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past actions, which then allows human accomplishments from the past, or perhaps
human actors from far away, to bear upon the localised present and perhaps to
circumscribe actions in the local situation (Murdoch 1997b: 329; Serres 1995:87).
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Murdoch (1997b: 328-329) outlines Latour's further argument that human
societies differ from simian ones through the increased mixing of humans and non-
humans in the former, such that, beginning with the delegation of basic activities to
bone and stone tools, human societies gradually attain a level of durability which in
simian societies does not exist. With the human domestication of animals and
plants, the number of non-humans existing alongside people proliferates
exponentially, making it impossible to recognise a pure 'human' society. Industry
and science subsequently increase the proliferation of non-humans mixed up with
humans, all layering on top of older mixings.
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Resources, technologies, animals,
and so on, all actively participate in, refine and frame such processes of interaction,
and this is an observation which spirals back to the basic point about ANT
not
accepting the standard divisions of conventional thought. Within ANT, agency is
conceived of not as some innate or static thing which an organism always possesses,
but rather in a relational sense which sees agency emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials (Callon and Law 1995:502).
This means that anything can potentially have the power to act, whether human or
non-human, and the semiotic term 'actant' is used to refer to this symmetry of
powers.
One upshot for Latour's own approach is thus to rescue the non-human things of
the world for social science, to recover the 'missing masses', and to give them a
'place', a role, an ability to prompt changes, a capacity for agency. In one of his
most recent works, he is led in all seriousness to ascribe thought-and-action to non-
human entities such as a prototype 'rapid personal transit' (RPT) system called
Aramis (Latour 1996). While there are reservations to be voiced about this
ascription (Laurier and Philo 1999; see also below), it is evident that Latour's
pioneering experiments open up a 'space' for contemplating the agency of non-
humans, animals included, and for speculating about them taking their seats in his
envisaged 'parliament of things' (Latour 1993:142-145). In fact, a thought-
experiment along these lines has already been conducted by Callon (1986), when
considering what scallops, exercising a measure of agency, brought to one particular
situation of scientific inquiry. This means that it is not just non-Western or lay
knowledges pushing along this road, nor just a few eccentric Western animal
psychologists; rather, it is also arising in the challenge to social theory occasioned by
ANT and its derivations. These latter approaches are providing an impetus to the
statements of a new animal geography ready to debate, for example, the agency of
animals (see esp. Wilbert 1999), implying that it is indeed not foolish to be talking
about animals possessing a measure of agency and being capable of resisting—not just
transgressing—human norms such as the spatial orderings of the city, the farm or the
zoo.
What is more, Latour explicitly debates his anthropomorphism, his readiness to
relocate qualities, attributes and capacities normally only associated with humans to
