From social to socio-material pathologies: on Latour, subjectivity and materiality

ABSTRACT

This article produces an encounter between the concept of ‘social pathology’ and the work of the philosopher Bruno Latour. It offers an introduction to Latour’s style of thought with regard to subjectivity. It argues that subjectivity is not an interiorized property of people, but a processual accomplishment from associating with different actors, which may be human or non-human. Subjectivity, from this point of view, exists in the interstice between affecting the world and being affected. Building on this Latourian perspective, the article goes on to argue that social pathologies should not be seen as a function of ‘society’, but rather as socio-material patterns of activity that spread across different spaces and places. Thus, the article posits that a more apt term for ‘social pathologies’ would be ‘socio-material pathologies’. It finishes by discussing the implications of these perspectives for both critique and methodology in social research.

KEYWORDS:

• actor-network theory
• Bruno Latour
• materiality
• psychiatry
• social pathologies
• socio-material
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Diagnostic Culture Group at Aalborg University for their helpful comments during the writing of this manuscript. I would further like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Karen H. Ross for her assistance with copy-editing the manuscript.

This manuscript is partially based upon my unpublished master’s thesis as well as a working paper, presented at the conference Qualitative Research in Mental Health 5, Chania, Greece in 2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rasmus Hoffmann Birk is a PhD Student at the Department of Sociology & Social Work, Aalborg University. His research focuses mainly on social work, qualitative methods and materiality, subjectivity and marginality.

ORCiD

Rasmus Hoffmann Birk http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3740-4765

Notes

1. Latour has used the term ‘empirical philosopher’ to describe himself (see Crease et al. 2003)

2. The academic research on psychiatry, psychiatric diagnoses, and mental disorder more broadly is vast, intersecting also with studies of gender, disability, and post-colonialism. In this article I do not consider these literatures fully, as the point is not to make a new understanding of psychiatry or mental disorder, but rather to use psychiatry as an example for a broader argument about subjectivity and materiality and their connection to the concept of social pathologies. For research that looks more broadly at psychiatry and subjectivity through critical lenses inspired by for instance feminism and post-colonialism, see e.g. DelVecchio Good et al. (2008), Das (2001), and C. Mills (2014).

3. Latour arguably differs from Deleuze or Foucault in the attention he gives to the concreteness of objects and the ways in which they prescribe regimes of actions to human beings. However, the connections between Deleuze, Latour, and Foucault lie outside the scope and aim of this paper. See instead Harman (2014), Pyyhtinen and Tamminen (2011), Hekman (2009), Kendall and Michael (2001).

4. Another source of inspiration could possibly be the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who in their theory of the extended mind contest the boundary between skin and skull (Clark and Chalmers 1998).

5. Indeed, ‘the body’ might itself be seen as a network, consisting of many different ‘actors’ such as gut microbes, brain neurons, and muscle fibers to mention a (very) few (see e.g. Rose 2013, 19–20).

6. The question of the normal and the pathological cannot be given full consideration in this article. But see Canguilhem (1978) and Gane (2002, 1998).

7. For considerations about how the empirical materials produced in qualitative research themselves are heterogeneous, see Michael (2004).