Actor-Network Theory and After – Jonh Law and John Hassard

After ANT: complexity, naming and topology

John Law
- Critique of the fixity and singularity of ANT (or what it became);
- ANT Definitions: a ruthless application of semiotics (semiotics of materiality); destruction of
dualisms; divides and distinctions are effects and outcomes, not given in the order of things;
relational materiality; entities are performed in, by, and through material relations; everything is in
principal uncertain and reversible; performativity which makes durability and fixity; ANT as an
alternative topological system, anti-eucledianism – spatiality is not a given, or part of the order of
things. Elements retain their spatial integrity by virtue of their position in a set of links or relations;
ANT needs to avoid naturalizing a single spatial form, a single topology;
- Criticisms of ANT: the heterogeneity of assemblages and actors is different between those who have
privilege and those who don’t (Leigh Star); ANT doesn’t consider non-strategic orderings; ANT
destabilized Euclideanism, but its own topological assumptions have been naturalized; ANT has lost
its capacity to apprehend complexity in the process of labeling. There have been attempts to convert
ANT into a fixed point – there should be no identity, no fixed point.
- The challenge of ANT of incorporating and appreciating complexity, without the mentality of “have
theory, will travel”. – The objects studied are fractal (more than one and less than many), they are
irreducible and topologically discontinuous.

On recalling ANT
Bruno Latour
- 4 problems with actor-network theory:
1. Network: the word used to mean a series of transformations (translations, transductions) which
could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory, now it means transport
without deformation (“instantaneous access”)
2. Actor: social scientists are constantly dissatisfied with their macro-micro duality. In ANT, this
double dissatisfaction is bypassed, and the focus is rather on movement (“society as a circulating
entity”). This movement (1) re-descripts what was earlier perceived as having to do with the
macro-social. ANT does not seek to designate a “Society”, but rather the summing up of
interactions, into the very practical/local. (big does not mean overall, but connected, local,
mediated, related…). In this movement, (2) actantiality is not what an actor does, but what
provides actants with their actions, subjectivity, intentionality, and morality. (“there is nothing
especially local, and nothing especially human, in a local intersubjective encounter”). (3) There is
also no change of scale in ANT, since the social domain is always flat and folded (and a
circulation). There are, however, empty spaces ‘in between” the networks that show the extent of
our ignorance and the immense reserve that is open for change.
3. Theory: ANT was just another type of ethnomethodology, to learn from the actors without
imposing on them an a priori definition of their world-building capacities. ANT is merely on of
the many anti-essentialist movements, which tells us that by following circulations we can get
more than by defining entities, essence or provinces. ANT is a method to find the procedures
which render actors able to negotiate their ways through one another’s world-building activities.
4. Hyphen: ANT and sociology of science and technology drifted apart: ANT called into question
the “out there” nature, the “in there” psychology, the “down there” politics, and the “up there”
theology. Two movements of STS: socializing the ‘outside’ nature (first wave) and objectifying
our “inside” subjectivity (second wave).
 - Latour believes it is impossible to end ANT, so he tried to point which parts should be abandoned.

Perpetuum mobile: substance, force and the sociology of translation

Steven D. Brown and Rose Capdevila
- ANT criticism that it can become itself a peculiar obligatory point of passage through which
something broadly resembling a liberal-humanistic agenda is played out. (orthodox theory?)
- Perpetuum mobile are machines that once set in operation, go on beyond the time and place of its
inception, they become cause-of-itself.
- There is no unrevealed inner principle at the core of the heterogeneous network (no axiom). ANT is a
method in and of translation, it does not remain the same as it unravels in its own convoluted
network.
- The sociology of translation seems to be able to proceed in the absence of a solitary mobile actor,
methodology, or a theory. The condition for ANT then is a sense of trajectory, which can be grasped
in two ways: 1) the circulation is like a translation drift, the body and texts and concerns moves
progressively further away from its natal interest in the process of network building; 2) the goings-on
that constitute the trajectory are themselves the very essence of ANT. Essence here is to suggest an
unsettling mixture of insubstantiality and heavy burden.
- 3 test signals:
1. Substance: The authors use the term perpetuum mobile to explain the thermodynamics of
Helmholtz, in which the universe becomes such machine, since nature becomes an eternal
manufacturing forge. This perspective was also reflected in the sociology of translation in many
ways: 1. In the way potential actants are instrumentally described as resources which stand ready
for enrolment into networks (nature as a ‘great general stockhouse’); 2. The concept of
translation was to Michael Serres the displacement of the object directly, whereas to Callon, it
became a matter of semiotic ordering. In the first moment, translation was related to the
thermodynamic concept of furnace; 3. Latour was highly influenced by classical and modern
philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibnitz, which were involved with the material philosophy
that transformed the concept of substance from Newtonian physics to the ‘new time’ of
thermodynamics. However, ANT reverses the theory of Spinoza and Leibnitz (whereas to them
substance is ordered by God and then is modified by finite beings, in ANT first comes a plane of
pure action out of which networks subsequently emerge. Action precedes thought, ordering or
organization.). There is also an ambivalence in the way ANT relates to the outside of networks
(“it is at once the great general storehouse of nature, where actants stand before, as resources to
be enrolled, and at the same time a space which is constantly withdrawing, a space which the
network must perpetually go after”). In order to solve this ambivalence, the authors use Deluze
and Guttari’s concept of ‘refrain’, which is a rhythmic series that creates by its very repetition a
sense of place. Thus, repetition is what holds together networks, and translation is about the
repetition of certain forms as much as the repetition of particular significations.
2. Force: The concept of perpetuum mobile influenced social energetics, in which the society
becomes a bounded system. This perspective was also present in the ANT blurring of humans
and non-humans (“there is only labor-power and that which is engaged in its conversion. There
are only actants and trials of force”). The authors continue to a discussion of the force that
powers that network, which cannot be immanent, as well as the long-lasting problem of agency.
Using the concepts of Hetherington, the authors get to the following conclusion: “The identity of
an actant must be formally indexed to the attributes it can present when it enters into relations.
Forming relations and inciting connections is the expression of a will-to-connect (Hetherington).
This will-to-connect is the actant’s way of endeavoring to persist in being. That is, in one sense at
least, ‘agency’. It is also what drives networks to incorporate and fold around actants. In
 themselves, though, actants are ‘functionally blank’. Their every presentation masks a more
fundamental lack of presentation or failure immediately to signify. The unfolding of
presentations, accompanied by this withdrawing from presentation, constitutes the essence of the
actant. Such an essence is effectively a trajectory, a movement through successive presentations
and relations.” This trajectory unfolds a territory.
3. Time: the relationship of actor-networks to the limits of force lies in this complex folding up of
rrhythms (the universal, the local, narrative). ANT studies attempt to become part of the network
of which they speak (establish a rhythmic pattern that somehow expresses the maneuvers and
translations made in the network under discussion). This ‘expression’ (Spinoza) allows us to say
that the essence of a thing – its way of going on – depends upon the relations of reiteration and
production in which it is engaged. Which means exploring how rhythms (universal, local,
narrative) become jointly articulated.
- The authors seem skeptical of the unproblematic adaptation of ANT in other fields.

From Blindness to blindness: museums, heterogeneity and the subject

Kevin Hatherington
- The author analyses the ordering of material heterogeneity in museums to observe the dynamic
between viewing subjects and viewed objects.
- What we think of as heterogeneity has changed (it is historically constituted) and these changes can
be seen by the changing mode of ordering the heterogeneous in museums.
- The museum acts as an obligatory point of passage for the constitution of the subject as a point of
view in the West from the time of the Renaissance to the present. It constructs, at different moments,
a ‘point of view’ through the constitution and arrangement of material ‘heterogeneity’ and in relation
to it, the viewing subject. It is also a space that performs a geometry of seeing and ordering,
associated with issues of materials, spaces, times and subjects.
1. Renaissance: (Subjectivity was objectified) The invention of the linear perspective marked the
constitution of heterogeneity at the time. It interpellates the viewer as subject through a relation with
the picture while leaving the actual embodied experience of viewing outside and apart.
- The viewing subject becomes a disembodied monocular eye in which a geometrical relationship with
the picture-object is established.
- The viewers although located outside the picture, at the viewing point, sees as if they were part of the
scene and as if what they were seeing were the three dimensional relationship that would be seen
with the eye.
- Linear perspective also relates to the incorporation of zero in mathematics (and in semiotics as a sign
and a meta-sign), since the disembodied eye is located at nowhere point of infinity, being part of the
picture as well as that which stands outside the picture and gives it meaning (sign and meta-sign).
- The subject, thus, stands outside and separate from the material world, able to look in on it from this
privileged position of infinity that formally would have only been occupied by God.
- The gaze and the character of the heterogeneity have direct relationship with one another. The
collections of the time were only displayed to invited guests, in private spaces. Their diversity did
not represent heterogeneity in the sense of anomaly and difference but hidden and secret forms of
connection that linked them as a totality. Order is established by the gaze of the subject through
forms of similitude.
- The order of objects was not established through any form of classification, but through
correspondence and through principles of similitude. These principles were made meaningful as a
mode of ordering by the objectivized subject (prince, connoisseur, artist, scholar…) who stood
outside as an appreciative eye located at the point of infinity.
- There can be no sense of heterogeneous as difference here, because there is a correspondence
between all things and between subjects and objects. The heterogeneity materiality of the network is
embodied in the Prince who is mirrored by his collection.
2. The Baroque: (Subjectivity became separated from the world of the objective) Dutch art and the
‘cabinet of curiosities’ contributed to the constitution of heterogeneity as a world of objects separate
and distinct from the viewing subject (epistemic shift).
- There is a new fascination with heteroclites, as oddities and exotic items became part of collections.
Here, heterogeneity can no longer disappear into similitude and secret connection as it was during
the Renaissance, instead it has to be laid out on a table and scrutinized by a subject who is not
heterogeneous or linked with the world of things.
- In the Renaissance, the subject (viewer) was synonymous with the heterogeneity of infinity (of God).
In the Baroque, heterogeneity became something separate that was seen by the eye and helped to
constitute the eye as distinct.
- In the paintings of Dutch artists of the 17th century, the subject ceases to be seen as objectivized but
as a subject separate from the world who sees it from outside but not from a fixed point defined by
the geometry of the object-painting.
- What is seen is not to be understood through similitude, but through forms of representation. (The
subject looks in from outside, into a picture that is laid out as a spectacle for the gaze of the detached
subject. The picture has no distinct vanishing point.)
- The same relation was present in the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, which were ‘secret’ rooms used to
house collections of exotic items both natural and artistic.
- By giving a prominent place to the heteroclite or anomalous, it adapted the principle of similitude
into a new system in which there was no correspondence between subject and object.
- The system of similitude is undermined by representation (comparison): to perform an act of
comparison, the viewer has to be detached from the space of the constituent objects that it views, but
also to be able to move freely over the range of objects that it sees and to be able to discriminate
between them. (topological complexity).
3. Modernity: (Subjectivity becomes subjectivized) Heterogeneity became a worry to modern forms of
understanding.
- The panopticon tries to banish our vision of heterogeneity in the material world, something that
becomes a source of anxiety, by internalizing it in a subjectivized subject. As an effect, modern
subjects are constituted as controllers of the heterogeneous objects world who act by controlling
heterogeneity (or passion) within themselves.
- In the panopticon it is the object, the watch tower, that is located at the ‘viewing point’ and the
subject, the prisoner, in the ‘vanishing point’. The object comes to be seen as something external to
the individual but it loses its heterogeneous character, it becomes unimportant. It is the subject itself,
therefore, that now becomes heterogeneous and looking at that heterogeneity means looking within.
- In the (Kantian) gaze of the connoisseur, a prisoner in the panopticon of a modern sense of beauty,
the sense impressions generated by the object are chaotic and heterogeneous but their heterogeneity
is ordered within the mind of the subject by categories of beauty and taste. (The objects make the
subjects aware of their heterogeneity and disciplines them through an internal process of ordering
that heterogeneity and making sense of it in terms of oneself as an orderly human being).
- The modern museum allowed a disciplined and disinterested aesthetic judgement to be presented to
the public who were in turn constituted as an appreciative aesthetic community or alternatively as
deviants if they chose not to belong to this community.
4. Contemporaneity: The Dadaist and later Surrealist projects were fundamentally about restoring the
heterogeneity to the object world by challenging bourgeois conceptions of art and art’s taming within
 the disciplined exhibitionary spaces of the gallery and museum and their associated positioning of
the viewing subject.
- The object is made heterogeneous through its incongruous location in a space in which it does not
belong, by Dadaists. Surrealists realized the heterogeneous character of the modern subject and
sought to celebrate that and represent it in their art objects. This movement was also a major
preoccupation of contemporary philosophy.

- In summary: Heterogeneity starts off with the recognition of the principle of infinity in connection
and it orders it as a point: in linear perspective and its reading in similitude, the subject and object are
synonymous and there is no sense of heterogeneous in either but in the relation between the two as a
principle for their ordering. In the classical age, heterogeneity is made visible by laying it on a table.
Ordered and measured it becomes something separate from the subject and representable in the
material world. In the modern world, heterogeneity becomes something of a problem, it can no
longer be ordered in the world of things but has to be neutralized and made invisible by internalizing
it and then disciplining it within the subject who is seen as master of the world of nature and things.
Finally, in this century, we see modern artists cut open that eye, blinding it, and let the heterogeneity
out.

Ontological politics. A word and some questions.

Annemarie Mol
- Ontological politics: the way in which the real is implicated in the political and vice versa. It explains
that the conditions of possibilities we live with (ontological) are not given. Reality does not precede
the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices.
- Reality is historically, culturally and materially located. If that is assumed, then it also multiple.
(ontologies).
- Political ontology differs from: perspectivalism (there isn’t only one expert, or one truth. It broke
away from a monopolistic version of truth but it didn’t multiply reality: many gazes, same object.)
and constructivism (shows how a currently accepted fact got crafted, supported, and that the
alternatives were not doomed from the beginning. The secret for their success lies not in the laws of
nature, but in the intricacies of history. There is a plurality of might-have-beens, but now they have
gone.)
- Multiple, not plural. Reality is done an enacted, rather than observed. It is manipulated by means of
various tools in the course off a diversity of practices, changing from one stage to the next. There are
different versions of the object, versions that the tools help to enact. Multiple forms of reality.
- Example: Anemia. >> It can be performed in several different ways: clinical, statistical and
pathophysiological. Thus, there are 3 different anemias (realities), that have co-existed for decades.
- Where are the optics? Although there are various ways to perform a deviance, we should not accept
the illusion that most decisive moments are explicit. In the case of anemia, it is important to
recognize that the fact that most countries detect most of it in a clinical manner emerged historically.
It grew out of a great number of contingencies and force, but there was never a moment or a place
where it was decided. If it had been discussed, the different arguments would shift the site of the
decision elsewhere, to places where, seen from here, it seems no decision, but a fact. (ex.: testing
everyone would create more false positives than real deviance, argument placed at the intricacies of
measurement techniques). – As it is, many conditions of possibility are not structured as the outcome
of decisions at all, but it would be impossible to make these decisions explicit, since it would imply
an extension of the argumentative format when everything becomes an option, and such arguments
will displace the decisions to further distant locations.
 - What is at stake? A practical matter such as anemia have reality effects. By establishing the
hemoglobin level statistically, instead of pathophysiologically, there is a contribution to dividing
humans into men and women, it creates a phenomenon of interference. Thus, in the ontological
politics around anemia, it is not just the reality of anemia that is at stake, but that of the sexes too.
Ontological politics is unlikely to come at rest once there is balancing of accounts, since such
accounts can’t close.
- Are there options? The notion of ontological politics seems to imply the possibility of ‘choice’, but
there aren’t necessarily options. What the multiplicity entails is that, while realities may clash at
some points, elsewhere the various performances of an object may collaborate and even depend on
one another. In the case of anemia, its multiplicity does not mean that there are separate entities
standing apart in a homogeneous field, the various anemias that are performed in medicine have
relations between them. They are not simply opposed to, or outside on another.
- How to choose? In the medical system, patients are supposed to make choices, and there is an
assumption that information needs to be provided. However, if we think in terms of ontological
politics, then information is no longer given to anyone. The stories professionals might tell have lost
their self-evidence, everything has become contestable. So if it is important to attend to the way
patients represent themselves, it is at least as important to ask how they are represented in knowledge
practices. Thus it is a fairly superficial matter to choose ‘after the facts’, given the information and
the techniques that have helped to generate these
- Conclusions:
1. If we think in such terms of deliberation or choice we risk the ramification of options
everywhere, with the consequence that they end up always seeming to be everywhere.
2. The interference between various political tensions is such that each time one thing seems to be
at stake, an unquantifiable number of other issues and realities are involved as well.
3. The various performances of reality in medicine have all kinds of tensions between them, but to
separate them out as if they were a plurality of options is to skip over the complex
interconnection between them.
4. Who is the actor who might decide between the options?

Who pays? Can we pay them back?

Nick Lee and Paul Stenner
- There is a contrast in ANT between an understand of order as necessarily involving a certain key of
exclusion and an understanding of order as involving only contingent exclusions. If an order is fueled
by the consumption of the excluded, then no recognition recompense or inclusion of the victim can
occur without the collapse of that order.
- In its analysis, ANT decenters: rather than rejecting the notion of centers of control, ANT gives
account of how control may, temporarily, become centered. The centered mode of explanation finds
clear centers of responsibility, thus simplifying short-cuts through complexity which affords
coordination. By contrast, ANT is a way of asking empirically how centeredness, order and
difference arise and are maintained, a way that is based on a methodological caution against the
employment of narratal/grammatical origins of action, such as the human agent. Therefore, agentic
responsibility is distributed into a dispersed network of interdependencies and co-responsibilities.
- ANT allows for the concepts of dependency and belonging to be applied recursively >> There is no
final word in ANT, no line to draw under an analysis to bring it to a close, no necessary completion
of account. The authors, however, propose an ‘anti-foundational’ approach to ANT that means a
return to the question of how institutions, or any organization or state of affairs ‘start’.
- The authors use the arguments from Latour’s ‘We have never been modern’ to point out his concept
of institution as a form of belonging where the possibility of belonging is guaranteed by the
 exclusion and silencing of certain characters (hybrids, in the case of modernity). The excluded ones
do the work that pays for our belonging, and this injustice is the condition on which that belonging
depends. Latour has also written into ANT the possibility of thinking ‘starts’, decisive points at
which institutions begin. – (We produce the modern world by mixing natural and cultural things into
productive hybrids who can then promptly be ignored thanks to the purifying tendencies of modern
thought – a refusal to give credit where credit is due is a necessary feature of modernity as an
institution.)
- The authors use Serres’ concept of ‘departure’: not just beginning, but also partition; a parting that
allows a start; a parting that remains in play as long as the institution persists; a thing that never
happened, but always is. – A departure is a beginning grounded in a division, a decision if you like, a
cut or a furrow in the frown that permits seeds to grow.
- The authors try to formulate an ethical practice of ANT based on the acknowledgement of ANT’s
inability to decide between our two accounts of order (exclusion as contingency and exclusion as
necessary).
- 2 accounts of order:
o Belonging by banishment (BBB): Order is produced and belonging and possession are
established by the banishment of those who pay from the circle of communication. The one
who pay is the one who is banished. There is an absolute and necessary boundary between
those who belong and those who do not.
o Belong by assemblage (BBA): Order is produced by meeting and becoming assembled with
others in a manner which increases the power of all concerned. This assemblage yields a new
entity which is more powerful or profitable than any of the participants alone.
- In the modern project, we humans belong only because we have banished those who do the work for
us (the hybrids). Having empirically recognized the banishment situation, we can set about giving
rights and recognition to the disenfranchised hybrids, who can then belong-by-assemblage with the
rest of us.
- The authors give an example of the banishment of children from the court of law (BBB) which
shifted with the development of video recordings and techniques to interview children (BBA). The
two forms co-exist,
- The authors use another example of a gender issue, in which two reimbursement schemes are at
work, and the man understands all debts as repayable, and the woman is aware of a limit to the
repayment of debt. (the discussion is about emotional work which is done solely by the woman
without recognition).
- Using Derrida, the authors explain that whatever the variable shapes ‘the network’ may take, the
energy required to maintain those shapes is taken, indirectly to be sure, from those who are excluded
from the network. BBA and BBB co-exist as a matter of necessity: for example, in global ‘free trade’
economy and third-world debt. – For free trade and fair exchange to be possible, there must be those
who are stolen from. What we should do is cancel all that debt. But that would entail an enormous
loss of income. Without the majority world servicing its debt, there will be no circulation and our
networks will collapse. Our wealth depends on their poverty.
- The authors distinguish between: ‘the other’, which can always be brought back into communion,
into the fold of responsibility, communicate dependency and mutual recognition; and “the Other”,
which marks a limit to this open, communicating network of mutuality, the network depends on their
exclusion.
- ANT allows, or is part of, the sketching of a new constitution for a new, yet already occurring,
amodern world. The point of departure is the refusal to disavow our dependencies. A commitment to
belonging by assemblage. No longer will obfuscating and exclusion be key actants in the network.
 - The authors present the main points of Serre’s theory of the worldwide world, in which nature is the
Other.
Conclusion:
- The authors suggest that as we break ontological boundaries and render everything ‘networky’, we
will become insensitive to complexity and heterogeneity if we forget that there is a heterogeneity
between Other and others. Unless we find some way of recognizing debts that cannot be paid as well
as debts that can be paid, we risk seeing in every other nothing but our own reflection.
- They also argue that ANT cannot decide between the two forms of belonging, between the call of
institution and moments of foundation and the call of flexibility, transgression and an analytic
disregard of moments of foundation. The point is to make the relation between being and becoming,
form and change articulable as a question for theoretical and empirical study within ANT and thus
preserve ANT’s ethical rather than moral character.

Materiality: juggling sameness and difference

Anni Dugdale
- The author observes the debates about intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) in an Australian
committee composed of experts. In doing so, she attempts to analyze de adequacy of the ‘model of
closure’ (in which truths or compromises are hammered out in controversy and the consequence is
closure). This model is also present it sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and social
construction of technology (SCOT), in which the process is imagined as one of negotiation, where
bargaining positions are backed up by various forms of power.
- Criticism of the ‘closure model’ of SSK/SCOT: 1. It assumes that various interest groups have social
power constituted prior and outside the science policy context, which isn’t explained, but is
considered explanatory; 2. It implies a particular model of the subject as a centered decision-maker
and knower who is, in addition, probably rational. Subjects are, rather, constituted in part in the
course of negotiation and are decentered; 3. The same is also true for objects: objects are always
decentered; 4. Following the insight from ANT, decisions are made possible through material
arrangements: negotiation has a feature of practical materiality.
- In analyzing the event of negotiation, the author suggests that materials (air tickets, building
letterheads, rooms, schedules…) are crucial in producing the bodies that are assembled together as
subjects. The subjectivities of the participants are already being produced in these material
arrangements, even before any verbal performance have occurred (in scheduling flights, preparing
folders and documents…). The participants even before entering the building, are already part of a
web of relationships with people and things that constitute them as a government bureaucrat. They
are translated by arrangement of such materials from their identities in other contexts (student,
doctor, parent…) into committee members (who enact a particular mode of bureaucratic
subjectivity).
- The author also observes that the members were carefully inserted into bureaucratic and commercial
performative arrangements (materiality, security apparatus…) which confers certain limited agencies
on us.
- The author rejects that this negotiation should be analyzed as a pluralist compromise or a post-
modern multiplicity, because: 1. The subject positions are being constituted in the committee in its
material arrangements; 2. All of the members of the committee are being constituted in all of these
logics; 3. The struggle between the different positions reproduce themselves in our individual, and
multiple, subjectivities. 4. We (the members of the committee), both as individuals and as a
committee, are being constituted as a single body. >>>> The material arrangements of the process of
bargaining co-produce both multiplicity and singularity. There is an oscillation between centered and
 decentered subjects. It is necessary to hold both difference (multiplicity) and sameness (singularity)
together if a compromise is to be reached.
- When it comes to the object, the conversation performs a kind of oscillation, and oscillation between
the (presupposition) that there is a single object on the one hand, and the performance of different
objects on the other, happening simultaneously. The enactment of a single IUD, demands or depends
on the mobilization of several different IUDs. Thus, negotiation and compromise have an oscillatory
character rather than a convergent one: the objects mobilized and then secured in negotiations are
always both singular and multiple, rather than converging from multiplicity to singularity.
- In analyzing the leaflet produced by the committee, the author concludes that the subject performed
in the materiality of the leaflet is oscillatory too. Thus, the centered and the decentered subjects are
mutually dependent: the decision-making subject is rendered singular but, at the same time, it is also
distributed across time and space into future bodies, future conversations, and into past points of
choice or procedure. The leaflet also distributes control as part of many ‘modes of ordering’.
- The workings of the leaflet and the subject that it produces is no more convergent than the working
of the committee, or the IUD. The committee’s compromises produce an oscillatory outcome.
- In conclusion, the author was able to destabilize the traditional model for negotiation and
compromises that is seen as a progressive movement of convergence from instability to stability.
Instead, the author empirically pointe to a different model in which compromise or closure does not
imply the stability of a single outcome. She also proposes that it is necessary to explore the character
of outcomes as oscillatory: if decisions, subjects, or indeed objects, cohere, then this is because they
are both singular and multiple.

Staying true to the laughter in Nigerian classrooms.

Helen Verran
- In describing the process of teaching measurements in schools in Nigeria, the author expresses her
feeling of disconcertment, when one of the teachers succeeded in teaching the kids measurements by
using 10 cm cards and multiplying by the times it was used, instead of a linear way.
- The author presents 2 orthodox ways of explaining away this feeling of disconcertment: 1. Through
institutional power relations, in which the lecturer is an agent of a colonizing modernity; 2. Through
the resistance of the Yoruba version of quantification against western imposition. These two
‘explanations’ are based on foundationist frames (realist and relativist) and each has a particular style
of reasoning which establishes its particular propositional notion of truth and falsity: the foundation
for realists is ‘physical entities’ and for relativists, ‘social practices’.
- The author put forward a non-foundationist interpretative frame: instead of some sort of foundation
on which knowledge-structure of symbols is built, this interpretive frame avoids any separation of
the material and the symbolic in proposing worlds as outcomes of mutually resisting/accommodating
participants, where participation goes far beyond the human to encompass the non-living as active in
routine (and novel) actions which constitute the world.
- ANT has been criticized for using monologic discursive traditions of foundationism, re-inscribing
the separation of knowledge making and ethical-political action, as well as its obsession with
executive action (Leigh Star). (The natural-social-discursive imbroglios become separated from
questions of the ethics of the ‘doing’ and of concerns with distributions effected through the ‘doing’.
- The author uses Kathryn Pyne Addelson’s ‘collectivist’ interpretative frame, in which outcomes
generated in collective action give an embodied answer to moral questions, to analyze the accounts
of quantifying. She presents two foundationist accounts (universalist and relativist) and explains that
the major difference between an account of quantifying founded in social practices (relativist) and
one which takes the physical world as a foundation (universalist) lies in the relativist dispute of the
naturalness of spatiotemporal entities as the universal foundation of quantification.
 - In looking again at the explanations presented in the classrooms in Nigeria, the author presents how
the Yoruba language and the English language symbolize numbers in different ways. So both the
traditional (western) way of teaching and the one that succeeded in the classroom observed are
correct. >> However, the author further problematizes this conclusion: such explanation regenerates
the boundary between ‘Yoruba’ and ‘English’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. We are re-making the
naturalness of domination; a particular set of colonial institutional power relations. And we are re-
inscribing the researcher as a disembodied judging observer who participates in modern spacetime,
as an academic legislator obliged only to adopt valid reasoning procedures, but who does not
participate in the time and place of those who her story is about.
- The author presents an alternative account of quantifying as an outcome of collective life of all
participants (humans and non-humans). This is a quantifying as embodied or, as routines of
collective acting by multiple participants. The focus is on the accommodations and resistances
between participants and the way these have been consolidated as routines, repetitions, and rituals.
The patterned enacting in routines, repetitions, and rituals constitutes a necessary background against
which innovation and novelty can occur. Thus, quantifying concepts are generated in these routines,
repetitions, and rituals of quantifying, these emerge as orderings of acting-out, as much solidly
material as they are symbolic. These concepts are not entities, but routinely (re-)generated tensions
between familiar participants.
- Using the frame of quantifying as embodied, the author re-structures the previous argument about the
successful class taught in the Nigerian classroom. The class was in fact a combination of the
constituent routines of English language and Yoruba language which quantifies in novel ways to
effect quantification that is, at the same time, both and neither English or Yoruba language
quantification. This is the origin of the author’s disconcertment.

What is intellectual property after?

Marilyn Strathern
- Despite the relative success of the ANT program to treat heterogeneous phenomena evenhandedly,
some divide akin to the human/nonhuman one still lingers in certain formulations regarding the
discussion of intellectual property in Papua New Guinea.
- The people of the Papua New Guinea Highlands present a continuity of identity between persons and
things. People are divided by what they do with their possessions and attributes with respect to
others, they achieve division through relations.
- Intellectual property rights (IPR) aims to break down the divisions between people, to give as much
protection to developing nations as to the technologically advanced by extending not just the benefits
of technology, but the procedural benefits of technology-protection. However, processes of
democratization have tried to reestablish the divide between technology and society, for example
IPR.
- Critiques of IPR: it is only valid when knowledge is used to create commodities; it is seen as a
spread of Euro-American norms of property that will legitimate the extractors of resources and make
it more difficult to promote indigenous claims; IPR is constructed around the figure of the solitary
author or corporate invention, it will likely work against people for whom knowledge and resources
are collective and inter-generational; bringing social procedures from technology-rich states and
companies to perceived technology-poor ones perpetuates divisions between world
powers/multinationals and indigenous people/third world enterprise; problems of translation from
community or collective ownership into internationally valid practices.
- The people from the central highlands of Papua New Guinea practice a type of negotiation called
‘compensation’: it refers both to the payment owed to persons and to the procedure by which they
 come to negotiate settlement (It covers damages, thefts, death, loss of resources). This process easily
translates people into things or things into people.
- Two crucial features of ‘compensation’:
1. It enrolls a rhetoric of body expenditure, both physical and mental effort, based on an
image of body process as the giving out and taking in of resources. What is embedded in artefacts
and instruments of all kinds is the energy with which persons have done things.
2. It travels by its own means of evaluation. A transaction which transforms human energy
into other values, it offers the promise of harnessing any order of material worth to realize them. (20
pigs for assistance in war, an insult for two weeks of wage…). There is no predetermined
discontinuity between persons and the products of their efforts.
- Compensation works as a species of social organization. Collectivities differentiate, identify and
describe themselves by their role in compensation, a kind of functional heterogeneity. Social units
are defined through exchange. >>> People divide people. Old social divisions are used to create new
ones and that work of division itself creates social distinction. Difference is constantly created in the
conduct of social life.
- If claiming access to knowledge leads to functional social differentiation, its utility turns out, like
any other resource, to be distributed among people in uneven quantities. The moment one suggests
that technology – or procedures for technology-protection – could liberate the usefulness of
knowledge for particular social units, one reintroduces the distinction between society and
technology which sustains the new international program.

Actor-network theory – the market test

Michel Callon
- According to the author, ANT’s strength comes from its lack of a stable theory of the actor and its
assumption of the radical indeterminacy of the actor.
- Callon aims to show how ANT can explain actors’ competencies, without however denying its basic
hypotheses and, in particular, without calling into question the refusal to give an a priori definition of
the actor or the role of non-humans in action. >>> Case study of markets: ANT and markets are
diametrically opposed (in ANT humans and non-humans are hard to separate, and actors have
variable forms and competencies; in the market, everything is delimited and roles are perfectly
defined).
- Characteristics of the market:
o The decentralization of decision-making;
o The definition of actors as calculating agents
o Conflicts of interest which are resolved in transactions that establish an equivalence measured
by prices;
- Ways for the market to maintain co-ordination in case of uncertainties: contingent contracts; focal
point (shared common knowledge); through networks (Granovetter).
- If agents can calculate their decisions, it is because they are entangled in a web of relations and
connections; they do not have to open up to the world because they contain their world. Agents are
actor-worlds.
- Instead of the path of economist, we must start out from the proliferation of relations and ask how far
the bracketing of these connections must go to allow calculation and co-ordination through
calculation. >>> Framing: an operation used to define individual agents which are clearly distinct
and dissociated from on another. It also allows for the definition of objects, goods and merchandise
which are perfectly identifiable and can be separated not only from other goods, but also from the
actors involved for example in their conception, production, circulation or use. Overflowing: the
impossibility of total framing. There are always relations that defy framing. Boundary-objects:
 elements mobilized to make possible the framing and stabilization of actions, while simultaneously
providing an opening onto the worlds, thus constituting leakage points where overflowing can occur.
- The buyer, seller, and object need to be disentangled in order for the transaction to conclude. >>>
money is pure disentanglement, pure circulation.
- Framing is necessary in order to create a space for calculability: Homo economicus does exist, but is
not an ahistorical reality. It does not describe the hidden nature of the human being. It is the result of
a process of configuration (involving different material, metrological and procedural devices, for
example), and framing.
- Conclusion: A concrete market is the result of operations of disentanglement, framing,
internalization and externalization. To understand a market, it is necessary to understand the
construction of calculative actors who consider themselves to be quits once the transaction has been
concluded. This does not mean that everything has been framed and internalized and that no relations
other than market relations exist (complete disentanglement is impossible); framing can function and
survive only if there is overflowing, and connections have not been internalized. ANT passed the
market test due to its flexibility (it is not a theory) and its lack of a theory of agent.

Good passages, bad passages

Ingunn Moser and John Law
- The paper uses some of the tools developed in the actor-network approach, but also in feminism, to
interpret the material and corporeal relations involved in the formation of contemporary
subjectivities.
- Case study of Liv, a disabled woman who requires a wheelchair to move >> focus on the material
specificities, corporeal and otherwise, which lead to or affect the character of dis/ability and thus
identity and subjectivity.
- Dis/ability is a set of specificities, we imagine ourselves as abled, but abled in a million ways. Just as
Liv is dis/abled in million ways.
- We should pay attention to specificities and the relation between specificities: the passage between
those specificities (some of them are easy for Liv, like the passage between controlling the front door
and moving her wheelchair, or difficult, like the passage between platform and train).
- There are specificities because they come in the form of heterogeneous materials. If networks are in
place, if the prostheses are working, then there is ability. If they are not, there is dis/ability. >>>>
Dis/ability is about specific passages between equally specific array of heterogeneous materials.
- The materiality of words (tongue, ear, muscles, devices...): also specific material heterogeneities and
the passages between those specificities.
- There are passages that are presupposed, normatively prescribed: if these turn out to be bad passages
for the subject, then they make lacks. And if such passages are made better, this makes for pleasure.
(easy passages to difficult or difficult passages to easy)
- Good passages mean moving smoothly between different specificities and their materialities. Bad
passages are about awkward displacements, moments that are difficult or impossible. However, the
good passages may conceal other passages that involve hard work, and make them invisible.
- Through writing her memoirs, Liv performs herself as a rational agent, struggling against all the
difficulties of a dis/abled body, in continuity. The autobiography is then a prosthesis. The person and
autobiography are partially connected, internally related, and irreducible to one another (cyborg).
- In Liv's life, continuity and discontinuity are being performed together (moral continuity/moral
discontinuity oscillation): To be a competent agent, is in some sense to be separated from other
agents at times. We have just seen that. But, at the same time, it is also to extend the moral
continuities of planful action and sustained identity into both the past and the future.
 - Link between discontinuities of moral agency and continuities of material support: she is able to act
as an autonomous agent, only because she is embodied in and performed by an endless network of
heterogeneous materials (humans and non-humans) >>> cyborg - irreducible to a unit, even though
'she' is also a unit.
- Liv's struggles to achieve the normative form of subjectivity allows us to acknowledge that we make
and are made by good/bad passages, continuities and discontinuities, and we weave are woven, in the
partial connections, in the particular oscillations of normative subjectivities.

A sociology of attachment: music amateurs, drug users

Emilie Gomart and Antoine Hennion
- In ANT, objects have been turned into networks and thereby radically re-defined. Another project is
the study of subject-networks: an attempt to offer an alternative account of the ways in which
subjects may be seized, impassioned and swept away >>> shift of focus from decentered subjects to
socio-technical 'dispositifs' of passion. (positive version of Foucault)
- Case study: 2 forms of passion: love of music and of drugs. >>> consensual forms of self-
abandonment: techniques, settings, devices and collective carriers that make this active dis-
possession possible.
- Both addictions involve a competent amateur who puts his/her equilibrium at risk in the name of a
non-communicable experience.
- Attempt to develop ANT by using it to study a new area.
- ANT and action theory:
1. Both ANT and action theory differs from theories of free subjects, Callon and Law, for
example, suggest that each element of the network relays and prolongs the action of the
collective without ever being a (or the) source of action itself. They conclude that the
capacity to be strategic cannot be assigned to a human actor within a network but should be
described as the effect of the association of a heterogeneous network;
2. Both also describe the actions of humans and non-humans symmetrically;
3. Both strip the subject of its cognitive, cultural, common sense capacities and return these to
its surroundings. Competencies are shaped by the social and material association;
4. ANT, however, cuts the link between action and an (albeit distributed) actor, which is crucial
to the theory of action. ANT seeks to describe the composition of heterogeneous elements in
networks which produce emerging action from an indeterminate source.
- The authors want to give up 'action' and turn towards 'event' to study other configurations of 'what
occurs' and to highlight the ideas of mediation >>> object-mediators do not just repeat and relay
actions, but also transform these in surprising ways. An 'event' occurs and it has a positivity of its
own which is limited neither to its origins and determinants, nor to its effects. Mediation allows the
course of the world to return to the center of analysis.
- The concept of actants (from semiotics) makes it possible to describe the emergence of an effect by
referring not to agents but to 'that which lets/makes happen' >>> in the article 'that which' is the
mediating object, the dispositif.
- Passion is the abandonment of forces to objects and the suspension of the self. >>> 'action' is not re-
introduced because there are no pure causes, no pure intentions. Instead, human activity is 'made
possible', 'potentialized', 'conditioned' by the activity of drugs or the pull of music. Such conditioning
requires active work >>> The abandonment is not exclusively passive, it involves the participation of
both person and the object: these models of being/acting weave together polar opposites -
passivity/activity, collective/individual (...)
- Analyzing the amateur's own description, taste is a concrete activity whose modes, dispositifs and
practices can be described >> A concert, for example, is a conjunctural event in which relevant
objects, subjects, and social groupings are co-produced.
- The amateurs, using their own 'sociology', circulates between different registers in both directions.
These 'passings' involve practices, uses of time and objects, relations to the group, indigenous
theories of what happens, what works, and what is at stake.
- 'Passings':
1. From the body to the 'head': described as a passage from physical force to intentional or higher
order force;
2. From the lone actor to the socio-technical dispositif: the interviewees deploy and articulate
different versions of the divide. It is in their encounter and the trial which co-ordinates them that
the appeal of taste and pleasure emerges (e.g. pleasure between personal choice and mimicry of
other experts, or the importance of social setting and the own activity of the drug user in the
construction of pleasure). Like the object, the person is not distinct a priori from the set-up which
fabricates it;
3. From striving to 'make an effect to laying back and 'feeling' the effect: a different register in
which action and passivity are not the only alternatives. There is a mix between active and
passive that is mutually enabling. (eg. the distinctions between what is caused by the drug and
what the person 'naturally' is are blurred);
4. From the objectivity of objects to objects as mediators: amateurs claim that their objects can only
be grasped through a particularly developed competence to perceive, combine and elaborate
them. There is no distinction between natural and social effects. >> the verbal and technical
virtuosity of the user are co-produced in the same experience as the pleasure and the 'purity' of
the drug. (Ex.: the object 'itself' (music/drug) is made powerful through the apprenticeship of the
amateur. The potential sensorial effect of music and drugs are conceivable only in relation to a
skilled consumer and he/she is only conceivable in relation to these 'potentialized' effects);
5. From the technical mastery of time and organization to a loss of control: there is no break
between the preparation/methodical work and the tentative expectation of a possible event. (e.g.
managing dependency as a way of remaining prepared for pleasure).
- Conclusion: This way of describing and qualifying events of passion forces the sociologists and the
amateurs to use the same type of account and vocabulary to characterize the event. Also, such events
cannot be separated from the modalities through which some moments and conditions are prepared
in order to make these 'happenings' possibly occur. The descriptions also reveal a subtle interweaving
between being abandoned to an external power and the virtuosity of practices, of manual and of
social skills. >>> the user passes between active and passive (passivity is not a moment of inaction
or lack of will, it adds to action, potentializes action).
- Passion is a paradox: it is entirely oriented towards an idea which is not the realization of the self,
nor the realization of an intention, but the revers: to let oneself be swept away, seized by some thing
which passes. (The active process of conditioning so that something might arrive). What is at stake is
the users' tentative encouragement of shifts between states of being. Music or drugs constitute their
beings, transform them irreversibly, and thus lead them to happiness or distress.