Dear Kjetil,

Your note caught my eye. Without responding to the full thread, I do 
want to address the specific issue you raise, the issue of agency. 
(As you suspect, this issue has been discussed on this list and in 
related lists.)

Non-human actors in actor networks are not agents and they do not 
possess agency. Bruno Latour describes actor networks, and he 
describes non-human actors. He does not describe non-human agents. 
There is an important difference.

An agent is "a person who acts. In philosophical usage it is not 
implied that the action is on someone else's behalf" (Mautner 1996: 
7). This second sentence covers an important qualification: an agent 
in this sense is a person who acts on his or her own behalf, rather 
than as the instrument of another's will. Agency is the property of 
an agent.

An agent may be an "actant" (Akrich and Latour 1992: 259), but not 
all actants are agents.

An agent is endowed with will and understanding. The quality of 
agency involves will, and agent causation means both the power to act 
(and to cause) AND the power NOT to act or to cause. This is also 
connected to the quality of will. (See, f.ex., Rowe  1995: 13).

Artifacts lack this power.

Artifacts are the instruments of their creators. They do not 
understand what they are doing in the sense of conscious 
comprehension of their role in the actor networks of which they are 
part. They lack the will or freedom NOT to act or cause.

Latour writes in a provocative and entertaining way that seems to 
blur the notion of agency into the notion that you describe using the 
term "actant." Nevertheless, not even Latour seems to claim that 
"actants" are agents possessing agency in the sense that agents 
possess will and understanding. In defining the notion of an actant, 
Latour and Akrich (1992: 259) shade the case by describing an actor 
as an "actant endowed with a character (usually anthropomorphic)." 
They use the term "endowed" in an ambiguous way: it suggests without 
explicitly describing an attribute the actant possesses in its own 
right OR it designate an attribute bestowed by the will of another. 
The term anthropomorphic, on the other hand, clearly indicates 
something that RESEMBLES a human being without being one.

Attributing agency to artifacts may be useful as a thought experiment 
or a metaphor. The sign, "the groom is on strike!" (Latour 1992: 227) 
does not describe the purposeful behavior of an agent. It recasts the 
malfunctioning of an artifact in comical metaphoric terms by 
comparing a malfunctioning artifact to a human being taking 
purposeful action. No artifact that exists today acts with willful, 
conscious purpose. Artifacts are the instruments of their human 
creators.

Manufactured artifacts cannot possess agency unless we redefine the 
term "agency" to exclude precisely the qualities of will and 
understanding that define agency as we now use the term.

Yours,

Ken


References

Akrich, Madeleine and Bruno Latour. 1992. "A Summary of a Convenient 
Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies." 
Shaping Technology / Building Society. Studies in Sociotechnical 
Change. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 
MIT Press, 259-264.

Latour, Bruno. 1992. "Where are the Missing Masses. The Sociology of 
a Few Mundane Artifacts." Shaping Technology / Building Society. 
Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Eds. 
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 225-258.

Rowe, William L. 1995. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Robert 
Audi, editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mautner, Thomas. 1996. A Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.


Kjetil Fallan wrote:

"Please excuse me if this should be old news to the list, but since 
no-one else has made mention of it hitherto in this thread, I thought 
I'd offer a non-designer point of view:

"Nonhuman agency has been discussed in the field of Science, 
Technology and Society studies (STS) since the late 1980s. The 
seminal text in this respect is

"Bruno Latour (under the pseudonym Jim Johnson), Mixing Humans and 
Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closerin Social Problems 
Vol. 35, No. 3, June 1988, p 298-310
Latour here demonstrates how nonhuman entities become actants through 
their design: certain tasks have been delegated to them, and 
performing these tasks (or not performing them, or performing them 
badly) make the nonhumans actants inhabit the given actor network on 
a par with human actants. To stick with Latour's case: this line of 
thought is what makes the sign put up on a door, informing about a 
dysfunctional door-closer, far more appropriate than the author (of 
the sign, not the article) might have intended: 'THE GROOM IS ON 
STRIKE!'

"Thinking of nonhumans as actants on a par with human actants poses 
challenges to many forms of design studies, but I find it a fresh and 
rewarding perspective to keep in mind when analyzing design 
processes, products and their meanings in the writing of a cultural 
history of design. Historians tend to get seduced by the agency of 
('great') human actors, loosing sight of the other inhabitants of the 
actor network. This is where Latour's insistence on the agency of 
nonhumans can function as a corrective."

-- 
Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management

Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School

email: [log in to unmask]