Assignment Prompt & Instructions
**files (4)**
– ## reflection1Brand.docx
– ## ReassemblingtheSocialIntro2.pdf
– WritingtheImplosion_TeachingtheWorldOneThingataTime.pdf
– ReassemblingtheSocialIntro3.pdf
**## reflection1Brand.docx**
The
[_IACP Reducing Violence and Crime_](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489?wrap=1) [Download IACP Reducing Violence and Crime](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489/download?download_frd=1) pamphlet gives four law enforcement strategies to reduce violence and crime in America:
· Prevention Programs
· Community Outreach
· Enforcement Strategies
· Government-Wide Coordination
Reflection Paper 1 (Human Technology)
Reflection Papers should be about 300-500 words. These should focus on one or two readings from the week before, either comparing them or focusing more fully on one. It’s preferable for me for you to discuss the first reading on the syllabus or what seems to be the main one each week, but if something else truly speaks to you, focus on that.
) You say in ~two sentences what you thought the main argument of the reading was;
) in ~1 sentence mention something you learned;
) include ~2 “somethings” that you feel connects to your own life or experiences.
) ask at one question you did not understand in the reading
)For my sanity, mention something from the lecture so I know I am not just speaking into the void. It can be anything and not necessarily related to the rest of the paper.
This is mostly just a place for you to gather and collect your thoughts, apply what you are learning to your life, and reflect on it.
Reference (have attached the readings for this week)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s)
**## ReassemblingtheSocialIntro2.pdf**
Introduction to Part II: Why is
it so Difficult to Trace the
Social?
It should be the simplest thing in the world. We are all bound by social
interactions; we all live in a society; and we are all cultural animals.
Why do these ties remain so elusive? In the preceding pages, one
reason has been offered up as an explanation. The adjective ‘social’
designates two entirely different phenomena: it’s at once a substance, a
kind of stuff, and also a movement between non-social elements. In
both cases, the social vanishes. When it is taken as a solid, it loses its
ability to associate; when it’s taken as a fluid, the social again disap-
pears because it flashes only briefly, just at the fleeting moment when
new associations are sticking the collective together. Although it
seemed at first sight that the subject matter of social sciences was
easy to locate thanks to the massive and ubiquitous evidence of the
social order, it now appears that it’s just the opposite: there is nothing
more difficult to grasp than social ties. It’s traceable only when it’s
being modified. Physiologists have shown that for a perception to take
place, continuous movements and adjustments are necessary: no
movement, no feeling. This is true for the senses of sight and hearing
as well as for taste, smell, and touch.200 If you clasp someone’s hand
and keep the grasp perfectly still, very soon you no longer feel any-
thing but a vague, embarrassing dullness—even if it’s the hand of your
beloved. With the absence of movements has come a blurring of the
senses. The same is true of the ‘sense of the social’: no new association,
no way to feel the grasp.
This is why to renew the feeling for social connections I had to
oppose two different types of methods. One that I called ‘sociology
of the social’ tries to keep together as firmly as possible and as long as
possible elements which it claims are made of some homogeneous
200 See the beautiful experiment with rapid-eye movement and its application in
portraits in R.C. Miall and John Tchalenko (2001), ‘A Painter’s Eye Movements: A
Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing’.
Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2005. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780199256044.003.0009.
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stuff; the other—which I referred to as ‘sociology of associations’—
tries to fathom controversies about the range of heterogeneous elem-
ents that may be associated together. In one case, we know roughly
what the social world is made of—it’s made ‘of’ or ‘in’ the social; in the
other, we should always begin by not knowing what it’s made of. Thus,
much like the pharmakon of the Greeks, the search for the social
becomes either a remedy or a powerful poison depending on the
dose and on the timing. Freshly grounded into small and timely
doses, it allows the observer to detect the new associations that have
to be constantly reshuffled in order to gather once more a collective
that is threatened by irrelevance. But if you let the elements that have
been bundled together pass their ‘sell by dates’, they will begin to rot.
If you persist in ingesting them, they will lead to complete paralysis.
You begin to take what has been connected together for a special type
of fabric: the social explains the social. You have entered a world that is
no longer traceable, a world that is in danger of being quickly invaded
by the fairies, dragons, heroes, and witches of critical sociology.
But how is it possible to have two completely opposite meanings for
the same adjective? It can be explained, I think, because the social
sciences have pursued simultaneously three different tasks: document-
ing the various ways in which the social is built by its members’ ingeni-
ousness; settling the controversies about the social by limiting the
range of entities at work in the world; and trying to solve the ‘social
question’ by offering some prosthesis for political action. There is
nothing wrong with these goals since sociology, the ‘science of living
together’, should indeed be able to fulfill the three following duties: it
should be able to deploy the full range of controversies about which
associations are possible; it should be able to show through which
means those controversies are settled and how such settlements are
kept up; and it can help define the right procedures for the composition
of the collective by rendering itself interesting to those who have been
the object of study. But what is impossible is to try to fulfill those duties
simultaneously without paying attention to their succession.
If you confuse the second with the first, for instance, you start
thinking that your main task is to restrict—in advance and in the
actor’s place—the range of uncertainties in which you are afraid the
actors will get lost. This means that you take it upon yourself to narrow
down the number of possible social aggregates, to limit the number of
agencies that make actors do things, to exclude as many non-human
objects as possible, to cling to a strict division of labor between natural
and social sciences, and, finally, to maintain a firm belief in sociology
as an autonomous scientific discipline. After such a treatment, it is no
longer possible to trace the five sources of uncertainty that we
have reviewed. Things get even worse when you confuse the third
160 Introduction to Part II
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duty—that of political relevance—with the other two. For perfectly
respectable reasons that are related to the necessity of modernization,
to the project of emancipation, and to the sheer difficulties of empirical
inquiries, you begin to substitute the actor’s composition of the col-
lective with your own definition of what holds them together. You
begin to ask what is a society and in which direction is it headed.
Although I am sure that such an intellectual strategy might have been
productive in the time of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, or Parsons, it has
now become disastrous. When a social explanation is proposed, there is
no longer a way to decide whether it is due to some genuine empirical
grasp, to the application of a standard, to an attempt at social engin-
eering, or to mere laziness. With the confusion of the three successive
duties of social science, the social has become thoroughly untraceable
even though social explanations keep proliferating effortlessly.
To be faithful to the project of a science of a social—now that the
words social and science have both been refurbished—we have to
overcome the mix-up without abandoning any of the three original
duties. After having shown in Part I how we could deploy the actors’
own world-making abilities, and before tackling in the Conclusion the
tricky question of political interest, I now have to show that it’s
possible to follow the settlement of controversies without confusing
such an inquiry with the other two. Yes, controversies are closed and
uncertainties are settled, but this is also the labor of the actors them-
selves so this too products empirical traces and so it can be thoroughly
documented. As soon as we let the actors clean up, so to speak, their
own mess, some order can be retrieved which is quite different from
the inquirers’ own attempts at limiting controversies in advance.
Unfortunately, if it’s so difficult to deploy the five sources of uncer-
tainty, then it’s going to be even trickier to follow the means through
which they are stabilized. In this new research I will seem to be even
more at loggerheads with ‘traditional sociology’. I will argue that what
has rendered the social untraceable is the very existence of society or,
more generally, of a social realm. This time the problem doesn’t come
fromtheambiguityof thewordsocial,but fromaconfusion,entertained
early on in the historyof sociology,betweenassembling thebody politic
and assembling the collective. Even though both operations have a lot
in common, the two should be kept apart if they are to succeed at all.
To put it broadly, society, this 19th century invention, is an odd
transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18th century and
the collective of the 21st.201 By asking society to do two jobs at once,
201 On the invention of the very notion of society, see Bruno Karsenti (2003), ‘Auto-
rité, pouvoir et société: La science sociale selon Bonald’ and Michel Foucault (2003),
‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976.
Introduction to Part II 161
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that is, to make the collective traceable and to play the role of a
substitute for politics, it has never been able to do either of them
properly. The supposed existence of a society has precluded the emer-
gence of a well-assembled collective as well as thwarted all efforts at
defining the odd sort of corporate body that political activities should
remain able to form.
Even though it will become clear only at the end of this book, the
reason of this double bind can be stated simply: the body politic was
supposed, by construction, to be virtual, total, and always already there.
There is nothing wrong with this since it had to solve the impossible
problem of political representation, fusing the many into one and
making the one obeyed by the many. Only political action is able to
trace, by a continuous circular movement, this virtual and total as-
sembly that is always in danger of disappearing altogether.202 This is
what Walter Lippmann had designated by the apt word phantom, the
Phantom Public.203 From the myth of the social contract onward, the
body politic has always been, as John Dewey put it in his answer to
Lippmann, a problem, a ghost always in risk of complete dissolution.
Never was it supposed to become a substance, a being, a sui generis
realm that would have existed beneath, behind, and beyond political
action. What has struck all readers in Hobbes’s sketch of his Leviathan
is how fragile ‘this mortal god’ was and how quickly it could dissolve.
For all to see, this giant had feet of clay.204
But as soon as you displace the mode of existence of the public into
that of a society, so as to save you the immense, contradictory, and
arduous task of composing it through political means, its problematic
fragility vanishes.205 The body politic transmogrified into a society is
supposed to hold up under its own force even in the absence of any
202 On the necessary ‘spin’ of political enunciation, see Bruno Latour (2003b), ‘What if
We Were Talking Politics a Little?’ (2003).
203 Walter Lippmann (1927 [1993]), The Phantom Public. I am following here the work
of Noortje Marres on Dewey and Lippman’s political philosophies. See Noortje Marres
(2005), ‘No Issue, No Politics’. The fragility of political personae is one of the great
lessons drawn from Ernst Kantorowicz (1997), The King’s Two Bodies. This is the reason
why the state is always the product of a continuing trial. See Dominique Linhardt (2004),
‘La force de l’Etat en démocratie: La République fédérale d’Allemagne à l’épreuve de la
guérilla urbaine 1967–1982’.
204 Although he takes it negatively instead of positively, Bourdieu summarizes per-
fectly this frailty when defining political representation: ‘So delegation – this originary
act of constitution in both the philosophical and political senses of the word – is an act of
magic which enables what was merely a collection of several persons, a series of juxta-
posed individuals, to exist in the form of a fictitious person, a corporatio, a body, a
mystical body incarnated in a social body, which itself transcends the biological bodies
which compose it (‘‘corpus corporatum in corpore corporato’’).’ Pierre Bourdieu (1991),
‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’, p. 208.
205 Remember that I have chosen to follow Bauman’s decisive insight about
the invention of sociology as a substitute to politics. See Bauman, Intimations of
Postmodernity.
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political activity.206 Although it remains invisible, the giant body
politic is now said to have had its feet solidly fastened to a sturdy
pedestal. All the difficulties of grasping the social start from such an
impossible feat of metallurgical fiction: the moving shape of the
Phantom Public now cast in bronze.
Whereas the body politic was ceaselessly traced by politics, society is
there whether we like it or not. And instead of seeing this as a contra-
diction or technical impossibility, social scientists will take this
ghostly presence as the best proof of its mysterious existence. Only
now does the Phantom become a ghoul, the Leviathan turned into a
behemoth. But it does not require much effort to see that a virtual and
always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the
collective to be assembled: if it’s already there, the practical means to
compose it are no longer traceable; if it’s total, the practical means
to totalize it are no longer visible; if it’s virtual, the practical means to
realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view. As long as
we detect behind the collective the shadow of society and behind
society the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can
proceed forward.207 To put it even more bluntly: either there is society
or there is sociology. You can’t have both at once as Gabriel Tarde warned
his readers when he saw the discipline taking such a wrong turn.
Naturally, all social theorists know this perfectly well and this is why
each in his or her own way has made efforts to extirpate their inquiries
out of the shadows of a society.208 They all have stated that society is a
virtual reality, a cosa mentale, a hypostasis, a fiction. But by maintain-
ing it where it was, if only to criticize it, they have never been able to
do more than carve a little niche for themselves inside the virtual, total
body that they claimed did not really exist. So, through a strange twist
of fate, society became at once what was always criticized as a fiction
and what was always there nonetheless as the impassable horizon of all
discussions concerning the social world.209 Whatever the solution, it
remained stranded like a whale, yes a leviathan, beached on a seashore
206 See John Dewey (1927 1954), The Public and Its Problems and his critique of
Hegelianism in politics.
207 ‘The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated
the public as an immature shadowy executive of all things. The confusion is deep-seated
in a mystical notion of society.’ In Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 137.
208 For a recent inquiry into the state of the art, see Nicholas Gane (2004), The Future of
Social Theory.
209 Thanks to the illusory power of dialectics, it’s sometimes this very contradictory
naturethat is takenastheverycirculardefinitionofsocietyitself.This isclear inCastoriadis
The Imaginary Institutionof Societybutalso in thenotionof self-transcendencedeveloped in
Jean Pierre Dupuy (1992), Introduction aux sciences sociales. Logique des phénomènes collectifs
and in the argument by Luhmann regarding the notion of autopoiesis of Humberto
R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living. Although they might all be tracing circles, the body politic, society, and organ-
isms do not carry the same entities and are not transported by the same vehicles.
Introduction to Part II 163
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where Lilliputian social scientists tried to dig it a suitable abode. Of
late, the smell of this decaying monster has become unbearable. There
is no way to succeed in renewing social theory as long as the beach has
not been cleared and the ill-fated notion of society entirely dissolved.
To do so we have to extract out of it both the body politic that it has
usurped as well as the collective that it keeps hiding.210
That society stands in the way of sociology and of politics is not so
surprising for those of us in science studies who saw earlier how
nature, too, stood in the way. Both monsters are born in the same
season and for the same reason: nature assembles non-humans apart
from the humans; society collects humans apart from the non-
humans. As I have shown elsewhere at length, both are twin freaks
generated to stifle the very possibility of a rightful composition of the
collective.211 But if it’s relatively easy to show the political compos-
ition of nature, so obvious is the difference between matters of con-
cern and matters of fact, society, through some strange perversity,
remains more obdurate, more obvious, more taken for granted. The
abyss between the social as association and the social as substance
seems more difficult to recognize. So much so that even my own
efforts at reducing the power of nature have been taken as a reinforce-
ment of that of society! The latter seems to be able to reign where the
former has been forced to give up some of its sovereignty. Hence the
unfortunate success of the notion of ‘social construction’ I scrutinized
earlier. And yet, there is no escape. After nature, it is society that has to
go. If not, we will never be able to collect the collective.
How can we move on and render the social fully traceable again? By
following the same strategy as in Part I. We should deploy the full
range of controversies instead of attempting to decide by ourselves
what is the best starting point to follow it. Once again, we should be
more abstract and more relativist than at first anticipated. This time
I will take as our point of departure the very difficulty social scientists
seem to have had in locating their inquiries at the right locus. By
choosing such a roundabout way, we are going to discover that the
two collectors they have chosen are simply not there because one
specific problem—how to solve the political relations of the Many
and the One—has been confused with another: how to compose the
collective. This discovery will allow us to escape once and for all the
large shadow still cast by the fast disappearing society and, hopefully,
to render the social fluid traceable at last.
210 I will account later with the notion of ‘panorama’ for the reasons why this way of
summarizing the social has nonetheless such a powerful grip on imagination, see p. 183.
211 Even though I don’t treat the question of nature as thoroughly here, it’s important
to remember that my argument makes no sense if the balance between nature and
society is not kept firmly in place.
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**WritingtheImplosion_TeachingtheWorldOneThingataTime.pdf**
This file is too large to display. [View in new window](https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/writingtheimplosion-teachingtheworldonethingatatime-pdf)
**ReassemblingtheSocialIntro3.pdf**
This file is too large to display. [View in new window](https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/reassemblingthesocialintro3-pdf)
**ReassemblingtheSocialIntro3.pdf**
This file is too large to display. [View in new window](https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/reassemblingthesocialintro3-pdf)
**## reflection1Brand.docx**
The
[_IACP Reducing Violence and Crime_](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489?wrap=1) [Download IACP Reducing Violence and Crime](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489/download?download_frd=1) pamphlet gives four law enforcement strategies to reduce violence and crime in America:
· Prevention Programs
· Community Outreach
· Enforcement Strategies
· Government-Wide Coordination
Reflection Paper 1 (Human Technology)
Reflection Papers should be about 300-500 words. These should focus on one or two readings from the week before, either comparing them or focusing more fully on one. It’s preferable for me for you to discuss the first reading on the syllabus or what seems to be the main one each week, but if something else truly speaks to you, focus on that.
) You say in ~two sentences what you thought the main argument of the reading was;
) in ~1 sentence mention something you learned;
) include ~2 “somethings” that you feel connects to your own life or experiences.
) ask at one question you did not understand in the reading
)For my sanity, mention something from the lecture so I know I am not just speaking into the void. It can be anything and not necessarily related to the rest of the paper.
This is mostly just a place for you to gather and collect your thoughts, apply what you are learning to your life, and reflect on it.
Reference (have attached the readings for this week)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s)
**## ReassemblingtheSocialIntro2.pdf**
Introduction to Part II: Why is
it so Difficult to Trace the
Social?
It should be the simplest thing in the world. We are all bound by social
interactions; we all live in a society; and we are all cultural animals.
Why do these ties remain so elusive? In the preceding pages, one
reason has been offered up as an explanation. The adjective ‘social’
designates two entirely different phenomena: it’s at once a substance, a
kind of stuff, and also a movement between non-social elements. In
both cases, the social vanishes. When it is taken as a solid, it loses its
ability to associate; when it’s taken as a fluid, the social again disap-
pears because it flashes only briefly, just at the fleeting moment when
new associations are sticking the collective together. Although it
seemed at first sight that the subject matter of social sciences was
easy to locate thanks to the massive and ubiquitous evidence of the
social order, it now appears that it’s just the opposite: there is nothing
more difficult to grasp than social ties. It’s traceable only when it’s
being modified. Physiologists have shown that for a perception to take
place, continuous movements and adjustments are necessary: no
movement, no feeling. This is true for the senses of sight and hearing
as well as for taste, smell, and touch.200 If you clasp someone’s hand
and keep the grasp perfectly still, very soon you no longer feel any-
thing but a vague, embarrassing dullness—even if it’s the hand of your
beloved. With the absence of movements has come a blurring of the
senses. The same is true of the ‘sense of the social’: no new association,
no way to feel the grasp.
This is why to renew the feeling for social connections I had to
oppose two different types of methods. One that I called ‘sociology
of the social’ tries to keep together as firmly as possible and as long as
possible elements which it claims are made of some homogeneous
200 See the beautiful experiment with rapid-eye movement and its application in
portraits in R.C. Miall and John Tchalenko (2001), ‘A Painter’s Eye Movements: A
Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing’.
Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2005. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780199256044.003.0009.
D
ow
nloaded from
https://academ
ic.oup.com
/book/52349/chapter/421264975 by N
ew
York U
niversity Libraries user on 08 August 2026
stuff; the other—which I referred to as ‘sociology of associations’—
tries to fathom controversies about the range of heterogeneous elem-
ents that may be associated together. In one case, we know roughly
what the social world is made of—it’s made ‘of’ or ‘in’ the social; in the
other, we should always begin by not knowing what it’s made of. Thus,
much like the pharmakon of the Greeks, the search for the social
becomes either a remedy or a powerful poison depending on the
dose and on the timing. Freshly grounded into small and timely
doses, it allows the observer to detect the new associations that have
to be constantly reshuffled in order to gather once more a collective
that is threatened by irrelevance. But if you let the elements that have
been bundled together pass their ‘sell by dates’, they will begin to rot.
If you persist in ingesting them, they will lead to complete paralysis.
You begin to take what has been connected together for a special type
of fabric: the social explains the social. You have entered a world that is
no longer traceable, a world that is in danger of being quickly invaded
by the fairies, dragons, heroes, and witches of critical sociology.
But how is it possible to have two completely opposite meanings for
the same adjective? It can be explained, I think, because the social
sciences have pursued simultaneously three different tasks: document-
ing the various ways in which the social is built by its members’ ingeni-
ousness; settling the controversies about the social by limiting the
range of entities at work in the world; and trying to solve the ‘social
question’ by offering some prosthesis for political action. There is
nothing wrong with these goals since sociology, the ‘science of living
together’, should indeed be able to fulfill the three following duties: it
should be able to deploy the full range of controversies about which
associations are possible; it should be able to show through which
means those controversies are settled and how such settlements are
kept up; and it can help define the right procedures for the composition
of the collective by rendering itself interesting to those who have been
the object of study. But what is impossible is to try to fulfill those duties
simultaneously without paying attention to their succession.
If you confuse the second with the first, for instance, you start
thinking that your main task is to restrict—in advance and in the
actor’s place—the range of uncertainties in which you are afraid the
actors will get lost. This means that you take it upon yourself to narrow
down the number of possible social aggregates, to limit the number of
agencies that make actors do things, to exclude as many non-human
objects as possible, to cling to a strict division of labor between natural
and social sciences, and, finally, to maintain a firm belief in sociology
as an autonomous scientific discipline. After such a treatment, it is no
longer possible to trace the five sources of uncertainty that we
have reviewed. Things get even worse when you confuse the third
160 Introduction to Part II
D
ow
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ic.oup.com
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ew
York U
niversity Libraries user on 08 August 2026
duty—that of political relevance—with the other two. For perfectly
respectable reasons that are related to the necessity of modernization,
to the project of emancipation, and to the sheer difficulties of empirical
inquiries, you begin to substitute the actor’s composition of the col-
lective with your own definition of what holds them together. You
begin to ask what is a society and in which direction is it headed.
Although I am sure that such an intellectual strategy might have been
productive in the time of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, or Parsons, it has
now become disastrous. When a social explanation is proposed, there is
no longer a way to decide whether it is due to some genuine empirical
grasp, to the application of a standard, to an attempt at social engin-
eering, or to mere laziness. With the confusion of the three successive
duties of social science, the social has become thoroughly untraceable
even though social explanations keep proliferating effortlessly.
To be faithful to the project of a science of a social—now that the
words social and science have both been refurbished—we have to
overcome the mix-up without abandoning any of the three original
duties. After having shown in Part I how we could deploy the actors’
own world-making abilities, and before tackling in the Conclusion the
tricky question of political interest, I now have to show that it’s
possible to follow the settlement of controversies without confusing
such an inquiry with the other two. Yes, controversies are closed and
uncertainties are settled, but this is also the labor of the actors them-
selves so this too products empirical traces and so it can be thoroughly
documented. As soon as we let the actors clean up, so to speak, their
own mess, some order can be retrieved which is quite different from
the inquirers’ own attempts at limiting controversies in advance.
Unfortunately, if it’s so difficult to deploy the five sources of uncer-
tainty, then it’s going to be even trickier to follow the means through
which they are stabilized. In this new research I will seem to be even
more at loggerheads with ‘traditional sociology’. I will argue that what
has rendered the social untraceable is the very existence of society or,
more generally, of a social realm. This time the problem doesn’t come
fromtheambiguityof thewordsocial,but fromaconfusion,entertained
early on in the historyof sociology,betweenassembling thebody politic
and assembling the collective. Even though both operations have a lot
in common, the two should be kept apart if they are to succeed at all.
To put it broadly, society, this 19th century invention, is an odd
transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18th century and
the collective of the 21st.201 By asking society to do two jobs at once,
201 On the invention of the very notion of society, see Bruno Karsenti (2003), ‘Auto-
rité, pouvoir et société: La science sociale selon Bonald’ and Michel Foucault (2003),
‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976.
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that is, to make the collective traceable and to play the role of a
substitute for politics, it has never been able to do either of them
properly. The supposed existence of a society has precluded the emer-
gence of a well-assembled collective as well as thwarted all efforts at
defining the odd sort of corporate body that political activities should
remain able to form.
Even though it will become clear only at the end of this book, the
reason of this double bind can be stated simply: the body politic was
supposed, by construction, to be virtual, total, and always already there.
There is nothing wrong with this since it had to solve the impossible
problem of political representation, fusing the many into one and
making the one obeyed by the many. Only political action is able to
trace, by a continuous circular movement, this virtual and total as-
sembly that is always in danger of disappearing altogether.202 This is
what Walter Lippmann had designated by the apt word phantom, the
Phantom Public.203 From the myth of the social contract onward, the
body politic has always been, as John Dewey put it in his answer to
Lippmann, a problem, a ghost always in risk of complete dissolution.
Never was it supposed to become a substance, a being, a sui generis
realm that would have existed beneath, behind, and beyond political
action. What has struck all readers in Hobbes’s sketch of his Leviathan
is how fragile ‘this mortal god’ was and how quickly it could dissolve.
For all to see, this giant had feet of clay.204
But as soon as you displace the mode of existence of the public into
that of a society, so as to save you the immense, contradictory, and
arduous task of composing it through political means, its problematic
fragility vanishes.205 The body politic transmogrified into a society is
supposed to hold up under its own force even in the absence of any
202 On the necessary ‘spin’ of political enunciation, see Bruno Latour (2003b), ‘What if
We Were Talking Politics a Little?’ (2003).
203 Walter Lippmann (1927 [1993]), The Phantom Public. I am following here the work
of Noortje Marres on Dewey and Lippman’s political philosophies. See Noortje Marres
(2005), ‘No Issue, No Politics’. The fragility of political personae is one of the great
lessons drawn from Ernst Kantorowicz (1997), The King’s Two Bodies. This is the reason
why the state is always the product of a continuing trial. See Dominique Linhardt (2004),
‘La force de l’Etat en démocratie: La République fédérale d’Allemagne à l’épreuve de la
guérilla urbaine 1967–1982’.
204 Although he takes it negatively instead of positively, Bourdieu summarizes per-
fectly this frailty when defining political representation: ‘So delegation – this originary
act of constitution in both the philosophical and political senses of the word – is an act of
magic which enables what was merely a collection of several persons, a series of juxta-
posed individuals, to exist in the form of a fictitious person, a corporatio, a body, a
mystical body incarnated in a social body, which itself transcends the biological bodies
which compose it (‘‘corpus corporatum in corpore corporato’’).’ Pierre Bourdieu (1991),
‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’, p. 208.
205 Remember that I have chosen to follow Bauman’s decisive insight about
the invention of sociology as a substitute to politics. See Bauman, Intimations of
Postmodernity.
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political activity.206 Although it remains invisible, the giant body
politic is now said to have had its feet solidly fastened to a sturdy
pedestal. All the difficulties of grasping the social start from such an
impossible feat of metallurgical fiction: the moving shape of the
Phantom Public now cast in bronze.
Whereas the body politic was ceaselessly traced by politics, society is
there whether we like it or not. And instead of seeing this as a contra-
diction or technical impossibility, social scientists will take this
ghostly presence as the best proof of its mysterious existence. Only
now does the Phantom become a ghoul, the Leviathan turned into a
behemoth. But it does not require much effort to see that a virtual and
always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the
collective to be assembled: if it’s already there, the practical means to
compose it are no longer traceable; if it’s total, the practical means
to totalize it are no longer visible; if it’s virtual, the practical means to
realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view. As long as
we detect behind the collective the shadow of society and behind
society the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can
proceed forward.207 To put it even more bluntly: either there is society
or there is sociology. You can’t have both at once as Gabriel Tarde warned
his readers when he saw the discipline taking such a wrong turn.
Naturally, all social theorists know this perfectly well and this is why
each in his or her own way has made efforts to extirpate their inquiries
out of the shadows of a society.208 They all have stated that society is a
virtual reality, a cosa mentale, a hypostasis, a fiction. But by maintain-
ing it where it was, if only to criticize it, they have never been able to
do more than carve a little niche for themselves inside the virtual, total
body that they claimed did not really exist. So, through a strange twist
of fate, society became at once what was always criticized as a fiction
and what was always there nonetheless as the impassable horizon of all
discussions concerning the social world.209 Whatever the solution, it
remained stranded like a whale, yes a leviathan, beached on a seashore
206 See John Dewey (1927 1954), The Public and Its Problems and his critique of
Hegelianism in politics.
207 ‘The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated
the public as an immature shadowy executive of all things. The confusion is deep-seated
in a mystical notion of society.’ In Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 137.
208 For a recent inquiry into the state of the art, see Nicholas Gane (2004), The Future of
Social Theory.
209 Thanks to the illusory power of dialectics, it’s sometimes this very contradictory
naturethat is takenastheverycirculardefinitionofsocietyitself.This isclear inCastoriadis
The Imaginary Institutionof Societybutalso in thenotionof self-transcendencedeveloped in
Jean Pierre Dupuy (1992), Introduction aux sciences sociales. Logique des phénomènes collectifs
and in the argument by Luhmann regarding the notion of autopoiesis of Humberto
R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living. Although they might all be tracing circles, the body politic, society, and organ-
isms do not carry the same entities and are not transported by the same vehicles.
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where Lilliputian social scientists tried to dig it a suitable abode. Of
late, the smell of this decaying monster has become unbearable. There
is no way to succeed in renewing social theory as long as the beach has
not been cleared and the ill-fated notion of society entirely dissolved.
To do so we have to extract out of it both the body politic that it has
usurped as well as the collective that it keeps hiding.210
That society stands in the way of sociology and of politics is not so
surprising for those of us in science studies who saw earlier how
nature, too, stood in the way. Both monsters are born in the same
season and for the same reason: nature assembles non-humans apart
from the humans; society collects humans apart from the non-
humans. As I have shown elsewhere at length, both are twin freaks
generated to stifle the very possibility of a rightful composition of the
collective.211 But if it’s relatively easy to show the political compos-
ition of nature, so obvious is the difference between matters of con-
cern and matters of fact, society, through some strange perversity,
remains more obdurate, more obvious, more taken for granted. The
abyss between the social as association and the social as substance
seems more difficult to recognize. So much so that even my own
efforts at reducing the power of nature have been taken as a reinforce-
ment of that of society! The latter seems to be able to reign where the
former has been forced to give up some of its sovereignty. Hence the
unfortunate success of the notion of ‘social construction’ I scrutinized
earlier. And yet, there is no escape. After nature, it is society that has to
go. If not, we will never be able to collect the collective.
How can we move on and render the social fully traceable again? By
following the same strategy as in Part I. We should deploy the full
range of controversies instead of attempting to decide by ourselves
what is the best starting point to follow it. Once again, we should be
more abstract and more relativist than at first anticipated. This time
I will take as our point of departure the very difficulty social scientists
seem to have had in locating their inquiries at the right locus. By
choosing such a roundabout way, we are going to discover that the
two collectors they have chosen are simply not there because one
specific problem—how to solve the political relations of the Many
and the One—has been confused with another: how to compose the
collective. This discovery will allow us to escape once and for all the
large shadow still cast by the fast disappearing society and, hopefully,
to render the social fluid traceable at last.
210 I will account later with the notion of ‘panorama’ for the reasons why this way of
summarizing the social has nonetheless such a powerful grip on imagination, see p. 183.
211 Even though I don’t treat the question of nature as thoroughly here, it’s important
to remember that my argument makes no sense if the balance between nature and
society is not kept firmly in place.
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**WritingtheImplosion_TeachingtheWorldOneThingataTime.pdf**
This file is too large to display. [View in new window](https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/writingtheimplosion-teachingtheworldonethingatatime-pdf)
**ReassemblingtheSocialIntro3.pdf**
This file is too large to display. [View in new window](https://www.sweetstudy.com/files/reassemblingthesocialintro3-pdf)
**## reflection1Brand.docx**
The
[_IACP Reducing Violence and Crime_](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489?wrap=1) [Download IACP Reducing Violence and Crime](https://durhamtech.instructure.com/courses/73653/files/2739489/download?download_frd=1) pamphlet gives four law enforcement strategies to reduce violence and crime in America:
· Prevention Programs
· Community Outreach
· Enforcement Strategies
· Government-Wide Coordination
Reflection Paper 1 (Human Technology)
Reflection Papers should be about 300-500 words. These should focus on one or two readings from the week before, either comparing them or focusing more fully on one. It’s preferable for me for you to discuss the first reading on the syllabus or what seems to be the main one each week, but if something else truly speaks to you, focus on that.
) You say in ~two sentences what you thought the main argument of the reading was;
) in ~1 sentence mention something you learned;
) include ~2 “somethings” that you feel connects to your own life or experiences.
) ask at one question you did not understand in the reading
)For my sanity, mention something from the lecture so I know I am not just speaking into the void. It can be anything and not necessarily related to the rest of the paper.
This is mostly just a place for you to gather and collect your thoughts, apply what you are learning to your life, and reflect on it.
Reference (have attached the readings for this week)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M249r4jH6nI&t=2s)
**## ReassemblingtheSocialIntro2.pdf**
Introduction to Part II: Why is
it so Difficult to Trace the
Social?
It should be the simplest thing in the world. We are all bound by social
interactions; we all live in a society; and we are all cultural animals.
Why do these ties remain so elusive? In the preceding pages, one
reason has been offered up as an explanation. The adjective ‘social’
designates two entirely different phenomena: it’s at once a substance, a
kind of stuff, and also a movement between non-social elements. In
both cases, the social vanishes. When it is taken as a solid, it loses its
ability to associate; when it’s taken as a fluid, the social again disap-
pears because it flashes only briefly, just at the fleeting moment when
new associations are sticking the collective together. Although it
seemed at first sight that the subject matter of social sciences was
easy to locate thanks to the massive and ubiquitous evidence of the
social order, it now appears that it’s just the opposite: there is nothing
more difficult to grasp than social ties. It’s traceable only when it’s
being modified. Physiologists have shown that for a perception to take
place, continuous movements and adjustments are necessary: no
movement, no feeling. This is true for the senses of sight and hearing
as well as for taste, smell, and touch.200 If you clasp someone’s hand
and keep the grasp perfectly still, very soon you no longer feel any-
thing but a vague, embarrassing dullness—even if it’s the hand of your
beloved. With the absence of movements has come a blurring of the
senses. The same is true of the ‘sense of the social’: no new association,
no way to feel the grasp.
This is why to renew the feeling for social connections I had to
oppose two different types of methods. One that I called ‘sociology
of the social’ tries to keep together as firmly as possible and as long as
possible elements which it claims are made of some homogeneous
200 See the beautiful experiment with rapid-eye movement and its application in
portraits in R.C. Miall and John Tchalenko (2001), ‘A Painter’s Eye Movements: A
Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing’.
Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2005. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780199256044.003.0009.
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stuff; the other—which I referred to as ‘sociology of associations’—
tries to fathom controversies about the range of heterogeneous elem-
ents that may be associated together. In one case, we know roughly
what the social world is made of—it’s made ‘of’ or ‘in’ the social; in the
other, we should always begin by not knowing what it’s made of. Thus,
much like the pharmakon of the Greeks, the search for the social
becomes either a remedy or a powerful poison depending on the
dose and on the timing. Freshly grounded into small and timely
doses, it allows the observer to detect the new associations that have
to be constantly reshuffled in order to gather once more a collective
that is threatened by irrelevance. But if you let the elements that have
been bundled together pass their ‘sell by dates’, they will begin to rot.
If you persist in ingesting them, they will lead to complete paralysis.
You begin to take what has been connected together for a special type
of fabric: the social explains the social. You have entered a world that is
no longer traceable, a world that is in danger of being quickly invaded
by the fairies, dragons, heroes, and witches of critical sociology.
But how is it possible to have two completely opposite meanings for
the same adjective? It can be explained, I think, because the social
sciences have pursued simultaneously three different tasks: document-
ing the various ways in which the social is built by its members’ ingeni-
ousness; settling the controversies about the social by limiting the
range of entities at work in the world; and trying to solve the ‘social
question’ by offering some prosthesis for political action. There is
nothing wrong with these goals since sociology, the ‘science of living
together’, should indeed be able to fulfill the three following duties: it
should be able to deploy the full range of controversies about which
associations are possible; it should be able to show through which
means those controversies are settled and how such settlements are
kept up; and it can help define the right procedures for the composition
of the collective by rendering itself interesting to those who have been
the object of study. But what is impossible is to try to fulfill those duties
simultaneously without paying attention to their succession.
If you confuse the second with the first, for instance, you start
thinking that your main task is to restrict—in advance and in the
actor’s place—the range of uncertainties in which you are afraid the
actors will get lost. This means that you take it upon yourself to narrow
down the number of possible social aggregates, to limit the number of
agencies that make actors do things, to exclude as many non-human
objects as possible, to cling to a strict division of labor between natural
and social sciences, and, finally, to maintain a firm belief in sociology
as an autonomous scientific discipline. After such a treatment, it is no
longer possible to trace the five sources of uncertainty that we
have reviewed. Things get even worse when you confuse the third
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duty—that of political relevance—with the other two. For perfectly
respectable reasons that are related to the necessity of modernization,
to the project of emancipation, and to the sheer difficulties of empirical
inquiries, you begin to substitute the actor’s composition of the col-
lective with your own definition of what holds them together. You
begin to ask what is a society and in which direction is it headed.
Although I am sure that such an intellectual strategy might have been
productive in the time of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, or Parsons, it has
now become disastrous. When a social explanation is proposed, there is
no longer a way to decide whether it is due to some genuine empirical
grasp, to the application of a standard, to an attempt at social engin-
eering, or to mere laziness. With the confusion of the three successive
duties of social science, the social has become thoroughly untraceable
even though social explanations keep proliferating effortlessly.
To be faithful to the project of a science of a social—now that the
words social and science have both been refurbished—we have to
overcome the mix-up without abandoning any of the three original
duties. After having shown in Part I how we could deploy the actors’
own world-making abilities, and before tackling in the Conclusion the
tricky question of political interest, I now have to show that it’s
possible to follow the settlement of controversies without confusing
such an inquiry with the other two. Yes, controversies are closed and
uncertainties are settled, but this is also the labor of the actors them-
selves so this too products empirical traces and so it can be thoroughly
documented. As soon as we let the actors clean up, so to speak, their
own mess, some order can be retrieved which is quite different from
the inquirers’ own attempts at limiting controversies in advance.
Unfortunately, if it’s so difficult to deploy the five sources of uncer-
tainty, then it’s going to be even trickier to follow the means through
which they are stabilized. In this new research I will seem to be even
more at loggerheads with ‘traditional sociology’. I will argue that what
has rendered the social untraceable is the very existence of society or,
more generally, of a social realm. This time the problem doesn’t come
fromtheambiguityof thewordsocial,but fromaconfusion,entertained
early on in the historyof sociology,betweenassembling thebody politic
and assembling the collective. Even though both operations have a lot
in common, the two should be kept apart if they are to succeed at all.
To put it broadly, society, this 19th century invention, is an odd
transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18th century and
the collective of the 21st.201 By asking society to do two jobs at once,
201 On the invention of the very notion of society, see Bruno Karsenti (2003), ‘Auto-
rité, pouvoir et société: La science sociale selon Bonald’ and Michel Foucault (2003),
‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976.
Introduction to Part II 161
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that is, to make the collective traceable and to play the role of a
substitute for politics, it has never been able to do either of them
properly. The supposed existence of a society has precluded the emer-
gence of a well-assembled collective as well as thwarted all efforts at
defining the odd sort of corporate body that political activities should
remain able to form.
Even though it will become clear only at the end of this book, the
reason of this double bind can be stated simply: the body politic was
supposed, by construction, to be virtual, total, and always already there.
There is nothing wrong with this since it had to solve the impossible
problem of political representation, fusing the many into one and
making the one obeyed by the many. Only political action is able to
trace, by a continuous circular movement, this virtual and total as-
sembly that is always in danger of disappearing altogether.202 This is
what Walter Lippmann had designated by the apt word phantom, the
Phantom Public.203 From the myth of the social contract onward, the
body politic has always been, as John Dewey put it in his answer to
Lippmann, a problem, a ghost always in risk of complete dissolution.
Never was it supposed to become a substance, a being, a sui generis
realm that would have existed beneath, behind, and beyond political
action. What has struck all readers in Hobbes’s sketch of his Leviathan
is how fragile ‘this mortal god’ was and how quickly it could dissolve.
For all to see, this giant had feet of clay.204
But as soon as you displace the mode of existence of the public into
that of a society, so as to save you the immense, contradictory, and
arduous task of composing it through political means, its problematic
fragility vanishes.205 The body politic transmogrified into a society is
supposed to hold up under its own force even in the absence of any
202 On the necessary ‘spin’ of political enunciation, see Bruno Latour (2003b), ‘What if
We Were Talking Politics a Little?’ (2003).
203 Walter Lippmann (1927 [1993]), The Phantom Public. I am following here the work
of Noortje Marres on Dewey and Lippman’s political philosophies. See Noortje Marres
(2005), ‘No Issue, No Politics’. The fragility of political personae is one of the great
lessons drawn from Ernst Kantorowicz (1997), The King’s Two Bodies. This is the reason
why the state is always the product of a continuing trial. See Dominique Linhardt (2004),
‘La force de l’Etat en démocratie: La République fédérale d’Allemagne à l’épreuve de la
guérilla urbaine 1967–1982’.
204 Although he takes it negatively instead of positively, Bourdieu summarizes per-
fectly this frailty when defining political representation: ‘So delegation – this originary
act of constitution in both the philosophical and political senses of the word – is an act of
magic which enables what was merely a collection of several persons, a series of juxta-
posed individuals, to exist in the form of a fictitious person, a corporatio, a body, a
mystical body incarnated in a social body, which itself transcends the biological bodies
which compose it (‘‘corpus corporatum in corpore corporato’’).’ Pierre Bourdieu (1991),
‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’, p. 208.
205 Remember that I have chosen to follow Bauman’s decisive insight about
the invention of sociology as a substitute to politics. See Bauman, Intimations of
Postmodernity.
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political activity.206 Although it remains invisible, the giant body
politic is now said to have had its feet solidly fastened to a sturdy
pedestal. All the difficulties of grasping the social start from such an
impossible feat of metallurgical fiction: the moving shape of the
Phantom Public now cast in bronze.
Whereas the body politic was ceaselessly traced by politics, society is
there whether we like it or not. And instead of seeing this as a contra-
diction or technical impossibility, social scientists will take this
ghostly presence as the best proof of its mysterious existence. Only
now does the Phantom become a ghoul, the Leviathan turned into a
behemoth. But it does not require much effort to see that a virtual and
always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the
collective to be assembled: if it’s already there, the practical means to
compose it are no longer traceable; if it’s total, the practical means
to totalize it are no longer visible; if it’s virtual, the practical means to
realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view. As long as
we detect behind the collective the shadow of society and behind
society the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can
proceed forward.207 To put it even more bluntly: either there is society
or there is sociology. You can’t have both at once as Gabriel Tarde warned
his readers when he saw the discipline taking such a wrong turn.
Naturally, all social theorists know this perfectly well and this is why
each in his or her own way has made efforts to extirpate their inquiries
out of the shadows of a society.208 They all have stated that society is a
virtual reality, a cosa mentale, a hypostasis, a fiction. But by maintain-
ing it where it was, if only to criticize it, they have never been able to
do more than carve a little niche for themselves inside the virtual, total
body that they claimed did not really exist. So, through a strange twist
of fate, society became at once what was always criticized as a fiction
and what was always there nonetheless as the impassable horizon of all
discussions concerning the social world.209 Whatever the solution, it
remained stranded like a whale, yes a leviathan, beached on a seashore
206 See John Dewey (1927 1954), The Public and Its Problems and his critique of
Hegelianism in politics.
207 ‘The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated
the public as an immature shadowy executive of all things. The confusion is deep-seated
in a mystical notion of society.’ In Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 137.
208 For a recent inquiry into the state of the art, see Nicholas Gane (2004), The Future of
Social Theory.
209 Thanks to the illusory power of dialectics, it’s sometimes this very contradictory
naturethat is takenastheverycirculardefinitionofsocietyitself.This isclear inCastoriadis
The Imaginary Institutionof Societybutalso in thenotionof self-transcendencedeveloped in
Jean Pierre Dupuy (1992), Introduction aux sciences sociales. Logique des phénomènes collectifs
and in the argument by Luhmann regarding the notion of autopoiesis of Humberto
R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living. Although they might all be tracing circles, the body politic, society, and organ-
isms do not carry the same entities and are not transported by the same vehicles.
Introduction to Part II 163
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where Lilliputian social scientists tried to dig it a suitable abode. Of
late, the smell of this decaying monster has become unbearable. There
is no way to succeed in renewing social theory as long as the beach has
not been cleared and the ill-fated notion of society entirely dissolved.
To do so we have to extract out of it both the body politic that it has
usurped as well as the collective that it keeps hiding.210
That society stands in the way of sociology and of politics is not so
surprising for those of us in science studies who saw earlier how
nature, too, stood in the way. Both monsters are born in the same
season and for the same reason: nature assembles non-humans apart
from the humans; society collects humans apart from the non-
humans. As I have shown elsewhere at length, both are twin freaks
generated to stifle the very possibility of a rightful composition of the
collective.211 But if it’s relatively easy to show the political compos-
ition of nature, so obvious is the difference between matters of con-
cern and matters of fact, society, through some strange perversity,
remains more obdurate, more obvious, more taken for granted. The
abyss between the social as association and the social as substance
seems more difficult to recognize. So much so that even my own
efforts at reducing the power of nature have been taken as a reinforce-
ment of that of society! The latter seems to be able to reign where the
former has been forced to give up some of its sovereignty. Hence the
unfortunate success of the notion of ‘social construction’ I scrutinized
earlier. And yet, there is no escape. After nature, it is society that has to
go. If not, we will never be able to collect the collective.
How can we move on and render the social fully traceable again? By
following the same strategy as in Part I. We should deploy the full
range of controversies instead of attempting to decide by ourselves
what is the best starting point to follow it. Once again, we should be
more abstract and more relativist than at first anticipated. This time
I will take as our point of departure the very difficulty social scientists
seem to have had in locating their inquiries at the right locus. By
choosing such a roundabout way, we are going to discover that the
two collectors they have chosen are simply not there because one
specific problem—how to solve the political relations of the Many
and the One—has been confused with another: how to compose the
collective. This discovery will allow us to escape once and for all the
large shadow still cast by the fast disappearing society and, hopefully,
to render the social fluid traceable at last.
210 I will account later with the notion of ‘panorama’ for the reasons why this way of
summarizing the social has nonetheless such a powerful grip on imagination, see p. 183.
211 Even though I don’t treat the question of nature as thoroughly here, it’s important
to remember that my argument makes no sense if the balance between nature and
society is not kept firmly in place.
164 Introduction to Part II
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ew
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**WritingtheImplosion_TeachingtheWorldOneThingataTime.pdf**
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**ReassemblingtheSocialIntro3.pdf**
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