Bruno Latour Reassembling the Social -Oxford University Press, 2005

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Acknowledgements: 3
Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations 5
PART I: HOW TO DEPLOY CONTROVERSIES ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD 23
Introduction to Part I: Learning to Feed off Controversies 23
First source of uncertainty: no group, only group formation 29
A list of traces left by the formation of groups 32
No work, no group 37
Mediators vs. intermediaries 39
Second source of uncertainty: action is overtaken 46
An actor is what is made to act by many others 49
An enquiry into practical metaphysics 54
A list to map out controversies over agency 59
How to make someone do something 66
Third source of uncertainty: objects too have agency 71
The type of actors at work should be increased 72
Making objects participants in the course of action 78
Objects help trace social connections only intermittently 82
A list of situations where objects’ activity is made easily visible 88
Who has been forgetting power relations? 92
Fourth source of uncertainty: matters of fact vs. matters of concern 97
Constructivism vs. social constructivism 98
The fortunate wreck of sociology of science 104
No social explanation is necessary 111
Translation vs. transportation 118
There is more to experience than meets the eye 121
A list to help deploy matters of concern 128
Fifth source of uncertainty: writing down risky accounts 135
We write texts, we don’t look through some window pane 136
Defining at last what a network is 143
Back to basics: a list of notebooks 148
Deployment not critique 151
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT - An Interlude in the Form of a Dialogue 157
Part II: HOW TO RENDER ASSOCIATIONS TRACEABLE AGAIN 175
Introduction to Part II: Why is it So Difficult to Trace the Social? 176
How to keep the social flat 183
First move: localizing the global 192
From Panopticon to Oligopticon 194
Panoramas 203
Second move: redistributing the local 212
Articulators and localizers 214
The implausible locus of face-to-face interactions 221
Plug-ins 226
From actors to attachments 236
Third move: connecting sites 243
From standards to collecting statements 245
Mediators at last 257
Plasma: the missing masses 266
CONCLUSION: FROM SOCIETY TO COLLECTIVE — CAN THE SOCIAL BE REASSEMBLED? 272
What sort of political epistemology? 274
A discipline among others 278
A different definition of politics 283
Bibliography 289