February Update

I have to apologize for not "blogging" for a long time (have I?), but I was quite busy in the last time.

Most interesting in the last time was the talk Bruno Latour gave at LSE last week, a recording of the talk can be found here.

Latour is a quite impressive speaker, seems to be a funny guy. He spoke about Gabriel Tarde, the old counterplayer of Durkheim, which stands for a sociology of relations/translations. Very keen on presenting a lot of fancy network tools from his students, new datascapes which make new theories necessary (!!! - a good question of a woman in the audience was how many social theories we would have to expect next week).

It is quite interesting that Latour has shifted his focus of interest from the actants to the relations, but in his theory there is not much difference, as every actor is constituted by his relations to other actants in the network.

The enemy, which Latour always adresses is the sociology of the Social, as a own entitiy. In Latours and presumably tardes terms this is the entity to be explained not the explanandum. In fact, I think from my point of view this is a cardboard enemy/dummy. Be honest, "the social" is never a explanaition.

I was interested in what John W. Meyer would say whom I consider to be more on the structural end of the spectrum, but also he would agree that it is the various mediators which make the world culture what it is.

Has Latours position become common sense?