The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias, Celia Roberts, Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias, Celia Roberts

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351619721
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of 'second generation' ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities.

The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT's dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT's involvement in 'real world' endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors' recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume.

The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.

Section 1

Some elements of the ANT paradigm(s)

Ignacio Farías, Anders Blok and Celia Roberts

It cannot be repeated enough: ANT is neither a theory nor a method. So, what is it? A productive answer has been that ANT entails a sensitivity for engaging with the world – not a central perspective, but an open repository of terms and texts, concepts and accounts, enacting and testing modes of attuning to the social life of things, to what an actor might be and to how things and actors coexist, clash, differ and associate. The figure of the repository evokes Thomas Kuhn’s first understanding of scientific paradigms as sufficiently unprecedented and sufficiently open ‘exemplars’ to which scholars come back looking for inspiring problematisations. ANT could be then understood as a repository of paradigms that have shaped the intellectual practices of a whole community of scholars.

The contributions to this section deepen this understanding of ANT as a repository of paradigms by paying attention to what lies ‘besides’ (para) what is said and ‘shown’ (deiknynai) in such exemplars – the most literal meaning of the concept of paradigm. This also corresponds to the second and most influential way in which Kuhn deployed the concept of a scientific paradigm: A ‘matrix’ of concepts, methods, sensibilities, procedures, values, commitments and assumptions permitting the collective and collaborative advancement and articulation of scientific inquiries. So, while what is said and shown in paradigmatic ANT exemplars resembles a plural repository of concepts and accounts, what lies besides these exemplars is a certain mode (and skilled practice) of relating theory and methods, concepts and descriptions, problems and valuations, and epistemic devices and critical commitments. Exploring ANT as a scientific paradigm in this second sense requires us to focus less on ANT terms and texts than on ANT as a skilled practice or a mode of doing.

With this aim in mind, we invited authors to reflect upon modes of problematising, inquiring, comparing, conceptualising, writing and criticising with or near ANT. We certainly do not think that these elements cover all key aspects of ANT nor that the responses offered by our authors reflect an uncontested doxa: There are more questions to be asked and lot to discuss. Yet, our authors offer conceptually powerful and truly original engagements with at least some elements of ANT paradigm(s).

The tour de force begins with Daniel López-Gómez’s chapter addressing this section’s concerns straight on. ‘What if ANT wouldn’t pursue agnosticism but care?’, he asks, answering with a story of initiation into the arts and crafts of ANT. Drawing on his work during the last 15 years on care arrangements for older people, López explores the epistemic and ethico-political effects of two modes of problematising with ANT. If the agnostic mode was essential to problematising the sociotechnical setting-up of a telecare system, the care mode forced itself upon the researcher through experiences of disconcertment resulting from encounters with the fragile daily life arrangements of telecare users. López explores the different types of ethico-political commitments for ANT researchers resulting from agnostic and caring modes of doing ANT.

We engage secondly with practices of making concepts. Adrian Mackenzie sets off his discussion of such practices with two observations: Firstly, concepts are not fundamentally different from any other objects; and, secondly, by often using the suffixes -ant and -ent, ANT has a tendency to create concepts denoting transitive relations. ANT concepts, he then suggests, might be better understood as ‘conceptants’ – a term that figures concepts as actants. Accordingly, the key question is how to make concepts more real. Mackenzie argues that there are some important lessons to be learned from how marmalade, clothes, code and salto-flips are made. Drawing on personal experience, ethnographic research and media accounts, Mackenzie discusses how ANT concepts can be made sticky, strong, trackable and lively.

Is this the radical empiricism that ANT aims to cultivate? And is this in any sense ethnographic? Britt Ross Winthereik’s contribution is the first of many in this volume that reflects upon current encounters of ANT and anthropology. In her case, the focus is on how the ethnographic is and has been practised and conceptualised in both fields. Drawing on fieldwork research in a technology fair, Winthereik describes how she encountered not just interlocutors and technical artefacts, but also concepts that reflected and diffracted the concepts she would bring into the field. She suggests that ANT’s radical empiricism – epitomised in the dictum ‘follow the actors’ – could be productively reinvented through an ethnography of conceptual relations and recursions.

Atsuro Morita engages with a similarly productive and equivocal question: Can ANT compare with anthropology? By recounting the history of comparison in anthropology and situating ANT in relationship to this history, Morita makes an important case to think ANT’s self-description as an infralanguage – where the concepts and problems of a practice need to be stronger than those of the analyst – as related (and thus comparable) to the deployment of recursive comparisons in anthropology – where anthropological modes of thinking and inquiring are compared with the modes of thinking and inquiring encountered in the field. Following a technology transfer project from Japan to Thailand, Morita complicates anthropology’s intellectual history by showing how travelling machines trigger practices of comparison ‘in the wild,’ which again invite the analyst to juxtapose comparisons and seek for lateral connections among them. Morita proposes the notion of lateral comparison as a mode of rethinking ANT’s infralanguage as something that is never neutral and always entangled in the trajectories of peoples and things.

The question is, indeed, who writes these stories. Or, as José Ossandón argues in his contribution, which are the conceptual personas that articulate ANT theoretical, methodological and political sensibilities. Ossandón explores this issue in relationship to recent ANT work on markets and by means of the question of how to write after Michel Callon’s performativity. The project starts with an exploration of the implicit instructions and sometimes rather explicit slogans aimed at formatting research personas (and, as it has turned out, whole armies of Callonian researchers) for the study of markets – instructions that invite to make making-offs, inversions and patchworks. In a second step, Ossandón introduces the readers to the characters or personas that some of the most renowned Callon followers enact in their texts not the least to comply with Callon’s instructions. Importantly, the ‘performative detectives,’ the ‘philosophical ethnographers’ and the ‘market reformists’ the reader of such texts will encounter are not idiosyncratic articulations of singular authors, but resonate with some of the key conceptual personas of ANT writ large.

This is all fine, fellow social scientists might argue, but can ANT be a critique of capital? This is precisely the question Fabián Muniesa addresses. In his contribution, he revises the conceptual repertoires used by Latour and Callon to analyse the making of scientific knowledge and technology development, the study of accounting, economics and marketisation, as well as the exploration of the economic theologies of the Anthropocene. For all three moments, Muniesa demonstrates the extent to which capital is unpacked by ANT scholars as an operation of translation, that is, as a mode of conversion of different things into assets that can be mobilised for certain purposes. Continuing with this problematisation of capital, Muniesa proposes a more systematic research programme not of capitalism, but of capitalisation and the epistemic practices, political configurations and valuation regimes that make conversions into capital possible. Critique is here to be understood as a method for examining tensions in current practices of capitalisation.

Michael Guggenheim has written the last contribution to our first section. In it, he features a colourful palette of modalities that critique can take in and with ANT. The question he poses – namely, ‘how to use ANT in inventive ways so that its critique will not run out of steam?’ – involves a double critique of Latour’s critique of critique. It does not just imply that ANT has always been in the business of critique, but also that the way ANT has done critique might require reinvention. To make this argument, Guggenheim speculatively expands Latour’s suggestion that critical theorists resemble blasé tourists capable of going anywhere mounted on their budget flights. Exploring critique as a mode of displacement, Guggenheim reconstructs how the critical expeditions of ANT into different fields and sites have enacted at least three further modes of travel: Ecotourism among natural scientists, spa-holidays in the studios of architects and designers, and executive business travel above the clouds of modernity. As an alternative, Guggenheim proposes vindicating the speculative, playful and multisensorial modes of exploration and learning of the exchange student, who jumping into unforeseen situations articulates critique not as the examination, but as the experimental modification of practices.

1

What if ANT wouldn’t pursue agnosticism but care?

Daniel López-Gómez

The question that opens this chapter does not seek to introduce new theoretical arguments to the passionate and long-standing debate concerning the epistemic, methodological and political attributes of ANT’s agnosticism (see, for instance, Callon & Latour, 1992; Gad & Bruun Jensen, 2010; Pels, 1996).¹ As is now well known, the radicalisation of agnosticism led to a post-social shift with well-known consequences for Science and Technology Studies (STS) and beyond.² Neither does the opening question aim to present care as an alternative paradigm, ethos or frame that would reveal and overcome the problems to which the adoption of agnosticism might lead. The question is certainly triggered by some sort of discomfort with ANT’s agnosticism, but points towards a more speculative yet practical concern. The paper attempts to appraise the pragmatic consequences that ANT’s repertoires have in our inquiries. As the notion of repertoire suggests, there is no appreciation here of the structural consistency of agnostic and care repertoires, neither is there a discussion about their intrinsic attributes. What I am interested in testing here are their pragmatic affordances, what these repertoires can do to our empirical engagements and what these engagements can do to them, that is, the differences these repertoires can contribute to making in our empirical inquiries.

This type of testing exercise is not very common in STS and ANT literature,³ which is quite surprising if we bear in mind that the most recognisable figures in ANT literature have repeatedly insisted since its inception that ANT should not be treated as a ready-made theory or method (Callon, 1999; Latour, 1999a), but as a repertoire (Mol, 2010, p. 261) that is diasporic (Law, 1998), increases sensibility and is shaped by the convoluted multiplicities of our case studies.⁴ But this lack of attention to the pragmatic affordances of these repertoires is even more striking if we acknowledge that doing ANT is not about producing ‘innocent’ descriptions but rather about intervening (through these descriptions too) in the ontological becoming of the actors we ‘follow’ and with whom we also become entangled during our inquiries. ANT repertoires do intervene in the framing of empirical engagements since they affect the establishment of settings and relationships with the actors and the way their accounts and concerns shape our own and are articulated by the repertoires we try to articulate. In fact, ANT scholars usually commit to nurturing their repertoires with challenging and complex empirical cases in the aim of producing conceptual, political, methodological and even aesthetical displacements.

Due to all these considerations about how ANT should be understood and handled, Annemarie Mol (2010, p. 261) suggested that ANT scholars should be considered ‘amateurs of reality.’ This would mean, following Hennion, that ANT scholars are ‘experts in the consequential testing of objects they are passionate about,’ and that ‘they confront them’ and ‘thus accumulate an experience that is always challenged by the way in which these objects deploy their effects’ (Hennion, 2007, p. 75). I do think that ANT scholars should be considered as such, but I also think that, much more often, we should confront our repertoires in the same way that amateurs confront their passionate objects. Without incorporating amateurs’ appreciating gestures towards our own repertoires, ANT will continue to be too easily treated as a ready-made theory or methodology regardless of the threatening messages of burying ANT if its amateurish character is not respected (see, for instance, Actor Network and After, Law & Hassard, 1999).⁵

This contribution is a very modest remedy to this situation. As amateurs do, it seeks to pursue a reflexive and pragmatic confrontation with the ANT repertoires we articulate in order to test how they shape our case studies and are shaped by them. The aim of this paper is precisely to contribute to doing so by performing a consequential testing of the agnostic and care repertoire in a particular case study. To do so, I will draw on an ethnography case study I conducted on a telecare service some time ago. It is a case study I have written much about and to which I did not wish to return, I must confess.⁶ However, after several attempts, I have finally come to terms with the idea that retracing my steps might be instructive of the pragmatic reflection I would like to pursue in this volume. In this regard, I will examine the ‘disconcertments’ (see also Jerak-Zuiderent, this volume) that the encounters with the telecare users produced in my fieldwork, which shifted the focus of my analysis from the sociotechnical setting-up of the telecare system to the fragility and affordances of the older peoples’ daily life arrangements. As a result of this, the pragmatic differences between the agnostic and care repertoires will be sketched out and discussed in light of the classic ANT literature and current debates on care and STS (Martin, Myers, & Viseu, 2015; Latimer & Puig de la Bellacasa, 2013; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

Doing agnosticism with telecare

Last year, 76 people aged 65 or over died alone at home in Madrid. So far this year, a further 53 have died and the total figure for 2002 may well exceed one hundred. The numbers can be extrapolated to other major Spanish cities, where there are increasingly more elderly people living alone, either as a result of a decision they have made or due to inevi...