A Different Society Altogether

A Different Society Altogether:

What Sociology Can Learn
from Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour

By

Roar Høstaker
 A Different Society Altogether:
What Sociology Can Learn from Deleuze, Guattari, and Latour,
by Roar Høstaker

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Roar Høstaker

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5418-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5418-4

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................. vi

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Introduction

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 29

Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 58

Two Syntheses

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 83

Theories of Agency

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 114

Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 151

Planes and Assemblages

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 190

Conclusions

Notes........................................................................................................ 209

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 213

Index ........................................................................................................ 228

 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Modes of inquiry ...................................................................... 19

Figure 3.1 French literary field .................................................................. 69

Figure 5.1 Bloor’s vector diagram ........................................................... 120

Figure 5.2 Modal structure of having-to-do............................................. 139

Figure 5.3 Hjelmslev’s model of the sign ................................................ 141

 PREFACE

The book you are holding in your hand is the product of a long-time
interest in the foundational questions of the social sciences. Ever since I
read Jeffrey Alexander’s multi-volume book Theoretical Logic in Soci-
ology (1985) in the late 1980s, the fundamental presuppositions of sociol-
ogy have constituted an important horizon for my work. Alexander has
attempted to renew sociology within the frame of the classical tradition
emanating from primarily Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. This is not a
solution I can recommend. The view promoted in this book is that great
parts of the sociological discipline have laboured for too long in the
shadow of these “forefathers” and it is about time to take stock of what
kind of sociology they have given us and to indicate new approaches. The
latter task can only, I believe, be accomplished by reintroducing a closer
relationship between sociology and philosophy. I write “reintroduce”
because 100 years ago most sociologists were trained in philosophy, but
this link has been broken in the process of becoming a profession. In this
book I rely heavily on the works of Bruno Latour and of Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, but my conclusions point only to a suggestion of how
sociology can reform its theoretical foundations without excluding other
possibilities.
A common presupposition in sociology is that there is order and then
there is deviation from order. Order is usually understood either as formed
by patterns of repetitive occurrences or as occurrences inscribed in a
context which gives them a kind of meaning. However, a common view
among the theorists central to this book is that order is not something to be
sorted out from a given reality but is something produced. Order itself,
along with its principles of production, has to be explained. This amounts
to a change of perspective that provides us both with a different view of
what entities our societies are composed of and with a different conception
of cause and effect in sociology. The search for order is instead discussed
in this book as a kind of “deep politics” underlying traditional social theo-
rizing. The attempts at finding repetitive and stable patterns are mixed up
with the State’s own mechanisms for producing stability for its citizens.
But there is more. The sociologists’ interpretations of social order as being
repetitive have become themselves a resource for the states’ production of
stability. This is so because repetitive explanations are, in a way, timeless
viii Preface

and can be applied to cases and situations perceived to be analogous. One

of the aims of this book is to contribute to a liberation from this form of
“state thinking” in sociology.

***

Much like both governments and individuals under neoliberalism, a

project like the present book gives rise to great debts. My debts are mostly
made up of gratitude for the comments and support of my work.
Financially it has been supported over the years by the Research Commit-
tee at the Lillehammer University College and by grants from the Small
Grants Programme of the Research Council of Norway. Furthermore, this
book would not have been written the way it has been without Ragnar
Braastad Myklebust’s deep knowledge of Latour’s and Deleuze and
Guattari’s works and of both French and Italian philosophy in general. Our
countless discussions have been tremendously helpful. Ole Andreas
Brekke and Kathinka Frøystad have read earlier versions of the manuscript
and their comments have significantly improved the layout of the argu-
ment of this book. In this context I also thank the two anonymous review-
ers whose suggestions forced me to make my argument much clearer.
Parts of Chapter 5 have been published earlier in the journal Science
Studies and the editors have most amiably allowed me to reuse this materi-
al.
This opportunity also allows me to acknowledge the following groups
for the occasions they provided to me to share my thinking about sociol-
ogy and French philosophy and the insightful comments they have offered:
the Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Bergen; the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the
University of Oslo; the Deleuze Studies Conferences; the Department of
Politics, Philosophy and Management at the Copenhagen Business School;
the European Sociological Association; the International Institute of Soci-
ology; the International Social Theory Consortium; the International Soci-
ological Association; the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts; and
the Society for Social Studies of Science. I wish also to express my grati-
tude to Steven Epstein for receiving me as a visiting scholar at the Science
Studies Unit of the University of California, San Diego, in 2006-2007 and
to Roddey Reid at the same institution for including me in his seminar. I
wish also to thank the Centre for French-Norwegian Cooperation in the
Social Sciences and Humanities at the Maison des sciences de l’homme,
which supported a stay in Paris during the spring term of 2010. In addition
to the individuals mentioned above I wish also to express my gratitude to a
 A Different Society Altogether ix

number of colleagues for discussing this project with me and for their
ongoing support: Rita Agdal, Gry Brandser, Emanuel Totland Frogner,
Tor Helge Jacobsen, Leif Inge Johansen, Christian Garmann Johnsen,
Bruce Kapferer, Mete Pamir, Thorvald Sirnes, Arild Utaker, Agnete Vabø
and Terje Ødegaard. Steven Connolley has corrected my occasionally idio-
syncratic English and has also been an important support for me.
My daughter, Mira, once made a drawing of her dad reading “a boring
French book” and I wish to thank her and her brother, Aslak, for their
patience and for the restorative breaks away from intellectual pursuits they
occasioned. I also wish to thank my partner, Kathinka, whose share in this
book only she knows the extent of.

—Roar Høstaker
 CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is critically to discuss some of the fundamental

problems in the social sciences emanating from the classical tradition
referring back to ancient luminaries like Marx, Durkheim and Weber. As
shorthand I shall call the point of reference of my discussion “sociology,”
although this classical line of social theorizing is also present in disciplines
like anthropology, history and political science. Another aim of the book is
to identify certain conceptualizations that might lead us in a new and more
fruitful direction. These objectives have grown out of a feeling that much
of the thinking in sociology is marked an intellectual exhaustion of sorts.
As I see it, one of the main problems hampering these disciplines is that
our expositions of all sorts of phenomena are given in advance. We have a
certain stock of explanations that can be adapted to anything. This explan-
atory uniformity makes the whole enterprise of social science not only
repetitive and boring, but also essentially predictable, preventing our find-
ing anything really new. The diversity of the world is not allowed to im-
pinge on us; instead, it is tamed and safely placed within our neatly fash-
ioned categories.
All lines of scientific research are supposed to question their own foun-
dations now and then, but one of the persistent findings from the sociology
of science is that this happens quite rarely. Sociology is no better: the tra-
dition has been somewhat sacralized. It is about time to break this spell
and to reassess the presupposition underlying this activity. The argument
of this book is that the social sciences can be renewed by the incorporation
of a few insights taken from continental philosophy or, to be more precise,
the theories of Bruno Latour and of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The
theories of the latter were presented (albeit in a transformed way) to the
English-speaking world as a part of the phenomenon of “French Theory”
in the 1980s, and Latour was one of the protagonists of the “Science
Wars” in the mid-1990s. This background may prejudice some readers
against the enterprise of this book, but this form of thinking nonetheless
offers us important lessons, and it would be a pity not to take advantage of
them.
2 Chapter One

Bruno Latour (b.1947) has been a significant voice in social theory in

recent decades, and if this voice were to be taken seriously, it would lead
to a significant change of “terrain” compared with that of the sociological
tradition. However, Latour’s voice has to some degree been restricted to
the field of science studies1 but even here he is often treated as a bête
noire. Latour is trained as a philosopher, but turned to sociology and social
anthropology in the mid-1970s. In France sociology and anthropology are
institutionally located within the humanities and Latour’s career has been
somewhat uncommon in this respect, because he has most of the time
worked at prestigious, “great schools” like the École des Mines in Paris
and later the Institut d’études politiques in Paris. Latour’s work belongs to
the broad movement of constructivism which came into prominence in the
1970s. Within science studies this line of inquiry involves foremost a
methodological orientation whereby scientific facts are seen not as a set of
ideas or doctrines, but as outcomes of local practices within a certain com-
munity. Latour began his work in science studies in the mid-1970s with
anthropological fieldwork at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. This
study was presented in the now seminal book Laboratory Life (Latour and
Woolgar 1986). The original 1978 subtitle of this book was The Social
Construction of Scientific Facts, but in the second edition of 1986 the
word social had been taken out. This seemingly minor change was actually
a telling sign of Latour’s critique of the social constructivist movement.
This movement had, he held, only shifted the weight from a traditional
view whereby scientific facts are discovered in nature to a view whereby
society explains everything. He has since the mid-1980s promoted a di-
vergent form of constructivism identified under the label “anthropology of
science” or “actor-network theory” (ANT). The latter label has become
very popular in the English-speaking world as a catchphrase, yet Latour
himself has alternately embraced and rejected it (2005). I shall here use
“anthropology of science”, with which he seems to be most comfortable.
One of Latour’s main ideas is that humans and objects must be studied
in conjunction and not separately. Society and technical artefacts presup-
pose each other and each can only be seen in isolation after a process of
purification by researchers and intellectuals. Most of what is labelled
social science, however, separates humans from their technical objects.
Social relations – that is, relations between humans – have so far made up
the foundations of the social sciences.
Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) and Felix Guattari (1930 – 1992) may
perhaps be characterized as one of the most remarkable pairings in philo-
sophy. Deleuze was a professional philosopher who taught at universities
and from 1970 at the new University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes. This uni-
 Introduction 3

versity became one of the centres for the post-1968 activism and where
Deleuze’s friend, Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984), for a time chaired the
department of philosophy. Guattari worked at the experimental psychiatric
clinic of La Borde and had passed his exam as a psychoanalyst at Lacan’s
École Freudienne in 1969. He was also a political activist on the left in
France and part of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s. He was,
moreover, a central figure in groups promoting a wider application of the
“institutional analysis” of La Borde. From 1965 the collective FGERI2
organized some of this work and in the early 1970s the French state fi-
nanced some members of this group as contract researchers. In the 1980s
Guattari was involved in establishing Radio Tomate, an activist radio
station, and in this period he worked with environmental activists and
other groups (Dosse 2007).
The main focus of my interest in their collective work concerns the two
books Anti-Oedipus (1984) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987), published in
1972 and 1980, respectively. These two books were the fruit of a radical
political conjuncture in which it was possible to question everything. This
background still imbues a certain freshness to the ideas promoted in them,
although they are, like all books, marked by the debates of their time.
Deleuze and Guattari were critical of the structuralism of the 1950s and
1960s, which emphasized the invariant traits in any given condition, while
at the same time they shared with structuralism the critique of the freely
acting subject that existentialism promoted. They also followed the struc-
turalists’ interest in semiotics, but they applied it differently and were criti-
cal of linguistics as a discipline. Their philosophy can therefore be labelled
as “post-structuralist”, but what I think is the most interesting aspect of
their philosophy for sociological thinking is the conception of a primordial
energeticism that is present in all sorts of fixed social entities and contin-
ually threatens to destabilize them. It is this fundamental vision and the
concepts linked to it that make up some of the lessons that sociology can
learn from Deleuze and Guattari.
I shall, of course, go into more detail on both the theories of Latour
(see Chapter 5) and those of Deleuze and Guattari (see Chapter 6), but one
of the aims of this book is also to promote a critique of and dialogue with
the sociological tradition.

The Problem
What is the main problem with the way we do social science? A common
way of discussing sociological theories is to view them as different ways
of studying society. We all know there are different perspectives within
4 Chapter One

these disciplines: some take the bird’s-eye view while others take a
worm’s-eye view; some emphasize conflict while others emphasize coop-
eration; some emphasize a close study of the subjective world of actors
while others insist on collecting quantifiable data in order to make possible
a generalization of the findings to a population. Even though they might
give us different “societies” as a result, they are mainly understood in
terms of epistemology, the way we extract knowledge about our object of
study.
The critique levelled at sociology in this book is not so much concer-
ned with how we can best study human societies, but rather with the way
sociology tacitly subscribes to certain ontological assumptions. This book
focuses on the entities that sociologists regard as important and how they
define the relations between them – in other words, the make-up of soci-
eties. My main contention is that the manner in which sociology distri-
butes properties to the different entities that we might find in a society de-
termines how we experience, talk about and write about them to a great
degree. By redistributing these properties we can experience, talk and
write about a society in new ways, and hence the title of the book: we
might arrive at a new society altogether. My aim is not to provide theore-
tical meta-comments on human societies, but by changing the conceptual
framework I seek to contribute to new ways of doing sociological re-
search. The aim is always to facilitate empirical research, and I do so here
by analysing concepts and how they operate.
At this point it may be useful to ask what is meant by society. The defi-
nition of this very imprecise concept depends, however, on the way a gi-
ven sociological theory distribute properties between entities and how the
relations between them are pictured. In this context I shall focus on the
common strategy in sociological analyses to advance two perspectives at
the same time: one taken from without the topic at hand (transcendence)
and the other emerging within (immanence). The latter involves following
the actors and what they do, say or write. The former strategy, however,
stipulates that the actors have to be situated in a proper social context and
in Latour’s words it gives sociology “fixed frames of reference” (1996a,
169). This strategy is easily recognizable by the way entities are given
clear identities and properties at the outset and these are applied to ana-
lyses without much reflection. Latour and Deleuze and Guattari follow a
completely different practice, emphasizing absolute immanence giving
different definitions of “society” as a result.3 Latour’s sociology is a soci-
ology “which has fluctuating referents” (1996a, 169) and his starting point
is always in the “middle of things” (2005, 25) with few preconceptions.
Deleuze and Guattari give primacy to connections between undetermined
 Introduction 5

entities before they are given any essential characteristics. They withdraw
to what is logically prior to the fixation of identities. Another facet that
distinguishes their approach is that their concepts are completely empty.
They are purely functions and have to be applied to concrete empirical ma-
terial in order to be meaningful (1987, 40-57). Hence, every new case
must involve a new effort and one cannot apply the same categories from
one case to the next. One of the consequences of these immanentist ap-
proaches is that there is, in principle, no society with fixed properties.
Latour even rejects the whole concept of society because it involves a
preference for humans over non-humans. He has instead coined the
concept of the “socio-technical collective” or “collective of humans and
non-humans” (Latour 1993b, 2005). The Latourian theory is thus a socio-
logy without society. Deleuze and Guattari, on their part, make use of con-
cepts like social plane, socius, social machine and society (1984, 1987),
but the way they use these concepts in their analyses may vary from topic
to topic.
This book will apply the concept of society in the same way as it is
used in the literature that I discuss, and this will, unavoidably, lead to
changed meanings of this concept here and there. One of the topics of this
book will also be to show how traditional sociology constructs its outside
and how the change of perspective between a transcendent and an imma-
nent viewpoint takes place in different theories.
I shall now turn to what I hold to be some of the fundamental presup-
positions in the sociological tradition. The aim is to pinpoint the properties
that this tradition prefers and the relations it leaves out. Below I sum-
marize in a set of theses what I find to be the foundations for not only so-
ciology, but also other branches of the social sciences. These theses will
form the basis for much of the discussion in this book:

1. The social sciences study the relationship between people or col-

lective entities made up of people.
2. Either people or collective entities, or both, are granted agency in the
form of potentialities residing in them,
3. or the actions of people or collective entities, or both, can be linked
to some sort of meaning that makes them do the acts they do.

The “either-or” properties of Theses 2 and 3 are linked to discussions

about modes of inquiry in sociology, and they will be treated more tho-
roughly later in this chapter. Thesis 1 states the preference for relations be-
tween humans, and it is the most fundamental one because it makes a
claim about which entities are most important to study, and it is commonly
held to be the most self-evident for many sociologists. However, one of
6 Chapter One

the main critiques formulated in this book is that much social scientific
thinking is not able fully to integrate two of the most characteristic fea-
tures of human social life: that we have languages and that we form an
intimate relationship to technical objects. We must, then, formulate two
more points to characterize how sociology commonly treats these features:

4. Objects are treated as intermediaries between humans, as neutral

tools, as something over which we struggle, or as separate entities with
their own potential to determine human life.
5. Signs in the form of speech, texts, images or bodily postures are
understood as communication.

To avoid potential misunderstandings I should state that sociology ignores

neither technical objects nor signs, but my claim is that they are not con-
stitutive parts of the ontology. In the case of technical objects, they can
change status from being faithful and neutral tools to being an overwhel-
ming “technology” or a “technical system” that might determine our fate.
Or, perhaps, a given technical artefact has the inherent potential to change
our social relations for the better or worse (see Thesis 4). These latter posi-
tions are all examples of a technical determinism whereby potentiality is
ascribed to techniques or technical objects while the human part of the
equation is diminished. In this way techniques become self-acting – which,
I shall argue, is just as problematic as the main claim in Thesis 1. Further-
more, according to Thesis 4, technical objects are not only portrayed in so-
ciology as neutral tools or part of an abstract “development” or force that
changes our society without our having any say in it, but they are also ob-
jects worthy of our admiration and competition. This is well known in the
common struggle for all sorts of vanity objects, ranging from powerful
cars to the latest electronic gadgets, and it is well portrayed in studies of
different lifestyles (e.g., Bourdieu 1986).
Thesis 5 may perhaps be met by headshaking disbelief: shouldn’t lang-
uage be a question of communication? What could be more self-evident?
The answer that Deleuze and Guattari might give would be that language
can be communicational in specific situations, but we must make clear
what is meant by communication and in this context it is understood accor-
ding to the Schema of Linguistic Communication. This schema is closely
related to information theory and presupposes a transmission of a message
between an addresser and an addressee. These two have a physical channel
through which the message is transmitted and there is a psychological
connection between them. Finally, they share a common code that makes
it possible for the addressee to understand the message (cf. Greimas and
Courtés 1982, 37-38). For Deleuze and Guattari this situation is much
 Introduction 7

more controlled and streamlined than what is common in linguistic ex-

changes. It is a situation where nothing new can happen because there is
no opening for new implicit meanings. This is so because there is more to
a statement than its message. Language orders the world for us and im-
poses a kind of functionality on it. If I make the statement: “all swans on
the lake are white”, I do not impart this freely to some interlocutor, but I
oblige the other party to believe that this is the case. In other words, I indi-
rectly impose a social obligation. This implicit presupposition of my claim
forces us to ask questions about the situation where the statement was
made and one might ask on what grounds it was made, etc. It might be an
example from the theory of science in a classroom, a claim about a state of
affairs while walking along the shore of the lake or it might be a malapro-
pos like a line from a play by Eugène Ionesco.4 This is the function of
what Deleuze and Guattari call order-words (mots d’ordres) which they
hold to be the foundation of language and where what is indirect or
implicit in discourse is of major importance (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
75-80). The status of the statement depends on what they call a collective
assemblage of enunciation. I shall discuss this concept in more detail later
in this chapter.
Bruno Latour formulated another way to distance himself from the
communicational model. In an interview he said that “what I am interested
in is the radical paradigm where you can’t be the human receiver because
even that is a semiotic production” (Crawford 1993, 264). We cannot,
therefore, give preference to any model of language that assumes indi-
vidual human actors because these actors are themselves part of a common
field of semiotic production. Human beings do make interpretations of
their situation, of other people’s conduct, etc., but that is part of the same
semiotic production: signs that are reacting to other signs. In Latour’s view
semiotics is not constituted in the interaction of human actors, but is much
more than what actors can interpret.
The aim of this book is to discuss all five theses above and their status
as presuppositions in sociology. As mentioned above, my main theoretical
supports in this undertaking will be the works of Latour and of Deleuze
and Guattari. It is necessary, however, to raise a fundamental question be-
fore we start: why on earth would a well-established and institutionalized
activity such as modern sociology want to revamp its theoretical foun-
dations completely? I believe there are three reasons: there are new in-
sights to be had; old dilemmas and problems might be solved; and new
strategies for empirical research can be outlined. In the following I shall
consider one of the seemingly unsolvable problems in sociology: the re-
8 Chapter One

lationship between structure and agency, which is commonly accepted as

one of the fundamental problems in the field.

Structure and Agency – The Impossible Problem

In this section I shall argue that the problem of structure and agency
can be connected to the presuppositions of a preferential treatment of hu-
mans in social science. This anthropocentrism, summarized in Thesis 1,
presupposes as a corollary the subordinate status of technical objects de-
scribed in Thesis 4. Only those approaches to social science that seek to
redress this imbalance between humans and objects can have any hope of
solving the dilemma, or, rather, dissolving it as a badly posed question.
In the same way as many other philosophical problems, the question of
structure and agency (or determinism and contingency) has a theological
origin: if God is not only omniscient, but also omnipotent, how is human
free will possible? If one holds that humans have free will, then God is
more distant, but if he forms my actions, he somehow intervenes in my
conduct. The problem of structure versus agency is thus something handed
down to us from Western history and has much deeper roots than does the
comparatively short history of the social sciences. The ascent of the na-
tural sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries transformed this
theological problem into the determinism of natural systems, whereby
previous conditions of a system necessitate its subsequent conditions. Al-
though a higher degree of contingency had to be acknowledged in human
affairs, a similar determinism can be found in Marx’s formulations on the
first pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
(1954b, 15)

Thus the previous actions of other humans constitute the conditions of

agents here and now and, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (15). Marx then goes on to list
how the French revolutions have repeated historical models, quipping
famously, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (15). The histori-
ical circumstances in this context not only frame a set of possibilities, but
tradition also passes on to us probable ways of action and we easily repeat
previous patterns. Therefore, by being both the provider of the possibility
of action and the originator of why we do what we do, history is given the
same role as God. Nevertheless, the emphasis remains on the human
 Introduction 9

element. A conversion of Marx’s remarks into contemporary social con-

structivist language would amount to the statement that previous humans
have constructed the social institutions that we have inherited. These insti-
tutions provide both the circumstances in which we live and many of the
motives for our conduct. We can, however, change these institutions by
changing our habits and our social relations.
Anthropocentrism is very much at the forefront in this way of under-
standing society and this view stands in contrast to descriptions of society
from the eighteenth century and earlier which emphasized the interaction
of humans with nature. The ascent of the human and social sciences from
the early nineteenth century was also an ascent of anthropocentrism (cf.
Foucault 1966, chs.9 and 10). The problem of structure and agency was
transformed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century at
the hands of Durkheim and Weber. In Durkheim’s work this transforma-
tion took place with the notion of the social as a moral order that con-
strains the individual, although the social is maintained and carried by the
individuals themselves (1982, 51). This is, however, not enough: this col-
lective moral order is a product of social life itself. In other words, the
social as transcendent is formed by the immanent processes among agents
themselves (2001). Weber, on the other hand, emphasized that sociology
should be based on understanding, and, unlike Durkheim, he did not take
the collective level as his starting point. For Weber, collective entities, like
states and organizations, were a kind of shorthand for the numerous
actions governed by an identifiable “average” meaning (1978). These two
forefathers of sociology indicated two different notions of the social order:
either it comes from a collective level that constrains individuals or it
comes from the patterns of probable, but meaningful, actions. The epi-
stemological choice of starting our social analyses either from a collective
level or from the actions of individuals has been with us ever since, and
our disciplines are shot through with it.
Contemporary sociologists have in different ways tried to bridge the
divide between agency and structure. Pierre Bourdieu has attempted to
solve this problem with the concept of habitus, which he defined as:
“…systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures” (1977, 72, emphasis in
orig.). Habitus makes the body the meeting point between objective condi-
tions (structures) and subjective experience (agency). Objective structures
are transformed into embodied experiences and become a basis for the
production of new practices. Anthony Giddens has claimed to have found
a solution in what he called structuration, in which individuals reflect over
what they do, but their actions have unintended consequences. The main
10 Chapter One

problem in sociology, he holds, lies in the antinomies between a sociology

of understanding and a sociology of explanation, with the former identi-
fied easily as the Weberian tradition and the latter as the Durkheimian. In
Giddens’ view the sociology of understanding has been marked by an “im-
perialism of the subject”, while the sociology of explanation by an “im-
perialism of the social object” (1993, 2). In the process of structuration,
agents reflect over their actions and make their own choices, but simul-
taneously these actions form structural patterns on a social level. In this
way Giddens reproduced a dual world view, but without giving priority to
an abstract level of structure over the more primary one of action. Among
the possible outcomes of processes of structuration might be the unknow-
ing reproduction of structural relations. A paradigmatic example for
Giddens was Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1980), in which the renow-
ned Birmingham sociologist followed a group of working-class boys from
their last year in the classroom to their time in the workplace. These boys
brought with them from their background a form of banter and aggressive
humour which they directed against the teachers in the face of school
discipline. This opposition was at the same time a sort of acceptance that
their school results would be poor. With dismal grades, they were funnel-
led into subordinated and boring work – not unlike their school experi-
ence. Nonetheless, they found this transition easy because they found the
same banter and aggressive humour among the workmates. An unintended
consequence of the whole process was a reproduction of subordination and
class divisions (Giddens 1993, ch.6).
Both Bourdieu and Giddens have worked hard in their attempts to
overcome this central problem, but neither solution will do because they
both reproduce, one way or the other, the distinction between transcend-
ence (determinism) and immanence (free will, human responsibility). In
the example above the reproduction of class relations is of a different order
than the behaviours of the schoolboys. The challenge of bridging or tran-
scending the question of structure and agency seems insurmountable. And
so it is. It cannot be solved with the presuppositions of the sociological
tradition; in Latour’s view, this is so because the play between a tran-
scendent and an immanent viewpoint in the discourse is fundamental to
modernity. Society is seen both as stronger than human beings (tran-
scendence) and as formed by them (immanence), but instead of formu-
lating a dilemma, he views it as a self-contradiction (Latour 1993b).The
presuppositions summarized in Theses 1 and 4 suppose that humans are at
the centre of this ontology and technical objects are only part of the peri-
phery. What is lacking is an explanation of why we have a certain level of
continuity in human societies. This continuity is something that is pro-
 Introduction 11

duced every day and cannot be taken for granted. On the other hand, hu-
man interactions are ephemeral and they are limited to a certain time and
space. Furthermore, humans change their minds and might do something
different from what you would like them to do. Latour’s fundamental in-
sight is that only our intimate relationship to objects is able provide the
foundation for this continuity. His solution is that we must grant agency to
non-humans and these (including technical objects) do not change their
mind at the blink of an eye. They do what they are prescribed to do: “a
profound temporal shift takes place when nonhumans are appealed to: time
is folded” (Latour 1988a, 301). This folding of time into objects has the
consequence that the work once laid into the house in which I live (and
write) remains actualized over 90 years later. This remains true despite re-
curring maintenance and periodical refurbishments. This is, of course, a
trivial example, one which we would not usually consider worthy of any
thought, but the de-trivialization of the trivial is one of Latour’s great
strengths. In this way technical objects may be seen as “congealed labor”
(1999b, 189), and their tasks would otherwise have been done by humans
themselves (or not at all) (1988a, 300-301). The relation between artefacts
and humans holds true if people still subscribe5 to them (or are forced to
do so). Museums are good places to watch objects that are no longer sub-
scribed to in the usual way, and, in that particular context, they are mainly
relevant for historical reconstructions or nostalgia.
An obvious answer to this type of critique is that we have known this
all along. To be sure, sociologists take for granted that technical artefacts
are important, but in what ways do they do so? Usually they are conceived
either as neutral tools or as a separate force (see Thesis 4). Marx’s treat-
ment of technical artefacts in the first volume of Capital is a telling ex-
ample. This book describes objects either as manufactured products or as
faithful tools, or – in a reversion of their faithfulness – they replace human
labour in the form of machinery and even turn the worker into a living ap-
pendage of it (1954a, chs.1 and 13). Yet again, we find the juggling be-
tween an immanent and a transcendent viewpoint; who is master and who
is slave in the relation between humans and non-humans might change.
This switching between viewpoints is the master template of sociological
rhetoric: we build our society ourselves, but some social entities are
stronger than us and dominate our lives (Latour 1993b). The only way this
domination is possible, however, is through technical objects, and one of
the key ways of renewing sociological theory is via a new understanding
of technical artefacts.
Still, the theoretical powers of sociology are yet to be exhausted, for,
as I have mentioned in Thesis 2, collective entities are sometimes ascribed
12 Chapter One

potentialities for action and the agency of technical artefacts is usually hid-
den or taken for granted within entities like “groups”, “interests”, “states”,
“institutions”, “forces”, and so on. In other words, the agency of objects is
hidden by being sublimated into abstractions. Similarly, the agency of hu-
man collectives is hidden by abstraction in formulations that assume that
techniques have their own momentum, which is the case when we speak of
“the development”, “productive forces”, “technology”, “the system”, and
so forth. Objects and humans are still seen as being apart. A major strength
in Latour’s analyses is his ability to describe humans and non-humans
symmetrically. One of his examples in the book Pandora’s Hope concerns
how murder by gunshot is explained. The slogan, “Guns kill people”, pro-
moted by those campaigning against gun ownership in North America, in-
volves a technical determinism as an explanation of murder. This slogan
emphasizes matter over humans in the way that the mere spread of guns
leads to more murders. The actions of the humans are only assumed, and
humans are made into intermediaries. To this slogan the American
National Rifle Association has answered with, “Guns don’t kill people.
People kill people.” The second slogan exculpates the gun and makes the
human the only responsible actor. In this social explanation the object
turns into a helper; in other words, the gun is only an intermediary.
Latour’s twist to this dilemma is to claim that a citizen holding a gun is
mediating action: he or she makes a detour via the gun to kill (or to
threaten, maim, etc.) while the gun “needs” to go via a human to unleash
its built-in programme (1999b, 176-180). Both the human and the gun
have their own programmes of action and they have to become part of
each other’s joint programmes. In other words, both gun and citizen ex-
change properties in the gun-wielding situation. The person is different
with the gun than without it, and the gun is different in a human hand than
in its case. It is the gun-human or human-gun assemblage that kills (178-
180). It is possible to kill by other means, but the gun adds some qualities
that other weapons might not have. It extends human action in certain
ways, but at the same time it constrains it and may displace it in unfore-
seen directions. A new uncertainty is involved. Similarly, seen from the
gun’s point of view, its action is extended by the human, but the human
might use it in ways that are prohibited by the built-in programmes and
may even harm it. The criss-crossing interaction between humans and non-
humans forms hybrids that make our world possible. These quasi-subjects
or quasi-objects cannot be classified as clearly belonging to either society
or nature unless there has been a prolonged work of purification through
which we tend to overlook some qualities and to emphasize others (Latour
 Introduction 13

1993b). In the Latourian perspective the age-old question of structure and

agency is transformed and dissolved.

Signs and Language

We have seen above that we cannot give a preferential status to re-
lations between humans because it excludes objects. What about signs and
language? Thesis 5 states that signs are commonly understood as com-
munication and an objection that might be raised is if this claim is still
relevant with the emergence of discourse analysis. This is a multidisci-
plinary field which has been thriving since the 1970s and some parts of it
has been influenced by French post-structuralism. The relevant question to
ask is whether the practitioners in this field really break with the com-
municational model. Or, phrased differently: are they able to make signs
and language relatively independent of interpreting actors? A look at dif-
ferent handbooks in the field reveals that the phrase “discourse analysis”
covers an enormous smorgasbord ranging from rhetoric, conversation
analysis, narratives and storytelling, analysis of tropes, socio-linguistics,
social semiotics, etc. (Grant et al. 2004, Dijk 1997). I do not think I can
answer this question definitely and I will leave it open. Like the linguist
Émile Benveniste I shall argue that language provides a sort of funda-
mental condition for human societies (1974, 62) and that language and
signs are something more than intermediaries between humans. How we
speak and write about ourselves and the world in which we live is not only
important for the way we understand this world, but also for the way
humans experience themselves and change their conduct, for these depend
on social concepts and categories. We write and speak all the time, and the
effects of our words and deeds escape us and they might be forgotten the
next moment or they might begin a life of their own by being repeated by
others. This phenomenon is, of course, connected to the technical means
by which we distribute writing and images in our societies, but language is
such a fundamental faculty that we can hardly think without something
psychologists call “mentalese” (Pinker 2009).
I shall try to develop an example of the sort of status that signs in the
form of text and language might have in the type of social analyses pro-
moted in this book. In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes’ commented
on the trial against the farmer Gaston Dominici in 1954. Dominici was ac-
cused of murdering three English tourists who were camping near his pro-
perty in the Alpine region of Southern France. The whole affair loomed
large in this period of French history owing to the gruesome details of the
murder and the ensuing speculations. These speculations were nourished
14 Chapter One

by the lack of evidence against Dominici and by the absence of a motive

for his committing a triple murder. In order to build the case against him,
the Public Prosecutor and the Presiding Judge had to make a psychological
profile of a cunning and scheming farmer. But where did they take this
psychology from? Barthes’ answer was that it was taken from bourgeois
literature from the nineteenth century, and it was highly questionable
whether it was in any way representative of the accused. In Barthes’ view
the real triumph in this case was that of literature:

… it is in the name of a “universal” psychology that old Dominici has been

condemned: descending from the charming empyrean of bourgeois novels
and essentialist psychology, Literature has just condemned a man to the
guillotine. (Barthes 1972, 43)

French bourgeois literature of a different epoch thus manifested itself as

the way the magistrates and prosecutors understood certain categories of
people.
This example shows how a certain genre of literature can liberate itself
from its origins and enter into what Deleuze and Guattari call a collective
assemblage of enunciation. Enunciation may be understood as the context
that makes a specific utterance possible, and Barthes’ observation was to
link the prosecutors’ and magistrates’ discourse to its possible nineteenth-
century source. This was, probably, part of a wider phenomenon of how
particular sections of the French bourgeoisie saw other sections of the po-
pulation in the middle of the twentieth century. The case thus evoked some
of the social significance of class relations. This particular flow of dis-
course about peasant life and how “these people” behave had evidently
taken on a life of its own. In Deleuze and Guattari’s parlance it had been
deterritorialized and then reterritorialized in the situation of the court pro-
ceedings. This essentialist psychology was, of course, not the only form of
discourse in the court: there are all sorts of rules and regulations that gov-
ern such proceedings, which ascribe strict roles for the participants and set
the parameters both for assessing evidence and for the punishments to be
meted out. Furthermore, Dominici was neither the first nor the last to be
accused in a criminal court. Thus a flow of those accused and a flow of
discourse meet at court and they are all conjugated at this specific site. In
this process both discourse and persons are transformed. The accused can
be either condemned or exonerated, and these linguistic transformations
have consequences for the treatment of the body of the accused, since he
or she is either liberated or punished.
This example illustrates the concept of assemblage (agencement) and
its two segments: one pertaining to signs, called assemblages of enuncia-
 Introduction 15

tion, and the other to bodies (in the widest possible terms), called machinic
assemblages. This latter concept concern how humans and non-humans re-
late to each other, engage with each other or part from each other. The rea-
son it is called machinic is the parallel Deleuze and Guattari made between
technical machines and processes in society. These processes operate with
regular input and output and they have components functioning in con-
junction with each other (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 456-458, 1995, 120-
121). The fundamental unit of analysis is thus the assemblage and in our
example it includes judges, lawyers, the accused, bailiffs, the public,
buildings, legislation and other legal documents, the evidence, the verbal
argumentation of the parties, etc. The advantage of the concept of as-
semblage is that it permits the analysis in a single grasp to recognize how
diverse entities function together (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 65-66). The
transformation of signs is, nevertheless, something different from the
transformations of humans and objects. Moreover, the flow of discourses
and the flow of people and objects might be deterritorialized or perhaps
conjugated (reterritorialized) in other ways at other sites. The notions of
flows and assemblage were formulated to avoid the fixation of specific
attributes into “actors” – whether individual or collective – and to indicate
that such actors, which are commonly assumed in the social sciences, to be
mere results to be explained and not something with which to start an
analysis.
In Chapter 5 I shall show how Latour has a somewhat different ap-
proach to the question of signs and language. He does not distance himself
from theories of agency in the same way as Deleuze and Guattari, but the
agency of humans and non-humans is possible to describe within lan-
guage. His so-called “Translational Model” is a way to explain how texts
can refer to states in the world.

A Non-Starter
The previous, perhaps hesitant, introduction of concepts both from
Latour and from Deleuze and Guattari leads us to consider how similar
forms of thinking have been introduced to the English-speaking world.
French social thinking has previously been applied in several ways, and
one of the most debated is called “French Theory” which is the North
American application of the philosophies of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze
and Baudrillard in the 1980s and 1990s. French Theory had its main insti-
tutional foundation within literary studies and cultural studies. The chron-
icler of the upheavals of French Theory, the intellectual historian François
Cusset, was astonished when he first came to the United States and found
16 Chapter One

out what kind of impact French social thinking had had on American intel-
lectual life. What was often called La pensée de ‘68 in France had in North
America been transformed into something else: French Theory. In this ap-
plication the theory was used to deconstruct texts and to analyse all sorts
of cultural expressions in relation to the identity of groups. In Cusset’s
view, the main blind spot in French Theory has been the denial of market
forces:

[It was] detailing clothing styles and coded lingos as forms of rebellious
expressions with little or no consideration of social positions and contexts;
debating sex wars and gender norms with hardly a mention of the profi-
table commodification of femininity as today’s ultimate existential pro-
duct. (2008, xvi)

Yet the social and political values promoted by this line of cultural studies
were the opposite of the values promoted by the philosophers they claimed
to be building on. With French Theory, French social thinking was shorn
of its political and historical context, and all types of semiotic expressions
were made autonomous in a way that could only feed a culturally oriented
and flexible capitalism (xvi-xviii). Cusset’s answer is not to renounce
theory, but he stresses that theory needs to be linked to historical and
social contexts in order to be able to form something that might also link
up the experiences outside of academia. One of the main problems, as I
see it, is that French Theory has become a major article of export from the
United States and it has to a high degree formed the reception of French
social thinking in the rest of the English-speaking (and English-reading)
world. This has been, and probably still is, one of the main obstacles for a
reasonable reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in the social
sciences.
In recent years a new line of scholarship has emerged in the Anglo-
American field that claims to be “Deleuzian” or, at least, claims to have
some theoretical pedigree from Deleuze. Under the headings of an “af-
fective turn” (Protevi 2009, Gregg and Seigworth 2010), a “non-
representational theory” (Thrift 2008) or a “political ecology” (Bennett
2010) etc., this literature has the laudable ambition of applying French
philosophy to particular analyses. They do not want to limit themselves to
making comments on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and in this regard their
aim is in line with the present book. The main problem I find with this
form of application of their theories is the lack of precision in the treat-
ment of concepts. The political scientist Jane Bennett wants to formulate
what she calls a “vital materialism” moving through and across bodies. In
 Introduction 17

a chapter called “The Agency of Assemblages” she gives the following de-
finition of assemblage:

Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant mate-

rials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are
able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound
them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some of the
points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily
trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its
surface. (Bennett 2010, 23-24)

A few lines further down the page she writes:

Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital

force, but there is an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency
of the assemblage. (24; emphasis in orig.)

With some poetic license the first sentences of the first quotation may be
acceptable, but the rest is difficult to square with the definitions given by
Deleuze and Guattari themselves (Deleuze and Guattari 1975, 112, 1987,
88). Another Deleuzo-Guattarian concept, which is presented in more
detail in Chapter 6, is that of abstract machine which, put simply, is a
macro-assemblage uniting some the functions of the particular (concrete)
assemblages in a given empirical material. It is a concept that gives a
synoptic grasp of very different processes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
141-146). The political scientist William E. Connolly has a similar project
to Bennett and in the book A World of Becoming he writes the following
about this concept:

… an “abstract machine” is a cluster of energized elements of multiple

types that enter into loose, re-enforcing conjugations as the whole complex
both consolidates and continues to morph (2011, 134)

So far, so good. Then he writes the following a few lines further down the
page:

A lava flow constitutes a simple abstract machine; the flow of molten lava,
the melted rocks of different types carried by it, the uneven terrain over
which it flows, the differential cooling rates of each type of rock when the
lava meets water and open air. Each lava flow congeals into a granite for-
mation, the pattern of which is not predictable in advance. (135)
18 Chapter One

This sounds very concrete to me and, much like Bennett’s, it is equally

difficult to square Connolly’s adaptation with the original approach. These
quotations are not picked haphazardly and more examples could be pro-
vided.
Maybe the main problem in this context lies in my expectations of how
theories should be treated. I expect a focus both on the concepts and on
their relations to each other and how they can be involved in specific
empirical materials. In the philosopher Arnaud Bouaniche’s words, the
American reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is too “mimetic and
incantatory” (2007, 300; my trans.). The reception has yet to achieve a
phase that is properly critical and liberated from all forms of aesthetic
readings. This scholarly situation is pretty sad and may overshadow work
of serious interest. The present book is, hopefully, a modest contribution
that can help to redress this situation.

Two Modes of Inquiry

The aim of this section is to introduce some initial distinctions in order to
organize the argument of the book. These distinctions will serve as an ana-
lytical model for the analysis of the different sociological theories discus-
sed in the coming chapters. This model is summarized in Figure 1.1.
Above I presented five theses summarizing the presuppositions of the so-
ciological tradition, but I have so far mainly discussed Theses 1, 4 and 5
and it is time to have a closer look at the remaining two. Thesis 2 states
that the social sciences grant agency to people or collectives in the form of
potentialities, and Thesis 3 that the acts of people or collectives can be
linked to some sort of subjective meaning. These two theses can be seen as
opposites, but they may as well be present in some theories as a mixture.
In this context I shall discuss them in relation to a distinction made by the
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur between an energetic and a hermeneutic
mode of inquiry (1978, 62-64). He made this distinction into a starting
point for his reading of Freud’s work, but we can generalize it as a way of
distinguishing between different types of sociological theories. In this dis-
tinction there is, on the one hand, “an explanation of physical phenomena
through conflicts of forces”, hence energetics. On the other hand, there is
“an exegesis of apparent meaning through a latent meaning” (1978, 62), in
a word, hermeneutics. Agency understood as forces working on each other
may be the paradigm of the energetic model in the social sciences, but
agency has often been subordinated to interpretation. Interpretation is, for
example, a major point in Weber’s sociological theory when he claims that
social action must be understood in relation to its subjective meaning
 Introducction 19

(1978, 4-33). This meanning is then trreated as the latent meanin ng of the
action. Furthhermore, this meaning is neither
n any me
meaning nor th he agent’s
own, but is primarily onne that is “su ubjectively addequate” or in nvolves a
“typical” coomplex of meaning (11), fo or instance, wwhat he called d an ideal
type. The sppirit of capitallism and the Protestant
P ethiic are ideal typ
pes in his
study of the emergence off capitalism. HeH tried to shoow the accord, in a cer-
tain historical period and within a certaain geographiccal area, betw ween these
two seeminngly antagonistic attitudes to life (Webber 1992). Somehow, S
these ideal ttypes make uss understand why
w agents didd the things th hey did in
a particular time and plaace. A hallmaark of the herrmeneutic mo ode of in-
quiry is thaat it always involves a momentm of aan observer or o author
“looking thrrough” what someone
s else does or writees. There are always a
privileged vviewpoint and an ascription of meaning.

Figure 1.1 A combination of

o the distinctio
ons made by Riicoeur and Prig
gogine and
Stengers (see text)

Energetiic models are concerned lesss with interprretation and more

m with
action. Agennts or collecttive entities arre forces thatt work on oth
her forces
and the effeect is a form of resultant action. In hiss seminal boo ok on the
American G Government’s response to th he Cuban Misssile Crisis, Essence
E of
Decision, thhe political sccientist Graham
m T. Allison summarizes threet dif-
ferent modeels of decisionn-making, two o of which aree relevant as examples
of energeticc processes.6 The
T first of th hese emphasizzes how goveernmental
agencies prooduce output as a a kind of ro
outinized actiion. Routines instituted
by standard operating proocedures makee it possible foor leaders to know
k (ap-
proximatelyy) how local branches
b will handle their environment and what
they will doo in particulaar cases. By making ruless and instructtions, the
leadership ccan produce action over a distance thrrough a kind of relay
structure. Thhis is so even though the lo
ocal level, infoormed by theiir specific
20 Chapter One

routines, might develop a rather parochial view of the world (1971, 78-96).
The second example is a model of governmental decision resulting from
political processes among bureaucratic players. The description of agents
as “players” is particularly relevant in this model because they play as
though they were on a stage, but it is in a play with an open-ended plot.
Policies are the outcomes of these “games” and they are not the result of
routines, but of the alliances and the forces the different players are able to
muster. Not all outcomes are possible, however, and policy has to be re-
layed through some channels, and this fact contributes to a certain pre-
selection of players. What the players can do is also restricted by rules that
the players have to respect, and they form factions that fight for a specific
outcome. At the same time, players are also involved in many different
games, and this might affect how a player acts in one or the other of the
games (162-181). In both of these models there are agents making inter-
pretations of each other’s aims and actions, but these interpretations are
not of the comprehensive and grand type that Weber prescribes, for exam-
ple. They do not involve a “looking through” of a whole discourse or ideo-
logy from some privileged vantage point. The emphasis is on the forces of
agents working on each other.
Both the hermeneutic and the energetic modes of inquiry are problem-
atic in the way they are applied in sociology, but for different reasons. Let
us first consider the hermeneutic mode of inquiry. Weber claimed, for in-
stance, that some social actions are so simple that we can even understand
them by direct observation. For instance, we understand “2 · 2 = 4” when
we see it or hear it read out loud (1978, 8). This is, however, to conclude
rather too rashly. This mathematical calculation is only intelligible in a
society in which natural numbers, arithmetic and schools are common.
Without this intimate connection and the scholastic homogenization of
young human minds, the expression “2 · 2 = 4” would not be directly
understandable. This expression is thus only comprehensible as an effect
of education. The expression “2 · 2 = 4” can to some extent liberate itself
(a deterritorialization) from this assemblage and enter into other contexts
(a reterritorialization), but it is nevertheless a product of social processes
and not a latent cause of them. This example shows that even the most
self-evident forms of meaning are produced by social processes under spe-
cific historical conditions. For actions less standardized than 2 · 2 = 4, the
difficulties in establishing a “typical” meaning may mushroom in different
directions. In my view, searching for latent meanings for why we do what
we do is not a sound way of doing social research, but is instead a way of
skipping over the difficult part of describing the mechanisms that produce
these meanings.
 Introduction 21

Although meaning in itself is thus not excluded from the horizon of in-
terest of the social scientist, meaning is a contingent product instead of
something anchoring what agents do. Attempting to find the meaning of
some pattern of action amounts to letting a result explain the cause (Latour
1993b). Instead, meanings are multiple and agents themselves produce
them locally, in a manner akin to the actors in Allison’s models. We
might, then, distinguish between grand hermeneutics and those locally
constituted by the agents’ own semiotic production. Within this perspec-
tive, we might regard the establishment of a comprehensive meaning of
social agency more as a social and political problem than as a solution.
Any nation will, for example, shelter within its borders an enormous
multiplicity of different meanings linked to the actions of individuals, but
in times of crisis the governing elites might be able to infuse the whole
body politic with their own overarching codifications. This comprehensive
meaning is thus a product of political mobilization.

Reversible and Irreversible Processes

The second distinction I have made, following Ricoeur, is the socio-
logical theories emphasizing energetic processes. In other words, there are
processes in which forces act on other forces. This is a form of thinking
which has strong affinities to that of physics and this discipline has from
time to time functioned as a model-science for many social scientists. I am
not going to trace these influences in any way, but what I want to intro-
duce are some discussions from the philosophy of the natural sciences
concerning the understanding of processes and time. The historian of
science Isabelle Stengers has for a long time emphasized, both in her own
work and in cooperation with the physicist Ilya Prigogine, the importance
of the distinction between processes that are time-reversible and those
which are time-irreversible (Stengers 1995). In their book Order out of
Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers pose the following question about natural
science:

What are the assumptions of classical science from which we believe

science has freed itself today? Generally those centering around the basic
conviction that at some level the world is simple and is governed by time-
reversible fundamental laws. Today this appears as an excessive simplifi-
cation. (1985, 7; emphasis in orig.)

Time-reversibility is the foundation for any repetitive order because every-

thing will repeat itself given the same initial conditions. Time-reversibility
entails that the processes under study can in theory flow backwards. The
22 Chapter One

classical example is the movement of the planets around the sun. Follow-
ing the physical models applied to understand these movements they might
theoretically be reversed and time would flow in the opposite direction.
These models do not emphasize time as an important element and in clas-
sical science “temporality was looked down upon as an illusion” (7), while
contemporary science must take it into consideration. A repetitive and re-
versible order is, according to Prigogine and Stengers, only possible under
stabilized and artificial conditions that rarely occur in nature. The funda-
mental laws of dynamics are, for example, formulated for vacuums and
other specific conditions and are reversible. “The artificial”, they con-
clude, “may be deterministic and reversible. The natural contains essential
elements of randomness and irreversibility” (9). In contrast to physics,
there is no reversibility in chemistry: When we burn a match or add alco-
hol to water there is theoretically no valid way we can think of the proc-
esses in reverse. These processes are thus time-irreversible and my view is
that social processes share the same characteristic. Nevertheless, socio-
logical theories tend to emphasize time-reversibility.
How is time-reversibility conceived in this discipline? In Stengers and
Prigogine’s understanding, time-reversible models do not privilege any direc-
tion of time and this is what I shall claim is present in many sociological
theories. I argued above that discussions about agency and structure in socio-
logy involve a play between social agency (immanence) and social structure
(transcendence) and this play is an example of time-reversibility in the way
these theories acknowledge that agents make their own social conditions and
then suddenly these conditions become stronger than their makers. Hence, the
direction of cause and effect has changed and this form of reversibility is
necessary for the way sociology constructs its transcendence. I shall in Chap-
ter 3 show how this way of understanding social processes is important in, for
instance, the social constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
who have claimed that: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective
reality. Man is a social product” (1984, 79). All bases seem to be covered in
this claim that can be taken for a self-contradiction. Bourdieu even shows this
dividedness between agency and structure in the course of a couple of sen-
tences. In his article Social Space and Symbolic Power he characterized his
sociological approach as “constructivist structuralism” or “structuralist con-
structivism” although he emphasized that his structuralism was different from
the one espoused by semiotics or the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

By structuralism or structuralist, I mean that there exist in the social world

itself, and not merely in symbolic systems, language, myth, etc., objective
structures which are independent of the consciousness, and desires of
agents and are capable of guiding or constraining their practices or their
representations. By constructivism, I mean that there is social genesis on
 Introduction 23

the one hand of the patterns of perception, thought and action which are
constitutive of what I call the habitus, and on the other hand of social
structures, and in particular of what I call fields and groups, especially of
what are usually called social classes. (1990, 123; emphasis added)

In this long and complex quotation Bourdieu in the first sentence argues that
the social conditions form and constrain agents (transcendence), while in the
second sentence he makes the opposite claim (immanence). The direction of
causation has changed.
A counter-argument to my claim of time-reversibility in sociological think-
ing might be that there is a time-line built into this type of argumentation: in
Berger and Luckmann there is first a time of construction by the agents and
then, after at threshold has been reached, a time when the structure starts to
constrain the agents. In my view, this argument is not tenable because Berger
and Luckmann only present the period when the structure is built as a logical
exercise. This is a “time” of unconstrained activity, but neither they nor
Bourdieu would seriously argue that there are real periods in which agents
construct their world unconstrained. I think the aim of their thinking is laud-
able because they want to explain how societies change while at the same time
remain relatively stable. The problem is theoretical and both approaches fall
into the same trap of ascribing potentiality to results (see Thesis 2). As I have
shown above Latour argues that this situation has emerged owing to the rele-
gation of objects to a minor position in the ontology of sociology. There are,
however, other ways that sociologists and other social scientist do the same
operation of producing time-reversible models and this happens every time
they construct an argument on the basis of something they hold to be a “norm”
in social life. This norm can be established in the form of statistical averages
or other regularities in a particular milieu. Two examples might suffice to
present this point more clearly. With reference to a statistical average a socio-
logist might say that “girls tend to have better grades in upper secondary
school compared with boys” and an anthropologist might say on the basis of
either statistics or observations that “Hindus tend to marry within their own
caste”. These statements clearly rely on the work of the social scientist herself
and are her own constructions. They may indicate processes in society pro-
ducing these repetitive patterns over time, while the nature of the processes
themselves may be less obvious. The reversal of causality happens whenever
the social scientist formulates a statement in the following way: “since girls do
better at school, then...” or “owing to the fact that Hindus marry within their
caste, then ...” The “norm” or repetitive pattern is then taken as a structural
cause and this form of argumentation is quite common in social science
discourse.
The question we arrive at is how can we achieve time-irreversibility and
reconcile sociology with a strict immanentist perspective. I think the answer is
to show that stability and “normality” is an ongoing production and not some-
24 Chapter One

thing to be taken for granted. Even though a person might experience every
day as a repetition of previous ones, he or she might only perceive them as
identical owing to the fact that conditions are stable. Willis’ detailed study of
how the schoolboys “returned” to their own social class showed that it was the
result of a prolonged process of mutual estrangement between boys and
teachers (1980). In Allison’s book routines and standards produce through
their execution a certain repetitive and predictable order (1971). Therefore, re-
petitiveness, and the stability it entails, is a product and not a cause. Time-
reversible theories nevertheless tend to alternate between an immanent and a
transcendent perspective in a similar way as seen above. The repetitive pat-
terns are transformed into potentialities hidden in the “conditions” or in agents
(see Thesis 2 above). This way of thinking also marks the entities of the socio-
logical tradition: some of them are defined as actors (e.g., humans) while
others are merely intermediaries (e.g., technical tools). In a sociological study
the social field may be populated by social institutions, status hierarchies,
social groups, and so on. In this way an antecedent homogeneity of the field is
achieved. In this line of thinking the relevant entities are given specific quali-
ties before we study them. Thus all analyses are re-analyses from a pre-given
repertoire. This seems to be one of the elements that makes Latour despair
over the condition of contemporary sociology:

A reader, asking in what sense our theory of the social could be reconciled
with “conventional” sociology, offered as an objection the way AIDS
patients mobilized as a group. Looking at traditional “social movements,”
it was obvious to her that patients’ organizations corresponded to “conven-
tional” definitions of the social because she had entirely forgotten how
deeply innovative it was for patients to make politics out of retroviruses.
(Latour 2005, 23)

In a traditional context, concepts like “group” or “social movement” are sub-

stances with their particular pre-given characteristics pre-defining the concrete
instances.
Neither Latour nor Deleuze and Guattari can, without qualification, be
put into the camp of time-irreversibility. Latour, for example, protests
against the time-irreversible view of the moderns who claim that there is
always historical progress. In the modern view we shall always have a su-
perior knowledge today compared with earlier periods. Social and tech-
nical change is always for something better and brighter (1993b, 73). In
the modernist world-view the chronological flow of time itself has become
a transcendent schema. He nevertheless argues in favour of an irreversible
movement of time, but this movement is connected to his concept of event.
In Latour’s anthropology of science the event is identified with the experi-
ment and in the experiment something absolutely new may take place. The
 Introduction 25

event is something unheard of and it changes the course of time by be-

coming the point of reference for what happens next. However, at the
same time it changes the way can talk and write about what came before
the event. The event has displaced the “coordinates” of our history and in
this way the causality of the event is split into two directions (Latour
1999b, 168-173): the past is re-written in light of the present. One of
Latour’s examples is the surgical examination of the mummy of Pharaoh
Ramses II in Paris in 1976. The scientists found that he died from tubercu-
losis. Some might protest that this claim must be an anachronism because
Koch’s bacillus was discovered in 1882 while Ramses II died 3000 years
ago. Others would accept the realist view that the bacillus was somehow
present also at Ramses II’s time although humans didn’t know about it.
Latour argues that none of these explanations are any good. Historically it
is not difficult to show that there was no bacillus before 1882. However,
scientific events do not only open up new possibilities for the future, but
they also re-write the past: the past is retrofitted with the new knowledge.
Ramses II died of tuberculosis, but he only did so in 1976. Before this year
the scientists had few clues to the cause of his death (Latour 2000).
In a way similar to Latour, Deleuze and Guattari regards events as be-
ing marked by a rupture. But there is a double causality of another type: on
the one hand, there are the transformations of bodies taking place at some
moment and, on the other, the sense produced and transmitted in the after-
math (Deleuze 1969, 115-117). For them May 68 is an example of a his-
torical event in the sense that it took place at a given time and place, but it
also became a major point of reference for the whole historical period after
it (2003). It opened up new possibilities that were almost unthinkable in
the previous period. In this way the event is extended into the future even
though May 68 had already become a part of the past in June. May 68 was
a historical turning point, but events need not be only those of major im-
portance. I shall discuss this concept further in Chapter 6.

The Organization of the Argument

In Figure 1.1 I have summarized the interrelationships between the dif-
ferent modes of inquiry by combining the distinctions made by Ricoeur
and by Prigogine and Stengers. These distinctions will form an analytical
prism for the organization of the chapters in this book. One the one hand,
many sociological theories are characterized by what we might call a
“Grand Hermeneutic” mode of inquiry. In these theories society is divided
into two parts, with one treated as appearances and the other as reality. On
the other hand, we have theories that emphasize society as being com-
26 Chapter One

posed by some forces working on other forces, for instance, in the form of
actor theories. At this pole we can distinguish between those concerned
with repetitive patterns and those that emphasize time-irreversible proces-
ses. The division into different chapters will follow these rather rudi-
mentary distinctions. It is important to emphasize that some sociological
theories involve a mix of the Grand Hermeneutic and the energetic modes
of inquiry and that my classification might now and then seem arbitrary.
In the analyses of theories subscribing to a Grand Hermeneutic, we
shall start with Weber and Durkheim in Chapter 2 and follow in Chapter 3
with an analysis of two well-known syntheses of these two founding fig-
ures: Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of
Reality (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. One common trait of
Weber’s and Durkheim’s sociology, as well as their followers, is a divi-
sion of the world into two separate realms: one where there is the flow of
singular instances taking place in the social world and another where these
instances are either understood (Weber) or explained (Durkheim). This di-
vision emerges as different forms in the two theorists, however. With
Durkheim it is connected to the concept of a social constraint that coerces
individuals to act and think in certain ways. It is important to note that
Durkheim, first of all, is interested in this social level and not in the flow
of acts and thoughts in the population. A similar view of singularities can
be found in Weber, but his works subordinate these to the meaning an ob-
server can give to them. I have sketched above a critique of grand herme-
neutics; I shall develop this critique further in this case, and apply it to
Berger and Luckmann’s and Bourdieu’s works. We shall see that while the
flow of singular instances is not given any status at all in Berger and
Luckmann’s book, Bourdieu’s sociology conforms more closely to the
pattern of perceiving these singular instances as a screen to be looked
through in order to unveil the relations governing them. Durkheim’s,
Weber’s and Bourdieu’s theories are shown to conform to what Deleuze
and Guattari call the despotic regime of signs, in which everything refers
back to a given signification (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ch.5).
Many social scientists do not conform to the Grand Hermeneutic, but
instead work in what can be characterized as an energetic mode of inquiry,
where we can observe in their theories how forces work on other forces.
However, the chief interest of the majority of sociologists working within
this mode of inquiry is to identify repetitive patterns, and to do so, certain
theoretical operations tend to take place: first, a focus on certain limited
properties of their case and an inflation of the importance of these pro-
perties, and then an ascription of agency to them, often in the form of hid-
den potentialities. Chapter 4 examines a minor sample of the works of
 Introduction 27

Manuel Castells, Robert Putnam and Randall Collins, and identifies these
problems in their works, although they appear in different ways. While
Castells tries to analyse networks (2000), he harks back to an old sub-
stantialism; Putnam’s study of social capital in the United States (2000) re-
lies on a simple set of linear causes that cannot really explain the historical
changes that he tries to explain; and Collins’ sociology of philosophies
(1998) depends on a repetitive and transhistorical model of how intel-
lectual life works. The only major figure in the sociological tradition who
avoids these pitfalls is Harold Garfinkel because he focuses on how order
is produced in specific situations instead of trying to locate a repetitive
order (1967). His approach emphasizes how actors cope in a changing
world, and it incorporates true time-irreversibility and immanence since
what happens at one moment is the foundation for the next. The chapter
also demonstrates the striking congruency between Garfinkel’s sociology
and Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic theory of language (1987, ch.4) and
suggests a rudimentary synthesis.
The last chapters of the book are dedicated to the theories of Latour
and of Deleuze and Guattari. These theories conform to the energetic
mode of inquiry and emphasize irreversible processes. In Chapter 5 I pre-
sent the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour and how it grew out of the
field of science studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Central in this field is the
Strong Programme of the Edinburgh School, and Latour extended this pro-
gramme to include the simultaneous changes in society by scientific and
technical objects. This view has led to several confrontations with Latour’s
British colleagues, and my examination of Latour’s debate with David
Bloor in 1999 reveals the major differences between these two conceptions
in science studies. The chapter then concentrates on an analysis of
Latour’s conception, the so-called “Translational Model,” and its close
relation to the linguist A.J. Greimas’ analyses of narratives (cf. Greimas
and Courtés 1982). At this point it will also be possible to describe some
of the limitations of Latour’s own approach: he does not seem able to in-
clude the historically settled conditions into his analyses that are taken for
granted by the human actors and he tends to emphasize the forms of action
over the material that this action affects.
Chapter 6 follows the discussions from the previous chapters, but
considers how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy might contribute to a
new form of sociological theory. This chapter will involve a presentation
and discussion of some of their main concepts: plane of consistency, as-
semblage, event and diagram. My main aim is to indicate some of the
theoretical context that envelope these concepts in order to show how they
are related to other concepts and enter specific theoretical debates. Plane
28 Chapter One

of consistency is, for example, connected to the philosophy of Spinoza and

the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (2010) provided examples which were im-
portant to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations. I also show the relation-
ship between the model of the sign developed by the linguist Louis
Hjelmslev and the concept of assemblage. Assemblage and diagram are
also discussed with reference to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s Disci-
pline and Punish (1991). The relevance of the Deleuzo-Guattarian con-
cepts for social analysis is tested with a discussion of how they are applied
in the works of a few of their contemporary “inheritors” in France: pri-
marily the literary scholar Yves Citton and the sociologist Maurizio
Lazzarato. Furthermore, I also take the liberty to discuss Durkheim’s con-
temporary, Gabriel Tarde, a precursor of sorts to Deleuze and Guattari in
the sociological field.
In the final chapter (Chapter 7) I summarize the debate between the
different types of research modes and the different types of social-science
theories discussed in the book. In light of the last two chapters, a point-by-
point comparison between the sociological tradition and the Deleuzo-
Guattarian line of research suggested in this book can be formulated. The
main thrust is that sociological theory must both shed itself of all attempts
to formulate a grand hermeneutics of society and resist the temptation of
referring to inherent potentialities as explanations. A major advantage that
would be gained with a less subject-centric social science would be the
overcoming of the dilemmas involved in the traditional relegation of
objects to a lesser status in the way we understand societies and in the
inclusion of texts and other sign vehicles. The concept of assemblage also
makes possible analyses of processes on different levels that are free from
any assumption of an “organistic” composition of social entities. Further-
more, unlike in the Durkheimian-Weberian tradition, there is no privileged
point of view from which society can be observed. Nevertheless, it is still
possible to produce descriptions of how society works.
 CHAPTER TWO

BREAKING THE SPELL:

WEBER AND DURKHEIM

The aim of this chapter is to go back to two of the classics in order to

show the origins of some of the problems that still mar sociology. Weber
and Durkheim continue to be cherished by their inheritors, and their con-
cepts still live on in a more or less transformed way in contemporary so-
ciology and political science. Within the tradition, the works of these two
classic sociologists are not really analysed and discussed; people render
their homages and show their respect. Not so this time, and this might lend
the chapter a certain “slash-and-burn” character. Instead of adding yet
again a number of footnotes to the sacred texts of the tradition, this chapter
tries to go straight to the problems. This is why I turn directly to the origi-
nal texts and pay less attention to studies of the historical and social cir-
cumstances of their origins, although these may be of interest for a dif-
ferent problematic. I shall also, to a minor extent, point out the way their
works have been received and thereby transformed by the different tradi-
tions of the social sciences.
The most troublesome concept in Weber’s sociology is the alleged
meaning of social action and the most problematic concept of Durkheim’s
is social constraint. Both have such a central position in the discourse on
society, among both professionals and the general public, that it may be
asked whether we can think of social science at all without them. I think
we can, but it will require considerable changes in the theoretical make-up
of these disciplines.
Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories are in this chapter linked to what I
called a Grand Hermeneutic (cf. Figure 1.1) in the previous chapter. This
hermeneutic is marked by a sort of “play” between appearances and the
latent reality of the same appearances, and it is this latent reality that is
important for the social scientist. This view is connected to the third thesis
I formulated in order to describe the presuppositions of sociological theo-
ries and this thesis states that the actions of people or collective entities, or
both, are linked to something else – for example a subjective meaning –
30 Chapter Two

that explains why they do what they do or why things happen the way they
happen. The conceptual couple of appearance versus reality implies that
the social world is divided in two. On the one hand, we find all sorts of
singular entities entering into bewildering and confusing relations, and, on
the other hand, a “double” where everything is ordered and understand-
able. I shall show how Weber conforms to this pattern by claiming that ob-
served social actions can be subsumed under a complex of meaning. In
Durkheim’s theories a collective level is said to constrain both the actions
and the thoughts of individuals. In both cases the “doubling” takes over
and defines a social world where all sorts of singular actions and thoughts
are deviations from this “double”. This abstract layer is something that the
great diversity of events always can be related to and involves a gross
simplification. The “double” forms a homogeneous and transcendent area
divided from the singular entities of the world. This doubling of the world
is an inheritance from Kant’s philosophy in which the conscious subject is
correlated to an object. Deleuze identified this as the first, out of four,
transcendental illusions of representation mapped at the end of Difference
and Repetition (1994, 262-270): difference tends to disappear in the con-
sciousness of the thinking subject (266). Deleuze was very critical of this
way of conceiving the world and wanted to emphasize the heterogeneous
entities that might enter into all sorts of relations that were not conceivable
from the viewpoint of the understanding mind. This critique of the under-
standing subject was also the foundation for Deleuze’s critique of the com-
municational model (cf. Thesis 5)
It is often argued that Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories are very dif-
ferent and this is true, but Kantianism is a strong commonality between
them. In this way it is possible to argue that sociology is to some extent a
transformed idealist philosophy. Although Weber starts from the level of
the unit act, this act has to be connected to a complex of meaning. In other
words, it must somehow be understood by a consciousness. Durkheim’s
viewpoint is the opposite since he starts with a macroscopic view in which
singular acts have little place, but his concept of social representations
might be seen as the human mind inflated to the level of society (Breslau
2000, 290-291). This chapter will hence analyse how the “doubling up” of
the world takes place in the works of these two classic figures: first by fo-
cusing on Durkheim and the social constraint and then on Weber and the
meaning of action. Moreover, at the end of the chapter, I emphasize their
commonalities, and my fundamental claim is that their theories conform to
what Deleuze and Guattari call the signifying regime of signs, that is, a
specific formalization of linguistic expressions that is present in a corpus
of texts or ways of making new expressions. A major trait of the signifying
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 31

regime is that meaning is constituted around a given centre. In this way an

order is produced and movement and difference are reined in. I then com-
pare this regime of signs with a passional or energetic regime of signs and
discuss it in relation to examples from psychiatry.

The Social Constraint

The central view of Durkheim’s sociology is that there is much more to
society than individual actions and consciousnesses. At some level all hu-
man societies form a set of phenomena that exist beyond individuals and
these phenomena constrain their actions. This is the social and it is a col-
lective entity even if the individuals are the material carriers of them. It is
important to note that the way he treated these social phenomena and the
terms he used to characterize them vary a lot in his works. The social is
not produced by the state but forms a level divided from it. Moreover, it is
made through processes among the population itself, but these immanent
relations are somehow transformed into an external constraint on indi-
viduals. The “doubling up” of reality characteristic of the Grand Herme-
neutic approach appears in the separation between this level of the social
and the individuals immersed in all their multiple relations, and it is the
social which is the object of the science Durkheim wanted to promote,
namely, sociology.
One of the places Durkheim most clearly expressed the concept of the
social as a constraint is in the first chapter of The Rules of Sociological
Method, in which he writes that a social phenomenon has very distinctive
characteristics: “it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, ex-
ternal to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason
of which they control him” (1966, 3); furthermore, “It is, (…), the col-
lective aspects of the beliefs, tendencies, and practices of a group that
characterize truly social phenomena” (7). Social phenomena are thus quite
diverse and manifest themselves in laws, organizations and social prac-
tices, but they are also states of mind, or what he in The Division of Labor
in Society (1933) called a collective conscience (conscience collective)7 or,
in later works, social representations. These collective states of mind are
strong when they affect all the individual consciousnesses through a cer-
tain repetition within the group whereby the same states of mind echo each
other; a lack of integration of a group is only a symptom of the lack of in-
tensity of its collective life (2006, 159-160). This intensity is only
achieved in groups which attain a certain density. One of the earliest forms
of collective life is religion, but how did religions emerge? Durkheim’s
view was that religious thought arises in the primitive group owing to the
32 Chapter Two

intensity of collective life, “because it determines a state of effervescence

that changes the conditions of psychic activity” (2001, 317) and an ideal is
superimposed on the real. Social representations are in this way the natural
products of collective life. On the one hand, they are the products of the
interactions of individuals in a group, but, on the other, they also constrain
individuals. In Durkheim’s argument there is a certain switch from social
immanence to social transcendence. Suddenly, something made by the
actors themselves comes back at them from without and constrains their
thoughts and actions. This subtle change of perspective is at the centre of
the conundrum of the social sciences (cf. Chapter 1).
One of Durkheim’s main aims with his books was to point to a set of
phenomena that should be sociology’s own and that should be independent
of both psychology and philosophical doctrines about society. He claimed
that within man there are two beings:

…an individual being that originates in the organism and whose sphere of
action is strictly limited by this fact; and a social being that represents
within us the higher reality of the intellectual and moral order that we
know through observation – by which I mean society (2001, 18)

Both sociology and psychology are concerned with the mental in some
way, but sociology’s substratum (i.e., the material carrier) is the group and
not the individual (1966, xlix). The social cannot be studied via the
representations and conduct of the individual since this would only give
access to a partial view, and society is the sum neither of individual
actions nor individual mental states. The individual actions and mental
states are only appearances for the reality which interests the sociologist.
Durkheim’s views were criticized by his older contemporary Gabriel
Tarde (1843 - 1904), who was a leading name in the emergent field of so-
ciology and criminology at the time when Durkheim began publishing his
work. Tarde is an interesting figure and represented many social markers
that contrast him with Durkheim: he was a conservative and a Catholic and
served many years as a judge in his hometown of Sarlat in the Dordogne in
southern France. His workload as a judge was not too heavy and he was
able to make a name for himself through his writings. As a consequence of
his renown he was called to Paris to head the Bureau of Legal Statistics.
He provided, for instance, Durkheim with the statistics for his book
Suicide. Later he was elected professor at the Collège de France (Milet
1970). Durkheim can to a much stronger degree be identified with the pol-
icies of the radical French republic of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Governmental policies guided academic careers and
Durkheim the socialist and atheist fitted in with the efforts to establish a
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 33

new and secular foundation for the state. The struggle between the Catho-
lic Church and the state was one of the main political conflicts in this
period. Unlike Tarde, Durkheim was also more of a product of the school
system. He was early sent by his parents to Paris from his home region
Alsace in order to qualify for the prestigious École Normale Supérieure
and for the Higher Teacher Exam, the agrégation, in philosophy. This was
the royal road to an academic career and it involved a period of teaching in
secondary schools in the province before a position was open to him at the
University of Bordeaux and later Paris. From the early years of the twen-
tieth century he became identified with the “New Sorbonne” fostered by
the government and very much part of the republican establishment (Lukes
1973, Ringer 1992).
What Tarde loathed in Durkheim’s theories was that social phenomena
“… exist independently of humans and govern them by despotically
projecting onto them their oppressive shadow” (Tarde 2002b, 61; my
trans.). His sociology is almost the opposite of Durkheim’s by making all
the collective entities the result of immanent processes, recognizing the
countless small imitations, oppositions and adaptations (Tarde 2001). His
view was that the great collective phenomena are governed by individual
conduct, while Durkheim held that the great collective phenomena govern
individual conduct (Tarde 2002b, 21-22). Durkheim returned the compli-
ment by denouncing Tarde’s theories as being either psychological or
philosophical rather than sociological (1966, liii) and Tarde’s work fell
into (near) oblivion a short time after his death. Tarde was to some degree
a precursor to the critique formulated in this book against sociology in the
way he emphasized how society differs in multiple directions. Durkheim’s
theory, on the other hand, emphasized stability despite the presence of
bewildering difference. This feature is probably also a key to understand-
ing the political effects of Durkheim’s theory in his time and its lasting in-
fluence on political and social thinking in France. The Division of Labor,
published in 1893, became especially important for bolstering the legiti-
macy of the radical policies of the republic at that time. This book argued
that despite a high number of social conflicts, the tendency of modern so-
cieties was to develop a new kind of solidarity owing to a higher degree of
interdependence between individuals. The insecure situation of the re-
public would find its solution in this bourgeoning organic solidarity, and
solidarity became one of the cornerstones of its secular ideology. The re-
public was from this period given the mission to promote general progress
and social cohesion (Donzelot 1984, 73-86, Ringer 1992, 209-210, 235-
236, 282-299). Furthermore, Durkheim’s description of the social as some-
thing that emerged out of the self-organizing processes of society made it
34 Chapter Two

possible for the state to intervene in relation to society as an external force;

it was not itself part of the “game”. In this way knowledge about processes
in society represented a sort of substitution for the state’s previous direct
relationship with the estates (Donzelot 1984). The transcendent, abstract
and reversible knowledge was important in this context because it is a
form of knowledge that may function as a renewable source for state
action. Durkheim and his successors could, therefore, deliver something
that was relevant for the development of the nation-state.
In this context it can be relevant to note that a later generation of
French sociologists like Jacques Donzelot (b. 1943) and Robert Castel (b.
1933) has treated the social – the collective level – as an invention of a
layer or sector imposed between the state and the population. Through the
mediation of this layer the state could be transformed into an entity that
would regulate the life of the citizen and later become what we call the
welfare state (Donzelot 1984). In this specific French tradition, the social
does not strictly belong to the political or to the economic, but its function
is to regulate deficiencies like poverty and the insecurities of life, which
was from the 1830s discussed under the heading of the “social question”.
It is common within this tradition to distinguish between the social as this
sector and the primordial sociality in society, often called societal (cf.
Castel 1995, 25-25, 48-51). In this tradition Weber’s notions of social
action and social relation (cf. below) would be misnomers.
A historical analysis of a possible “Durkheim-effect” in France cannot,
however, hide that he considered the state as an object of study only to a
very little degree. The historian Johan Heilbron has claimed that this situa-
tion might have come from a long-term institutional “censorship” in
France, since sociology belonged to the human and moral sciences. The
study of politics and the polity was not the object of these disciplines, but
was the prerogative of the state itself and its privileged schools for edu-
cating civil servants (1990). The emphasis upon society as something apart
from the state became part of the sociological tradition (cf. Tilly 1984).
Tarde’s sociology, on the other hand, rejected the possibility of a tran-
scendence of the Durkheimian type, and this rejection was simultaneously
a rejection of the population as an object of intervention (cf. Lazzarato
2002, 135-137). There is no outside from which the social game can be
viewed and controlled. Instead, there are only historical outcomes, and
these do not obey reversible laws.
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 35

Biological Concepts
The Anglo-American tradition often treats Durkheim as a functionalist
and one of the reasons commonly given for this view is that he imported
concepts from biology. This is, in my view, probably an underestimation
of the polemical nature of his enterprise (cf. below). His “organicist” argu-
ments were directed against the views of Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903)
and of Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 – 1936). In a review from 1889 of
Tönnies’ book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft he noted that traditional so-
cial forms (Gemeinschaft) were perceived as organic while the new indus-
trial ones (Gesellschaft) were seen to be mechanical (Durkheim 2002). A
few years later Durkheim turned the conceptual scheme of organic versus
mechanical on its head in The Division of Labor. He probably imported or-
ganic concepts as a way to bolster his arguments and they were usually
taken from physiology, which was a model science in his age. The aim
was to identify the social as a self-organizing collective level above the di-
versity of the economy, but at the same time different from the state.
On the one hand, Durkheim’s importations from biology into his theo-
ries are expressions of a general vitalism. For instance a certain density of
the population is given as the starting point of religious life, since, “vital
energies become overstimulated, passions more powerful, sensations
stronger” (2001, 317). We also learn that, “every strong state of con-
science is a source of life; it is an essential factor of our general vitality”
(1933, 96). This fundamental energeticism expressed on a collective level
can be contrasted to the grand analogies he made between the body of
higher animals, their organs and the build-up of society. These analogies
are especially present in The Division of Labor. The aim of this book, he
wrote, is to study the function of the division of labour in society, and, “to
ask what the function of the division of labor is, is to seek for the need
which it supplies” (1933, 49). Need, in this context, is analogous to the ne-
cessities provided by one organ to another in a body.
Durkheim further developed the organic metaphor in the contrast be-
tween a mechanical and an organic solidarity. While mechanical solidarity
builds upon the similarities between individuals and is instituted through
the control exerted by the conscience collective, organic solidarity springs
from the dissimilarity found in societies with a high degree of division of
labour. When labour is divided into different social functions, the collec-
tive mental states loosen their grip on the members of society, who be-
come individuals in the proper sense. This centrifugal movement, how-
ever, is counteracted with a much higher degree of dependence of the
members of society upon each other. This leads to new forms of obli-
gations and a new solidarity:
36 Chapter Two

This solidarity resembles that which we observe among the higher animals.
Each organ, in effect, has its special physiognomy, its autonomy. And,
moreover, the unity of the organism is as great as the individuation of the
parts is more marked. Because of this analogy, we propose to call this soli-
darity which is due to the division of labor, organic. (1933, 131)

Durkheim developed many examples of how the different parts of modern

society are more dependent upon each other than in previous ones, but the
main symptom and proof of the development of an organic solidarity is the
gradual proliferation over the centuries of restitutive law.
Traditional societies depended upon a small set of punitive or repress-
sive laws. What is still common with these types of laws is that a breach
provokes a strong and passionate reaction (Durkheim 1933, book 1, ch.2);
this is not so with restitutive law:

What distinguishes this sanction is that it is not expiatory, but consists of a

simple return in state. Sufferance proportionate to the misdeed is not in-
flicted on the one who has violated the law or disregards it; he is simply
sentenced to comply with it. (111; emphasis in org.)

Restitutive law involves legislation that regulates administrative affairs,

liberal professions, family relations, contracts etc., and is only relevant in a
society with a highly developed division of labour. Furthermore, this legis-
lation is not just imposed upon the society by the state, but is grounded in
the sense that the obligations originate from society itself. In other words,
it is a social constraint.
This is an important argument in Durkheim’s polemic against Spencer,
who argued that social harmony in industrial societies emerges through the
division of labour from contractual arrangements on the market. Durkheim
held that the fulfilment of one single contract at a time would only lead to
an external obligation and not a social one. The fulfilment of contracts was
regulated by law and thus by a level above the individual parties, but there
is more: the way we make our contracts and the way we execute them is
regulated by customs. Professional obligations can, for instance, be very
strict although they are rarely regulated by written rules (214-215). In this
context Durkheim needed the organic analogy to reinforce his argument
for a new set of collective obligations. Seeing society as being analogous
to a body composed of many different organs was a way to fortify his
claims that increasing individualism was a social process and that there is
more to the division of labour than the purely economic function, which
had been evident since the works of Adam Smith. This analogy also made
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 37

it possible for him to claim that some traits of his contemporary society
were pathological.
Another type of conceptual importation in The Division of Labor con-
cerns how Durkheim explains the emergence of a stronger differentiation
in society. The first type of explanation he imported from physics: The di-
vision of labour increases when the density and volume of a society in-
creases (1933, 256-266). Furthermore, with an explicit reference to
Darwin, he made the struggle for existence the driving force of it all. By
specializing into a specific trade or profession, individuals can avoid
coming into direct struggle over the same resources but at the same time
fulfil different social needs (266-275). Durkheim needed these concepts in
order to explain change, because his own theory of the social as a tran-
scendent force outside the individuals did not by itself have any theory of
change.
The main function of organicist and other biological references in
Durkheim’s work seems to have been to emphasize the natural and self-
organizing properties of society, as opposed to views of society as either
artificially constructed by contractual arrangements on the marketplace or
from an external entity, say, the state. This may, once more, have been a
way to delimit the realm of sociology, in the latter case, from potential
encroachments from politics. A major problem with borrowing concepts
from other fields is, of course, that they bring along residual meanings that
are alien to the field in which they are employed. Durkheim’s borrowings
are, seen as a whole, quite heterogeneous, and they do not seem to form
neat descriptions of society as a collection of structures linked to socially
needed functions, as in later functionalist versions.

Possible Critiques and Alternative Interpretations

The claim, which I make, that Durkheim’s social phenomena may be
analysed mainly as social constraints may be open to critique. In the pre-
face to the second edition of the Rules, Durkheim criticized some errone-
ous interpretations of his work, one of them being that social phenomena
can only be explained by constraints. The concept of constraint, he claim-
ed, was only used as a way of identifying social facts and delimiting the
field of study and not to explain them (1966, lii-liv):

The coercive power that we attribute to it is so far from being the whole of
the social fact that it can present the opposite character equally well. Insti-
tutions may impose themselves upon us, but we cling to them; they compel
us, and we love them; they constrain us, and we find our welfare in our ad-
herence to them and in this very constraint. (liv, footnote)
38 Chapter Two

This argument, however, only shows that human beings tend to make
emotional investments in the institutions that constrain them because they
also depend upon them for stability and security. The argument does not
deny the fact that the foundation of these institutions is their constraint on
the individuals.
It is sometimes claimed that the main concepts of Durkheim’s are
solidarity and integration (cf. for instance Wallace and Wolf 2006, 18-24).
I would instead contend that both concepts are connected to the funda-
mental concept of social constraint. I have argued above that both mechan-
ical and organic solidarity are obligations and thus social constraints. The
central place ascribed to integration is probably due to the importance
given to Durkheim’s book Suicide in the teaching of the sociological tradi-
tion in the Anglo-American world. Integration is the central concept in his
analysis of the egoistic suicide, and he claimed that the relatively high rate
of suicide among Protestants was connected to the inability of the Prot-
estant Church to integrate its members fully. This situation stood in con-
trast with both the Catholics and the Jewish minority whose members indi-
cated smaller tendencies towards self-destruction (Durkheim 2006, 110-
114). Religion, according to Durkheim, does not protect the person against
suicide by the quality of its learning, but because it is a society. What con-
stitutes this society, he writes:

is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all

the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong
these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the reli-
gious community. (125)

In other words, integration is just another way to express the effects of the
social constraint! Although Durkheim held that social integration is a pro-
duct of a given society or collective, he cannot, of course, be held respon-
sible for all the different uses of his concepts in our own time. Integration
is nowadays often understood as akin to “finding one’s place in society”,
and it is something that can be stimulated through political interventions.
When social minorities cling to their own traditions and practices (i.e.,
being highly integrated, according to Durkheim) they are, at least in the
dominant political discourse in Europe, perceived to resist integration. Or,
we might say, still in a Durkheimian manner, that minorities resist the
social mores of the majority population and thus resist what constrains the
majority (although this majority might perceive their mores as a kind of
freedom). From this point of view, minorities are less integrated.
It may be argued that my interpretation of Durkheim’s theories under-
estimates the change of emphasis in his own development as a social
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 39

thinker. Both Suicide (1897) and The Division of Labor in Society (1893)
are clearly less concerned with collective representations compared with
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). There are important
changes in Durkheim’s views, especially the central place of religion, be-
ginning in the late 1890s following the Dreyfus Affair. Nevertheless, he
had already developed the concept of conscience collective in The Division
of Labor. What has been made of Durkheim’s books by the different tra-
ditions in the social sciences and humanities is another matter. Traditions
in sociology and political science concerned with how institutional ar-
rangements form our social lives have taken their cue from The Division of
Labor and Suicide, while those concerned with the analysis of collective
patterns of consciousness, culture or language have found much to laud or
criticize in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and for empirically ori-
ented social scientists, the Rules and Suicide are often canonical (Lemert
1994). Many different Durkheims have come out of this plurality of
voices, but one of the strangest creatures is Durkheim-the-paradigmatic-
functionalist. A standard textbook version from the mid-1970s can be
summarized as follows: Durkheim was an important critic of Spencer, but
retained much of Spencer’s organicism with his concepts of a functional
division of labour and the distinction between the normal and the patho-
logical in societies. Durkheim’s functionalism influenced central anthro-
pologists like A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski as well as
the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who made Durkheim the main source for
the concept of Integration in his AGIL paradigm (Turner 1974, 18-25).
Historically oriented readers of Durkheim have roundly criticized this
version of Durkheim (Turner 1995), and in sociology it can be traced to a
practice that canonized Durkheim’s works but at the same time dismem-
bered them for whatever use functionalists like Robert K. Merton (1910 –
2003) and Talcott Parsons (1902 – 1979) had for them. In The Structure of
Social Action, Parsons tried to make Durkheim fit into his thesis of a con-
vergence between different social theorists towards a teleological theory of
action (1968). Teleological action – or action oriented towards a goal – is
something which is completely foreign to Durkheim’s determinism (Pope
1973).8 Similarly, Merton claimed in an article in the American Journal of
Sociology in 1938 to have found a major dilemma between Durkheim’s
positivism and his collectivism. On the one hand, Durkheim rejected indi-
vidual goals as a relevant object of study, but, on the other, he acknowl-
edged at least in The Division of Labor the possibility of collective aims.
Merton held that Durkheim’s assertion of the latter view entailed a relin-
quishing of positivism, because positivism claims that only sensory data
can be studied. Collective goals do not yield sensory data, while individual
40 Chapter Two

goals might. Furthermore, individual goals have actual effects in social

settings, and:

To ban ends as “improper” for scientific study is not to exempt sociology

from metaphysics, but to vitiate its findings by a crude and uncriticized
metaphysics. (1990, 22)

This view, however, misrepresents both the social constraint and Durkheim’s
positivism. The latter belonged to the rationalistic French tradition that
constructed theories against immediate impressions. In this tradition there
was also a main aim to “get the facts right”, but what was called facts were
not the same as data or observations: they were theoretical concepts that
could give a coherent understanding of the mechanisms producing these
observations (Turner 1995, 5-8). In other words, facts are concepts made
to account for observations. At the end of his article Merton blamed
Durkheim for being too much influenced by Cartesianism (1990, 27), but
this is precisely the root of his positivism. There are probably certain
institutional and historical foundations for these misunderstandings, but
they cannot be addressed in this book.
Another critique raised against Durkheim is that his arguments often
are very polemical, and this is especially present in the Rules. This polem-
ical stance often distorts the depths of his real arguments (Lukes 1990).
This view may, however, underestimate the intellectual environment in
which Durkheim had to present his theories. In order to state his case for
sociology as a science sui generis with a given set of its own phenomena,
Durkheim chose the strategy of para-doxa – to oppose common beliefs
(doxa) (Cormack 1996). Both Suicide and The Division of Labor may be
understood as rhetorical exercises in which the author took extreme cases
of phenomena that were commonly seen to be either individual phenom-
ena or the sum effects of individual phenomena in order to show that they
were indeed collective and thus social. Furthermore, if something is social,
it is not psychological, philosophical, biological or economic. In The Divi-
sion of Labor, for instance, Durkheim claimed that the collective moral
effect of the division of labour – organic solidarity – is much more im-
portant than economic effects (1933, 56-63). It may, of course, be noted
that Durkheim was not consistent, that he made rules of method that he
himself was unable to follow in Suicide, and that he even misrepresented
Judaic law in The Division of Labor in order to make it sound more puni-
tive and less restitutive than it was (Lemert 1994). This might have been a
strange thing to do for someone issued from a long line of rabbis, but
Durkheim associated restitutive law with modern societies. To argue oth-
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 41

erwise would have made the ancient Jews sound more organic and that
might have endangered the main argument in The Division of Labor.

Critical Remarks
To conceive the fundamental social phenomena as a constraint on the
individual members of society is open to many types of critiques. The
most problematic aspect is, of course, the transformation of immanent
processes suddenly to impinge on the individuals from an outside. I have
in Chapter 1 argued that this form of play between immanence and tran-
scendence involves time-reversibility. Weber might have called it a form
of reification (cf. below). A critique more in line with the Latourian and
Deleuzo-Guattarian perspectives promoted in this book is that the tran-
scendence of the conscience collective or social representations is a result
rather than a cause (cf. e.g., Latour 1993b). Societies and social groups on
all levels commonly indulge in ways of telling each other who they are,
why they are there, how they recognize each other and what a member of
the group ought to do in particular situations. This is something that must
be seen as being in constant composition and it cannot be declared to lie
beyond the agents in the group. The phenomenon commonly called peer-
pressure is, of course, a part of this picture. The group or society might, of
course, be highly institutionalized, but that only means that they control
material resources that make it possible for them to make their relations
more repetitive and harder to change. My conclusion is, then, that they can
produce repetitive patterns and these patterns cannot be causes since they
are results. A substitution of cause and effect is, therefore, at the founda-
tion of Durkheimian sociology.
A counter-argument to my view might be that the sudden transfor-
mation of immanent processes into a transcendent force constraining the
individuals is only a manner of speech. I think, however, that it is more
than that: it is a way to sublimate causes to an abstract (and perhaps more
dignified) level without reference to the materiality of the world and in the
same operation they make the world a much simpler place by separating
themselves off from all sorts of bewildering singularities. To the contrary
we need a return of the repressed.

Weber and Meaningful Action

Weber’s sociology distinguishes itself on certain points from Durkheim’s
and Tarde’s. He does, however, construct a similar “doubling up” of
reality, as did Durkheim and his social representations. Weber’s major
42 Chapter Two

claim was that sociology had to be a science of understanding (Verstehen)

and thus part of the human sciences and should not strive for explanatory
laws in the way of the natural sciences. In Economy and Society
(Wirtschaft und Gesellshaft) he laid down definitions of the fundamental
concepts of sociology and it is here I shall focus my attempts to trace his
sociology of understanding. This type of reading, however, goes against
the grain of much Weberian scholarship since the 1970s and 1980s, when
Weber’s works to a higher degree than before was read in continuity as
historical-sociological studies in their own right; his early works was com-
pared with his mature ones; his theoretical development was placed in its
proper historical context, etc. This tradition is also highly critical of the
dominant reading of Weber of the preceding period as an action-theorist
and methodologist, with Economy and Society as a centrepiece (Tenbruck
1989, 150, Scaff 1989, Herva 1989). My reading is, however, somewhat
“lopsided” due to the lopsidedness of the reception of Weber’s theories,
but I shall try to incorporate some of the views of this recent research
tradition.
In the first chapter of Economy and Society Weber seemingly founded
his sociology on action and acting individuals. However, we only have
“action” if the individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour,
and this action is “social”, “insofar as its subjective meaning takes account
of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (1978, 4).
The acting individual attaches this subjective meaning to his behaviour in
either an overt or a covert manner, by omission or acquiescence. Pure re-
active behaviour, to which no subjective meaning is attached, is not social
action, although it is difficult to distinguish the two empirically (4-5).
Weber mentions different types of reactive or constraining relations that
might lead to social action, but are not social by themselves. Stimuli from
the external environment or from one’s own body are devoid of meaning,
but may lead to social action. For instance, he mentioned that some his-
torians hold that, “the flooding of the Dollart in 1277 had historical signifi-
cance as a stimulus to the beginning of certain migrations of considerable
importance” (7). The flooding, in this case, is devoid of meaning, while
the migratory movements were based upon interpretations of the situation
by the actors and were, therefore, social actions. In the same way such
phenomena as the age cycles of the human body, fatigue, habituation, and
memory lack meaning but may lead to meaningful action.
This distinction between reactive behaviour and social action can be
related to Weber’s scientific view, which he adapted to a high degree from
Heinrich Rickert (Herva 1989, 150). In relation to the world the human
mind is presented with a continuum of infinite and particular phenomena
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 43

and there are two ways to elaborate an order out of this continuum. One
way is to make systems of laws and necessary relations that explain the
phenomena in the way of the natural sciences; the other is to select phe-
nomena and relate them to values in the way of the cultural sciences (Aron
1967, 189-190). It is this value-reference (Wertbeziehung) that is the basis
for the subjective meaning in question. This view does not mean that re-
active behaviour is an unimportant part of human behaviour, but it is of
another order than social action since it is not related to any values. Using
a Weberian idiom, we may view Durkheim’s notion of social constraint as
being devoid of meaning since it is only purely reactive behaviour,9 but
the emotional investments in social institutions that it might entail (cf.
above) can be meaningful. In this way the fundamental understanding of
what sociology was supposed to be changed at the Franco-German border.
The distinction between external explanation and internal understand-
ing refers back to the state of the intellectual field in Germany in Weber’s
time. During the nineteenth century German universities were the most in-
fluential in Europe and the philological and historical sciences had set the
standards of good scholarship. At the centre of the German universities’
social mission was the educational concept of Bildung, which involved the
cultivation of the individual potentialities of each human being, and this
ideal stood in stark contrast to the training of someone for practical tasks
in society. The state-employed and university-educated Bildungsburger-
tum stood apart from the business-related bourgeoisie. The ideal of indi-
vidual Bildung was very much connected to German Romanticism and
idealistic philosophy. From around 1880 this tradition found itself in crisis
owing to the encroachment of the “realistic” subjects of the natural sci-
ences and technical education. The breakthrough of party politics in the
same period enhanced the disenchantment of the university-educated with
the direction of how society developed itself. This crisis was also identi-
fied as the position of positivism within the historical sciences themselves.
Furthermore there was an intellectual crisis arising from doubts about the
validity of historical knowledge. This was the so-called “problem of his-
toricism”: historical studies can help us learn about the world views preva-
lent in other historical periods, but what about our own values and world
views? Do they depend as much on their time as does the ones of the past?
This question opened the vertiginous problem of historical relativism
(Ringer 1969). The intellectual historian Fritz Ringer has argued that
Weber’s sociology grew out of an attempt to renew the German tradition
of historical science and not to reject the ways of the world as did many of
his colleagues (Ringer 2000).
44 Chapter Two

The foundation of Weber’s sociology of understanding or compre-

hension10 is that humans confer meaning and significance onto their own
and others’ actions. Weber’s definition of social relations is important in
this respect. Taken in isolation, we can see that it denotes the behaviour of
a plurality of actors “insofar as, in its meaningful content, the action of
each takes account of that of others and is oriented in these terms” (1978,
26). This sentence is followed by a formulation that a social relation, “thus
consists entirely and exclusively in the existence of a probability that there
will be a meaningful course of social action” (26-27). This sentence intro-
duces an important concept in Weber’s social theory: probability or likeli-
hood. When something has likely happened under certain circumstances in
the past, one can assume that it could happen under similar circumstances
in the future. This assumption makes room for calculations and orien-
tations of an actor’s behaviour in relation to other actors. The religious
scholar Arnold Eisen and the sociologist Dennis Wrong have in particular
pointed to the importance of this notion in Weber’s theory, although he
uses Chance, Wahrscheinlichkeit and numerous other expressions to de-
scribe it. Eisen identified two main meanings of Chance in Weber’s
writing, either as likelihood or, “in the sense of ‘opportunity’, or ‘prospect’
or ‘advantage’” (1979, 210). Calculating one’s prospects in relation to
others is essential in order to participate actively in the social world. From
this viewpoint Weber conceived society as, “essentially a set of broadly
warranted predictions made by its members about one another’s behavior”
(Wrong 1970, 25). For Weber, “an individual living in a social world must
be ever calculating” (Eisen 1979, 210), and it is through probability that
stability is achieved in social relations.
One basis for stability through probability is the repetition of actions in
the form of “usage” (Brauch) or in the form of more stable “custom”
(Sitte), which not only refers to past observations but also to their likely
occurrence in the future in a certain group. This idea is similar to an instru-
mental (zweckrational) orientation, but in this case the actors are oriented
towards identical expectations that make their actions predictable (Weber
1978, 29-30). Stability is thus achieved through repetition and mutual ex-
pectations and, furthermore, these repetitions are endowed with meaning
owing to their predictability. An even higher degree of stability is achiev-
ed, Weber believed, when social actions – especially those that involve so-
cial relations – may be guided by the belief in the existence of a legitimate
order: “The probability that action will actually be so governed will be
called the ‘validity’ (Geltung) of the order in question” (31). Individuals
orient their actions according to a legitimate order, although their personal
motives may vary for doing so, for even the thief acknowledges the legiti-
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 45

macy of the law by acting surreptitiously. Different systems of orders may

also exist at the same time in a social group. By fighting a duel, an actor
may acknowledge both a code of honour and the law forbidding them. He
can do this by keeping the duel secret or by handing himself in to the
police (31-33). A legitimate order may be based upon either a subjective
guarantee of an affectual, value-rational or religious kind or, on the other
hand, upon an external sanction. Among the latter type, Weber distin-
guished between convention and law, and these are, as opposed to the
subjective ones, defined by probability. Law, he claimed, is externally
guaranteed by “the probabilities that physical or psychological coercion
will be applied by a staff of people in order to bring about compliance or
avenge violation” (34; emphasis in orig.). What is interesting is that while
law and convention can become objects of calculation, this is not the case
with the affectual or other subjective guarantees of order.
Weber found a similar divide between the external and internal (or sub-
jective) in what he called the four main orientations in social action: the
instrumentally rational (zweckrational), the value-rational (wertrational),
the affectual and the traditional. While instrumentally rational action uses
objects and humans in the context as means to reach an end, value-rational
action wants to further some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of
behaviour independently of its prospects of success. Affectual action is
determined by the actor’s emotional states, and traditional action is de-
termined by ingrained habituation shading into reactive behaviour (1978,
24-26). This binary divide between what Weber called the rational and ir-
rational types of social action11 seems mainly to be a distinction between
what can most easily be related to something in the external environment
of the actor and what has to be related to an internal environment. The ra-
tional types of action are more understandable because they are more
calculable. When actors follow their goals or their values, their actions are
easy to predict. This is not the case with “an uncontrolled reaction to some
exceptional stimulus” (25), which is Weber’s definition of affectual action.
But this stimulus can take a consciously directed course and might become
value-rational.

The Observer
So far I have emphasized that meanings are established, but without
any considerations of how they are established. Now and then Weber re-
fers to “the observer” as someone who is somehow able to take the multi-
tude of different meanings that we attach to our actions and to formulate
them into a comprehensive interpretation. The place and role of the ob-
46 Chapter Two

server is, however, not much discussed in Economy and Society. If the
world is a continuum of actions and meanings, the activity of the observer
(the social scientist) who interprets this continuum will be an important
concern. The problem stated by Weber is the following: how can the ob-
server be sure of the correctness of any given interpretation? Many human
experiences can be completely hermetical and a full understanding cannot
be established, and yet the ability to perform similar actions cannot be a
requisite to understanding action: “one need not have been Caesar in order
to understand Caesar” (Weber 1978, 5).
Weber distinguished between two types of understanding. The first one
is to understand by direct observation. It is in this context that he pre-
sented an example we have discussed in Chapter 1: we understand 2 · 2 =
4 when we see it or hear it read out loud:

We can understand in a similar observational way the action of a wood-

cutter or of somebody who reaches for the knob to shut a door or who aims
a gun at an animal. (1978, 8)

This is the rational observational understanding of actions. The second

form of understanding is explanatory understanding. Here we presuppose
more information about the situation in order to understand the motivation
of an actor for doing what he or she does. With the woodcutter we may
learn that he is:

working for a wage or is chopping a supply of firewood for his own use or
possibly is doing it for recreation. But he might also be working off a fit of
rage, an irrational case. (8-9)

A motivational analysis of action, therefore, includes more information

about the context in which the action takes place than direct observation.
This context Weber called the complex of meaning in which an under-
standable action belongs, and it is in relation to this complex that an action
can be said to have an intended meaning. The observer cannot rely on the
actors’ consciously stated motives, because the real motives may be re-
pressed and unclear to the actor herself or himself. Furthermore, processes
and actions that for the observer seem similar may fit into various com-
plexes of meaning. Often conflicting motives are present and only the
actual outcome of a conflict can give a solid basis for judgement (9-10). If
not even the actors can know the real motives of their actions, then the
status of the observer must be particularly important.
This issue is evident when it comes to whether an observer has ade-
quate grounds for his or her interpretation of the motive of an action. The
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 47

goal is to reach an interpretation that is “subjectively adequate” or “ade-

quate on the level of meaning”, and this is reached when we can link a
course of action to what we recognize as a “typical” complex of meaning
(Weber 1978, 11). When we have to take account of the action of a plural-
ity of actors in social relationships, the meaning will not be the same for
all actors and the observer will have to formulate an average or a theoreti-
cally constructed ideal type. In many ways the ideal typical meaning is im-
posed as characteristic of a particular relationship, but Weber warned
against a reification of such entities (27). We cannot, for instance, continue
to talk about a state if its claim to a monopoly of legitimate violence with-
in a given geographical area is neither heeded nor enforceable.
It is important to stress at this point that “motive”, “intention”,
“subjective meaning” and other similar individualizing concepts should
not be understood in a psychological way as the subjectively held motive
of the actor in the given situation,12 a view that Weber’s contemporaries
Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel both held. Instead, Weber insisted
that the interpretation by the observer establishes the meaning, and this
meaning is a complex that is verifiable by others (Herva 1989). Weber,
however, was ambiguous on this point, and some of the early translations
of Economy and Society may also have contributed to a psychological bias
in many interpretations (Munch 1975, Graber 1975).13 Nonetheless, he
wanted to found his sociology on action and a unit act, but the weight
given to the observer entails that the meaning of action has a virtual
existence before the action takes place. The observer and the actor must
wholly or partially share some sort of common universe of meaning. This
is evident if we do not take this universe for granted, but introduce a
reflexive moment. The level of shared notions is more discernable in direct
observation than in explanatory understanding, because the ability to take
2 · 2 = 4 as self-evident presupposes a society where everybody has
learned this at school. Similarly, to understand what is meant by reaching
for a doorknob presupposes knowledge about what doorknobs are for.14
Rational actions are also more directly observed and understood because
in Western societies people commonly sell to the highest bidder or in other
ways act to increase their wealth or to gain some advantage. In other
words, for instrumental action to be self-evident it must take place in a
society where instrumental actions are commonplace. When it comes to
affective actions, however, we have to introduce some discourse or
empathic understanding in order to make them meaningful. All our efforts
as observers must, in all cases, be directed towards establishing sufficient
knowledge in order to find the relevant complex of meaning under which
we can subsume the particular action. The task of the sociologist in this
48 Chapter Two

case is similar to the judge, but the difference lies in that the judge is
bound by the rules of law while the sociologist can choose either to
conform to the concepts offered by the sociological tradition or to forge
new ones.

The Meaning of Meaning

An important question is nevertheless what meaning means. Both
Weber and his commentators take the meaning of meaning for granted but
this is not a tenable position. What seems clear from Weber’s own way of
describing his conception is that there is a split between the meaning stated
by the observer and that of the agents although they share a common field
of meanings. The agents go about their business of day-to-day life; they
have their own motives and affects connected to what they do. Their
actions have a value-reference and are consequently social. The observer’s
meaning is something quite different and it is supposed to summarize
many different independent motives. What I shall do in the following is to
explicate Weber’s notion of meaning or complex of meaning in relation to
semiotics. From this perspective I shall argue that the locally formulated
motives can be compared to the overall and synoptic meanings stated by
the observer. The reason why a semiotic perspective can help us in this
context is that the operations made by the observer form a discourse on
something he or she experiences: it is summarized in statements. This
operation of re-presentation is exactly the operation made more generally
by signs. I believe that the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1839 –
1914) triadic theory of the sign may help us to make the semiotic turn that
Weber never made. Peirce defined the sign as follows:

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for

something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is,
creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more de-
veloped sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first
sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not
in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes
called the ground of the representamen. (Peirce 1960, 2.228; emphasis in
orig.)15

To have the capacity of becoming an interpretant the sign formulated in

the mind must have the ability to re-present what is observed. In the same
way as Weber, this theory of the sign postulates the need of a mind capa-
ble of interpreting the sign, which is the same as producing the interpret-
ant, which is another sign. Peirce’s formulations thus depend on a “model
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 49

of consciousness”, which is also underlying the sociological theories dis-

cussed in this chapter. However, Peirce’s model of the sign is not limited
to linguistic signs, but can be applied to all entities which can be represent-
amina: a puff of smoke is a sign of fire; a light signal at a crossroads indi-
cates when to drive or not; a blushing face might signify shyness; a black
ribbon marks sorrow, etc. The representamen and the interpretant both re-
late to the object, but in Weber’s case the relation between representamen
and object is what Peirce called indexical (cf. Pharies 1985, 39-40). This
means that the social action as the object of Weber’s observer is closely
connected to the quality of being observable and hence of being a repre-
sentamen. This means that object and representamen are identical in this
case. Through the observer the object is related to the interpretant, but the
interpretant is just another sign that may have its own interpretant, and so
on ad infinitum (Peirce 1960, 2.92). Signification is thus produced by a
chain of signs defining each other reciprocally and, therefore, it must be-
long to a more general discourse in society and not only a consciousness.
We may understand the refinement of meaning presupposed by Weber as
an exchange of one interpretant for another, and this exchange of signs is
in this case a linguistic one. The main task of the Weberian observer is to
produce a discourse on what he or she observes.
In order to develop the understanding of Weber’s sociological theory
and to make a bridge to a Deleuzo-Guattarian critique of this form of so-
ciology, I shall in the following develop further the topic of sociology and
semiotics by going a bit more into detail in semiotic theory. One of the
most influential theories in semiotics in the twentieth century was formu-
lated by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 – 1913), who worked in the same
historical period as Peirce, but they did not know of each other’s work.
Saussure’s model of the sign was formulated as a way to study language as
a system and it is as a result less general than Peirce’s.16 In Saussure’s
view, a sign is formulated as a simultaneous relation between a “sound
pattern” (called a signifier) and a concept (called a signified). Only togeth-
er do they form a sign. This relationship between sound pattern and con-
cept is arbitrary in his view (1959, 65-70). Instead of one sign referring to
another sign referring to an object, as in Peirce’s model, the sign is unified
by its two composite parts. Furthermore, Saussure held that language as a
system (langue) could be studied as a synchronous social phenomenon
separated from actual speech (parole) (71-78, 87-91). Language was for
him a phenomenon constraining the members of a language-group – a
view much in tune with Durkheim’s sociology. French speakers in a given
historical period could not avoid using the given vocabulary and con-
comitant concepts when speaking to others in French. However, the most
50 Chapter Two

controversial part of Saussure’s model of the sign is the signified, because

it cannot be directly observed. It can only be made explicit by another
signifier which can only be made explicit by another signifier and so on.
Thus, we end up in an infinite regress in the same way as in the case of
Peirce’s interpretant.
Saussure’s model of the sign had a great impact on the French post-war
intellectual movement that falls under the category of “structuralism”,
which included figures like the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908
– 2009), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981), the literary
scholar Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) and the linguist Algirdas Julien
Greimas (1917 – 1992). Within the framework of structuralism the linguist
Émile Benveniste (1902 – 1976) tried to make a sort of synthesis between
the Peircean and the Saussurean theories of signs and I shall go into some
detail on this point, because he introduced some concepts that was sub-
sequently applied by Deleuze and Guattari in their philosophy.
One of the consequences Benveniste drew from Peirce’s theory was
that social semiotics must involve multiple sign-systems and that language
was only one of these. If there are many different sign systems they must
all have the ability to signify – a capacity he called signifiance (1974, 45,
51-53). Furthermore, if signs are held to belong to different systems, it
must be impossible to make direct conversions between them. This is cal-
led the principle of non-redundancy between semiotic systems. The na-
tional signs of red, blue and white colours in a flag cannot be converted
into a jingoist speech, even though a flag might be blowing in the wind at
a performance of such a speech. One cannot say the same things in writing
as in music. Sign languages and Braille can, however be converted into
writing and do not form separate sign-systems from alphabetic writing.
Sign languages and Braille are then said to be redundant in relation to
writing. Although the relationship between semiotic systems is non-
redundant, they can be interpreted within another system which is in this
regard an interpretant system: it has the ability of interpretance, in
Benveniste’s words, and for social signs language is an universal inter-
pretant (53-54, 61-62). This means that the signs of societies can be inter-
preted by language and this capacity is due to what Benveniste called the
double signifiance of language: it has both the ability to form particular
signs and to form discourse. This unique quality makes it possible for
language to interpret and explain itself (63-64). The conceptual pair of
signifiance and interpretance forms the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of the interpretative or signifying regime of signs (1987, ch.5) and
it will be presented in more detail below. It is important to note that the
conceptual couple of signifiance and interpretance does not presuppose
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 51

any appeal to a subject doing the interpretation or making the signs. Ac-
cordingly, it does not presuppose what I have called the communicational
model in its treatment of signs and language.
Returning to Weber we might say that the observed social action has
the ability to signify and the formulated complexes of meaning serve as
interpretants for this action. He often formulated a complex of meaning as
an ideal type and he gave us in his works ideal types of power, legitimacy,
bureaucracy, the economy of antiquity, the development of cities in the
middle ages, etc. (Weber 1978, 1992). Below I shall in further detail
discuss this act of giving interpretations to everything and what it does to
the social world.

The Signifying Regime of Signs

Although the sociologies of Durkheim and Weber are quite different,
they both conform to a kind of “model of consciousness”: the latent struc-
ture of the social world is grasped in the mind of a subject. In Weber’s ap-
proach this is made explicit by the comprehensive interpretations made by
the observer, while in Durkheim’s case the level of the social has the same
task. In some of his texts the social can be described as a mind inflated to
the level of the society (cf. Breslau 2000, 290-291), while in others it is
described as being composed of social institutions or identified by legis-
lation and moral obligations of all kinds. Durkheim also presupposed the
need for a sociologist to identify the social and how it works. A common
denominator for the two classic figures is that the complexes of meaning
and the collective social phenomena, respectively, constitute their main
interest, while the singular entities of the social world are raw obser-
vational data or merely effects of the social constraint. This is opposed to
Deleuze and Guattari’s stance, which presupposes a continual presence of
the pre-individual singularities and the extent of order found in the social
world is not something latent in it, but a consequence of orders. There are
mechanisms in each society producing order and the sociologist becomes
part of such a powerful mechanism when she only is interested in de-
scribing this order.
Durkheim and Weber’s way of analysing the social world, which I so
far have identified with a Grand Hermeneutic or a play between appear-
ances and reality, conforms to what Deleuze and Guattari have called the
signifying regime of signs. This is part of a conceptual figure they called
the despotic regime in which the various flows of bodies or signs can
somehow be referred to a centre. The distinctive mark of the signifying
regime of signs is that everything has a meaning and this is so both in the
52 Chapter Two

case of Weber and Durkheim. In Weber a particular meaningful act can be

referred to a common complex of meaning and in Durkheim an individual
consciousness can be identified as a somewhat divergent version of a
common social representation (cf. 2001, 17). Thus in both cases, every-
thing can be referred to a fixed point from which everything in the social
world can be ordered. We might say that both Durkheim and Weber
“think” like a state and this type of thinking involves, first of all, arresting
movement and then describing order. This involves a certain “locking in”
of signification within a specific domain and it might form what is called a
dominant signifier.
It is important to note that the signifying regime of signs is only one of
several regimes of signs and Deleuze and Guattari define this concept in
this way:

We call any specific formalization of expression a regime of signs, at least

when the expression is linguistic. A regime of signs constitutes a semiotic
system. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 111)

The signifying regime describes the same situation as the one we have
seen in connection with Peirce and Weber: “every sign refers to another
sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
112), and these signs form circles with the signs that mutually define each
other. As we have seen with Weber, the actions of the world has the ability
to signify; it has signifiance in Benveniste’s terms (1974, 61-62). Further-
more, we need the sociologist as an observer to systematize and re-centre
the observations. Thus a secondary mechanism is necessary – an interpre-
tative capacity or what Benveniste called interpretance (54). In Deleuze
and Guattari’s interpretation the signs constituting the chain can be rela-
tively dispersed and may form different circles of signifying signs, but
they need reinterpretations now and then in order not to ebb away through
entropy (1987, 113-117). Political leaders, for example, reinterpret the
fundamental meanings of belonging to the same nation, economic leaders
the imperatives of the marketplace, party leaders the mission of the oppo-
sition, business executives the goals for the next quarter, professors what
is expected of students this term. The prominence of mass media in our
time produces interpretations upon reinterpretations, thus ensuring the
abundance of new ways of understanding our various conditions and
thence a return to the same.
In the cases of Durkheim and Weber the trained sociologist or other
specialist observers must take up this interpretative function. In
Durkheim’s case the social representations comprise the source of expla-
nations to the bewildering actions and mental states of the multitude, while
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 53

in Weber many of the same actions (but not all) must somehow be sub-
sumed under a relevant complex of meaning. Since the early twentieth
century, sociologists and other social scientists have provided us with
interpretations and reinterpretations and this remains the state of the art.
Although the signifying regime may be said to dominate a way of
writing, concrete texts usually mix different types of semiotics and do not
come in a pure form. Deleuze and Guattari have also identified what they
called the passional or the subjective regime of signs, which they compare
with the signifying one. The passional regime,

is defined by a decisive external occurrence, by a relation with the outside

that is expressed more as an emotion than an idea, and more as effort or
action than imagination. (1987, 120)

It involves a rupture with the signifying regime, marked by a striving to-

wards a linear and temporal succession of finite proceedings, rather than
by the circular repetitions of the signifying regime. The passional regime
may be an event that opens up for something new and which does not have
a given meaning from the start. It can perhaps be given a meaning later on
when it has run its course or it may be open to conflicting interpretations.
In the Old Testament, Deleuze and Guattari have noted these two regimes
in the contrast between the passion of the prophets and the delimiting
signifying regimes of the empires or the kingdoms. The interpreter in this
context is the priest of the temple. The prophet does not interpret but is
driven by his direct relationship with God and the meanings of the actions
of the prophet is only given long after the fact when they are taken up by
theology (122-124). But they first identified the nature of these two
regimes of signs in a reading of certain works in psychiatry from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially those of Joseph
Capgras (1873 – 1950) and Paul Serieux (1864 – 1947), on the one hand,
and Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872 – 1934), on the other (119-121,
cf. also Deleuze 2003a).
Clérambault made the clearest distinction between a passional delirium
and an interpretative delirium among psychiatric patients. He is primarily
known for the description of erotomania – a condition whereby a person is
convinced that someone, usually above his or her own station in life, is in
love with him or her – as a version of the passional delirium. Clérambault
cited, for instance, the case of Léa-Anna who was convinced that the
British King George V was in love with her. She went many times to
London to establish contact with him and spent thousands of francs for
travelling across the Channel (1942, 323-330). Clérambault identified
three stages through which the illness usually passes. There is first a stage
54 Chapter Two

of hope when the patient is optimistic about the future of the relationship
with the object of the passion; the object could never be happy without
him or her. When the efforts are frustrated, there is a stage of disappoint-
ment, and lastly a stage of grudges against the object. In this last stage the
unrequited “lover” might direct violence against the object or against
someone from his or her entourage (e.g., spouse, lover). Nevertheless, dur-
ing the later stages, there is still a subconscious hope that the situation
might change to the desired one (337-339). Although there might be ideas
of persecution in the later stages of the illness, Clérambault held that the
classic paranoiac is of the interpretative kind.17
As an example of the interpretative type, we may mention the case
from the 1890s and early 1900s of Madame X cited by Serieux and
Capgras. She had entered into a marriage of convenience at the age of 20
with a functionary, but the marriage was not a happy one. After a while
she began to suspect that her husband was having affairs and she “recog-
nized” his mistresses among strangers on the street. Gradually her accu-
sations became more serious, like accusing her husband of having sex with
their daughter, being a homosexual, trying to get rid of her in order to get
involved intimately with a young male friend, etc. Then her mother-in-law
and her husband allegedly wanted to dispose of her by persecuting her in
the streets in order to provoke an accident; they wanted to drive her to her
wits’ end to provoke a suicide; the slightest mention out of the ordinary
was an ironic comment on their intentions. During a vacation in Italy she
expected to be pushed into the crater of Vesuvius or off some other cliff.
She silently resigned herself to the prospect of imminent death during their
stay, but meticulously avoided coming between her husband and an abyss.
When she was hospitalized for the first time, she claimed that a recently
hired nurse (who clearly must have been in the employ of her husband)
had tried to strangle her in bed; letters she received at the asylum
contained hidden malignant messages, etc., etc. (1909, 11-15). The case-
story goes on and on with different twists and turns on the topic of her
husband’s infidelities, his wish to get rid of her and, later, his alleged
attempts to rob her of her inherited fortune (16-25).
Clérambault held that interpretative delirium could be identified by the
distrust shown by the patients towards people around them. In the case of
Madame X, every interpretation she made of her situation was linked to
her distrust of her husband and mother-in-law. She constantly produced
new and extended ways in which they persecuted her, and her world-view
revolved around this topic. The situation of the paranoiac and the anguish
in which he or she lives influence the whole personality, but it is a resign-
ed and passive existence. While the interpretative delirious person lives in
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 55

a state of expectation, the passional one lives in a state of striving. In con-

trast to the paranoiac, the passional delirious person attempts to realize the
passion through different forms of activities and is first of all marked by
self-pride (orgueil), hope and desire – although disgust may enter during
the later phases of the illness. An erotomaniac may, nevertheless, have the
constant hope for a sexual fulfilment of the passion. While the patient’s
affective attachment to the object of the passion can often be easily located
to a particular time and place, the ideas of persecution of the paranoiac has
emerged gradually and cannot be dated. Many paranoiacs are oriented
towards the past, while passionals are oriented towards the future and their
hope of achievement. Another important distinguishing feature, according
to Clérambault, is that the passional type seems quite normal except when
it comes to the source of the passion, while the whole world of the para-
noiac is marked by his or her interpretations (1942, 337-346). The ways
that those affected by the two types of delirium react to treatment are also
very different. A suppression of the patient’s passion makes the whole
passion wane, although a new passion may arise some time later. But if
you suppress some of a paranoiac’s most important notions, the delirium
tends to reproduce itself in new ways:

Suppress in an interpreter the conception you find as being the most im-
portant, suppress them in a great number and you have punctured a net-
work (réseau), but you have probably not broken the chains. The network
will persist without limits and the stitches in the mesh will remake them-
selves. (343; my trans.)

If the semiotic regime of the interpretative delirium corresponds to that

of sociology, it is no wonder that Latour might despair over the eternal re-
turn to the same that is common in these fields (2005). In the same way as
the paranoiac, the world signifies something already given, and all singular
events may be incorporated into the web of signification. In a way, the so-
cial scientist knows the answer to any study before the inquiry even starts.
Neither the passional regime of signs nor the passional delirium, as a spe-
cific case, signifies anything, but is concentrated around what Clérambault
called a postulate guiding the strivings of the passional. This postulate is a
sort of contractual arrangement (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 135), with the
object of love for the erotomaniac, with God for the prophet, but most of
all the passional regime of signs is the main semiotic regime of the sub-
jects formed under capitalism (Deleuze 2003a, 15-16). A hallmark of capi-
talism is primarily the activities and endeavours to achieve certain goals,
which leads to new endeavours to achieve even more goals and so on. This
is a development along a line of events of subjects guiding themselves by
56 Chapter Two

their postulate and not a circular movement returning to the same, as in the
case of the signifying regime.
An objection to my analyses so far may be that this is exactly what
Weber argued in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1992), and so it is. What Weber tried to show in this book was the elec-
tive affinity between early capitalism and Protestantism. The original capi-
talist spirit was a passion in the same way as the religious fervour of the
believer and they mutually reinforced each other (1992). In Richard
Sennett’s words the Protestant tradesman of the seventeenth century was a
“driven man” (1998, 105), a restless new character in society. I do not
think Weber’s book in any way invalidates my view that his sociology
conforms to model of the signifying regime of signs, but it shows that con-
crete texts come in a mixture of different signifying regimes. Furthermore,
concrete empirical assemblages mix them too. The passional regime is the
regime within which agents become subjects – or what is called subjectifi-
cation. Michel Foucault forged this concept in order to study the way
human beings are defined by their external circumstances, but then make
these circumstances into a relation to themselves and thereby turn into
active subjects (1982, 1990, 57-65). On the one hand, assemblages place
humans in specific positions to each other and in that way ascribe signi-
fication to them. On the other, they often assume a specific form of subjec-
tification, for instance, in the form of the “capitalist spirit” of the trading
company that Weber describes. Similarly, when Durkheim described (cf.
above) how citizens are not only oppressed by social institutions, but also
begin to love and cherish them, he expressed the same kind of process: the
citizens make a subjective investment in them. By directing their love to-
wards these institutions they do a kind of work, but it is a work on their
own psyches. The advantage of the concept of subjectification is that it de-
pends on specific circumstances. Unlike traditional forms of sociology, it
does not start with predefined actors that are constant over time because
the constitution of this acting subject is the main question. I shall return to
this topic in later chapters.

Conclusion
I have in this chapter tried to formulate a critique of two of the
“founding fathers” of sociology, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. My
main argument is that their theories are reformulated idealist philosophies
and “double up” reality in a way analogous to the perception of the world
by a consciousness. This characteristic is most clear in Weber’s case,
where the observer of action is supposed to link what is observed to some
 Breaking the Spell: Weber and Durkheim 57

adequate complex of meaning – in other words to an ordered perception.

Durkheim, for his part, postulated a level of collective representations
coercing the thoughts and actions of individuals. A common trait between
the two classics is that the complex of meaning or the collective represen-
tation takes over and remains the important aspect of the social world.
Furthermore, the way Durkheim and Weber formulated their theories con-
forms to what Deleuze and Guattari have called the despotic or signifying
regime of signs. This is a way signification is produced in connection with
the state, with its functionaries interpreting the meaning of the world for
the populace. While traditionally these interpreters might be the priest, in
contemporary society such functions may lie with politicians, the media or
even the social scientist. An important trait of this regime is the formu-
lation of meaning through one sign signifying another in infinite circles
around a centre. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ”interpretative
delirium” or paranoia in which the victim’s distrust of the world around
her leads to different interpretations, but all circulating around the way she
is persecuted.
The signifying regime of signs is conservative and calls the multi-
plicities of the world to order, and this is also one of the central functions
of the sociology in this tradition: ordering the social world into neat cate-
gories. Deleuze and Guattari prefer what they call the passional regime of
signs whereby the agents break free of the dominant significations and
follow a straight line of flight. Even though this line of flight towards a
goal might lead to a new reterritorialization and the establishment of a new
dominant signifier, it is preferable to the incessant interpretations locked
within a given regime of signification.
We have seen so far the mapping of the discursive machinery of the
classical contributions of Durkheim and Weber, but how do they influence
the works of their inheritors within current social sciences? This is the
topic of the next chapter, and, as we shall see, the “doubling up” of the
world and the signifying regime of signs is reproduced among some of
their inheritors, although in different forms.
 CHAPTER THREE

TWO SYNTHESES

This chapter follows the lead from Durkheim and Weber and analyses
how the two “models” received from them – the social constraint and a
way of making interpretations of social action, respectively – have been
synthesized in the theories of some central figures in contemporary sociol-
ogy. In this context I concentrate on two of them: Berger and Luckmann’s
The Social Construction of Reality and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
From Berger and Luckmann there is a line going to studies of all things
“socially constructed” – including to some degree science studies and
Latour’s work as well. The examination of Bourdieu’s work concentrates
on his concept of social field as a sort of site where the Durkheim-Weber
connection can be made clearer. The mode of inquiry I called a Grand
Hermeneutic in Chapter 1 (cf. Figure 1.1) with its interplay between latent
appearances and a reality is reproduced with these authors, but, as it
seems, in even stronger degrees than in Durkheim and Weber. The
ascription of meaning to all sorts of social action is very much at the
forefront (cf. Thesis 3). In the previous chapter I argued that the theories
of Weber and Durkheim both presume a kind of “model of conscious-
ness”. In Weber’s case this happens through the understanding observer
and in Durkheim’s case by an inflation of social representations to the
level of society. In the latter case society turns into a giant mind. Neither
Berger and Luckmann nor Bourdieu can as easily be associated with this
kind of idealist philosophy since they introduce a dialectical way of think-
ing to their analyses. They do, however, produce other theoretical prob-
lems related to concepts of legitimacy and the lack of autonomous treat-
ment of language. In Bourdieu’s case I also argue that his way of concep-
tualizing the social world conforms to what I have called the signifying
regime of signs in the previous chapter.

First Synthesis - Berger and Luckmann

Peter Berger (b. 1929) and Thomas Luckmann’s (b. 1927) The Social
Construction of Reality is a book which has been widely read and com-
 Two Syntheses 59

mented on since it was first published in 1966. It is considered a classic in

contemporary social sciences and one of the foundational texts of social
constructivism as a sort of intellectual movement born in the shadow of
functionalist theories and quantitative surveys. I agree with the philoso-
pher Ian Hacking that, “the idea of social construction has been wonder-
fully liberating” (1999, 2)18 because it makes phenomena previously seen
as inevitable and fixed into contingencies. Some of the immediate re-
actions to Berger and Luckmann’s book were of the same kind. David
Martin wrote in a review that:

Like Homans, Berger and Luckmann are for “bringing men back in”. This
requires an investigation of what men “know” about their socially shared
universes rather than an exposition of impersonal functional imperatives.
(1968, 340)

Much of the force the arguments of Berger and Luckmann have attained is
probably due to the reaction of the 1960s against the prevalent view of
society as a natural and naturalized entity apart from us and as something
to be studied “out there”. This latter “sin” involved both Parsons’ function-
alism and the empiricism of Paul Lazarsfeld (1901 – 1976). The view that
society was somehow constructed gave an enormous potential to criticize
established social theories and society itself. If society is a construct of
social processes, then another society could be constructed by other proc-
esses. The book fanned the eagerness for both social change and change in
the social sciences. However, the general effect of social constructivism is
not the topic in this chapter, but the particular version of it propounded by
Berger and Luckmann.
It is perhaps a bit unfair to judge their work only on the basis of one
book. Coming from Germany and Austria, respectively, Berger’s and
Luckmann’s careers took them in different directions, with Berger to uni-
versity posts in the United States and Luckmann to the University of
Constance in Germany. They have separately written many books, mainly
on topics within the field of the sociology of religion. However, their main
impact on sociological debate and on coming generations of social scien-
tists has been through The Social Construction of Reality. This is the rea-
son why I concentrate on this book here.
There is a long prehistory to the concept of social construction in the
writings of, among others, Marx and Hegel. Berger and Luckmann found
major inspiration in the work of Alfred Schütz (1899 – 1959) and his
phenomenology and in Karl Mannheim (1893 – 1947) and his sociology of
knowledge. I shall, however, in this chapter emphasize the reformulations
they made of Durkheim and Weber’s theories. In Berger and Luckmann’s
60 Chapter Three

view Durkheim and Weber did not contradict each other, even though, as
we have seen, the first took the collective as his starting point while the
other took individual action. This lack of contradiction is due to the dual
character of society of being both real and subjective:

Our view of the nature of social reality is greatly indebted to Durkheim and
his school in French sociology, though we have modified Durkheimian
theory of society by the introduction of a dialectical perspective derived
from Marx and an emphasis on the constitution of social reality through
subjective meaning derived from Weber. (Berger and Luckmann 1984, 28-
29)

By reality they understood a “quality appertaining to phenomena that we

recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot
‘wish them away’)” (13). This reality is the end product of the process of
construction and the discipline that studies this process is the sociology of
knowledge. Knowledge is defined as the “certainty that phenomena are
real and that they possess specific characteristics” (13). The main concern
of this sociology of knowledge is how realities are taken to be known in
human societies:

It is our contention, then, that the sociology of knowledge must concern

itself with whatever passes for “knowledge” in a society, regardless of the
ultimate validity or invalidity (by whatever criteria) of such knowledge
(15).

Witchcraft or astrology is thus a valid form of knowledge in societies in

which it is held to pass as knowledge. This amounts to a reformulation of
Durkheim’s statement that “there are no false religions” (2001, 4) and, as
we shall see in Chapter 5, Berger and Luckmann’s view of knowledge was
taken up in David Bloor’s principle of symmetry in the study of scientific
controversies. Not only should the knowledge produced by the historical
winners be taken seriously, but also that of historical losers, although this
alternative knowledge would have given a completely different “nature”
from the one we have ended up with (1976).
What interests me in this context is that knowledge enters into the
realities of societies by being developed, transmitted and maintained in
social institutions (Berger and Luckmann 1984, 15). This formulation is
quite parallel to Durkheim’s, which regarded social representations as a
specific type of social phenomena maintained by the collectivity. Like
Berger and Luckmann, Durkheim held that these representations were
made by the collectivity itself, but on this point they diverge from the
 Two Syntheses 61

Durkheimian path by basing this knowledge on interactions in everyday

life. In formulating his concept of social representations, Durkheim both
criticized and reformulated Kant’s apriorism. According to Kant we are
born with certain categories (space, time, causation, etc.) which we use to
understand our empirical world. Durkheim held that these categories were
necessary, but they could not be derived from the psychic nature of the in-
dividual. Instead they were formed by the collectivity and held as col-
lective representations: “They depend on the way this collectivity is con-
stituted and organized, on its morphology, its religious, moral, and eco-
nomic institutions, and so on” (2001, 17). The individual only translates
states of the collectivity, and this amounts to an expansion of the Kantian
cogito to a collective mind. With Berger and Luckmann this collective
mind is supplanted by the common-sense knowledge of everyday life:
“Common-sense knowledge is the knowledge I share with others in the
normal, self-evident routines of everyday life” (Berger and Luckmann
1984, 37). This is the form of knowledge that, according to Durkheim, “…
encourages acceptance without previous examination” (2001, 18), but the
difference is that Durkheim was talking about the knowledge instituted by
the collectivity on a level that is transcendent to the individuals. While
Durkheim connected individual consciousnesses to this level, Berger and
Luckmann connected them to immanent practices of everyday life. In a
way we might say that Berger and Luckmann turns Durkheim’s social
constraint around and grounds it in a more immediate level.
In Berger and Luckmann, knowledge is founded in everyday life be-
cause reality is founded in it. This is the reality par excellence that individ-
uals refer to, and it is constituted by an order of objects “that have been
designated as objects before my appearance on the scene” (1984, 35;
emphasis in orig.). This reality of everyday life is an intersubjective world
shared with others. It is through this world that the individual tries prag-
matically to come to terms with the world around her, although she regu-
larly moves between multiple realities. Such moves between realities may
be experienced as small shocks or leaps and the individual will often try to
translate the realities of a foreign world into the terms of everyday ex-
perience (39-40). Berger and Luckmann’s concept of reality describes
more limited domains than the Durkheimian concept of society. Instead of
the institutions regulating whole societies, we get the objectified entities of
our everyday experiences.
Berger and Luckmann, however, build a bridge between Durkheim and
Weber primarily through their theory of institutionalization. If the every-
day world is an order that exists before any individual, where does it come
from? Their answer is that “social order is a human product, or, more pre-
62 Chapter Three

cisely, an ongoing human production” (1984, 69). This dictum is the basis
for their version of institutionalization which probably is the part of the
book most canonized by the social-science tradition. It is this part of the
book that has given several generations of sociologists the ability to indi-
cate a social phenomenon (with or without the use of an index finger) and
to utter the sentence: “it is only socially constructed!” With this argument
all tendencies to make social relations seem inevitable have been coun-
tered. Berger and Luckmann’s argument is similar to when Weber tried to
show how stability in social relations is gradually achieved through usage
(Brauch) and more so through custom (Sitte), instrumental action, and,
finally, the legitimacy of a given order (1978, 29-30). In Berger and
Luckmann the seed of institutionalization lies in mutual typification
through habitualization, and habitualization presupposes social interaction
over time (1984, 70-73). These mutual typifications receive a new force
when completely new individuals are initiated to the situation, like when a
couple has children (which is Berger and Luckmann’s example). The typi-
fications are not any longer negotiable, but gain an external force. They
have become objectified, and, the third moment in this process, this outer
force is internalized in the course of socialization. This is a coercive order
by which both children and adults are “kept in line” and “taught to be-
have” by external sanctions, and it also has to produce various stories that
will make the order be experienced as legitimate (74-80). Berger and
Luckmann conclude with a pronouncement that sounds like a tautology:
“Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a
social product.” (79) I have previously (Chapter 1) used this quotation as
an example of time-reversibility and this still holds: actors have construct-
ed something which suddenly (after passing some kind of threshold) turns
against them and constrains them. This type of argumentation abounds in
much social constructivism.
In Weber’s thinking, as we saw previously, the observer had an impor-
tant place linking observed action to a relevant complex of meaning. Not
so in Berger and Luckmann’s theories, and they tend to shun epistemo-
logical questions (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1984, 25-26). Meaning in it-
self seems only to become a topic in the same breath as the legitimation of
a given order. It is through shared meanings that an institutionalized reality
finds its legitimacy. Meaning is the quality that makes institutions “hang
together” by forming symbolic universes (81-85, 110-146). Meaning is
added onto reality on different levels of the institutional organization, from
pragmatic everyday relations to the highest level of symbolic systems.
Language is conceptualized in a similar way as symbols superimposed
upon a given reality, but language may also transcend everyday reality and
 Two Syntheses 63

become symbolic systems like science, religion, philosophy and art. All
the same, Berger and Luckmann held that language originates in everyday
life and has its primary reference to it; language and other semiotic sys-
tems seem to be treated as a dimension that is added on to this reality. It is
able to facilitate translations between different realities, but holds no inter-
est beyond that (51-55, 82-83). Language is mainly part of symbolic uni-
verses that are “sheltering canopies over the institutional order” (120).
These symbolic universes represent the highest form of legitimation where
the level of pragmatic application is transcended once and for all (113). In
this way all sectors of the institutional order are integrated in an all-
embracing frame of reference: “all human experience can now be con-
ceived of as taking place within it” (114; emphasis in orig.).
Berger and Luckmann’s theory of institutionalization may be described
as a gradual abstraction or Aufhebung of meanings from lower levels to-
wards the higher ones of the symbolic universes and it is thus able to have
a retroactive effect on the institutional practices at the local level and dom-
inate them. This view of society is quite disturbing by being not only total,
but also totalizing. The only escape routes available are heresies forming
counter-symbolic orders (1984, 124-127), but the heretic actors are “con-
demned” to repeat the pattern of symbolic domination. Underneath this
need for order and dominance lies the notion that “all social reality is pre-
carious. All societies are constructions in the face of chaos” (121;
emphasis in orig.). The dread of “anomic terror” lures around every
corner. We are suddenly faced with a Hobbesian war of all against all,
wherever that argument came from. The contingency of social reality, as
opposed to its inevitability, has moved to the other extreme of social vola-
tility. This argument about impending chaos is an ad hoc importation used
to magnify the need for order. In Berger and Luckmann’s theory every-
thing fits neatly together. There are no loose ends.

A Critique
There are many ways to criticize this form of theory. One is to indicate
the reproduction of the Marxian substructure-superstructure schema,
where religion, science, art, philosophy, etc. are symbolic systems semi-
independent of the practices of everyday reality. This division sublimates
these symbolic activities to a higher sphere untainted by the practical work
of practising clerics, scientists, artists, philosophers, et al. This Olympian
view of science has been one of the main targets of attack from the dif-
ferent schools of science studies that emerged in the 1970s, and this may
also be the reason for Berger and Luckmann’s limited influence in this
64 Chapter Three

field compared with other specialties in the social sciences (cf. Sismondo
1993). The abstraction of linguistic exchanges grounded in everyday prac-
tices, but moving through different levels of legitimation to the apices of
the symbolic universes, does seem to form a new version of how particular
entities are only raw materials from which a new whole can be construct-
ed. It is interesting to note that language or sign-systems hold no interest
for Berger and Luckmann beyond their function of legitimation (or de-
legitimation in the case of heretic movements). What the actors say or oth-
erwise express do not seem to interest them at all. In a transformed way
they reproduce the social representations of Durkheim, but now in the
form of symbolic universes dominating society. Every kind of messiness is
tidied up and no unpredictability is allowed at all. In this respect Berger
and Luckmann’s work represents one of the most totalizing conceptions of
the social world in contemporary sociology.
Another form of critique is that the book contains several arguments
that can be seen in isolation from each other and which have subsequently
become the basis of the different uses made of the book (Abbott 2001, 64).
The first part of the book, The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday
Life, is concerned with the local grounding of knowledge while the second
part, Society as Objective Reality, is a theory of institutionalization. These
are the parts of the book that receive the most attention and are often read
separately, while the third part, Society as Subjective Reality, is often skip-
ped altogether because it does not add anything you cannot find in the
other two parts. Even the theory of institutionalization found in the second
part tends to be pillaged mainly for its triad of typification, externalization
and internalization (cf. Wallace and Wolf 2006, 285-292 for an example).
The abstracting movement of meaning up to the “sheltering canopies” is
less often seen to be relevant.
The general, added-on quality of meaning and language at all levels of
their theory is particularly problematic. Being connected only to legiti-
mation they are divided from the practical construction of reality, and we
are not really able to explain satisfactorily how this process takes place.
Human expressivity is highly connected to signs and we can hardly think,
much less form institutional patterns, without involving language. Never-
theless, one of the main arguments against Berger and Luckmann’s theory
is that it is too brittle due to the lack of materiality. With reference to the
discussion in Chapter 1 of Thesis 4 and Latour’s argument for the agency
of non-humans, it is only the materiality we find in actual society that can
save from tautology the dictum that society is a human product and, simul-
taneously, that humans can be a social product. Berger and Luckmann
have written a few pages on human nature and how humans are “world
 Two Syntheses 65

open” and are not dependent upon a specific habitat.19 They conclude that
humans produce themselves because their nature is mainly a social nature
(1984, 65-70). The physiological side of human nature can thereby be seen
away from. But what about the objects humans use to form society? These
are only taken for granted and never included in the “equation”. Berger
and Luckmann’s book strengthened the anthropocentric hubris in the so-
cial sciences, and it represented an important step in what Latour called
the purification of the social as seen apart from the technical basis which
makes it possible (cf. 1993b).
In the next section I shall present another synthesis of Weber and
Durkheim which the phenomenological movement in philosophy has also
inspired.

Second Synthesis – Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) has been one of the most influential
sociologists in current social sciences, and his work emerged in the 1960s
about the same time as Berger and Luckmann’s book. Bourdieu was, in a
similar way to Durkheim, a product of the French state’s “educational ele-
vator”. Coming from a working class background in the Bearn, he was
sent to the most prestigious schools in Paris and later became a university
teacher in Lille and head of Centre de sociologie européenne at the École
des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. The collective work at this
research centre made it possible to produce much of the empirical material
that he used for his books. His election in 1980 to the chair of sociology at
the Collège de France was tantamount to an intellectual recognition of his
work. From the 1980s his books were also launched internationally and he
became gradually a celebrity on the academic scene. Outside of France his
books were often regarded as being very theoretical, while in France he
was for a long time considered mainly to be an empirical researcher. The
image of Bourdieu in France changed dramatically with his support for the
striking workers in 1995. After this intervention and his previous publica-
tion in 1993 of the French edition of The Weight of the World (1999), he
was seen as a political figure on the French left.
Both Bourdieu and Berger and Luckmann have found much inspiration
in phenomenology, but in different strands of this movement. Edmund
Husserl (1859 – 1938), Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961) are the most central names for Bourdieu.
Another important source for understanding Bourdieu’s theories is the
French school of historical epistemology, including Gaston Bachelard
(1884 – 1962) and Georges Canguilhem (1904 – 1995).20 But it is the rela-
66 Chapter Three

tionship to Durkheim and Weber that interests us here and to what degree
Bourdieu’s theories may be said to synthesize them. Bourdieu’s main
strategy for researching the social world was twofold. One the one hand,
he wanted to make,

analyses of what people bring along in their baggage, the worlds of their
imagination, their habitus, and, on the other hand, analyses of the objective
social conditions under which they live. (Broady 1991, 265; my trans.)

Even though Bourdieu also used this strategy in the 1960s, it is in the early
1970s that he formed the two major concepts that would to a high degree
define this twofold strategy: habitus and field (1985a). While habitus
denotes the internalized structures (or dispositions) of the actor producing
social practices, a field is first of all a particular way to conceptualize the
social context within which social practices take place in differentiated so-
cieties. It is this concept of field that particularly synthesizes the thinking
both from Durkheim and Weber and I shall concentrate on it in the fol-
lowing. Before we go into a more detailed discussion of this relationship I
shall, however, first try to make a more detailed presentation of what is
meant by the concept of field.

Field
A significant trait of Bourdieu’s sociological concepts is that they have
a heuristic function and are not linked to a particular view of what entities
the world consists of. Sociological theories and concepts are first of all
made in order to enable empirical research of the social world. A concept
like field only receives a meaning in specific empirical studies (Bourdieu
1985a, 11-12). This is, in other words, an approach that emphasizes the
immanent relationships in each case. Nevertheless there are some invariant
traits in most of Bourdieu’s applications of the concept of field and I shall
in the following make a rudimentary sketch of them:21

A field is first of all a microcosm within what Bourdieu calls the social
space – usually geographically limited by the nation-state. Every field is a
“system” or “space” structured by positions, and in this space there are
struggles between actors holding different positions. A particular trait is
that every field has its own rules and specific stakes to be fought over. The
struggle in each field has as its stake the appropriation of the specific capi-
tal in the field or the redefinition of what is held to be capital. This capital
is unevenly distributed and this leads to a division between the dominant
and the dominated within a field. This uneven distribution of capital deter-
mines the structure of the field at a certain historical point in time. Even if
 Two Syntheses 67

the field is marked by conflicts, the actors have a common interest in the
existence of the field. They also appropriate the field’s specific habitus as a
sense for the game in the field. One can understand the strategies of the
actors by indicating the position they hold in the field and which subjective
views they maintain in it. Among the most common strategies in a field is
a conflict between a conserving orthodoxy and a subversive heterodoxy.
The actors’ different interests are specific to the field and cannot be re-
duced to, for instance, an economic or political interest. A field has a rela-
tive autonomy, but struggles occurring outside the field can nevertheless
have great effects on the field. Every actor in the field may be character-
ized by three main traits: his or her social trajectory, habitus and position in
the field.

Specific analyses of fields have in particular been made by Bourdieu and

his associates of what they call “fields for limited production” like liter-
ature, philosophy, literary journals, haute couture and science, or institu-
tional fields like the fields of economic leaders, bishops, university profes-
sors, educational institutions, politicians and judges (Broady 1991, 266-
267). How the relative autonomy is constructed may vary from case to
case, and there will be a question of whether something is a field or not. In
the following I shall use Bourdieu’s analysis of the literary field as an ex-
ample. This is a field in which the autonomy of the producers (i.e., the
writers) is very strong, but Bourdieu has also studied fields where the au-
tonomy is weak, for instance, the journalistic field which is very depend-
ent upon market relations (1998).
The literary field emerged in France in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. In this period a number of authors successfully claimed autonomy
for literature in the face of commercial or political demands. Art should be
developed for its own sake and works should not be written to fulfil cer-
tain demands of genre or to satisfy the taste of a certain public. What took
place was a gradual revaluation of the hierarchy between literary genres
and writing styles and at the end of the century there existed a binary
structure between two poles, where the pole for autonomous production
dominated. Criteria for literary assessment were in this process sorted out
from commercial ones and in the late nineteenth century the hierarchy be-
tween genres and authors at the autonomous pole was the complete reverse
to the one at the commercial pole. While literature at the commercial pole
catered either to a bourgeois public or to the popular masses, authors at the
pole for l’art pour l’art turned themselves towards an intellectual public.
Younger poets, for instance, might not have had any public at all and
wrote only for other poets. Each pole in the field maintained two different
hierarchies between both authors and genres. At the commercial pole the
boulevard theatres were the most important ones, with their grand pro-
68 Chapter Three

ductions for a bourgeois public, while the popular public was given vaude-
villes, cabarets, serialized novels and rural novels. At the pole for autono-
mous production this hierarchy was reversed by the raising of poetry into
the most important form of art, while the naturalist and psychological
novel had a certain middle position and with the intellectual theatre as the
lowest-ranking genre (Bourdieu 1996a). A diagram of the literary field is
given in Figure 3.1 and the way Bourdieu conceptualized the horizontal
axis of the field it represents the composition of the different forms of
capital. The vertical axis represents the amount of capital of each type.
At the commercial pole economic success was important, but at the
same time individuals were ascribed status by their attachment to theatres
and other institutions of art and with official recognition in the form of
honours or the election to academies, etc. Economic success and recog-
nition by the state thus went hand in hand within the most prestigious parts
of the commercial literature. At the pole for autonomous production this
logic was turned on its head and economic success raised suspicion. One
should not write for a certain literary taste, but instead develop both the art
and the taste. This led to long periods in which an author lived off a for-
tune, had alternative employment, or led an impoverished bohemian life.
This situation produced a logic where “the loser wins”. Never achieving
success, or only achieving it late in life, was seen as the result of a strong
artistic calling, and nowhere was this calling stronger than in Bohemia,
where nobody was tarnished by either money or readers. Success at the
autonomous pole was connected to getting a “name”, that is, honour and
personal prestige for the author (Bourdieu 1996a, 1993b).
When the pole for autonomous artistic production became the domi-
nant one within the literary field, the whole field began to act like a re-
versed market. The “commodities” that gave most money were valued the
lowest (Bourdieu 1993b, ch.1). Literary quality came to function as the
specific capital within the field, which means that the question of literary
quality was what the field was “about”. This specific literary quality was
also recognized and given a wider symbolic value. Texts became widely
known; the author was honoured and given prestige. This form of recog-
nition is what Bourdieu called symbolic capital, which is a form of capital
that can also be valued outside the field. At the pole for artistic production
the accumulation of symbolic capital was connected to the assessment of
literary qualities, while at the subordinate commercial pole it was dele-
gated from the state or the market. Despite these differences there was
only one literary field because the actors struggled over something they
had in common: what is supposed to be good literature. This was so de-
spite the fact that they disagreed about what was supposed to be literature,
 Two Syn
ntheses 69

Figure 3.1 Frrench literary fiield in the secon

nd half of the n ineteenth centu
ury (based
on Bourdieu 1993b, 48)
70 Chapter Three

which readers to cater for, what topics were relevant to write about, how to
write about them, etc. (ch.1) Even though Bourdieu emphasized the exist-
ence of only one literary field, he recognized that poetry, novel or the thea-
tre could be analysed as separate subfields with their own stakes in relation
to a superior literary field.
The distribution of the symbolic capital also involved a hierarchy be-
tween generations. The older authors who had reaped both honour and
readers to their work were at the same time “patterns” for the younger
generation of authors either to emulate or supersede. The younger authors
might either mimic the previous generation and their works or produce
new works in a new style. This avant-gardist strategy was more risky than
reproducing an established type of works. In a field like literature there
were few institutionalized points of passage in the form of exams or
admission procedures, and established authors had few means to keep the
avant-garde at bay. Defending themselves actively against a new current in
literature was difficult for established authors because public critiques and
polemics in newspapers would only legitimate the avant-garde as being
important. The avant-gardist strategy had around 1900 become the most
common strategy for younger authors to make a name for themselves, and
this led to a great number of different literary tendencies. Bourdieu called
this situation an institutionalization of anomie (1993b, 250-253).
An already established condition of legitimate literature and legitimate
authors in the field represented an external objective structure in relation
to the actors. It was within this condition authors expressed themselves,
but the acts of actors do not flow from the conditions in the field. Their
way of acting had to be seen in relation to their previous experiences and
life-trajectories. It depended on their habitus which was both formed by
the field, but also by the experiences of the individual actor earlier in his
or her life. Nonetheless, a literary work became a subjective position-
taking to the objective conditions in the field. The value of a work was
commonly assessed by its literary qualities only, but in Bourdieu’s view it
is the literary field itself which makes it possible for the work to function
as a piece of art. There is a substitution of cause and effect: the actors in
the field spoke and wrote about literature as if the literary quality of a
piece of work came from the work itself, while it was only their own
feelings for the work they expressed. The same substitution of cause and
effect took place with the praise of the author. To praise the work was to
praise the personal qualities of the author, who was seen as the source of
the literary quality of the work. This form of valuation Bourdieu called
charismatic since it is connected to a belief in the author and the literary
work. This belief was nevertheless necessary if the literary field was to
 Two Syntheses 71

function, even if it involved a naïve misrecognition of the real conditions

in the field (1993b, ch.2, 1996a, 227-231). Literary critique and literary
studies often write themselves into this process of charismatic valuation by
concentrating on a literary work or an author without any analysis of the
conditions in the field. A sociological analysis of these processes must
break with the purification of literature but also avoid making a purely ex-
ternal objectification. Actors must be studied from two sides – field and
habitus – in order to transcend the difference between external and internal
explanations (Bourdieu 1985a).
Now, the literary field is only one of many fields that Bourdieu has
analysed and it only serves as an example in this context. Despite the em-
pirical variation between fields, there is nevertheless a common perspec-
tive that he applies to all fields. Their fundamental structure is defined by
the two axes in a Cartesian-like diagram where one of the axes is the
amount of capital and the other the different types of capital relevant for
the field. Furthermore, there is present in the field a dialectic relationship
between the subjective experiences of the actors and the objective con-
ditions of the field.

Relationship to Durkheim and Weber

So far I have analysed Bourdieu’s concept of field, but how do his
theories connect to the Durkheim’s and Weber’s?22 When it comes to
Durkheim, it is tempting to look at the critique Bourdieu directed against
the form of knowledge Durkheim stood for. On the one hand, Bourdieu
did not accept the transcendence and permanence of Durkheimian social
phenomena. A concentration on the social constraint would only get the
analyses caught up in the dilemma between rule and exception. The socio-
logist could state the rules and actual practices flowed from these into
multifarious manifestations, sometimes violating the rule and sometimes
not (Bourdieu 1977, 26-27). This form of knowledge, objectivism in
Bourdieu’s parlance, is very limited and it cannot explain how certain so-
cial conditions emerge and change. Objectivist knowledge involves a per-
spective of the world where everything happens as a kind of spectacle:
everything that can be observed becomes an object to be decoded. A part
of this relation to the world is the total separation of the observer and the
observed. By taking another direction and instead immersing oneself in the
practices of the agents, the sociologist might be able to get to grips with
the actors’ experiences of the world they live in, but this world of practices
and common-sense knowledge presupposes a familiarity that does not
question the conditions that make it at all possible. This subjective knowl-
72 Chapter Three

edge is therefore limited too, although some experiences of the objective

conditions framing the actors may be expressed in practical terms. These
conditions are often transformed in the actors’ experience as a sense of
limits for what is possible to achieve, an amor fati. Nevertheless, the so-
ciologist has to break through the subjective experiences of the actors in
order to construct the objective conditions of their experience (1-4). In
other words, the objectivist knowledge of Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss and
others is necessary, but only to a certain point. Even the objectivist form
of knowledge must be modified through a reintroduction of the subjective
experience. The rupture with objectivist abstraction:

…, has no other aim than to make possible a science of the dialectical

relations between the objective structures to which the objectivist mode of
knowledge gives access and the structured dispositions within which those
structures are actualized and which tend to reproduce them. (3; emphasis in
orig.)

In this way an objective analysis of subjectivity may be achieved.

Unlike Berger and Luckmann, Bourdieu did not hesitate to bring philo-
sophical and epistemological questions into his sociology. Quite to the
contrary, as his main concepts are only heuristic constructs for the facili-
tation of research of the social world. Berger and Luckmann, for their part,
claimed that epistemological questions remain in the domain of philo-
sophy:

To include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociologi-

cal knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding.
(1984, 25)

With the danger of circularity and self-reference in mind, they consider the
sociology of knowledge as an empirical discipline, with philosophical and
methodological questions relegated to an outside. This would not have cut
any ice with Bourdieu, who claimed that sociology is particularly well
suited to include epistemological questions due to the particular self-
reflective potential of this science. The dialectic between objective and
subjective knowledge makes possible the study of how certain objective
relations lead to certain subjective experiences. But this objectification of
the social conditions of others should lead to scrutiny of the researcher’s
own social conditions. If those actors (over there) experience their
conditions in such and such a manner, what do my own social conditions
make me experience? This form of self-reflection becomes an analysis of
 Two Syntheses 73

one’s own social interests and what these interests make one experience
and not experience (1988, 16, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).23
When it comes to Bourdieu’s relationship to Durkheim, he might, as
we have seen, be critical of the form of knowledge the distanced objectifi-
cation may give, but he also needed this knowledge. At the same time, the
presentation of the objective relations governing a field has a certain
Durkheimian ring to them: a field is,

... a field of forces, i.e., as a set of objective power relations which impose
themselves on all who enter the field and which are irreducible to the in-
tentions of the individual actors or even to the direct interactions among
the actors. (Bourdieu 1985b, 196)

Some version of the social constraint is at work here. Yet the concept of
field writes itself into a tradition in the social sciences concerned with the
differentiation of society into limited spheres of activity. Durkheim’s The
Division of Labor in Society is an important part of this tradition, and
Bourdieu acknowledged this continuity from Durkheim (and Spencer) to
himself (1996b, 433, n.2). However, he rarely touched upon the differen-
tiation process per se. For Bourdieu the question of differentiation was a
question of contrast between the traditional society of Kabylia and modern
class societies (cf. 1977, ch.4).24 In Kabylia all relations are governed by
honour, but this is a very volatile entity and not acting in an honourable
manner might lead to the loss or diminution of a man’s or a family’s
honour. Constant activity is therefore necessary to maintain one’s honour,
and all sorts of practical problems may ensue if you have less of it. These
may include fewer hands to harvest the crops, fewer allies in cases of
feuds or a lessened likelihood of the family’s young women to make good
marriages, etc. A whole symbolic economy is involved while the transition
to modern societies presuppose a break-up of the symbolic economy of
honour and the development of a genuine economic market and a separa-
tion of the non-economic into separate cultural activities like literature,
religion and science. Writing is important as it functions as a form of
“primitive accumulation of cultural capital” and it is maintained by an
educational system. Economic and cultural capital became the main goods
to be struggled over in society and “academic qualifications are to cultural
capital what money is to economic capital” (187). From the social space
formed by the composition of these two forms of capital, the different
fields can emerge as microcosms of it.
Linking Bourdieu’s concept of field to Weber’s theories is easier.
Genealogically it can be traced to an analysis published in 1971 of
Weber’s sociology of Judaism as it is found in Economy and Society
74 Chapter Three

(Bourdieu 1971). What is important for Weber, and hence Bourdieu, is to

identify spheres of activity dominated by specific internal logics (Lahire
2001, 30-32). The relation between priests and prophets in ancient Judaism
is analogous to the relation between an establishment and the avant-garde
in the Bourdieuean field. Similarly, the structure of the field is analogous
to the complex of meaning (in the Weberian sense) to which particular
actions relate. We have seen above how literary works and authors are
given a meaning as an expression of a particular standpoint in the
historical situation of the literary field. I shall come back to his relation to
Weber below.

A Sociological Critique
The French literary sociologist Bernard Lahire has formulated a broad
critique of some of Bourdieu’s concepts and this might be of interest in
this context (2001).25 One of Lahire’s main critiques is that Bourdieu’s
concept of social field gives priority to the central actors who feel the
competitiveness of the field, for instance, the authors, critics and the
publishers for the literary field. Other actors who are necessary for the
existence of the field, like secretaries, copy-editors and printers, are not
part of the equation. In other words, a lot of “trivial” functions remain
outside the concept all together. All in all, the “popular classes” fall out of
all fields “drowned in a huge ‘social space’” (2001, 34; my trans.) with
scant access to either cultural or economic capital. The concept of field is,
hence, mainly relevant to use as an analytical tool for the great stages of
society where power is at stake. This critique, however, may be relevant
for fields of limited production and institutional competition, but in
Distinction Bourdieu also includes fields of consumption where the
popular classes are not excluded even though they are still dominated
(1986, 230-232).26 Nevertheless, there is a tendency in Bourdieu’s writing
to make all contexts into fields and Lahire notes this in Bourdieu’s use of
this concept in an analysis of family relations. Hence, it may be necessary
to distinguish between a stricter use of the concept in connection with
historically constituted macro-entities and a somewhat looser use of it on
some occasions (Lahire 2001, 37-40). Social field, which is a concept
developed through studies of specific social “regions”, has nonetheless
been given universal pretensions in the well-known formula
[(Habitus)(Capital)] + Field = Practice (Bourdieu 1986, 101).
An important critique put forth by Lahire is that the concept of field
excludes the empirical content relevant to it. In a study of the literary field
it is not possible to answer the question: What is literature? The field
 Two Syntheses 75

emerges as a naked frame, in which the content is only relevant as stakes

in struggles between the actors, and it is transformed to position-takings
within the field. This content is never relevant in it own right. Similarly, in
his studies in educational sociology Bourdieu was little concerned with
what sort of knowledge was being taught, but he was concerned with
teaching as a transformed expression of the power relations in society
(Bourdieu and Passeron 1979, 1990). Similar objections can be made in
relation to all fields studied by Bourdieu and it has the consequence that an
important quality of his objects of study escapes him completely (Lahire
2001, 44-46). This relationship to the empirical content of a field is con-
nected to Bourdieu’s rejection of all attempts to give language and semi-
otic systems an autonomous function. Words, for Bourdieu, had no power
by themselves independently of the person expressing them and his or her
authority. This is especially true if one speaks in the name of a social insti-
tution (the government, the church, the party, the union, science, etc.) and
its legitimacy (Lahire 2001, 47-48).27 Bourdieu thus turned upside down
the problem of representation in linguistic theory. Words do not represent
objects “out there”, but instead the authority with which they are spoken.
They represent the social institution and the symbolic systems with which
they surround themselves, and these symbolic systems are only trans-
formed expressions of the social relations which make them possible
(Bourdieu 1993b, 32). Bourdieu’s repeated critique of Michel Foucault
was founded on the same way of reasoning: Foucault had made the
episteme and the discourses independent of the social relations that made
them possible (33). In Bourdieu’s theories language and signs are subordi-
nated to a version of the communicational model (cf. Thesis 5), but what is
communicated is not of much interest for him. In the same way as with
Berger and Luckmann, what is said is sublimated into something else. In
Bourdieu’s version language is first of all an expression of domination.
Lahire’s critique can be developed a bit further. The empirical content
of the field is mainly excluded because it is only treated as raw material in
order to unveil the social conditions that make them possible. The “dou-
bling up” of reality is hence reproduced. The social conditions turn into
“hard” realities that somehow can explain the empirical content of the
field and this content only becomes a fetish cultivated by the actors them-
selves. It is the task of the sociologist to show where the actors misrec-
ognize the real relations. Bourdieu was, however, no simple critic of ideol-
ogy since he did not see his task as only unveiling the ideology in order to
finish it off. On the contrary, he insisted that these views had to be present
in the field in order for the field to function.28 What is important for the
researcher, in his view, is to get to grips with the dialectic between ob-
76 Chapter Three

jective relations and subjective expressions. This particular twist is never-

theless a reproduction of a model where subjective expressions are subor-
dinated to an objective reality, which is the same opposition as between
appearance and latent reality found in both Durkheim and Weber. The be-
wildering multiplicity of actions can only be understood in light of the one
unifying instance whether we are talking about the complex of meaning
(Weber), the collective representations (Durkheim) or the objective social
relations (Bourdieu). The objective social relations are in Bourdieu’s theo-
ries chiefly understood as hierarchical dominance between both actors and
different social fields. As we have seen previously, fields are usually struc-
tured along two main dimensions: continuous distribution of the amount of
capital along one axis and a similar distribution of the composition of the
capital along the other. The quantitative distributions of capital form a
homogeneous space which nonetheless does not preclude the eventual
formation of sub-fields and sub-sub-fields, etc. On the basis of this distri-
bution along two dimensions it is possible to identify the hierarchical rela-
tions between actors and to identify dominant and dominated individuals,
groups and institutions.

A Radicalized Critique of Bourdieu

I have argued above that Bourdieu has reproduced the “doubling up” of
reality found previously in Durkheim and Weber. In Bourdieu’s case this
is made by the confrontation between objective relations and subjective
expressions. The subjective expressions are only a surface which can pro-
duce all sorts of misrecognitions if we take them too seriously. They must,
instead, be understood in their dialectical relationship to the objective re-
lations which can throw some light on the principles of their production.
There is always something hiding behind the confusing expressions of the
multitude (cf. Bourdieu 1977, ch. 3). Bourdieu’s sociology is therefore a
sociology of unmasking; a sociology of critique of all the possible mis-
recognitions that humans might make, although they may be functionally
necessary for the existence of a social field. This critical stance or critique
of ideology is, of course, not something particular to Bourdieu. The icono-
clastic gesture, as Latour calls it, goes back for centuries and is one of the
defining traits of us (Westerners) as modern (Latour 1993b, 1996c). Since
Marx the critique of ideology has been a major weapon in the armoury of
everybody (among them sociologists) who wants to unveil the workings of
power and to fight capitalism. The main problem with this line of thinking
is that it presupposes a fixed point from which everything can be ordered.
To claim that a field is about something specific (i.e., domination) is to
 Two Syntheses 77

produce such a fixed point from which everything can be assessed. By

doing that we can distinguish between instances perceived to be the sub-
jective expressions of the actors and those identified as objective con-
ditions of the field. We are suddenly in the terrain of the signifying regime
of signs where everything has a meaning (cf. Chapter 2).
The source of actors’ misrecognition is, in Bourdieu’s view, that they
(usually) do not (or maybe only implicitly) fathom the “real” objective re-
lations. They need the sociologist to point these out for them. Everything
has a meaning and in Bourdieu’s theories this meaning was first of all con-
nected to relations of dominance. An important result of this ascription of
meaning to everything is that the actors are kept in check. They can never
surprise us with anything and there is something fateful lying over
Bourdieu’s analyses (cf. Lazzarato 2002, 284-285, Querrien 2004, 106, for
similar views). Even the transformations of the field through heterodox
movements are already understood through the concept of social field. All
changes are repetitions of an already established pattern. The contrast to
Deleuze and Guattari is interesting as they and Bourdieu to some extent
have analysed the same instance: the relationship between priest and
prophet in the Old Testament. Bourdieu reinterpreted Weber’s sociology
of religion (Bourdieu 1971), and in his treatment the prophets became a
paradigmatic example of the avant-garde in a social field. Prophets re-
newed what the field was all about against the ossified orthodoxy of the
priesthood. This renewal was nonetheless kept within the borders of a
given field. In Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of the Old Testament the
prophets were traitors against the signifier and broke out of the pre-given
ordering of meaning. It is the passional delirium (cf. Chapter 2) that is the
model for this process of making the prophet into a subject and it involved
a deterritorialization along a line of flight. This line of flight was nev-
ertheless checked and might reterritorialize itself around a new signifier
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 122-128). However, in comparison to
Bourdieu this process involved something new – a real change and a trans-
formation of order. The Bourdieuean prophet was in Deleuze and
Guattari’s context only a swindler (tricheur) who seemingly produced
something new but in reality only repeated an old pattern. Deleuze and
Guattari always portrayed order as something that was under challenge.
The order of the prophet was not the same as the order of the priest and
there were always possible lines of flight away from any order at all.
While Bourdieu’s sociology is based upon the arrest of movement, the
Deleuzo-Guattarian theories are based upon movement and change. Order
is for them something in need of explanation and there is no hidden order
that will explain everything.
78 Chapter Three

I shall in the following discuss this topic a little further in order to

make a comparison with Bourdieu. In Chapter 1 I have shown how
Deleuze and Guattari linked flows of discourse and flows of bodies at a
specific site which they called an assemblage. It is important to note that
the flows are conjugated by the assemblage and they do not serve as raw-
material for a specific viewpoint from which everything is understood.
Hence, Deleuze and Guattari do not perform the operation of “doubling
up” of reality as is commonly done by the authors we have analysed so far.
The relations involved in the assemblage emerge from a primordial back-
ground of particular and pre-individual entities. This means that there is no
hidden order to be found, but rather order is produced (to a greater or
lesser extent) through the assemblages. In human societies this order is
commonly produced by linking formed signs to bodies and in this way a
kind of functionality of the social world is achieved. An assemblage in-
volves a double articulation of both signs and bodies and “bodies” should
be understood in the widest possible sense.
How can this way of thinking help us to avoid the iconoclastic gesture?
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 152-153) make an
obscure reference to a study by the psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890 –
1947), and it can be an interesting example for reflection. In 1942 Lewin
and his colleagues conducted a study of housewives in a town in the
Midwest in the United States about food and how it reached the table and
how it was served. Lewin asked questions like: “Why do people eat what
they eat?” “Which channels does the food come through?” There were
clear views among the informants about what was “food for us” and what
was “food for others”. These were representations that might vary among
different ethnic groups and in relation to the level of family income.
Furthermore, there were also clear views that different types of meals
demanded different types of food, and the housewives who were inter-
viewed also discerned between food for festivities and food for everyday
meals. When they chose what food to cook, they assessed factors like cost,
health, taste and status. At the same time factors like time for preparation
and transportation were important. The situation of purchase itself was
often perceived as a conflict between crossing concerns. Meat was popular
among those with a medium or higher income, but it was expensive
(1952a, 174-183).29 We can analyse this example as an assemblage and
such assemblages have two sides: on the one hand, the machinic assem-
blages connected to the movement of bodies – purveyance of food, trans-
portation, preparation and the serving of it; on the other hand, the collec-
tive assemblages of enunciation – which food suits us? Which food is for
others? Which food is for everyday use and which is for special occasions?
 Two Syntheses 79

etc. The flows of discourse and the flows of content are connected with
each other at this local point of contact. The discourse (about food) is not
made autonomous of the machinic assemblage it is connected to and the
machinic assemblage is not part of an external or underlying reality “ex-
plaining” the discourse (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 88-91). There is no
unveiling or unmasking in Deleuze and Guattari, but power is exerted by
forming both the discourse and content in particular ways. They are
especially concerned with how the forms on the plane of expression can
“bind” (or overcode)30 a certain content and produce a dominant signifier.
In our example this could be fixed views on which food is edible, at which
meals one should eat meat, which meat is food and which meat is not food,
etc. This type of fixed ways of understanding the world is not unlike what
Bourdieu called symbolic power (1977, 169-170). Deleuze and Guattari
identify it with the signifying regime of signs. This regime of signs is not a
hidden order to be detected, but something actively produced through the
assemblage.
The construction of Bourdieu’s analyses around the twin concepts of
subjective expressions and objective relations has led to a host of problems
for the reception of his work. He came back many times to the problem of
being understood properly, and I think the way he made his analyses con-
tributed to this situation. The distanced objectifications of the relations
within a field were often taken as denunciations. They were seen as violent
intrusions into the relations of the dominant classes. Thus some held his
analyses to be in bad taste, while others would read them with Schaden-
freude. Bourdieu withheld for some time the publication of Homo Aca-
demicus because he felt it would be read as a self-flagellation (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992, 62-64). This book, which analyses the academic field
in Paris, includes Bourdieu himself and there are passages in this book
“which separated me from some of my best friends” (63). His intention
was not to accuse, but to do a socio-analysis and a self-analysis at the
same time. There is, however, a disparity between intentions and the
means with which he tried to fulfil them. The objectification of relations in
a field is easily read as denunciations and his sociology is then transform-
ed into a “theatre of ressentiment and culpability” (Deleuze and Parnet
1996, 59; my trans.). Bourdieu’s sociology falls unwittingly into a very
French pattern in French literature identified by D.H. Lawrence and taken
up by Deleuze as: “the mania with the ‘dirty little secret’” (58; my trans.).
Bourdieu remains, wittingly or unwittingly, the great unmasker of the
French elites.
Bourdieu’s sociology falls into some of the main traps of what I have
identified as a Grand Hermeneutic (cf. Figure 1.1). The structure of the
80 Chapter Three

field forms a fixed point from which everything can be viewed and as-
sessed. This is quite different from Berger and Luckmann’s approach,
however, but there are nevertheless some further commonalities between
them.

Berger/Luckmann and Bourdieu Compared

There are many commonalities between Berger and Luckmann’s book
and Bourdieu’s version of sociology and many of them might hark back to
their common foundation in phenomenology. They both represent attempts
at making this philosophical movement relevant for social research, albeit
in different ways. Berger and Luckmann’s book is a theoretical and logical
exercise, while Bourdieu’s work is closely connected to his empirical
work, spanning from fieldwork in Kabylia to education, art, literature, so-
cial tastes, academia, television, etc.
I have so far argued that both strands of sociology do what I have cal-
led the “doubling up” of reality, although I do not think they conform to a
simple “model of consciousness” in the way Durkheim and Weber do.
This is probably due to the introduction of dialectics. In Berger and
Luckmann’s case this is evident in their theory of institutionalization
which starts in a kind of inter-subjective “Weberian moment” in which
agency is typified and made habitual and ends up in a retroactive
“Durkheimian moment” where the objective structures constrain the actors
(1984, 28-29, 71-85). In Bourdieu’s case dialectics is introduced between
objective structures (somewhere hidden in social reality) and the sub-
jective expressions of the same reality. For both of them this form of dia-
lectic involves a kind of time-reversibility where some hard instance
produced by the actors themselves (or at least through the work of the
sociologist) suddenly changes causal direction (1990, 123-126). Bourdieu
even introduced a stronger moment of dialectic in order to avoid the prob-
lem of “self-reference”: someone formulating an analysis of a kind of ob-
ject in the world can always be asked about what her foundation for for-
mulating this particular analysis is. This is especially important for social
scientists, because they analyse the world in which they themselves are
part and thus may have great stakes in it. One person’s viewpoint does not
have to be another one’s. This is exactly Bourdieu’s point in indicating
that the sociologist can use sociological knowledge to reflect on her own
social interests and what that might involve for her analyses (1977, 2,
Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
The intentions seem good, but isn’t this operation a kind of rhetorical
twist in order to secure the upper hand for the sociologist? Latour has
 Two Syntheses 81

argued against self-reflective texts in social science on this basis: they tend
to be boring and they are only a resource for the sociologist in her struggle
for priority over the narratives of the actors themselves. My version is bet-
ter than yours because I am so very self-reflective. This attitude will only
strengthen the dominance of the scientific institutions over their subjects
(1988c). There is clearly something to this argument if we apply it to
Bourdieu’s form of self-reflection, because it is a way for him to provide a
foundation for his sociological enterprise. In this way he can reinforce his
arguments and for Bourdieu sociology is a kind of combat sport.31
Latour’s argument, on the other hand, is that all texts, from a narrative
point of view, are equal regardless if they are written by a sociologist or
one of the actors that is studied (1988c). This equality of texts entails that
the problem of self-reference cannot really be avoided and that all forms of
scientific research must involve a rhetorical dimension.
Another topic that I have raised above is that the two different socio-
logical approaches of Bourdieu and Berger and Luckmann share a kind of
totalizing vision. In Bourdieu’s case this is evident in the fate-like domina-
tion which seems to be present in the social fields. Another way to under-
stand this view is that domination, which is the topic that Bourdieu is most
concerned with, is most efficient when it is taken for granted by the actors
themselves. This is the symbolic power or even symbolic violence exerted
within social fields (1977, 192). In Berger and Luckmann this totalizing
vision emerges in the discussion of language and the legitimacy of a given
institutional order. The symbolic universes forming “sheltering canopies”
form wholes. All of social reality is contained within them although it may
be threatened by anomic terror (whatever that might be). In the same way
as in the Bourdieuean social fields, any opposition against orthodoxy
within a symbolic order is only a kind of heresy. It is hence both under-
stood and contained within the symbolic order itself (Berger and
Luckmann 1984, 110-146). Both of these visions are much more compre-
hensive than anything thought out by Weber and Durkheim. What is sup-
posed to be social encompasses a broader range of elements than in their
predecessors and I believe this is an effect of the omnipresence of the con-
cept of legitimacy in both approaches. Actors legitimate their actions or
the social order through discourse, but the content of this discourse is not
really of interest for these sociologists (Bourdieu 1992). In both ap-
proaches something like an “event” in the meaning of Latour or Deleuze
and Guattari is not really possible and nothing really new can happen.
I shall return to the question of events in later chapters.
82 Chapter Three

Conclusion
As we have seen in this chapter both Berger and Luckmann and
Bourdieu reproduce many of the problems they have inherited from Weber
and Durkheim, but some of them are more accentuated and become more
refined. In the previous chapter we saw how the theories of Weber and
Durkheim in different ways conformed to the pattern of the despotic or
signifying regime of signs. This is a regime of signs where everything is
interpreted from a centre and there is a constant need to renew the inter-
pretations and the social scientist can easily enter the role previously held
by the priests or other state functionaries. This regime of signs is also
clearly based on a “statist” way of thinking, where the need to reign in
loose ends is paramount and all sort of movement is halted. The world of
the interpretations made by the paranoiac conforms to the same pattern. To
compare social-science theories with the world of the interpretative
delirious is, however, not to say that these theories or their theorists are
paranoid. Durkheim and Weber conformed to a “state-like” way of think-
ing and this way of thinking functions in similar ways to paranoia.
With Berger and Luckmann and Bourdieu, however, something dif-
ferent happened: the theories themselves seem to be infused somewhat
with the paranoid way of working. How is this possible? If we look back
at the analyses of Serieux and Capgras (1909) and Clérambault (1942),
one of the main marks of the paranoid is the disdain for everyone around
her, and some of the same disdain is found in Berger and Luckmann and in
Bourdieu’s work.32 We have seen above how Bourdieu’s works have been
read as denunciations and even self-flagellations. This is quite unavoidable
when your whole theoretical apparatus is oriented towards the chase for
the “dirty little secrets” of the French society. Moreover, in The Social
Construction of Reality the social heretics are also “condemned” to repeat
the pattern of social domination that holds society together and the para-
noid disdain is evident in Berger and Luckmann’s praise of order and their
fear-mongering about the anomic terror lurking around the corner.
What should be evident by now is the impasse the type of theories
coming from the tradition of Durkheim and Weber leads us to, and it is
time to have a closer look at a different type of sociology in the next
chapter.
 CHAPTER FOUR

THEORIES OF AGENCY

I have so far analysed theories linked to what I have called a Grand

Hermeneutic mode of inquiry, and I shall now turn to theories that I iden-
tify with an energetic mode of inquiry (cf. Figure 1.1). In this mode of in-
quiry phenomena are explained “through conflicts of forces” (Ricoeur
1978, 62). One way to understand this in sociological terms is to say that
within a given field there is a set of forces that might work on each other.
In the specific theories discussed in this chapter these forces can be identi-
fied as actors and these actors are individual human beings, institutional
entities or more abstract social factors. The main point is that there is
agency and different outcomes of it. I have, as in the previous chapter,
chosen a few works of contemporary social scientists which show different
ways of applying agency in social analyses. These are works written by
the sociologists Manuel Castells (b. 1942), Randall Collins (b. 1941) and
Harold Garfinkel (1917 – 2011) and the political scientist Robert D.
Putnam (b. 1941). They are all very influential intellectuals and in
Garfinkel’s case his adherents have even formed a school of thought and
research practices. There is, of course, a certain amount of arbitrariness to
such samples and my aim is not to claim any representativeness for them.
Nonetheless, the way agency is applied in some of these studies is quite
common in sociology.
An objection that may be raised on this point is that the theories
discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 also involve agency. Intersubjectivity is the
foundation both of Weber and of Berger and Luckmann. Durkheim’s
social constraint is a force impinging on individuals, and social actors
compete between each other in the fields identified by Bourdieu. This
argument is obviously true, but the main difference between the works
analysed in this chapter and the previous ones is that the former do not
perform the “doubling up” of social reality. There is no “play” between a
flow of particular entities and a latent structure hidden somewhere beneath
it. The distinction between a grand hermeneutic mode of inquiry and an
energetic one must be understood as a way of organizing the material and
such categorizations are always debatable.
84 Chapter Four

In Chapters 2 and 3 I argued that the theories discussed there were

marked by time-reversibility. In these theories human actors construct
some institutional pattern which acts back on them when a given threshold
has been reached. In this way the direction of the arrow of causality is re-
versed and the social conditions are suddenly stronger than the actors. We
achieve what I in Chapter 1 described as a play between immanence and
transcendence. Most of the theories analysed in this chapter can be char-
acterized as time-reversible, but it is applied differently from the ones
discussed previously. The time-reversibility in the present works does not
go through a period (real or assumed) of construction, but it is simply
ascribed to acting entities. In other words, they are plain action-
potentialities, simply present in the social situation and ready to launch
their action. I have already identified this ascription of potentiality in
Thesis 2 as one of the presuppositions commonly present within the socio-
logical tradition. I shall discuss this further below.
There is one divergent character in the present set of social theories
and that is the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel. Not only does it
avoid the trap of time-reversibility, but it is a consistent immanentist ap-
proach. I shall, of course, discuss how his theory of agency is able to avoid
this trap, but what is also interesting is that he seems to have confirmed
Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic theory of language without even taking
the linguistic turn. I shall discuss this common ground in the last part of
the chapter.

Hidden Potentialities
I mentioned above that time-reversibility is applied in most of the
theories I am going to analyse in this chapter and it is applied as action-
potentialities. Latour compared the actualization of social potentialities to
the dropping of a pendulum: its movement is completely predictable and
under similar conditions the same will happen again (1999b, 303). Nothing
new can really happen in such cases. Agency hence becomes repetitive
and, as I have argued in Chapter 2, knowledge about repetitive patterns
makes it possible to intervene in the processes from the outside. The
reason for this is that we somehow already “know” what will happen
under given circumstances. Social scientists have often sought knowledge
about repetitive and predictable processes because it might be useful. Fol-
lowing Prigogine and Stengers we might say that such processes presume
“close to equilibrium conditions” (1985). To assume such conditions in
society is, in my view, to simplify things too much. Instead it is important
 Theories of Agency 85

to show that stability and repetitive patterns are an ongoing production and
cannot be taken for granted.
Ascribing an action-potentiality to some collective or individual actor
or some other social condition usually involves what is called substan-
tialism or essentialism. Both concepts relate to how we understand the ob-
jects we study. We have a substantialist construction when we emphasize
one criterion as the defining one for an object, while all others are sec-
ondary. We do this if we emphasize barking as the defining criterion for
the object we usually call “dog”, before we go on to study the fur, the
snout, the tail, etc. In this example, barking has become the standard
against which all the other relations are measured. One of Bourdieu’s main
critiques of his fellow social scientists was that their construction were of
this type (1990, 126, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 228-229). Essential-
ism, on the other hand, is the position claiming the existence of some inner
quality that really is the object. In our example that dog might be defined
by manifesting “doggishness” (Barnes 1983, 26-28). In some intellectual
traditions the terminology on this point might be a bit different and in, for
instance, biology the distinction between substantialism and essentialism
is not heeded: they call both instances for “essentialism” (cf. eg., Buller
2005, 428-429). The only way to avoid substantialism and essentialism is
to relate the object to something else than itself – a relationism. In our ex-
ample of a dog, this can be achieved by either our uttering the word “dog”
while we point at an exemplar or we might try to define it by relating it to
other entities. We can utter general sentences like “dogs have a tail” or
“dogs bark” etc. Gradually by adding more and more sentences we might
arrive at an analytical object of “dog” (Barnes 1983, 26-28).
There are many different ways of introducing some form of rela-
tionism. Deleuze and Guattari prefer to describe it as a kind of emergence
from a background of pre-individual singularities: it gradually becomes
individuated. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms “dog” in our example is indi-
viduated by being placed in convergence with certain singularities and this
convergence closes it off from other singularities (cf. Zourabichvili 2003,
76). A recurring example given by Deleuze is the observations made by
the narrator in Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. At first, a flock of
girls is described as something nebulous and after a while he identifies one
of them as “the girl with the golf club”, who turns out to be Albertine.
Even when the two meet at the house of the painter Elstir, the narrator has
problems remembering her traits correctly: does she have a mole on her
neck or on her cheek? (Proust 2006; vol.1, 785, cf. also Deleuze 2010). An
individual is thus something emerging from a background of unattribut-
able singularities.
86 Chapter Four

In order to move from claims about the prevalence of substantialism

and essentialism in the social sciences, I shall in the following analyse
some works of three different but well known social scientists. These
analyses merit some detailed exposition before a more principled critique,
and in order to be sufficiently specific I have limited my treatment to only
one piece of work for each author.

Randall Collins and the Sociology of Creativity

Randall Collins is a prominent American sociologist whose work
straddles both micro sociology and macro history. He has written exten-
sively in the field of sociological theory and in this context I shall go into a
detailed discussion of his The Sociology of Philosophies from 1998. The
scope of this book is immense. It wants to formulate a global theory of
intellectual change and does so by making a sociological analysis of all
major philosophical movements in human recorded history. This is not just
another history of philosophy following the common path from the Pre-
Socratics via the Scholastics ending up with Wittgenstein and Sartre. The
book tries to include all movements that we know of that can be called
philosophical. The philosophical development in ancient Greece is never-
theless presented as an example for the subsequent analyses of the other
geographical regions, but otherwise the main parts are analyses of what
Collins called the Asian Path and the Western Path. The former includes
the philosophies of Ancient China, India and Japan while the latter in-
cludes philosophies emerging out of Islam, Judaism and Christendom, and
they are followed until the familiar ending with the philosophies of the
twentieth century. This inclusiveness has led to a book of great length –
1098 pages all in all – and in this context I shall concentrate on the theo-
retical and methodological foundations for this huge enterprise.
The topic of Collins’ book is a sociology of philosophies, but what is
philosophy? He defines it, perhaps a bit vaguely, as “abstract conceptions”
produced by specialized intellectuals “turned inward upon their own argu-
ment” (1998, 12). The main focus is on the network of intellectuals in a
specific period and their ideas. This is opposed to those who find that the
history of philosophy is a history of ideas reacting to other ideas, or that
ideas emerge out of some individuals’ genius. Collins’ focus is the intel-
lectual community, but his is not a history of the non-intellectual reasons
for the emergence of certain conceptions. Thinking, he claims, “consists of
making ‘coalitions in the mind’” (7) and the main topic of the intellectual
activity called philosophy is the truth. By passing ideas about the truth
from one intellectual to the other, ideas become decontextualized and they
 Theories of Agency 87

become “sacred objects” in a Durkheimian sense: “transcending indi-

viduals, objective, constraining, demanding respect” (19).
Collins derived the main theoretical foundation for his approach
from the work of Erving Goffman (1922 – 1982) and his emphasis on
local situations. The local has primacy and the dynamic of locally based
action forms chains of “interaction rituals” (or IRs as Collins call them),
and the main types of IRs among philosophers is: “the discussion, the
lecture, the argument, sometimes the demonstration or the examination of
evidence” (25). These are the occasions for the sacred object of “truth” to
emerge and they are also the ceremonies in which this truth is worshipped.
Although intellectuals publish their works and in that way make possible a
wide dissemination of their ideas, they cluster in communities that meet
with some regularity. Intellectuals form groups in much of the same way
in Antiquity as in the 19th Century. Without intellectuals and their IRs,
writing and ideas would never be charged up with “emotional energy”
(called EE): “they would be Durkheimian emblems of a dead religion,
whose worshippers never came to the ceremonies” (27).
For Collins, the social structure is mainly identified with repetitive
patterns and these repetitions are IRs. These patterns have the feel of
externality and have become thing-like and compulsory. IRs that have
generated emotional commitments among their participants, resist change
to their identifying symbols (29), and social institutions are mainly repeti-
tive networks of such IRs. Individuals generate their own histories of ritual
participation, also called IR chains, in which each person acquires a per-
sonal repertoire of symbols loaded with membership significance. This
repertoire may have varying degrees of abstraction and reification, and
constitutes the individuals’ cultural capital (called CC). In addition:

… they will have, at any point in time, a level of emotional energy (EE),
by which I mean the kind of strength that comes from participating suc-
cessfully in an interaction ritual. It is a continuum, ranging from a high end
of confidence, enthusiasm, good self-feelings; through a middle range of
lesser emotional intensity; on down to a low end of depression, lack of ini-
tiative, and negative self-feelings. (29; emphasis in orig.)

EE is long term, and must be distinguished from the transient enthusiasm

of recent experiences, but it fluctuates in relation to recent social expe-
rience. An individual’s trajectory of action at any moment depends on the
networks in which he or she participates, and from an individual point of
view this is his or her opportunity structure. By studying the relationship
between individuals we can grasp this network and this constitutes the
main method applied by Collins in the book. Some individuals will domi-
88 Chapter Four

nate the IRs through their relatively higher CC and EE and the networks
are often tightly knit and with a limited space in the ruling coalition. There
are also limits to the attention which can be given to intellectual work.
Intellectual movements often take the form of a few dominant figures of
approximately the same generation. This generation introduces some
inventions to the local intellectual game and this gives the following gen-
erations something to work on: “This implies that the imperfections of
major doctrines are the source of their appeal” (32).
Collins’ theoretical model has some similarities with Bourdieu’s socio-
logical theory as I have described it in Chapter 3, but EE is an individual
property that is different from the Bourdieuean habitus and it can increase
and diminish. CC, in contrast, is made up of “charged symbols” trans-
mitted by the tradition and in IRs. The most valuable parts of the CC are
the ones that might facilitate new inventions. CC is hence a property of the
individual, but somehow recognized by the network as important and
transmitted through it. It is also, distributed around an attention space. A
given CC is valued in relation to its possibilities for success in the next
round of competition for attention (1998, 38). The intellectual networks
are competitive and highly stratified where everyone is attracted to think-
ing “high-status ideas” and to socialize with high-status persons (39).
High-status persons are, however, inclined to give their attention to other
persons that might increase their EE in IRs and disinclined to give any
attention to those who involve a drain of EE.
The way Collins studies intellectual networks is not to organize them
into schools of influence, but to focus on the personal relationships be-
tween philosophers. The most important of these are, of course, the ties
between a master and a pupil, but all sorts of personal relations proliferate.
The most notable philosophers do not work in isolation, but are members
of chains of teachers and students. The teachers and students are them-
selves known philosophers or participate in circles of significant contem-
porary intellectuals (65). The question is, then, to ascertain who are the
most “notable” and Collins argues that “ideas are creative because they
hold the interest of other people” (58). This claim to creativity cannot be
securely decided upon until several generations have passed because it is
only in the long term effects on the intellectual game that the real impact
of a philosopher can be gauged. Collins’ empirical method is to rank
philosophers in China and Greece “according to how many pages of
discussion they receive in various histories of philosophy” (58). The
yardstick they are measured against is thus the assessments made by
posterity.
 Theories of Agency 89

An argument against this method might, of course, be that Collins has

not studied creativity, but reputation. This is in a way unavoidable, Collins
argues, since: “intellectual greatness is precisely one’s effect on the course
of intellectual history” (1998, 59). The aim of all philosophical work is to
influence generations downstream from one’s own. Although the canons
might change from period to period with some philosophers falling out of
favour while others come to prominence, they are nevertheless among
those who have entered the long-term chain of reputation in the first place.
Socrates was, for instance, not only renowned for his relationship to Plato,
but for a long time also famous for being the teacher of Aristippus, found-
er of the Cyrenaic school, of Antisthenes, whose followers founded Cyni-
cism, and of Isocrates the rhetorician. So far so good, but is Collins’ argu-
ment consistent? At another place in his book, Collins finds Socrates to be
overrated when it came to his originality (87), but this argument seems to
be contrary to Collins’ own method where creativity is connected to
reputation. Has Collins only measured fame? This seems to be his fear. It
might, for instance, be argued that Socrates’ fame was secured owing to
his centrality in several independent (Post-Socratic) schools. He was well
placed and didn’t really have to be very clever to become famous. In order
to deflect the argument that he only has measured followership, Collins
analysed the trajectories of some philosophers who came to their fore late
in life or after their death. Nietzsche, Spinoza and Schopenhauer serve as
examples from Western philosophy, but these are not true stories about
obscure and isolated origins, he claims. Spinoza’s philosophy grew out of
his closeness to the most active centre of Cartesianism and he was able to
achieve a certain notoriety while he was still alive (61). Hence, the redis-
covery of “lost works” cannot be possible without a previous connection
to the intellectual world.
The fundamental methodological and theoretical view in The Sociology
of Philosophies is thus that personal contacts form networks and ideas cir-
culate within these networks. In comparison with Bourdieu, there is no
latent meaning that needs to be discovered. The energetic processes be-
tween social agents are what count, and the transmission of and struggle
about philosophical ideas are part of these processes. No philosopher is an
island and they participate in IRs where both cultural capital (in some
places also called intellectual capital, a more specific form of CC) and
emotional energy (EE) are transmitted and increased. Although Collins
emphasizes how CC and EE are transmitted from the network, these two
concepts emerge as the main theoretical problems with Collins’ whole
conception: both EE and CC tends to be portrayed as potentialities re-
siding in the individual philosopher ready to release their creative forces
90 Chapter Four

under the right circumstances. This essentialist function of CC and EE is

accentuated in the analysis, mentioned above, of the trajectories of
Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They all followed a pattern indi-
cating eminence, in his view, by being prolific publishers: “they had the
emotional energy and the cultural capital that is typical of creative
success” (1998, 62). A surface pattern for spotting eminence makes it
possible for Collins in this quotation to conclude something about the
depths of their being. Eminence is already present at an early stage, but it
takes time for it to realize its potential. In a similar vein we hear in other
contexts that “the creative inspiration” (73) is built up and EE is height-
ened “to a creative pitch” (75). These are all action-potentialities waiting
to be released.
The concept of EE, and its different levels of intensity, is especially
troublesome since it is a property which is personal and difficult, or, one
might think, rather impossible to gauge. Or is it? Collins claims that indi-
viduals at the top rungs in a network have high levels of EE while those at
the lower level often have a:

… weak structural position for access to crucial cultural capital. They

appear as “the kind of person” who always has troubles – obstacles, dis-
tractions, family and financial difficulties – which just seem to keep them
from ever getting their work done. This is where we find the familiar
writer’s block of failing intellectuals, the “dissertationitis” of advanced
graduate students. I interpret their problem as a low level of EE specific to
success in the intellectual field. Emotional energies reflect the distribution
of cultural capital and network opportunities in the structure around them.
(1998, 45-46)

In this context EE is described as being relative to success in the intel-

lectual field, while in the case of Spinoza et alii this energy was high at an
early stage, but their intellectual success was dismal for a long time. How-
ever, in relation to “the kind of person” described above, Spinoza et alii
were evidently able to “rise above non-intellectual obstacles” (46) and not
to be hindered by them. Out of Collins’ arguments we might draw the fol-
lowing conclusions: if you turn out to be a loser your EE is low, but if you
are a historical winner it is high. This latter dictum holds true even if you
look like a loser for a long time. At this point, the concepts of EE and CC
seem to be able to explain all cases of either failure or success absolutely:
no loose ends are allowed. In other words, Collins’ theoretical conception
is immune to aberrant cases and opens the way for a study of intellectual
history that only can confirm that winners had the relevant CC and a high
EE, while this was not the case for the losers.
 Theories of Agency 91

As important as CC and EE are in the philosophical game, according to

Collins, there is also imperative to be first with an intellectual invention
due to the limited attention space. The structural make-up of the intellec-
tual world only allows a limited number of people to receive much atten-
tion at the same time. There are also more intellectuals willing to become
renowned philosophers than those who are able to achieve this status:

We know the names of some of Cicero’s compatriots who studied with the
same array of philosophers at Athens and Rhodes (...), but only Cicero
reaped the intellectual and emotional resources to make himself famous in
philosophy. We can be sure that for every major philosopher capable of
transmitting significant cultural capital and emotional energy, there were
many more pupils who had the opportunity to reinvest these resources than
actually did so (Collins 1998, 74).

This quotation confirms the essentialist bent of Collins, but it is also trou-
blesome because it implies that the only really good way of making use of
a philosophical training is to become a philosopher yourself: it is the only
worthy game in town. However, Cicero’s own career denies this possible
claim since he was probably more prominent in his day as a lawyer and
politician than as a philosopher. To trace the other possible uses of a philo-
sophical education and how it related to other social trajectories would
involve a much wider historical horizon than the one chosen by Collins.
The main reason this cannot be done, and which at the same time con-
demns Collins’ book to be a history of philosophical winners, is the lack
of information. For most of the historical period he has studied we do not
really know much about the conditions of intellectual work. His descrip-
tions of IRs make them sound like encounters that might have taken place
at a German university in the nineteenth century or at an American one in
the twentieth. We cannot assume that they had the same form in ancient
China or ancient Greece without the possible peril of anachronism. On the
other hand, the conception of creativity espoused by Collins makes use of
the reception of a given philosopher’s oeuvre as a yardstick for this philo-
sopher’s creativity. This reception by posterity reflects back on the author
and the creativity of the author is seemingly the cause of his own re-
ception. The agency of the “receptors” is hence denied. In this way Collins
enters into the pattern that Bourdieu has identified as charismatic
consecration (1996a, 227-231), where the belief in the author makes it
seem that creativity flows from his or her works and not from something
added by the readers. This only strengthens the emphasis on essential and
personal properties in Collins’ way of understanding philosophical great-
ness.
92 Chapter Four

The theoretical conception of The Sociology of Philosophies hinges on

the relationship between the intellectuals and their CC and EE, the net-
work in which they take part in and the possibilities of the attention space
in which they find themselves. The problematic of the appearance versus
reality, as analysed previously, is not present, although there is an inter-
action between agents and a network. However, in a similar manner to
Berger and Luckmann, the singular cases are effectively kept out and the
theory is immunized. It is an energetic model, but in Prigogine and
Stengers’ terms, Collins assumes simple and time-reversible laws in a state
close to equilibrium (Prigogine and Stengers 1985, 7). This is emphasized
by the way he formulates his model for the history of philosophies as
trans-historical. The same laws about IRs, EE, CC and attention space,
although they are historically founded patterns, can be applied to all
conditions and at all times. Similar to classical physics, nothing is really
allowed to change with time (7). Nothing really new can happen. Collins
formulated his model for intellectual creativity in order to counter argu-
ments from unnamed “postmodernists” who allegedly claim that there are
no general explanations (1998, 11-12). In an ironic twist to what he claims
to be a sociological project, Collins seems to espouse a view of creativity
similar to the nineteenth-century cult of the genius.

Putnam and Social Capital

Another contribution of interest for us is the book Bowling Alone by
the American political scientist Robert D. Putnam (2000). Putnam, who is
a professor of public policy, had for years studied social organization and
cohesion in Italian local government before he set his eyes on the same
topic in the US. The theses proposed in the book engendered a lot of dis-
cussion when Putnam first presented them in the mid-1990s, even before
the book was written. The title indicates a fundamental change that has,
according to Putnam, taken place in the US since, at least, 1970: while
people previously did things together, like bowling, they now do them
alone. What has happened, he claims, is that both social and civic engage-
ments have less importance for Americans. The interest of this book in our
context is the way Putnam made his analyses and what they can tell us
about his overall sociological theory.
Putnam analysed the phenomenon of participation in groups, organiza-
tions and political life as social capital. Social capital is “social networks
and the associated norms of reciprocity” (2000, 21) and it comes in many
shapes and sizes:
 Theories of Agency 93

Your extended family represents a form of social capital, as do your

Sunday school class, the regulars who play poker on your commuter train,
your college roommates, the civic organizations to which you belong, the
Internet chat group in which you participate, and the network of profes-
sional acquaintances recorded in your address book. (21)

For Putnam social capital is mainly something positive. A high level of

connectedness is a positive benefit for all living in a community, although
there are some types of sociality that are exclusive for a group of people –
called “bonding social capital” – and may have a sectarian function. An-
other general type of social capital may be characterized as oriented to-
wards the wider society – “bridging social capital” in his parlance. Some
of the early critiques levelled at Putnam were that his claims for a decline
in social capital in the US were not correct.33 The first part of his book is
thus an exposition of trends in social participation. Then the book tries to
answer why the decline has happened, why a high level of social capital is
good for the “American Community”, and, finally, what can be done to in-
crease it. Because of a lack of space in this book I shall concentrate on the
trends of participation and the causes of decline.
Bowling Alone is a huge book that refers to an enormous amount of
data and previous research in the field. The story told across many differ-
ent dimensions in the first part of it is that participation has declined in
politics, community-based organizations, trade unions and other formal or-
ganizations of employees, and in most types of informal social connec-
tions. Even religious participation has declined although it has often been
held to be at variance from the general pattern. The composition of the so-
cial capital within the religious field has changed somewhat owing to the
increased importance of the Evangelical churches, which have increased
their membership. They foster more of a bonding form of social capital
than the more bridging capital of traditional churches (2000, chs. 2-9). De-
spite Putnam’s upbeat prose this decline of social connectedness gives a
rather bleak impression of America and American social life: even family
dinners have become rarer!
The participation in civic and other types of social connectedness is,
however, not a general story of decline and nostalgia for the past. Putnam
shows that the amount of participation has varied a lot both during the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and it reached a historic peak in
1960 after unprecedented growth since 1945. But there has since been a
tremendous decline in social capital, but “why, beginning in the 1960s and
the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, did the fabric of Amer-
ican community life begin to unravel?” (2000, 184). Putnam tested indi-
cators for different “culprits”. What he found was that some factors like
94 Chapter Four

increased financial distress, the emergence of two-worker families, more

commuting, and suburbanization of cities have had some effects leading to
a decline of social capital, but they do not really amount to much. The
American infatuation with television (and to some extent other electronic
media) is, however, a prime suspect. He cites numerous studies that in-
dicate a strong tendency in American families to centre their activities on
themselves and in front of the television screen. The effect of television
viewing on social participation is, nevertheless, a bit difficult to assess
since it is impossible to discern the causal relation: does television lead to
social passivity or would all the heavy TV watchers have become passive
anyway? (ch.13). The main cause for civic and social disengagement,
Putnam finds, is generational. The war generation born between 1910 and
1940 is by far the most active generation in the twentieth century. Both the
baby boomers (born 1941-1964) and what is often called the generation X
(born 1965-1980) are not joiners – the X-ers even less than the boomers.
The high level of civic and social activity until the peak in 1960 was due
to the war generation and their high level of activity was waning from the
1970s owing to their life cycle. The particular experiences of this gene-
ration must somehow be at the root of their great civic activity and the
Second World War and its mobilization of the population for the war ef-
fort looms large in this picture (chs.14 and 15).
Bowling Alone is a stimulating read and portrays a very rich and varied
world. The book is a great achievement in many ways, but the analytic
strategy it uses is too simple: “American Community” is portrayed as a set
of forces working on each other like Newtonian physics. Putnam’s analy-
ses fit the model outlined by Prigogine and Stengers of reversible physics
where everything happens under conditions of equilibrium and time is not
really allowed to make much of a difference (1985, 7-18). The different
factors explaining the decline in social capital are portrayed as potential-
ities that unleash their power like a spring at a given moment. One of the
most penetrating critiques of this way of conceiving the social world is
written by the sociologist Andrew Abbott who called it “General Linear
Reality” (or GLR) (1988).34 This article debunked, astonishingly enough,
Bowling Alone 12 years ahead of the latter’s publication.
General Linear Reality is one of the ontologies within the field of the
social sciences that has disrupted the ties to the heritage from Weber and
Durkheim, but it has instead adopted the linear thinking presupposed by
multiple regression analysis and similar multivariate statistical techniques
as a way of formalizing how societies work. Abbott was not against cau-
tious uses of these techniques, but he was strongly opposed to making
them into an ontological foundation (1988, 169-171). A central assump-
 Theories of Agency 95

tion in linear methods, Abbott found, is that entities are fixed while their
attributes may change (171-173). In Putnam’s book this is shown by the
way political participation, civic, religious and professional participation,
and social connectedness all remain coherent as entities over time while
their attributes vary. One may, for instance, ask if union membership in
the US is the same type of entity in the 1990s as it was in, say, the 1960s.
Is local community participation the same object in the thoroughly sub-
urbanized cities of the 1980s compared with those of the 1950s? The en-
during identity of these entities is problematic since they have changed
quite dramatically between the two points in time (2000, chs. 2-9). This
form of immutability of types is one of the hallmarks of substantialism or
essentialism since it is assumed that they maintain an identity owing to an
outer characteristic or an inner virtue.
Another problem is that GLR does not acknowledge that the order in
which events take place matters (Abbott 1988, 177-178). In other words, it
does not recognize that in historical sequences the outcome of a prior
event can influence what follows next and is consequently irreversible. If
we look at my question above about union membership, some radical
changes took place between the two periods. One of the most fundamental
was that the economy changed from being mainly industrial to be based on
services. Furthermore, in the 1980s Ronald Reagan introduced new legis-
lation to make unionization harder and the employers became more vir-
ulent in their attacks on workers who tried to unionize the workforce.35
Putnam is aware of these changes (2000, ch.5), but they are not allowed to
impinge on his analyses. A historically based argument would be that both
the conditions within an industry, legislation and other historical events
would influence the proclivity of workers to become union members at a
later moment. His discussion of the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) is
another example. He indicates how the number of members declined after
1960 partly because of political struggles within the organization over
questions like the desegregation of schools and other school issues (55-
58). Historical contingencies may thus determine the rate of participation
in organizations, but Putnam holds that membership figures for individual
organizations are an uncertain guide and claims that “we have to study
group membership in general” (58). Membership in a group is, however,
always specific and it only becomes general in the head of a social analyst.
When it comes to the explanations of social and civic disengagement
we encounter other problems with the GLR mapped by Abbott and adopt-
ed by Putnam. In GLR independent and dependent variables are seen to be
clearly separable and a given variable has one and only one effect on an-
other variable (Abbott 1988, 175-180). This is why television viewing was
96 Chapter Four

such a headache for Putnam: he could not decide whether television pro-
duced less connected individuals or if TV viewing is an effect of increased
passivity. Some of the evidence he referred to seem to indicate that pas-
sivity and watching TV mutually reinforce each other.

… [D]ependence on television for entertainment is not merely a significant

predictor of civic disengagement. It is the single most consistent predictor
that I have discovered (Putnam 2000, 231; emphasis in orig.).

Furthermore he showed how people related to television in a more active

way in the 1950s while a more passive way of watching became prominent
from the 1970s on. Television is even mildly addictive! It is thus possible
to think that change in TV habits might have changed the causal direction
of the variable “television”, but no, this is not allowed within Putnam’s
framework (246; for a conclusion). He nevertheless seems to acknowl-
edge the effect of television by summarizing the effect of baby boomers,
X-ers and TV watching in the variable “the TV generation” (284).
An interesting aspect of Bowling Alone is that Putnam in many ways
rediscovers the effects of historical change, but he is without a conceptual
apparatus to make us understand what makes “American Community”
tick. For the war generation, participation must have been desired in a way
it was not desired by the later generations. Why was this so? The reader of
his book would search in vain for an answer. The psychological invest-
ments in the society change from the war generation to the boomers. This
includes the way they organize their lives, the way they work, the way
they relate to each other, etc. What we learn from Putnam’s book is that
boomers were politically active in the 1960s, but have since become much
less so. They are, however, much more tolerant than previous generations
and to some extent more than the X-ers. Surveys from the 1950s show that
large sections of the population held views that cannot be characterized as
anything other than racist and homophobic. This is something that
changed radically in the 1990s. Boomers and X-ers are more tolerant, but,
at the same time, more private (Putnam 2000, 352-358). We are, however,
not anywhere near an adequate understanding of the mechanisms produc-
ing this result if we limit ourselves to Putnam’s book.
Another way to understand the fate of the baby boomers is to view it as
a thwarted revolution. They wanted to create new political forms that
would challenge the authority of the government; new ways of living
one’s life opposed to those of the parent generation; to seek new forms of
knowledge that would contradict the experts, etc. But one of the effects of
this activism was an overload of representative bodies with demands and
the state became less able to govern efficiently. This was, for instance, a
 Theories of Agency 97

concern in an international report written by prominent social scientists in

the mid-1970s (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975). The Reagan
counterrevolution in the 1980s was to limit the scope and activity of the
state and the activity receded. Michael Forman, a critic of Putnam, has
written:

Not surprisingly, the main survivor from the activism of the 1960s has
been a distrust of established authorities which has transmogrified into a
broad-based decline in confidence in public institutions and political action
(2002, 253).

Investments in private life and individual success were thus some of the
very few openings for this generation and the following ones. No wonder
that surveys from the 1990s show that both boomers and X-ers are more
oriented towards individual fulfilment and material gain than the war
generation (Putnam 2000, 273-274). The transformation of the baby bo-
omers can be characterized by what the philosopher Jacques Rancière has
called the double bind of democracy: on the one hand, the mobilization of
a generation for participation in public life made the society ungovernable
for political leaders, and so too much democracy is a bad thing; on the
other hand, the deflection of desire into individual satisfaction is a bad
thing too, because it has made them disengaged and private (2005, 14).
The pursuit of individual self-realization was, moreover, unfruitful for
many. This is shown in the rise in the rate of suicides in recent genera-
tions, and the diagnosis of depression is much more common than before
and its prevalence depends on age group. Lifestyle surveys from the 1990s
also indicate that common ailments like headaches, indigestion and sleep-
lessness are much more common among people born in the 1970s and the
1980s than in older generations (Putnam 2000, 261-265).
Putnam’s book is a very valuable intellectually due to the amount of
data and previous analyses that it presents. It is a very engaging topic.
However, the reliance on the world view promoted by the GLR makes it
somewhat limited. Putnam stumbles on a major historical transformation
of US society, but lacks the conceptual tools to understand it as a historical
process. Putnam’s ideals are the pre-war and war generations that had
made America great, and Putnam’s political agenda seems to be to make
America great again. There appears, however, to be a glaring mismatch
between Putnam’s desire for a Great America and the more prosaic desires
of the citizens. Still, why America should be great and what that should
mean for peoples both inside and outside the US are somewhat unclear.
98 Chapter Four

Castells and Informationalism

Manuel Castells is a sociologist who previously specialized in urban
studies and has worked at American universities in this field for most of
his career. He originally had to flee from Catalonia under Franco’s dicta-
torship and studied and worked in France in the 1960s and 1970s. He is
most famous for his multi-volume study The Rise of the Network Society
where he made a broad empirical analysis of changes in contemporary
societies. I shall limit myself to discuss the first volume of this work. His
major claim is that the “information revolution” has been the main
changing force in our time and it has changed our economic and social
structure to the extent that we have left industrial capitalism and entered
the epoch of informationalism: “… the core of the transformation we are
experiencing in the current revolution refers to technologies of information
processing and communication” (2000, 30; emphasis in orig.). This his-
torical change does, however, not benefit everyone since traditional pat-
terns of production and citizenship are changed in the same process. The
uncontrolled transformation has its reverse side in political regroupings
around primary identities like territorial areas and religious beliefs. The
prevalence of networks is the central idea of the book and these are based
on instrumental exchanges and might,

selectively switch on and off individuals, groups, regions, and even coun-
tries, according to their relevance in fulfilling goals processed in the net-
work, in a relentless flow of strategic decisions. (3)

The network links together a number of autonomous systems, or nodes,

and the exchanges between them have, to a high degree, information as
their raw material. In the networking logic the costs of maintaining a net-
work grow in a linear pattern while the value of it grows exponentially
with the number of nodes. Hence, the benefits of the network outpaces the
costs when more nodes are connected to it (70-71).
For Castells the technical paradigm underlying the development of the
Internet is the foundation for the emergence of informationalism (2000,
69-76), but the technical aspect is only one part of the story. The other part
is the transformation of the large-scale enterprises and a way of production
involving emphasis on customer information, “just-in-time” principles and
autonomous units competing for access to contracts and markets. The
networked company may have units spread around the globe and they
have to respond flexibly to any changes in the marketplace (2000, ch.2).
This transformation began already in the 1970s with the crisis of mass pro-
duction. The industrial companies had to become flexible and they moved
 Theories of Agency 99

their focus from planning and production to following the changing tastes
of the customer. The network-structure is an answer to this challenge and
means less hierarchical units, but they are replaceable nodes in the net-
work. The networked company is thus “flatter” in shape, but power is nev-
ertheless exerted from specific centres. Informationalism also involves a
transformation of the workforce towards an emphasis on knowledge work-
ers of different kinds: managers, professionals and technical workers. Al-
though the economy is increasingly global, the flow of labour is still con-
strained by national borders and by cultural and institutional differences.
There is nevertheless a general tendency to transform labour relations
towards less collective bargaining, more individual contracts, more flex-
time work and work on the move. The social responsibility of companies
both towards workers and communities is more limited than in previous
historical periods. Traditional forms of employment involving long-term
contracts and pre-set career patterns are eroding (2000, chs.3 and 4).
This transformation is not only limited to companies and the world of
work. The enterprises of the networked companies are located in specific
cities and these cities have to develop the support functions that are neces-
sary for the enterprises. The cities themselves become part of the informa-
tional network and develop greater disparities to their hinterlands. At the
same time the development of whole new industrial regions like Silicon
Valley is important for the way labour and competency can flow between
companies. Informationalism also involves a transformation of the way
cities are constructed, although this is a slower form of change. The ten-
dency is perhaps a transformation towards general suburbanization without
any city core or towards the structure of the east and south Asian mega-
cities, with functional areas dispersed in segments throughout them. In
order to remain part of the network these cities have to make possible a
space of flows. This space must include both space for electronic ex-
changes and for the physical flows of people and goods (2000, ch.6).
The combination of the technical transformation and the transforma-
tion of enterprises is the driving force of the rise of the network society. In
a more general remark he notes that;

Networks are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating

new nodes as long as they are able to communicate within the network,
namely as long as they share the same communication codes (for example,
values or performance goal).(501)

The main advantages of networks are their variable geometry whereby

they can expand or contract their operations without destabilizing their
centres. The major holders of power in such systems are those controlling
100 Chapter Four

the “switches” between the different networks, and an example he gives is

the financial companies taking control over media companies which might
influence political processes (2000, 502). The great appeal of this work is
that Castells is able to synthesize different historical changes around the
technical model of the network and the exchanges of information in them.
Simultaneously he is able to study its reverse side in the form of identity
politics and the disaffiliation of whole populations from the networks. One
of his main claims is that “our societies are increasingly structured around
a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self” (3).
The network is for Castells the model against which everything is
measured. It is an energetic model since there are forces that work on other
forces and, furthermore, it is supposed to be flexible and dynamic. The
aim of my analysis in this context is to study how Castells constructs
agency and not to assess whether this model gives a good picture of the
transformations going on. There is, however, a tendency that the stated
dynamic of the network sometimes just disappears. The networks are, for
example, described as fluid (2000, 71), but the fluidity seems to solidify in
the way he describes them:

As I have argued in the general introduction to the book, the new, informa-
tional paradigm interacts with history, institutions, levels of development,
and position in the global system of interaction along the lines of different
networks. (218)

In this quotation “history”, “institutions”, “levels of development” and

“position in the global system of interaction” are treated like discrete enti-
ties which can act. But this is a substantialized use of these concepts and it
is not valid since “history”, “levels of development” and “positions” can-
not in any way be actors unless we abstract all sorts of specific social and
technical relations to a “higher level”. As I argued in Chapter 1, this way
of forming collective actors is no uncommon practice in sociology, but it
is highly troublesome because it hides the mechanisms of the underlying
processes. Furthermore, this quotation is no isolated occurrence in
Castells’ book. It is one of the marks of his explanations that even con-
cepts indicating processes and relationships are treated like discrete acting
substances. This is yet another version of potentialities hiding in entities
and unleashing their powers under benign circumstances (cf. above).
Is not this judgement a bit unfair? We all summarize processes in the
form of collective actors and assume a sort of substance for them as a sort
of shorthand. Assuming coherence as a shorthand, however, is something
different from treating them on a continuous basis as substantive actors.
What has happened in Castells’ case is that these expressions have ossified
 Theories of Agency 101

into a generalized substance-speak. In this substance-speak he has prefer-

red to use nouns where he could have used verbs and other dynamical ex-
pressions to emphasize movement and change. Castells tends to emphasize
what something is over what it does. We learn about television that it is:
“… characterized by its seductiveness, its sensorial simulation of reality,
and its easy communicability along the lines of least psychological effort”
(2000, 361). This is a characterization of television in itself. It identifies a
sort of potentiality in the substance (television) and not something that is
produced in the process of watching television or in the relation between
television and its audiences. Taken in isolation this quotation does not
sound that odd, but together with all the others over hundreds of pages, the
effect is disconcerting.
In some places Castells changes the way he constructs agency from
that of network to the more traditional way of seeing collective agency in
the form of “nesting arrangements”. In these individuals join higher units
and these even higher units, etc. in a vertical fashion. The agency of the
composing entities is abstracted to the higher entity at every step up the
ladder. Castells writes, for example, the following about multinational
corporations:

…, multinational corporations are indeed the power-holders of wealth and

technology in the global economy, since most networks are structured
around such corporations. But at the same time, they are internally dif-
ferentiated in decentralized networks, and externally dependent on their
membership in a complex, changing structure of interlocking networks,
cross-border networks in Imai’s formulation. Besides, each one of the com-
ponents of these networks, internal and external, is embedded in specific
cultural/institutional environments (nations, regions, locales) that affect the
network in varying degrees (2000, 208).

If we take this quotation seriously it describes different nesting arrange-

ments with a superior substance (corporation) having many other sub-
stances (networks) nesting within it and these again nest within other enti-
ties (nations, regions and locales). But are nesting arrangements in con-
formity with his model of networks? Early in his book he describes a net-
working logic which should go counter to a traditional nesting logic (70-
71). Although he presents an enormous amount of research and the multi-
volume work is the result of a huge effort, the theoretical logic embedded
in his analyses nonetheless undermines his attempts to construct a new
interpretation of how the social world works.
102 Chapter Four

Comparisons
Collins, Putnam and Castells formulated their theories within what I
have called the energetic mode of social inquiry, but, as I have shown,
they do so in different ways. In both Collins’ and Putnam’s cases they use
timeless explanatory models even though both study historical transforma-
tions. Both refer to hidden potentialities that are “kept on ice”, so to speak,
until they release their powers. In Collins’ case this is due to his trans-
historical model of intellectual change, which ends up with a formula of
ideas begetting new ideas which again begets new ideas. Why philoso-
phers might discuss and disagree with each other passionately is not really
important for his analysis. That said, Collins’ book contains huge map-
pings of conceptual change within the different philosophical traditions
and these might be of great interest for students in a field like the history
of ideas or history of philosophy. Putnam, for his part, subordinates his
analyses and his whole social ontology to the linear thinking underlying
statistical methods like multiple-regression analysis. Historical transfor-
mations like the ones he has tried to analyse have different properties than
the effects of a simple set of independent variables on a dependent one.
Historical processes are not time-reversible in the way it is assumed in the
foundational philosophy of these statistical techniques. This is not a
problem concerning these techniques themselves, for they have their
legitimate uses, but it turns into a problem when their principles are
transformed into a social ontology. If we take time-irreversibility serious-
ly, analyses of the same conditions at different points in time usually will
give different results since there are events in the meantime that might
have changed the relationship between the entities we study. Historical
transformations like the one Putnam has analysed are not marked by con-
ditions of what Prigogine and Stengers call “close to equilibrium” (1985,
7-18), because if they were, there would be no real transformation. Even
changes that are gradual constitute the foundation for what happens next
and even small changes at given points in time can gradually change the
whole way an assemblage functions by an additive process.
If we turn to Castells, we can see that he is mainly caught in a game of
wanting to analyse flexible networks, but is unable to do it. This should
not diminish our appreciation of the effort behind his multivolume book
and all the empirical material he has collected there. Theoretically, how-
ever, he tends to hark back to a way of thinking where agency is ascribed
to discrete collective entities. This form of agency presumes a process of
abstraction or Aufhebung to a higher level of some sort. The result is dis-
concerting because where flexible association was supposed to reign, there
 Theories of Agency 103

are mainly substantialized entities. We also find traditional nesting ar-

rangements with actors hidden within actors in the manner of a Russian
doll.
All the three works analysed in this context are what we might call
great books, and in the cases of Putnam and Castells, they have received
much public attention. Their aim is all to make a significant contribution
to both our understanding of important social transformations and to give
us a diagnosis for the society in which we live. Hence they all embody
great scientific ambitions, but they are nevertheless all held back by their
theoretical shortcomings. It is about time to move onto another type of
terrain and that is what we shall do in the following.

Harold Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology

I have claimed above that Harold Garfinkel was one of a small number
of sociologists who has been able to break with time-reversibility. I have
so far shown that time-reversible theories in sociology come in a limited
number of guises. Some of them presuppose an initial moment of con-
struction either by the actors themselves or by the sociologist herself be-
fore the arrow of causality changes direction and starts constraining the
actors. Previously in this chapter I have analysed some theories where re-
versibility is assumed as a potentiality for action. The aim of this part of
the chapter is to show how Garfinkel differs from this pattern.
Garfinkel was a student of Talcott Parsons, and ethnomethodology, as
he called his approach, may be seen as taking a critical stance against
Parson’s sociological theory. Where Parsons finds order, Garfinkel claims
that order is negotiated from situation to situation. Order is no cause, but
an effect. In this way the circle of time-reversibility is broken and what is
order at one moment in time will differ from what is constructed as order
at another. The actors are, of course, not naïve when they enter into rela-
tions to each other. They usually have a common stock of knowledge to
assess the situation they are in, but they reflect over this knowledge in an
active way. The sociologist cannot know in advance what will happen and
the order which is obtained is a negotiated result (Heritage 1992). Alfred
Schütz’ phenomenology of everyday life was an important inspiration for
Garfinkel’s move away from Parsons. In the same way as Berger and
Luckmann, he was concerned with the way actors use typifications to
assess the situation they are in and to analyse their relationships to each
other. Unlike Berger and Luckmann, however, typifications do not serve
in Garfinkel’s theories as a foundation for a grand theory of institutions
and how they come about. Instead typifications are one of the starting
104 Chapter Four

points for the analysis of situations (1967). Ethnomethodology is con-

cerned with situations and it is perhaps limited as a general sociological
theory due to this scope. Everything that human beings do is perceived as
action within ethnomethodology, whether it is actors moving about, re-
lating to other people, speaking, writing or thinking. We are hence in the
realm of the energetic mode of inquiry.
Garfinkel’s main book, Studies in Ethnomethodology, is a collection of
papers analysing different cases and these cases usually concern the
actors’ background knowledge and how, in different ways, this taken-for-
granted knowledge is challenged. Garfinkel is famous for his so-called
“breaching” experiments where he let the experimenter do something that
disrupted the common expectancies of some situation. The aim of these
experiments was to show that even a seamless and taken-for-granted order is
somehow produced from situation to situation. By breaching with what was
expected in a situation the experimenter could observe different types of
reactions from the others. His students were given breaching experiments as
assignments, and in one of his examples the subject (S) of the experiment
was telling the experimenter (E) that she had had a flat tire while going to
work:

(S): I had a flat tire.

(E): What do you mean, you had a flat tire?
She appeared momentarily stunned. Then she answered in a hostile way:
“What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ A flat tire is a flat tire. That is
what I meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question!” (Garfinkel 1967,
42)

The breaching of expectations made the background of common sense

visible and Garfinkel’s point was to show how actors managed situations
in a practical way. All sorts of everyday situations are practical accom-
plishments and the hostile reaction to the breach of common expectations
happened regularly as subjects found it annoying to renegotiate the ob-
vious. This exchange of words also indicates how much of our everyday
conversations presume indirect knowledge.
One of the assignments Garfinkel gave his students was to act as
boarders in relation to their own families, to be strangers in their own
homes. This meant talking politely, not getting personal, use formal ad-
dress, and speak only when spoken to. In most cases the families were to-
tally stupefied by this way of acting:

Reports were filled with accounts of astonishment, bewilderment, shock,

anxiety, embarrassment, and anger, and with charges by various family
 Theories of Agency 105

members that the student was mean, inconsiderate, selfish, nasty, or impo-
lite. (1967, 47)

They also demanded explanations or tried to “analyse” his or her case to

find an explanation. When the student explained the experiment to the
other family members they were able to restore the situation, but

… for the most part family members were not amused and only rarely did
they find the experiment instructive as the student argued that it was
supposed to have been. (48-49)

The breaching (and other) experiments were made to show how impor-
tant common-sense expectations are for the definition of a given situation
and that actors standardize expectations for what any situation might
entail. This phenomenon has been recognized by social scientists long be-
fore Garfinkel, but they,

… have used the fact of standardization to conceive the character and con-
sequences of actions that comply with standard expectancies. Generally
they have acknowledged but otherwise neglected the fact that by these
same actions persons discover, create, and sustain this standardization.
(1967, 66)

In other words, social scientists have concentrated on the standard expect-

ancies and singled them out as the phenomenon worth studying. This
amounts to a kind of professional neglect in Garfinkel’s view, where they
have confused cause and effect and they have then made the member of
society into “a judgmental dope of a cultural or psychological sort” (67).
Another way to express this view is to say that researchers have
concentrated on formulating social rules that the actors allegedly follow.
Their preference for the social rules has in this way caught their analyses
in a play between rules and exception. The truth, however, is the other way
round: standardizations are the results of social agency and not the cause
of it.
Another way of acting laid bare by Garfinkel is that actors use what he
has called the “documentary method of interpretation”. He borrowed this
concept from Karl Mannheim, and Garfinkel’s intention was to show how
actors – both lay persons and social scientists – interpreted small scraps of
evidence from inside a culture. Actors tend to assume a stock of “socially-
sanctioned-facts-of-life-in-society-that-any-bona-fide-member-of-the-soci-
ety-knows” (1967, 76), and they tend to interpret the actions and expres-
sions of others on the basis of this stock. To show how much interpre-
106 Chapter Four

tations add to evidence, Garfinkel made an experiment where ten under-

graduates were consulting a psychiatrist for their “social problems”. They
could explain the whole range of their problem to the advisor who was
sitting in another room and could make comments on his answers. These
comments, however, were not audible to the “psychiatrist” in the other
room. The answers of the advisor were either yes or no and he followed a
table of random numbers to decide when to apply a “yes” or a “no”. The
subjects in the experiment interpreted his expressions as deeply held
insights and in their comments they tried to make sense of them. In one
case the subject wanted to know whether he as a Jew should continue to
date a Gentile woman despite the hostility of his father. In another case the
subject asked about his studies. He had somewhat low grades in physics
and wanted to switch to mathematics. The first subject found the advisor’s
answers meaningful but at times surprising. Some of the answers per-
plexed him and he ascribed them to the advisor’s lack of full knowledge
about his case. The second subject found, on the basis of the answers, that
it was perhaps foolish of him to pursue a degree in anything, and that he
perhaps should go into inventive work directly without a degree (79-88).
When the subjects were made aware of the experiment they were “in-
tensely chagrined” (92).36 The main finding was that the subjects treated
the answers as sensible, but often incomplete, inappropriate and contradic-
tory. Nevertheless, they tried to make sense of them and made follow-up
questions to clarify. Contradictory answers from the advisor were often
explained as a result of the advisor learning more about the subject’s situa-
tion. The subjects imputed knowledge and intent to the advisor and in the
cases of contradictions they searched for patterns in his answers (89-92).
This “documentary method of interpretation” is, however, not only a
method of the layperson but also of the sociologists. They too interpret
scraps of evidence within a culture:

Its obvious application occurs in community studies where warrant is

assigned to statements by the criteria of “comprehensive description” and
“ring of truth”. Its use is found also on the many occasions of survey
research when the researcher, in reviewing his interview notes or in editing
the answers to a questionnaire, has to decide “what the respondents had in
mind”. (1967, 94-95)

This method cannot be easily dispensed with, lest the sociological enter-
prise become completely sterile. Studies that have tried to suspend inter-
pretation altogether usually became totally formal and devoid of sociologi-
cal matter. One of Garfinkel’s recurring themes, however, is that sociol-
ogists do not act and think any differently than laypersons. This does not
 Theories of Agency 107

mean that the subjective experience of actors is privileged in ethnometh-

odology, but it must be taken seriously as accounts of how individuals
reflect over their actions and tell each other what they do and why they do
it. There is no aim in ethnomethodology to confront these accounts with a
“reality” in order to correct them. Accounts are merely practical actions
and how they function can be described by the sociologist (Heritage 1992,
135-141). The sociologist’s own analysis is only an account of accounts.
Ethnomethodology was early taken up by the practitioners of social
studies of sciences as part of the intellectual movement of social construc-
tivism and phenomenology. These studies emphasized how scientific
knowledge was made in local laboratory settings by actors reflecting over
their own practices (Latour and Woolgar 1986, Knorr-Cetina 1981, Knorr-
Cetina and Mulkay 1983). A fuller presentation of this line of research will
be made in the next chapter, but Garfinkel’s work will be discussed in a
somewhat different context in the following section.

The Question of Language

What I want to do in this section is to take Garfinkel’s arguments in a
somewhat different direction by indicating a certain congruence between
Garfinkel’s conceptions and the pragmatic theory of language formulated
by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, ch.5). This might seem a bit outlandish,
especially since Garfinkel never seemed to have been interested in linguis-
tics or semiotics in themselves. On the other hand, conversational analysis
is commonly applied within the ethnomethodological framework (cf.
Heritage 1992, ch.8), but that is something quite different. Garfinkel even
claimed that,

EM [ethnomethodology] is not in the business of interpreting signs. It is

not an interpretation enterprise. Enacted local practices are not texts which
symbolize ‘meanings’ or events (2002, 97).

This view is, however, not that far from the views of Deleuze and Guattari
since their concern was how signs function in particular assemblages and
not to give them an interpretation. My claim that there is congruence
between these two theories in some respects does not, of course, overlook
the fact that they were trained in different idioms and that I develop
Garfinkel’s insights in a different direction of his own. Nevertheless, the
two approaches both share the same type of intuition: that common pat-
terns must be explained and they cannot be taken as causes.
I shall in the following take a second look at Garfinkel’s experiment
with the psychiatric advisor. The students thought he was a bona fide
108 Chapter Four

member of society who was answering to the best of his knowledge, but to
the contrary he was tricking them to generate interpretations. These could
not be inferred from the outset, but they regularly referred to a common
stock of knowledge that the student assumed as shared by the advisor
(1967, 92-94), thus the possibility of moving from this particular situation
and their situated expressions to this common stock of socially ratified
knowledge. An important feature of this situation, but not accentuated by
Garfinkel, is the element of domination implicit in it: the experiment took
place at a Department of Psychiatry37 and the student was therefore con-
fronted with the symbolic weight of the psychiatric profession. The right
of the “advisor” to give advice and to be listened to is presumed and is
probably important for making the experiment work at all. In this situation
marked by authority the interpretations made by the undergraduates can be
understood as searches for the coordinates guiding the answers of the
advisor and thus were supposed to guide the solutions to their own “social
problems”.
This experiment is typical for a situation in which language “gives life
orders. Life does not speak: it listens and waits” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 76). In Deleuze and Guattari’s view the elementary unit of a state-
ment is what they called the “order-word” (mot d’ordre) – a word calling
to order:38

We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for

example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every state-
ment to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are,
and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not con-
cern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a “social
obligation”. Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Ques-
tions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language
is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts cur-
rent in a language at a given moment. (79; emphasis in orig.)

In this definition, language as utterance comes to the forefront and be-

comes the basis for the study of signs and what they call collective assem-
blages of enunciation (cf. Chapter 1). Domination within the assemblage
comes more visible because not all characters command the necessary
obedience to be listened to. The subjects in Garfinkel’s experiment, for ex-
ample, were frantically searching for signposts to guide their interpreta-
tions. They assumed that the “advice” could be relied upon for ordering
both practices and their understanding of the world.
This view of language presupposes, however, the linguistic turn that
Garfinkel had never taken, which is a fact lamented by Latour (1988c).39
 Theories of Agency 109

Enacted social practices were Garfinkel’s object and linguistic utterances

were actions and could be described in that respect, but they were not part
of a separate domain called language. There is a multiplicity of possible
outcomes of a situation, although some are more probable than others.
Garfinkel was, however, interested in what is called indexical expressions.
In Chapter 2 I showed that Peirce introduced this concept and it is part of
his classification of signs into three types: 1) the sign united with its object
in resemblance – icon, 2) the sign representing the object, but has no other
relationship to it – symbol, and 3) the sign representing the object in an
arbitrary manner, but has a real connection to it – index (Peirce 1960,
4.531). What interested Garfinkel was that indexical expressions are com-
pletely dependent on their context of use and, furthermore, they cannot
easily be subjected to formal analysis. An example of an indexical expres-
sion might be somebody pointing while saying “that’s a nice one”. This
phrase might have quite different meanings depending upon the situation:
a guest pointing out a picture from a photo album, or a girl with her boy-
friend in front of a jeweller’s window, or a greengrocer describing his let-
tuce, etc. (cf. Heritage 1992, 143-144). What is supposed to be nice might
even vary within each situation. The comment may also be assumed to be
ironic, sarcastic, or plainly in breach of commonly assumed standards of
“niceness” (“That one nice? She must be mad!”). Within ethnomethodo-
logy the meaning of the expression depends on the speaker’s and listener’s
invocation of common knowledge and context as a resource (144).
Deleuze and Guattari would perhaps be interested in how an expression
distinguishing something as “nice” compares with other qualifications
(plain, ugly, or bad, for example) and thence an ordering of the world.
What makes a lettuce’s niceness different from a photo’s depends, how-
ever, on implicit presuppositions and collective assemblages of enun-
ciation. In this way linguistic expressions always make use of collective
resources and are never individual (1987, 79-80).
Another common ground between Deleuze and Guattari and Garfinkel
is that they, in opposition to what is common, do not see language
primarily as communicational. This holds if we understand communi-
cation as an intersubjective process where an addresser imparts a message
to an addressee following some version of the Schema of Linguistic
Communication (cf. Greimas and Courtés 1982, 37-40; cf. also my
comments in Chapter 1). For Garfinkel linguistic interaction is connected
to certain procedures rather than to a message:

“Shared agreement” refers to various social methods for accomplishing the

member’s recognition that something was said-according-to-a-rule and not
the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. (1967, 30)
110 Chapter Four

Similarly, order-words are linked to social obligations and are transmitted

through a form of redundancy of the statement and the speech act. What is
expressed obliges us at the same time: “Newspaper, news, proceed by
redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc.”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 79). Statements thus always transmit more
than is literally “said”. Unlike Garfinkel, they do not emphasize the inter-
subjective relations as a primal event for language, but rather the ability
within language to transmit what others say. Linguistic expressions are full
of reports of what other people said or wrote. The first determination of
language is, then, indirect discourse:

There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, mur-
murings, speaking in tongues: the translative movement proper to language
is that of indirect discourse. (77)

Language has always a plurality of voices and this plurality can especially
be found in what is usually called “free indirect discourse”. This is a form
of discourse in fiction where there is a sudden change of viewpoint from
the narrator to one of the characters. Jane Austen is regularly held to be the
first author to use this form in English and here is an example from
Persuasion:

He thought it a very degrading alliance; and Lady Russell, (…), received it

as a most unfortunate one. Anne Elliott, with all her claims of birth, beauty,
and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself, at nineteen,
in an engagement with a young man who had nothing but himself to rec-
ommend him, … (1994, 24-25; emphasis added).

The italics indicate the sudden movement from the narrator to the thoughts
of Lady Russell. The shift is indicated by subjective expressions like
“throw herself away” and the effect is one of more immediacy. Another
example shows how free indirect discourse often involves a kind of trans-
formed direct speech:

She looked around the room. The floor would be a problem, of course. She
40
would have to get rid of the carpet.

In this case, there is an impression of direct speech, but the tense is not in
the present and the pronouns are in the third person and not in the first. In
other words, the second and third sentences are the character’s subjective
thoughts, but they cannot be said or thought in this manner by the charac-
ter (let us say, in a play or in real life).
 Theories of Agency 111

The Russian linguist Valentin N. Voloshinov (1895 – 1936) was one of

the first to identify the particular quality of free indirect speech.41 He was a
member of the circle of intellectuals around the literary scholar Mikhail
Bakhtin (1895 – 1975) in the 1920s and he was able to publish the book
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in 1929 before Stalin’s censor-
ship and purges silenced many of the circle’s members (Brandist 2002).
Voloshinov used free indirect speech as an example to counter both the
objectivism of the Saussurean Geneva School and those who held that lan-
guage expressed the inner subjective personality of characters.42 Language
is, one the one hand, too dynamic to give rise to an abstract system of
structures and, on the other, personality is itself a theme of language and is
expressed in language and not the other way round (1973, 152-153). For
Deleuze and Guattari a consequence of Voloshinov’s analysis is that enun-
ciation does not necessarily refer to a subject, but, rather, that subjectivity
is allocated through linguistic processes. The subject is a product rather
than a starting point (Deleuze 2003b). Furthermore, Voloshinov argues
that in the free indirect discourse:

.., we have a combination not of empathy and distancing within the

confines of an individual psyche, but of the character’s accents (empathy)
and the author’s accents (distancing) within the confines of one and the
same linguistic construction. (1973, 155; emphasis added)

The feelings of the character come to the forefront while the narrator steps
back. Voloshinov traces free indirect discourse as a mixed genre harking
back to Old French where narrators often did not distinguish between the
voice of the character and that of the narrator. Narrators participated in the
experiences and words of their characters from within (150). For Deleuze
and Guattari free indirect discourse was important because it indicated the
implicitness and embeddedness as a fundamental aspect of language;: “it is
an enunciation taken into an utterance (enoncé) that depends itself on
another enunciation” (Deleuze 2003b, 185; my trans.), and, furthermore,
“my direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through
me” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84).
The main problem with linguistics as a discipline, according both to
Voloshinov and to Deleuze and Guattari, was the tendency to extract con-
stants from language. This search for order is pursued to such extremes
that something about the way ordinary words function completely escapes
linguistics (Voloshinov 1973, 109-111, Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 82-
85). The view of Deleuze and Guattari is thus based on the same funda-
mental intuition as that of ethnomethodology, but I shall not minimize the
differences between these two approaches. Deleuze and Guattari argued
112 Chapter Four

that although order-words are primary in the language function, it is never-

theless possible to identify in texts what they called regimes of signs (cf.
Chapter 2). This concept involves a form of formalization that Garfinkel
would not accept. Ethnomethodology is a way of studying situations and,
perhaps, cannot be said to be a general sociological theory owing to this
limitation. Nevertheless, both approaches suggest that the imposition of
rules and obligations are involved in linguistic exchanges and this goes
much further than imparting a message between two parties. Language
orders the world, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, and this order is present
in and through indirect speech. By making utterances a human being
invokes much more than what is seemingly present between two inter-
locutors – perhaps a whole world or a world view. Free indirect speech
also makes it possible for them to show that subjectivity is a product of the
function of language and not something to be taken as a fundamental
starting point. Both Garfinkel’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches
indicate the closeness of language to social processes, although the former
tends to make it into a part of action while the latter treats language and
signs as something autonomous of the relationship between bodies.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have analysed some sociological theories in what I
have called the energetic mode of inquiry. Following Ricoeur, this mode
of inquiry involves notions of forces working on other forces and it is con-
trasted to the hermeneutic mode of inquiry with its search for hidden pat-
terns. Within the first mode of inquiry we included the distinction between
time-reversibility and time-irreversibility made by Prigogine and Stengers
and the bulk of the chapter analysed theories belonging to either side of
this demarcation. We have seen how the theories of Randall Collins,
Robert Putnam and Manuel Castells all presuppose close to equilibrium
condition and time-reversibility. Both Collins’ and Putnam’s books are
marked by reversible potentialities that release their forces under certain
circumstances, while Castells tend to give actorial substance to all sorts of
collective entities.
It might be possible to argue that Collins’ theories should be included
in the group of grand hermeneutics owing to his synthesizing of Weberian
thought in other works and he has obviously imported some of his ideas of
intellectual field and capital from Bourdieu. These concepts, however, re-
ceived another type of treatment in Collins’ book in the way he has essen-
tialized both cultural capital and emotional energy. I shall defend the use
of the distinction between the different modes of inquiry owing to the fact
 Theories of Agency 113

that theories belonging to the different modes enter into different theoreti-
cal problems. The “hermeneutic” models tend to end up in what Deleuze
and Guattari described as the signifying regime of signs (cf. Chapters 2
and 3). Most of the energetic models presume what Prigogine and Stengers
called conditions that are “close to equilibrium”, where the research effort
tries to find repetitive patterns in the social world. These repetitive patterns
then explain why things happen the way they happen. A common problem
with theories of this type is that they also tend to repeat the way they ex-
plain evidence. In other words, they form a common frame that all sorts of
empirical evidence can be put into. This is the source of the repetitiveness
of much sociological research.
The odd man out is Harold Garfinkel, whose work reintroduced uncer-
tainty and the continued construction of the world around us that social
actors do. This conception thus breaks with reversibility and he introduces
real irreversibility into his work by insisting on the recurring re-making
and re-interpretation of social order in social situations. What is evident is
that what happens at one point in time has consequences for what might
happen next. With his breaching experiments he shows not only how
taken-for-grantedness is broken, but also how difficult it is to restore
order. Regarding the need to restore order and the difficulty involved, he
showed to what degree it is a product of active work and that it cannot be
taken as a cause. Because of its irreversibility, his work is not that easy to
integrate into sociological theory presupposing reversibility. Garfinkel’s
great achievement is to reintroduce difference and openness, although he
did not move beyond the analysis of social situations. What I have done is
to compare ethnomethodology to Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic theory
of language. Some of the same construction of order takes place in speech
situations as in those social situations discussed by Garfinkel. We have so
far in this book met linguistic theory in the form of signs and the relation-
ship between signifiance and interpretance (Chapter 2 and 3) and the fol-
lowing chapters will take us somewhat further.
 CHAPTER FIVE

LATOUR’S ANTHROPOLOGY OF SCIENCE

AND ITS LIMITATIONS

In Chapter 1 I argued that Latour’s theories have made it possible for so-
ciologists to solve (or rather to dissolve) the problem of agency versus
structure. The only way to explain the continuity of human societies, he
has claimed, was to involve technical objects and to accept their agency on
a par with humans. This is a very unusual thought for a social scientist and
it does not only undermine the common sociological presuppositions for-
mulated in Theses 1 and 4, but the other ones as well. The aim of this
chapter is to explain this approach in some depth and how it may take
sociology in a different direction. Latour’s approach is not without its
problems, however, and I shall make these clearer towards the end of the
chapter.
It is well known that Bruno Latour's anthropology of science is to some
extent influenced by semiotic theory. The use of concepts like actant,
inscription, translation, modalities, shifting in, shifting out, regime of
enunciation, etc. attests to this fact. The aim of this chapter is also to show
how most of Latour's theoretical views can be connected to semiotics,
although this should not exclude other readings of his work. Theories of
agency are also important starting point for understanding his theories, and
the work of Garfinkel, discussed in Chapter 4, is important in this regard.
However, from his earliest texts on science studies (Latour and Fabbri
1977) to his more recent Cogitamus (2010), Latour has always maintained
semiotics as a fundamental theoretical tool, and his main source of semi-
otic theory was Algirdas Julien Greimas and his Paris school. I have in
previous chapters emphasized the relationship between sociology and
semiotics and the reason for doing so is the importance of signs and lan-
guage in human existence, although it is often subordinated to social re-
lations by sociologists. In Latour’s work the question of language has
gained a special importance because it is the only space in which “the-
world-according-to-natural-science” can meet “the-world-according-to-
sociology” and in this space this opposition can be dissolved (cf. Latour
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 115

1993b, 64). “Naturalism” and “sociologism” are like two twins who hate
each other, but are nevertheless inseparable. Semiotics is hence important
in order to understand Latour’s approach, but also to excavate its weaknes-
ses.
In the first part of the chapter I shall discuss the background of
Latour’s conception seen in relation to its origins within the field of sci-
ence studies and debates emanating from it. This especially concerns his
relation to what is called the Edinburgh School. I shall then concentrate on
the foundations of his theories and how they are relevant for a more gen-
eral social theory. My comparison between Greimas’ theories and Latour’s
concentrates on how he imports semiotic concepts on a massive scale into
what we might call his Translational Model. Translation is a fundamental
concept of Latour’s and it summarizes the way he implements his funda-
mental ontology in empirical studies. This fundamental ontology is de-
scribed in the philosophical précis Irreductions (1988b). The translational
model sets, however, some limits for which phenomena can be observed,
but Latour’s main theoretical problems are his (partial) rejection of histori-
cally established conditions and the emphasis given to the forms of action
over its substance.

Latour’s Oeuvre
The emblem “anthropology of science” that Latour has applied to his
theory must not be understood as indicating a kind of specialism: it is not a
limited field for anthropologists interested in natural science, for example.
Far from it! His theoretical outlook is oriented towards a fundamental
ontology (cf. Harman 2009) and this ontology includes all of what he has
called the “collective of humans and non-humans” (Latour 1999b). I have,
for simplicity’s sake, continued to call this collective “society”, although
his theory undermines most contemporary sociological understandings of
this concept. The notion “anthropology of science” is probably meant as a
provocation within the French intellectual field, because in France science
is not supposed to have anything to do with anything made by humans.
Instead of engaging in the further development of the Latourian ontology
in what has been called “actor-network theory”, I prefer to link his
concepts to their emergence in the field of science studies and to their
background in semiotics. By doing so I think that their general relevance
to the topic of this book can be made evident.
There is always a risk of oversimplification when it comes to sug-
gestions of how to divide an author’s works into historical periods or
phases of creation. With this caveat in mind I think the development of
116 Chapter Five

Latour’s theoretical views can, perhaps, be divided into at least three dif-
ferent phases. First, a phase of early foundations through fieldwork and
historical studies from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s; then a re-
orientation in the 1990s towards a critique of modernity and a develop-
ment of his theories as a reaction to some critiques from colleagues. I shall
also designate a third phase from the late 1990s to the present, where he
has published books which are more concerned with the application of his
theories to new areas than they are with further theoretical development. I
must admit that in this book my chief interest is with the two first phases
in which he formulated his approach. Science studies as a field of research
developed in an Anglo-American context and Latour’s articles and books
were first of all written for this public. In the later two phases his earlier
books were translated into French and some of his new ones were written
in French first and then translated into English. The first phase is also
marked by Latour’s close collaboration with Michel Callon at the École
des Mines in Paris where Latour worked for a long time (Callon and
Latour 1981, Callon 1986).
The first phase is first marked by the publication in 1979 of Laboratory
Life (1986) in collaboration with Steve Woolgar, and this book was well
received at the time as one of a very small number of field studies of a
scientific laboratory. The focus of the book was on how scientific facts
were constructed by the activities of the biochemists at Salk Institute in La
Jolla, California. At the forefront was the mobilization of laboratory equip-
ment, chemicals, test animals and rhetorical strategies employed by the
scientists in controversies over the molecular structure of certain hor-
mones. A few years later Latour published Les Microbes. Guerre et paix
(literally “Microbes: War and Peace”, later translated and published in The
Pasteurization of France), a textual study of how Louis Pasteur’s micro-
biology had been able to reverse some of the weaknesses humans had had
in their relationship with contagious illnesses for millennia (Latour
1988b). By introducing aseptic and antiseptic practices or by reducing the
virulence of microbes in order to make vaccines, humans could reduce
their traditionally high rate of mortality. Microbiology was able to turn the
tables on the microbes and as a consequence many people had longer and
richer lives and fewer had to see a child or a close relative wither away in
a fever from an innocent infection. Microbiology thence changed society
in a dramatic way in the later decades of the nineteenth century and early
twentieth, although it was taken completely unawares by the Spanish flu
in1918. In Latour’s analysis of microbiology something new had happened
to both society and microbes: there is a clear “before” and “after”. Or, in
other words, his analysis is time-irreversible.
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 117

The last book in this phase was Science in Action (1987) where Latour
summarized both his own and others’ work in this field and where he de-
veloped what I later in this chapter call the Translational Model. In this
book he showed how controversies over scientific claims quickly gave rise
to very technical rhetoric. Groups of scientists and engineers mobilized
colossal financial and technical means in these arguments to get the facts
right. Latour holds that the composition of both “nature” and “society” is a
result of such controversies and none of them can be considered to be
constants. A typical view in this phase is that controversies are decided by
trials of strength and this principle Latour made into the theoretical foun-
dation of his analyses. It is described in some detail in the philosophical
précis Irreductions, printed as the second part of The Pasteurization of
France (Latour 1988b, 153-236). One of the major principles in this précis
is that “whatever resists trials is real” (158). Everything can increase or
decrease in reality through the force gained or lost by trials of strength.
Fundamental entities (often called actants) gain strength by associating
with other entities. In this way they might resist some entities and form
joint vectors of force with others (160). In Chapter 1 I presented the gun-
wielding situation as an example of this kind of thinking. The gun and the
person holding the gun mediate each other’s actions and they enter into a
joint vector of force. The human being can do something more with the
gun in her hand than without it and the gun needs the human in order to
realize its built-in programme of firing a bullet (Latour 1999b, 178-180).
This conception, which is clearly marked by what I have called energet-
icism, is the starting point for Latour’s constructivism or what we might
also call his associology.
Latour’s approach has not been received without criticism from his
Anglo-American colleagues. The introduction of non-human actors has
not been very popular and he and Callon have been criticized for playing
“chicken” with the others because they are willing to go further in their
arguments than the rest of their colleagues (cf. Collins and Yearley 1992,
Callon and Latour 1992, for a reply). Latour’s associology based on trials
of strength has also been criticized for reducing scientific research to a
kind of political mobilization or manipulation. His approach is a sort of
generalized Machiavellianism (Schaffer 1991) or even worse – for Latour
everything is war! (Haraway 1997, 33-34). Scientists wage war against
each other, but use lab results as weapons. In the 1990s Latour tried to ac-
commodate his views to some of this critique by introducing concepts
inspired by Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) (Latour 1996b, 1999b),
and some of his dissatisfaction with Irreductions in the early 1990s stem-
med from the dangers of establishing a new meta-language (Crawford
118 Chapter Five

1993, 265). Scientific concepts, either from the social or the natural
sciences, usually form an observational language that might replace the
entities it studies and we might end up in a similar situation as the “dou-
bling up” of reality described in Chapter 2, where the concepts of the
observational language subsume the particular instances. Latour wants to
form an infra-language and its role is to indicate only the relationship be-
tween entities without “touching” the objects themselves. Nonetheless, in
the works from the 1990s he seems to have proceeded in a way that is
faithful to the essence of the principles of Irreductions and other parts of
his early work (Crawford 1993, 266).
Latour’s research in the 1990s continued in the same direction as
earlier with the development of theory based on fieldwork in science or
technology (1992, 1996a). What is new in this phase is the development of
his critique of modernity in We Have Never Been Modern (1993b). In this
book modernity was chiefly marked by the emergence of experimental
science in the seventeenth century and the concomitant radicalization of
the division between nature and society that followed in this epoch. He
was especially concerned with the modern belief in the ability of for-
mulating a solid foundation from which you can look through the views of
everybody else and criticize them (Latour 1996c, 1997). Bourdieu was es-
pecially given a rough treatment in this regard. In Chapter 3 I showed that
by constructing the objective conditions of social actors, Bourdieu was
able to look through their subjective expressions. In his view the actors are
always producing an illusion about their own conditions. Latour, however,
returned the question and asked how the sociologist can believe he is the
only enlightened one if everybody else is supposed to be delusional
(1996c, 46-47). Latour’s research and theoretical arguments from the
1990s is summarized in the book Pandora’s Hope (1999b) and many of
my analyses in this chapter refer to this book.
Latour’s later production, which I have called his third phase, I find
less interesting. The reason is that they are in many ways applications of
earlier theories to new areas. They include a study of religious speech
(2002b), a fieldwork on the judicial processes of a French supreme court
(2002c), a suggestion for how to include nature into politics (1999c) and a
book on how his approach could change sociology altogether (2005). The
last book sounds interesting to me since I am analysing his approach with
reference to what sociology can learn from it. This book is, however, quite
disappointing because it is mainly a restatement of arguments found
elsewhere. In this book he polemicizes against the “sociology of the so-
cial”, which is the sociology of Durkheim and Bourdieu, but he cannot
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 119

denigrate himself by taking his opponent’s views seriously and his argu-
ments may easily be rejected as an attack against a straw man.

Latour and Science Studies

As mentioned above Latour’s approach grew out of his work within
science studies in the 1970s and 1980s. I shall now take a closer look at
this subfield and its research orientation in order to help elucidate Latour’s
views.
One of the central sources of inspiration for science studies was the so-
called Edinburgh School in the theory of science, with David Bloor and
Barry Barnes as chief representatives. The programme of this group was a
kind of sociological transformation of Thomas Kuhn’s (1922 - 1996) The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). From this well-known theory
about scientific upheavals and relatively calm periods of normal science,
the Edinburgh group gave emphasis to the Kuhnian view that there was
nothing in nature itself that should lead to a change from one paradigm to
another. Paradigm shifts are, for the most part, a change in the way we see,
understand and speak about nature. The conclusion they drew from this
view was that our knowledge about nature is built upon conventions, and
conventions can be changed according to human choice (Barnes 1982).
This does not mean, however, that the way we understand nature is un-
constrained by our experience of it. Our beliefs concerning nature are
modified by the confrontation between what we originally believe and
what we experience. Bloor illustrated this point with a vector diagram, as
in Figure 5.1 below. Experience is like a “force impinging on a system of
forces. It will influence but not uniquely determine the resultant force”
(Bloor 1976, 27). In conformity with my earlier terminology we might
observe that the approach of the Edinburgh group can be said to be within
an energetic research mode. The reason why science is formed as it is
today, in their view, is only owing to different choices made at different
points in time in a long historical process. If previous scientists had made
other choices, the natural sciences would have been different. This be-
comes evident if we compare the taxonomies from Western natural sci-
ences with those of archaic or marginal societies. The cassowary, for
example, is not regarded as a bird among the Karam in New Guinea. At
the same time, the Karam classify what we call birds together with bats in
the taxon yakt. This view is not less true than biology’s classification of
cassowaries as birds because it is based on different principles (Barnes
1983, 34-37).
120 Chapter Five

Figure 5.1 Froom Bloor, 19766: 27.

Furthermmore, the Edinnburgh group held that the history of sciience was
marked by W Whiggishnesss. Those reseaarchers who w were able to convince
others that thheir findings were
w the correect ones were hailed as hero oes. They
were seen aas the only ones o who were able to peenetrate into the com-
plexities of tthings and finnd the truth ab
bout nature – aand, as if this were not
enough, theyy were often seens as the onnly worthy reppresentatives ofo reason.
The portrayaals of other reesearchers with hin the same ffield of researrch and in
the same hiistorical periood depict them m poorly: theey were unreasonable,
their ideas aabout the pheenomenon werre plainly wroong, they werre tied to
cumbersomee social interrests or they y were simply ly incompeten nt at the
practical woork of researchh. This historriography treaated winners anda losers
asymmetricaally in the view of the Ed dinburgh grouup. While thee winners
were able too formulate knowledge
k aboout nature as it really is, the
t losers
were gulliblly misled by social
s factors. A typical moodel of explanaation was
that the winnners were abble to find th he right answeer despite social limi-
tations, while the losers succumbed to o the same lim mitations. Thiis type of
historical wrriting is far frrom dead, as I have shown in the case of Randall
Collins and his Sociologyy of Philosoph hies in the prrevious chapteer (1998).
The Edinburrgh group vieewed this form m of horiograaphy as a mysstification
because it cconceals the faact that all scientists were part of sociall contexts
and that succcess as a reesearcher wass totally depeendent upon how h they
managed to use social rellations to theirr own benefit.. The Edinburrgh group
wanted to move away from the previously p doominant asym mmetrical
explanationss to a symmeetrical way of o studying sscientific conttroversies
whereby booth wins and losses could d be explaineed as social outcomes
o
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 121

(Bloor 1976, Barnes 1977). This is usually called the Strong Programme
within science studies, and it has given the impetus to much empirical
research. A central method was the use of case studies – either historical or
ethnographical ones – of the social processes leading to the construction of
scientific facts (cf., Knorr-Cetina 1981, Shapin and Schaffer 1985,
Mackenzie 1990, Collins and Pinch 1993, Pickering 1995),43 and Labora-
tory Life was one of these studies (Latour and Woolgar 1986).
With this ambition of explaining even scientific facts as being socially
constructed, the science-studies community overstepped some “natural
boundaries” that had until then hampered social research. While the pre-
vious generation of sociologists of science had limited themselves to the
study of the social relations between scientists (Merton 1973) and had left
the scientific facts alone, the new ambition was to explain even these.
Whereas “nerves” had failed the previous generation (Bloor’s expression),
such doubts would not stop this one.
What makes Latour’s work of importance beyond the science-studies
community is that he, with his colleague Michel Callon, breaks with the
mainstream in this field on some central points. The main problem with
the Strong Programme, according to Latour, is that it gives predominance
to social explanations. While realistic descriptions in the history of science
saw transcendent nature – being “out there” – as the ultimate referee for
the controversies of scientists, the Strong Programme produced a new
asymmetry with society as the strong side and nature as the weak one.
Latour’s view is that through scientific research we make a part of nature
actual for us through a social process; we socialize nature. Nature is thus
changed by becoming part of society, but in this process society is not left
untouched. It too has been changed and this includes the definitions of
persons, groups and institutions. Society and nature presuppose each other
mutually and one of them cannot be used as a cause to explain the other.
The state of society and the state of nature are results and not causes. This
is Latour’s extended principle of symmetry (1987, 1993b). The Strong
Programme made scientific facts immanent to social processes, but non-
humans are not allowed to redefine what society is all about; their agency
is denied.
It is the absoluteness of the nature-society divide that Latour wants to
get away from. We can have a closer look at one of his examples to clarify
his view. One of Latour’s studies was on Louis Pasteur’s work, and he
has, among other things, made an analysis of Pasteur’s famous article
Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique from 1857 (1922). In this
article Pasteur claimed that lactic acid is caused by an organism and not by
chemical deterioration, which was the common view at the time. He de-
122 Chapter Five

scribed in the article how it is sometimes possible, when carefully ex-

amined, to find some grey matter above the deposit of the chalk of an
ordinary lactic ferment. This grey matter was not easy to work with. An
examination under microscope yielded little result, and often it was not
possible to discern the grey matter at all. “Nevertheless,” Pasteur insisted,
“it is this [the grey matter] that will play the major part” (1922, 7; my
trans.). By isolating the grey matter Pasteur could add it to vessels con-
taining milk-like solutions, make new fermentations and conduct a series
of different trials. Latour’s interpretation of this article is that Pasteur
showed how the organism gradually became more and more real through
trials. For a long time the organism was something that produced some
sort of action until at last it was a fully developed organism with recog-
nizable properties. This new actor needed Pasteur and his chemical com-
petence and his skill as a spokesman along with the chemicals and the
laboratory equipment during the experiment in order to be made real, but
at the same time Pasteur needed the ferment. Without the organism, there
would have been no bubbling in the vessels and no grey matter that could
have been dried and pressed for transport (which could have started new
processes of fermentation elsewhere). Without the organism, Pasteur
would not have achieved anything in the laboratory, there would never
have been an article sent to the Academy of Sciences, no honours and no
promotion to a position in Paris (Latour 1993a, 1999b, ch.4). Latour asks
thus: “Who is acting in this experiment? Pasteur and his yeast. More
exactly, Pasteur acts so that the yeast acts alone” (1993a, 141; emphasis in
orig.). The microorganism could express itself as an independent actor
because it was articulated in Pasteur’s laboratory (cf. 1999b, 140-144).
A realist interpretation of Pasteur’s results could be that fermentation
has always been around. It has existed as a potentiality that Pasteur only
unleashed in his laboratory. This view introduces an idealist philosophy
about some hidden world where all things “slumber” until someone “dis-
covers” them and it is a way of “doubling up” reality in a manner we have
met in previous chapters. It is also a view that gives a limited space to
Pasteur’s work in the discovery of the ferment. The real hero is the
fermentation itself making its potentiality manifest and it can thereby settle
disagreements between scientists. From a realist standpoint scientific
failure – the production of an artefact – is usually described in social terms
while the acceptance of a fact is described as being the thing itself (Latour
and Woolgar 1986). Everything happens as if the reality of the beyond
somehow confirms or denies the efforts of human beings in their study of
nature. This view also underestimates the particular technical relations
necessary for the fermentation to express itself and to continue to do so to
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 123

this day. Stabilizing the fermentation as an integral part of our social insti-
tutions requires continuous work by humans and other non-humans.
On the other hand, as a kind of mirror reflection of the realist view, the
adherents of the Strong Programme ignore the place of the fermentation
and transform everything into social relations. Pasteur becomes an oppor-
tunistic strategist manipulating his social surroundings both to further his
research and to win over the scientific community to his camp in scientific
debates. What both realist and socializing views ignore is that the experi-
ment was a unique event that was radically new both to the fermentation
and to Pasteur. Pasteur made it possible for the fermentation to become a
substance and to be made available to other researchers, to the dairy
industry and for general knowledge. Pasteur, on his part, became the one
who could handle fermentations in his laboratory, who could have an
article accepted and, as a result of this, improved his working conditions
(Latour 1999b, ch.4). All the actors involved changed their properties. In
Pasteur’s laboratory the fermentation was at its most vulnerable. It was at
an institutional zero-point, but after Pasteur’s results were accepted it
gradually became part of the institution we call “nature”, while Pasteur’s
own increased social standing was gradually divided from his concrete
interventions with the fermentation. If he (and the fermentation) had not
succeeded, his social standing and his personal history would have been
different. The laboratory and the events that take place there form a cor-
nerstone in Latour’s theoretical edifice and one of the effects of these
events is the transformation of both nature and society. The adherents of
the Strong Programme, in contrast, need a stable theory of society in order
to use it as a fixed point to explain science. In other words they need a
time-reversible sociology.

Theoretical Foundations
Together with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, semiotics plays an im-
portant part in the theoretical and methodological foundation for Latour’s
anthropology of science. What I shall do in the following is to do a reading
of Latour’s theories with reference to semiotic theories. This might seem a
bit strange for a book in which I try to find out what sociology can learn
from Latour’s work. Would it not be more reasonable of me to emphasize
that his anthropology of science is a theory of agency? Well, it is not so
strange because the semiotic theory he relies on is itself a theory of
agency. In Chapter 4 I have shown the close relationship there is between
Garfinkel’s theory of action and language. The production of signs, espec-
ially in the form of texts and speech, is an integral part of human societies.
124 Chapter Five

All human institutions rely on them for the way they work and my aim is
to show both the importance for this way of thinking both of Latour’s
theory and for an adequate understanding of society.
Latour tends to switch between explanations based on agency and
explanations based on semiotics. Some of his most read texts from the
1980s emphasized actor-oriented explanations (cf. e.g., 1983, 1987) while
semiotics has continued to hold a central place in his theoretical formu-
lations during the 1990s and later. He has, however, not often commented
directly upon the relationship to semiotics and its importance for his theo-
ries. His relationship to semiotics is not without some tensions too. In the
1950s and 1960s research into structural semiotics established language as
a middle field between nature and society, but Latour has been critical of
the tendency in much (French) theory to isolate this area completely from
the rest of the world. Discourses do not speak themselves or texts do not
write themselves. Nonetheless, he has maintained that the autonomy of
language must be respected since this area is the only place where we can
avoid the twin perils of naturalism and sociologism (1993b, 62-65, 1993a,
130-131, Crawford 1993, 264). That means that scientific facts can neither
be reduced to represent pure nature nor, on the other hand, reduced to
being the sole result of social forces. In the domain of language, actors,
both non-human and human, can more freely be constructed on a joint
plane of immanence. With this autonomous conception of language Latour
found that he could more easily treat both human and non-human agents
symmetrically (cf. Crawford 1993, 264).
Latour’s main source of semiotic theory was the Paris school of
Greimas and this influence was mediated by Latour’s friend, the linguist
Francoise Bastide, who also studied scientific texts (1979, 1981). Greimas’
school was one of several different attempts to develop a scientific ap-
proach to the analysis of language and texts. These efforts usually included
a rigorous theoretical apparatus in order to unveil the underlying structure
of texts, or even of the wider discourse. The main way of doing so was to
reduce the diversity of texts systematically into a small number of func-
tions or elements. A major aim was to make the structure of the texts plain
without any recourse either to the intuition of the reader or the intentions
of the author. The centre of attention was the texts themselves and the dis-
course of which they were a part. Greimas and his colleagues have held
that language should be studied both as system and process, and I shall ex-
plain what these mean in the following. In the formulation of utterances
(énoncés)44 elements are combined in strings called syntagms and the
elements of syntagms are recognized because they are formed by a relation
of “both .... and”. In the example “Eve bought a red dress”, the phrase
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 125

represents a combination of elements co-present in the utterance and might

be the beginning of a longer story involving Eve, the red dress along with
other items and persons. It is possible to add more and more elements to
the story as long as we wish. The formulation of such strings is the process
of language along what Greimas called the syntagmatic axis. This axis is
seen to be (vertically) opposed to the paradigmatic axis that represents the
language as a system of interchangeable elements. A paradigm is a class of
elements which can occupy the same place in a syntagmatic string, and
elements can be recognized by a relation of “either .... or” (Greimas and
Courtés 1982, 224, 327-328). From a paradigmatic point of view the dress
in the example could have been another colour, another type of garment,
some other person could have made the purchase, or the transaction could
have been different. The paradigmatic axis represents sets of possible
combinations and the rules governing the combination of phrases will
determine how we can express ourselves. The connections of utterances in
strings on the syntagmatic axis are an actual existence in language, while
the combinations along the paradigmatic axis are a virtual existence since
the possible combinations are not present, but nevertheless have to be part
of the linguistic repertoire (371). The rest of the language is virtually pres-
ent – present as a possibility – in any actual phrase. Greimas proposed two
main strategies in the analyses of language. First as a system where he took
utterances and terms (lexemes) and divided them into minimal units of
signification – called semes – on an elementary level of signification. On
this elementary level, semes form sememes, which is a composition of
semes for a given term in a given context ( 278-279, Greimas 1983, 50-
55). In this way the analysis of meaning can be constructed from ele-
mentary “building blocks”. The second strategy was to study language as
process in the form of narratives (cf. Greimas 1983, Hénault 1979, 1983),
and it is in this narratology I shall show that we can find many of the
parallels to Latour’s approach. Moreover, I shall also show that Latour’s
neglect of the virtual dimension will lead to some problems for his theory.
What I do in the following is to show how Latour developed the Trans-
lational Model from the late 1980s and during the 1990s with reference to
semiotics in general and Greimas in particular. I divide this analysis into
four different (but related) topics: 1) how actants gain competence and
emerge as actors through trials of strength; 2) how science “loads” the
actors of the world into discourse; 3) how Latour’s approach understands
social context; and 4) how his understanding of technical artefacts makes
it possible for us to ask questions about pre-existing conditions.
126 Chapter Five

From Performance to Competence

Translation is an important concept for Latour and both he and Callon
suggested in the 1980s that their approach was a “sociology of translation”
(Callon and Latour 1981, Callon 1986). Translation takes place when an
actant is able to enlist another actant for its own purposes (1988b, 158-
162). It might be a human speaking on behalf of an organism in a jar or
someone “enlisting” a gun in order to threaten someone else. In the latter
case the human is able to translate or delegate her strategies via the gun.
At this writing moment I translate my need to write by applying a com-
puter. This form of “enlistment” or delegation is everywhere and it builds
stronger or weaker alliances. Greimas defines an actant as being “that
which accomplishes or undergoes an act, independently of all other deter-
minations” (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 5). This definition emphasized the
absolutely elementary form of activity: an actant either does something or
something is done to it. Only later in a more complex story is the actant in-
vested with a more fundamental role that turns it into a fully fledged actor.
In Latour’s view a narrative either stabilizes the actors or, to the contrary,
destabilize them in its course (Latour 1987, ch.1). In this section we shall
see how this happens in relation to scientific texts.
Many of Latour’s texts are concerned with the question of how sci-
entific objects come into existence. In ways similar to other researchers in
science studies, his answer was that this occurred through trials and these
trials usually start in a laboratory. But how are objects defined within such
trials? First, the object is often only described by what it does – its perfor-
mance. It has become a “name of action” (1993a, 136, 1999b, 119), or else
“the ‘thing’ is a score list for a series of trials” (1987, 89). We know what
it does, but not yet what it is. This situation does not last long, however,
because each performance presupposes a competence which retrospec-
tively explains why the object withstood the trials (1987, 89). By being as-
cribed a competence, the object becomes an actor in the full sense (1999b,
122); it has been given one or more roles. The scientists translate their de-
sire to know into laboratory tests and gradually they are able to enlist some
“name of action” and later give it a specific substance.
This way of understanding scientific research presumes that it can be
studied as narratives along the syntagmatic axis. The background for
Greimas’ conception in this field was an elaboration of a previous study of
Russian folktales. In the 1920s Vladimir Propp (1895 – 1970) had made a
study of 100 Russian folktales and had formulated 31 different functions
to describe situations in these (1968). Greimas condensed and generalized
Propp’s schema during the 1960s and 1970s and gave different versions of
how a narrative is structured. Common for folktales, Greimas argued, is
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 127

that a subject lacks a certain object (understood in broad terms). In the

folktale the object might be a person or thing missing after a misdeed by a
villain. A sender enters a contract with the subject (receiver) in order to
obtain what is missing. In the folktale the sender is often a person of au-
thority from the social hierarchy (queen, king, mother, father) conveying
an obligation upon a receiver who is also often the subject of the narrative
(Greimas 1983, Hénault 1979).45 The sender delegates a task to the
receiver-subject and (often) sanctions the results of the action. The sender
possesses some knowledge that he transmits to the receiver and he also
frames the action. What makes a text a narrative text is, according to this
theory, a state of dispossession or possession of some valued object lead-
ing to some action to produce the opposite state of dispossession or pos-
session (Hénault 1979, 145).
During the 1970s Greimas transformed the narrative schema further by
concentrating on the relationship between the subject and the object as the
principal actants of transformations. Utterances about the relation between
a subject and an object were seen to take two basic forms: either an utter-
ance of state (être) or an utterance of doing (faire) (Hénault 1983). In
syntagmatic chains utterances will take other utterances as objects and
modify them. The phrase “Eve bought a red dress” is an example of nar-
rative performance in which some action is modifying the state of some-
thing or someone. In this case the action (buying) changes the state of Eve
from a state of non-possession to a state of possession (of the dress).
Performance amounts to the realized action in narratives. However, this
realization presupposes the existence of some virtuality or potentiality for
action. The subject in the phrase (Eve) must have a certain competence to
do what she does. She must have an ability to know how to make a trans-
action and how to choose the right type of dress. She must want to buy it
and she might even feel obliged to do so. Utterances about competency are
utterances of a condition that might lead to some doing and it is hence part
of the virtual dimension. On this basis, Greimas and colleagues dis-
tinguished between four modal values of competence. The subject can be
seen to have knowing (savoir) about what to do, to be wanting (vouloir) to
do something, to be obliged to or have to (devoir) do something and to be
able to (pouvoir) do something (Hénault 1983, 55-61).
In a story a hero typically acquires different forms of competence
during the course of a story, but this competence is acquired before the
hero’s actual performance. Anne Hénault used Star Wars as an example:

The young Luke finds a video message showing a princess in distress. This
leads him to the search for Obi Wan Kenobi (first acquisition of knowing-
to-do as well as wanting). The latter reveals to Luke his origins and what
128 Chapter Five

duties they involve for him (first acquisition of having-to-do) and about the
galactic struggle to come (second acquisition of knowing-to-do). Later the
old man becomes the Mentor of the future hero and instructs him in all the
practices of combat (acquisition of being-able-to-do), (1983, 57; my trans.)

All these acquisitions of competencies come before the action proper of

the story.
However, according to Latour this relationship is quite the opposite in
scientific texts: performance comes first, then competence. In the analysis
of Pasteur’s article Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique (1922)
referred to above, Latour shows how, quite early on in his experiments,
Pasteur identified a “grey matter” as the substance that would play the
major part in further experiments. A couple of pages later he identified this
grey matter as a plant-like entity quite similar to the brewer’s yeast that he
had previously studied (Latour 1993a). The competence – its substance of
being a plant-like entity – is gained after a series of performances and it is
ascribed retrospectively. The potentiality of the fermentation to start lactic
fermentation is, however, only valid under certain circumstances. Latour’s
use of semiotic theory in this connection might be described as rather un-
orthodox. An “actantial” analysis of a scientific text like Pasteur’s more
true to Greimas’ own formulations would probably have concentrated on a
play of possession and dispossession of an object. The lack of knowledge
of the causes of lactic fermentation described early in Pasteur’s article
(1922, 5-6) could be defined as the absence of a cognitive object. This also
presupposes a knowing or cognitive subject formed by the inscribed author
– the enunciator – in different ways. The aim of a scientific article in this
view would be to eliminate the lack of knowledge and to gain possession
of it (cf. Bastide 1981 for an example). This is, however, a formula that
would have gone counter to the Latourian notion of a symmetrical descrip-
tion of human and non-human agents.
The description above may seem a bit technical and far from the realm
of social agency, but it is not. The reason is that the way sociologists tend
to describe actors is not so different from the way actors are described
within the Greimasian framework. In Chapter 2 I have referred to how
Weber claimed that “one need not have been Caesar in order to understand
Caesar” (1978, 5). To understand why Caesar crossed the Rubicon (a spe-
cific performance) the sociologist does not have to assume full knowledge
of Caesar’s mind, but is nevertheless able to ascribe to him a motive in the
form of a will, an ability to do it and, perhaps, even an obligation to start a
civil war. An important point in Latour’s approach is also that the soci-
ologist’s informants produce narratives in the same vein about themselves
and other people. They analyse their own and other’s motives and interests
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 129

and give reasons for why this or that happened (1996a, 163). Whether
these stories are true or not is beside the point; the main thing is that we
regularly think and act in relation to such narratives and that these stories
follow certain patterns.

Circulating References
The Latourian application of semiotic theory does not stop in the labo-
ratory. Scientific facts are part of a whole circulatory system of autonom-
ization of disciplines, alliances with other social forces and public repre-
sentations. Scientists have to get other people interested in order to make
their work possible:

Immense groups, rich and well endowed, must be mobilized for scientific
work to develop on any scale, for expeditions to multiply and go farther
afield, for institutions to grow, for professions to develop, for professorial
chairs and other positions to open up. The skills required for getting others
interested are again different from those necessary for setting up instru-
ments and for producing colleagues. (Latour 1999b, 104)

A scientific fact does not only concern specialists telling themselves how
clever they are (or not) at setting up instruments, but the fact has to enter
into relationships with industrial interests, political interests, teachers, sci-
ence writers, television producers, research council bureaucrats, the public,
etc. All of these interests, both professional and non-professional, must be
able to introduce the scientific fact into their proper stories: it must be able
to be translated as part of their own interests. The yoghurt-consuming part
of the contemporary population may not be aware of it, but they benefit
from Pasteur’s work from more than 150 years ago.
Nevertheless, in order to be a part of this circulatory system of scien-
tific facts an experiment must be repeatable by others or it must somehow
be possible to check the truth of a claim in other ways. This is usually
called the problem of reference in science: how do words on a paper refer
to something taking place somewhere else or even in the past. A scientific
article like Pasteur’s presupposed that it is about something happening or
being outside the text. If Pasteur as a scientist was going to be accepted as
a truthful spokesperson for the ferment, his claims had to correspond to
some activity in a glass jar. The question is, in this context, how to explain
this relationship between word and world. Early modern science solved
this problem by relying on honourable gentlemen as eye-witnesses to their
experiments (cf. Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The realist theory of science,
so much part of our common sense, presupposes a fundamental discon-
130 Chapter Five

tinuity between word and world. Our words are mere descriptions or de-
pictions of a not really knowable real world. Latour, in contrast, held that
this part of scientific activity is best described as a circulation of reference
(1999b, 24). Something that re-presents the real is transformed into some-
thing transportable, but a trace is maintained that is immutable and some
information is thus kept constant (1988d, 58, 1999b, 58).
I shall explain this further by following an example from Latour’s
participation in some pedological and botanical fieldwork in Boa Vista in
Brazil in the early 1990s. The group of scientists was studying a border
area of the tropical rainforest and the savannah. Before they got down to
work there was only undifferentiated forest and savannah. They could, of
course, have described the forest or the savannah after having walked
around in it, and this is something that has been done many times in travel
literature. The scientific enterprise, however, presupposes the establish-
ment of a systematic reference to the object under study. The group ob-
tained this first by dividing the area into numbered squares and then by
taking samples of leaves and soil within each square. All samples were
numbered and thus linked to their particular square. The soil samples were
collected in a wooden frame – the pedo-comparator – mimicking the
square structure of the area. The pedologists thereby obtained a synoptic
representation of the soil in the area by this organization of the lumps of
earth. This device made it possible for the pedologists to assess the quali-
ties of the soil at a glance and to enable the production of a graphical
representation of the soil in the area. Later these samples were moved to
Paris for further analysis and the results entered the scientific literature in
the form of reports and papers. In this way the pedologists turned them-
selves into (scientific) spokespersons for the rainforest in Boa Vista
(1999b, ch.2).
An important point in this context is that in Latour’s view the world
can nowhere be seen apart from words, although the world is, of course,
much more than words. If we limit ourselves to the non-scientific descript-
tion, we can sense the forest, but we cannot produce signification about it
(even in our thoughts) without adapting linguistic forms to this matter and
it is hence a semiotic production. In the research enterprise this is even
clearer. When the researchers divide the area into numbered squares this is
carried out by means of the forms found in geometry and arithmetic. When
the researchers collect samples of the soil, the samples are not just earth,
but, within this endeavour, they have taken on the form given to them by
the researchers. They have taken on significance beyond being just pieces
of earth and have become representatives of some part of the area. They
re-present the forest, and these lumps of earth can again be re-presented in
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 131

the graphic table and the graphic table can be re-presented by descriptions
in texts, etc. (1999b, ch.2).
Interpreted in semiotic terms this process of collection and re-
presentation of the forest and the savannah shows the process by which a
science produces its internal referent. Each step of the re-presentation in-
volves the cognitive activities of the enunciator (the researchers) through
successive steps of shifting out by which they frame and stage the object
they want to say something about (Latour 1999b, ch.2, cf. Greimas and
Courtés 1982, 87-91, 269-261). In fictional narratives, shifting out is a
technique used by the author (the enunciator) to move the reader’s atten-
tion away from herself and out to some action going on at another place,
another time and concerning someone else (Latour 1988d, 5). If we start a
short story with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night …”, and
continue the narrative in a way presupposing both good visibility and fair
weather, the reader would start doubting the realism and quality of our
writing. An impression of realism is produced by the constraints that a
shift has been placed upon the actors in the text. In scientific texts, this
“reality” or “truth effect” is produced quite systematically. If we return to
our example, we find, first, the shifting out from the enunciator to the
frame of the geometrical pattern laid out in the forest, then from these
numbered squares to the samples of earth, from the samples to the pedo-
comparator and from this device to the graphical drawing and from the
graphical drawing to a written summary. The enunciator can at each step,
without problem, move back from one or more of the frames – shift in –
and say something about the condition of the forest and the savannah in
Boa Vista (Latour 1999b. ch.2). Shifting in is the opposite operation of
shifting out and moves the attention back to the enunciator or some other
“I” in the text (Latour 1988d, 6, Greimas and Courtés 1982, 100-102). For
each step in the chain of outward shiftings, something is delegated the task
of re-presenting the object the enunciator really wants to say something
about. However, this process of delegation depends at each stage on the
relevance and the accuracy of the “framing” made by the enunciator. It is
this “framing” that allows the sciences to claim that they speak about an
external referent and not just an internal one. However, for Latour every
notion of an external referent is meaningless.46 Reference can only mean
the chain of translations of internal referents. To what degree scientists
speak truthfully about nature depends upon the quality of this chain
(Latour 1999b, 310).
A consequence of this view is that there is no known or knowable
reality that is a non-linguistic reality. That does not mean that everything
is language, but rather that science has become immanent to language.
132 Chapter Five

There is no place where reality can hide outside language; this view
constitutes a rebuttal of realist epistemology in Latour’s view. The rupture
between word and world, assumed by realist epistemology, involves pre-
suppositions of an undifferentiated background existing independently of
human knowledge. When scientists propose some state of fact about the
world, a common argument is that this factual entity has always been
present, even before the fact. The fact, lying in a slumbering state, is
potentially knowable by us, and when it is discovered it simply manifests
its potency. The real hero is the entity itself and not the humans who
describe it and make it possible for this knowledge to be formulated (cf.
above). Instead, Latour insists, we must see scientific research as a process
whereby “nonhumans are progressively loaded into discourse” (1999b,
99). What takes part in the circulatory system of science are texts and what
they can tell us about the world is somewhere else than in the texts. Texts
are always about something happening somewhere else and cannot avoid
to do so (Latour 1988c).

Latour and the “Sociology of the Social”

I have so far presented Latour’s anthropology of science in relation to
narrative theory. Humans and non-humans meet in the domain of language
and stories are formulated about them and about what they can do or not
do. Their competencies are stabilized in the course of the narrative or they
might be destabilized and lack credibility altogether. Debates that every-
body held to be settled are opened up and given a new turn (cf. Latour
1987, ch.1).
I have so far summarized Latour’s approach as the Translational
Model, but it is important in this context to recognize that Latour uses
translation and delegation almost as twin concepts. The pedologists trans-
lated the state of the forest into graphs and tables, and, symmetrically, we
can say that the graphs and tables were delegated this task. The Latourian
concept of translation was developed with reference to the philosopher
Michel Serres and his La Traduction (1974, cf. Callon and Latour 1981,
308, n.8), but Serres’ project is somewhat different from that of Latour.
Unlike Latour, he seems less concerned with the study of scientific or
technical research47 and the forms of action found there. He is more
engaged with the substance of scientific theories than are Latour and his
colleagues. To use Latour’s lingo of the late 1980s: Serres’s topic is con-
cerned with already established science rather than “science in the
making” (Latour 1987).
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 133

The object of study for Latour is how human actors construct scientific
facts; how they circulate references and make technical artefacts come into
existence. His programme is to follow the actors and their activities. More
traditional sociology would state that in order to do so, Latour would have
to situate his actors carefully in a social context, and in some way, to refer
to what they actually do to this context. Within the context the acts of
individual actors are often tied to social interests, social representations
and general beliefs or other external determining causes. Performances can
be aligned with this pre-established context and suddenly the researcher
has an explanation for why actors actually do what they do. In this way
these realized acts are subsumed under these causes and only become
outer expressions of the cause. This form of explanations has been one of
the main targets of Latour’s critique of the social sciences (Latour 1996a,
199). It is the sort of theory that brings us back to the critique formulated
in previous chapters of the tradition following Weber and Durkheim and
which Latour calls the “sociology of the social” (2005). In this tradition
singular instances in the social world are aligned and explained by some-
thing else.
However, Latour does not deny the existence of social context, but
action cannot be explained by context. Nor does action reside as some
potentiality, either outside or inside the actors, because we cannot know
why actors really do what they do. These are forms of information we do
not have access to. All presuppositions of access to why actors really do
what they do amount to an intervention from something beyond our
knowledge (1988b, 18-19, 253, 1996a, 142-143, 154-155, 162-170, 199-
200). The main theoretical error, in his view, seems to be the assumption
of potentialities lying in wait for the right conditions to unleash their built-
in agency. Latour solves the problem of context by analysing how agents
involved in the same field or controversy link together and combine
agents:

whom they endow with qualities, to whom they give a past, to whom they
attribute motivations, visions, goals, targets, and desires, and whose margin
of manoeuvre they define. (1996a, 163)

In this way social agents engage in contextualization: they analyse and

interpret their social context and direct their actions in relation to some
part of this context. In this view, social context is a resource for the agent
in his or her production of agency. The different elements of the context
can be made explicit in the same way as meaning is produced through the
realization of language: by inter-definitions of terms (Latour 1988b, 9-10).
134 Chapter Five

All these social actions are connected to the (inter-) definitions of

meaning, and may thereby become the object of semiotic-based analyses.
These inter-definitions nonetheless throw us back to the particular ut-
terance as the starting point for the analysis of a controversy or a field. It is
important to note that actors may diverge strongly in their definitions of
each other and there is no way of establishing a comprehensive meaning
between them and this is not at all a goal for Latour (1996a). This ap-
proach stands in stark contrast to the “sociology of the social” because the
latter presupposes a superior or underlying level where the meaning of the
multiplying actions of actors will converge (cf. Chapters 2 and 3). In this
way general causes can lead to particular actions. Context understood as
inter-definitions, on the other hand, leads us to another conclusion. The
more texts we include, the more the context will diverge in different
directions. Chains of translations do not make totalities, but networks
where all connections are local, and an important claim of Latour is that
these networks are all on the same level. There are no differences of level
for Latour: no Aufhebung to abstract macro-actors at another level. While
there might be centres where a certain degree of universality is produced,
even these are also local and particular (Latour 1988b, 253, 1993b, 117-
122). These are “centers of calculation” at which resources can be pooled
and action over distance can be achieved (Latour 1987, ch.6, Callon and
Latour 1981), but these centres do not belong to a higher or lower level.
Everything is on the same plane and will pull in different directions
(Latour 2006, 241-251).
What seems to annoy Latour most with traditional context-oriented
sociology is that he finds it judgemental. When someone aligns an utter-
ance or a social act with a context, they measure that utterance or act with
something which itself is a result of sociological constructions. To avoid
this problem he has stated that anyone embarking on a study should not
“use culture, the content of science, or discourse as the cause of the phe-
nomenon” (Crawford 1993, 263). In other words, we should not use nature
to judge society or discourse, and, similarly, we should not use social
relations or discourse to judge nature (1993b). In short, he advocates an
agnostic stance in relation to the evaluation of the substances of the
different disciplines constructing objects, whether these concern science,
discourse or social relations. In his case studies, Latour left judgements of
substance to the actors themselves. They had to be, he writes, “left to their
own devices. It's a laissez-faire sociology” (1996a, 170). This view is quite
in line with Garfinkel’s view that ethnomethodological studies “are not
directed to formulating or arguing correctives” (1967, viii). This laissez-
faire attitude is the basis for Latour’s affirmative view of science, society
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 135

and discourse. His solution is to describe the forms or types of activities in

which the actors are engaged in the translational process, whether these
actors are people, objects or literary devices, and not to pass judgements
on them.
Yet there is something deeply unsatisfying with Latour’s anthropology
of science and I think we are getting closer to what it is. On the one hand,
his concentration on form rather than substance troubles me and this is a
topic I shall return to later in this chapter. On the other hand, my concern
is with his understanding of context. His critique of context-oriented soci-
ology is highly relevant and has inspired my own formulations presented
in previous chapters. Latour’s views seem to be similar to Greimas’, which
distinguish between explicit (or linguistic) context and implicit context.
The implicit context is characterized as “extra-linguistic” or “situational”
and can be important for the understanding of texts. However, it can only
be called upon for semantic interpretation when it has been made explicit
(Greimas and Courtés 1982, 58). By studying social context through
contextualization Latour makes social relations immanent to language in a
similar manner. However, with the notion of contextualization, Latour’s
theory enters into the same difficulties faced by many practitioners of
agency-centred sociology. Contextualization depends upon the actors’ own
inter-definitions and it is therefore limited to the agents’ own taken-for-
granted world. A Latourian analysis makes explicit many of the implicit
notions in texts, but it ends at, or stays within the realm of, what the agents
have in common. This shared world becomes a setting that the analysis
can describe, but whose own principles cannot be studied because they
belong to another dimension (cf. Alexander 1982). The result is a form of
“endogenization” where the setting closes itself around the events taking
place (cf. Chateauraynaud 1991).

Technical Mediation
The theoretical problems that Latour gets into when it comes to context
can be given a semiotic interpretation as an opposition between the virtual
dimension of the paradigmatic axis and the actual dimension of the
syntagmatic axis. He tends to concentrate on the actuality of the syntag-
matic axis. An emphasis on the paradigmatic axis, however, would involve
him in already established conditions that would have made some out-
comes more likely than others. Such previously established structures are
(of course) also evident in the physical world. In other words, there are
patterns both in language and the physical world that constrain speech,
writing and agency. This is the past structuring the present and it has not
136 Chapter Five

been one of Latour’s main concerns. In his work from the 1980s past
knowledge is taken for granted by scientists as “black boxes” and sci-
entists might open them up or keep them well shut depending on their
research and rhetorical strategies (Latour 1987). Nevertheless, most
knowledge in a scientific field is commonly taken for granted and is not
doubted at all. There is an absence of controversy over it and it is therefore
not part of the contextualizations of the actors. In the French version of the
Reassembling the Social he states the consequences of this view most
clearly, where controversy is the main entry point for the study of a social
phenomenon: “controversies leave more traces in their wake than already
established connections, which, by definition, stay mute and invisible”
(2006, 46; my trans.). This is perhaps the sociological version of a black
hole – everything disappears as soon as actors agree on something.
Latour’s approach on this point is not tenable in my opinion, and I shall
argue for the importance of constitutive condition in the world being
present before the beginning of an analysis. Such conditions will constrain
or in other ways affect the agency of actors and must therefore be a topic
for study.
Latour’s theoretical problem comes to a head in the question of tech-
nical mediation. Technical mediation is Latour’s notion of how humans
enter into relationships with technical artefacts and it is the foundation for
Latour’s argument that his approach transcends the problem of structure
and agency (cf. Chapter 1). In this view the continuity of society can only
be explained by including technical artefacts and other non-humans, but
how can we include the objects in the analysis if they are silent and hence
cannot be known? There is thus a theoretical contradiction in his approach.
What he does is to introduce a vocabulary of action, which again is taken
from Greimas’ semiotic theory.
We have already discussed how narrative performance is formed in the
example “Eve bought a red dress”. This transformation of Eve from the
non-possession of an object to the possession of it may be analysed as a
narrative programme (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 245-246). Traditional
narratives are full of such programmes and they may be nested within each
other. Eve may, for instance, have to jump on a bus to get to the shop in
order to buy the dress. To take the bus may be seen as an instrumental sub-
programme necessary to achieve the ultimate goal; and, of course, there
may be many other sub-programmes. Latour called them programmes of
action. Technical mediation in its first and most basic form takes place
when someone wants to achieve something and, in order to fulfil this
intention, takes up an object that will enable the achievement of this goal.
The object may, for instance, be a tool and Latour used in this context the
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 137

same example as Greimas and Courtés: a monkey fetching a stick in order

to get a banana (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 246, Latour 1999b, 181-182).
This instrumental programme may be nested within other sub-programme:
the monkey has to sharpen the stick before use, for example. This forms
the second meaning of technical mediation and makes it possible to com-
pose elaborate procedures (Latour 1999b, 180-183).
The third meaning of technical mediation concerns “blackboxing”: “a
process that makes the joint production of actors and artifacts entirely
opaque” (Latour 1999b, 183). A technical object with its multiple sub-
programmes is stabilized to such a degree that we rarely have to take the
“technicalities” into consideration. We only discover them when some-
thing breaks down. In Greimas’ parlance this may be described as annex
narrative programmes by which we delegate subordinate tasks to someone
or something (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 246). The act of delegation is
important at this point as it involves the transfer of competence (1982, 72).
As Latour has shown earlier (1987), the degree of blackboxing may even
be so complete that it leaves the realm of discourse entirely. This is the
fourth meaning of technical mediation: the silent presence of an enunciator
is materialized (shifted down) in some object that constrains other actors
to comply. His example is the speed bump constraining a driver to reduce
the velocity of the vehicle in order not to destroy the car’s suspension
(Latour 1999b. 185-190). So, even if drivers may find speed bumps annoy-
ing, they are not controversial in the sense that they might be removed the
next day. They continue to exert an influence on drivers by just being pres-
ent. These different meanings of technical mediation form the basis upon
which we build our relationship with objects, how we receive new pos-
sibilities through them and how asymmetries between humans develop
because of them. In other words, the emergence of what Latour called the
collective of humans and non-humans.
By delegation we transfer competence to non-humans. An important
question in this context is what sort of competence is delegated? As we
have seen above, Greimas distinguished between four different modal
values of competence: knowing-how-to-do (savoir faire), wanting-to-do
(vouloir faire), having-to-do (devoir faire) and being-able-to-do (pouvoir
faire). Following the lead of his colleague Madeleine Akrich, Latour has
analysed the competence involved in the relationship between actors (non-
human or human) in technical assemblies according to the modal value of
having-to-do. However, Latour and Akrich never make this explicit, but it
is clear from their analyses of such assemblies as scripts (Latour 1988a,
1992, Akrich 1992, Akrich and Latour 1992). When technical objects are
constructed their makers inscribe some programmes of action into them.
138 Chapter Five

Instead of talking about the function of a technical device, Latour prefer-

red to say that a device prescribes some types of performance from other
actors (humans or non-humans), it proscribes others and, furthermore, it
allows or may afford others (Akrich and Latour 1992, 261). In the speed-
bump example, the bump may be said to translate the will of the road-
works authorities to allow cars to drive on the road, but at the same time it
prescribes a low speed.
These four categories represent the modal structure of having-to-do
projected onto what Greimas called the semiotic square (cf. Figure 5.2
below) (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 140-141). The semiotic square is a
way to analyse the semantic relationship between oppositions, contra-
dictions and complementarities. In order to operate an automatic teller
machine (ATM) you have to put in your card, to enter your pin code, etc.,
but you are, for example, proscribed from opening it up. This is a simple
opposition, but Greimas did not stop there: there are some functions that
are permitted (allowed) by the system without being forbidden or oblig-
atory, for instance, in our case checking the balance of your account.
Furthermore, some performances may be seen to be completely optional
(afforded). You might in our example, lean on the ATM while operating it.
These optional functions are defined by a negation of those prescribed, but
at the same time, they stand in opposition to those allowed. This oppo-
sition arises from the fact that optional actions are both non-obligatory and
involve both real freedom of choice and unpredictability, since allowed
performances are limited by not falling into a category of proscription. At
the same time, some optional performances may be proscribed48 and
others not.
Different parts of a technical-social assemblage may be analysed as
delegated competencies in this way, but competencies other than the
“having-to-do” are needed as well. Akrich and Latour also include what
they called subscription and its opposite, de-inscription, to describe the re-
action of the anticipated actor to what is prescribed or proscribed to them.
There is a gap or a possible crisis between subscription and prescription
when the actor confronts a new set-up. The actor may have his, her or its
own anti-programmes and will not accept the given one. Furthermore,
Latour and Akrich use the notion of pre-inscription to describe the
competence that can be expected from actors arriving at a given setting,
competence that is necessary for the resolution of the crisis between
prescription and subscription (1992, 261). The link to the Greimasian
understanding of competence is not as clear in these instances as it is in the
previous one, but the paired concept “subscription/de-inscription” seems
to be similar to Greimas’ modal value of wanting-to-do (and wanting-not-
 Latour’s Anthhropology of Sccience and its L
Limitations 139

to-do), whille pre-inscripttion seems to

o be similar tto the modal value of
knowing-hoow-to-do (Greeimas and Co ourtés 1982, 1167-168, 3722-373). In
our examplee of the ATM M, it is not only necessaryy to want to withdraw
money (andd to prefer the machine to a clerk at a brranch of the bank),
b but
you have too know in advvance how to insert your c ard, to enter your
y pin-
code, etc.

Figure 5.2 Thhe modal structuure of Having-tto-do (devoir) w

with Latour and
d Akrich’s
concepts in brrackets.

If we taake a look baack at the preevious discusssion about siilent pre-

existing connditions this vocabulary
v off scripts and ccompetencies is a way
for Latour tto introduce such
s silent prre-existing connditions by seemingly
s
not doing itt. A technicaal-social set-up is, of courrse, something g already
given and iit is a prolonngation of thee past into thhe present. A counter-
argument too this conclusion might be that Latour’ss notion of sccripts is a
vocabulary which makes the make-up p of technical artefacts actu ual for us
and this makke-up is not onnly something g virtual. Thiss might be truee to some
extent, and I do not denyy that Latour and Akrich’s vocabulary for f a “de-
scription” (ttheir term) of
o competenciies and perfoormances of technical-
t
social set-upps may be higghly relevant for empiricall research. Th he vocab-
ulary is, how
wever, introduuced by the sociologists them mselves and not
n by the
actors. The study of technnical mediatio on hence has forced Latourr to break
140 Chapter Five

his own methodological precepts of a laissez-faire sociology and it shows

some of the inherent contradictions in the Latourian theoretical approach.

Forms of Action
I have observed above that in Latour’s study of how scientists do
research or how engineers construct technical artefacts, he is only inter-
ested in the forms of their agency. He is not concerned with the substance
of what they write, the topics of their research or what they try to con-
struct, whether it is a nuclear bomb or an everlasting light bulb. His
version of sociology is a laissez-faire sociology while traditional sociology
is moralistic (cf. above). To some extent this view is reasonable, but upon
second thought I find it not so reasonable after all. Later in this chapter I
shall argue for why I think so, but for now I shall only address that
Latour’s solution is quite in parallel or analogous to the one chosen by
Greimas for linguistics. Linguistics as a scientific enterprise studies
linguistic forms and not the substances of what is said or written. I shall
return to the question of whether this delimitation is also valid for a socio-
logical enterprise.
Greimas’ starting point for this view was the work of the Danish
linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1899 - 1965) and his glossematic model of lan-
guage (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 322). In the next chapter I shall show
that Hjelmslev is important for some of Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments
too. In the following, however, I shall emphasize how the linguists inter-
pret his model of the sign. This interpretation can be found in diagram-
matic form in Figure 5.3. Hjelmslev (1961) took Saussure’s model of the
sign as a starting point for his own conceptualizations. I have shown in
Chapter 2 that in Saussure’s model a “sound pattern” (called the signifier)
is solidarily connected to a concept (the signified) and together signifier
and signified form the signification of the sign. The relationship between
sound pattern and concept is arbitrary, and, unlike Peirce’s model, the sign
does not directly refer to an object or a ground (Saussure 1959).
Hjelmslev distinguished between two parallel planes of language:
expression (signifier) and content (signified). These planes presuppose
each other reciprocally in a similar way to in Saussure’s model. In addi-
tion, within these two planes he distinguished between form and substance
(Hjelmslev 1961, §13). Substance in this context is usually understood as
meaning or purport and it is what supports signification (Greimas and
Courtés 1982, 322). Purport is a way to re-introduce into the sign, on the
one hand, the matter of expression and, on the other, the matter of the
content. In the first case the purport of expression might be lines on paper,
 Latour’s Anthhropology of Sccience and its L
Limitations 141

printed signs, vocal soundds, hand moveements, bodilyy attitudes etc., but this
specific mattter must takee on a given form
f in orderr to be a subsstance (of
expression).. In the case of
o content-purrport, signs deenote somethiing in the
world or inn Hjelmslev’s own words: “the word rring is a sign n for that
definite thinng on my finnger” (1961, 57; 5 my emphhasis). This denotation
d
concerns a ddefinite thing,, but also this thing as som
mething intelliggible. Let
me try to annalyse his moodel of the siign a little furrther with an example
inspired by one of Latourr’s analyses: take
t the phrasse, “the GRF hormone
can cure dw warfism”.49 Iff we look at the plane off expression first, this
phrase can be expressedd phonetically y in different ways even by b native
English speaakers – it varries in phonettic substance. It nevertheleess has to
conform to some sort off sound patterrn and syntax in order to be b under-
standable. TThis is the forrm of expressiion (cf. Figurre 5.3). Similaarly if we
move to thee plane of coontent, the ph hrase about thhe effects of the GRF
hormone cann be treated inn many differeent ways. Withhin biochemisstry it can
be treated aas a truth-claaim, by bioethicists as ann ethical prob blem, by
politicians aas a promise (“dwarfism
( will soon be soomething of th he past”),
etc. The divversity of thee contexts of this phrase ddenotes somee specific
entities in thhe world and a relation bettween them. O On this backgrround we
can speak off a form of coontent to which all the speccific applicatio
ons of the
phrase have to conform.

Figure 5.3 Grreimas’ interpreetation of Hjelm

mslev’s model oof the sign (Hén
nault 1979,
28).
142 Chapter Five

In Greimas’ view, substantial questions about the content cannot be

decided by linguists, but have to be left to the actors themselves. The form
(of expression and content) is necessary for the substance to be part of the
signification, but the substance is variable and taken by itself it is, in this
interpretation, amorphous. For Greimas and his colleagues this division
serves as a way of determining the object of linguistics to include only the
form of the expression or of the content (cf. Figure 5.3). The substance is
part of an indeterminate domain for the linguist. The reason why the
linguist can say something about signification is that the form organizes
itself into systems of relations (cf. Hénault 1979, 28-29).
It is not my intention to claim that Latour adopted this model
wholesale, but by limiting himself to the forms of activities he has in-
troduced into his anthropology of science an indeterminate domain: this
domain he left to the actors themselves. In both the Latourian anthro-
pology of science and in Greimas’ linguistics this formulation is a way to
“bracket out” parts of reality from the field of interest and the question to
be discussed later is the extent to which this is a good solution.

Confrontation with the Edinburgh School

I have previously referred to some critiques from Latour’s Anglo-
American colleagues and a general impression is that many of Latour’s
opponents seem to think that his work somehow lets the science-studies
field down. His work opens up for more general ontological debates while
they want to limit the scope of the field to what concerns scientific knowl-
edge in itself. But, contrary to this view, it is exactly the openness of
Latour’s theories that makes science studies relevant for sociological
theory; the limiting efforts only diminish it into yet another subfield of
sociology or history. However, David Bloor has out forth one of the most
strongly formulated critiques of Latour’s in 1999. He held that Latour has
misrepresented the viewpoint of the adherents of the Strong Programme by
claiming that they wanted to explain nature by society. This occurs
because Latour supposes that the divide of nature and society or of object
and subject was relevant for the Strong Programme, but this is not true:
“The aim isn’t to explain nature, but to explain shared beliefs about
nature” (Bloor 1999, 87). The studies of science are studies of knowledge,
which includes everything held to be knowledge in society.50 We must
view nature in itself as only implicated as a constraint in the formation of
beliefs about nature (cf. Figure 5.1). We cannot really know objects and
what they are, but every society cannot avoid having some correct notions
of nature if they are to persist. Our knowledge is a part of society, but the
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 143

study of society is itself a naturalistic enterprise whereby we study how

society is governed by causal relations (Bloor 1999, 87-88, cf. Latour
1999a for a reply).
In my view Bloor’s critique has only served to expose the fundamental
theoretical weaknesses of the Edinburgh group. These weaknesses are
multiple. First, his view distinguishes between two realities: a non-social
nature (Bloor’s expression) that we cannot really know and a social nature
that is a part of society. Nature is, in this way, “doubled up”: on the one
hand, the mute and indigested non-social nature and, on the other, the
social one where nature is understood, discussed and is a result of histor-
ical processes. Although nature has been cleaved into two realms, there is
nonetheless a relation between them. A sort of “footbridge” is established
in the form of the constraint that ensures that our social nature does not go
too far away from the constraints of the non-social one. If this were to hap-
pen, it would endanger any civilization. However, this “doubling up” of
nature involves a rewriting of Kantian idealism, but what Kant holds
firmly in the consciousness is instead held as beliefs in society as viewed
by Bloor. Knowledge about nature (out there) is now mainly the results of
interactions between humans; they are conventions that we commonly
agree on. The objects, on their side, are only intermediaries that we cannot
really know. The facts that the social world is filled with objects, that they
even store some of the knowledge for us, are irrelevant. They are not
socially real. Only society can supply us with the terms for all knowledge
and experience.
This view is problematic for a number of reasons. In practical terms we
are forced to violate this ontology unless we want constantly to doubt the
reality of ourselves (as objects) and everything around us. Along these
lines Daniel Breslau has criticized the Strong Programme as a foundation
for research on scientific practices:

Because scientists can only carry out their work of construction through
the use of their equipment, lab specimens, and other material objects, we
are forced to treat these as real. They cannot be purely derivative of social
interactions because the social interactions are carried on by means of
these objects. (2000, 293)

It is by the laboratory equipment that we (Westerners) socialize natural

objects (and not only our beliefs about them). The Bloorian view entails
that we constantly maintain an intermediate layer between ourselves and
our possible experiences of the world.
When Bloor and the Edinburgh group distinguish so sharply between a
non-social nature and a social one, they reproduce (in their own way) the
144 Chapter Five

distinction between nature and society. Above I referred to Bloor’s claim

that the nature-society distinction is not relevant for the intellectual enter-
prise of the Edinburgh group, but this claim is not correct. The structural
anthropologist Philippe Descola has traced this conceptual framework
back to the ancient Greek distinction between phusis and nomos. Phusis
was defined as the domain governed by its own perfect laws while nomos
was the domain governed by laws given by the citizens for themselves. By
being defined in relation to each other they became closely connected:
“two domains of parallel legality, but while one is given its own dynamic
and finality, nature does not know the inconstancy of humans” (Descola
2005, 101; my trans.). It is this divide between culture and nature that was
radicalized and extended in Europe in the early modern period. The
original aim of this distinction was to indicate an autonomous domain
from the conventions arising from the decisions made by the multitude
gathered in the agora. With the Strong Programme the development of this
divide in Western thinking has come full circle as the domain governed by
conventions has taken over even our knowledge about the domain inde-
pendent of conventions. This domain only remains as a shadow that we
cannot really dispose of. Descola has insisted on the historical contingency
of the distinction between nature and culture, or naturalism as he calls it,
and he has tried to include it in a comprehensive grammar of different on-
tologies concerning the relation between humans and non-humans (2005).
Naturalism is only one of a total of four basic ontologies in Descola’s
work, and Barnes’ example of the classification of the cassowary among
the Karam can be somewhat further developed in light of Descola’s gram-
mar. Barnes has criticized Ralph Bulmer, the author of the original article
on the subject (1967), for comparing Western and Karam natural tax-
onomies in a way that treats the Western taxonomy as the norm and the
Karam classification as a deviation from objective knowledge (Barnes
1983, 34-35). This critique is probably correct, but the aim of Bulmer’s
article was to explain the particular place of the cassowary in Karam tax-
onomy. His answer was that the Karam relates to the cassowary as to
sisters or cross-cousins (i.e., father’s sister’s children). Brother and sister
are mutually dependent, but the brother controls the sister and marries her
away, usually to his own advantage. Furthermore, “your cross-cousins are
the people with moral claims on you which you at times are quite reluctant
to meet: and whose names you should not say” (Bulmer 1967, 18). These
are troublesome relations, and one would at least avoid a situation where
your relationship to them might affect the growth of your most valued
crop, the taro. To kill a cassowary is in a sense to commit homicide; cer-
tain rules apply and the hunter is in a ritually dangerous state. The con-
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 145

sumption of cassowaries should be limited to the forest, and live casso-

waries should not be taken into gardens or homesteads or be domesticated.
Breaking some of the precautions in the treatment of cassowaries would
endanger the growth of taro (Bulmer 1967, 12).
Relating to non-humans in a way similar to humans conforms to what
Descola characterizes as animism, which is “an imputation by humans to
non-humans of an interiority identical to their own” and implies “an
extension of the field of ‘culture’ to non-humans with all the attributes it
implies” (2005, 183; my trans.). Although there is a subjective and cultural
continuity between humans and non-humans, the physical makeup of
humans and non-humans is seen as being discontinuous. This ontology is
quite the opposite of naturalism, in which we find a continuous nature con-
trasted with discontinuous and divided cultures. In Descola’s analyses, the
distinction between humans and non-humans in naturalism is constituted
by the ability of humans to engage in reflexive consciousness, their sub-
jectivity, their production of signs and mastering of semiotic systems, their
building of cultures, etc. While naturalism produces a nature with its own
laws that are separate from human activities, which express themselves
through many and diverging cultures, animism can be characterized as
“multinatural” and to some extent “unicultural” ( 242-243). Perhaps the
attempt by Barnes to place the cassowary within a natural taxonomy is
completely misguided from the viewpoint of the Karam, and we should
instead make a place for it within a social taxonomy together with differ-
ent categories of humans, but also together with domesticated dogs, who
are the owner’s adopted children. Pigs cannot be included, however, since
the Karam do not see them as having a independent spiritual existence
(Bulmer 1967, 19-20). With animism, the social and the natural exchanges
places and different realities and practices emerge, compared with the
dominant naturalism of the West.
The comparison with Descola’s work above shows that the Edinburgh
group, and their Strong Programme, relies on a distinction between nature
and society despite the claim to the contrary. They also betray themselves
as Kantian idealists by their insistence that they only study beliefs about
nature. Hence they reproduce a “doubling up” of reality that I have dis-
cussed and criticized in previous chapters.

Critical Remarks
Following my previous discussions of Latour’s anthropology of
science, I have identified two main avenues of critique. The first one is his
overemphasis on the syntagmatic axis and thereby his giving preference to
146 Chapter Five

the observable and actual over the principles governing the setting. This
lends a shallow historical depth to his analyses, and pre-existing con-
ditions that somehow make agency converge is only rarely assumed. The
second avenue of critique that I have indicated so far concerns his concen-
tration on forms of action over the substance of it. I shall treat these two
topics in turn, although they can be connected to each other.

Pre-existing Conditions
The presence of pre-existing conditions that govern the conditions of
action is rarely made explicit in Latour’s texts. Above I have discussed his
concept of technical mediation and what happens when artefacts leave
discourse completely and at this stage these objects silently constrain what
actors can do. Latour has nevertheless insisted on the actors’ own contex-
tualizations as the starting point for analyses of context. He does, however,
make some exceptions to this rule, and I shall only indicate where they can
be found without going into further details. In We Have Never Been
Modern (1993b) he argues for the existence of a Modern Constitution
dividing the world into neat categories of “nature” and “culture” that can
be seen as a historically constituted form of speaking and writing about the
collective of humans and non-humans. He is also forced to presume pre-
existing conditions in his analyses of what he calls “regimes of enun-
ciation” which govern the way we might speak or write politically, reli-
giously, judicially and so on (Latour 1999d, 2002c, a, b). Despite these
exceptions, there is a clear hostility to assuming pre-existing conditions in
society in Latour’s work and it seems to be a heritage both from
Garfinkel’s theory of action and from Greimas’ understanding of context.
His view at this point can also be understood as a criticism of the “socio-
logy of the social”. What seems to annoy him most is the moralism in-
volved in traditional forms of sociology and its reduction of agency to con-
text. If we are to develop this debate further I think it is important to ask
how we can, on the one hand, include pre-existing conditions, but, on the
other, avoid moralism. In other words, is there a non-reductive way to
include context?
My answer is yes, and Latour himself has, perhaps unwittingly, provid-
ed us with a splendid example of it. In The Pasteurization of France he
mentions that an important motivation for the scientific effort in France in
the late nineteenth century was to avenge the war of 1870 - 1871. Every-
thing that made the French people stronger would make this goal more
attainable (1988b, 6-12, 16-19). Latour made this into a part of the setting
in order to study how Pasteur transformed the field of hygiene, but what is
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 147

clear is that the desire for revenge somehow produced an overarching

meaning to very diverse scientific efforts. However, this desire cannot be
used to “look through” the motives of the actors or to reduce their actions
to this project. In other words, there is no opening for traditional con-
textual explanations. Nonetheless, this setting must have imposed strong
limitations concerning possible actions for the actors involved. In the same
way as Pasteur had to align his interests with the hygiene movement, he
had to be a French patriot or nothing. The field of science in France was,
in this way, overcoded by nationalism and it defined the limits and the
possibilities of the scientific enterprise in this historical period. At the
same time nationalism is probably taken completely for granted by the
actors involved: to question it was not part of the scientists’ “contex-
tualization” to use Latour’s vocabulary. In this way nationalism was pres-
ent in the constitution of the field of science, but only as an externally set
limit set by the state. All such limits or divides constrain the agency of the
actors present in the field and make some actions more probable than
others.
This way of governing “mass action” from an outside is called molar
by Deleuze and Guattari and represents a hierarchical principle in society.
It is contrasted with the molecular, which implies the free combinations of
singular entities (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, ch.4, 1987, ch.9). Latour, for
his part, has concentrated in his analyses on the molecular combinations of
humans and non-humans, while in the example given above this is not
enough. The framing of the activity of scientists is decided elsewhere. A
major point of Deleuze and Guattari is that the molar is of a different
nature than the molecular and thus has to be studied in its own way.
Latour’s emphasis on molecular relations limits his approach. The molar
functions through the formation of certain categories, divides and limits
that govern the latitude of what agents can do. It is an indirect form of
power through which certain outcomes are made more probable than
others. Power through the Latourian networks is wielded more directly and
indirect regulation evades his analyses. The molar is usually governed by
the “political machine”, which in archaic societies might be the family or
the clan, and in modern societies, the state. The establishment of nation-
states allowed for the extensive standardization of language, culture and
society in comparison with earlier civilizations and thereby increased the
force of the molar way of governance of society. In Deleuze and Guattari’s
social philosophy there is a dynamic between the molar and the molecular,
where all sorts of new inventions and variations are made through the
lateral molecular relations, while the hierarchical molar units try to cap-
148 Chapter Five

ture the inventiveness and to lead it in certain directions. More about this
in the next chapter.

Form over Substance

The second avenue of critique, as mentioned above, can be opened in
relation to Latour’s agnostic stance in relation to the substance of scien-
tific research and his concentration on the forms of action. The question is
for how long an anthropology of science can isolate itself from this sub-
stance. By limiting his approach to what agents do, without passing judge-
ments on their actions and their objects, a Latourian researcher may easily
slip into a mode of acquiescence. It has also been noted as a tendency in
much constructivist scholarship to be rather uncritical to what scientists do
(Sterne and Loach 2005). Whether the scientists or engineers are con-
structing crematoria for Auschwitz, nuclear bombs for Hiroshima or
drones for the next war is irrelevant. No moralism is allowed! This incli-
nation towards acquiescence may be strengthened by the tendency to limit
the scope of case studies to the world of the actors themselves (cf. above).
The different lines of my critique against Latour’s theoretical approach
hence converge: the limited scope of his studies, the shallow historical
depth and the concentration on forms of action instead of substance lead to
the same mode of acquiescence. Latour’s colleague, Steve Fuller, has
argued that this way of approaching science and engineering goes much
deeper and concerns all of constructivist science studies. The Edinburgh
group and their followers (including Latour) have based their work on
Kuhn’s concept of normal science. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scien-
tific Revolutions (1970) came out at a time when many were critical of the
close relationship between science, industry and the military. By empha-
sizing how conflicts in science were solved only inside the scientific
community itself, Kuhn could isolate science from this criticism. Science
studies have to a high degree taken over this programme and limited their
efforts to study the “puzzle-solving” (Kuhn’s expression) of scientists and
have bought wholesale Kuhn’s isolation of science from the effects of
science on the world (Fuller 2000, ch.7).51
The agnosticism of science studies has to some extent been fruitful as a
limited research strategy, but the absurdity of it is laid bare in Latour’s
attempt to export it to the field of politics in order to “bring science into
democracy” (Latour 1999c). As a way of renewing political ecology, he
wanted to change the rules of representation to parliamentary organs by
including spokespersons for non-human entities. In the same way as for
his studies of scientific practices, his critique of political institutions
 Latour’s Anthropology of Science and its Limitations 149

concerned their form and not their substance. If he had engaged himself
with the latter, he would have been forced to take into consideration the
existing assemblages of political discourse. Instead he limited himself to
sketching new forms of representation and decision-making that included
science and technology (Latour 1999c). This “politics of nature” has been
criticized for having no direction. It is without substance and thus without
any politics at all (cf. Caillé 2001). In order to solve our ecological prob-
lems, the only thing he could offer was a rewriting of the rulebook of
liberal democracy. In his attempts to be political Latour seems to have
demonstrated another limitation to his approach.

Conclusion
Latour's anthropology of science is a great leap forward compared with
the sociological tradition and this is due to his inclusion of non-humans to
his analyses. By doing that he has rejected the first thesis of the sociologi-
cal tradition (cf. Chapter 1) that states that it studies relationships between
humans or collectives of humans. This also implies a rejection of the view
that technical objects are pure intermediaries between people or neutral
tools (Thesis 4). Non-humans contribute something to the formation of a
collective of humans and non-humans. The great advantage of this concep-
tion is to provide a new kind of continuity in the description of the world
and without preferential treatment of humans. One of the consequences is
that the relationships between the entities in this ontology have been
changed. Society must be composed in a different manner than before.
Furthermore, the continuity in agency between humans and non-humans
leads to a rejection of the “play” between a perspective of immanence
(human agency) and that of transcendence (social structure constraining
actors). This rejection is also a rejection of time-reversibility, because the
play between immanence and transcendence in sociology was based on a
change of direction of causality: what had been previously constructed by
humans suddenly constrains them in a reversion of causality.
An important part of Latour’s work has been to make semiotic con-
cepts operational in social-science research. In this connection his analyses
of circulating reference and the gradual emergence of scientific objects
and of technical mediation are all very important. The limitations of his
approach are not due to semiotics, but rather to his applications of it. He
has, to a high degree, given preference to the directly observable and
actual over the principles governing the setting: the virtual. Or, in lin-
guistic terms, he seems to prefer analyses along the syntagmatic axis to
those along the paradigmatic axis. One of the consequences of Latour’s
150 Chapter Five

preferences is his emphasis on the human actors’ construction of the

world, and this leads to a tendency of his case studies to encapsulate them-
selves within a limited frame. This results in a rather shallow historical
depth, and pre-established historical conditions are commonly treated as
“silent” and irrelevant. It seems as though he fears introducing some of
this silent context of our societies because he would have to make com-
promises with the “sociology of the social” that he dislikes so much. His
emphasis on studying forms of action without touching the substances
would have become more difficult without this way of bracketing-off
cases. If he had to introduce more context, it would be impossible for him
to stay away from the political and social stakes at hand.
In the following chapter I shall present the work of Deleuze and
Guattari in more detail and from their philosophy try to develop an ap-
proach that can solve some of the problems encountered in Latour’s work,
although I shall, of course, preserve the important insights of his anthro-
pology of science.
 CHAPTER SIX

PLANES AND ASSEMBLAGES

In this chapter I shall continue my pursuit for a reconceptualization of

sociological theory and the turn now comes to Deleuze and Guattari. Their
philosophy does not easily lend itself to sociological theorizing, however.
One reason for this situation may be the conceptual distance between them
and the sociological tradition kept in the iron grip of the presuppositions
indicated by the five theses that I presented in Chapter 1. Another reason
may be the diversity of topics that Deleuze and Guattari traverse and some
of these are not easily connectable to topics dear to social scientists.
However, the political and social situation in their own time was not far
away in their writings and this fact makes them relevant for sociology and
might give some leads for how we might involve them in sociological
analyses.
The method of Deleuze and Guattari is to invent concepts and to set
them in motion in an empirical material. In the same way as Latour, the
concepts only describe functions or parts of functions (“functives”) that
are completely empty of substance. All identities and subjectivities are the
results of an analysis and they can in no way be the starting points for it.
In this way their procedure is the opposite of the one common in socio-
logy. Owing to the “emptiness” of the concepts they could perhaps easily
lend themselves to being transposed from one analysis to the next, but this
would go counter to the demand for empirical specificity, or what I have
called their emphasis on immanence. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is not
an axiomatic of easily applied principles, but is a way to approach an em-
pirical material. This is also the reason why I in the first half of the chapter
show how their concepts can be involved in relation to examples and in
the second half go into an analysis of “soft power” and discuss some of the
recent transformations in the Western societies.
In the first part of this chapter I shall present some of the context for
Deleuze and Guattari’s work and the background for concepts like ma-
chine and plane of consistency and assemblage. On the basis of this back-
ground I then make a Deleuzo-Guattarian analysis of the laboratory and
compare it with Latour’s treatment of this locus for scientific research. In
152 Chapter Six

this way I can, on the one hand, discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts,
but, on the other, present how their approach differs from Latour’s. I then
discuss a topic common to these approaches, namely, the event and how it
ensures time-irreversibility, although their understanding of this concept
differs. In the later parts of the chapter I discuss two examples of applied
Deleuzo-Guattarianism. First the approach of the sociologist Gabriel
Tarde, who can be seen as one of their precursors, and then the literary
scholar Yves Citton’s analysis of storytelling in modern media-saturated
societies. A critical discussion of the latter’s contribution leads to an ana-
lysis of Deleuze’s claim that our Western societies are in the transition
towards “societies of control”.

Machines and Planes

The main joint works by Deleuze and Guattari were written in the
period of 1969 to 1980. Deleuze was already an established philosopher
when they first met in 1969 and Guattari had for many years worked at the
experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde near Blois in the Loire Valley
(Dosse 2007). In 1969 he also finished his qualifications as a psycho-
analyst under Jacques Lacan. For a long time he had also been an activist
on the French extreme left. Their encounter and their writing of books
together “with four hands” (Deleuze) has everything to do with the events
of May 1968. It was a way to continue this anti-authoritarian revolution in
political and social thinking, to bring it into philosophy and also into new
areas of social life and political struggles. The political conjunctures of the
early 1970s are, alas, long gone and those promoting more egalitarian
politics are on the defensive. Many of the ideals of this epoch were taken
over by the consumer-oriented version of capitalism we know under the
names of neo-liberalism or post-Fordism. However, much of the critical
potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy still remains unexploited
both in our understanding of human societies and in politics.
Deleuze had in the 1960s published extensively in the history of
philosophy and had developed his own line of thinking that he called
“transcendental empiricism” (Sauvarnargues 2009), but he turned towards
more political questions at the end of the decade. His encounter with
Guattari led to more open and radical creations. Some of Deleuze’s col-
leagues have never forgiven this move away from philosophical
“seriousness” and this is shown in the way Deleuze’s early work is
emphasized over the co-authored work. Even their jointly-written books
from the 1970s are often spoken of as though Deleuze were the sole au-
thor. My view is that their joint authorship should be respected and that the
 Planes and Assemblages 153

main books from this period, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (col-
lectively known as Capitalism and Schizophrenia) are the most important
ones when it comes to questions of social and political philosophy and
hence for the concerns of the present book.
Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, is a philosophical and political cri-
tique of psychoanalysis and of capitalism. The main critique of psycho-
analysis is directed against its orientation towards familial relations.
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize instead how psychiatric patients relate to
society and the world in general and this observation should vouch for a
reorientation towards society and the libidinal investments that are made
there (1984). The shattered subjectivity of the schizophrenic emerges in
this book as a kind of existential zero-point and for Deleuze and Guattari
this condition is a kind of philosophical starting point where all kinds of
pre-established signification are dissolved. This asignifying condition is
contrasted with that of the paranoid whose oversensitivity gives everything
a fixed interpretation. The paranoiac is the one who assumes the existence
of bodies organically placed in relation to each other, while the schizo-
phrenic tends to dissolve such unities into their composing elements. I can
perhaps clarify this opposition by presenting the examples of two famous
memoirs written by psychiatric patients and referred to by Deleuze and
Guattari.
The first one was written by Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 – 1911), a
retired supreme-court judge, who in 1903 published his memoirs from his
time as an inmate at asylums in Germany. In his mind Schreber built a
whole firmament of celestial levels populated with masses of souls. These
masses belonged to foreign peoples and foreign deities threatening to
destroy the Order of the World. He was also communicating with God
through rays and God performed a series of miraculous changes to his
body in order to turn him into a woman. He was also constantly afraid of
becoming the victim of “soul murder” (2000). Describing his fearful ex-
istence, his conflicting relationship to the psychiatrist Paul Flechsig in
Leipzig and especially his stay at the asylum of Sonnenstein, Schreber’s
delirious narrative goes on and on for several hundred pages. He wrote the
manuscript for the book while being an inmate and he used it in a claim of
sanity in a court case demanding release from hospital. After the success-
ful lawsuit, the publication of the manuscript made his paranoia a famous
case. Many authors have discussed and commented on it, and especially a
pamphlet by Sigmund Freud (2003) from 1911 and Elias Canetti’s book
Crowds and Power (1962) have ensured an enduring interest in Schreber’s
book.
154 Chapter Six

Another well-known memoir of mental illness is the book written by

Louis Wolfson (b. 1931). He became a student of language as a kind of
reaction to his mother and the language spoken by her, English. As a way
of getting out of English, he taught himself French, Hebrew and Russian
and in 1970 he published his memoirs Le Schizo et les langues (The Schiz-
ophrenic and the Languages) written directly in French and with a preface
by Deleuze. In this book he wrote about how he started to transform
English words by using the phonetic resources of the other languages. He
was especially fond of keeping the consonants of an original English word
and combining them with new vowels from some of the other languages,
but at the same time trying to keep some of the meaning of the words. In
this way English would not irritate him so much (Wolfson 1970).
Furthermore, Wolfson feared poisoning through food and drink and one
major problem for him was the English labels on the containers and that he
had to read them. After some time his relationship to his mother became
somewhat better after she started to address him in Yiddish in lieu of
English. Wolfson’s case is also a famous one, receiving much attention
and comments from other writers, including Paul Auster and J.M.G. Le
Clézio (cf. Pontalis et al. 2009).52
Both Schreber and Wolfson are somehow outside “normality”, but they
are so in very different ways: where the former fills the world with clearly
distinguished and threatening beings, the latter recombines vowels, con-
sonants and meanings within a given field. For Deleuze and Guattari these
two diagnoses have a philosophical importance: paranoia is a totalizing
and totalitarian experience while schizophrenia dissolves everything and
recombines it in new and free ways. Schizophrenia is hence understood as
a form of freedom, but at the same time it is the outer limit of this freedom
bordering on catatonia and death (Deleuze 2003d). The opposition be-
tween schizophrenia and paranoia is also extended to society marked by,
on the one hand, the horizontal (and immanent) principle of capitalism,
schizophrenizing society and, on the other, the hierarchical principle of the
state and its overcoding of signification. The state tends to give meaning to
everything in society in the same way as the paranoid gives meaning to
everything in the world. While the state tends to hold entities fixed by
putting them into clear categories and imposing meanings on them, the
freer principles of capitalism tend to liberate and decode them. Anti-
Oedipus explores the mutual dependencies of state and capitalism and the
way the state has imposed certain axioms on the way capitalism works.
Even at this early period, Deleuze and Guattari saw the tendency for capi-
talism to increase its realm by including traditional state functions (like
surveillance and repression) into its own mode of working (1984).
 Planes and Assemblages 155

A Thousand Plateaus is less polemical and is structured differently.

The book does not form one single argument, but explores certain con-
cepts on a given “plateau”. What is important on each plateau is the envi-
ronment produced by each of these concepts and it also involves different
configurations of their other concepts, although the connection between
the plateaus can be quite weak. Some of the topics of Anti-Oedipus turns
up again and are developed further. There is, for example, an ongoing
critique of the vertical principle of the state and state apparatuses and how
freer forms of inventions can be made transversally between different
social realms and in artistic and intellectual creations. They want to pro-
mote molecular relations rather than hierarchy. One example is the first
plateau, which starts with some reflections over the way books are com-
posed. Commonly books are “root books” or “trees” with their topics
branching off in a binary fashion from a common trunk (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 5). This hierarchical pattern is compared to the rhizome
with its roots spreading out under the immediately visible surface, leading
to new and unforeseen connections. Philosophically speaking a rhizome
“connects to any point to any other point” (21) and A Thousand Plateaus
itself is written rhizomatically with oblique connections between the dif-
ferent plateaus and the plateaus themselves are “self-vibrating region[s] of
intensities” (22). The richness of material in A Thousand Plateaus is so
overwhelming that I can only touch upon a small part in this book and
some of the main concepts are discussed more in detail later in this chap-
ter.
I have previously mentioned that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
emphasizes movement and change and it can be linked to what I have pre-
viously called the study of society as energetic processes (cf. Chapter 1).
The energeticism of Deleuze and Guattari can be shown in their emphasis
on flows and the instability of all well-established relations. This is no
more evident than in the opening sentences of Anti-Oedipus where they
state that:

Everywhere it is machines – real ones not figurative ones: machines

driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all
the necessary couplings and connections. (1984, 1)

All basic functions of both the human body and society are described as
machines – or more precisely, desiring-machines because they hold desire
to be a fundamental part of both the body’s and society’s infrastructure.
Desire is not seen as a longing for something lacking, but as a fundamental
force in a generalized productivism:
156 Chapter Six

… the breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine
coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions:
its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal-
machine, a talking machine, or a breathing-machine (asthma attacks).
(1984, 1)

The concept of desiring-machine is (as I shall explain below) in later

books included in the concept of assemblage, but what I want to em-
phasize in this context is that this form of energeticism is fundamental for
Deleuze and Guattari’s work. It is, however, important to ward off some
potential misunderstandings at this point. Deleuze and Guattari’s vocab-
ulary of machines does not imply that they think everything is mechanical
or that they affirm the mechanical, like the members of the Futurist Group,
for example. What they want is to avoid the already established notions of
the psyche, the unconscious, social institutions and social representations.
With the concept of machine they fuse traditional distinctions between
human and machine, organic and mechanic, the psychic and technical in
one strike (Schmidgen 1997, 20). This concept is, however, not to be taken
as a metaphor, but must be understood literally:

… an organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one

produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that pro-
duces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. (Deleuze and Guattari
1984, 1)

The world is hence a set of machines where the desiring-machines, pro-

ducing the bodily and psychic states, enter into the social machines and is
part of their infrastructure. The subject and subjectivity are mainly a kind
of bi-product of this generalized productivism. There is in principle no dif-
ference between the desiring-machines and the social machines, but they
conceive that the desiring-machines work in the subconscious on a mo-
lecular level while the social machines (of capitalist production, the state,
state institutions, the media, etc.) try to rein them in or to steer desire in
specific directions. Desire can be suppressed from a quasi-outside – or a
molar level in Deleuze and Guattari’s parlance – but it will always remain
as a kind of destabilizing factor in social life (1984).
This distancing from the mechanical can be contrasted with Deleuze’s
claims in other texts that his approach can be summarized as a study of
non-organic life or a kind of vitalism: “Everything that I have written has
been vitalist, at least I hope so, and constitutes a theory of signs and
events” (Deleuze 2003c, 196; my trans.). To make a claim for vitalism
may be a bit surprising and vitalism seems more in tune with the views of
 Planes and Assemblages 157

some of the theorists criticized in this book. Assumptions of oblique vital

forces are present in the theories of all those who appeal to hidden potenti-
alities or, for example, in some of Durkheim’s importations from physio-
logy in The Division of Labor in Society (1933). Both sociologists and
laypersons alike, more or less consciously, may view society as composed
by closely knit and mutually dependent organic units. Deleuze does not, of
course, intend to appeal to hidden life forces or to conceive society as
reproductive cell-like structures. The social world may nevertheless be
conceived as something quasi-living. The difference from an organism is
that the organism closes itself off and reproduces itself, while non-organic
life is open and heterogeneous (Zourabichvili 2003, 84-89). Deleuze and
Guattari’s foundational energetics of liberated flows or desiring-machines
is consequently an attempt at developing explanations that are neither
organic nor mechanical. This is a problematic that harks back to debates in
French intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, to the philos-
opher and physician Georges Canguilhem’s (1904 – 1995) essay Machine
and Organism (2006), originally published in the late 1940s.
Deleuze’s orientation towards vitalism and processes as quasi-life
forms can be linked to the impressions he had taken from the philosophy
of Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941). In his critique of the external and mech-
anistic viewpoint of evolutionary theory, Bergson shifted the perspective
to the individual organism and its possibilities (2006). Deleuze had already
published a book about Bergson’s philosophy in the mid-1960s (2007) and
his books on film, written in the 1980s, were based on an reinterpretation
of Bergson’s theories on images and memory (Deleuze 1983, 1985).
Another important reference for Deleuze, and thus for the joint Deleuzo-
Guattarian enterprise, is the work of Spinoza (1632 – 1677). From
Spinoza’s Ethics Deleuze has forged the concept of a “common plane of
immanence” (2003e, 164; my trans.). This plane of immanence or consist-
ency is a kind of initial condition for everything and life itself is installed
on this plane of consistency. It is important not to understand life “as a
form or a development of forms, but as a complex relation between dif-
ferent velocities, between retardation and acceleration of particles” (165;
my trans.). The way to understand the concept of plane of consistency (or
immanence) is to think of it as an initial condition which has no previous
initial condition. This is also what makes it so difficult to think and to
define it precisely. They also apply the concept of plane of consistency or
immanence very flexibly and speak of different planes in relation to
specific problematics. For example, the concept of body without organs is
characterized as: “the field of immanence of desire, the plane of con-
sistency specific to desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 154; emphasis in
158 Chapter Six

orig.). In other words, it is a plane specific to this general process of

production. In the case of philosophical thought Deleuze and Guattari have
defined the plane of immanence as “not a concept which is thought nor
thinkable, but the image of thinking” (2005, 40). It is a way of “orientating
oneself in thought” (40) a kind of horizon for a specific way of thinking.
Therefore, this plane of immanence is, in this case, a plane of consistency
specific to philosophical thought.

A Sideways-Glance
If we have a closer look at previous “constructions of planes”
presented in this book, we might perhaps make this idea of a plane of
consistency (or immanence) a bit clearer. If we take Bourdieu’s concept of
social field (1985b, cf. also Chapter 3), it is defined by certain parameters
in the composition of capital on one axis and the amount of capital on the
other. The concept of capital, on its side, refers to the value given to spe-
cific social resources over which individuals compete. To compete over a
set of resources, however, presupposes an actor who can feel the com-
petition and orient herself in the field, even though this orientation might
be unconscious. In a response to some critiques Bourdieu wrote that:

It is not true to say that everything that people do or say is aimed at maxi-
mizing their social profit; but one might say that they do it to perpetuate or
to augment their social being. (1993a, 274)

This is perhaps one of the clearest statements by Bourdieu that he adheres

to a kind of model of the human: it is an anthropology where humans tend
to perpetuate or augment their social being. Deleuze and Guattari’s philos-
ophy to the contrary is anti-anthropological and if there are specific actors
in an analysis they emerge on the plane itself and in a specific context.
Furthermore, Bourdieu’s social field presupposes a kind of Euclidean scale
that can be used to measure the amount of capital and the differences in
the composition of capital, while this is not relevant for the plane of
consistency. Bourdieu’s concept of field is closer to what Deleuze and
Guattari called the “plane of organization”, where entities are already
given a specific identity and the possibilities for mutual combinations are
limited. They identified this plane with the vertical principle in society:
some forms are pre-defined and imposed on the plane of consistency
(Deleuze 2003e, 171-172). In this form of context fixed dimensions for the
amount and the composition of capital might be relevant.
As I have indicated above, Deleuze and Guattari analyse planes that
are specific to a particular problem. Their analyses depend on the case at
 Planes and Assemblages 159

hand and every new case needs a new effort. Does this mean that
Bourdieu’s social field can be transformed into a plane of immanence?
The answer is a cautious “perhaps”, but only if the actors, and the assem-
blages they are part of, can be seen to emerge out of the conditions of the
field itself. The entities on a plane of immanence are commonly described
as “pre-individual” (Deleuze 1969, 124-125) and they might be individual-
ized in specific situations. For Bourdieu the concept of field is a heuristic
device and it is a way to grasp the immanent conditions of a specific social
context. However, the concept imposes too many fixed dimensions to the
contexts within which it is applied. This reveals a more fundamental
difference between Bourdieu and Deleuze and Guattari: the former was
interested in studying a social order, while the latter two were oriented
towards which processes are taking place on a plane without fixed borders
and dimensions.
Berger and Luckmann also state some initial conditions for their
analyses although these are centred on the ability of humans as a species.
They take as their starting point theories about the world-openness of the
human kind (1984, 65-69). Another reference is made to the biologist
Jakob von Uexküll (1864 – 1944), who held that humans have no pre-
given ecological niche and that their organs are not specialized for limited
types of motions and their instincts rather underdeveloped (Uexküll 2010).
All of these arguments serve as Berger and Luckmann’s reason for con-
centrating their theory on the social plasticity of human beings without
bothering themselves with the limitations set by human physiology or
other material aspects. This line of thinking leads them to conclude that:

While it is possible to say that man has a nature, it is more significant to

say that man constructs his own nature, or more simply, that man produces
himself. (Berger and Luckmann 1984, 67)

Some kind of anthropology is at work in this theory as well and it is the

foundation for the Robinson Crusoe-like construction of the social world
that they adhere to.
Of those I have discussed in previous chapters, only Latour can be said
to be involved in discussing first principles that have no previous or
additional dimension. These discussions are presented in the philosophical
précis Irreductions where he states that “nothing else is, by itself, either
reducible or irreducible to anything else” (1988b, 158). Reductionism is
the great sin that Latour wants to purge in this text. What he means with
reductionism is the quest for something to serve as a simple foundation in
our social relations, science, religion, philosophy, etc.: for a Christian
everything emanates from God’s omnipotence; the astronomer searches
160 Chapter Six

the origin in the Big Bang; the engineer can reduce risk to a question of
mathematical calculations; a social theorist can relate everything to the
contradictions in late capitalism; an economist can refer to the psychology
of the marketplace; a moralist can blame everything on the evil nature of
human beings, etc. From these simple foundations one might draw strong
conclusions or perhaps even criticize everyone else for being wrong. This
is the critical stance that Latour wants to get away from (1993b, 5-7,
1996c). Both reductionism and his own “irreductionism” build upon the
fundamental principle that “whatever resists trials is real” (1988b, 158).
Trials of strength form the basis for all his analyses and the strategy he
employs to do away with reductionist views is to indicate how they skip
steps in their explanations in order to reach their conclusions. The mere
exposure of such lacunae will at least reduce the strength of reductionist
claims. A re-introduction of mediating circumstances will make such
claims fail in trials of strength. In Irreductions Latour even has added a
quasi-biographical sketch about how he began to formulate his anti-
reductionist programme in the early 1970s at a moment when he found
himself overloaded with reductionisms (1988b, 162-163). Hence, his first
principles grew out of counter-reaction to the dominant narratives in this
period.
Latour is, however, engaged in a somewhat different line of thinking
compared with the one involved in the formulation of Deleuze and
Guattari’s plane of consistency. First of all, Irreductions presupposes an
extreme concreteness of all entities. Every one of them has, at the start, the
same claim to existence and at the same level (Harman 2009). I shall try to
make this contrast with Deleuze and Guattari clearer by returning to von
Uexküll’s studies in ethology. Deleuze held that von Uexküll was engaged
in a Spinozist project not unlike his own by emphasizing how each species
is part of an environment (Umwelt) based on the principles of the ability to
affect others and to be affected (Deleuze 2003e, 167-170, Uexküll 2010).
He returned many times to von Uexküll’s analysis of the life-world of the
tick. This little animal has a very simple life cycle. The female climbs to
the tip of a branch of a tree or to the tip of a grass straw and lies in wait for
the smell of butyric acid (sweat) coming from a passing mammal. When
this unlikely event takes place the tick drops onto the mammal and crawls
to a bare spot of its skin and bores itself into the bloodstream (Uexküll
2010, 44-52). In Deleuze’s comment the relationship between the tick and
its victim is marked by three different affects: climbing to the tip of a
branch, dropping onto the mammal and boring into the warm and nutrient
fluid inside. These are energetic forces dispersed by the ethologist on a
plane of immanence (2003e, 166-168). In this view, von Uexküll decon-
 Planes and Assemblages 161

structs the tick into three primary affects and the tick as an individual may
emerge on this plane. If we take a look at this problem from the viewpoint
of Latour’s insistence on absolute concreteness, it would probably lead to
a view that the tick and its three affects are all real to the same extent and
on the same plane. Hence it is not possible to define the world of the tick
as an “inside” which can be studied separately. This is in line with his
claim in We Have Never Been Modern that his ontology entails the dis-
solution of the opposition between inside (immanence) and outside (tran-
scendence) (1993b, 129). This is at least a programmatic statement, but he
is not consistent on this point. His research practice always starts in “the
middle of things” (2005, 25) and any claim about the reality of the tick
will have to be resolved within language, which he has given a special
status. In other words, in his concrete studies he is forced to reintroduce
the distinction between immanence and transcendence even though he dis-
tributes the properties between outside and inside differently from Deleuze
and Guattari.
Now I can, perhaps, try to summarize some of the initial concepts
necessary to understand the social philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari: a
given empirical case is always studied as a multiplicity of heterogeneous
relations on a plane of immanence. Concepts like “desiring-machines”,
“molecular”, “molar”, etc. are only put into action in order to grasp the
relations of this given case. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is not an
axiomatic whereby any social multiplicity can be understood if the reader
understands the fundamental axioms. Their philosophy is more of a mode
of thinking and analysing the world than a set of quick fixes. This is also
the reason why I prefer to explain their concepts by discussing examples
and I shall do so more extensively later in the chapter. In the following I
shall have a closer look at the concept of assemblage, which is a further
development of the concept of desiring-machines.

Assemblages
In the joint publications of Deleuze and Guattari the concept of
machine is transformed in the years after 1972 into that of assemblage
(agencement) and abstract machine, and this is the status in A Thousand
Plateaus (1987). Guattari, however, in his own publications (1979, 1992)
continued to use machine in much of its original meaning. In my previous
presentation of this concept I have emphasized how it is marked by a
double articulation: on the one hand, it conjugates flows of signs and, on
the other, flows of bodies on the plane of consistency (Deleuze and
Guattari 1975, 145-146, 1987, 88-90). “Bodies” must be understood in the
162 Chapter Six

widest possible sense as comprising both humans and non-humans. An

assemblage is a joint or locus where these flows meet and exchange prop-
erties and the assemblage itself is marked by relative stability. In previous
chapters I have discussed a court of law (Chapter 1) and households
(Chapter 4) as examples of such assemblages. In the first example the
flows conjugated at the court were, on the one hand, those of defendants,
judges, lawyers and, on the other, the legal discourse on laws and proce-
dures and the not-so-legal discourse on motives, opportunities and psycho-
logical dimensions of crime. In the latter example I was concerned with
Kurt Lewin’s study of Midwestern households and the flows of foodstuffs
and the associated discourse on what to eat, for what occasion, food prices,
etc. (1952b). The concept of assemblage does not take the distinction
between subject and object as a starting point and this is a great advantage
because very complex relations can be grasped simultaneously. However,
the study of assemblages must be made for each case at a time. Every new
empirical material demands a new analytical effort: assemblage is not one
of those analytical figures to be transposed onto any given material.
Deleuze and Guattari involve it in a rather plastic way; it can be given
different tasks and this may be to some extent a source of confusion.
Having this in mind, we can now introduce the importance of Louis
Hjelmslev’s model of the sign to the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of
assemblage (Hjelmslev 1961). In Chapter 5 I have emphasized the impor-
tance of this model to Greimas’ semiotics and my hypothesis was also that
Latour has made some of the same distinctions as in the linguists’ under-
standing of Hjelmslev’s model, for example, a concentration on form com-
pared with substance. A linguistic interpretation of this model is sum-
marized in Figure 5.3. Hjelmslev’s model is based on a development of the
Saussurean distinction between signifier and signified where he insisted on
the distinction both within expression (signifier) and content (signified),
between form and substance. When Shakespeare lets Marcellus exclaim
that, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Hamlet, act1, scene
4), it can be said (and it has been said) in many different ways. In other
words, it has different substances of expression. Nevertheless, in all of
these different ways of saying the sentence, the speaker has to submit to a
particular phonetic form (a form of expression) if the sentence is to be
understood by others. Furthermore, the sentence denotes something (the
state of being rotten, the kingdom of Denmark, Hjelmslev’s home coun-
try). Thus, it has a form of content, but to say something more specific
about what the state of rottenness might involve or about the peninsula and
islands making up what we usually call Denmark (substance of content) is
 Planes and Assemblages 163

beyond linguistics and linguists limit their interest to the two formal-
izations.
Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in this model concerns the fact that it
both involves a development from a completely formalized situation
(forms of expression and of content) and a situation of completely un-
formed entities. These unformed entities they call the matter of expression
and of content. The substances of expression and of content are formed
matter, or in Hjelmslev’s explanation, they are chosen by the form. These
formed entities (for instance linguistic and material entities in human
societies) presuppose a plane of consistency of unformed matter:

… the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its

flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and
prephysical free singularities. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 43)

In this situation no signification is possible because the matter does not go

through any formalization. In Guattari’s words the relation between ex-
pression and content is asignifying (1977). Deleuze and Guattari relate to
Hjelmslev’s formulations in a rather free manner and the reason they could
include matter is partly owing to the French translation of Hjelmslev’s
book, Prolegomena. The Danish expression mening which is translated as
purport in the English version, is translated into matière or sens in French
(cf. Guattari 1977, 261 on this point). Instead of limiting the model to
semiotics, they transform it into a general model of double articulation and
in that way they are able to fuse Hjelmslev’s model of the sign with their
own concept of assemblage. On the one hand, we find flows of expres-
sions and, on the other, flows of bodies (or matter). In Hjelmslev’s view
there is a mutual solidarity between expression and content, but Deleuze
and Guattari often treat expression and content to be in relative movement
to each other. This relative movement means that specific forms of expres-
sions are not always linked to particular forms of content, but when they
are we have the situation of a dominant signification. When we say “Den-
mark” it usually refers to some particular peninsula and islands in the
earth’s northern hemisphere, a particular territory. This specific territory is
hence overcoded by this expression – giving name to it. Our everyday
social life and linguistic exchanges depend upon such fixed significations
and it shows how language provides functional organization to the world
around us. This way of providing functional organization can be referred
back to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language (cf. Chapter 4), where
the order-words have predominance as a pragmatic starting-point. Lan-
guage orders the world and worldly struggles also take the form of strug-
gles over words. I shall discuss this somewhat further later in this chapter.
164 Chapter Six

Following the discussion above, an assemblage is a kind of meeting

point between language and matter, and on this point Deleuze and Guattari
distinguish between these two segments by naming them the collective
assemblage of enunciation and the machinic assemblage, respectively. We
have met the expression of the machinic above and they write that a
machinic assemblage:

… relates not to the production of goods but rather to a precise state of

intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repul-
sions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations,
and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relation to one
another. (1987, 90)

The machinic, then, involves the material flows that include both human
beings and non-humans, but it emphasizes the immediate and non-
linguistic aspects of these relationships. On the other hand, we have the
collective assemblage of enunciation concerning the “acts and statements,
of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 88). A reinterpretation of Latour’s anthropology of science in line
with these concepts may clarify what they mean.

A Reinterpretation of Latour
The aim of this reinterpretation is to show how Deleuzo-Guattarian
concepts may be set in motion with reference to a particular empirical
material. During this exercise I shall also indicate some major disa-
greements between these two approaches. In his anthropology of science
Latour identifies the laboratory as the central locus for scientific research
(1987), and this holds true even for those in which fieldwork is important:
the fieldworker carries some of the laboratory with her. It is, so to speak,
reemerging in the field by the scientists bringing in equipment in order to
observe, to make measurements and to collect samples. We can analyse
the laboratory as an assemblage: first as a machinic assemblage and then
as an assemblage of collective enunciations. In a Hjelmslevian way we
might say that the laboratory is a certain formed environment – a form of
content and a form of expressions – and the content is the researchers,
chemical compounds, test animals, equipment, samples, etc.53 On the other
hand, the laboratory has its own expressions in the form of laboratory
protocols, field notes, procedures, ethical guidelines, etc., and we could
have limited us to these expressions and their relationship to the content.
But, as we know, the activities in the laboratory must remain in contact
with the collective assemblages of enunciation of science in the form of
 Planes and Assemblages 165

conferences, meetings, work-groups, journals, pre-print servers, research

grant applications, popular science journals, textbooks, university courses,
etc. It is through these channels that the work of the laboratory is assessed,
but it is also through them that the researchers get their research problems.
These different arenas can in their turn be taken separately since they
define their own content and expressions, and they may in periods be more
or less detached from the concrete activity in the laboratory. A certain line
of theoretical developments might be completely deterritorialized from an
experimental basis and can, at a later stage, reterritorialize in the labo-
ratory or perhaps it is abandoned completely. The laboratory seen as an
assemblage is thus no static entity, but an entity on the plane of con-
sistency where different flows of bodies (researchers, compounds, equip-
ment, samples, etc.) and expressions meet and react to each other.
A consequence of these multiple and proliferating assemblages is that
the concept of assemblage does not denote a closed-off entity, but it is
open and can enter into other ones. So far this would agree well with
Latour’s anthropology of science. Latour also describes the laboratory as
being part of a larger network (1987) or a circulatory system (1999b). Sci-
ence is involved in what he calls a mobilization of the world from the lump
of soil collected in the Amazon to the written report from the fieldwork. In
this process “nonhumans are progressively loaded into discourse” (99) and
they have to be part of human alliances and public representations. Scien-
tists, for their part, have to interest other people in order to make their
work possible.
At this point a Deleuzo-Guattarian reinterpretation of Latour’s ap-
proach might break down to some extent and this impasse can be related to
Latour’s dependence on actor theory. Latour tends, for example, to identi-
fy the processes of mobilization with personalities (often famous ones) and
everything seems to happen as if it is a mobilization for a public protest
next Saturday or for an election next month. His descriptions lack histori-
cal depth and the recognition of the fact that science is a highly institu-
tionalized activity where some positions are heavily entrenched while
others are not. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms Latour seems to lack a concept
similar to what they call stratum. A stratum stands in opposition to the
movement of deterritorialization and in all assemblages there is a tension
between a movement towards, on the one hand, the stratum and what is
already actual and, on the other, a movement of deterritorialization
towards the virtual or what might happen (1987, 40-72). All sorts of struc-
tured and territorialized environments are strata. That Latour’s anthro-
pology of science does not involve a concept of stratum may perhaps be
met with some criticism. In the book Science in Action Latour has distin-
166 Chapter Six

guished between “ready made science” and “science in the making”. This
distinction is represented by a Janus-faced figure with ready-made science
facing backwards (sporting a beard) and science in the making facing
forwards (clean shaven) (1987, 4). The defenders of already established
science will always be sceptical to new claims to scientific truth. In other
words, Latour introduces a distinction between science as territorialized
stratum and the deterritorializing movement of science driven by competi-
tion between laboratories and research groups. He is, however, only inter-
ested in science as stratum to the degree actors are forced to open “black
boxes” of already established science in their pursuit of new scientific
knowledge (4). Science as stratum does not really interest him. Some
dimensions of science thus evade him since already well established (and
taken for granted) kinds of knowledge and practices also will influence the
direction of the deterritorializing movement. To include how already
established patterns structure future action would be, in Latourian terms, to
re-introduce a notion of context that is not actively created by the actors.
Latour’s dependence on a theory of agency is the source of these prob-
lems.
In contrast to agency, the concept of assemblage is a way to concep-
tualize action, creation and events without the assumption of a subject or a
specific division of tasks between subjects and objects. Subjectivity is in
this approach a kind of product rather than a starting point. The Latourian
associology is not able to achieve this kind of co-creation and bequeathing
agency on non-humans does not really solve this problem. This is so
because the distinction between humans and non-humans involves an
ascription of ontological status between entities before the analysis. A real
symmetry between the two cannot take place because only humans can
speak on the behalf of non-humans. In the Latourian language of mobi-
lization only humans can engage non-humans in their representational and
political strategies. In Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding the funda-
mental question is to identify the assemblages in each situation and how
they relate to the movements towards change (deterritorialization) or to-
wards stability in the strata.
In Chapter 5 I have argued that some relations in society are imposed
from an outside, for example, by the state apparatus. This molar over-
coding, as I called it, stands in opposition to the free molecular combi-
nations between entities on the plane of consistency. The example at hand
was the diversity of scientific efforts in France during the last decades of
the nineteenth century following the debacle of the war in 1870 – 1871.
Any scientific effort had to be within the frame of French nationalism or it
would have to linger in the margins. My conclusion was that French
 Planes and Assemblages 167

science in this period was overcoded by nationalism. This type of over-

coding presupposes a different type of assemblage from the ones we have
described so far and Deleuze and Guattari call them molar machines or
binary machines (1984, ch.9, Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 151-157). They
describe them as governing a segmentary line in society from a sort of
quasi-outside that they call the plane of organization. This plane represents
the hierarchical principle in society imposing certain lines of force on the
plane of consistency. These machines overcode certain activities and
social stations in a binary fashion: between the rich and poor, men and
women, grown-up and child, the professions, the nationalities, the social
institutions, the stages of life, the alternation between work and holidays,
public and private, etc. These segmentary lines depend upon binary
machines making these divisions and marking the territory of each
segment. One of the principal themes of Deleuze and Guattari is to indi-
cate all the relations that undermine the strong segmentary lines in society.
Latour accepts the existence of such segmentary lines only to a limited
degree, but he polemicizes against the binary division between nature and
society in the Modern Constitution (Latour 1993b). His main aim, how-
ever, is to show that this divide in the way we think, write and speak about
nature and society provides a poor description of the realities. He wants to
get away from the divide and hence denies its efficacy. I think a better and
more honest approach is to accept that the distinction between nature and
society is a segmentary line which is heavily entrenched in Western socie-
ties. Furthermore, it is heavily policed by philosophers of science and by
scientists themselves. In order to systematize scientific findings they have
to enter them into the binary machine. They have to belong either to nature
or to society. In a Deleuzo-Guattarian way of expressing it, this clear divi-
sion between nature and society is imposed from an outside. To acknowl-
edge this actual condition is not to diminish Latour’s argument that a sci-
entific fact starts out as a quasi-object somewhere in between nature and
society, but in order to enter it into textbooks and university lectures it has
to conform to the schema. Nevertheless, combining entities of all sorts in a
free molecular way is a necessity for researchers in order for them to make
new experiments or to develop new ways of thinking, speaking and
writing about their objects of study.
The present reinterpretation of Latour’s position in light of Deleuze
and Guattari’s should make it quite plain that their positions are quite
different from each other. I shall, however, in the following turn to a topic
where the two approaches share more in common.
168 Chapter Six

The Event and Irreversibility

In Chapter 1 I claimed that both the theories of Latour and those of
Deleuze and Guattari involve irreversibility: something new emerges at a
particular point in chronological time and numerous new possibilities are
opened up. Furthermore, there is no going back. Event is the concept to
explain this effect and discussions about it concern how to understand
change compared with historical continuity. We have previously seen in
this book (cf. Chapters 2 and 3) how some sociological theories advocate a
kind of state-like thinking which arrests movement and therefore tends to
eliminate the event altogether. Events have first of all been important
within the discipline of history. The historian Lucien Febvre (1878 –
1956), one of the founders of the influential Annales school in France,
argued in his book Combats pour l’histoire (Struggles for History) (1965)
against what he called event history or circumstantial history. This was the
practice of treating events as brute facts following each other from one
moment to the next in a chronological fashion. One of his main targets was
diplomatic history with its emphasis on following the relations between
states on a day-to-day basis. Febvre wanted to advance a historiography
that also included continuities. A similar critique of the event was made by
Foucault in order to criticize pure descriptions of occurrences. In other
contexts, however, he used it in a positive manner to indicate major
changes and he used the event in order to distance himself from structur-
alism and its problems of conceptualizing change at all (1972, 8, 27, cf.
Revel 2002, 30-32). The understanding of the event in the theories of both
Deleuze and Guattari and Latour is similar to this latter meaning: the event
is something that disrupts the smooth flow of occurrences and it inserts
something new.
We have already seen how Latour claims that something new happened
in Pasteur’s experiment with the fermentation (cf. Chapter 5). The qual-
ities of both Pasteur and the fermentation changed completely and he as-
serts it is a failure of traditional sociology and history not to be able to
understand this fact:

No event can be accounted for by a list of the elements that entered the
situation before its conclusion, before Pasteur launched his experiment,
before the yeast started to trigger the fermentation, before the meeting in
the academy. (Latour 1999b, 126; emphasis in orig.)

In other words, the experiment cannot be explained as the result of all the
separate factors in a given situation. In this view, the event is not a result
of a zero-sum game. It is an antidote to all the insistence on repetitive
 Planes and Assemblages 169

patterns and contextual causality and it is usually not very much liked by
those who prefer neat explanations. In Latour’s concept of the event there
are two sides: the human and the object meeting at a joint site – the experi-
ment – and afterwards they part and both are changed. Pasteur enters new
social circles while the fermentation enters into the dairy industry, bak-
eries, etc. New possibilities opened up for all of them. Furthermore, there
is a kind of double causality at work because the existence of the fer-
mentation from 1857 on is retroactively brought to bear as an explanation
for the souring of milk that also took place before this year (168-173). In
Latour’s conception the event both opens up new possibilities and it rear-
ranges the way we can speak and write about the past.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, however, the event is something
that lingers on into the future. It is developed by Deleuze from the phi-
losophy of the stoics in the book The Logic of Sense (1969). Later, in their
collective work, it is closely aligned with that of assemblage. We remem-
ber from above that an assemblage is a site where two different flows –
one of expressions and one of content – meet and exchange properties. In
the Deleuzian notion events also have a double character. On the one hand,
they take place at a given time and a given location: they are accidents or
occurrences. This is their corporeal effectuation and it is linked to a given
present time (68). On the other hand, they have an added quality es-
chewing this present by having both a past and a future (177). This added
quality is the incorporeal effectuation of the event. Above I have indicated
the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal transformations for the
concept of assemblages and the Stoics were the first to make this distinc-
tion. Deleuze and Guattari express this distinction this way:

… when knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body,
when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermingling of bodies;
but the statements “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am eating,” “The
water is turning red,” express incorporeal transformations of an entirely
different nature (events). (1987, 86; emphasis in orig.)

Event, in their conception, belongs primarily to language, but there is

something expressed about the content (Deleuze 1969, 34). In the example
of the accused Gaston Dominici in Chapter 1, the utterances of “Guilty!”
or “Not Guilty!” would lead to completely different consequences for the
accused (and for history): the utterance is an attribute of the accused, but it
should not be confused with what actually happens to the concrete body.
The states of words are not the same as the states of affairs.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s conception they see all events as having
fundamentally the same form. On the one hand, events may take place at
170 Chapter Six

any time and may involve small instances changing the course of a series
of occurrences. On the other hand, Deleuze writes about events as “pure”
events, “ideal” events or Events with a capital E. The last is the event as a
historical turning point and as a becoming. In this form of event, many
minor events communicate with what takes place at these ruptures
(Deleuze 1969, 68-69, 72). Historical events resonate through time and
there is something in an event like that of May 68, the fall of the Berlin
wall in 1989, the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on 9/11 or
the financial crisis of 2008, which is irreducible to causality. This is so
because phenomena that were previously held to be independent of each
other come into resonance and the event opens up a new field of virtu-
alities within a given problematic (Deleuze and Guattari 2003). Although
the event has already occurred at a given place and time, the realization of
the virtualities involved in it remains to be achieved. The historical event
is in itself undetermined, it has no meaning beyond itself, but it must be
interpreted and given a direction by others (cf. Stengers 1995, 80-82 on
this point).54 In the early 1980s Deleuze and Guattari criticized the social-
ist government in France for holding back and eliminating the possibilities
opened up with the events of May 68 (2003, 216). The days of May is still
an event that resonates through history and as late as 2007 the, at that time,
conservative candidate to the French presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, held an
inflammatory speech where he claimed that his presidency would finally
bury May 68 and all its intellectual and moral relativism.55 A pure event
hence becomes a sort of emblem or reference point for all sorts of other
events. This latter example shows what Deleuze has called the double
causality of the event. On the one hand, there is the causality of the corpo-
real effectuation and then there is the incorporeal effectuation where the
event as an emblem has become a quasi-cause (1969, 115-117). If we, for
example, ask why airport security checks are stricter now than earlier, the
answer is commonly given as “9/11”.
Another conception of the event has been developed by Deleuze’s one-
time colleague at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, the philoso-
pher Alain Badiou. He has in recent decades linked the concept of event to
the concept of truth. In his view, truth-processes can emerge within the
fields of politics, love, science and music and they involve the faithfulness
to an event like May 68 or to a falling in love or to a scientific discovery
like Einstein’s theory of relativity or a new direction in music like the
Second Viennese School. For Badiou a destructive event, like 9/11 in our
time, is dangerous because it can be the origin of a seeming truth – a simu-
lacrum (2001). Although it might be said that Deleuze and Guattari were
faithful to May 68, this link between event and truth is quite alien to their
 Planes and Assemblages 171

work.56 For them a destructive event cannot be avoided, but it might be

counter-effectuated in the way we relate to its hereafter (Deleuze 1969,
174-179). As the example of 9/11 shows, even destructive events become
emblems and resonate with other events in the same way as described
above. We cannot wish such events away, but we can work against certain
effects of them. Deleuze discussed the example of the poet Joe Bousquet
(1897 – 1950) who was paralysed in the First World War and he had to
remain in the care of his family for the rest of his life. He could not undo
the event that paralysed him, but through his poetry he was able to avoid
the bitterness and sadness of the war crippled to the extent that he would
not have wanted any other fate (174-176).
To conclude we might say that the event has a double quality in
Deleuze and Guattari’s work by being both linked to a given time frame
and to something lingering on and opening up new possibilities (for good
and for bad). In the following I shall develop further how Deleuze and
Guattari’s concepts can be set in motion in the analyses of specific
empirical contexts.

Publics and Storytelling

I have argued above for the importance of flows and processes in the
way they conceive the world, and in this part of the chapter I shall discuss
some of the works of Gabriel Tarde and Yves Citton in this connection. I
have previously (in Chapter 2) presented Tarde as a critic and contem-
porary of Durkheim and it might seem anachronistic to discuss him as an
example of a Deleuzo-Guattarian conceptualization. They were, after all,
born 20 – 25 years after his death. However, his work has strong similar-
ities to some parts of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and they acknowledged him
as a major influence (1987, 218-219, Deleuze 1994, 313-314). Thus, his
sociology can be recognized as a precursor to the problematic treated in
this book and he represents an alternative historical road that sociology did
not take. In this connection I focus on Tarde’s analysis of the formation of
publics and this is a topic that the literary scholar Yves Citton in his book
Mythocracy (2010) has recently developed further. Citton’s focus is on the
stories told by the media and the population’s economy of attention, and,
although his analyses are good examples of a combination of Tarde and
Deleuze and Guattari, I shall take them somewhat further. The main topic
of Citton’s book is to analyse how power functions in contemporary
Western countries and this is something I shall return to later in this
chapter.
172 Chapter Six

Tarde and Publics

The foundation for Tarde’s sociology is that we imitate each other and
one individual may be suggestive to another individual’s conduct. This
suggestion can be made directly between individuals by imparting their
desires and beliefs to each other or by non-verbal means in the form of
perception of each other’s conduct. Ideas and conducts can flow through-
out society between individuals by contagion, although these flows of imi-
tations are modulated and conjugated by the family, social groups, the
density of the city and the mass media (Tarde 2001). The family, social
groups, the city and the media thus form what we might call assemblages
in a sense which is not far from Deleuze and Guattari’s. Tarde compares
social imitations to the psychologists’ concept of memory. The social imi-
tations are a social form of memory, but not as reminiscences we can call
into consciousness by will, but rather as unconscious patterns. These are
patterns of repetition which provide a certain stability to the world. He
sometimes argued that imitation is akin to hypnosis or somnambulism
(2001). These imitative patterns are not fixed and inert imprints on the
cortex, but they are like a:

… special vibration, empty in form, and does not last except on the con-
dition of repeating itself, in a way like the apparent tranquillity of a ray of
sun concealing the speed and instantaneity of the waves, made and un-
made, remade and unmade again, in myriads, in just a moment. (2002a,
110; my trans.)

This memory is hence unstable and it depends upon the repetitive patterns
of our conduct. However, these patterns interfere with each other: through
the interference between two imitative rays (rayonnements imitatifs) social
oppositions occur and new patterns emerge and spread throughout a
population (2002b, 37). In the social world such interferences will
constantly emerge and new inventions will spread through these rays.
Invention is a central element in the process Tarde calls social adaptation.
Here too he starts with an inner mental adaptation in the inventor's
consciousness. This inner harmonic solution has to be imitated by others,
or else it will have no social value whatsoever. Through imitation an
invention will spread and enter into oppositions with other imitations.
These oppositions might lead to new adaptations and even new combina-
tions and inventions (8, 50-59). Tarde holds adaptation to be society’s true
creative co-production whereby a new harmony can be achieved.
It is important to note that the starting point for Tarde’s sociology is
not the individual, but the flows of imitations within each individual and
 Planes and Assemblages 173

between individuals. This perspective differed from views present within

sociology in Tarde’s own days and it is uncommon in ours as well. It has,
however, strong affinities to the perspectives promoted by Deleuze and
Guattari, who also held that the subject and its conduct must be seen as
something produced, rather than as a starting point. The flows of imi-
tations in Tarde’s theory take place on a kind of pre-individual plane (cf.
Deleuze 1994, 314), not unlike what we have previously discussed as a
plane of consistency, but in this case specific to social relations. The flows
on this plane form a type of primordial energeticism changing combina-
tions from moment to moment. While I in one situation might end up by
applying this particular conduct, I might in a similar situation apply
another one. Their pre-individualized forms confront each other inside me
and are experienced as a hesitation between them. My conducts are never-
theless individualized in particular situations through a process that I do
not fully control. In the same way as argued in Deleuze and Guattari’s
works, the flows of pre-individual imitations can be dominated from a
quasi-outside. This might be by the authority wielded by some individuals
in the family, in educational institutions or in the social group that may
modify which conducts are experienced as being legitimate. From this
authority humans form habitual ways of conducting themselves (cf.
Lazzarato 2002). Furthermore, patterns may entrench themselves as his-
torical results of previous confrontations. Coming from southern France,
Tarde was very much aware of the dominance exerted from the north, for
instance, in the way the French language had been imposed on the south-
erners (Tarde 2003, 54). The linguistic situation was an outcome of arbi-
trary historical processes, but it was institutionalized in schools and im-
posed on all school children. Their linguistic expressions were forced into
particular channels.
From the presentation above we might conclude that Tarde had a kind
of Deleuzo-Guattarian approach long before they were born. He wrote
about a wide number of topics and in this chapter I focus on his study of
publics, which was influential in the early research on journalism and the
media (cf. Park 1972). One of the major political concerns of the last
decades of the nineteenth century was the phenomena of crowds. The Paris
Commune in 1871 ended in class war and in the 1890s the number of
strikes and riots were again on the rise. The psychologist Gustave Le Bon
had published the book The Crowd (1947) in 1895 and it was much read
and debated all over Europe during this period. The bourgeois anxiety for
crowds can be contrasted with Tarde’s concern with the public as specific
groups formed by the readership of newspapers. While the crowd is a
more spontaneous group depending on the physical presence of its mem-
174 Chapter Six

bers, the public is more persistent and durable and less spontaneously in-
clined towards violence. This, however, does not mean that a public can be
less marked by hatred, he claimed, but the members of the public are
dispersed and the focal point for their rage may be far away (1910). Tarde
saw publics first of all as communities superposing themselves on already
existing social groups and many of these groups had to transform them-
selves into publics in order to strengthen themselves as groups (21-23).
Publics were in Tarde’s time the fastest growing type of social communi-
ties. The hub of the public is the newspaper and the relationship between
the newspaper and the readers is marked by a certain adaptation and within
given bounds a journalist can exert an enormous power over his public.
The foundation for this journalistic power is the central locus of the news-
paper compared with the dispersed readership. Furthermore, this form of
power relies on the reader’s dependence on the newspaper for information
and for the strengthening of opinions they are already inclined to have.
Through the newspaper-reader relationship, the journalists and editors may
foment certain views that can collectively form a public opinion that can
express itself in elections or in political controversies.57 In Tarde’s theory
of journalism the flow of imitations through society is amplified and
multiplied by the newspaper-assemblage. People who did not know they
had the same sensibilities suddenly were in “contact”, although not with
each other, but via the hub of the newspaper. Within the margin of these
sensibilities the paper could develop its allegiances and inspire the conduct
of their public.
The question we might ask in the following is how we can use Tardean
theory to understand contemporary societies. The saturation of media in
our own time has reached levels that were unforeseeable in the early twen-
tieth century. This question leads us to Yves Citton’s study of mythocracy.

Citton and the Economy of Attention

Citton owes much to Tarde and to Deleuze and Guattari and his book
can be seen as an exemplary development of some of the topics taken from
all three of them, and we might even include Spinoza and Foucault in the
mix. His topic is to understand the workings of “soft power” in society
(2010). Soft power is the power that suggests, insinuates and stimulates
rather than orders, forbids and coerces. This orientation is supported by the
claim by Deleuze and Guattari and others, that the transformations of our
societies in the last 40 years of the twentieth century have changed the
way power functions in Western societies compared with the traditional
“hard” power of the government or the “captains of industry”. In Citton’s
 Planes and Assemblages 175

view, a major difference between soft power and hard power is that the
former cannot be identified with a given social instance or level because it
circulates like flows and through storytelling it influences our social imag-
ination. A crucial starting point in this context is that social and political
institutions gain their power from the population. This is an insight already
promoted in the sixteenth century by Étienne de la Boétie (1530 – 1563) in
his Discourse on voluntary servitude (2010). He held that the most des-
potic tyrant did not have power (pouvoir) other than the one he was able to
draw from the beliefs and strategies of his subjects. If his subjects refused
to obey his bidding he would be reduced to a feeble body screaming in
vain his orders (Citton 2010, 21). In other words, the power that seemed to
come from the “top” in the direction of those “below” in fact emanated
from the subjects themselves.
In order to wield power over the population social institutions must
somehow capture the power emanating from below, and in media-
saturated societies, like our own, this capture must involve the attention of
the population. In Citton’s view we can even speak of an economy of at-
tention since attention is one of the scarcest resources there is in Western
societies. In the political sphere the squabbles between the parties and
critiques of the government may even strengthen the powers that be owing
to its keeping the attention away from other topics that might be more
embarrassing. This economy of attention depends on its appeal to our
wants and desires and must be understood in relation to an economy of
affects. Inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, Citton defines affect as:

an emotion felt inside by the spirit and conditioning the thoughts, the wills
and the future behaviours of the individual. This emotion is based on a
partial perception of the reality that surround us and constitute us. (29; my
trans.)

Spinoza divided the field of affects into three branches: desire, joy and
sadness and these are further combined into love and hate, jealousy and
pity, pride and shame, etc. (1997, book III). The advantage of the concept
of affect, in Citton’s view, is not to explain how we are governed by unre-
flected feelings compared with our cognitive rationality. That would be to
throw us back into Weber’s distinctions between irrational and rational
types of action (cf. Chapter 2). No, the advantage is first of all that it in-
vites us to recognize that our own sensibilities should be understood in
relation to impressions that come to us from the outside:

Even though they [the affects] for us tend to come from the most intimate
core of our personality, emotions can be understood as being first of all re-
176 Chapter Six

lational phenomena, intersubjective or, even better, transindividual. (2010,

30; my trans.)

The latter concept is an appeal to a similar form of pre-individual plane as

I have shown in the case of Tarde above.
Citton’s argument is that the economy of attention and the economy of
affects depend on each other. We give attention to the objects and events
that affect us and the affects depend, in their turn, on what we give at-
tention to. Hence a circular reinforcement operates between attention and
affect. Security-minded politicians do not gain votes in elections owing to
a mechanical process; they have to cultivate certain affects in the pop-
ulation. In our media-saturated societies the circulation of certain stories
and images imprint themselves on our affects. With the daily dosage of
televised fear-inducing stories about murders alternating with scenes in
which the criminals are transported to prison between two policemen, it
cannot avoid making an impression on the population:

It should not at all be surprising that the aggregate of individual affective

economies in the relevant population tends to “recognize themselves” in
the discourse attaching their attention by order-words (mots d’ordres) rest-
ing on the same fears and the same needs for protection cultivated night
after night on the little screen. (Citton 2010, 31; my trans.)

To describe this intimate solidarity between a certain economy of affects

with a certain distribution of attention-time, Citton uses the concept of
frayage, which perhaps can be translated into English as channelling. This
notion, taken from neuropsychology, is a translation into French of the
German concept of Bahnung, where a nerve impulse following a certain
route in the brain will more easily take the same route later:

The attention that I “lend” (provisionally) to an event today makes a lasting

stamp that my attention might later be more susceptible to “borrow again”
tomorrow. (31; my trans.)

The affect represents the passage opened (frayé) by previous passages

which channel the attention that pushes through and tries to find the way
of least resistance. This channelling on a mass basis forms publics in the
Tardean sense, comprising individuals who do not know each other but
who think and act in similar ways owing to an effect of “recognizing
themselves” in the circulation of certain sensibilities in the media (2010,
ch.1).
 Planes and Assemblages 177

In this view the human beings are chiefly marked by channels

(frayages). They are not just open containers for the pre-individual flows
of imitations as one might suspect Tarde to believe. Nevertheless, in the
same way as in Tarde’s theory, individuals affect each other mutually.
This mutual affection gains force by being, in Maurizio Lazzarato’s com-
ments to Tarde, “flows or currents between brains” (2002, 27; my trans.).
These flows are emotions, feelings and sentiments – desires in Tarde’s
words – and, furthermore, knowledge, ideas and information – beliefs.
Citton takes this model of flows of desires and beliefs as a foundation for a
theory of the power (puissance) of the population as opposed to the power
(pouvoir) of the state and social institutions (2010, ch.2). This is a distinc-
tion harking back to the Latin notions of potestas and potentia, both of
which tend to be translated as power into English. In political philosophy
this distinction is inherited from Spinoza (Negri 2007) where potentia
(puissance) is the vital force of the multitude and the potestas (pouvoir) is
more closely connected to authority and the means of wielding hier-
archical power. For Citton this distinction is a way to formulate a hier-
archical organization of the flows of desires and beliefs in society. While
these flows are the source of power (puissance) both for the population
and the individual, they depend on the already established economy of
affects and they are thereby channelled by the already established
frayages. The effectuation of “soft power” (pouvoir) by the media and
other social and political institutions is made possible by a capture of these
flows of desires and beliefs and re-channelling them in certain directions.
This leads to certain multiplier-effects on the affective economy of the
populace. The institutions are able to hasten the flows originating from the
population and in this way a certain verticality is produced within
immanent social processes (Citton 2010, ch.2). The Tardean notion of
publics is thereby rediscovered in a transformed way, and Citton insists
that this model makes the whole social sphere into an entanglement of
strategy-making. In this entanglement we can choose between three main
strategies: we can affirm the existing flows, we can try to resist them or we
can try to push them in the direction we want. The way the flows work is
usually through the telling of stories, and by staging a certain story we
may capture the imaginary of the population and either confirm the al-
ready established channels (frayages) or contribute to a re-channeling of
the flows. Staging involves the linking of certain facts and conditions to a
unifying scheme that gives direction and motivation for a certain action or
way of perceiving the world (2010, chs.3 and 4).
Citton’s aim is to provide the means for a new left that is yet to be
invented, and as a social analysis it is a written in an upbeat and combative
178 Chapter Six

way. In a similar manner as Tarde and Deleuze and Guattari, he has identi-
fied an initial and pre-individual plane on which affects and stories flow.
The exercise of power on this plane is possible by capturing these affects
and then to channel them in specific directions and to link them to stories.
This happens through the segmentation of our brains by the formation of
certain passages or frayages in our affects. The human is still a
“segmented animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 208), but this segmen-
tation is not imposed on us like a command, in Citton’s view, but it is
cultivated gradually through suggestions. The flows on the plane are thus
conjugated in a circulatory system between political institutions and media
institutions and our brains. In our culturally oriented capitalism the seduc-
tion of our affects is the most important way domination functions.

Critique and Further Development

There are, however, some absences in Citton’s analysis and they con-
cern the dynamic of the media and the media organizations themselves. He
wants to tell other and alternative stories, but these will have to counter the
force of the great media companies and their dependency on ratings, and
(for some of them) advertising and sales. This dependency and the way
these assemblages conjugate the flows of storytelling lead to a certain cen-
sorship when it comes to which stories can be told and which cannot. In
his book on television, Bourdieu held that this medium itself goes counter
to thinking. The tempo is always hectic in the television world and every-
thing said on the screen has to be easily recognizable by the viewers.
There is no time for longer lines of reasoning – on the contrary, this is the
medium par excellence for “fast-thinkers” (1998, 28-38). The news on
television runs particularly counter to reflection because of their depend-
ency on the imperative of actuality. The attention of the viewers is quickly
moved from one piece of news to another. The psychoanalyst Roland Gori
has extended this analysis to involve many of the other electronic media of
our time. In his view, their basic function is to make information circulate
and not to make us reflect over events and to come to terms with them: the
faster the circulation the better. Television and other electronic media are
hence anti-memory and anti-history. They live off the way they can stimu-
late us and do not contribute to making us understand the world in which
we live (2010).
An implicit thought in both Bourdieu’s and Gori’s views seems to be
that the problem is not only the way Western societies organize how tele-
vision and similar media are produced, but there is something in the tech-
nical properties of these media which add to the phenomena they describe.
 Planes and Assemblages 179

The medium adds something to the message and it should not only be
treated as a content (cf. McLuhan 1968). A way to extend the analysis
would be to go further into how the different media techniques contribute
to the circulation of the flows on the plane. However, if we return to
Citton’s analysis it can be seen as an indication of a change in the relation-
ship between signifiance and subjectification in the power-assemblages in
society. In Chapter 2 I have discussed signifiance in relation to the signify-
ing regime of signs and sociology’s tendency to emphasize this regime of
signs in their search for order in society. Signifiance concerns the ability
of the world to signify (Benveniste 1974, 61-62). In the same chapter I dis-
cussed subjectification in relation to the passional regime of signs. The
passional regime was the regime of the individual breaking free from
given significations and following a goal or a line of action. In the pas-
sional regime humans are not only subjected to given conditions, but they
are able break loose from them and become subjects. In concrete as-
semblages, however, these two regimes come in mixtures and in specific
social formations they impose a given combination of signifiance and sub-
jectification on individuals (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 179-181). On the
one hand, the conditions under which people live are defined with ref-
erence to a given meaning and, on the other, the individuals are forced to
make these conditions into their own and to orientate their agency in
relation to them. In Lazzarato’s formulation subjectification involves a
“work on oneself (travail sur soi)” (2011, 30). What Citton’s analysis of
soft power indicates is a transformation from a way of governing society
emphasizing the imposition of dominant significations to another placing
more emphasis on each individual’s subjective participation. Suggestion
can only function by the complicity of the individuals themselves. This
change towards the governance of societies through the governance of
subjectivities indicates a more fundamental change in Western societies. In
the following I shall have a closer look at this change and how it is con-
ceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari.

From Discipline to Control

We have seen above how Citton concentrates on what he calls “soft
power” circulating as beliefs and desires. It is, however, necessary to note
the relative novelty of this social development. One of the effects of this
circulatory system is less overcoding and suppler forms of governing
society. Deleuze remarked in an article from 1990 that Western societies
are in the transition of becoming what he called “societies of control”
(1990). Control is a mode of power he contrasted with the Foucauldian
180 Chapter Six

analysis of discipline as a “hard” way to govern societies (Foucault 1991).

In order to make this discussion somewhat clearer, I shall turn to the way
Deleuze and Guattari describe how assemblages can be studied on dif-
ferent levels of society. Earlier in this chapter I have given examples of
concrete assemblages that conjugate flows of bodies and signs on a plane
of immanence and how macro assemblages can overcode a particular part
of society. These latter assemblages operate as “binary machines” policing
a given divide in society, for instance, the lines between men and women,
young and old, teacher and student, etc. I have also characterized the over-
coding binary machines as molar, which means that they dominate a given
part of society from an outside. As an example we can take any family. It
may itself be seen as a concrete social assemblage, but at the same time its
members can take part in other assemblages (work, sport, school, etc.).
Furthermore, any given family is part of the general category of “family”
and it is criss-crossed by social and political codings of different types.
Some of these are legislation regulating the rights and duties of the par-
ents, rights to paid maternity leave and (perhaps) paternity leave, tax
breaks and subsidies, obligatory school attendance, inheritance of property
between generations, etc. All of these legal regulations concern families in
general or specific categories of them. They are imposed from an outside
and they function according to a binary code of whether the legislation
applies to your particular family or not. This form of molar overcoding is
common in the regulation of the mass phenomena in society and it is also
called “serialization”, following the distinction made by Jean-Paul Sartre
between “group” and “series”. For Sartre groups are marked by mutual
relations between its human participants, while the series lacks this quali-
ty. A series is defined by an outer common point of reference, which gives
those who are part of the series a common identity. Sartre’s example of a
series is the line of people waiting for the bus at the Place St. Michel in
Paris early in the morning (1991, 256-269). Our example is a particular
family compared with the family in general. Modern bureaucracies, pri-
vate or public, function by serialization of their clients.
Deleuze and Guattari see overcoding as the most general trait of how a
state functions in relation to society. Similarly, the necessity of capitalism
to produce for a market is the most general trait for how capitalism op-
erates in society. These general traits can be seen as different states of an
abstract machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 223). This concept is a bor-
rowing from computer science and it is used in this field of research as a
model to describe a computer system in a way that makes it possible to
analyse it, but without building the machine itself. In Deleuze and
Guattari’s formulation it is understood to provide a synoptic and compre-
 Planes and Assemblages 181

hensive grasp of major processes. In this context it is important to note that

an abstract machine does not involve a convergence of something from a
lower level to a higher level. The machine is an abstraction compared with
all the concrete machines in society. One of the processes that interest
them most is the state of the abstract machine as diagram. They borrowed
this concept from Charles Sanders Peirce and his classification of signs
into indices, icons and symbols (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 142). We
have indices or the indexical mode of signs when there is a direct physical
or causal connection between the sign (representamen) and the object. A
knock on your door indicates a visitor, for example. Icons have a likeness
to their object, for example, in the way a photo may be similar to the
object it depicts. Symbols, however, are pure conventional signs for their
object as are road signs or national flags. Peirce saw the diagram as a
particular version of the icon and a minimal definition might be that the
diagram is “the sign that reproduces in miniature the structure and internal
proportions of a certain phenomenon (let us think in terms of an equation
or of a map)” (Virno 2008, 73).58 In the Deleuzo-Guattarian application
the diagram is present in the different assemblages on a plane of consist-
ency and “constitutes and conjugates all of the assemblage’s cutting edges
of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 141). A diagram as a
state of the abstract machine retains the most general traits of the assem-
blages and draws a plane of consistency that unites the planes of expres-
sion and content in a joint matter-function. It is not only a way to describe
a given state, but it has a piloting role: It “… does not function to repre-
sent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a
new type of reality” (142). A diagram is thus a way to summarize a gener-
al logic present in a particular reality, and it is something in movement
away from the most territorialized forms. These formulations may give the
impression of the presence of a superior Idea governing the whole and this
idea guiding the general trend towards new social forms. Is the Deleuzo-
Guattarian diagram only a modified version of the Hegelian concept of
Zeitgeist? That would, however, involve a kind of collapse of their mate-
rialist and energetic philosophy and it is a perspective the two have dis-
tanced themselves from (142).
Deleuze’s analysis of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (1991) is
interesting in this connection as a way to clarify both how Deleuze and
Guattari understand the concept of the diagram and how they view social
change. A starting point in this analysis is the prison as assemblage with,
on the one side, its forms of content – the prison as a formed milieu – and
the flow of prisoners through the prisons as their content. On the other
side, we have the forms of expressions surrounding it – first of all penal
182 Chapter Six

law – and the flow of verdicts defining delinquents and meting out
punitive measures (cf. Deleuze 2004a, 30-51). But Foucault took the
analysis further by indicating the new function given to punishment in
penal law from the late eighteenth century. Its function was no longer to
avenge a misdeed or to uphold sovereignty, but to reform the prisoner. By
the mechanism of discipline the prisoner was supposed to become docile
and malleable according to externally set norms. The prison as a discipli-
nary assemblage received its most general form in Bentham’s Panopticon,
where prisoners could be under surveillance from a central tower without
their being able to know whether they are observed or not. This model of
prison, Foucault claimed, is not a utopian ideal dreamt up by a reformer:

… it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its

functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be
represented as a pure architectural and optical system; it is in fact a figure
of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific
use. (1991, 205; emphasis added)

Wherever there are locally situated disciplinary assemblages the diagram

of the Panopticon is reactualized. The panopticon, therefore, is no general
idea hovering over the population, but a technique spreading itself to all
corners of Western societies by examples, writings, drawings, etc.
In Foucault’s view this form of surveillance and correction in relation
to a norm insinuated itself in all sorts of contexts within which power is
exerted: “It’s a case of ‘it’s easy when you’ve thought of it’ in the political
sphere” (206). It is also a technique which is polyvalent in its applications:

… it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct

schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars
and idlers to work. (205)

The spread of discipline throughout society in many diverse concrete

assemblages is at the same time a spread of the panoptic model. In
Deleuze’s words the panoptic diagram is a non-unified immanent cause
co-extensive with the whole social field. The diagrammatic state of the
abstract machine is like a cause present in the concrete assemblages which
effectuates the relations, and the relations of forces involved in this cause
do not pass on a level superior to the concrete assemblages, but through
the “tissue” itself of the assemblages they produce (Deleuze 2004a, 44).
Nevertheless, in Deleuze’s view, the diagram constructs a real yet to be
actualized, or in Foucault’s words the panoptic schema, “was destined to
spread throughout the social body” (1991, 207). Moreover, this schema is
 Planes and Assemblages 183

singular inasmuch as it is an invention that can be dated and its effects can
be studied from there on. Taken one by one the different techniques of the
disciplinary assemblages have a long history, but they came to function
differently in the new historical period (224).59 They were techniques
selected by the new diagram and this makes Deleuze conclude that tech-
niques are chosen primarily for social reasons rather than for technical
reasons (2004a, 47-48).
Deleuze has emphasized the extreme applicability of discipline to all
sorts of social environments and, in his view, discipline was one of the
dominant traits of Western societies and as a technique of power reached
its apogee in the early twentieth century. One of the marks of the discipli-
nary logic is the formation of enclosed environments (milieux d’enferme-
ments), each with their own internal rules. In these environments indi-
viduals were to be formed into compliant and useful persons, and these en-
closed environments included the family, the school, the barracks, the
hospital, the prison, etc. Each environment had its own order and hence its
own rules. The individual moved through life from one environment to the
next: first the family, then school, then the factory, now and then the
hospital and eventually prison and the barracks. The prison was the en-
closed environment par excellence and served as an analogous model for
the other ones (Deleuze 1990, 240-241). Many of the strong segmentary
lines in society that I have mentioned above were introduced in this
period. Discipline was the mode through which they were inculcated into
each human being. Transitions between the enclosed environments were
often marked by expressions like: “You’re not at home now”, “You’re not
at school any longer”, etc. (240). It is, however, in Deleuze’s view, im-
portant to note the limits of discipline as a way of governing a society.
Disciplinary technologies were only relevant as a way of teaching individ-
ual bodies to behave in certain ways. In the first volume of the History of
Sexuality (1990) Foucault noted the emergence of the state’s attention to
the phenomena of the population. The population as a collective became
important as a source of wealth with the expansion of capitalism in the
nineteenth century and the state took a more prominent place in devel-
oping the qualities of this collective. With this new concern emerged the
development of new knowledge in this period on mortality, fertility, life
expectancy, hygiene, etc. New techniques of indirect regulation were de-
veloped in order to control the phenomena of the population, and Foucault
called this indirect regulation the biopolitics of the population. Discipline
and biopolitics formed the two poles around which the power over life was
organized (139).
184 Chapter Six

The transformation towards more “soft power”, to use Citton’s phrase,

can be connected to the emergence of a new diagram and hence a new way
power is wielded in society. One of the main problems with the model of
discipline is its rigor towards those who are supposed to be disciplined.
This led to a crisis in the enclosed environments, which reached its most
acute phase in Western societies in the period of 1960 – 1980. This is indi-
cated by a high number of wildcat strikes, student rebellions, the anti-
psychiatry movement, new social mores, etc. The institutions of discipline
were not abolished, but they became open to all sorts of continuous
changes. In 1990, Deleuze formulated a hypothesis that our societies are
now less marked by discipline and there is emerging a new diagram that
he called control (1990). Control involves governance through a hybrid-
ization and flexibilization of governing techniques and the boundaries of
the enclosed environments have been opened up. Deleuze has tried to
identify a common logic for the new controls in comparison with the older
techniques of discipline and I shall try to summarize some of the funda-
mental principles. 1) The enclosed environments of discipline sought to
form the body according to the environment’s own specific rules. When
the individual moved from one environment to the next, new rules had to
be learned from scratch, although their rules were analogous to each other.
With the new controls the rules are flexible and the geometry of the
environments also varies. Deleuze compared the enclosed environments to
moulds (moules) forming the individual to a certain point, while he charac-
terized the controls as a modulation (242). While the concept of mould
refers to the rigidity of a casting process, modulation refers to the varying
of a periodic waveform. Both concepts, however, share the same etymol-
ogy of measure or norm.60 Modulation may be understood as a variable
norm keeping the bodies in a condition of metastability. 2) In the societies
of discipline the human could seemingly leave the enclosed environments.
They could leave school after exams, or work after 5 p.m., they could
leave hospital after being cured, etc. In contrast, in societies of control hu-
mans are never really finished with anything. Continuous education tends,
for example, to replace school as a given stadium of life and electronic
bracelets blurs the distinction between prison and freedom. 3) The institu-
tions in societies of control are less hierarchical and leave more to the
human beings themselves, but they have to show results now and then.
Individual behaviours are not programmed, but change direction and con-
sistency in response to experiences and possibilities. 4) While societies of
discipline were governed by order-words (mots d'ordre), societies of con-
trol are governed by passwords giving or refusing access to information.
Order-words (or slogans) are a way to govern large groups as wholes and
 Planes and Assemblages 185

this concept is connected to the relationship between mass and individual,

which is transformed with the new diagram. 5) In societies of discipline
the human being was counted as an individual related to the mass and this
mass was constituted in the opposition to a centre. In societies of control
this opposition is not present and the individual counts as part of a
statistical sample – or better: it is only a “dividual” in relation to all the
samples it enters into. This dividual is someone whose behaviours and
tastes can be mapped and satisfied from an outside. 6) In societies of
discipline the individual was a discontinuous source of kinetic energy
within a given place and time frame, while in societies of control the
dividual has to move in an undulant way, serpent-like, in between crossing
demands. 7) Marketing and sales compose the new “spirit” of the capitalist
enterprise compared with production in the previous period. The company
is not a physical entity located at specific sites, but a “pure gas” (242-246).
This is a very rudimentary model and it does not mean that discipline
as a governing technique is abolished, but its importance has become less
central for Western societies. Indeed, the governing techniques of the soci-
eties of control can be interpreted as a generalization of discipline to the
outside of the enclosed environments, but by means of more supple
methods and in changing circumstances (Hardt and Negri 2007, 66). This
externalization is evident in much of the social changes taking place in the
decades since Deleuze published his article. One of the themes of
Foucault’s study of discipline was the spatial organization of social insti-
tutions and the surveillance of their members (1991). In the new situation
this surveillance has been extended to society itself. Increased flows of
people, commodities and information across institutional and national bor-
ders and between different professional and life situations have led to the
erection of assemblages for different types of authentication. This form of
control is legitimized in the public discourse with reference to what is seen
to be anomalies produced by these flows. These anomalies relate to phe-
nomena as different as terrorism, money laundering, falsification of quali-
fications, migration, the spread of diseases, identity theft, Internet swindle,
copying of trademarked merchandise, the spread of species of animals and
plants to new habitats, etc. The flows that are under surveillance are made
possible by the expansion in transportation and the revolution in informa-
tional techniques, and the anomalies are small war machines (cf. Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, ch.12 for this concept) diverting these flows. These war
machines and their guerrilla war against authentication lead to even more
investment in techniques to control and rein them in. The fundamental
question that is posed in this context is who or what can be trusted. Can
the downloaded programme be trusted? Are the tablets bought in Tijuana
186 Chapter Six

reliable? Is the meat that you bought at the supermarket from a healthy
farm? Is the airplane passenger a trustworthy traveller or is she a threat?
For some of these questions the answer, so far, has been to collect a lot of
data to show who or what one can rely on. Although the anomalies within
these flows often are limited, the demand for authentication is addressed to
almost everyone and every thing in an increasing number of situations. It
has become a new mode of life; you have to check in now and then to
show who you are and that you or your belongings are bona fide. If you
(or your belongings) are not bona fide you are either denied services or
locked out of coveted areas or perhaps punished. In this way, new divides
and distinctions are produced in society.

Soft Power Revisited

It is now, perhaps, time to return to my previous discussion about how
“soft power” relies on suggestion and the mobilization of our subjectivities
rather than by forced definitions of meaning. Above I have discussed it as
the relationship between signifiance and subjectification, and this distinc-
tion indicates the traditional duality of the concept of subject. On the one
hand, subject involves being dominated by a superior power. Social sub-
jection (assujetissement social) concerns the distribution of individuals in
society and their ascribed social roles and identities. As subjects in this
sense we are all subordinated to these arrangements and what they pre-
scribe and proscribe for us. This meaning is close to the etymological
definition of “lying beneath”. On the other hand, the notion of subject also
means an active, sentient and thinking human being. It is the process of
becoming subject in this sense that is indicated by the concept of subject-
tification. Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with how individuals and
groups can alternate between being subjected and being active subjects
(1984, 348-349). The importance of subjectification seems to have in-
creased in recent decades, even in the realm of traditional bureaucracy.
Lazzarato has, for the case of France, shown how a client to state bureauc-
racies is not any longer mainly defined by legal rights, but is required to be
active in relation to her own case. Real work has to be performed in order
to keep unemployment benefits or other social benefits and the dossiers
tend to become more and more adapted to the client’s particular case
(2011, 99-104).
I have mentioned earlier that in a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective the
subject and subjectivity are the results of a process of production. The em-
pathy of the social worker, for example, is part of the production of the
client as a subject in the same way as the stories told by the media do the
 Planes and Assemblages 187

same to the spectator. This construction of the subject involves social and
situational signification. In his analysis of soft power and storytelling,
Citton emphasizes how we pay attention to stories that we already “know”
and which “feel right” (2010). But there is more to this process and that is
the machinic. The machinic is, however, a more indirect dimension in the
construction of the subject, where the human being is not an active part but
is itself a part in a machine. Deleuze and Guattari’s example to illustrate
the distinction between subjection and the machinic is television.61 As
viewers we can, on the one hand, identify with the content of the pro-
grammes, the characters in shows and the stories that are told. In this way
we are subjected to television as viewers. The machinic perspective, on its
side, emphasizes how humans have become cogs in the wheels of the
entertainment industry. This is shown by the way we tune in to a TV show
at a given time of the day or the week. While watching we are affected in a
diffuse manner by the way programmes are formatted, the high pace of the
editing of images, the sentiments in the music, the tone of voice of the
presenter, etc. All of these elements somehow influence our subjectivity,
but it happens indirectly and we do not go through a process of becoming
subjects (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 458). The machinic is molecular and
asignifying compared with the molar process of subjection and subjecti-
fication.
One of the few social theorists to have emphasized this duality is
Marshall McLuhan in his essay “The Medium is the Message” in the book
Understanding Media (1968) and Deleuze and Guattari picked up his
argument that electric light is a medium completely without information
(1984, 240-241). It can be used to light up all sorts of scenes whether it is,
in McLuhan’s words, brain surgery or night baseball. Both are impossible
without it. McLuhan’s main point is that we tend to be seduced by the
content of the media, while the “’message’ of any medium or technology
is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human
affairs” (1968, 16). This fundamental intuition is the same as that under-
lying the argument about the machinic: humans apply a certain technology
for a given purpose but get something more. A change of relationships
between themselves, a new way of relating to each other, a redistribution
of power-relations between each other, etc.
When Deleuze and Guattari published A Thousand Plateaus in 1980
they assumed that both subjection and the machinic would be present at
the same time. They described them as two coexisting poles (1987, 459) in
the same way as in the example of the television above. Many of our
recent social media on the Internet have the same characteristics: they give
us something that we benefit from subjectively, but, at the same time, the
188 Chapter Six

user is part of a public to be sold to advertisers. On the other side,

Lazzarato argues that the process of making us into dividuals since 1980
has had the effect of making subjection and the machinic part ways. Many
activities do not involve our subjectivities in the same way as before. This
concerns, for instance, the collection of electronic information on us, or
our participation in security controls at airports, or when we enter in our
pin code in order to make a payment, etc. (2011, 110-113). Humans are
only cogs in a technical machinery that has been let out of the factory and
into society. While the factory led to the subjectification of humans as
workers, the new application of registration techniques do not convene the
subject. A human only has to follow technical protocols in order to make a
payment, to pass a security check, to borrow a book at the library, to
access a database, etc. (111-113). One of the main conclusions to draw
from this view is that theories that only rely on a critique of different
modes of subjectification, like the one of Citton, will only be partially
useful. It will lack one important dimension and that is the modes of divid-
ualization. The simultaneous processes of subjectification and machinism
hold the human subjectivity in a double grip and the question is how to
form a relevant understanding of it and the possibilities for critique. When
we are part of machines that work on us indirectly in an asignifying way, it
is difficult to make them into objects for collective decision-making and
political action. Transformative political action relies upon the formation
of passional subjectivities taking their fate into their own hands, but at the
same time the machinic may easily slip out of their grasp and they may
end up reproducing the existing system.
I could have continued to work on this analysis and to extend it in dif-
ferent directions, but this is not the object in this context. The aim has been
to show how Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts can be set into motion on a
sociological material and how an analysis can be produced as different
aspects or layers. By producing an empirically oriented analysis like the
one above, I have aimed chiefly to show the relevance of their concepts for
sociological work but not to provide a recipe. Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy is no axiomatic, with strict theses to be applied on all types of
material. On the contrary, the involvement of their concepts depends on
the material at hand. On the other hand, their philosophy does not imply
“anything goes”. Their concepts relate to each other and they are part of
larger debates in philosophy, semiotics and politics, and they must be re-
lated to these debates.
 Planes and Assemblages 189

Concluding Remarks
I have so far shown how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts can be set to
work in different of empirical materials. Theirs is a philosophy of process
and transformation characterized by themselves as the study of “non-
organic life”. If we look closer at the concrete processes of transformations
I have presented in this chapter, we can see that they are very different
from each other. These processes involve flows, and we have the flows of
foodstuffs through families, flows of scientific discourse, flows of research
samples, flows of accused, flows of imitations through society, flows of
stories in a population, etc. All of these flows are on a pre-individual plane
of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of life does not concern life
in general and life is not an undifferentiated absolute, but it can be describ-
ed as “a multiplicity of heterogeneous planes of existence” (Zourabichvili
2003, 85; my trans.). These planes are immanent to the plane of consist-
ency, but no analysis can be totalizing. They all have to relate to their own
particular conditions.
The flows on these planes have their own temporality and this is also
the case for the different strata on them: the assemblages conjugating the
flows, the lines dividing them into different parts and their binary
machines overcoding them. Strata are formed and dissolved in different
temporal dimensions (Guattari 1979, 8-9): a habit, a feeling, an exchange
rate, a human body, a linguistic cliché, a legal rule, a social institution, a
corporation, a building, a land-use pattern in a city, a political hegemony,
etc. They have all different temporalities of formation and dissolution and
do not connect to a time in general. Emerging events may change their
temporalities and lead them in different directions of dissolution and
reinforcement, but there are in all strata movements in both directions
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 55-57). Furthermore, these planes of
existence traverse the individuals and the latter may emerge as subjects on
them or not (Zourabichvili 2003, 85-86). In this way it is possible to avoid
psychological bias in the form of action-potentialities or that the world is
kept still in the mind of an actor.
For the social sciences the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is an
encounter with a new mode of thinking making traditional categories and
concepts obsolete. It is a way of becoming sensitive to new types of ques-
tions to be asked about what we out of habit speak of as “social relations”
and “society”.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

CONCLUSIONS

The title of this book promises the reader a “different society” and it is
perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but as I have stated in Chapter 1, by
distributing the entities we find in human societies in a new manner, that
is, by redefining their properties and what combinations that are possible,
we shall be able to experience it differently and we can speak and write
about it in new ways. My aim has been to give a modest contribution to
such a turn in sociological thinking and to formulate sociological theories
in terms that are more adequate for our contemporary situation than the
vocabulary inherited from the nineteenth century, if not earlier. A different
way of describing society may also involve new forms of experiences and
at least the potential for political action for changing it. Radical political
engagement has a mixed press in sociology, which is supposed to strive
for scientific objectivity. There is, nevertheless, a kind of “deep politics”
in traditional sociological theorizing independent of political colour. This
“deep politics” is the concern for social order that sociologists have and
any attempt at formulating an alternative sociological theory has to
confront it. Furthermore, one of the main bulwarks of the self-professed
apolitical sociology is Weber’s essay on objectivity in the social sciences
and how social research should become free from value-judgements
(2010). A fundamental critique of this essay is necessary, therefore, but
Weber’s concerns with self-reference is a question that sociologists have
to take into account.
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical work has been presented in this
book as one of the alternative perspectives that sociology can learn from.
In order to promote a sociological theory with Deleuzo-Guattarian lean-
ings in the English-speaking world, a reasonable reception of their philos-
ophy in English is necessary. At the end of this chapter I shall try to gauge
the quality of a sample of this reception and to delineate the main prob-
lems in some of the commentaries or involvements with their theories.
First, however, I shall return to some of the fundamental questions asked
in the beginning of the book and ask how we can perceive them now.
 Conclusions 191

The Five Theses Revisited

In the first chapter I introduced five theses to describe the fundamental
presuppositions of traditional sociology and it would be natural at this
point to take stock of the theories advanced in this book and compare them
with these theses. In this way it might be possible to indicate the conse-
quences for analyses and research practices. Thesis 1 states that the social
sciences study the relationship between people or collective entities made
up of people. In other words it indicates the anthropocentrism of these dis-
ciplines. On a fundamental level, however, this thesis holds true even for a
sociology with Deleuzo-Guattarian leanings because our topic is the world
of humans. But the composition of entities in this world differs strongly
from the traditional one by granting objects and signs a sort of “citizen-
ship” in our analyses. Instead of skulking around like paperless immi-
grants in fear of the sociological police, they are able to assert themselves
within our disciplinary community. A main characteristic of the concept of
assemblage (agencement), which Deleuze held to be the most fundamental
of the ones that he had coined (Deleuze and Parnet 1996, 65), is the simul-
taneous grasp of relations between bodies (humans, technical objects, etc.)
and language. They are all conjugated at specific loci. The central idea is
that signs and bodies are treated as two parallel, but paradoxical move-
ments that might exchange properties. This operation makes possible the
famous “decentring” of the human being in our analyses (cf. Foucault
1972, 12-13).
The notion of citizenship introduced above is an apt one for grasping
the new situation. Most importantly, technical objects and linguistic and
other sign-expressions are not treated as something that can be reduced to
something else. In Thesis 4 I stated that sociology treats objects as inter-
mediaries between humans, as neutral tools, as something over which we
struggle or as separate entities with their own potential to determine
human life. All of these different parts of the thesis indicate different ways
of reducing technical objects to one specific property. When they are
viewed as tools or intermediaries their own effect on what happens tends
to be neglected compared with the activity of humans. When we see them
as vanity objects their attraction to human beings are overemphasized
relative to their technical action and if we see them as an overwhelming
force we overemphasize the technical action over all other effects. This
does not mean, however, that they cannot be tools, objects of vanity, inter-
mediaries between humans or determiners of human life, but they should
not be reduced to one of these functions. The invention of the automobile,
for instance, gave us at the same time a mechanical vehicle independent
192 Chapter Seven

both of rails and draught animals, but also a status symbol. We can treat it
as a tool to increase our own mobility, but its invention and proliferation
led to the invention of traffic jams, car crashes and pollution. All of these
may influence our lives in ways not controlled by our own volition. I could
also mention effects like political lobbies, increased road building, the
establishment of automobile industries, trade unions, increased flows of
goods, suburbanization and longer commuting distances etc. In Latour’s
words we might say that the joint action of technical objects and humans
exceeds or surpasses what we expect. Objects extend human possibilities,
but at the same time add something unforeseen into human existence
(1999b, 176-180). In this way technical artefacts also change our social
relations and add a certain amount of uncertainty into them.
A similar argument for “citizenship” can be made for signs and lan-
guage. Thesis 5 states that in sociology signs in the form of speech, text,
images or bodily postures are understood as communication. When signs
are viewed as communication they conform to the Schema of Linguistic
Communication, which means that an addresser has encoded a message
and sent it through some kind of channel and this message has in the
receiving end to be decoded by the addressee (cf. Greimas and Courtés
1982, 37-37). In practice this means that signs are understood as vehicles
for some sort of message that might be “filtered” out from the signs them-
selves by the addressee or by somebody else. This perspective involves a
reduction of the properties of signs. A characteristic example of how
sociology treats signs as communication is found in Erving Goffman’s The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). This book is not concerned
with language in itself, but all actors and their surroundings are sign-
vehicles available for other people’s interpretations. According to the
world described in this book, social actors try to give an impression on
others by the way they act, by the way they stage a situation, the way they
manipulate props and the way they enter in and out of character. The main
idea is that when we leave our privacy, we are on stage, we are observed
by others and we have to play along. There are, however, different ways of
engaging with social roles. Seen as a continuum a person can embrace her
role to the full extent at one end or, at the other, she can be completely
cynical:

When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern
with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the
term “sincere” for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by
their performance. (18)
 Conclusions 193

Honesty or dishonesty are therefore two important categories for judging a

performance, and the signs, in the form of garments and performance,
have been fused with the actor’s whole social being as a sign-vehicle and
her subjectivity is open for us to look into. Signs are, in this example, held
to be intermediaries between humans in their interaction or they may be
expressions of an inner subjectivity. By decoding signs we can peep into
another human’s soul. In other words, signs are treated as subordinate to
relations between humans and not as equal “citizens” of society. In
Goffman’s theory signs have no independence – they do not add anything
in their own right.
When we, on the other hand, make the shift from treating signs and
language as mere intermediaries or as a window into the soul, we also
liberate the human being from carrying the whole weight of speech, text or
bodily posture. Stock phrases and conventional ways of being are a kind of
collective property that we involve in particular contexts and in most cases
we have a situation where these signs are understood because they refer to
other signs that refer to other signs, etc. In other words, it is a situation of
what we have called signifiance and overcoding. Epithets like “honesty”
and “dishonesty” cannot have an independent existence referring to the
inner soul of the social actor because we do not have access to this soul,
whatever we might mean by “soul”. The epithets of “honest” or “dis-
honest” are something projected by the observer herself as a reaction to the
meeting between the observer and the body as a set of signs.
Deleuze developed a critique of communication as early as in 1964
when he published the first edition of his book on Marcel Proust. Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past (2006) forms, in Deleuze’s view, a challenge
to the presupposition in philosophy that conversation and good will is
fundamental for gaining new understandings. Friendly exchanges do not
make the narrator in Proust’s book learn much. To the contrary, com-
munication tends to conventionalize thinking and to dull down everything.
The narrator is, however, now and then forced to think by what he encoun-
ters and this impels him to gain new insights (Deleuze 2010, 115-124).
The meeting with Proust’s book lets Deleuze formulate a critique of a
fundamental assumption in philosophy. This is the assumption that we all
have a natural ability to think and, when we think, this natural ability is
usually coupled with a good will and a natural sense for recognizing the
truth. But this “dogmatic image of thought”, as Deleuze calls it, will not do
because there might be ill will, madness and even plain stupidity. Only an
encounter with something outside conventional wisdom can force us to
start thinking (1994, 129-153). A more generalized comment on Deleuze’s
view may be that philosophers have presumed that the thinking subject is
194 Chapter Seven

somebody like themselves; sharing the same intellectual training and

world-view. They share the same taken-for-granted world and common
sense and they do not have to state this social and intellectual context for it
to have an efficacy. Later Deleuze and Guattari developed a similar view
by claiming that a primary function of language is to be indirect discourse
– a discourse inside another discourse which is often not stated explicitly
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 75-91). When a mayor or a magistrate utters
the phrase “I hereby declare you to be husband and wife”, it may be seen
as a speech act in J.L. Austin’s meaning (1975), but it presupposes a range
of collective phenomena. It presupposes, for instance, a specific legislation
and a specific vector of social efficacy. In other words, the phrase is
supposed to have concrete consequences for the social status of the
individuals in question, for the paperwork of certain bureaucracies, for the
collection of statistics, legal rights and obligations, etc., and the declara-
tion itself is part of a stock of formulae. The phrase is hence only relevant
within this context. Comedians often work against this effect of indirect
discourse by introducing mistakes of category or other contextual errors. If
I, for instance, stopped a couple in the street and declared them to be
husband and wife, this would only have a comical effect or they might
believe me to be mad.
The utterance analysed above is an example of what Deleuze and
Guattari call “order-words” (mot d’ordre): they are utterances linked to a
social obligation. The same, however, is true for more informal utterances
like, “It will rain this afternoon”. The indirect meaning of the word may
vary with the situation and as a casual remark it would have a different
meaning than if it were an exchange of views between meteorologists. By
uttering this second phrase as a casual remark, I try, nonetheless, to bind
my interlocutor to a future state of the world. She might not accept it and
might utter other phrases to that effect, or, if she does accept it, might act
on this information by, for instance, bringing an umbrella. Hence, there are
no innocent utterances since they are usually involved in an ordering of the
world for us or in other ways demanding something from us. Language is
thus shot through with politics and attempts at domination (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, ch.5, Lecercle 2009). For Deleuze and Guattari language is
first of all a collection of order-words.
I have so far discussed three of the five theses I stated in Chapter 1:
Theses 1, 4 and 5. All of them limit the scope of sociology to relations
between human beings and exclude or diminish the status of objects and
signs. The inclusion of objects and signs into the mix, as is suggested in
the present book, has the effect of changing the composition of what
sociologists and other social scientists can involve in their analyses and it
 Conclusions 195

makes it possible for us to rid ourselves of the anthropocentrism that

marks the discipline. The two remaining theses, however, take up a dif-
ferent question altogether: how can sociology understand why something
in the social world happened the way it happened? The two theses provide
two different forms of explanation. Thesis 2 states that either people or
collectives are granted agency in the form of potentialities hidden in them,
while Thesis 3 states the alternative: there is some sort of meaning that can
be linked to why people do the things they do. The latter thesis involves a
form of hermeneutics where the aim of the research effort is to identify
latent patterns of meaning. In order to distinguish it from the ordinary
everyday interpretation of meanings I have called this mode of inquiry a
Grand Hermeneutic. The comprehensiveness in the search for latent pat-
terns is at the forefront in this form of analysis and social-science narra-
tives employing this form of reasoning tend to accentuate the play between
appearances and a reality that will make everything understandable. Thesis
2, however, points to an explanation in the form of agency by forces acting
into a given situation. These forces are either hidden as a kind of essence
in human beings or as a single quality which is supposed to unite a collec-
tive entity with the help of abstraction. However, this way of thinking only
masks our ignorance and it was ridiculed as early as in Molière’s Le
malade imaginaire, where the ability of opium to make somebody sleep
was explained to be the result of a “dormitive virtue” residing in the
substance itself (1964; third interlude).
What is common to the two ways of producing explanations (and indi-
cated by the two theses) is the wish to find stable, repetitive and reversible
patterns. There are, of course, many bewildering incidents in society, but
stability and order has been (and still is) for great many social scientists
what they want to find. This is their main research interest. When such an
order of repetitive patterns or of comprehensive meanings is found, they
regularly claim these to be the fundamental causes of the singular inci-
dents. I have earlier argued that reversible order under conditions close to
equilibrium (cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1985) and comprehensive mean-
ings must be seen as something produced and not caused (cf. Chapter 1).
There is, however, a reason why social scientists have emphasized order:
human societies have themselves mechanisms by which they try to
produce repetitive and stable patterns. Political entities, like states, usually
have as one of their projects the production of some level of stability for
their citizens. Legislation, social institutions and other patterns of conduct
that resemble each other over time may give such stability. The same goes
for the political discourse interpreting our situation, lining up the alterna-
tives and indicating the future goals to be achieved. No wonder social sci-
196 Chapter Seven

entists were taken in and have made the description of these stable patterns
of conduct their own object of study. This search for comprehensive
meanings and repetitive order shows the deep involvement of the social
sciences with the powers that be.
This commitment to social order I shall call the “deep politics” of the
social sciences and it is shot through most traditional theories. I have
already shown how both Durkheim and Weber rely on a form of state-
thinking in their reliance on the signifying regime of signs in their social
theories. In this regime of signs each sign refers to another sign referring
to yet another sign, but these signs circle around a centre which is
constantly renewing the emission of signs. The sociologist has, together
with other high priests of the state, an important task of providing rein-
terpretations of what might maintain the circulation. This is a form of
thinking that is similar to the frantic interpretations of the paranoiac (cf.
Chapter 2) and it arrests movement trying to leave the interpretative
centre. In Durkheim’s case the principle of order – which is also the
principle of the interpretative centre – is defined by the social constraint
subordinating all the pre-individual singularities under itself, and in
Weber’s case by the complex of meaning giving us a comprehensive
meaning for all these singularities. For Bourdieu the objective social con-
ditions do the same job and Berger and Luckmann even have this strange
argument about anomic terror lurking in the shadows of social order
(1984, 121). In the case of Collins, Putnam and Castells, order is produced
by the regular and regulated agency of hidden potentialities or collective
actors.
This is, however, not all there is to sociology’s and the other social
sciences’ political commitment to order: reversible knowledge is useful for
governing a population (or any other group for that matter) from the
outside. Simple models can be injected into a given context without much
effort. A commitment to irreversibility and immanence can be perceived
as an antidote to this problem. In these cases transcendent models cannot
be applied and order cannot be taken for granted, but has to be explained.
This also means that events change the course of history and, furthermore,
this new course of developments builds upon previous series of events,
implying that the way a society functions in one historical period will be
different from the way it functions in another one. In other words, each
historical period has to be studied in its singularity. However, a commit-
ment to irreversibility and immanence is not a miracle cure for ethical and
political problems and Latour’s work is a case in point. In his work we
encounter what we may call “moral neutrality”. His programme is to
advance what he calls “a laissez-faire sociology” (1996a, 170), which
 Conclusions 197

means that researchers should study what scientists and engineers do, but
refrain from any moral or political judgements of their activities. On the
face of it this stance seems reasonable and Latour is able to make this
distinction owing to his emphasis on the forms of action rather than on the
materiality this action touches on. I have argued earlier (cf. Chapter 5) that
this may induce political acquiescence on the part of the sociologist and it
may lead her to take a rather technical attitude towards the activities of the
research subjects: it is morally equal to us whether the people we study are
building the next “superweapon” or are developing an inexpensive cure for
HIV infection. We can leave the political and moral questions to a com-
mittee for research ethics. What is important to the researcher, in this per-
spective, is to be able to do research on them and nothing else. In my view
this attitude may easily lead to ethical and political irresponsibility. Latour
himself has avoided getting into this kind of quandary because he has
studied topics that are not really politically controversial.
In place of an attempt at producing political neutrality or a com-
mitment to order, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is political through and
through to the extent that, at least, their joint works can be characterized as
a kind of political philosophy inspired by Marxism. The flows of money
and commodities in Marx’ Capital is transformed into a general produc-
tivism and flows in Anti-Oedipus. But in contrast to Marx, the flows do
not lead to dialectical contradictions between social agents or to repetitive
patterns of accumulation. In their philosophy there is no process which
will (inevitably) lead us towards a final crisis and revolution. In other
words, there is no teleology (cf. Garo and Sauvarnargues 2012). Deleuze
and Guattari’s Marxism is also unorthodox in its rejection of both state and
party hierarchies. The problem of both communist and social democratic
parties has been that they modelled themselves on the state form they tried
to conquer. In this way they just reproduced the subjection of the labour
class under a despotism they in principle should have been fighting against
(cf. Sibertin-Blanc 2013). The same pattern may affect revolutionary
groups which can, at different historical stages, either embrace hierarchy
and subjection or become group-subjects inventing new ways of doing
politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, 348-349). Guattari had already in the
1960s coined the concept of the transversal to describe the way actively
promoted disruptions of existing institutional arrangements can provide
effects that are neither horizontal nor vertical, but diagonal (2003). The
transversal makes elements that “naturally” do not have anything to do
with each other, come into contact (Deleuze 2010, 201-203,
Sauvarnargues 2009, 363-364). In A Thousand Plateaus this line of think-
ing was developed further with what they call a micropolitics on the plane
198 Chapter Seven

of consistency undermining the segmentary divides and molar machines of

the plane of organization. Following lines of flight and liberating flows are
the aims sought in this form of politics. These lines of flight must be
transversal in order to make areas come into contact that are normally held
separate by traditional politics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ch.9). This
break with traditional hierarchical forms of politics is also linked to their
concept of minority and minority politics, which does not necessarily mean
a minority in numbers or a numerable national minority. It concerns the
way groups form political strategies that go beyond common state
responses. While a state responds to opposition by forming new political
axioms (by legislation, repression, subsidies, etc.), minority politics seek
to criss-cross the limits involved in such axioms (469-471). Feminism and
women’s liberation movements are examples of minoritarian movements
by a part of humanity that is not a numerical minority. These movements
have had many transversal effects in many countries since the 1960s by,
for instance, making “the private political”, as the slogan goes. However,
these movements have also in part been subordinated to state axiomatics
of “equal rights”, positive discrimination, etc. The minoritarian way of
thinking politics is close to Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude for-
mulating its own mode of being in opposition to the state (2000).
Beginning movements and liberating flows and following lines of
flight on the plane of consistency make up the strategy of Deleuze and
Guattari’s politics, although they warn against the possible lines of annihi-
lation that might follow. Fascism is an example of a political movement
following a line of flight leading to destruction, while Stalinist totalitar-
ianism was, on the other hand, more of a state affair (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 229-231). There is, however, no fixed recipe for what to do, and:

Staying stratified – organized, signified, subjected – is not the worst that

can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into de-
mented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier
than ever. (161)

Put differently, it is not enough to declare that everything should be

flowing. You have to engage with the strata you are part of. This is a form
of politics which is not limited to a separate political sphere and this view
seems to be perplexing for some of their commentators who claim that
there is no politics in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy at all (cf. Patton
2012, 203). Their ultimate aim, however, is to make the political sphere
whittle away into society.
An important precursor to this form of politics on a plane of con-
sistency is the philosophy of Spinoza and his distinction between happy
 Conclusions 199

and sad affects.62 Sad affects are those that limit our potential for action,
while the happy ones are those that augment our ability to act (Spinoza
1997, part III). In Deleuze’s view Spinoza’s philosophy is a philosophy in
favour of life and, “What is poisoning life is hatred, including hatred
against oneself, culpability” (Deleuze 2003e, 39; my trans.). Political
leaders can exploit this hatred and for Spinoza monarchy is a way to dupe
people into fighting for their own slavery while believing they are fighting
to save themselves. The tyrant needs sadness to be able to govern while
the sad souls need a tyrant to support and to propagate (38). To promote
our ability to act is at the same time to promote joyous affects and to
weaken the power of tyranny over ourselves. We should, however, guard
ourselves against any individualistic or voluntaristic interpretations of this
view. To believe that individuals have absolute power over their actions is
to hold humans to be a “kingdom within a kingdom” (Spinoza 1997, 82),
according to Spinoza.
The political guidelines sketched above are, of course, very general,
but their advantage in comparison with those of Latour is that they cannot
be dissociated from the materiality of what happens. This is so because the
principle of “what augments our potential for action” depends on this
materiality. Contrary to the “deep politics” of the social sciences, it does
not laud social order as a taken-for-granted benefit, but rather that which
strengthens autonomy and the ability to change social and material circum-
stances.

Objectivity and Self-Reference

Any open political engagement in sociology will be met with Max
Weber’s view that social science should be free from value-judgement. On
the one hand, this argument is applied to stop any debate about the
political commitments of social researchers, and, on the other, it is used to
guarantee the claim of political neutrality for other forms of research. This
guarantee is usually only a covert argument for the support of any given
social and political order. It is, therefore, one of the main bulwarks for the
“deep politics” of order in sociology. In the same way as I have in Chapter
2 taken a critical look at the presuppositions of Weber’s sociology, it is
necessary to take a look at his claim for objectivity in social research.
What does Weber mean by value-free judgement? How does he think it
can be achieved? And, not least, are his arguments still valid 100 years
after their formulation? My answer to the last question is, unsurprisingly,
negative, but I think that some of Weber’s concerns are still relevant and I
200 Chapter Seven

shall provide a reinterpretation of these concerns in a manner that might be

relevant for our contemporary situation.
In the following I shall make a close reading of Weber’s essay on
“objectivity” published in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft in
1904. Weber had recently become its editor and in his view the Archiv
should not have a tendency. In the parlance of his time this meant that the
published articles should not follow a given political view or a more
general Weltanschauung. The journal should shun value-judgements to the
extent that the validity of the empirical research published in the journal
should, at least in principle, be able to be accepted even by a Chinese
person (2010, 58-59). What he meant by the latter argument was that even
a complete outsider should be able to recognize the correctness of an
empirical study. At this point it is important to reiterate what Weber held
to be the correct way to conduct research in the social sciences. Above all,
he rejected the idea that the social world should be studied from an outside
and by formulating simple repetitive laws: the social sciences are not
natural sciences. Instead he held that this form of research depended on the
researcher’s empathic understanding of the acting subjects (74). In his
essay Weber called the science he wanted to promote the “cultural sci-
ences”. These were disciplines analysing “the phenomena of life in terms
of their cultural significance” (76) and what marks these phenomena is the
value-orientation of the actors towards them.

Knowledge of cultural events is inconceivable except on a basis of the sig-

nificance which the concrete constellations of reality have for us in certain
individual concrete situations. (80; emphasis in orig.)

If we speak, for example, of phenomena like money, religion or prostitu-

tion, the subjective interests and values of human beings are fully invested
in them (81). The cultural sciences hence study phenomena that are shot
through with values and significance and culture itself is a value-laden
concept (76). It is no wonder that even social scientists should start
believing that these phenomena can only be studied by taking up a value-
laden angle. Weber, however, does not accept the latter argument.
The question then arises: how do we study these value-laden topics in
an objective manner even though we all belong to the same society and
have our own (very value-laden) views on the same phenomena? This is
the hard nut to crack for Weber. His solution was the logical exercise of
constructing an ideal type of the phenomenon. This ideal type is not an
image of the reality studied, but it is formed:
 Conclusions 201

… by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the

synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occa-
sionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged ac-
cording to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analyt-
ical construct (Gedankenbild). (2010, 90; emphasis in orig.)

This ideal type cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality – it is a

“non-place” or utopia. Important for his argument is that the ideal type is
not without presuppositions and it involves a certain perspective on the
topic under study. There is only one criterion for its quality and that is its
success in revealing the causality and significance of interconnected phen-
omena in their concrete manifestations (92). For Weber the formation of
an ideal type was first of all a logical exercise and it is this logical work
which makes it into something free from value-judgement (98-99).
In my view this argument for the value-freedom of the ideal type is not
really convincing. If we take him seriously Weber said the following: 1)
the cultural sciences study a field soaked in values; 2) the phenomena
under research are interesting for us in relation to their cultural signifi-
cance; 3) the concept of culture itself is a value-concept; 4) the reason why
we choose certain research topics over others depends on our own subjec-
tive choices and, if this was not enough, 5) the quest for scientific truth is a
product of certain cultures and it is hence itself value-laden (2010, 110).
Furthermore, within this field of cascading values and value-judgements
the researcher is supposed to make a number of choices that ensures that
her ideas about the topic at hand are free from value-judgements. In other
words, suddenly, by some sort of magic, everything turns objective.
Even though I do not think Weber’s argument can be sustained in its
present form, I nevertheless think that there is something to be learned
from it. In one of the summaries of his argument written at the end of the
essay he seems to emphasize that an ideal type produces an alternative
viewpoint from the pure subjectivity of the researcher. From this view-
point the empirical reality can be ordered in a way that makes the presup-
positions of this ordering explicit for the reader (2010, 110-111). The
opposite of making one’s presuppositions clear is the pure projection of
the researcher’s political views or her Weltanschauung onto an empirical
material. Earlier in the essay he also emphasizes the argument that
subjective knowledge would only be valid for one person, while objective
scientific knowledge would be valid “for all who seek the truth” (84). We
have also seen above that an empirical study should be valid even for a
complete outsider. One of the main concerns of the essay on “objectivity”
is hence the question of self-reference. How do we construct analyses that
202 Chapter Seven

will not only reflect our own subjective views and our own place in soci-
ety, but may be valid for others as well?
There are at least three different answers to this question in con-
temporary sociology. The first one is that this is a philosophical question
outside the scope of social research. Unlike other scientific enterprises, the
researcher within the social sciences and humanities cannot have a
distanced relationship to her object of study owing to the fact that she is
part of the object herself. This is Berger and Luckmann’s (cf. Chapter 3)
argument and they refused to say anything about self-reference because it
would be, in their words, “somewhat like trying to push a bus in which
one is riding” (1984, 25). In other words, this question belongs to debates
on a philosophical meta-level. The second way to tackle this question is to
perform a similar operation to Weber’s: trying to produce a kind of outside
to the social experience for both the researcher and the researched by the
means of methodological and logical operations. This seems to be the view
of Bourdieu, who held that sociological methods, like ethnographic obser-
vations or statistical surveys, make it possible to construct an objective
knowledge about the social conditions of the actors. “Objective” must in
this context be understood as a view from an outside and not as a kind of
guarantee for the truthfulness of sociological findings. The task of the
sociologist is not to disregard the subjective knowledge of the actors’ own
experience, but to produce a kind of dialectical analysis between this
subjective knowledge and the external (objective) perspective (Bourdieu
1977, 2, Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Bourdieu’s way of producing the
objective instance is thus different from Weber’s. However, as we have
seen in Chapter 3, Bourdieu’s sociology has a strong streak of unmasking
and unveiling, which means that the objective knowledge about the con-
ditions of the social actors tends to be given priority over their subjective
experiences. The third view to the question of self-reference may be repre-
sented by Garfinkel or Latour, who would both reject the construction of
an external viewpoint. In Garfinkel’s view, Bourdieu would be forced to
make ironical comments on the inability of social actors to know their own
world: he would treat them as judgemental dopes (1967, 66-75). Latour
would say that we cannot avoid self-reference and we should instead
acknowledge that we are all in the business of constructing narratives
about the world. The question is how we go about making them. The nar-
ratives of social scientists should not, for instance, have priority over the
actors’ own descriptions of their situation (1988c) and all scientific texts
have a rhetorical dimension (cf. Chapter 3).
In a continuation of Latour’s anthropology of science we might say
that the different methods in the armoury of sociological research, like
 Conclusions 203

statistical surveys, interviews, participant observation, focus groups, textu-

al analysis, etc. are applied in order to “load” some part of the social world
into discourse. In the same way as the pedologists taking earth samples in
Boa Vista, the sociologist takes samples from the social world in order to
produce an internal referent. If we take our Latourian argument further,
these methods are (more or less) standardized techniques or procedures
and have their own contributions to make. They add something to our
research in the same way that firearms add something to a murder (Latour
1999b, 176-180). Nevertheless, if we take each research procedure step by
step, their “task” is to enable us to produce summarizing utterances about
something or someone in the social world. These utterances cannot refer to
something outside human experience because if they were, we would not
be able to load them into discourse.63 Furthermore, the way we make our
research and apply our methods is infused with the researcher’s own
decisions for each step of the chain of research. The different research
methods themselves are results of human constructions following deci-
sions made by earlier generations of researchers and these decisions may
seem arbitrary with hindsight. For example, some of the statistical
measures and coefficient still in use today were made the way they were in
order to summarize information in a world with only simple calculating
machines (Mackenzie 1981). A source of uncertainty and surprise is the
people we interview and observe or whose texts we analyse. Compared
with the lumps of earth collected by the pedologists, people can speak
back and may have strong opinions on their own situation. The fact that
sociologists study their own species gives them certain challenges and
some of them are connected to the problems of relying on what people tell
you (cf. Lewontin 2001). What they say, do or write is something we
cannot always control even though an interview or an observation must be
viewed as a coproduction between the researcher and informant. Yet the
resulting uncertainty is something to be strived for and not to be elim-
inated (Latour 2005, ch.2) and it is one of the ways we can avoid the
danger of only projecting the researcher’s own views on to the material.
With reference to our discussion above about fruitful encounters (Deleuze
2010, 115-120), we might say that exposing oneself to the uncertainty of
empirical research is a way of exposing oneself to the encounters that
might force us to think.
To summarize we might say that Weber wanted to find something
through logical operations that would somehow be outside value-
judgements and in this way a researcher could somehow produce some-
thing that would be acceptable even for a complete outsider. Several gen-
erations of social researchers have tried to follow the same path, but the
204 Chapter Seven

best we can hope for are “disturbing events” (cf. Stengers 1995) or fruitful
encounters that might force us to reconsider our earlier views. These
events are the anomalies that cannot be easily integrated into our precon-
ceptions, but we have to allow these surprises to happen to us.

The Anglo-American Reception

One of the preconditions for a sociology with a Deleuzo-Guattarian
bent is a reasonable reception of their philosophy in the English-speaking
world. In Chapter 1 I express some misgivings about some of this
reception and its links to the phenomenon of French Theory (Cusset 2008).
It is perhaps the time and place to develop some of these comments
further. The question is where to start? Commentaries in English on
Deleuze’s work, but also on his work with Guattari, have expanded to
become a minor cottage industry and it is difficult to make a reasonable
selection. The reception of their work in English can easily be expanded to
become a research topic in its own right, but this is not my aim. I shall
limit my comments to a few central works.
On the one hand, Daniel DeLanda stands out as one of the few who
have taken Deleuze’s philosophy as a starting point for his own approach
to social-science research. His aim is consequently closely related to my
own and in this context I shall take a closer look at his A New Philosophy
of Society (2006). A more general cross section of the different strands of
the reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work can, perhaps, be found in
The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Smith and Somers-Hall 2012),
where (mostly) Anglo-American authors have written commentaries on
various topics in Deleuze’s (and to some extent Guattari’s) work. This
book is part of a prestigious series of commentaries on different philoso-
phers and it will come across to students as a kind of standard reference to
Deleuze’s work in the years to come. The kind of Deleuze (and Guattari)
emerging from this book might be interesting to spell out as a kind of
mapping effort. A possible critique of this choice is that the Companion
series is a book series within philosophy and it might not be representative
for the whole field. This argument may be quite true, but a wide range of
perspectives on the intellectual merits of Deleuze and Guattari are present
in this book. All in all I think the Companion may give a picture of the
tensions that are present in the reception of their work.
If we begin with DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society (2006) it
seems clear that his aims are to use Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as a
tool box and to develop his own “Assemblage Theory” of society which
breaks with their approach at certain points. The direct comments to their
 Conclusions 205

work are, for the most part, given in his endnotes. The question for me is
to what extent DeLanda’s approach is interesting for my own reflections
over sociological theory. In this book DeLanda raises an important critique
of the assumptions made in much social science of abstracted totalities.
When we say “society” we often presume entities that fit neatly into each
other like the organs of a body or that one totality is contained within
another in a kind of nesting arrangement. This critique is quite in line with
the ones made in this book, but nothing can hide the meagre results of
DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari. He keeps the Deleuzo-
Guattarian concept of assemblage, but defines it as a “whole” which is
“characterized by relations of exteriority” (2006, 10; emphasis in orig.).
He skips, however, the concepts of plane and flows, which are related to
assemblage, and the consequence is that the fundamental productivism of
the Deleuzo-Guattarian approach halts completely. Furthermore, his in-
ability to exploit their theory of signs makes him rely on a problematic
figure like Goffman for his understanding of conversation (52-53) and his
inability to make use of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of the state and
state apparatuses makes him support himself by sociological common
sense in the form of Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy (68-70). He also
finds Bourdieu’s sociology ontologically compatible with his own as-
semblage approach (64). Unfortunately, DeLanda’s “new philosophy of
society” is not so new after all, but is, with few exceptions, a reiteration of
already well-established theories.
If we move on to the contributions in The Cambridge Companion to
Deleuze they can, perhaps, be divided into three main categories: 1) the
institutional-philosophical reception, 2) the literary reception and 3) the
creative-philosophical reception. My attitude towards the different catego-
ries can be summarized with a twist on a title of an old Italian movie: they
represent The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, respectively. The Com-
panion is, as mentioned above, a book in a philosophical series and many
of the authors are philosophers. The contributions I designate as the
“institutional-philosophical” reception dominate and these are marked, in
general, by a high scholarly standard. Some of them will be of great in-
terest for most readers (e.g., Smith 2012, Beistegui 2012, Lord 2012). But
even among these generally solid contributions there are articles marked
by a kind of exteriority to the topic at hand. James Williams lets us know
that:

The profound influence of Deleuze’s encounters with Hume, Nietzsche,

Kant and Bergson mean Difference and Repetition enters into a critical and
creative dialogue with them. (2012, 47)
206 Chapter Seven

With the possible exception of Kant, there is no attempt by Williams to

explain further what this “critical and creative dialogue” should involve in
Deleuze’s book. William’s article is first of all marked by lists of names
and concepts rather than analysis. Although the philosophical reception is,
in general terms, solid, it is marked by a certain narrowness: Deleuze’s
works from the 1960s are at the centre of attention with Difference and
Repetition and The Logic of Sense as major references. His texts are
mainly discussed in relation to other philosophers in the philosophical
tradition. In this way he is safely placed within the philosophical fold. The
importance of literary and other references to his work is diminished,
however. In the case of Difference and Repetition the writings of Arthur
Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud were important for his confrontation with
Kant (cf. Sauvarnargues 2009, 22-26), while in the Companion Deleuze’s
relationship to literature is limited to a separate chapter (Bogue 2012). I
can understand the need for Anglo-American philosophers to make room
for Deleuze in the philosophical discourse in their native tongue, but a
kind of purification has taken place in the process. This strategy of appro-
priation becomes a parody, however, when Paul Patton wants to make
Deleuze relevant for John Rawls’ theory of justice (Patton 2012, 213-216),
which is a line of thinking quite alien to Deleuze’s work.
The “literary” reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s work is quite
different from the “philosophical” one. It is, first of all, marked by an
absence of conceptual discussions and an emphasis on the allusions that
the words in Deleuze and Guattari’s texts may give rise to. The works
criticized in Chapter 1 (Bennett 2010, Connolly 2011) clearly belong to
this category and in the Companion John Protevi’s article on Deleuze and
Life (2012) is a case in point. This article makes a “tour of biophilo-
sophical themes” (259) in Deleuze and Guattari’s texts. There are many of
these and they do merit a separate analysis. However, the main problem in
Protevi’s reading is the absence of the conceptual continuities underlying
many of the themes in their texts. These biophilosophical themes are
usually not only about life and many other themes in their collective work
are about life without seemingly to be so. Furthermore, many of their
analytical operations are similar from case to case, although they may use
different names on these operations. The net result of the lack of
conceptual orientation in Protevi’s article is to make the biophilosophical
themes in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing sound more exotic than they
actually are. One example of how Protevi makes Deleuze and Guattari
sound odd is his treatment of their “double articulation” and the rela-
tionship between expression and content. In Protevi’s version there is
absolutely no connection between expression and content and Hjelmslev’s
 Conclusions 207

model of the sign and how the latter enters into assemblages of different
kinds and is important for their theory of language, etc. (251-252). In
Protevi’s version there is a lack of conceptual continuity between the dif-
ferent themes of Deleuze and Guattari, but some of the responsibility for
the literary reception of their work must be assigned to the two authors
themselves. Deleuze has emphasized how their joint style of writing seeks
to make the reader grasp the conceptual meaning in an intuitive manner
(Deleuze 2004b). Unwittingly, expressions like, “God is a Lobster, or a
pincer, a double bind” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 40), which is linked to
the topic of the double articulation, open up the door for an allusive read-
ing that emphasizes each word of their text and not the conceptual unity
underlying it.
In the Companion the worst example is still to come in the form of
Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Ethics (2012). This article claims that Deleuze
has a “nomadic vision of the subject” (170), although there is no attempt at
showing what this might mean by referring to his texts. This nomadic
vision is, however, “neo-Spinozist” (172) and we are told that a Spinozist
ethics is an “ethics of empowerment” (177). So far so good, and we further
learn that, “The ethical subject in a nomadic perspective lies at the inter-
sections with external, relational forces: it is about assemblages” (175).
Well, yes, but when is it not about assemblages? If we take the recurrent
use of “nomadic” in Braidotti’s article and take a look at A Thousand
Plateaus, this concept is defined there in relation to its opposite, the
sedentary (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 414-415). The nomadic war
machine is, for instance, opposed to the state (388-394) and the nomadic
space is smooth compared with the striated one of the sedentary (380-381).
Nowhere in Braidotti’s text is “nomadic” defined or related to its opposite
and the reason is that it is not applied in a conceptual manner, but it is used
in order to give the reader a set of allusions to what it might mean. It is
possible to produce a kind of sense in Braidotti’s text that might have
something to do with Deleuze and Spinoza, but the writing style is
primarily incantatory. Her text is above all engaged in the cultivation of a
specific language community than in philosophical discussion.
However, a few of the articles in the Companion have avoided the
Scylla of philosophical purification and the Charybdis of literariness. The
articles of Dosse (2012), Holland (2012), Genosko (2012) and Somers-
Hall (2012) have a quality rarely found elsewhere. They are all able to
combine both conceptual analyses close to the original texts and knowl-
edge of the historical and philosophical context of these concepts. These
authors are able to involve Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking in their own
208 Chapter Seven

thinking without falling into the trap of either free associations or begging
for institutional approval.
I am aware that by criticizing the reading of Deleuze and Guattari
made by everybody else I am sticking out my own neck. Whether I have
succeeded in my own readings and attempts at involving their philosophy
in sociological thinking I can only refer to the previous chapters of this
book and the reader can make her own judgements.

In Guise of a Conclusion
By using Latour and Deleuze and Guattari in this book as sources of
inspiration for a new direction in social research, I have only indicated one
of several possible ways for a future development of these disciplines.
There are many other sources for the way these disciplines can, on the one
hand, be criticized and, on the other, be renewed. Nevertheless, the line of
philosophical thinking promoted by Deleuze and Guattari is more radical
than what is commonly offered at the theoretical marketplace and there is
a need for radical transformation. The fundamental principles for the di-
rection lined up in this book are simple to summarize: 1) humans have no
privileges in relation to objects and signs, 2) societies must be studied as
ongoing realizations (productivism), 3) processes are normally time-
irreversible (events), 4) repetitive patterns are products and not causes and
5) all new analyses need a new effort (immanentism). These points are
perhaps formulated in a crude, slogan-like manner, but they condense the
main arguments of the book and stand in contrast to the five theses of
sociological presuppositions written in Chapter 1. The reader will know
that it has taken many pages to come to this conclusion, but the realization
of this programme remains a tremendous task for whoever will take it up.
This book is written with a strong urge for change in sociology in
particular and in social science in general. In an interview Deleuze with
Claire Parnet for television in 1987, he said that desire is a constructivism:
it is to construct an assemblage (2004b; letter D). My desire has hence led
to the writing of this book and a book is itself and assemblage connecting
to other assemblages outside it, for “a book exists only through the outside
and on the outside” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 4). By connecting to other
assemblages this book is, I hope, able project my desire onto new assem-
blages at other places.
 NOTES

1
This is also called “social studies of science” or “science and technology studies”
(STS).
2
FGERI stands for Fédération des groupes d’études et de recherches institution-
elles. When their work was financed by the state they called themselves CERFI –
Centre d’études, de recherches et de formation institutionelle.
3
This statement is perhaps at odds with some of Latour’s own arguments. In the
book We Have Never Been Modern he claims that a main aim of his method is to
dissolve the opposition between immanence and transcendence and to make
everything into an outside (1993b, 127-129). This stands in contrast with his meth-
od of studying everything in medias res (Latour 2005, 25).
4
Harold Garfinkel and his indexicality (1967) and Valentin Voloshinov with his
multi-accentuality (1973) show the same contextual dependence of the meaning of
a statement. Some of their views will be discussed in Chapter 4.
5
Latour tends to describe technical objects as containing scripts for what they are
supposed to do, and by using a specific technical object the human is said to sub-
scribe to the actions of the object (cf. Akrich and Latour 1992).
6
The model proposed by Allison that is not treated here is the Machiavellian
model in international relations. In this model we assume a rationale behind all
sorts of actions. It is, then, a sort of grand hermeneutical model.
7
The original French use of conscience collective in The Division of Labor in
Society denotes both a collective consciousness as a sort of cognition and knowl-
edge and a collective conscience as having moral content (cf. Durkheim 1978).
8
Pope has a very detailed reading and critique of Parsons’ reading of Durkheim.
He later revisits Parsons with some colleagues in a critique of Parsons’ reading of
Weber (cf. Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope 1975).
9
This is my interpretation. Weber made no explicit reference to Durkheim’s socio-
logy as far as I can find.
10
The translators of Aron’s Main Currents of Sociological Thought (1967) prefer
“comprehension” to understanding, and the former is probably the best translation
of Verstehen, although understanding is the most common translation.
11
Some commentators have called them non-rational to sweeten the pill.
12
Although Weber was ambiguous in the following formulation: “A motive is a
complex of subjective meaning which seems to the actor himself or to the observer
an adequate ground for the conduct in question” (1978, 11; emphasis added). A
similar ambiguity can be found in Aron (1967, 180-181).
13
Munch (1975) has claimed, for instance, that “sense” is a much better translation
of the German Sinn than “meaning” and is less prone to psychological misunder-
standing.
210 Notes

14
The author of the present book lives in a society where door-knobs are quite un-
common. We use door handles instead.
15
In accordance with common practice the page number from Peirce’s Collected
Papers is given by indicating volume number first and then page number. Peirce’s
Collected Papers are published in a total of eight volumes.
16
Saussure called his science semiology and there was a long discussion con-
cerning the distinction between semiology and semiotics. In this book I maintain
the distinction made by Deleuze and Guattari by calling semiology the discipline
concerned with linguistic signs and semiotics the discipline concerned with signe
in general (Guattari 1979, 19).
17
Léa-Anna held beliefs, in addition to some general persecutions in the past, that
the King was persecuting her in various ways through his agents (Clérambault
1942, 322-330).
18
Hacking has a general treatment of the different strands of social constructivism
from the viewpoint of analytic philosophy.
19
This is a reference to the work of Jakob von Uexküll (2010), which I shall return
to in Chapter 6.
20
The connections between Bourdieu’s sociology and these two different philo-
sophical movements is treated in depth by Donald Broady (1991).
21
The following summary is largely based upon the analysis of Bernard Lahire
(2001, 24-26).
22
There are of course many other intellectual debts in Bourdieu’s work. Cf. a
previous article of mine for references to some of these (Høstaker 2006).
23
Self-reflection in Bourdieu’s theory does not involve extensive introspection or
similar sorts of “boot-strapping”.
24
This insight relies heavily on Sirnes (1997, Part 1).
25
Owing to a lack of space I do not refer to all of Lahire’s critical comments. This
concerns Lahire’s critique of Bourdieu’s claim of a homology between fields of
limited production and the social space. He also criticizes Bourdieu’s normative
arguments for the autonomy of the fields.
26
There is nonetheless a symbolic dominance from the fields of production in the
way they feed the fields of consumption with goods to struggle over. For a critique
of this form of “study of reception” from the viewpoint of literary sociology see
Lahire (2001, 48-51).
27
Bourdieu’s most important works in linguistic theory can be found in the book
Language and Symbolic Power (1992).
28
For instance, about symbolic power as organized and guaranteed misrecognition,
cf. Bourdieu (1977, 171-172).
29
The prices of meat had increased dramatically just before the study owing to the
war, and the motive for those who financed it was to know how families coped in
the new situation.
30
A code is a rule for how to link a given signifier and signified. Overcoding is a
rule that restricts a signified (or a class of them) always to a given signifier. In this
way a given meaning is “locked in”.
31
Sociology is a Combat Sport is the title of a documentary made by Pierre Carles
in 2001 that features Bourdieu and his work.
 A Different Society Altogether 211

32
The question of disdain in Bourdieu’s sociology was also raised in the 1980s by
the philosopher Jacques Rancière (2007), although in a different way than mine.
Confer also the discussion of the relation between the theories of Bourdieu and
Rancière by the philosopher Charlotte Nordmann (2006).
33
Another line of critique took Putnam to task for the way he argued his case. For
him social capital is a public good for the whole “community” and not only for the
individual. By doing that, Putnam lets his arguments slip easily into circularity (cf.
Portes 1998). This is a critique that might be relevant for the book Bowling Alone
too.
34
Only some of Abbott’s arguments are presented in this context.
35
Michael Forman criticizes Putnam’s way of studying labour unions as the same
type of object as any other professional or voluntary organization. Unions are dif-
ferent due to the opposition a union tends to meet in many workplaces (2002).
36
Some of Garfinkel’s experiments would not have gone down well with the
Research Ethical Committees in our time.
37
At the University of California, Los Angeles where Garfinkel worked? This is
not specified.
38
Mot d’ordre also means slogan.
39
Garfinkel’s work is a major theoretical influence for Latour, besides the linguis-
tics of Greimas, cf. Chapter 5.
40
In indirect speech it would sound like this: “She looked around and found that
the floor would be a problem, of course, and that she had to get rid of the carpet”.
In direct speech it would sound like this: “She looked around the room. ‘The floor
will be a problem, of course. I have to get rid of the carpet’, she thought”. This
example is from http://www.novalearn.com/grammar-glossary/free-indirect-
speech.htm (accessed 26 February 2009), but modified.
41
Actually he called it “quasi-direct discourse”, which is a translation from
German, das uneigentliche direkte Rede
42
The so-called Vosslerites named after Karl Vossler (1872-1949).
43
The number of publications within this field is enormous and only a few are
mentioned here. For a general overview of the science-studies field until the end of
the last century, see Cussins (2000).
44
Énoncé is regularly translated as “utterance” (in Greimas and Courtés 1982) or
“statement” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Greimas and
Courtés define utterance as: “any entity endowed with meaning, belonging either
to spoken strings or to written texts, prior to any linguistic or logical analysis”
(1982, 362). The utterance is contrasted with enunciation, which makes the utter-
ance possible.
45
But this is not always so: in a text like The Quest for the Holy Grail the sender is
God, the receiver is Mankind, the subject the Hero and the object is the Holy Grail
(cf. Greimas 1983, 204).
46
Greimas presupposes an external referent as an extra-linguistic reality. However,
he is aware that all sciences (through their discourse) must build an internal refer-
ent (Greimas and Courtés 1982, 259-261).
47
Serres’s understanding of interest also diverges strongly with the understanding
within science studies (cf. Callon 1986, 186).
212 Notes

48
Yet these cannot really be afforded in a technical system without destabilizing it.
49
This example is from Latour 1987, Chapter 1.
50
This is a view that also goes back to Berger and Luckmann’s The Social
Construction of Reality (1984) and to Durkheim’s dictum that there are no false
religions (2001).
51
Fuller’s book is in other regards quite problematic in its polemic towards science
studies. He tends to portray them as Kuhn’s puppets and he is so indignant of how
science studies as a field of research has turned out that he compares the Latourian
concept of non-humans to theories of animal liberation and generally castigates
actor-network theory as “flexible fascism” (2000, 374-378). Shock value? You bet!
52
Wolfson has later published two other memoirs. One of them shortly after his
mother’s death.
53
This analysis is inspired by Deleuze’s essay Un nouveau cartographe (2004a, 31-
51) on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1991).
54
Stengers’ comment is on the concept of event in general and in relation to the
foundation of the sciences.
55
Cf. the newspaper Le Monde, 30 April 2007.
56
Badiou is more of a Platonist in comparison to Deleuze and Guattari who were
clearly anti-Plato (cf. Myklebust 1996).
57
The Dreyfus affair was in this period the template for such a controversy in
which the struggle over the public opinion was paramount.
58
I am stretching it a bit here since Virno does not comment on Deleuze and
Guattari directly, but on something else. This definition is, however, one of the
best I have found for the notion of diagram, and Deleuze also speaks of it as a
“map” (cf. 2004a).
59
The philosopher Theodore Schatzki has criticized Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
of abstract machine and Deleuze’s way of using it in relation to Foucault’s book.
Schatzki’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari (and Foucault for that matter) is
marked by certain reifications and misunderstandings. I shall not go into a detailed
analysis of his argument, but only make the reader aware of its existence (2002,
89-96, 217-222)
60
Latin; modulus, small measure.
61
Deleuze and Guattari call this dimension machinic enslavement. This is a rather
awkward term in English and I would have to explain in detail the background for
it in French. In order to economize with space I have to simplify a bit.
62
Originally affectus. Sometimes also translated as emotion.
63
We can, of course, have experiences through our five senses that we cannot
speak, think or write about. The world of our direct experiences and the world of
signs are not concurrent.
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 INDEX
Abbott, Andrew .............. 94–97; 211
abstract machine ... 17–18; 161; 180–
82
actant .......................... 114; 117; 125
actor theory .......... 8–13; 83–84; 165
actor-network theory ........ 2; 114–50
actual existence .... 125; 135; 149–50
adaptation ....................... 33; 172–74
affect ...................... 175–78; 198–99
economy of ...................... 175–78
affective turn ................................16
AGIL ............................................39
Akrich, Madeleine ................ 137–40
Allison, Graham T. ... 19–21; 24; 209
The Essence of Decision .... 19–20
American Journal of Sociology ....39
American National Rifle
Association ...................................12
animism ...................................... 145
Annales-school ........................... 168
anthropocentrism ................ 8–9; 191
anthropology ................................22
of science ....... 2; 114–50; 164–69
social ..........................................1
Antisthenes ...................................89
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft ..... 200
Aristippus .....................................89
Aron, Raymond
Main Currents of Sociological
Thought .................................. 209
Artaud, Antonin.......................... 206
asignifying.................... 153; 187–88
assemblage ....27–28; 102; 108; 151;
161–67; 172; 180–83; 191; 204–8
machinic......... 14–15; 78–79; 164
of enunciation ...7; 14–15; 78–79;
108; 164
Assemblage Theory ................ 204–5
associology ......................... 117; 166
attention
economy of...................... 174–77
Austen, Jane
Persuasion............................. 110
Auster, Paul ............................... 154
Austin, J.L. ................................ 194
authentication ...................... 185–86
baby-boomers ........................ 94; 97
Bachelard, Gaston........................ 65
Badiou, Alain............... 169–71; 212
Bakhtin, Michail ........................ 111
Barnes, Barry ......... 119–23; 142–45
Barthes, Roland ............... 13–14; 50
Mythologies ....................... 13–14
Baudrillard, Jean .......................... 15
Bennett, Jane ......................... 14–15
Bentham, Jeremy
Panopticon ............................ 182
Benveniste, Émile ............ 13; 50–52
Berger, Peter . 22–23; 26; 58–65; 72;
75; 80–82; 83; 92; 103; 196; 202
The Social Construction of
Reality ........... 26; 58–65; 82; 212
Bergson, Henri................... 157; 205
binary machine .......... 167; 180; 189
biopolitics .................................. 183
blackboxing ......................... 136–37
Bloor, David .. 27; 60; 119–23; 142–
45
body without organs .................. 157
Boétie, Ètienne de la
Discourse on voluntary servitude
.............................................. 175
botany .................................. 130–32
Bouaniche, Arnaud ...................... 18
Bourdieu, Pierre.... 9–10; 22–23; 26;
65–82; 83; 88–89; 91; 118; 158–59;
178–79; 196; 202; 210–11
Homo Academicus ................... 79
 A Different Society Altogether
Language and Symbolic
Power ..................................... 210
Social Space and Symbolic
Power ................................. 22–23
The Weight of the World ..........65
Bousquet, Joe ............................. 171
Braidotti, Rosi
Nomadic Ethics ...................... 207
breaching experiment ....104–5; 108;
113
Breslau, Daniel ........................... 143
Broady, Donald .......................... 210
Bulmer, Ralph ...................... 144–45
Caesar, Julius ............................. 128
Callon, Michel .................... 116; 126
Canetti, Elias
Crowds and Power................. 153
Canguilhem, Georges ...........65; 157
Capgras, Joseph ................ 53–54; 82
capital ........... 66–71; 75; 76; 158–59
cultural ........... 73–74; 87–92; 112
economic ............................ 73–74
intellectual................................89
social ............................ 27; 92–97
symbolic...................................70
capitalism ...16; 19; 56; 77; 98; 152–
54; 180; 183
capitalist spirit ........................19; 56
Carles, Pierre
Sociology is a Combat Sport .. 210
Cartesianism .................................40
cassowary ..................... 119; 144–45
Castel, Robert ...............................34
Castells, Manuel ......27; 83; 98–103;
112; 196
The Rise of the Network Society
......................................... 98–101
CERFI ........................................ 209
charismatic consecration ..............91
Cicero, Marcus Tullius .................91
Citton, Yves ..28; 152; 171; 174–79;
184; 186–88
Mythocracy ............................ 171
Clérambault, Gaëtan Gatian de... 53–
56; 82
code ............................................ 210
229
collective of humans and non-
humans ...... 5; 115; 136–37; 149–50
Collins, Randall 27; 83; 86–92; 102–
3; 112; 120; 196
The Sociology of Philosophies
.................................. 86–92; 120
communication . 6–7; 13; 30; 51; 75;
98; 109; 192–93
competence .......................... 137–40
complex of meaning . 19; 30; 46–48;
51–53; 57; 62; 74; 76; 196
Connolly, William E.
A World of Becoming ........ 17–18
conscience collective 31; 35; 39; 41;
209
constructivism ......... 2; 117; 148–49
content ...................... See expression
contextualization.... 134–36; 146–47
control.................................. 179–86
conversation analysis ................. 107
corporeal effectuation ................ 169
critique of ideology................ 76–77
Cuban Missile Crisis.............. 19–20
cultural studies ............................. 15
Cusset, François..................... 15–16
Cynicism...................................... 89
Darwin, Charles ........................... 37
deep politics............... 190; 196; 199
DeLanda, Daniel .................... 204–5
A New Philosophy of Society . 204
delegation .......................... 132; 137
Deleuze, Gilles . 1–8; 14–18; 24–25;
27–28; 30–31; 41; 49–53; 55–57;
77–80; 84–85; 107–13; 147–48;
149–50; 189; 190–91; 193–94; 197–
99; 210–12
A Thousand Plateaus. 3; 78; 152–
58; 161; 187; 197; 207; 211
Anti-Oedipus ....... 3; 152–58; 197
Difference and Repetition 30; 206
The Logic of Sense ........ 169; 206
democracy ........................... 97; 149
Derrida, Jacques .......................... 15
Descola, Phillippe ................ 144–45
desiring-machine ......... 155–58; 161
despotic regime............................ 51
230
deterritorialization .....14–15; 20; 77;
165–66; 181
diagram .................... 27–28; 181–85
Dilthey, Wilhelm ..........................47
direct observation ............. 20; 46–48
disaffiliation ............................... 100
discipline .............................. 179–86
discourse
free indirect .............. 110–12; 211
indirect ............. 110–12; 194; 211
discourse analysis .........................13
dividual .............................. 185; 188
documentary method .............. 105–7
dominant signifier ............52; 57; 79
Dominici, Gaston ........... 13–14; 169
Donzelot, Jacques .........................34
Dosse, Francois .......................... 207
double articulation .............. 161; 206
Dreyfus Affair ......................39; 212
Durkheim, Émile .... 1; 9–10; 26; 28;
29–41; 43; 49–52; 56–57; 58–62;
64–66; 71–74; 76; 80–82; 83; 94;
118; 133; 157; 171; 196; 209; 212
Elementary Forms of Religious
Life ...........................................39
Suicide ......................... 32; 38–41
The Division of Labor in Society
... 31; 33; 35; 37; 38–41; 73; 157;
209
The Rules of Sociological Method
..................................... 31; 37–40
École Freudienne ...........................3
Edinburgh School ..27; 115; 119–23;
142–45; 148–49
Eisen, Arnold ...............................44
emotional energy ............ 87–92; 112
energeticism3; 35; 117; 155–58; 173
enunciation ...................14; 111; 211
epistemology ....................4; 65; 132
erotomania.............................. 53–56
essentialism ........ 85; 90–92; 95; 112
ethnomethodology .84; 103–13; 123;
134
event 24–25; 27–28; 53; 82; 95; 110;
123; 152; 160; 168–71
Index
expression ..... 140–42; 162–65; 169;
181–82; 206–7
Fascism ...................................... 198
Febvre, Lucien
Combats pour l’histoire ........ 168
feminism .................................... 198
FGERI ................................... 3; 209
field ............. 58; 66–76; 81; 158–59
literary ................... 66–71; 74–75
Flechsig, Paul ............................ 153
form ............................. 135; 148–49
of action 115; 132; 140–42; 148–
49; 197
of content .. 140–42; 162–63; 181
of expression .... 140–42; 162–63;
181
Forman, Michael.................. 97; 211
Foucault, Michel . 3; 15; 56; 75; 168;
174; 180–83
Discipline and Punish .... 28; 181;
212
History of Sexuality ............... 183
frayage ................................. 175–78
French Theory ........... 1; 15–16; 204
Freud, Sigmund ......................... 153
Fuller, Steve................. 148–49; 212
functionalism ............. 35; 39–40; 59
functive ...................................... 151
Garfinkel, Harold ... 27; 83–84; 103–
13; 114; 123; 134; 146; 202; 209;
211
Studies
in Ethnomethodology......... 104–7
General Linear Reality........... 94–97
generation X .......................... 94; 97
Genosko, Gary ........................... 207
George V ..................................... 53
Giddens, Anthony .................... 9–10
glossematics......................... 140–42
God ................................................ 8
Goffman, Erving .... 87; 192–93; 205
The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life ........................ 192
Gori, Roland ........................ 178–79
Grand Hermeneutic .. 21; 26; 29; 31;
51; 76; 80; 83; 112–13; 195; 209
 A Different Society Altogether
Greimas, Algirdas Julien ...... 27; 50;
114–15; 123–32; 135–42; 146; 162;
211
group-subject .............................. 197
Guattari, Felix ... 1–8; 14–18; 24–25;
27–28; 30–31; 41; 49–53; 56–57;
77–80; 84–85; 107–13; 147–48;
149–50; 189; 190–91; 194; 197–99;
210–12
A Thousand Plateaus .3; 78; 152–
58; 161; 187; 197; 207; 211
Anti-Oedipus ........ 3; 152–58; 197
habitus ........ 9; 66–67; 70–71; 75; 88
Hacking, Ian .........................59; 210
Hardt, Michael ........................... 198
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ..59
Heidegger. Martin ........................65
Heilbron, Johan ............................34
Hénault, Anne ............................ 127
history ............................1; 142; 168
of ideas.............................86; 102
of philosophy ...........86; 102; 152
of science ............................... 120
HIV-infection ............................. 197
Hjelmslev, Louis ...28; 142; 162–65;
206
Prolegomena to a Theory of
Language ............................... 163
Hobbes, Thomas...........................63
Holland, Eugene ......................... 207
human nature ................................64
Hume, David .............................. 205
Husserl, Edmund ..........................65
icon..................................... 109; 181
iconoclastic gesture ................76; 78
ideal type .. 19; 47; 51; 200–201; 205
identity politics ........................... 100
imitation ......................... 33; 172–74
immanence 4; 10–12; 22–25; 33; 41;
61; 66; 84; 121; 135; 149–50; 151;
161; 196–97
incorporeal effectuation...... 164; 169
index.............................49; 109; 181
indexical expression ........... 109; 209
information ......6; 98–100; 130; 178;
184; 185; 187–88
231
informationalism.................. 98–103
institutionalization ........... 62–63; 80
integration.................................... 38
interaction rituals ................... 87–92
internal referent ........... 131–32; 203
interpretance .................. 50–52; 113
interpretant............................. 48–51
interpretative delirium ..... 53–55; 57
Ionesco, Eugène............................. 7
irreversibility .... 21–25; 27; 95; 102;
112–13; 116; 152; 168–71; 196–97
Isocrates ....................................... 89
Judaic Law............................. 40–41
Kant, Immanuel ... 30; 60–61; 205–6
Kantianism........................... 30; 143
Karam .......................... 119; 144–45
Kenobi, Obi Wan ....................... 127
Koch’s bacillus ............................ 25
Kuhn, Thomas ..... 119; 148–49; 212
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions .............. 119; 148–49
Lacan, Jacques ......................... 3; 50
lactic fermentation ....... 121–23; 128
Lahire, Bernard .............. 74–76; 210
Latour, Bruno .. 1–8; 10–13; 15; 23–
25; 27–28; 41; 55; 65; 64–65; 76;
81–82; 84; 108; 114–50; 151; 164–
69; 192; 199; 202; 208; 209; 211–12
Irreductions 115; 117–18; 159–61
Laboratory Life ......... 2; 116; 121
Pandora’s Hope .............. 12; 118
Reassembling the Social ........ 136
Science in Action ................... 117
The Pasteurization
of France ................. 116–17; 146
We Have Never Been
Modern .......... 118; 146; 161; 209
Lawrence, D.H............................. 79
Lazarsfeld, Paul ........................... 59
Lazzarato, Maurizio .... 28; 179; 186;
188
Le Bon, Gustave
The Crowd ............................. 173
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave.. 154
Léa-Anna ............................. 53; 210
legitimacy ...... 45; 51; 58; 62; 75; 81
232
Lévi-Strauss, Claude ........22; 50; 72
Lewin, Kurt .................... 78–79; 162
linguistics ..... 3; 107; 111; 140; 142;
163
literary studies ..............................15
Luckmann, Thomas .. 22–23; 26; 58–
65; 72; 75; 80–82; 92; 103; 196; 202
The Social Construction of
Reality ............ 26; 58–65; 82; 212
machine ........ 151; 155–57; 161; 187
machinic ..... 15; 78–79; 164; 186–88
machinic enslavement ................ 212
Madame X .................................... 54
Malinowski, Bronislaw ................39
Mannheim, Karl ................... 59; 105
Martin, David ...............................59
Marx, Karl ..... 1; 8; 9; 11; 59; 63; 77
Capital .....................................11
The Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte.........................8
Marxism ..................................... 197
matter
of content ....................... 140; 163
of expression .................. 140; 163
May 68 ................... 25; 152; 169–71
McLuhan, Marshall .................... 187
Understanding Media ............ 187
meaning 5; 9; 18–21; 26; 29–31; 42–
44; 45–49; 51–53; 57; 62; 64; 77;
134; 140; 196
meaningful action .........9; 29; 41–48
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice...............65
Merton, Robert K. .................. 39–40
metastability ............................... 184
microbiology .............................. 116
micropolitics......................... 197–98
minority politics ......................... 198
mode of inquiry ...................... 18–25
energetic..18–25; 26–27; 83; 102;
104; 112–13
hermeneutic.. 18–21; 112–13; 195
Modern Constitution .......... 146; 167
modulation ................................. 184
molar ..... 147–48; 156; 161; 166–67;
180; 187
molar machine ............................ 167
Index
molecular ... 147–48; 156; 161; 166–
67; 187
Molière
Le malade imaginaire............ 195
multi-accentuality ...................... 209
multiple-regression analysis ...... 102
multitude.................................... 198
narrative ..................................... 132
performance ............ 136–37; 139
programme ...................... 136–37
naturalism ............ 115; 124; 144–45
Negri, Antonio ........................... 198
neo-liberalism ............................ 152
network27; 86–90; 92; 98–103; 115;
134; 147; 165
neuro-psychology ...................... 176
Nietzsche, Friedrich ....... 89–90; 205
nomadic ..................................... 207
nomos ........................................ 144
non-human ...... 64–65; 132; 148–49;
164; 166
non-organic life ........... 156–57; 189
non-representational theory ......... 16
Nordmann, Charlotte ................. 211
normal science ..................... 148–49
objectivism ...................... 71–73; 76
objectivity .......................... 199–204
Old Testament ....................... 53; 77
ontology 4; 6; 10; 23; 102; 115; 143;
145; 149; 161
opposition ...................... 33; 172–74
order-words .... 7; 108–10; 163; 176;
184; 194
overcoding .... 79; 147; 163; 166–67;
179; 189; 193; 210
paradigmatic axis 124–25; 135; 149–
50
para-doxa .................................... 40
paranoia 53–56; 57; 82; 153–54; 196
Paris Commune ......................... 173
Parsons, Talcott ... 39–40; 59; 103–4
The Structure of Social Action. 39
passional delirium .................. 53–55
Pasteur, Louis ....... 121–23; 128–30;
168–69
 A Different Society Altogether
Mémoire sur la fermentation
appelée lactique ....... 121–23; 128
Patton, Paul ................................ 206
pedology ............................... 130–32
Peirce, Charles Sanders ...48–50; 52;
109; 181
Collected Papers .................... 210
phenomenology ......59; 65; 103; 107
philosophy
continental..................................1
phusis ......................................... 144
plane
of consistency .. 27–28; 151; 157–
61; 173; 181; 189; 197–99
of existence ............................ 189
of expression ....................79; 141
of immanence... 157–61; 180; 189
of organization ......... 158–59; 198
Plato .............................................89
political ecology ...........................16
political machine .................. 147–48
political science ..................1; 29; 39
Pope, Whitney ............................ 209
positivism ...............................40; 43
post-Fordism .............................. 152
post-structuralism .....................3; 13
potentialities ... 6; 11–12; 26–27; 84–
86; 100–102; 112; 189; 195–96
pragmatic theory of language ......84;
107–13
pre-existing conditions ......125; 139;
146
Prigogine, Ilya .....21–22; 25; 84; 92;
94; 102–3; 112
Order out of Chaos ............ 21–22
Propp, Vladimir .......................... 127
Protevi, John........................... 206–7
Deleuze and Life .................... 206
Proust, Marcel ......................85; 193
Remembrance of Things Past . 193
Within a Budding Grove ..........85
public...... 171; 173–74; 176–77; 188
Putnam, Robert D. .....27; 83; 92–97;
102–3; 112; 196; 211
Bowling Alone ............ 92–97; 211
quasi-object ..........................12; 167
233
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R.................. 39
Ramses II ..................................... 25
Rancière, Jacques ................ 97; 211
rational action ........................ 44–48
Rawls, John ............................... 206
Reagan, Ronald...................... 95; 97
realism ........... 25; 122–23; 129; 132
reductionism ........................ 159–61
reference
circulating................ 129–32; 149
regime
of enunciation ................ 114; 146
regime of signs
despotic ................................... 26
passional .............. 31; 53–57; 179
signifying ..... 30; 51–57; 79; 113;
179; 196
representamen ................ 48–50; 181
reterritorialization 14–15; 20; 57; 77;
165–66
reversibility .. 21–25; 27; 34; 62; 80–
81; 84; 102; 103; 112–13; 149–50;
195–97
rhizome ...................................... 155
Rickert, Heinrich ......................... 42
Ricoeur, Paul ........... 18; 21; 25; 112
Rimbaud, Arthur ........................ 206
Ringer, Fritz................................. 43
Sarkozy, Nicolas ........................ 170
Sartre, Jean-Paul .................. 86; 180
Saussure, Ferdinand de . 49–51; 111;
140–42; 162
Schatzki, Theodore .................... 212
Schema of Linguistic
Communication ............. 6; 109; 192
schizophrenia ....................... 153–54
Schopenhauer, Arthur ............ 89–90
Schreber, Daniel Paul .......... 153–54
Schütz, Alfred ...................... 59; 103
science studies . 2; 27; 63; 107; 114–
50; 209; 211
Science Wars ................................. 1
scientific fact .... 116; 121; 124; 129;
133
script .................................... 137–40
sedentary.................................... 207
234
segmentarity ....... 167; 178; 183; 198
self-reference ............ 72; 80–81; 199
self-reflexivity .................. 73; 80–81
sememes ..................................... 125
semes .......................................... 125
semiology ................................... 210
semiotic square ..................... 137–40
semiotics .7; 48–51; 51–57; 75; 107;
114–15; 123–32; 135–42; 149–50;
162–65; 181; 210
Sennett, Richard ...........................56
serialization ................................ 180
Serieux, Paul .................... 53–54; 82
Serres, Michel ............................ 211
La Traduction ........................ 132
shifting
in/out ........................ 114; 131–32
signifiance ...... 50–52; 113; 179; 193
signification.............. 48–51; 140–42
signified................49; 140; 162; 210
signifier ................49; 140; 162; 210
sign-language ...............................50
signs ... 6; 13–15; 48–51; 64; 75; 78;
107; 114; 123; 191–93; 196; 207
Simmel, Georg .............................47
singularities .............. 26; 41; 147–48
pre-individual ..... 51; 78; 85; 159;
173; 176–78; 189; 196
Sirnes, Thorvald ......................... 210
Smith, Adam ................................36
Smith, Daniel W.
Cambridge Companion to
Deleuze .............................. 204–8
social constraint...26; 29; 31–41; 58;
60–61; 71; 73; 83; 196
social constructivism .... 2; 9; 22–23;
58–65; 107; 123
social context.... 4; 16; 66; 120; 125;
133–35; 159
social machine ................................5
social relations.... 2; 6; 9; 44–45; 62;
75–76; 114; 120–21; 123; 134–35;
159; 173; 189; 192
social representation .30; 41; 52; 60–
61; 64; 76
social space ......................66; 73; 74
Index
social subjection .......... 186–88; 197
social theory .......................... 2; 115
societies of control152; 179; 184–85
society........................ 4–5; 115; 117
sociological theory.... 4; 11; 28; 142;
151
sociologism ........................ 115; 124
sociology ................... 1; 29; 39; 142
of the social 118; 132–35; 136–37
of translation ......................... 126
of understanding ................ 41–48
presuppositions.............. 4–8; 199
traditional ........ 1–8; 133; 149–50
socius ............................................. 5
soft power ...... 174–79; 184; 186–88
solidarity ...................................... 38
mechanical ........................ 35–37
organic............. 33; 35–37; 40–41
Somers-Hall, Henry ................... 207
Cambridge Companion to
Deleuze .............................. 204–8
speech act .................... 108–10; 194
Spencer, Herbert .............. 35; 36; 73
Spinoza, Benedict . 89–90; 157; 174;
198–99
Ethics..................................... 157
Spinozism .................................. 207
Stalinism .................................... 198
state axiomatics ......................... 198
Stengers, Isabelle 21–22; 25; 84; 92;
94; 102–3; 112; 212
Order out of Chaos............ 21–22
Stoics ......................................... 169
storytelling . 152; 171; 175; 178; 187
stratum ................. 165–66; 189; 198
Strong Programme 27; 121–23; 142–
45
structuralism ...... 3; 50; 111–12; 124
structuration ................................... 9
structure and agency ........ 8–13; 136
subject 3; 28; 30; 53; 166; 179; 186–
88
subjectification ...... 56; 179; 186–88
subjectivism ........................... 71–73
subjectivity . 72; 111; 112; 145; 153;
156; 166; 179; 186–88
 A Different Society Altogether
substance ...115; 123; 126; 128; 132;
134–35; 140–42; 148–49; 149–50;
162–63
substantialism ..27; 85; 95; 100–101;
103
symbol ................................ 109; 181
symbolic power ..............79; 81; 210
symbolic universe............. 62–65; 81
symbolic violence.........................81
syntagmatic axis . 124–25; 135; 149–
50
Tarde, Gabriel .....28; 32–33; 34; 41;
152; 171–74
technical mediation .............. 135–40
television viewing ........................95
The Quest for the Holy Grail...... 211
tick ............................................. 161
Tönnies, Ferdinand
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft 35
transcendence ..4; 10–12; 22–25; 34;
37; 41; 71; 84; 121; 149–50; 161;
196–97
transcendental empiricism .......... 152
translation ................................... 114
Translational Model ..... 15; 27; 115;
117; 125; 129–32
transversal ............................ 197–98
trials of strength.................. 117; 126
truth effect .................................. 131
typification .....................62; 64; 103
Uexküll, Jakob von. 28; 159–61; 210
utterance 14; 108; 111; 124–25; 127;
134; 169; 194; 203; 211
235
value-judgment .. 190; 199–201; 203
value-reference ...................... 43; 48
Virno, Paolo............................... 212
virtual existence ........... 47; 125; 135
virtuality ..... 127; 139; 149–50; 165;
169–71
vitalism .......................... 35; 156–57
Voloshinov, Valentin N. ............ 209
Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language......................... 111–12
Vossler, Karl .............................. 211
war generation ................. 94; 96–97
war machine .............................. 185
Weber, Max1; 9; 18–19; 26; 28; 29–
31; 34; 51–53; 51–53; 56–57; 58–
62; 65–66; 71–74; 76; 80–82; 83;
128; 133; 190; 196; 199–204; 205;
209
Economy and Society .. 41–48; 74
The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism ................. 56
Whitehead, Alfred North ........... 117
Williams, James......................... 205
Willis, Paul ............................ 10; 24
Learning to Labour ................. 10
Wittgenstein, Ludwig .................. 86
Wolfson, Louis ............ 153–54; 212
Le Schizo et les langues ......... 154
Woolgar, Steve .......................... 116
Laboratory Life ......... 2; 116; 121
world-openness .................... 65; 159
Wrong, Dennis............................. 44