Post-ANT and its consequences

The paper discusses the contested state of actor-network theory (ANT) through the engagement of its four prominent figures, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern, John Law and Bruno Latour. The aim is to describe a body of ANT critique that have been developed since its formation in the 1980s and to shed light on whether ANT should be considered a theory, a method, or neither of these.

Questions

1. Why is it interesting to go beyond ANT?
2. How is it possible?

Two goals of ANT critique:

1. To show a difference between ANT's constructivism and social constructivism.
2. To reveal that ANT is neither a theory nor a method.

What is ANT?

ANT describes the world as a complex space where all entities, including theories, are continuously shifting, — which implies that ANT itself cannot claim to remain the same (57).

A foundational ANT feature is its generalised symmetry (Callon, 1986). This is explained as its belief that “all things are what they are in relation to other things, not because of essential qualities.” (58) Things also cannot be categorised before their relations are clarified, because prior to that moment they don’t have any inherent qualities. This has an important outcome in that ANT does away with various well-known dualisms such as human/non-human, true/false, micro/macro, seeing them instead as network effects.

In other words, it the conclusion of any ANT study would be the same, precisely that agents are implicated with the networks. An emphasis will always be to refuse any advance determination on “who the relevant actors are in any given situation and what comprises a network.” (76)

This leads to a conclusion that ANT is relatively undefinable, each case demands a new methods assemblage. (Law, 2004)

Defining the three parameters

Post-ANT is a “reflexive” ANT (56) — that is, ANT reflecting on itself. The refection occurs via the three main axis: complexity, multiplicity and fractality.

• Multiplicity means that there may be several versions of the same phenomenon, in Mol’s case, a disease (arthritis).
• Fractality implies that the versions of the phenomenon may be related but not on all points or in all dimensions.
• Complexity arises in the tension between multiplicity and fractality. (66 referencing Mol, 2002)

ANT critics

The challenge to ANT, posed by feminists is that it is always too easy to focus on strong actors: “networks appear quite differently for marginalized actors living with multiple borders” (58 citing Star and Griesemer). Such temptation may make ANT appear as essentially a "managerial theory.” (59)

Latour’s four critical positions

1. Network. Is now misused, because the term has naturally changed its meaning. In the original ANT sense, network was used as a tool for institutional and generally sociological critique. With the advent of internet, network now means the opposite, eg access to information.(61)
2. Actor. These, in a strict sense, cannot be found neither on the micro, nor on the macro level. This follows from the general conclusion that if relations between actors only appear as network effects, the concept of the social is only used as a label and does not constitute any explanatory model.(62)
3. Theory. ANT cannot explain practices because it is a technique designed, as seen above, to bypass any characterisation made in advance. (62)
4. Hyphen. Here Latour is said to argue that the original impetus of ANT was to address regions of modern way of thinking, such as the “world out there”, the “inside” of the subject, the politics and the teleology or purpose (62). This mode of critique has now been lost, and ANT has transformed into a “theory about the fluid transformation of actors in a nonmodern situation.” (63)
   
   (However I now struggle to understand why it is the hyphen’s fault, hoping to clarify later)

The post-pluralism of ANT

ANT challenge the notions grouped around social constructivism, a view that people from different social groups have accordingly variable perspectives. These are, on the one hand, perspectivism, a concept that sees reality as a “mute material, which is being gazed at from different angles.” (71) On the other hand, there is pluralism, defined as “an egalitarian idea about the status of the various kinds of knowledge produced by theoretical perspectives.”(73)

A post-plural view proposed by ANT theorists approaches these and similar approaches with a grain of salt. There is a doubt that proliferation of perspectives leads to any qualitative increase in knowledge, since any knowledge produces to the same extent as it is produced. (73)

Conclusions

1. As seen above, ANT approaches are tailor-made every time. It forms alliances with methods, yet is not itself a method. ANT does not tell the researcher what to do. The only motif that relates it to any method is that it reminds the researchers that whenever they go, they are likely to find clusterings or “hybrids of action” comprised of actor-network relations, rather than any definite entities.
2. Moreover, ANT is only minimally a theory, since it “proposes a generalised agnosticism with respect to the value of theories.” (75)
3. ANT is rooted in practice, and is predominantly built of the knowledge derived from actors in the field. In other words, it only gains value when it forms specific constellations with matters of empirical study. (75)

References

Gad, Christopher, and Casper Bruun Jensen. 2010. “On the Consequences of Post-ANT.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35(1): 55–80.