I agree with Bill that ANT as such is somewhat lacking in historicity as a
model, but in fact a lot of the research which uses ANT is historical in
orientation and data. Latour did some very interesting work on Pasteur, for
example. In my other posting on this, I mention the need for a more
dynamical aspect and sense about networks-in-time. I also quote Foucault,
and the relations of Latour and Foucault are an interesting subject about
which I'd be interested to know more.
In his larger theoretical works, such as We Have Never Been Modern and
Pandora's Hope, Latour also does a rather Foucault-like analysis of
longterm historical changes in western culture. He looks at Socrates in
relation to later notions of democracy and at the historical origins of the
modernist separation of nature from culture and both from religion. It's
clear that Latour knows that historical analysis is essential for
understanding the contexts of local practices. It's not clear that this is
formally integrated in ANT, which tends to operate on short-timescales, and
mostly to follow the action forward into the future, even when the data is
historical.
How well integrated is the H in CHAT? What formal links are there between
AT and any sense of what time-depth in history is expected to be relevant
to some activity now? As we move out into the C, the cultural context, we
inquire into its history, into the origin say of the genres of activity
involved now. But how does CHAT conceptually link across big jumps in
timescale, between the microgenetic and the biographical-historical? This
is the sort of issue I was trying to address in my work on heterochrony.
We all know we need to do it. It's just not very easy, is it? ....... JAY.
At 10:23 AM 11/2/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Not knowing a whole lot of ANT, I'm compelled to ask -- where is the "H" in
>ANT? There seems to be neither the sense of change over time nor a way to
>describe reliance of present actions and events upon past actions and events
>- which imho is a key requirement for a theory of people and things in
>interaction.
>
>bb
---------------------------
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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