Latour, Bruno (b. 1947)

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Oxford

Oxford University Press

2005

"Interiorities are built in the same complicated way as Horus's chamber in the center of the pyramid of Cheops."

What I am trying to do here is simply show how the boundaries between sociology and psychology may be reshuffled for good. For this, there is only one solution: make every single entity populating the former inside come from the outside not as a negative constraint 'limiting subjectivity', but as a positive offer of subjectivation. As soon as we do this, the former actor, member, agent, person, individual--whatever its name--takes the same star-shaped aspect we have observed earlier when flattening the global and re-dispatching the local. It is made to be an individual/subject or it is made to be a generic non-entity by a swarm of other agencies. Every competence, deep down in the silence of your interiority, has first to come from the outside, to be slowly sunk in and deposited into some well-constructed cellar whose doors have then to be carefully sealed. None of this is a given. Interiorities are built in the same complicated way as Horus's chamber in the center of the pyramid of Cheops. The old empiricist motto was not that off the mark: nihil est in intellectu, quod non sit prius in sensu, although its meaning (nothing is inside which has not come from the outside) is a bit different. Nothing pertains to a subject that has not been given to it. In a way, is this not the strongest intuition of social sciences: 'Have we been made up?' Of course, the meaning of this tricky phrase depends entirely on what is meant by this innocent little word 'outside'.
(pp. 212-3)

Architecture::Pyramid Architecture::Chamber

Reading

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

01/06/2016