Ana makes a number of good points, but I think that Latour has found ways
to finesse them. He is rather strategic in his use of the "symmetry"
principle, which is in some ways more of a rhetorical ploy than a master
theory. He is trying to get social analysts to look beyond persons as the
focus and only meaningful or primary units, to get them to see that who we
are and how we act depends as much on the artifacts around us as on the
people around us or on anything internalized within us.
Networks are not causal, though they are material ... although I would say
that for Latour the distinction between material and semiotic is also
"symmetrized". This is a different ONTOLOGY, not just a different
epistemology. Networks are made up not just of material connections, but of
practices of "translation" that link elements by way of meanings. More
exactly, there are processes that take place, involving the actions of
humans and nonhumans together, which transform relations and inscriptions
(or meaningful traces) so that they can be embedded in further links and
connections. Networks are made, they are dynamic. They do not persist on
their own, independently of human agency (and nonhuman agency).
So "mediation" is pervasive in ANT. But it's not just that artifacts (or
"natural" elements, also symmetrized: natural-social nonhumans) mediate
between humans, but humans also mediate between artifacts. A person or a
human community is part of the way one tool or sign gets another one made
... to paraphrase the infamous dictum about genes. WE are also mediational
means in the network ... and why not?
Latour is radically anti-Faustian ... and in his later work consequently
very "environmentalist" ... the world is not a place where humans are all
that matters and everything else is just an instrument for our purposes. We
are also among nature's "tools", and we also function as "signs", as
carriers of meaning (in our bodies and in our actions, including discourse).
The argument about person-person being different from person-thing harks
back for me to Martin Buber and the I-thou, I-it distinction. Buber was
talking about dehumanization, about treating people like we treat things.
Latour is headed toward saying that we ought to treat things like we wish
we treated people ... he is trying to take the best of both paradigms, the
humanization of mediated social relations (as emphasized say in Deborah
Hicks' recent readings of Bakhtin) -- extended to the realm of the
nonhuman, and the recognition in AT and situated cognition models that
people are also shaped by our encounters with things.
He would not agree that for nonhumans the networks are deterministic and
causal ... they can't be, for many reasons. For one, meaning effects
intervene all along the network of connections. For another, the networks
consist of loops, and causality become distributed, or in effect becomes no
longer deterministic, when it turns back on itself along multiple pathways.
Latour is also not thinking of these networks as consisting of causal
material interactions as such, but as made up of functional transformative
actions or practices (or processes ..... he does not use these terms
because some imply the agency of humans and other imply the agency of
nonhumans and he wants to speak equally of both).
I think that to really sort this out any further we would have to take a
specific example and consider how ANT might deal with the effects of
mediation and agency. ANT is a really strange worldview, but a very
productive one that avoids a lot of the dichotomies that have hampered
western thinking for a long time. It is a truly post-Cartesian worldview,
and very much misunderstood -- and also very difficult to explain!
I recommend Latour's books in English: _We Have Never Been Modern_ and
_Pandora's Hope_. You can also find a lot of his work on the website that
is maintained for him at:
http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour
JAY.
At 01:38 AM 10/31/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Jay,
>
>I think that "ANT, actant-network theory" looses the notion of "mediation"
>which is central in CHAT. The actants cannot be symmetrical ( Latour makes
>of this a "symmetry" between persons-as-actors and things-as-actors, calling
>both actants-in-networks). A person-as-actant relates to a thing-as-actant
>in a very different way than the "thing-as-actant" relates back to the
>"person-as-actant". There is a shift in the "domain" or "level". And the
>mutual relationship is mediated by, let's call it, a "mediator-as-actant". I
>think that the accent on "symmetry in action" in ANT destroys both the
>asymmetry and the mediational quality of the relationship between an actant
>and an "actee". It is true that all is connected and that what an
>individual-as-actant can do depends on what an object-as-actant can do, but
>I think that just making them symmetrical misses the point because in a way
>"what objects-as-actants can do" depends on the individuals in a different
>sense than "what individuals-as-actants" can do. The sense is different
>because for the individual this relationship is mediated on multiple social,
>cultural, and historical levels, while for the object-as-actant the
>relationship to the other parts of the network is deterministic, direct and
>causal. It is not a fear of dehumanizing that makes me see the flaw in the
>ANT, it is my understanding of the difference between causal relationships
>in the material world and culturally, historically and semiotically mediated
>relationships in the world of human individuals. A material object is going
>to fall to the ground every time it looses a force that keeps it "off" the
>ground regardless of the social or even material consequences, but a person
>may opt to keep their hand on a hot pot, even to get burned, if the
>consequences of removing their hand would destroy something in their social
>relationships (let's say, they see that they might hurt someone if they drop
>a pot of hot soup). This is a crude example. What I want to say is that
>creating symmetrical relationships between all the actants in the activity
>network destroys the concept of mediation. In addition it releases all the
>energy that moves this dynamic process forward making the network rather
>flat and empty.
>Ana
>
>
>
>
>----------------------------------------
>Ana Marjanovic-Shane
>home: 1-215 - 843 - 2909
>mobile:+267 -334-2905
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
>Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 8:55 PM
>To: XMCA LISTGROUP
>Subject: dialogue and activity, Gordon's take
>
>
>Having now had a chance to look more at Gordon's paper, as well as to
>respond a bit off-list to Steve (whose constructive response to my
>constructively intended comments is a great example of how positive
>critical dialogue can be around here ...), I wanted to add a few more
>thoughts on the basic issue that Gordon poses.
>
>He begins from the interesting perspective that subject-object relations in
>dialogic activity are more akin to subject-subject relations, that is that
>in sign-mediated processes, esp. face to face dialogue, we are acting on
>one another (or with inner speech, say, on ourselves) as a special aspect
>of the object-world. The discourse we produce then functions as a
>mediational means for this effective (cf. perlocutionary) action.
>
>But matters are not so simple, as Gordon develops the analysis of his
>episode-in-focus. Sometimes the discourse really is the object (too), eg
>when we negotiate how best to say something, or how to write it out. And
>the discourse has to be expanded semiotically beyond just the words to
>include the gestures and the actions-with-artifacts. Now those artifacts
>can be mediational means in action directed toward another subject, or they
>can be primary objects of action, when we work to "improve" them.
>
>This suggests to me that, somewhat as Gordon proposes, both words and
>things, both things-as-signs and things-as-material-interactants (cf.
>actants), usefully bridge for us between a focus on (non-subject)-oriented
>activity and subject-oriented activity. We can instrumentalize our dialogue
>with others when we construe it as contributing to getting something done
>on a non-subject object (making the land yacht go, the wheel turn). And we
>can semioticize our action-on-an-object to turn it into a topic of talk, or
>a part of "text" production (i.e. the things and actions as signs used
>communicatively), to enact some agenda of building or maintaining an
>interpersonal relationship, or communicating an idea.
>
>Putting both signs and tools inside the activity triangles of
>subject-object-means shows us that no phenomenon is inherently either a
>sign or a tool; it depends on how we are using it at the moment. Likewise
>no actant is inherently a subject or an object; it depends on how it is
>construed within the activity at some juncture. All these vertices of the
>triangles are ROLES (in the formal sense, i.e. "arguments" of a system of
>relations, which is what Arne I think was well aware of). Something
>occupies that role because we put it there, not because its nature compels
>it to be in one role or another.
>
>This perspective makes a good link to ANT, actant-network theory, an issue
>we have often discussed here in the past. An actant is a participant in
>discourse that functions semiotically (in Greimas' sense) because of its
>role in some (for Greimas, narrated) activity. Roles can be filled by
>persons, by things, by signs, by texts, by quoted speech, by reified
>processes, etc. Latour makes of this a "symmetry" between persons-as-actors
>and things-as-actors, calling both actants-in-networks. This causes a lot
>of confusion if we insist on reading it within the traditional modernist
>distinction between humanistic stances towards persons-as-subjects or
>agents and the disparaged scientific stances towards persons as objects of
>study. Some people recoil from equating people and other things because
>they fear dehumanization, others because they can't take seriously the
>apparent implication that things have human-like agency.
>
>But a sophisticated reading of ANT shows that what Latour is doing is
>redefining the notion of agency, moving it away from the sovereign
>individual-as-actor, and re-integrating it into a larger social-technical
>network: what we can do is a function of what everything else around us is
>doing and how we are connected to the rest. This is no different for
>nonhuman actants. Once we insert everything into a network, once we shift
>ontology so that we don't believe it makes sense to talk about either
>people or things in isolation, not part of any network; once some part of a
>network becomes out minimal unit of analysis ... then the symmetry of
>subjects and objects does not seem so strange.
>
>I think this is exactly parallel to what Gordon, and Arne, are doing in
>looking at how signs and tools, subjects and objects, are roles within
>activity systems (call them activity networks ...) and the occupants of
>these roles can shift role as activity unfolds. In fact, I think the most
>interesting implication of Gordon's analysis is that activity-with-dialogue
>unfolds precisely BECAUSE of such shifts. This in turns makes it credible
>that we could classify the different ways in which dialogue can function as
>activity and within activity by the configuration of roles and especially
>by the sequence of transformation of roles. This gives us in fact a new
>descriptive framework that is more dynamic than the static triangles of
>yore.
>
>It's not quite phenomenologically dynamic. It's a sequence of snapshots and
>a recipe of transformations of roles (a transition network model, states
>and rules for going from state to state), but this is a rather common first
>approximation to dynamical modelling in many fields. Keep your eye on the
>land-yacht: now it's an improvable object, now its a symbolic token, now
>it's a tool for transport, now it's the topic of a discourse, now it's a
>gift, now it's a missile, now it's commodifiable property, now it's
>evidence in an argument. Now it's an agent that makes us do something, now
>its an agent that leads us to say something, now it's a model of something
>else. The engine of dynamics is running here. Making the world now
>enables/affords making the world a bit differently next. We can't ever
>quite know in advance what we might decide to do once we see how our last
>turn has turned out. It always means and does more than we intended in
>doing it. To us as well as to others.
>
>I've ended here with a rather individualistic language to make the point.
>It should be corrected back to the less familiar language of the network
>.... interactions, events, role-shifts, world-effect happen in the
>changing, dynamical network. We can take up a stance within the network,
>and we can try to imagine a chunk of the network larger than ourselves
>(though always needing some viewpoint from which to see).
>
>Suppose we now add one more feature: how it feels to participate in these
>dynamic activity networks. We still don't have a handle on all the relevant
>factors that co-determine (over- and under-determine) which transformations
>of role happen at each stage. I don't believe there is any complete set of
>determiners, from which all futures are predictable. But certainly we can
>trace out the contributions of various co-determiners, and one of those has
>got to be how we feel in some state of the network-now, and how we've been
>feeling across some dynamics of the network recently (and longer term).
>This affective aspect should also be symmetrizable within a network
>ontology ... but that's a tall order.
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>Educational Studies
>University of Michigan
>610 East University
>Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
>http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>---------------------------
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------
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