New materialism
Petr Ocelík
MEB421 Teorie bezpečnosti a metodologie
10th December 2015
Outline
• New materialism (NM): assumptions
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
New materialism: assumptions
• Reaction to predominance of cultural and discursive approaches.
• Trans-disciplinary enterprise.
• Materialism
• Empiricism
• Relational perspective
Materialism
• “Truth and falsehood. Large and small. Agency and structure. Human
and non-human. Before and after. Knowledge and power. Context and
content. Materiality and sociality. Activity and passivity…all of these
divides have been rubbished in work undertaken in the name of actornetwork
theory.” (Law 1999: 3)
• NM rejects Cartesian dualism between social and natural world.
• Physical things are central to our identities which are practiced
through objects we use.
• The world is a socio-material construction.
Empiricism
• NM rejects abstract theory and the imposition of general categories
upon the empirical data.
• “The task of the researcher is no to impose order, limit the range of
acceptable entities or add reflexivity to [actors’] practice. But follow
the actors, their wild innovations, methods, and accounts.” (Latour
2005: 11)
• NM uses rather an ethnographic research approach that allows to
unfold the story in its complexity.
Relational perspective
• The world is full of hybrid entities containing both human and nonhuman
elements that are mutually related.
 Social world is created by entanglements (Actor-Networks,
assemblages) of human and non-human actors.
Human actors vs. non-human actants
• Agency: capacity of a thing or person to impact its surroundings (no
intentionality needed).
• Human actors and non-human actants.
• Actants: anything that “…modify other actors through a series of…”
actions (Latour 1999: 75).
• If the entity modifies other entities, contributes something new to
the entanglement that cannot be reduced to the other entities, then
it is an actant.
Actor-Network Theory
• ANT mostly connected with a French philosopher and
sociologist Bruno Latour (1947 - ).
• It is rather a research methodology.
• The central concept: Actor-Network that mediates interactions
between people.
• ANT focuses on how, rather then why, are certain Actor-Networks
formed, maintained, and destroyed.
Panopticon
Translation
• “I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation,
the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some
degree modifies two elements of agents.” (Latour 1994: 32)
• Translation focuses on the manner in which entities’ interests and
goals are represented, simplified, and transformed into construction
of an Actor-Network.
• Often, few actors become spokespersons for many of other by
defining and linking identities of others in increasingly simplified and
fixed ways (e.g. “we - as a nation - are threatened and need to be
protected”).
Conclusions
• NM (ANT) allows to accommodate and focus on non-social, noncultural
entities that populate the world and integrate them with the
social ones.
• It moves away from abstract thinking and anthropocentrism.
• The entanglements are seen as provisional and historically
contingent (room for intervention).
First question for seminar
• Think about at least two mundane security-related objects
that you encountered when you have been walking this
morning from your home to this class.