Where are the Missing Masses in the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Cosmic Problems

Abstract

Some 35 years ago, in ‘Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, Bruno Latour asked where the missing masses of sociology were. Inspired by an analogous problem in cosmological physics, he argued that sociologists should attend to nonhumans in their descriptions and consider how the material world plays an active role in the worlds they investigate. Since then, with the spread of Actor-Network Theory, the rise of material-semiotic approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the proliferation of ‘new’ materialisms, it may be said that the missing masses of sociology have been found. Returning to the cosmological problem that prompted Latour’s intervention, this article asks if something nevertheless remains missing in today’s missing masses. Reporting on and working from ethnographic engagement with dark matter researchers, this article draws on the work of Étienne Souriau and Martin Savransky to argue that sociologists should attend just as closely to the reality of problems in their descriptions and explore the active role they play in the communities and worlds sociologists study. By understanding how problems come to matter for the people, practices and beings that belong to them, we may better understand the formation of the worlds their activities aim to bring about – and, in this case, the universe itself. In showing how problems are cosmological constituents in their own right – directing, forming and potentially abandoning those who respond to their call – this article argues that attending to problems is not a departure from empiricism but its continuation.