Reassembling the Social

I've just finished reading this book. I have been trying to get it finished for months and finally managed to get the reading time in the last week or so. I can't remember quite how I got onto it except that it was something to do with finding ways to look at culture in a post-structuralist way and finding Latour's name cropping up. Having read it I can see why and am interested to note that the approach he outlines is very resonant for me. This chunk from the review on the Amazon page for the book begins to capture why:

Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again.

In essence Latour reckons that the way that a lot of sociologist employ the term 'social' has, in effect, detached it from actual relations and turned it into a kind of 'something' independent of the actual links, ties, relational transaction and mediations that in reality constitute the social. Latour relativises the social and flattens it. It's like a shift from a container view of space to a relativistic one: instead of the social being a kind of container space which allows social action to take place, he advocates that we need to approach things by seeing the 'social space' being constituted moment to moment by the relating of actants; the relating creates the social-space out of nothing. This is the network in the title of the theory: the 'web' of relating that constitutes or mediates actants.

'Actants' (Actors) is the other thing that Latour looks at in this case by expanding the category. And for my interest in cultural studies is a significant thing. Actors or actants are not just human but anything that acts within the social arena by transforming meaning; there's a big play made of the difference between translation and mediation and the significance is that the latter effects changes in whatever it is that is passed on. This means that the artefacts and texts in the human world can have their own agency and it enables them to exert their own influence, have their own messages and even purposes.

All of this means that ANT encourages the study of the social (or cultural, for that) by paying attention to what is actually happening and not simply trying to find exemplars of social theories or predefined phenomena. I like this because it seems to me that the fun in cultural studies is paying attention to what is going on, how people are actually relating, using things, making meaning and how the stuff affects, changes and influences the culture created.

This is a powerful approach to anything that has a social dimension and I will no doubt continue to develop the fundamental insights in my own thinking and hope to read more based on this approach.

I think too that it relates to my thinking about corporisations, principalities and powers etc. What first got me moving beyond Walter Winks 'Naming the Powers' was the question of how one addressed the powers. This led me to considering that the localisation and the means of communication is important and in so doing we have to recognised the 'physiology' and 'psychology' of corporate powers and in a sense this becomes the same concern as ANT articulates to pay attention to the 'transactions' (my choice of word) which constitute the entity and its interaction with the wider world rather than being transfixed and misled by the 'big shadow' it casts on the 'spiritual' plane or even the social. An ANT-inspired approach to the spiritual would see the spiritual not as a separate but fully interconnected realm (a kind of version of the Faery land in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) but as the flip-side of the coin of the material realities we most easily perceive.

What Latour doesn't go into, but I kept expecting, was emergence which combined with his bottom up approach would re-enable, I think, talk of social entities (or spiritual reflexes thereof) which nevertheless remains importantly describable in terms of careful observation of actualities in their own right unimpeded by theoretical or ideological construals which may or may not be helpful...

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies): Amazon.co.uk: Bruno Latour: Bo

No Ideas but in Things

If you're interested in Cultural Studies or political theory it's likely you're going to come across Marxian/Marxist thinkers using the terms 'structure' and particularly 'superstructure'. This article has a helpful couple of paragraphs to introduce what they mean, basically. This is done in order to show how Walter Benjamin manages to assimilate and move beyond that analysis. The article is here: notes for the coming community: No Ideas but in Things
Now here's where analytical rubber starts to hit the ground:

The distinction between structure and superstructure, Agamben claims, cannot be based on a simplistic causal relationship. The need to figure out the entire material structure before one can go up to the immaterial superstructure is a false need. If anything, Benjamin shows that there is a direct correspondence between the two, which abolishes the metaphysical or dialectical distinction between animality and rationality, nature and culture, matter and form, economy and politics, reality and poetry. By making immediate or unmediated connections between elements of the structure and the superstructure, Benjamin does not practice vulgar materialism, but a courageous one.

I think that this means that it is possible to do useful analysis of cultural artefacts/texts without necessarily having a fully developed analysis of the whole material base. I rather suspect that the fundamental insight underlying Godel's incompleteness theorem would question that approach anyhow. Be that as it may; it does seem to me that the micrological approach is fruitful (whatever Adorno said). This is possible because, Benjamin asserts, there is a third factor 'infrastructure'.

The paradigmatic example of an infrastructure is the arcades ... covered passageways that were very popular in nineteenth century Paris ... An arcade is not an expression of ideas, whether they are economic or political, material or formal. Those ideas are expressed in this thing that we call an arcade. Whatever may be the structure or the superstructure of the arcades ... it must come to manifest itself through the infrastructure, and not vice versa. The infrastructure thus becomes the secret key that unlocks the mysteries of the city.

Is other words you have to pay attention to the actual 'stuff' and the trialogue between 'stuff', processes and ideas. Which is much more like, I would argue, the way that human beings 'access' things anyway: we encounter the things in themselves, in the midst of the forces that shape and shaped us and the ways that make meaning in relation to these things (noting too the reflexivity of processing all of this through a social nexus).
I think. Though it may be that I'm reading this through the lens of the approach to cultural analysis that I have come to (and which I put out there towards the start of 'Engaging Culture') which is an attempt to synthesise the insights of several culturally analytical approaches (including Marxian) on the basis that they can't have the credibility and traction they have had without being able to do things that resonate and produce insight. However, as a Christian with a belief in human fall/ibility, and taking on board the insights of post-modern thinking, I also think that their totalising is a problem. So I like in Benjamin's insight the way that it enables us to see the relationships between 'things' in the human world as reflexive and dialogical rather than simply causal in one direction or another. I think that this is to recognise that complexity (arising from chaos) is the name of the game.

And yet, is that a further totalising? Maybe not: the point of chaos/complexity in that respect is to engender a certain humility and constrainedness about our analysing while allowing us a model of why that should be, and so remain useful. As a Christian, I also warm to the materiality and particularity of Benjamin's approach. It echoes the incarnation and the way that this gave the early church a purchase for critique of neo-platonism and thus gnosticism (which wasn't nearly as benign as the Dan Browns of the world might lead you to believe).

How storytelling shaped humanity - opinion - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist

For all of us interested in hermeneutics, this could be the new kid on the block of theories. New Scientist reports here: Review: How storytelling shaped humanity - opinion - 25 May 2009 - New Scientist: "Art, Boyd says, is a form of play. It is an interesting idea. In recent years, biologists who study play have come to see it as an adaptation allowing intelligent animals to hone mental and physical skills in non-threatening environments. This fits perfectly with Boyd's assertion that fiction fosters cognition, cooperation and creativity. Where the idea falls short is in its failure to recognise that play is primarily interactive, whereas storytelling is more of a spectator sport."
Now, I'm not sure whose perspective that last sentence represents but I think I disagree with it. Not completely but enough to be very dubious: the thing is that lots of good storytelling is actually interactive and not just about spectating. And indeed, the social setting of much storytelling is interactive even if the story is 'spactated' for a time: the conversation in which the story is 'performed' is often a co-operative affair and stories are swapped and commented upon.

That said, the approach seems potentially useful: "the process of creating a story may be expensive in terms of time and energy but is intrinsically rewarding because it appeals to our brain's love affair with pattern. It also reshapes the mind, promotes a creative approach to problem solving and increases the storyteller's social status. The audience, meanwhile, pay a price in their time, but in return acquire a deeper insight into society and the minds of other individuals."
Now think about that in relation to the biblical narratives. Does it work? Well, the pattern thing does: part of the point is that the biblical narratives are helping to highlight patterns of God's relating to humans and this can have the effect of enabling us the hearers/readers to approach our lives (problems included) differently, with the creativity of God. The greater insight in the audience is also into the ways of God. So much so familiar. This seems to be pretty much noting particularly salient points which are not really about evolutionary perspective but things that are consonant with it; as such they do us the favour of helping us to pay attention to some fairly practical matters relating to basic drives and social conditions.

Oh, I missed out about the story-teller's status: celebrity culture; say no more. ... ?

Fractals may 'explain' quantum wierdness

This could be big news: "what if there were a way [of] showing how quantum theory might emerge from a deeper level of non-weird physics?". The reason it could be big is that it would further solidify the hold of quantum theory on science, and more importantly for culture, on the popular imagination. You only have to look at the effects on art and social sciences of the emerging sciences of chaos and complexity (and heck; I'm working on a fractal model of theological reflection, for goodness sake) over the last decade or so, and it becomes apparent that the imaginative power will be huge. Therefore in terms of passing on the gospel in our culture, well, we're going to have to take it to heart and learn from it (and not rush just now; nothing worse than seeing Christians use half-digested science or philosophy to 'defend' the gospel!). This NS article Can fractals make sense of the quantum world? - physics-math - 30 March 2009 - New Scientist will give you the background to the debate over quantum versus relativistic theories. Palmer, the author of the new approach says "My hypothesis is motivated by two concepts that wouldn't have been known to the founding fathers of quantum theory," he says: black holes and fractals.

Now the thing that could set the cat (Schroedinger's) among the pigeons (especially for some NewAge /new mysticism apologists)is this: "quantum theory is famous for making only statistical predictions - it can only tell you the probability of finding an electron with its quantum-mechanical spin pointing up. This arises naturally, suggests Palmer, because quantum theory is blind to the intricate fractal structure of the invariant set. Just as our eyes cannot discern the smallest details in fractal patterns, quantum theory only sees "coarse grain approximations", as if it is looking through fuzzy spectacles." So out go the appeals to probability etc. Even more relevant, for apologetics in the face of certain 'new atheist' challenges is this "What makes this really interesting is that it gets away from the usual debates over multiple universes and hidden variables and so on," says Bob Coecke, a physicist at the University of Oxford. "It suggests there might be an underlying physical geometry that physics has just missed, which is radical and very positive." However, it may mean that we are back to a more deterministic universe; though I think that chaos is here to stay, so not a fully closed Newtonian box...

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Interesting and occasionally irritating: despite the attempts at various points to remain neutral or agnostic about religious claims and their counterparts, this article keeps (as the title does) leaning to atheism-lite. That said, I think that we need to think about this stuff. As a God-botherer (though actually I don't think God is 'bothered' by me, though probably about me), I am one of those who is comfortable in principle in recognising that the processes of this world are part of God's activity, in a sense. This means that the mechanisms by which we come to be are part of that creative activity poetically presented in different ways in Hebrew and Christian scriptures, variously as fiat, dust of the earth being breathed into, chaos being defeated, building blocks being assembled and held together and so forth. This means that the questions being asked in this article and the attempts to answer them in terms of normal cause and effect are not really at issue for me (unlike for those who feel that scripture compels them to 6x24hours of special creation). So do have a look at it: Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist.

One quote may get us into the matter (pun not intended but allowed to stand): "So if religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work, where does that leave god? All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it."
I guess I think that this is a good illustration of how apparently objective study vears into smuggling conclusions in premises. The latter bit is the sop to the 'religious'. However the 'damage' is done by the way the first-quoted sentence is framed; by summing up the findings in terms of "religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work" the dice are already loaded. Let's not be detained by defining religion (which is one problem with the article, which does pop up implicitly in the comments -which are not on the whole edifying reading). I rather think that the sentence in question is a bit like saying, "since seeing other people is a natural consequence of how our eyes and brains work, where does that leave society?", or possibly, "since speaking is a natural consequence of how our larynx and brain works, where does that leave language?". The latter may be appropriate since it may well be that language is a side-consequence of the body doing other things, so to speak and so may provide a rough parallel at that point. I guess the obverse of that point is that if the kind of theistic claims I think that I am making are about right, then we would expect to see the processes of development of life (which produce emergent properties at an oblique to the main 'purpose' of some developments, for example) produce effects which might obliquely enable relating to God. And if you're puzzled by why I seem so darn keen on 'oblique' read more here or here.

We should hold that together with what (atheist) scientist Scott Atran is quoted as saying a bit further on: ".. [religion] arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds. I don't think there's an adaptation for religion any more than there's an adaptation to make airplanes." If I could tweak that a bit to give my own spin: "scientific theory arises as an artefact of the ability to build fictive worlds ..." In other words metaphor and imagination are the main tools of religious ideas and of invention and theory. I think that perhaps what is actually being said in this theorising is that the things that enable religion are present in human beings and like every other higher order thinking ability (including those driving scientific discovery and theory), derive from basic somatic and psychological facts of human being. That does not rule out facticity: it merely allows us to appreciate how we might be able to perceive something...

The End of the way we do knowledge

Joel Garreau's response to an article by Chris Anderson outlining how petabyet computing may fundamentally change the way we do knowledge contains the following important insight. "Data are an artifact of selection, which means they reflect an underlying hypothesis or they wouldn't have been collected. For example, in my work I discovered a frightening lack of timely data to 'prove' either my hypothesis that North America was behaving as if it were nine separate civilizations or economies that rarely were bounded by political jurisdictions of nation, state, or county. It was equally problematic coming up with the data to prove that places like Silicon Valley were becoming the modern iteration of 'city' even when the millions of square feet of big buildings were right before your eyes. It wasn't until those 'nine nations' or 'edge city' models began to be seen as useful by others that people started to go through the very great deal of trouble to verify them by collecting data in a fashion that ignored all previous boundaries. Life is not obligated to follow data and it frequently does not."
I've recently been musing on this as I'm reflecting on the models of theological reflection represented by the pastoral cycle and similar. And as I pointed out in a conversation with a student regarding writing a reflection, there is no uninterpreted data; the very selection of data implies a weighing of merit against stated or unstated criteria. It is this that the petabyte age may challenge and allow us to sidestep more fully. Sean Carroll summarises the potential import: "giant new petascale datasets that resist ordinary modes of analysis, but which we can use to uncover heretofore unexpected patterns lurking within torrents of information".
That said, we're still going to need to be able to hypothesise the correlations thrown up, but it's a potentially creative world opening up.
Chris Anderson's article.
Page of responses.

Bee gone dull cares.

I keep hearing about this thing about bees disappearing,

and this article gives us the skinny on the latest theories. It's a bit worrying, being as how they are major players in pollination and thus some of our food supply (remember ecology? -How things work together for good?). Here's my favourite silly theory: "'My favorite theory, which I throw out, is that the bees are out there creating their own crop circles, working very hard, physically pushing the crops down with their little legs. It fits. It explains the loss of bees and crop circles at the same time.'"
The article also looks at some of the metaphoric uses being made of the phenomenon.
Before we get too 'doomsday' about it though, ""From an ecological standpoint, it is opening up the possibility for local pollinators like the mason bee to come back." Honeybees, after all, are an introduced species. They were brought here by European explorers and settlers. The Indians called them "white men's flies.""
Honey, I'm Gone - washingtonpost.com: