main features of this social approach is that it limits sociology studies to the social by replacing its object by associations made of social relations. For him, It is a need to think about theories that investigate what the social is made of. Latour argues that sociology has to trace the actors and to understand what changes are happening related to collective (12).
In conclusion, Latour proposes to rethink sociology considering the changes promoted by new technologies. From his view, it is a need to give a step out of common sense and think about what intangible interests are associating social actors. For him, the ‘social’ cannot be confused with the territory where it overlays.
Work cited:
Latour, Bruno. “Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations.” Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 1-17.
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