Law and ANT (and its Kin): Possibilities, Challenges, and Ways Forward
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12133 |
| Author | Emilie Cloatre |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 45, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2018
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 646±63
Law and ANT (and its Kin): Possibilities, Challenges, and
Ways Forward
Emilie Cloatre*
This article interrogates the contributions that Actor-Network Theory
(ANT) has made, and can continue to make, to the critical study of law.
Both within its original field of Science and Technology Studies (STS)
and beyond, ANT has enabled a reimagining of the `social' as rela-
tional, heterogeneous, and fluid. In turn, it has argued for a renewed
attention to materiality in social analysis. For law, such approach is
potentially fruitful, significant, and disruptive of a number of assump-
tions of previous (socio-)legal scholarship. In this article, I sketch out
key elements (and critiques) of ANT, previous efforts to bring ANT into
law, and discuss its potential for enhancing understandings of law. At
the same time, I argue that ANT in law is best approached with a
commitment to care, and to kinship, and in conversation with feminist
thinkers, legal ethnographies, and the discrete voices of law.
INTRODUCTION
This article aims to provide a concise guide to how actor-network theory
(ANT) has been used, and could be used, in the context of socio-legal studies
and the critical study of law. The task, however, is not easy, for a number of
reasons. First, ANT has become a vast and shifting field: since its inception
ANT has been critiqued, revisited, reinterpreted, and further developed. It
has also integrated new ideas, nuances, and vocabularies. Suitably, given the
approach it proposes, different versions of ANT have in fact long coexisted.
Second, a broad range of scholarship, that is not explicitly or exclusively
`ANT', has become seen as part of its broader `kinship' (some, but not all, of
it labelled as `post-ANT'). Finally, understandings of what ANT may mean
646
* Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NS, England
e.cloatre@kent.ac.uk
Thanks to the Editorial Board for their invitation to write this piece, and to Emily
Grabham and Thanos Zartaloudis for their feedback on earlier drafts.
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University Law School
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
for law are still evolving, and have themselves been varied. Even though law
has not translated ANT as extensively as other disciplines have, there is no
clear and single identifiable `law and ANT' body of scholarship ± which,
again, is consistent for this type of approach. In this introduction, I am
deliberately adopting a broad reading of what ANT can be said to be about,
rather than advocating that it should be read as a unified set of principles for
legal studies. I argue that while ANT continues to have significant potential
for our understanding of law, it could be at its most useful if we are to adopt
a read ing th at tak es ser ious ly bot h othe r rele vant insi ghts f rom
interdisciplinary legal studies, and feminist and postcolonial critiques of
ANT. As a result, this article calls for a double movement of, first, engaging
ANT's key original ideas in order to reimagine both law and society as fluid
and heterogeneous, and, secondly, of translating it in conversation with other
scholars that have enabled us to complicate both our understanding of the
multiple lives of law in practice, and of the significance of a `standpoint' in
theorizing. I wish, then, to propose not a definitive guide to what ANT can
do for legal studies, but a more modest set of suggestions as to how it could
be used to productively help us further unpack the complexity and diversity
of the liveliness of law that others have also drawn out, beyond its institu-
tions and its own internal claims, so as to venture into new terrains through
relational, material/semiotic thinking ± a suggestion, thus, to approach ANT
with an ethics of `thinking with'.
1
The article starts with a brief summary of the origins of ANT, of its core
concepts, and of some of its feminist kin (which I see as particularly
productive for thinking through ANT in legal studies). It moves on to
explore how it has been taken up in legal scholarship, both in relation to
materiality and to the fluidity of the social. It draws attention to Bruno
Latour's much commented upon engagement with law, while interrogating
other potential readings of ANT for law, and alternative intellectual agendas.
It concludes by proposing that ANT in law be read with a commitment to
care, and to kinship, and in conversation with feminist thinkers, legal
ethnographies, and the discrete voices of law.
BACKGROUND
Although this short piece does not allow for a full history of ANT's complex
origins, it is worth briefly summing up some of its key aspects.
2
ANT
emerged from Science and Technology Studies (STS), relatively early in the
development of the discipline. Its foundational texts were written throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, and its ideas have since then continued to be translated
647
1 D.J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).
2 For a more thorough history see, for example, M. Michael, Actor-Network Theory:
Trials, Trails and Translations (2017).
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff Unicersity Law School
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