New materialism
Petr Ocelík
MEB401 / MEB427 / ESS427
13th December 2018
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 (and other entities)
• ANT focuses on how, rather then why, are certain Actor-Networks
formed, maintained, and destroyed
ANT in energy studies
[Actor-Network Theory] can be noteworthy, then, for de-centering the
technological artefact as the object of inquiry and expanding scholastic
focus on ‘technology’ to include the vast social and cultural networks
that surround it... By focusing on the relational aspects among
engineers, inventors, analysts, politicians, artifacts, manufacturing
techniques, marketing strategies, historical context, economics, and
social and cultural factors, ANT highlights that technology emerges
through a seamless web of material objects and immaterial
epistemologies. This situates energy technologies as neither inevitable
nor static. Instead, energy technologies are the product of a complex
power play between divergent actors and their interests.
Sovacool 2006: 10-11
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 actors’ 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)