Latour (1999) The Trouble with Actor Network Theory

This online paper by Bruno Latour offers an overview of some of the tenets of and misconceptions about Actor Network Theory. Three resources have been developed over the ages to deal with agencies. The first one is to attribute to them naturality and to link them with nature. The second one is to grant them sociality and to tie them with the social fabric. The third one is to consider them as a semiotic construction and to relate agency with the building of meaning. The originality of science studies comes from the impossibility of clearly differentiating those three resources. Microbes, neutrinos of DNA are at the same time natural, social and discourse. They are real, human and semiotic entities in the same breath. The article explores the consequence of this peculiar situation which has not been underlined before science studies forced us to retie the links between these three resources. The actor network theory developped by Callon and his colleagues is an attempt to invent a vocabulary to deal with this new situation. The article reviews those difficulties and tries to overcome them by showing how they may be used to account for the construction of entities, that is for the attribution of nature, society and meaning.