Actant

It’s not explanations I’m after
I’ve pieced together my own understanding
You know that it makes no difference
And you didn’t have to sever

Everett Hughes was fond of noting that “one person’s emergency is another routine” (1970).We can rarely really see the circumstances of another’s world of work – indeed this is one natural consequence of the division of labor and of arms’ length relationship. In every case, it is important to examine the relationship between people and the work that they do, including grounds for trust in how that work is represented.

Star, S. L., & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology of Visible and Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, 8(1/2), 9-30.

Society explains nothing but has to be explained (Tarde 1999a, 1999b). If it is to be accounted for, it will be, by definition, through the presence of many other little things that are not social by nature, but only social in the sense that they are associated with one another (p. 113).

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In order to obtain objectivity as they understand it, social scientists try to find cases where their human subjects are as little prone as possible to influence the result. For this, the only solution is to render him or her unaware of what is manipulating his or her behaviour, as for instance in the famous Milgram experiment about the inner cruelty of American students. While the actor is held by forces unbeknownst to him or her, only the scientist is ‘in the know’, producing what is taken as solid knowledge since it is untainted by the subjective reaction of the participants. The scientist is disinterested and the subject uninterested in what is by definition unknown. The set up seems ideal for producing a science of humans as hard as that of natural objects, since human subjects have no influence whatsoever on what is said about them (p. 115).

If social scientists wanted to become objective, they would have to find the very rare, costly, local, miraculous, situation where they can render their subject of study as much as possible able to object to what is said about them, to be as disobedient as possible to the protocol, and to be as capable to raise their own questions in their own terms and not in those of the scientists whose interests they do not have to share! (p. 116)

Latour, B. (2000). When things strike back: A possible contribution of `science studies’ to the social sciences. British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 107-123

Cory Doctorow:

“An artist’s enemy is obscurity, not piracy.”

“the most interesting discussion bubbling up now is how do we get stable institutions when, at any moment, new technologies render them obsolete”

“Stability is over-rated… our cultural institutions, whose purpose-arguably the purpose of all institutions ever-is to facilitate collective action, to do things one institution can’t, will now be created on an ad-hoc basis, to pass away when not needed.”

Bethune, Brian. (2008). “Scourge of the corporate pirates.” Macleans, May 5, 2008 edition, p. 57.

“There’s one small problem,” I said timidly. “I don’t know a thing about transportation.”

“Neither do I” replied my boss serenely. “That’s why I was chosen. In a year, you can learn about any subject in the world. There’s work ahead, but it will be good for your eduction.” (p. 11).

Akrich, M. (1992). The De-Scription of Technical Objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law. (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 205-224). Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Thus, if we are interested in technical objects and not in chimera, we cannot be satisfied methodologically with the designer’s or user’s point of view alone. Instead we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user, between the world inscribed in the object and the world described by its displacement.

This is precisely what is at stake in my project - key to tracing the connections between patients, doctors and ICT is going back and forth between the designer and the user. The literature tends to focus on one or the other, but tracing involves moving back and forth between both.

Akrich & Latour (1992)

“Whatever acts or shifts actions, action itself being denned by a list of performances through trials; from these performances are deduced a set of competences with which the actant is endowed; the fusion point of a metal is a trial through which the strength of an alloy is defined; the bankruptcy of a company is a trial through which the faithfulness of an ally may be denned; an actor is an actant endowed with a character (usually anthropomorphic)” (p. 259).

Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the social. Economy & Society, 33(3), 390-410.

In a way, this is the perfect starting point for Actant. 

One of the things that I have come to expect from the Actor-Network Theorists are these kinds of treatises, as much concerned with pushing the social sciences forward while at the same time doing everything they can to enroll as many academics as possible into abandoning the 20th Century project, a project which they have more or less established as an unmitigated failure. 

Law & Urry have written a beautifully constructed article here, a textbook example of exactly how these types of articles should be written. Establish the villain (social science methods), explain exactly why we need to stop everything we are doing to defeat said villain (they are participating in enacting realities that are both simplistic and Euclidian), and then point towards the toolkits that may provide the best weapons (taking the lessons of complexity theory seriously).

For Law and Urry, the social sciences are relational or interactive, in that they “participate in, reflect upon, and enact the social in a wide range of locations including the state” (p. 392). Key is understanding methods as performative, “they have effects; they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover” (p. 393). If we believe that methods are participating in the production of realities, what are we to do with this?

Here they point to Osborne and Rose’s 1999 article “Do the social sciences create phenomena? The example of public opinion research,” which argues that there are no realities in such forms as public opinion, and therefore the “truth” can never be properly discovered. For Osborne and Rose, methods are not simply technically flawed, but are “constitutively inappropriate” as well. Yet Law & Urry are not satisfied with this response, calling it both too romantic (implies that we can never know reality well at all) and too scientistic (implies an ultimate truth that appears beyond reach in the methods of social science).

This brings Law & Urry to question how this polarization (of being too romantic on one side, and too scientistic on the other) can be avoided. This may come from an understanding that the “real” is indeed “real”, but also understanding that  it is also made, and that it is made within relations; “certain kinds of social realities are performed into being in social science, and this does not make them any less real” (p. 395). Here they quote Heisenberg “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The conclusion is that social science and its methods are simultaneously real and produced.

If social science is both real and produced, “the issue is not simply how what is out there can be uncovered and brought to light, though this remains an important issue. It is also about what might be made in the relations of investigation, what might be brought into being” (p. 396). The question of “what might be brought into being” is crucial here, the “ontological politics” of trying to parse out which entities are being enacted. With the ontological politics question in mind, we are able to consider what realities the current methods of social science help to enact or erode, and which realities are strengthened. The important shift is from epistemology (where what is known depends on perspective) to ontology (what is known is also being made differently).

How do we move on from the single world (“different methods produce different and often inconsistent results”) and Euclidian space (“much social science method is predicated on a set of more or less spatial metaphors to do with height, depth, levels, size, and proximity” p. 398)?

For Law & Urry, the first thing to do is admit that much of life escapes our capacities to make models of it, “not only in the technical sense that it is beyond the grasp of current research methods, but in the more profound sense that it is constitutively resistant to the process of being gathered together into a single account, description, or model” (p. 399). We can also admit that our methods have problems understanding non-linear relationships and flows.

In the final act, Law & Urry point towards approaches that are rooted in complexity theory. These approaches takes us away from conventional linear analysis (structure/agency), and rejects common-sense notion that large changes in causes produce large changes in effects. Using complexity, small changes can sometimes produce large effects, and vice versa, individual and statistical levels of analysis are not equivalent, system effects do not result from the simple addition of individual components. Finally, complexity theory models the emergent properties of non-linear systems, but it does not predict them.

This brings us back to the first question, and leads us to question our “methodological inheritance.” As Law & Urry argue, we can no longer assume that there is a world “out there,” and that it is our job to “find it.” We are reminded that, when methods enact whatever they describe into reality, methods are not innocent; “they help make realities, But the question is: which realities? Which do we want to help make more real, and which less real? How do we want to interfere?” (p. 404).

If there was any doubt, they end the paper with a list of things that our current social science methodologies are unable to deal with:

Deal poorly with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow.

Deal poorly with the distributed – that which is found here and there and not inbetween

Deal poorly with the multiple – that which takes different shapes in different places

Deal poorly with the non-casual, the chaotic, the complex.

Deal poorly with the sensory – vision, taste, sound, smell

Deal poorly with the emotional – time compressed outburtst of anger, pain, rage, pleasure,

Deal poorly with the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains that follow the movements and displacement of people, object, information, and ideas.

I just finished my last course requirement for my PhD in sociology, and I have to say that it doesn’t feel good thinking about the time (and money) I have spent becoming skilled methods that I currently understand as being ill equip in dealing with the world I live in. I have heard the argument that you have to know what you are tearing down, but I think that argument is pretty weak (I learned Parsons without having to live Parsons). However, I think I am lucky in that I can work on re-building of Sociology (which I am still believe has potential) early in my career, before I become established and likely cranky at all these kids trying to tear down everything I have worked so hard to build. I already see this in some of the other kids around me, so willing to stay in the comfortable captains quarters of all of these sinking ships.

This is only the start.