I'm not very
familiar with actor-network theory, but I have come across it in
several anthropological texts I have recently read—Elyachar's
Markets of Dispossession,
Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy,
and On Barak's On Time. I admit that in these works
sometimes I can't find the connection between the theory and the
barrage of stories and facts. Each
of these texts has many elements that are quite difficult to
disentangle, and which could each
warrant in-depth review.
However, I will keep this rather superficial for now, as I have to
continue reading On Time...
Anyway, I've been reading
Graham Harman so I'll see if I can casually and uncritically apply
his philosophy to these texts—maybe a decent (though unprofound) exercise, but still I
apologize for vulgarity and simplicity beforehand.
First,
identifying non-human actors in historical processes is nothing
revolutionary or even very interesting. This is not where the problem
lies, however. It is rather when the focus on “objects” or
whatever is made at the expense of ideological configurations or
modes of consciousness (as for example in Mitchell's book). There is
no place for human agency, which I presume to be at least as
important for direct political action and the articulation
of demands (in the general
strike, for instance) as is the positive power of the workers to have
those demands met. In other words, a strike may be effective towards
its particular goals because of
(or rather, largely because of) technical considerations—this would
be Mitchell's determination of the vulnerability of the networks of
coal or oil production as the primary factor. However, what demands
are made is a matter of consciousness, and unless Mitchell is a
technical determinist (he says he isn't) then that ought to be
accounted for. I mean, his book is about democracy, however poorly he
defines it.
Second,
there's the irritating exultant mode of writing that Barak resorts to
when he switches over from telling us a story to discussing his
theoretical framework. For example, he writes, “Close attention to
these connections may open up new paths of inquiry, such as a marine
biology of the Arabic novel, an electrical engineering of
neoclassical poetry, or an agricultural science of Arabic semantic
fields. What follows is an attempt to flesh out some of these
connections” (131).
Quite
aside from the exultation, there's the problem of flattening, which
happens in two ways: first, there's
“vertical” flattening, such that levels of abstraction are
hopelessly confused, and second, there's the “horizontal”
flattening, in which causal interactions are reduced and intermediate
actors eliminated.
The
vertical flattening is of course intended, though I don't exactly
know why this would be desirable in this context. As an example, let
us take the “underwater linguistic environment” (39). Is there
anything linguistic in this environment? Well yes, Barak might say,
the submarine cables through which telegraphs are sent. But the sea
termite cannot interact with the cables linguistically,
but only indirectly through, for example, chewing through the cable
and preventing communication. We might ask what properties the
termite is interacting with when it does so—none of these turn out
to be linguistic in nature. There are certain qualities, in other
words, that the termite cannot abstract
(where I take abstraction in a realist sense of engaging certain
properties or distorting a certain object in
a certain way). So this
doesn't make much sense to me.
We
could also take Barak's enthusiasm as that not for “vertical”
flattening but “horizontal” flattening. For example, take the
line, “Along these lines, and in a much more literal sense, our
worm [the sea termite] may almost be able to write... the teredo [the
termite] opened the door for my own entry into the narrative, thus
participating in the writing of its own history” (39). Or
alternatively, he earlier declares the termite to be “semi-literate”.
Horizontally, this could mean that the worm as an actor caused
someone to write about it, and thereby somehow wrote
its own history. The problem, of course, is the compression of the
causal chain. The worm caused someone to write about it, but this
does not mean the worm wrote or has any direct engagement with
writing or reading. Things in a causal chain need to be alike in some
sense in their interactions, but the further effects of that (the
writing) need not be related whatsoever.
In
other words, to sum up:
some properties may elicit the effects of other properties through
the medium of the object to which they belong, and those properties
need not be the same or commensurable. The termite chews the cable,
which affects some physical properties of the cable, which properties
effect the linguistic properties of the cable through the
medium of the cable-object. The
termite is not linguistic and cannot interact with linguistic
reality, and there is no
“underwater linguistic environment”.
A
better use of the theory, in my opinion, is to be found in Elyachar.
She claims the Egyptian Master (craftsman) is not separate from the
market he creates, and that the failure of neoliberal programs in
Egypt can be related to this fact (though it does not just apply to
craftsmen, there it is most visible). Here, there is a good reason to
bring in actor-network theory, whereas in the other two books I've
mentioned it seems to be only weakly-related to the actual arguments
provided—aside from the commonplace denunciations of subject-object
distinctions that are not sufficiently relational or anti-humanist
enough (strange how those two charges go together, given recent work
in speculative realism).
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