Seeing it Whole: Staging Totality in Social Theory and Art

2012 ◽  
Vol 60 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 64-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Toscano
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Social Totality ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Systemic Constraints

Can, or should, social theory try to ‘see it whole’? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the ‘sociological imagination’ and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience with systemic constraints, knowledge with action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand. The article contrasts these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. It explores this contrast through the ‘panorama’ as a visual practice and a metaphor for theory itself. Against Latour's proposal to reduce and relativize totality, it argues that sociology can learn from contemporary artistic efforts to map social and economic power as a whole. ‘Panoramic’ projects in the arts, such as Allan Sekula's and Mark Lombardi's, can allow us to reflect on sociology's own deficit of imagination, and on the persistence of the desire to ‘see it whole’ – especially when that whole is opaque, fragmented, contradictory. A live sociology can only gain from greater attention to the critical experiments with forms and methods of representation that are being carried out by artists preoccupied with the staging of social totality.

Decadence in the Biographical Sense

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Graham Harman
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Object Oriented Method ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Primary Meaning

This article summarizes the author's 2016 book Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, outlining the book's five criticisms of actor-network theory (ANT) and its fifteen provisional rules of object-oriented method in social theory. The article also considers Bruno Latour's criticism of Immaterialism, in particular his view that such terms as “symbiosis” and “decadence” rely too heavily on an inappropriate “biological” metaphor that has no place in discussion objects in a wider sense. In response, the authors claims that the primary meaning of the symbiosis and decadence is not biological, but biographical.

Actor-Network Theory and Autopoiesis

2009 ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Lars Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Process Analysis ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Intensive ◽  
Over Time

A new knowledge management perspective and tool, ANT/AUTOPOIESIS, for analysis of knowledge management in knowledge-intensive organizations is presented. An information technology (IT) research and innovation co-operation between university actors and companies interested in the area of smart home IT applications is used to illustrate analysis using this perspective. Actor-network theory (ANT) and the social theory of autopoiesis are used in analyzing knowledge management, starting from the foundation of a research co-operation. ANT provides the character of relations between actors and actants, how power is translated by actors and the transformation of relations over time. The social theory of autopoiesis provides the tools to analyze organizational closure and reproduction of organizational identity. The perspective used allows a process analysis, and at the same time analysis of structural characteristics of knowledge management. Knowledge management depends on powerful actors, whose power changes over time. Here this power is entrepreneurial and based on relations and actors’ innovation knowledge.

scholarly journals Recovering critique in an age of datafication

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (7) ◽  
pp. 1135-1151
Author(s):  
Nick Couldry
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Questions

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour’s own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article’s final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.

The Wire as speculative research

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Leclair-Paquet
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Psychological Realism ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Wire

Created by David Simon in 2002, the HBO series The Wire presents the established moral code of a society that lies outside mainstream America and depicts institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Terry Eagleton suggests of Dickens, that his ‘grotesque realism is a stylistic distortion in the service of truth, a kind of astigmatism which allows us to see more accurately.’ The content of Simon's programme operates in a similar way. It proposes an alternative to academic narratives able to disseminate knowledge beyond the closed-off world of peer review.The richness, uniqueness and intricacy of The Wire has made it difficult to trace its thematic and stylistic heritage. The programme has been referred to as a ‘lyrical sociology’, ‘a type of urban sociology’, ‘a rendering of urban theory’, a ‘fontless social science’, a ‘theoretical archetype’, a ‘Dickensian show’, and more. At an aesthetic level, The Wire has been qualified as a work of ‘psychological realism’, ‘social realism’, as something aspiring to Fredric Jameson's aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’, or even a ‘rich counterpart to actor-network-theory’.

Why Sārus Cranes epitomize Karuṇarasa in the Rāmāyaṇa

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
NIELS HAMMER
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Affective Neuroscience ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Affective States ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Critical Literature

AbstractBy correlating literary evidence, avian ethology and neurophysiology I will try to demonstrate why Vālmīki chose a pair of Sārus Cranes, and not any other avian species, to epitomise grief and sorrow in the Rāmāyaṇa. This choice illustrates the importance of personal experience of the living reality (behaviour of Sārus Cranes); but the grief, śoka, as experienced by Vālmīki, became in later critical literature, the rasa of karuṇa, the aesthetic appreciation of grief, as suggested by Ānandavardhana and explained by Abhinavagupta. By emphasising the central importance of affective states (sthāyibhāvas) in life as well as in the arts (rasas) Vālmīki, Abhinavagupta and Ānandavardhana appear to have had a perception of the human condition that is consistent with recent developments in affective neuroscience; and thus it is the pitch and the tonal quality of the cries of grief that convey the depth and universality (sādhāraṇatva) of the emotion.

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Harman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Causal Relation ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Human Contact ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Real Objects ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is an intellectual movement in the arts and humanities sharing certain affinities with both phenomenology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It is a philosophically realist position often at odds with existing currents in postmodernism and critical theory. The best-known idea of OOO is that objects “withdraw” from all direct human and non-human contact, so that relations between things are always indirect and must be accounted for rather than taken for granted. More broadly speaking, however, OOO is a theory of two kinds of objects (real, sensual) and two kinds of qualities (real, sensual). Real objects and qualities are not directly accessible to thought, perception, practical use, or even causal relation, and must be approached by more allusive means. Sensual objects and qualities, by contrast, exist only for some other entity, human or otherwise. Each type of object has troubled relations with each of the two forms of qualities, resulting in four basic tensions, the analysis of which is the heart of object-oriented method in every field and not just literature. OOO literary theory has a special fondness for the weird: especially the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose work is taken to exemplify two of the key ontological tensions. Dante and Edgar Allan Poe are also key OOO figures, due to their manner of theatrically investing their characters and readers in sincere relations with objects. OOO’s relation with the formalist aesthetics of Immanuel Kant is ambivalent, since Kant is admired for cutting off the aesthetic object from its surroundings but challenged for his modernist assumption that the human and non-human must never be mixed.

« Cela nous a échappé… » : théorie de l’acteur-réseau et le problème des générations scientifiques

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Dubois
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Intellectual Product ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
Social Construction Of Science

The present article reviews in detail the generational fate of Actor-Network Theory (AnT). This theory is one of the rare examples of an intellectual product that has managed to transpose into the very general terms of contemporary social theory findings initially elaborated in what is often seen as the confidential field of science and technology studies. Building in particular on MJ Nye’s work on the origins of the social construction of science in order to establish a generational approach to the study of the sciences, the article distinguishes two generations of AnT and highlights the asymmetric character of the intergenerational link between them. In looking back on the principal criticisms of AnT since its creation, the article shows how second-generation AnT – the ‘diaspora’ generation, as Law has termed it (1999) – identifies mostly with a degenerative research program (in Lakatos’ sense, 1978), built around four main types of effect: effects of repetition, of dramatization, of routinization and, finally, of invisibilization of the critical debate.

scholarly journals Bruno Latour, actor-networks, and the critique of critical sociology

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Spasic
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Critical Sociology ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Actor Networks

The paper analyzes the theoretical opus of Bruno Latour and his treatment of the concept of critique. In the first section "actor-network theory" is presented through its key notions (actant, network, translation, associations) together with Latour?s theory of modernity. In the second section various aspects of the relation between Latour and critique are discussed - first his own criticism of others (standard sociology and especially "critical", i.e. Bourdieu?s sociology), then the criticisms aimed at his work, to conclude with the political ambivalences of Latour?s attempt to develop an "acritical" social theory. .

STRUCTURING A SUCCESSFUL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER PROCESS: A CASE STUDY FROM THE PERSPECTIVES OF ACTOR NETWORK THEORY

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huda Ibrahim ◽  
Hasmiah Kasimin
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Technology Transfer ◽  
Transfer Process ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Private Company ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Technology Transfer Process

An effi cient and effective information technology transfer from developed countries to Malaysia is an important issue as a prerequisite to support the ICT needs of the country to become not only a ICT user but also a ICT producer. One of the factors that infl uences successful information technology transfer is managing the process of how technology transfer occurs in one environment. It involves managing interaction between all parties concerned which requires an organized strategy and action toward accomplishing technology transfer objective in an integrated and effective mode. Using a conceptual framework based on the Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper will analyse a successful information technology transfer process at a private company which is also a supplier of information technology (IT) products to the local market. This framework will explain how the company has come up with a successful technology transfer in a local environment. Our study shows that the company had given interest to its relationships with all the parties involved in the transfer process. The technology transfer programme and the strategy formulated take into account the characteristics of technology and all those involved.  

The Action of Christian Buildings on their Chinese Environment

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-121
Author(s):  
Michel Chambon
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Architectural Style ◽  
Actor Network

This article explores the ways in which Christians are building churches in contemporary Nanping, China. At first glance, their architectural style appears simply neo-Gothic, but these buildings indeed enact a rich web of significances that acts upon local Christians and beyond. Building on Actor-Network Theory and exploring the multiple ties in which they are embedded, I argue that these buildings are agents acting in their own right, which take an active part in the process of making the presence of the Christian God tangible.

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