Culture studies” and the culture complex | 10

ABSTRACT

In Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour argues that culture “does not act surreptitiously behind the actor’s back” but rather is “manufactured at speciﬁc places and institutions, be it the messy oﬃces of the top ﬂoor of Marshal Sahlins’s house on the Chicago campus or the thick Area Files kept in the Pitt Rivers [sic] museum in Oxford” (Latour 2005: 175). He goes on to characterize this close attention to the sites where things are made as a distinguishing trait of work conducted in the tradition of science studies. In doing so, he counterposes these concerns to those of “sociologists of the social” who aim to bring to light hidden structures-of language or of ideologies, for examplein order to account for social actions in ways that social actors themselves are unaware of. This passes over the more mundane and material processes of making culture that Latour highlights. In what follows I explore the implications of Latour’s approach for the analysis of the relations between culture and the social. I suggest that science studies and, more generally, actor-network theory (ANT) provide useful models for the development of forms of cultural analysis-which, analogically, I shall call “culture studies”—capable of illuminating how culture operates as a historically distinctive set of assemblages, the “culture complex” of my title, which act on the social in a variety of ways. I then relate these concerns to those of Foucauldian governmentality theory to suggest how the analysis of culture might best be approached when viewed as part of a ﬁeld of government. Finally, I consider the implications of these approaches for the development of a properly historical approach to the tasks of cultural analysis. (In addressing these issues, I draw on, modify, and add to discussions in Bennett 2007a, 2007b.)

To look to Latour’s work for guidance in analyzing the relations between culture and the social might seem quixotic given his opposition to the model of the two-house collective dividing the assembly of things (nature) from the assembly of humans (society) that he attributes to early modern science and political thought (Latour 1993). For the

concern to distinguish culture from the social as a subdivision within the assembly of humans is a further aspect of the “modern settlement” that Latour has worked assiduously to unsettle. Latour makes this clear in Politics of Nature, where he suggests that we put aside the ideas of culture, nature, and society to focus instead on the processes through which humans and non-humans are assembled into collectives whose constitution is always simultaneously natural, social, cultural, and technical. Yet Latour also qualiﬁes this position by arguing that although the division between nature and society as incommensurable realms has no valid epistemological foundations, it has real historical force if understood as referring not to “domains of reality” but to “a quite speciﬁc form of public organization” (Latour 2004a: 53). Similarly, in Reassembling the Social, Latour is less iconoclastic in relation to the

concept of the social than in many of his earlier formulations. The central diﬃculty, he argues, lies not in the concept of the social if this is thought of as a stabilized bundle of connections between human and non-human actants that might be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon-the connections between the middle classes, works of art, and the organization of class distinctions, for example (Latour 2005: 40). Rather, problems arise when the social is thought of as a speciﬁc kind of material-as if there were a distinctive kind of “social stuﬀ ”—that can be distinguished from other “non-social” phenomena and then be invoked, in the form of an encompassing social context or social structure, as an explanatory ground in relation to the latter (Latour 2005: 1-4). In place of this conception of the social, that informed the procedures of the sociology of science against which science studies pitted itself, Latour recommends that it be thought of as an assemblage of diverse components brought together via a work of connection on the part of a varied set of agents. John Law’s formulations point in a similar direction, construing the social as the outcome of varied processes of translation through which diﬀerent “bits and pieces” of the socio-material world are brought into association with one another in the context of relationally conﬁgured networks of people and things, a process that involves the deletion of other similarly constituted networks and their being held in place long enough to produce durable eﬀects (Law 1994: 102-05). Although it is not a move that either Latour or Law makes, the case for seeing culture

not as made up of a distinctive kind of “cultural stuﬀ,” (representations, say) but as a provisional assembly of all kinds of “bits and pieces” that are fashioned into durable networks whose interactions produce culture as speciﬁc kinds of public organization of people and things, is readily perceptible. So, too, is the possibility of accounting for the historical emergence of culture as a result of the production of new assemblages of human and non-human actors through which its diﬀerentiation from the social and the economy was eﬀected. Before pursuing this line of inquiry further, however, I want to consider some of the more general aspects of science studies and actor-network theory to identify the light they throw on the both the work that goes into the making of culture and the distinctive kind of work that it, in turn, performs. I shall focus on three issues here. (1) The ﬁrst concerns what Law characterizes as the “semiotics of materiality” of ANT, in

which, given its focus on the “relational materiality” constituted by diﬀerent assemblages of human and non-human actors, what matters is how the elements of such assemblages work together to order and perform the social (Law 1999: 4). Such practices of social ordering are, as Laws puts it elsewhere, “materially heterogeneous,” made up of bits and pieces of talk, architecture, bodies, texts, machines, etc., all of which interact to construct

and perform the social. This relational materialism has much in common with the accounts of discursive or ideological articulation which have played such a signiﬁcant role in cultural studies. In both cases, the identity and eﬀectivity of elements derive not from their intrinsic properties but from the networks of relations in which they are installed. Yet, there is an important diﬀerence between these two positions, one of which, in my view, should be counted in ANT’s favor. It concerns the expanded, and more convincingly materialist, ﬁeld of analysis that results from ANT’s incorporation of non-human actors into the networks that go to make up and perform the social. This has several advantages over the view associated with the “cultural turn”—that social relations are essentially cultural in form because they are informed by linguistic or meta-linguistic articulations of social meanings, positions, and identities. For it makes possible a nontautological account of the constitution of culture, understood as a distinctive public organization of things and people, that is distinguished from the social rather than merged with it. When those whom Latour characterizes as “sociologists of the social” try to account for the durability of social ties, Latour argues, they typically appeal to the role of social norms and values, thus engaging in the “tautology of social ties made out of social ties” (Latour 2005: 70). A good deal of work in cultural studies proceeds similarly by deﬁning culture’s eﬀects in terms of its properties: culture as a meaning-making system that makes meanings, for example. This is avoidable in an approach which focuses on culture as an assemblage of heterogeneous elements whose “culturalness” derives from, rather than precedes, their assembly. (2) I take my second point from Andrew Pickering’s characterization of the adjacent

ﬁeld of practice studies as amounting to a “social theory of the visible” (Pickering 2001: 164) that does not look for any deeper or hidden structures beneath the “the visible and speciﬁc intertwinings of the human and the nonhuman” (Pickering 2001: 167). This commitment to the analysis of natural/cultural/social/technical networks and assemblages as consisting only of visible surfaces, a single-planed set of wholly observable events, actions, and processes with no hidden, deep, or invisible structures or levels, stands in contradistinction to the dualistic ontologies of the social that still characterize those versions of the cultural turn that have most inﬂuenced the development of cultural sociology. Such ontologies provide the basis for ANT’s opposition to the language of “cultural constructivism” since the very notion that culture constructs the social is at odds with ANT’s focus on the complex entanglements of people and things in the intersecting networks through which the social is performed without any prior distinction between what might be allocated to culture and what to society. By locating intellectual work on a single-planed reality, this position also questions intellectual practices that aim to organize their own authority and distinctive forms of political intervention by claiming insight into another set of hidden or invisible processes and realities held to take place behind the backs of other actors. It construes intellectuals not as seers but as mobilizers and transformers, reshaping relations between things and people by the production of new entities and their mobilization in the context of the material-semiotic networks through which the social is made and performed. (3) There is a strong focus in science and practice studies on the speciﬁc settings-most

notably laboratories-in which scientiﬁc work is conducted, and on the transformations (puriﬁcations, reductions, translations, etc.) to which scientiﬁc practice subjects the materials it works with so as to produce new entities in the ﬁeld of knowledge. This comprises an exemplary materialism in the attention it pays to the material settings and instruments through which such entities are made and mobilized. There is, as Law notes,

a good deal of common ground here between ANT and those readings of Foucault’s concept of discourse which-somewhat against the authority of Foucault’s own textsstress its material and institutional properties (Sawyer 2002). But there is also a diﬀerence to the extent that ANT places a greater emphasis on analyzing the processes through which things are put together to comprise those ordering strategies that Foucauldian analysis calls discursive but whose formation-the processes of their making and remaking-it tends to occlude (Law 1994: 18-26). This opens up the space for a productive interchange between ANT and Foucauldian theory in its potential to add a denser materiality to Foucault’s insistence on the need for an “ascending analysis of power” that would “begin with its inﬁnitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then look at how these mechanisms of power, which have their solidity and, in a sense, their own technology, have been and are invested, colonized, used, infected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination” (Foucault 2003: 30). In a similar vein, Latour argues that “power, like society, is the ﬁnal result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be made up, composed” (Latour 2005: 64). The task that this enjoins analytically is one of tracing the networks of associations through which particular forms of power are assembled, aiming for as dense a description as possible of the capacities that are folded into and accumulate within them. The implication is that we should consider how distinctive kinds of cultural power are

organized via the production of distinctive cultural assemblages-in museums, libraries, broadcasting, art galleries, heritage sites-which, as closely interacting components of the “culture complex,” bring together persons, things, techniques, texts as parts of distinctive public organizations which, in turn, can be mobilized in distinctive ways to act on the social with a view to bringing about changes in conduct.