Thomas F. Gieryn

Book ReviewAramis, or the Love of Technology. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pp. x+314.

constructed discourse of power) to reconstitute himself/herself and the social relation. Such a conception of the changeable nature of human action, which reflects David Matza’s (Delinquency and Drift [Wiley, 1964]) concept of “drift,” opens the possibility for transformation of human subjects and the social structures we construct. Thus the authors discuss “recovering subjects,” who include not only “criminals” but all of us who in one way or another are invested in social forms and constructed discourses that do harm. The final chapters focus on various policies and practices that promote recovering subjects and simultaneously transform the political economy into an empowered democracy in which harm is reduced. This book should become the focus of debate and discussion in the years ahead because it provides the basis upon which criminology can indeed be reformulated in new and imaginative ways. The reader who is not already familiar with postmodernist work and its often obscure language, however, will find it exceedingly difficult to extract the authors’ ideas. This is unfortunate because the authors hoped to “introduce the basic ideas of postmodernism” (p. 1) and engage readers in a new discourse. The authors could have done a much better job of guiding the uninitiated through the linguistic labyrinth of postmodernism, thereby making it a more inviting book. Even though this is at times a difficult text, it is nonetheless important reading precisely because it challenges us to examine critically our assumptions about human subjects, the social world, crime, and justice policies.