The risk of 'de-centering humans'; Reflections on LSE last year

Nicholas at Installing (Social) Order has a nice post updating the blogosphere on their latest work, particularly on 'decentering humans' in International Relations.  I'm glad to see that these issues are still burning away and that the IR/ANT collective is still hanging together!

With regard to the project in general, one question that must ultimately be asked, I think, is: when we have traced all the networks that form the human how do we avoid humans being dissolved into those networks?  How do we avoid shifting from anthropocentrism to an un-self-critical network-centrism?  How do we avoid the political complacency that can potentially come from thoroughgoing relationality?  Are there no unintended consequences of ANT's creeping colonisation of more and more intellectual territory?  I think that there are.

This is something that came up at the Millennium conference last year, as I'm sure you remember!  There was a clear divide at that event between ANT-types and others, most particularly from the critical realist camp, for whom human reflexivity as the basis of political agency is indispensable.  It was argued that the appropriation of 'agency' as a substitute for 'causality' undoes all the hard won victories of emancipatory politics (and its accompanying critical theory) in the 20th century.

As something of an ANT-phile I was quite challenged by this idea.  David Chandler in particular helped me to see the point.  I came to realise that it isn't just a blustery, reactionary reiteration of substantialism or modernist humanism (although it sometimes goes that way too!).  When ANT was working just on science and technology it was easy to downplay and de-exceptionalise the agency of the human - scientists and technicians had been granted far too much agency, far too much centredness and self-control and therefore depriving them of that was methodologically and politically unproblematic.  No one was ever going to lapse into thinking that these people really lacked agency or were cultural dopes; the goal was to shift these human agents back into their networks and ANT did that brilliantly.

When we shift forward 25 years and look at the situation where, now, rightly or wrongly, ANT is a sociological metalanguage that is informing all kinds of theorisation we have to tread much more carefully.  The political agency of human beings in general is in no way as assured as that of scientists and technicians.  We simply can't take human agency for granted in all walks of life (or in all modes of existence, perhaps).  Remember that ANT ethnographers were always (and they were always aware of this) studying up.  That is, they were studying persons with more power, money and prestige than they themselves enjoyed.  Studying down, studying persons who are downtrodden, disenfranchised, held by dominant discourses to be feckless and incapable of rational self-determination - these people need to be treated with greater care.

To systematically remove all the classic humanist means by which their agency can be defended without careful consideration of consequences is, frankly, irresponsible.

That isn't to say that ANT-type work has no place within broader social or political theory.  Far from it.  I am still an ANT-phile!  All I mean to say is that irreducing the human must not, ultimately, dissolve the human.  The ontological status of human political agency is too fragile to be thrown around so cavalierly.  That doesn't mean that we must stop walking in the direction that we have been but, as Latour would put it, we may need to slow down.  It isn't that ANT cannot be translated into all these different areas but we need to recognise and deal with the ever larger degree of transformation that is required to properly extend these networks the further they stray from their origins.  Part of that, I think, means that we have to find a way of saying: the more mediations, the more human.  More humanity, not less.  A new humanism.

That's the major realisation that I got from the LSE event last year (having had a year to reflect on it!).

More on Agency, Millennium Conference

A bit of background might help elucidate how and why I arrived at my last post on things and agency.  I was suddenly compelled to write about it by Jeremy's post but I'd been thinking about it for a while.

Until quite recently I too was quite happy to use 'agency' in the more-or-less Latourian fashion (as a catchall term for 'causal efficacy' of any sort) and considered any objection to it to be simply reactionary.  It was attending the Millennium journal's conference on 'Materialism in World Politics' a few months ago that changed my mind.  The conference itself seemed to be split down the middle to some degree in terms of the theoretical persuasion of the attendees: half were dyed-in-the-wool historical materialists of one sort or another; the other half were acolytes of materialism after the fashion of Latour, Connolly, Bennett, Haraway, etc.  I found it interesting that the to-and-fro of the argumentation between the two camps eventually ended up orbiting around one issue in particular: that of the 'agency' of things.

Some, Colin Wight and David Chandler for two, argued strongly against the attribution of agency to things.  Another person even called it 'fascist' since it 'eliminated the difference between people and things.'  This objection is, of course, totally reactionary.  Granting 'agency' to things doesn't destroy the difference between humans and other kinds of things; it makes the difference one within a plurality rather than across a duality and ontologically secondary rather than primary.  However, some objections were more nuanced.  The argument that really persuaded me was that the concept of political agency is a hard-won spoil of ideological conflict and that it mustn't be taken for granted because many political ideologies deny the notion of human beings in general having the capacity for reflexivity, self-consciousness and intentional, purposive, intelligent action.  We see this today with the creeping technocratisation of governance in Europe, disguised and rationalised by economics and the cult of There Is No Alternative, for example.  Such ideologies are real today and they were even more so in the past.

This made me realise that agency in science and in politics are quite different things.  In science human agency, conventionally defined, has been granted far too much but in politics this is not the case; in politics the very capacities that were so overstated in scientists need to be cultivated, nurtured and promoted.  What in one instance was so hyper-abundant as to be a pest in the other is, if not endangered, not in overwhelmingly good health.

We certainly need to understand the impurity and complexity of politics in terms of the massive proliferation of things qua 'issues' (as in 'dingpolitik') and we need to be rid of the myth of naked humans talking amongst themselves but we also need to recognise that there is an enduring truth in the various theoretico-political myths of 'humans amongst themselves' -- that there are specificities to human being that require special theoretical terms.  Human being may not be unique in type but it is singular in importance and so we need to be careful when we are taking apart the concepts with which its specificity has hitherto been captured, even if we are justified in performing such disassembly work in general.

So, I don't pretend to have any answers here.  I'm not saying that the old humanist version of agency must necessarily be preserved.  I'm largely won over by Levi's articulation of agency as gradational and to be attributed in its varying forms on the basis of empirical evidence rather than a priori.  Jeremy's splitting of the term into three works well too.

I suppose what I'm trying to say programmatically is that a lot of work has been done un-bifurcating nature, flattening ontology, pluralising duality, post-ing humanism and so on and a large part of this has involved dethroning the naked human Subject.  However, that, for any social or human science, can only be an initial, critical move; an earth-clearing exercise.  The attribution of 'agency' to things worked well at that stage but it has become dehistoricised and ANT has become known as 'the theory that things have agency' -- as ANT quietly steamrollers its way through the human sciences this claim becomes gradually indissociable from everything else anyone has ever said about it.  A far greater degree of nuance than this is now required

It seems that Levi and Jeremy are both well ahead of me on this but I met numerous people at the Millennium conference who were still very much stuck with the impression that the claim that 'things have agency' is very much the insight of Latour, ANT, etc.  I now think that this is not the important insight so much as it was one way of articulating a broader point in a way that worked analytically, polemically and philosophically in that particular context (science studies in the 1980s) but that is less than adequate now.

I suppose this is ultimately just a 'baby and bathwater' argument: I think that 'agency' as traditionally defined has some conceptual and political importance, despite its flaws, so we should be careful when redefining it, though redefine it we must.

Materialism and World Politics Conference: ANT and IR, Offshore

I finished my paper for the upcoming Materialism and World Politics conference hosted by the Millennium journal at the LSE over the weekend. Apparently papers are going to be posted on the conference website but I've posted mine below anyway (also available here). My paper is for the Theory Talks panel on 'Accounting for Symmetries in the International.'

The paper explores the benefits of Actor-Network Theory for International Relations by taking up the case of 'offshore' in general and offshore financial markets in particular.  I take ANT to be a social ontology (that makes things themselves social) and a spatial topology (that defines space by connection between elements, not in terms of an abstract container).  I find that what I call 'absolute' conceptions of space are intimately bound up with social/material dualism and that offshore can only be consistently, symmetrically and materially understood through ANT's 'network' space.  I conclude that ANT has great potential for IR but we need to avoid, as John Law argues, naturalising any one spatial topology.  My case study indicates a strong future for ANT in IR but, moreover, I suggest that IR could benefit ANT insofar as, in many ways, it does not fit its ontological and methodological presuppositions (and therefore it challenges them).