What Next for Actor Network Theory? Inventing around Latour on a planet in distress

Abstract

This is a reflection piece on the theme ‘what will happen to actor-network theory (ANT) after Latour?’ We distinguish three scenarios but focus on the one we see as the least probable but most interesting for sociology and related disciplines. With inspiration from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, we think of this third scenario as a way of “inventing around” Latour. In this scenario, classical ANT tenets are prolonged and refracted through Latour's later work on modes of existence and critical zones. This mutant ANT is subject to further transformations through encounters with empirical situations and concepts from many other places. We use two brief cases for illustration. The first considers the empirical potentials and possible pitfalls of Latour's modes of existence in relation to the emergence of carbon markets as a form of Anthropocene politics. The second examines recent urban upheavals and transformations in Bangkok through the lens of urban critical zones, which make visible problems of co-existence that shade into pluriversal cosmopolitics because the city is full of beings that are both modern and amodern. These cases point the way to a scenario in which ANT is still unfinished, and far from “uncritical”. It is an “indisciplinary” scenario, where ANT with sociology and adjacent disciplines venture into complex landscapes of planetary ecological disruptions and postcolonial tensions without any false protection from certified theory and pre-defined politics.

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