I would not expect that you would be convinced by Latour, nor anyone
else that didn't fit your theoretical standpoint.  You find necessity
in certain normative descriptions, that is fine, I don't see the
necessity, though i do see they are handy for telling good stories and
stories that people tend to be used to and thus readily accept.
However, that I prefer something, or that you prefer something is no
reason for someone else to prefer something.

ANT helps us in many ways, it provides accounts of the genesis of
events that actually accounts for non-humans as part of, not separate
from, the social world in any epistemological or ontological sense.
Many people find that very appealing.  Other people tend to find the
ideas of symmetry principle and reflexivity principle appealing,
especially in that it allows them to tell a story about what happened
instead of a story of who did what to whom.

actually i'm not hiding behind anything.  i don't find ant
descriptions particularly impoverished.  i do find the need for people
to construct elaborate theories of subjectivity that accounts for
religious or historical dogma to be slightly impoverished, but those
traditions have generated great results within their frameworks, just
like ANT does within it's framework.

we have, as researchers, many models that we can follow, the reason we
choose one or another varies, i prefer to promote pragmatism.  If ANT
does what you need and you find utility use it.  If someone requires
you to use an agent-centered theory or you find those theories better
for your research, use that.   Do not expect to find the same things
out about the world though...

ANT has given us two interesting, albeit somewhat old reminders in
recent years.  One is the theory of the mess in social science,
which... is what i think the problem of the agent centers on... how to
clean up a mess.  keep in mind that the agent though isn't cleaning up
anything, just blackboxing a set of problems so you don't have to deal
with it.  Much like ANT says... 'but i don't see agents, i just see
actants'  It puts that problem aside and focusses its efforts in other
directions.  Similarly the mess is the result of all social research,
as the social research must mix in the world and thus change the very
social milieu that it studies.  ANT is pretty good at accounting for
that.   SImilarly to this last point ANT has given the idea of
ontological politics... that is that through actions the new reality
emerges, and there is in that a field of possible realities from which
many things are choosing at any point.  that is a pretty useful tool
in a framework of weak ontological statuses.  However from my
understanding you have a strong ontological structure, so such
analyses probably aren't appealing.

In any case, there are many reasons for choosing ant... but having or
not having agency is not a good one.  a better one would be... does
ant map onto the problem you face to give you results that will be
acceptable to your academic community....  if so, learn about it... if
not, forego it.


On Apr 22, 2009, at 12:16 PM, Klaus Krippendorff wrote:

> jeremy,
>
> you hide behind ANT to give us a very impoverished description of
> the world
> in which designers are like billiard balls acting on other billiard
> balls.
> How does ANT help us be in our different worlds?
>
> i read you posts and understand that you don't care for whether you
> deal
> with billiard balls, humans or computers as long as they have an
> effect.
> for you, action is a cause-effect relation between actors and actees.
>
> incidentally i read a good deal in latour's recent reassembling the
> social
> -- pretty unconvincing.
>
> klaus
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
> related
> research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> jeremy
> hunsinger
> Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:41 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: actor-networks Re: Discourse on object level
>
> an action is a relation between two things.  in theory one of those
> things
> can be another relation, so i think you can see where that goes.
>
> i think you will find many many people who will tell you they never
> wanted
> it called actor-network theory, but the name stuck.  sort of like the
> volkswagon 'thing' and 'beetle'
>
> personally, i think it is the relations that are of interest, which
> means the actions.  other people have other standpoints.   I've made
> the argument before that i don't really care about the 'nodes' of the
> network at all, i just want to see the relations and have them
> define the
> nodes.  perhaps the node will end up as a person, perhaps the node
> will end
> up as a machine, perhaps it will be a machine that acts like
> a person perhaps it will be a person who acts like a machine.   but
> again... standpoints vary on what is most important.  what is very
> important
> is being clear about the various principles that guide actor- network
> theory, and for that one should probably read latour's recent book.
> On Apr 22, 2009, at 10:30 AM, Terence Love wrote:
>
>> Dear Jeremy,
>>
>> Many thanks again - especially for your patience!
>>
>> Does this mean that an action always has an actant and an actee?
>>
>> Or can one have an actant with no actee?
>>
>> Or is it only the action that is of interst? In that case, would it
>> imply
>> ant as an 'action network theory', which one might expect to
>> represent
>> theories about networks of actions?
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Terry
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: jeremy hunsinger [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: Wednesday, 22 April 2009 10:12 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Cc: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: actor-networks Re: Discourse on object level
>>
>> Usually sequence is part of the narrative of the description of
>> events, which is part of the write up.  it is usually handled by the
>> methods of analysis you use, such as  ethnography, which keeps track
>> of its own time.
>> however, you can see how that becomes a problem when you start
>> talking
>> about atemporal methods like semiotics, there you probably wouldn't
>> use time, because it isn't really part of the method's normal
>> analysis.  but in discourse analysis time is also present as one
>> tracks the changes
>> (actions)
>> in the discourse over time.  now here's a trick that i've proposed
>> and
>> i blame terry pratchett for the idea, but time... can also be
>> accounted for as an actor in actor-network if you plan on doing that.
>> i could see how time could become an actor if you were analyzing say
>> an emergency room where time acts in all kinds of relations to all
>> kinds of things.
>> however, for the most part, people don't seem to use time as an
>> actor,
>> and they just use the temporal relations common to the method they
>> are
>> using.
>>
>> the problem might be with your construction below (and my prior loose
>> speaking)... which represents an actor/action divide.  some actor-
>> network take the term actant from semiotics, Griemas i think, but
>> maybe propp before.  they use actant to resolve the issue where
>> people
>> assume there is an actor without action.  There is no necessary
>> divide
>> between actor/ action; the 'actor' does not become apparent until the
>> 'action'.  That is to say, that there are actions which are
>> relations,
>> and actants acting, but without the action, we have no relations, and
>> thus no actor.   Actants are things acting, there is no actor,
>> without
>> the action, and thus no temporal divide.
>>
>> In my prior example below, i posited the existence of an actor
>> without
>> acting, the way we would do that would be to have actions ongoing
>> (which almost always happens) from that actant.  usually any given
>> actant is doing many things in the system and the problem is sorting
>> it out.
>>
>> On Apr 22, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Terence Love wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Jeremy,
>>>
>>> Thank you. That is really helpful and clarifies a lot.
>>>
>>> Wondering how in ant you handle information about sequence and time
>>> when an action happens?
>>>
>>> I can see how you correlate an action to an actor and identify
>>> classes of relationship between actors but identifying the sequence
>>> of actions and how they relate to identified actors, actor
>>> relationships and actions I'm unclear on.
>>>
>>> Best wishes and thanks,
>>>
>>> Terry
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: jeremy hunsinger [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>>> Sent: Wednesday, 22 April 2009 8:52 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Cc: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: actor-networks Re: Discourse on object level
>>>
>>> reasons and causes are described after the analysis is finished.
>>> you look
>>> at the system of relations and you can then describe what happened
>>> and can infer whatever cause fits the described data.  let's keep in
>>> mind that actor-network theory is not a method, it is a standpoint
>>> about how to treat research and how to gather that data using
>>> methods, such as semiotics, discourse analysis, or ethnography.
>>> it's primary use is to mould the data collection and to provide
>>> insights into data analysis..   it doesn't assign reasons so much as
>>> track actions and relations in networks.  reasons and causes are
>>> things to be very skeptical about because frequently we have less
>>> than a cause and more of a conjunction or constant conjunction
>>> according to hume, so... actor network would note that x did y, but
>>> when y then immediately did things it would not note that x caused
>>> y,
>>> because as you can imagine y may merely have been waiting until time
>>> z to act, and action y was incidental.  one can only find out these
>>> relationships through time.
>>>
>>> now after the analysis is over and you have your data and you see
>>> that every time x is in proximity of y, y acts somehow, you may be
>>> inclined to hypothesize a causal relation, and others over time may
>>> support that or deny that.
>>>
>>> one thing to note here is that mental models, 'reasons' can be
>>> 'actors' in actor-network.  a good idea can 'act', recruiting people
>>> through people, etc.   latter theories might call this unification
>>> of
>>> actors a mess or an assemblage.  but it is very useful to be able to
>>> track an idea as an actor.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 22, 2009, at 8:23 AM, Terence Love wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Jeremy,
>>>>
>>>> How do you deal with the reasons and causes for actions in ant?
>>>>
>>>> Best wishes,
>>>>
>>>> Terry
>>>>
>>>
>>
>