Monday, December 06, 2004
Here's a citation that enables me to make a point or two, not in entirely well-referenced and nuanced form.... Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant-Network Theory -- Vandenberghe 19 (56): 51 -- Theory, Culture & Society
"This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its 'fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described."
Or, I would argue, the whole rationale for the "actant" construct was simply that sociology (and social science in general, had taken a linguistic turn, and was deep in the grip of the idea that discussion of the materiality and functionality of technology was crude technologi9cal determinism.
But since we have to deal with a world which doesnt just do what we want as a matter of magic, it was necessary to allow nonhuman entities the power to engage in discourse, to negotiate (a favoured and revealing term) with us.
Thus call them actants and treat them as able to engage in this way.
(The worse example oif this in my own experience was a talk about the US space programme, where th Moon was one of the actants along with NASA and some other organisation...)
This also allowed for a move on from the radical relativism of social coinstructivist approaches to science. which didnt have to cope with functionality, but still did run into difficulties when it came to dealing with experiments and observations seeming to have a little more to them than a few lab-lifers say-so.
Now that materiality has been allowed to re-enter social science, perhaps its time to stop using the term "actant" and where appropriate employ terms like "artefact", "entity", "hypothesised object" and so on.
The "sosial shaping" approach at least implies that there is something to be shaped!
While sounding off, whay is it that so few people use Molina's provocative "Sociotechnical Consitutency" approach, which is more elaborated and a better guide to doing research IMHO than ANso-calledT? (Though I do like the terms "stabilisation" and "translation" from ANT.)
"This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its 'fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described."
Or, I would argue, the whole rationale for the "actant" construct was simply that sociology (and social science in general, had taken a linguistic turn, and was deep in the grip of the idea that discussion of the materiality and functionality of technology was crude technologi9cal determinism.
But since we have to deal with a world which doesnt just do what we want as a matter of magic, it was necessary to allow nonhuman entities the power to engage in discourse, to negotiate (a favoured and revealing term) with us.
Thus call them actants and treat them as able to engage in this way.
(The worse example oif this in my own experience was a talk about the US space programme, where th Moon was one of the actants along with NASA and some other organisation...)
This also allowed for a move on from the radical relativism of social coinstructivist approaches to science. which didnt have to cope with functionality, but still did run into difficulties when it came to dealing with experiments and observations seeming to have a little more to them than a few lab-lifers say-so.
Now that materiality has been allowed to re-enter social science, perhaps its time to stop using the term "actant" and where appropriate employ terms like "artefact", "entity", "hypothesised object" and so on.
The "sosial shaping" approach at least implies that there is something to be shaped!
While sounding off, whay is it that so few people use Molina's provocative "Sociotechnical Consitutency" approach, which is more elaborated and a better guide to doing research IMHO than ANso-calledT? (Though I do like the terms "stabilisation" and "translation" from ANT.)
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