Perhaps Prof. Macdonald did a really good job of setting the reading up for us, or I was so mortified by his warnings of its density that I could only be pleasantly surprised, or I’ve completely misinterpreted the text, but the Latour reading was significantly less difficult than I was expecting, Latour’s style isn’t the most accessible, but the regular interjections of hilariously blunt insults and over-the-top metaphors (ANT as Prince Charming kissing Sleeping Beauty? Ahahah) made the chapter much more bearable (and dare I say, enjoyable) than I was anticipating.
His supposedly controversial statement that we must redefine our conception of agency to include objects as actors is argued so convincingly to the point that it seems obvious and common sense. This is of course, his intention, as someone who describes those who think otherwise as deluded to the point of unsubstantiated religiosity or close-minded and focused on the tautological to the point of being comparable to a puppy chasing its tail.
In short, Latour argues that we must blur the line between humans and objects as actors. He says that this understanding of objects as having agency is necessary in order to also understand broader structures of social domination, namely the ways in which they are perpetuated. He is suggesting that objects shape and sustain social power structures that other, lesser, sociologists, would ordinarily attribute to solely interhuman interactions. I think I would agree.
I spoke to my sociologist friend briefly about ANT. He told me that one of its problems is that it’s not clear where it makes room for intentionality and by extension, responsibility. If our social selves are created and defined by those things that act upon us, and if we are on par with objects in the way that we negotiate our place in and perpetuation of the frames and structures which constrain us, where does that leave room for a) emergence and b) resistance?
I think that a) can be somewhat uncontroversially addressed within Latour’s context. By a) I mean the initial emergence of social norms, as opposed to their solidification. Latour doesn’t seem to deny the role of face-to-face relations in creating dynamics such as e.g. the dominance of a male over a female. But, I understand him to believe these interactions and negotiations of power to be temporary and constantly negotiated and redefined. The way in which they become static and durable is through their embodiment in or facilitation by objects; ‘things... which lend their ‘steely’ quality to the hapless ‘society.’ So, a dominant male creates and sustains patriarchy when he requires a female to wear shoes for which she must bind her feet – therefore perpetuating the notion of her fragility and making it visible and communicable to those who gaze upon her. I think this answers my friends objection, but he’s a sociology PhD and I’m an undergrad who’s never done even introductory sociology or anthropology (this course really threw me into the deep end....) so I wonder what elements of his objection I was missing...
Resistance is a much more interesting concept whose compatibility with Latour I’d be interested in exploring. Prof. Macdonald mentioned in class that he doesn’t think we have free will – which is I think a very pessimistic view of the world, which has the danger of sort devolving into a nihilistic ‘everything is permitted, and nothing matters’ attitude. I think there must necessarily be a conception of agency that allows for responsibility, resistance and more specifically morality, or the responsibility to resist. Pragmatically speaking, this seems like a difficult project, especially in capitalist and liberal societies which do the cleverly insidious thing of subsuming all that attempts to counter them into themselves. (For example Che Guevara shirts or the argument that Obama is proof of a ‘post-racial’ society)
Clearly, operating in opposition to a norm or structure is still a response to and therefore shaped by it. Adorno for example writes “One is trapped, conformism is produced a priori by meaning itself.” However, despite all of this, it seems to me that there *is* or should be some “asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations.” This asymmetry is reflected in the emergence and potential disintegration of the networks themselves. Surely if social interaction gives birth to the structures that objects solidify, then it can also dismantle them. In the obvious way that we can stop producing bras in our opposition to patriarchy, but also in that we can harness the power of existing objects and make them send new signals.
I read an interesting article (which I can’t find anymore) that wrote of a study conducted by a police force in the USA which found that visible property destruction instilled feelings of lawlessness and evidence of weakened state power in citizens and made them more inclined to engage in ‘criminal behaviour.’ This explains why cops are so concerned with broken Starbucks windows, and why property destruction seems so integral to social uprising. It explains why the activist violence upon police cars is somehow comparable to police violence upon human bodies. There appears to be some recognition by ‘the powers that be’ that objects are indeed actors and can provoke acknowledgement of the instability of a system and imminent social change, but that initial human actors are those who are capable of using objects to send signals that are counter to those of existing structures. Clearly there is intentionality involved, here, and I still think it’s possible for us to make objects a little bit more than they make us. I kinda like the idea of objects as actors though, it gives some satisfying weight to the possibility of literally 'smashing the state.'
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