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Reassembling the Social
Latour's 2005 manifesto and methodological textbook for actor-network theory — the book that most systematically laid out the injunction to follow the actants and the refusal to treat 'society' as an explanatory resource rather than a thing to be explained.
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005) is Latour's most systematic methodological statement and the single most influential introduction to ANT. The book argues that sociology took a wrong turn when it made 'society' an explanatory variable — a pre-existing context that could be invoked to account for individual actions — and that the correct procedure is the opposite: trace the specific associations through which social assemblages are continuously reconstituted and refuse to smuggle pre-formed social wholes into the analysis. The book provides the vocabulary (actant, mediator, translation, plasma) and the rules (five sources of uncertainty) that make ANT a workable research program rather than a gestural theoretical stance.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was written in response to ANT's success as a research tradition and the widespread misuse of its vocabulary. By the early 2000s, 'actor-network' was being invoked as