Latour, Bruno. “When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of ‘Science Studies’ to the Social Sciences.” British Journal of Sociology. Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 1 (January/March 2000) 107-123.

“when social scientists claim to comprehend something they have left aside what the thingness of this thing actually is!” (112)

“This contribution would of course be lost immediately, if one was again separating out objects into two pots, one for the fetishes which can and should be accounted for as ‘mere social constructions’ because they are soft, and the other for facts, which, by definition, escape all social explanations because they are hard (Latour 1996c). Hence, I devised the neologism ‘factishes’ to remind us o the uselessness of such a dichotomy” (113).

“The old tired theme of social construction has been turned on its head since scholars are now busy trying to show the ingredients with which some lasting order is being maintained” (114).

“Mastery, impartiality, community and disinterestedness are not the hallmarks of those laboratory set-ups” (114).

“A laboratory experiment is a rare, costly, local, artificial set up in which it becomes possible for objects to become relevant for statements made by scientists” (115).

“Nothing is more difficult than to find a way to render objects able to object to the utterances that we make about them” (115).

“If microbes, rock seams, do not have to be protected against biasing the experiments, it is not because they are fully mastered by their scientists, but because they are utterly uninterested in what human scientists have to say about them. It does not mean that they are ‘mere objects’, but that, on the contrary, they will have no scruples whatsoever in objecting to the scientist’s claim by behaving in the most undisciplined ways, blocking the experiments, disappearing from view, dying, refusing to replicate, or exploding the laboratory to pieces. Natural objects are naturally recalcitrant; the last thing that one scientist will say about them is that they are fully masterable” (116).

“To sum up. As I see it, things are unfairly accused of being just ‘things’. More exactly, it might be more rewarding to go back to the etymology of the world (in Anglo-Saxon as well as Roman languages) and to remind ourselves that all things (res and causa in Latin, see Thomas 1980) also means an assembly of a judicial nature gathered around a topic, reus, that creates both conflict and assent” (117).

“When social scientists try to find a hidden structure ‘manipulating’ agents in spite of themselves, they believe they have to imitate the natural sciences’ formidable invention of a divide between primary and secondary qualities, to sue an old but convenient philosophical vocabulary. Primary qualities define the real stuff out of which nature is made, particles, strings, atoms, genes, depending on the discipline, while secondary qualities defines the way that people subjectively represent this same universe. For instance, this table looks brown, polished and quaint, whereas it is really made up of atoms and vacuum” (118).

“Modernist dream—...Natural scientists deal with the primary qualities of the natural world while the social scientists deal with those of Society. The knowledge of what the universe is really like will allow the natural scientists to define all secondary qualities as irrational, private, subjective or culturally respectable (depending on his or her diminishing degree of militancy). While the knowledge of what Society is really like will allow the social scientists to reject all interjections of the actors themselves as so many irrational, subjective, private distorted, perverse, irrelevant or culturally respectable illusions (depending again on the decreasing level of arrogance” (119).

“Things (or quasi-objects or risk, the word does not matter) have the peculiar feature of not being divisible into primary and secondary qualities. They are much too real to be representations, and much too disputed, uncertain, collective, variegated, divisive to play the role of a stable, obdurate, boring primary qualities, furnishing the universe once and for all. What the social sciences, together with the natural, can do, is to represent those things in all of their consequences and uncertainties to the people themselves” (119).

“‘Things’, in the sense given to them by the shocking influence of STS on the natural and social sciences, do not have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain” (120).