Blog Post - Week 4 - Assembling Publishing-Publics/Archive Fever

Latour's ANT (Source: Ryan Selvage)

"...Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is notoriously difficult to summarize, define or explain. There are a number of reasons for this..." (Cressman, 2009)

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This week; we discussed issues of assemblage, the role and impact of technology upon means of publishing and of course: Latour's 'Actor Network Theory'. (ANT)

Personally, i found it rather difficult to wrap my head around the many concepts and abundant intricacies of the ANT - and took great solace in Cressman's brief summation of the topic.

In short, Cressman (2009) argued that the ANT - as proposed by the likes of Latour (1996) -  considers "...both human and non-human elements equally as actors within a network. In other words, we should employ the same analytical and descriptive framework when faced with either a human, a text or a machine..."

Latour (Source: Wikipedia Creative Commons)

Straight away I found myself questioning when - and in what context - would the ANT be applicable/used?

Again, this was met with a degree of uncertainty, because many readings - not least that of Law and Hassard (1999) - found that there is no orthodoxy in current ANT, and different authors use the approach in substantially different ways.

However one sticking point across many, if not all of the proposals from those critiquing the theory is this: Technological and Social (or 'Human') actants, regardless of their contextual positioning, are to be held as equals in their respective social structure.

Once more, this lead me to question the potential windfalls of the ANT... and the first was rooted in the very name of the concept itself.

This stance was readily supported by Dankert (2010) who found that "ANT does not use the word actor in its regular meaning. The word actant would be more appropriate. An actant is that which accomplishes or undergoes an act. They differ from actors because an actant can not only be a human, but also an animal, object or concept that accomplishes or undergoes an act. Through the use of the word actant humans, animals, objects and concepts are treated equally in an analytical sense"

To relate this concept back to the over-arching theme of 'Publics and Publishing', we may thence gather that the ANT is applicable in determining the role and impacts of technologies (consider these as a means of publishing) upon their users (publics) - and vice versa!. This, in turn, serves as concrete foundations in many socio-cultural studies.

And whilst generally used in this field of study, I propose the idea that the ANT could also be used in an 'every day', or significantly more common, form when deconstructing advertising messages; be those via print or in a video-graphical form.

Respondents, in critiquing or analysing the given texts, could effectively deduce the role of the 'actants' in the work, and thus conceive their impact in transmitting the intended (or otherwise) messages to be decoded.

References:

Cressman, D. (2009) - A Brief Overview of Actor-Network Theory: Punctualization, Heterogeneous Engineering & Translation (accessible at http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/cprost/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/0901.pdf) 

Dankert, R. (2010) - Using Actor Network Theory Doing Research. (accessible at http://ritskedankert.nl/publicaties/2010/item/using-actor-network-theory-ant-doing-research)

Latour, B. (1996) - On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications” Soziale Welt pp.369-381.

Law, J. & Hassard, J. (1999) - Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford and Keele: Blackwell and the Sociological Review).