Bruno Latour:
Networks, Societies, Spheres
I was going to write about the two articles for which I’m not leading the discussion tonight, but
after reading them, I’ve decided to focus on the two that were least comprehensible
to me. I hope that by framing them
in terms of something else I’m reading, I’ll begin to make some sense out of
them.
For the last two weeks I’ve been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by
Rebecca Skloot and, perhaps because it’s very fresh in my mind, both Latour and Deleuze/Guattari
brought up concepts that made me think of the story of Henrietta Lacks. In
1951, she died of cancer and her cancerous cells, called HeLa, were harvested
and proved to be intensely valuable to cell culturists and other researchers.
The book includes a narrative about Henrietta and her family, woven together
with science and ethics and deception and profit.
I can’t pretend I understood much of what Deleuze and
Guattari were writing about. I do, however, understand rhizomes to a certain
extent. Kudzu comes to mind or, more positively (in the U.S. South anyway),
iris and ginger. Plants whose reproductive structure travels and spreads and
can be divided to create new plants. Some, like kudzu, become invasive because
there is no single reproductive organ and, as D & G note, “a rhizome may be
broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old
lines, or on new lines” (9). While a root system can be traced, a rhizomic
system splits and grows and travels.
The HeLa cells did just that. Most cells split a finite
number of times and die off, but HeLa cells, being cancerous, became immortal
and were divided into test tubes and shipped all over the world for research
purposes. Over time, they changed or were altered but continued to grow. They
also were particularly agile and managed to contaminate other cell cultures. This
particular system was not linear but multiplicitous. While there is a
particular entry point, an original cell culture, it has long since been
subsumed into a mass of growth and divergent research.
Similarly, Latour discusses the meanings of networks and the
idea that nothing is self-contained, that something “looks contained within
itself with well-delineated edges and limits; then something happens, a strike,
an accident, a catastrophe, and suddenly you discover swarms of entities that
seem to have been there all along but were not visible before and that appear
in retrospect necessary for its sustenance” (797). Latour views a network as,
in part, “the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist” (799).
Skloot recognized that HeLa consisted of many “unexpected
beings,” and brought all of them together in a single narrative. She details
the activity system of the cells and their ability to reproduce endlessly which
allows them to interact with the system of biological science which contains
numerous systems of research and discourse. Peripherally, but not
unimportantly, there is Henrietta Lacks the person and the family she left
behind when her body died. Since her cancer cells remained alive, however, the
family eventually found out about their existence and began to interact
unhappily with the science community again. With the story, the actor-network
becomes apparent. Henrietta Lacks was first reduced to her
parts/cells/attributes, then, as information became known about her and her
family and her doctors, she began to grow again until she (the person) was part
of an entire network of research, family and discourse. All of the parts are
interdependent and, with information, the voids between all of the seemingly
disparate parts are starting to shrink.
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