Bourdieu + Simondon = Chernobyl: Outline of General Theory of (Social) Inventions

This article proposes to use the intuitions of Gilbert Simondon and Pierre Bourdieu related to the notion of invention to address the possibility of a sociological explanation that, without sacrificing “social laws” and the possibility of working with longue durée objects, would allow non-human objects to be included in the analysis. First, we reconceptualize the notion of “invention” belonging to Simondon’s projects of individuation theory and mechanology, as well as the project of “history of inventions” proposed by Bourdieu within his genetic structuralism for analysis of the state acts. The institutional context of the Chernobyl accident and the technical genealogy of the RBMK-1000 reactors are then used as examples to describe how the Simondon–Bourdieu general theory of inventions captures the relatively autonomous causal orders of the social and the technical. Two versions of the conceptualization of the notion of associated milieu are explored, offering different heuristics for analyzing cases of such intersections of causal orders. The text concludes by listing the main points of the general theory of inventions, which offers social theory ways to talk about stable causal orders while being ontologically inclusive enough to include technical (and other) types of objects.