This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
In noting the shift in contemporary understandings of ‘society’, Latour writes: “It is no longer to be taken as the hidden source of causality which could be mobilized so as to account for the existence and stability of some other action or behaviour (this is at the heart of the systematic effort of actor-network theory). The diffusion of the terms, ‘network’ and ‘fluid’, shows the growing doubts about the notion of an all-encompassing society. In one way, we are witnessing, a century later, the revenge of Gabriel Tarde or Emile Durkheim: society explains nothing but has to be explained. If it is to be accounted for, it will be, by definition, through the presence of many other little things that are not social by nature, but only social in the sense that they are associated with one another” (2000, p. 113, references omitted).
The reference to Cleopatra’s nose is a reference to Hegel’s rendering of necessity and contingency as dialectical opposites which hold within them the seeds of each other. “[W]hat seems necessitated (e.g. the execution of a plan) turns out after all to have been contingent on Cleopatra’s nose” (Hegel 1967, p. 338 [translator’s footnote to para. 118]).
Lochlann Jain uses the term “living in prognosis” to refer to the moment of collision that exists between life and death articulated by Maurice Blanchot in his story ‘The Instant of My Death’ (1994). There is a temporal gap in which life and death intermingle; a moment of transition from being healthy to being ill that the cancer patient experiences. This temporal state she names as “living in prognosis”. The lack of cohesion of language used to describe and to speak of cancer as a disease in some ways mirrors the temporal instability (between life and death) that pervades the experience of someone living in prognosis (Lochlann Jain 2007, pp. 77–78).
Sarah Franklin captures this capacity of biotechnologies very beautifully in writing about Dolly the sheep: “Dolly’s relationship to capital can be described both in terms of how she has extended its existing meanings and how she has transformed these through excess. Like her genetic identity, Dolly’s economic value and her unique significance for emergent biotechnological economies lay in her multi-functionality resulting from the fact that she was made and grown as a cell before being born and bred as a sheep. Above all, Dolly was valuable because she was viable—a viable offspring and an animal model for a technique that confirmed a new means of propagation from cultured cells. She was thus a ‘capital’ animal both in the sense of being a principal animal, or base, for a new line or branch of production, and in the sense of being the initial, original, or primary animal inaugurating an animal lineage that could perform the function of being a capital stock, or fund, out of which future profit could be generated. Dolly manifested capital’s old and new, binding the oldest definitions of capital as ‘stock’… She both epitomized and vastly extended the meaning of livestock, or breed wealth, through her embodiment of new forms of biological control over an expanded array of reproductive functions. (Franklin 2007, p. 47)”
References
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Theses on the philosophy of history. In Illuminations (trans: Harry Zoorn), 245–255. London: Pimlico.
Cooper, Davina. 2007. Opening up ownership: Community belonging, belongings and the productive life of property. Law and Social Inquiry 32: 625–664.
Fletcher, Ruth, Marie Fox, and Julie McCandless. 2008. Legal embodiment: Analysing the body of healthcare law. Medical Law Review 16: 321–345.
Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly mixtures: The remaking of genealogy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Grabham, Emily, Davina Cooper, Jane Krishnadas, and Didi Herman (eds.). 2008. Intersectionality and beyond: Law, power and the politics of location. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish.
Hegel, Georg W.F. 1967. The philosophy of right. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1991. Technology is society made durable. In A sociology of monsters: Essays on power, technology and domination, ed. John Law, 103–132. London: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno. 2000. When things strike back: A possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences. British Journal of Sociology 51(1): 107–123.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lochlann Jain, Sarah. 2007. Living in prognosis: Toward an elegiac politics. Representations 98: 77–92.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the editors, Donatella Alessandrini and Jon Goldberg-Hiller for their thoughtful suggestions.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bhandar, B. Constituting Practices and Things: The Concept of the Network and Studies in Law, Gender and Sexuality. Fem Leg Stud 17, 325–332 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-009-9128-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-009-9128-3