I found that Latour’s ‘Objects Have Agency’ made similar claims to what we have read in previous weeks about a historical marginalization of objects within academia. This time the discipline being questioned is sociology for its inability to recognize and examine objects as actors. Being rather convinced at this point I didn’t find Latour’s reading as informative in my thinking about these issues as readings from prior weeks (Appadurai, Miller). In terms of interrogating disciplines, I find it interesting that the authors we have read have been focused on economics, sociology and anthropology, but I think questioning the focus of geography is also important. For example both physical and human geography are not attuned to objects as actors even though they constitute human, social, and spatial landscapes.

With that aside, the important point I got out of Latour’s reading was that sociologists limit action to what ‘actors’ do ‘intentionally.’ Latour’s project is to extend the list of participants, he argues that actants are participants. A good example that Latour gave was our ability to analyze and understand systems of entangled interractions in non-human societies, but not in our own. Through action network theory Latour argues that we should not exclude objects as participants because they seem so different from the category of humn but rather include them because they are so different, or “incommensurable.” I think this is an important point, that often we disregard or ignore what doesn’t fit with the way we want to thinko about the world, but what doesn’t fit is also really important. In a way what Latour is talking about is recognizing contradictory and dialectical social relations.

The problem that I had was with understanding the relationship of objects to hierarchies, inequalities that interrupt individual action. I’ll readily acknowledge that I come from a discipline that examines the roots of inequality as being in ideology, and for example the effects of racialized thinking on material conditions. I’m interested in understanding the connection Latour is making, but I think clearer examples would help me better understand his claim. The relationship of object agency with social power relations hasn’t really been explored in any of the other readings but I definitely sturggled with what Latour was getting at in the final section of his essay.

My questions are about the disciplinary critique that many of the readings we have read make.

1. Do you think the social sciences are limited by definitions of human and humanity that arise out of other disciplines (philosophical or scientific), rather than interrogating these concepts themselves?
2. A lot of the readings have been calling for an inclusion of objects, and object agency…so what about animals?