SPECIAL ISSUE ON KNOWLEDGE IN PRACTICE

Urban ANTs: A Review EssayUrban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies.Ignacio Faras and Thomas Bender (Eds.). New York: Routledge. 2010.ISBN 0415486629. 333 pages, $150.00 (cloth)

David J. Madden

Published online: 17 June 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

The field of urban studies is not only an observer of the city but also a participant in its struggles.By framing the city as essentially distinct from the suburb or the village; by making the cityknowable as a territory that can be acted upon in particular ways; by intervening in debatesabout urban policy; or by legitimizing controversial political projectsin myriad ways, urbanstudies contributes to shaping the object of its research gaze. One of the tasks for urban studies,then, should be able to account for how urban practice and urban knowledge bring each otherinto being. This task is particularly urgent during this period when urbanists are, once again,speaking of the fields crisis, confusion, and fragmentation (May and Perry 2005; Amin 2007).Hence the topic of Urban Assemblages is an important and timely one. It is an inquiry into(and a demonstration of) how the field of urban studies is changed by actor-network theory, atype of sociology developed through the study of science, technology and knowledge.

In Urban Assemblages, Ignacio Faras and Thomas Bender have collected a number ofarticles that probe the city using analytical tools developed by actor-network theory (oftenreferenced by its initials, ANT). The volume also includes interviews with threegeographers and sociologistsNigel Thrift, Stephen Graham and Rob Shieldswho havebrought ideas from ANT into the study of the urban. The book presents some of the majorideas of a discourse that is already an influential and growing resource for urban sociologyand other nearby fields like geography, urban design and architecture. So UrbanAssemblages is a vital, even necessary, contribution. Yet when it comes down to it, ANTchanges urban studies in many ways and not all of them are improvements. ANT does havesomething original to add to urban studies, but its role should probably be limited. UrbanAssemblages is not uncritical in its adoption of ANT for urban studies, but it does not go farenough in working through the potential problems raised by the actor-network portrayal ofthe city. Some well-known sticking points within ANT become even sharper when it isbrought into urban sociology; some necessary urban questions are impossible to ask usingANT alone. A little ANT can help urbanists see the city anew; a lot of ANT would leaveurban studies intellectually and politically impoverished.

Qual Sociol (2010) 33:583589DOI 10.1007/s11133-010-9167-8

D. J. Madden (*)Sociology Program, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000, USAe-mail: dmadden@bard.edu

Very briefly: ANT, the sociology of associations or sociology of translation, sees allthings as networks of actors. Networks are working alliances of multifarious composition.Actors, or actants, are, as the name implies, things that actanything that resists, impactsor translates other things. Actants in ANT, famously, are human as well as non-human,animate as well as inanimate, material as well as ideational, large and small, those thingscalled natural, cultural, and social. As Bruno Latour puts it in an early programmaticstatement, ANT starts from the ideas of irreducibility and infinite combinability: Nothingcan be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everythingmay be allied to everything else (Latour 1993, p. 163). Despite the word theory in itsname, ANT is not a theory. It is a method for framing field sites and research objects. It isan argument for what sociology should and should not be. And it is an account of whatexists and a linked set of claims about how to generate valid knowledge about the world;along these lines, Harman (2009) refers to ANTs metaphysics. Staunchly opposed toessentialism of any sort, ANT sees the world as immanent, contingent, absolutelyheterogeneous, and as ontologically flat, disclosing no other levels, final explanations orhidden core. ANT is thoroughly constructivist, although it has a number of smart criticismsto make of the language of social construction (Latour 2003). Whereas social constructionsays, that which appears natural is actually social, ANT sees the society/nature divisionitself as an effect that needs to be analyzed and completely rejects the stability of thesocial or the natural as categories. It claims, in contrast: that which appears to be onething is actually a temporary negotiated settlement between many different things whilerefusing to take an a priori position on the status of these things.

The prime ANT injunction is to follow the actors themselves (Latour 2005b,p. 12). This should be done while staying true to the principle of generalized symmetry(Callon 1986), which holds that human and nonhuman actors should be described usingcommon concepts. It is impossible to point to a set of findings or conclusions to be drawnfrom actor-network studies, although certain network tendencies have been noted. Studiesin this tradition often uncover the heterogeneity and multiplicity of ostensibly well-integrated networks. Actants often attempt to make themselves obligatory passagepoints which are necessary for the continued success of the network. When all is runningcorrectly, networks often manage to black box themselves, hiding their artificialityunder the illusion of integrality. This black boxing only becomes apparent when networksfall apart due to quasi-entropic decay, strategic missteps or intentional refusal on the partof one or another actant.

Arguably ANTs encounter with urban studies is not a new introduction so much as areunion. ANTs attention to the interrelationships between humans and nonhumans; itsattraction to the mechanic and the technical; its curiosity about what happens behind theclosed doors of the laboratory or the trading floor; its focus on infrastructure, linkage anddecayin a variety of ways, ANT could be considered a twin, or even a mutant outgrowth,of urban studies itself. Since the beginning of the 20th century if not longer, urbanists weredescribing society as an agglomeration of networks, and not only when talking about linkedtechnological systems. The urbanist idea of the production of space entails a critique ofabstract knowledge, essentialism and boundedness that is not disharmonious with someANT tenets, and it foregrounds considerations of materiality in ways that are in accordancewith ANT. The intercourse between the putatively natural and the putatively social is an oldtopic in urban geography. Some versions of urban studies independently evolved many ofANTs characteristic traits; Latour (2005b, p. 11) has called William Cronons (1992)Natures Metropolis a masterpiece of ANT even though Cronon wrote his history beforeencountering that literature.

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Urban studies and the actor-network perspective have an undeniable affinity. If ANTsphilo-scientism endears it to the technocratic wing of urban studies, ANTs aesthetic avant-gardism appeals to urbanologys counterculture. Indeed, part of ANTs brilliance is itsmodernistic literary styling. Latours semi-fictional Aramis, or the Love of Technology(1996), written in multiple voices including that of a public transport system, is a work ofsociological cubism. As a genre, it specializes in the surrealistic juxtaposition ofincongruous things: scallops make decisions, microbes make Louis Pasteur, scientificinstruments and office supplies have agency alongside protest movements and governmentprograms. The ANT imaginary is filled with hybrids, cyborgs and monsters. It is no wonderthat ANTs marriage of data and Dada has found a following within urban studies, whichhas long been attracted to the new wave, the futuristic, and the ultramodern and also longbeen fascinated with the arcane, the eccentric, and the uncanny. And some qualities of citiesthemselves might make urban studies particularly fertile territory for ANT. Where subwaylines can be shut down by distant signal failures and architects take into account thebehavioral tendencies of rats, the idea of nonhuman agency is intuitively plausible.

In the spirit of an experiment and proposed as a way out of a scholarly urbanimpasse (p. 1), Urban Assemblages explores the new insights into the city that can begained if one dares to engage in urban studies with the theoretical tools of contemporarysocial science (pp. 12). In his introductory essay, Ignacio Faras argues that there issomething Heideggerian about this venture, for it is the question itself that is primarily atstake (p. 2). ANT takes aim directly at a perennial issue in urban studies: what, exactly, arewe studying when we study the urbanthe city? Urbanization? Space? ANT handles thisby thinking the city as an improbable ontological achievement (p. 2). Urban studies laANT sees the city as a bundle of networks; the task of the urban researcher is thus toexamine the bundling process itself. As Bender puts it:

The metropolis...is made up of networkshuman networks, infrastructural networks,architectural networks, security networks; the list could be almost infinite, and theyare not confined by a circumferential boundary....Networks agglomerate intoassemblages, perhaps a neighborhood, or a crowd at a street festival, or a financialcenter like Wall Street in New York City. The metropolis, then, is an assemblage ofassemblages. (p. 316)

ANT asks: how is it that these urban assemblages come to be assembled as they are?This approach is most successful when drawing sociological attention to new researchobjects or to the contingency and fragility of interaction. In their contribution, Don Slaterand Tomas Arizta analyze some of the institutions, actors and knowledges that performcultural globalization in Aviles, a city in northern Spain. The meaning of and the interfacebetween the global and the local were very different for a fancy cultural institute thanfor students in area schools. Slater and Arizta were fascinated by such a clear case of theperformance of locals and globals....What we believed ourselves to be observing was theprocess of mapping, and acting upon maps, that appealed to entities (e.g. Asturian culture,global culture) which were brought into existence by that very appeal: pure performativity(p. 91). The modifier pure might be overstated; it is implausible that none of the relevantentities were brought into existence in temporalities and spaces beyond the immediateperformance. But their overall point is well taken. Dealing more explicitly with the issue ofhow networks persist through time and space, Anique Hommels, via an analysis ofHighway 75 in Maastricht, describes how elements of the cityscape get so deeply entwinedwith other phenomena that they become obdurate, immovable facts on the ground. Thehighway, entangled with various professions, places, ideas and laws, activates some

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questions and forecloses others. And Israel Rodrguez Giralt, Daniel Lpez Gmez andNoel Garca Lpez provide a mesmerizing study of the use of sound in May Daydemonstrations in Barcelona. Counterposing the civilized, rationalized silent city withthe struggle to be heard, the authors interpret the loudspeaker and the public soundsystemas political instruments that are capable of mobilizing distinct sorts of collectivities. Theyconclude that [a]ll sonorous practices...turn out to be technopolitical practices, as they setup a specific spatiality and collectivity that participates in a sonorous-based politicalstruggle to define the city (p. 191).

The concept of an assemblage, then, can push towards a redefinition of what it means tobe an urban participant. It focuses sociological attention not just on human interaction butalso on the various technologies, categories and materials that make up the city. Faras citesPeter Marcuse, who argues that the idea of the city as an actor is perhaps the mostpolitically loaded...[of] usages, for it implies a harmony of interests within the city; whatsgood for one (generally the business community) is good for all (p. 10). ANT, it seems,opens a new perspective from which to criticize this way of assembling of the city into oneunified, business-friendly actor.

But whereas Marcuse-style critical urban theory expressly engages with politics, ANTpointedly sticks to an apolitical, ironic stance. Thisand not the yoking together of thehuman and nonhumanis where things start to go awry. ANT is unable, fully andsincerely, to explain why sociologists should venture down its particular path withoutresorting to question-begging about what proper sociology should do. Actor-networktheorists are the first to dispute the claim that sociology should strive to become a sciencein the traditional disinterested sense of a gaze directed to a world outside, recognizing thatany study of any group by any social scientist is part and parcel of what makes the groupexist, last, decay, or disappear (Latour 2005b, p. 33). Yet ANTharshly disparaging ofcritical sociologyinsists upon skeptical, value-free inquiry, lamenting that the politicalagenda of many social theorists has taken over their libido sciendi and complaining that aninfatuation with emancipation politics leads sociologists to produce bad science (Latour2005b, p. 49, 52). ANT is thus a weird hybrid indeed: ontological boundary-pushing isgrafted onto epistemological boundary-policing. It verges towards something like a post-social, reconstituted positivism. It also might amount to bad faith, because in practiceespecially when applied to topics beyond the laboratoryANT is often mixed withFoucauldian biopolitics or governmentality studies, Left Heideggerianism, radical democ-racy, or some other intensely political, critical idiom. In these cases it can be seen implicitlylegitimizing itself with a patina of radical politics, although it disavows the idea of politicaland social critique.

Whatever the consequences in science studies, when applied to urban questions, ANTsself-inflicted political fatuousness becomes impossible to ignore. Faras writes that ANTsradicality is a result of its desire to extend relationality beyond language...beyondculture...and beyond communication...to all entities (p. 3). But the very category ofradicalof getting to the root of thingsis completely alien to the actor-networkworldview. ANTs supposed radicality undermines itself. Its version of relationality, farfrom being radical, is so broad and undifferentiated as to blur the many diverse ways thatthings interact, rather than bringing relational difference into sharper focus. Unable to detectexclusion, negation, or antagonism, ANT, unaided by other sociological sensitivities, has ahard time dealing with some of the most obvious and horrific aspects of contemporaryurban life. While it registers that networks decay and break down, this is an insufficient wayto think conflict and inequality. As a consequence, most actor-network studies of cities tendto eschew analyzing exclusion, domination, elitism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation,

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segregation or any other variety of ubiquitous, quotidian urban violence the denial of whichrenders any urban studies paradigm useless at best.

It is one of the virtues of Urban Assemblages that, rather than shying away from thesequestions, it explicitly faces them. Stephen Graham observes about ANT-inspiredperspectives that theres a danger in that tradition that you become preoccupied withminute, minute details which can be very elegant and very enlightening, but which make ita struggle to bring out the political and politicized nature of technological assemblages(p. 204). Nigel Thrift thinks that it is difficult to deny that ANT works best in stronglydefined situations (p. 112). Faras wonders if it is not an implicit critique of ANT and itspossible contribution to urban studies when Rob Shields insists that urban studies shouldnot be an apolitical, philosophical game (p. 298). Offering the most sustainedconsideration of ANTs urban limitations, Thomas Bender worries that ANT seems toremove ethics and politics from social analysis (p. 305) and predicts, If Latour continuesto explore the city, it is likely that he will be forced to expand and enrich ANT in order tocapture institutional power (p. 314). Forced by whom or what? It probably should beunnecessary to make the point that we ought not...to presume the social to be always flatand ahistorical (p. 312). Bender finally asks whether a weak ANT, used analogicallymight be more useful in urban studies than the orthodox version (p. 317). As valuable asthese more sober considerations are, they only appear in the interviews and framing essaysand do not make it into the volumes main chapters. The case studies that do examinepolitics and inequality do so by drawing upon theoretical languages beyond that of actorsand networks.

A number of papers in Urban Assemblages illustrate the quandaries of urban actor-network theory. In their aforementioned study of Aviles, Slater and Arizta cannot explainwhy the city would pursue a strategy of regeneration through creative and culturalindustries (p. 94) without gesturing towards political-economic developments beyond thelanguage of networks; the authors, notably, do not actually affirm ANT in any serious way.In his article on transportation systems in Bogot, Andrs Valderrama Pineda addresses thequestion of how we co-produce urban transport systems and the city (p. 123). The pluralagent of co-production is composed of planners (politicians, engineers, economists,lawyers, communication experts, journalists, consultants, sociologists, historians), citizens,operators, investors and non-human actors and the author of this text among many otheranalysts (ibid.). To include all of these groups in the same category is to obscure veryimportant differences regarding how they produce transportation and the city. Pinedarecognizes this and notes that the process of production is contested, but does not explorethis contestation. Furthermorein this list of co-production agents, why not include, say,janitors who work in the planners office buildings? Or those who would like to work asjanitors but are unemployed? Or those Bogot residents who demand access to publictransportation but do not succeed because of various goals pursued by politicians, planners,or sociologists? Given the scale of ANTs theoretical aspirations, these actors should beincluded. The actor-network literature is filled with lists of this sort; they often appearcompletely arbitrary. In his chapter, Manuel Tironi asks how can Santiagos experimentalmusic scene exist and, in addition, be productive and innovative? (p. 27). His richethnographic data describe tactics for dealing with marginality and maintaining artisticdistinction, against the backdrop of a municipality that seeks to promote only certain typesof culture: a field of ambition, struggle and differentiation, a distinction betweenmainstream and fringe, which belies the image of a fluid, gelleable creative city.

So in some cases, ANT militates against the non-actor-network arguments that coexistwith it uneasily. In other cases, it seems to lead urbanists down blind alleys, as with its

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curious campaign against the concept of scale. Richard G. Smith, for example, asserts thatscale is a prefabricated structure, an unquestionable framework from which one cansubsequently begin to account for what is happening in a given situation (p. 75). AlanLatham and Derek P. McCormack argue that after eliminating the concept of scale, otherforms of association and assemblage come into view (p. 65). But oddly both of thesepieces also seem to acknowledge that it is precisely the point of critical conceptions of scaleto argue against the idea that scale is a fixed feature, which obviates their critique. Theseauthors miss the chance to learn from the literature on scale and globalization about howscale and globality are assembledwhile being willfully nave about the obvious myopiaof a flat ontology.

Urban Assemblages performs a true service by showing how ANT can indeed contributeto urban studies, as well as by raising important questions about that contribution. But itdoes not fully process or contextualize the issues that it raiseswhich is a missedopportunity. As much as an actor-networked urbanism highlights the problems surroundingANTs methodological politics, so too does ANT bring out some of the aporias in urbanstudies; the book could have made a stronger statement here. As well, it might haveweighed in on the unfinished discussion about what is at stake between ANT andcompeting, related discourses like Urban Political Ecology (Heynen et al. 2006; Keil 2005;Castree 2002).

ANT is antithetical to critical sociologyto ethics and politicsby design and not byaccident. For that reason, surely Latour, Callon, and company are tired of hearing thisparticular line of criticism. Despite its protestations to the contrary, something about ANTsuggests, to many, that it could or should be a vehicle for sociological critique. Butfundamentally, its unorthodox ontology clashes with its disengaged neo-positivism. Likethe return of the repressed, the question of ANTs politics constantly reappears, not quietedby antic fantasias like Dingpolitik (Latour 2005a).

Elsewhere, Graham and Marvin more successfully conjure a critical networkedurbanism that seeks to move towards urban democratization in its fullest sense and inall urban contexts (Graham and Marvin 2001, p. 407). Couldnt ANT, in its own way,become a networked critical urban theory (Brenner 2009)? Couldnt ANT provide adecentered-but-still-critical urban sociology of associations, with a lot of interesting casestudies? It seems unlikely. If there is anything left to Horkheimers idea that critical inquirymeans getting to the human bottom of nonhuman things (Horkheimer 1972, p. 143), thena critical ANTcall it CANTis impossible and mutually unwanted. Some actor-networktheory can help urbanists critically rethink the nature of urban phenomena, as UrbanAssemblages demonstrates. But with too much ANT, critical urban studies would beimpossible.

References

Amin, A. (2007). Re-thinking the urban social. City, 11, 100114.Brenner, N. (2009). What is critical urban theory? City, 13, 198207.Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the

fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge?(pp. 196223). London: Routledge.

Castree, N. (2002). False antitheses? Marxism, nature and actor-networks. Antipode, 34, 111146.Cronon, W. (1992). Natures metropolis: Chicago and the great West. New York: Norton.Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networks infrastructures, technological mobilities

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Harman, G. (2009). Prince of networks: Bruno Latour and metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.Heynen, N., Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (Eds.). (2006). In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology

and the politics of urban metabolism. New York: Routledge.Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory: Selected essays. New York: Continuum.Keil, R. (2005). Progress reportUrban political ecology. Urban Geography, 26, 640651.Latour, B. (1993). The pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the love of technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Latour, B. (2003). The promises of constructivism. In D. Idhe & E. Selinger (Eds.), Chasing technoscience:

Matrix for materiality (pp. 2746). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Latour, B. (2005a). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: Or, how to make things public. In B. Latour & P. Weibel

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David J. Madden is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. His research interests include urban studies, political sociology, and social theory.

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Urban ANTs: A Review EssayReferences

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