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The Social Study of Information and Communication Study, edited by C. Avgerou, C. Ciborra, and F.F. Land, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.62-76 (repris dans reprinted in prologue of -see book XII).

(An office at the London School of Economics, a dark Tuesday of February at the end of the afternoon, before moving to the Beaver for a pint. A quiet but insistent knock is heard. Student peers into the office.)
Student —Am I bothering you?
Professor —Not at all; these are my office hours anyway. Come in, have a seat.
S— Thank you.
P— So… I take it that you are a bit lost?
S — Well, yes. I am finding it difficult, I have to say, to apply Actor Network Theory to my case study in organisations.
P — No wonder— it isn’t applicable to anything!
S — But we were taught… I mean… it seems like hot stuff around here. Are you saying it’s really useless?
P — It might be useful, but only if it does not ‘apply’ to something.
S — Sorry —are you playing some sort of Zen trick here? I have to warn you: I’m just a straight Organisation Studies doctoral student, so don’t expect… I’m not too much into French stuff either, just read a bit of Thousand Plateaus but couldn’t make much sense of it...
P — Sorry. I wasn’t trying to say anything cute. Just that ANT is first of all a negative argument. It does not say anything positive on any state of affairs.
S — So what can it do for me?
P — The best it can do for you is to say something like: “When your informants mix up organization and hardware and psychology and politics in one sentence, don’t break it down first into neat little pots; try to follow the link they make among those elements that would have looked completely incommensurable if you had followed normal academic categories.” That’s all. ANT can’t tell you positively what the link is.
S — So why is it called a ‘theory’, then, if it says nothing about the things we study?
P — It’s a theory, and a strong one I think, but about how to study things, or rather how not to study them. Or rather how to let the actors have some room to express themselves.
S — Do you mean that other social theories don’t allow that?
P — In a way, yes, and because of their very strengths: they are good at saying positive things about what the social world is made of. In most cases that’s fine; the ingredients are known; their numbers should be kept small. But that doesn’t work when things are changing fast, and, I would add, not, for instance, in organization studies, or information studies, or marketing, or science and technology studies, where boundaries are so terribly fuzzy. New topics, that’s when you need ANT for.
S — But my agents, actors, I mean the people I am studying at the company, form a lot of networks. They are connected to a lot of other things, they are all over the place…
P — But see, that’s the problem, you don’t need Actor-Network to say that: any available social theory would do the same. It’s a waste of time for you to pick this very bizarre argument to show that your informants are in a network.
S — But they are! They form a network! Look, I have been tracing their connections: computer chips, standards, schooling, money, rewards, countries, cultures, corporate board rooms, everything. Haven’t I described a network in your sense?
P — Not necessarily. I agree this is terribly confusing, and it’s largely our fault — the word we invented is a pretty horrible one… But you should not confuse the network that is drawn by the description and the network that is used to make the description.
S — …?
P — But yes! Surely you’d agree that drawing with a pencil is not the same thing as drawing the shape of a pencil. It’s the same with this ambiguous word, network. With Actor-Network you may describe something that doesn’t at all look like a network —an individual state of mind, a piece of machinery, a fictional character; conversely, you may describe a network —subways, sewages, telephones— which is not all drawn in an ‘Actor-Networky’ way. You are simply confusing the object with the method. ANT is a method, and mostly a negative one at that; it says nothing about the shape of what is being described with it.
S — This is confusing! But my company executives, are they not forming a nice, revealing, significant network?
P — Maybe yes, I mean, surely, yes— but so what?
S — Then, I can study them with Actor-Network-Theory!
P — Again, maybe yes, but maybe not. It depends entirely on what you yourself allow your actors, or rather your actants to do. Being connected, being interconnected, being heterogeneous, is not enough. It all depends on the sort of action that is flowing from one to the other, hence the words ‘net’ and ‘work’. Really, we should say ‘worknet’ instead of ‘network’. It’s the work, and the movement, and the flow, and the changes that should be stressed. But now we are stuck with ‘network’ and everyone thinks we mean the World Wide Web or something like that.
S — Do you mean to say that once I have shown that my actors are related in the shape of a network, I have not yet done an ANT study?
P — That’s exactly what I mean: ANT is more like the name of a pencil or a brush than the name of an object to be drawn or painted.
S — But when I said ANT was a tool and asked you if it could be applied, you objected!
P — Because it’s not a tool — or rather because tools are never ‘mere’ tools ready to be applied: they always modify the goals you had in mind. That’s what ‘actor’ means. Actor Network (I agree the name is silly) allows you to produce some effects that you would have never obtained by any other social theory. That’s all that I can vouch for. It’s a very common experience: try to draw with a lead pencil or with charcoal, you will feel the difference; cooking tarts with a gas oven is not the same as with an electric one.
S — But that’s not what my supervisor wants. He wants a frame in which to put my data.
P — If you want to store more data, buy a bigger hard disk…
S — He always says: ‘Student, you need a framework’.
P — Ah? So your supervisor is in the business of selling pictures? It’s true that frames are nice for them: gilded, white, carved, baroque, aluminium, etc. But have you ever met a painter who began her masterpiece by first choosing the frame? That would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it?
S — You’re playing with words. By ‘frame’ I mean a theory, an argument, a general point, a concept — something for making sense of the data. You always need one.
P — No you don’t! Tell me, if some X is a mere ‘case of’ Y, what is more important to study: X which is the special case, or Y which is the rule?
S — Probably Y… but X too, just to see if its really an application of… well, both I guess.
P — I would bet on Y myself, since X will not teach you anything new. If something is simply an ‘instance of’ some other state of affairs, go study this state of affairs instead… A case study that needs a frame in addition, is a case study that was badly chosen to begin with!
S — But you always need to put things into a context, don’t you?
P — I have never understood what context meant, no. A frame makes a picture look nicer, it may direct the gaze better, increase the value, but it doesn’t add anything to the picture. The frame, or the context, is precisely the sum of factors that make no difference to the data, what is common knowledge about it. If I were you, I would abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at hand.
S — ‘Just describe’. Sorry to ask: but is this not terribly naïve? Is this not exactly the sort of empiricism, or realism, that we have been warned against? I thought your argument was, how should I say? more sophisticated than that.
P — Because you think description is easy? You must be confusing description, I guess, with strings of clichés. For every hundred books of commentaries, arguments, glosses, there is only one of description. To describe, to be attentive to the concrete states of affairs, to find the uniquely adequate account of a given situation-- I have, myself, always found this incredibly demanding. Ever heard of Harold Garfinkel?
S — I’m lost here, I have to say. We have been told that there are two types of sociology, the interpretive and the objectivist. Surely you don’t want to say you are of the objectivist type?
P — You bet I am! Yes, by all means.
S — You? But we have been told you were something of a relativist! You have been quoted as saying that even the natural sciences are not objective… So, surely you are for interpretive sociology, viewpoints, multiplicity of stand points, all that.
P — I have no real patience for interpretive sociologies, whatever you may call by that name. No. On the contrary, I firmly believe that sciences are objective — what else could they be? They’re all about objects, no? I simply say that objects might look a bit more complicated, folded, multiple, complex, entangled, than what the ‘objectivist’, as you say, would like them to be.
S — But that’s exactly what ‘interpretive’ sociologies argue, no?
P — Oh no, not all. They would say that human desires, human meanings, human intentions, etc., introduce some ‘interpretive flexibility’ into a world of inflexible objects, of ‘pure causal relations’, of ‘strictly material connections’. That’s not at all what I am saying. I would say that this computer here on this desk, this screen, this keyboard, as objects, this school are made of multiple layers, exactly as much as you, sitting here, are: your body, your language, your questions. It’s the object itself that adds multiplicity, or rather the thing, the ‘gathering’. When you speak of hermeneutics, no matter which precaution you take, you always expect the second shoe to drop: someone inevitably will add “but of course there also exist ‘natural’, ‘objective’ things that are not interpreted”.
S — That’s just I was going to say! There are not only objective realities, but also subjective ones! This is why we need both types of social theories…
P — See? That’s the inevitable trap: ‘Not only but also’. Either you extend the argument to everything, but then it becomes useless —‘interpretation’ becomes another synonym for ‘objectivity’— or else you limit it to one aspect of reality, the human, and then you are stuck—since objectivity is always on the other side of the fence. And it makes no difference if the other side is considered greener or more rotten; it’s beyond reach anyway.
S — But you wouldn’t deny that you too possess a standpoint, that ANT is situated too, that you too add another layer of interpretations, a perspective?
P — No, why would I ‘deny’ it? But so what? The great thing about a standpoint is, precisely, that you can change it! Why would I be stuck with it? From where they are on earth, astronomers have a limited perspective, for instance in Greenwich, the Observatory down the river from here —have you been there? it’s fabulous. And yet, they have been pretty good at shifting this perspective, through instruments, telescopes, satellites. They can now draw a map of the distribution of galaxies in the whole universe. Pretty good, no? Show me one standpoint, and I will show you two dozen ways to shift out of it. Listen: all this opposition between ‘standpoint’ and ‘view from nowhere’, you can safely forget. And also this difference between ‘interpretive’ and ‘objectivist’. Leave hermeneutics aside and go back to the object —or rather to the thing.
S — But I am always limited to my situated viewpoint, to my perspective, to my own subjectivity?
P — You are very obstinate! What makes you think that ‘having a viewpoint’ means ‘being limited’ or especially ‘subjective’? When you travel abroad and you follow the sign ‘belvedere’, ‘panorama’, ‘Bella vista’, when you finally reach the breath-taking site, in what way is this a proof of your ‘subjective limits’? It’s the thing itself, the valley, the peaks, the roads that offer you this grasp, this handle, this take. The best proof is that two meters lower, you see nothing because of the trees, and two meters higher, nothing because of a parking lot. And yet you have the same limited ‘subjectivity’, and have exactly your very same ‘standpoint’! If you can have many viewpoints on a statue it’s because the statue itself is in three-dimensions and allows you, yes, allows you to turn around it. If something supports many viewpoints, it’s just that it’s highly complex, intricately folded, nicely organized, and beautiful, yes, objectively beautiful.
S — But certainly, nothing is objectively beautiful — beauty has to be subjective… taste and colour, relative… I am lost again. Why would we spend so much time here fighting objectivism then? What you say can’t be right.
P — Because the things people call ‘objective’ are most of the time a series of clichés. We don’t have much good description of anything: of what a computer, a piece of software, a formal system, a theorem, a company, a market is. We know next to nothing of what this thing you’re studying, organisation, is. How would we be able to distinguish it from subjectivity? So, there are two ways to criticize objectivity: one is by going away from the object to the subjective human view point. But the other direction is the one I am talking about: back to the object. Why should we leave objects to be described only by the idiots?! Positivists don’t own objectivity. A computer described by Alan Turing is quite a bit richer and more interesting than the ones described by Wired Magazine, no? As we saw in class yesterday, a soap factory described by Richard Powers in Gain is much more lively than what you read in Harvard Case Studies. The name of the game is to get back to empiricism.
S — Still, I am limited to my own view.
P — Of course, you are, but again, so what? Don’t believe all that crap about being ‘limited’ to one’s perspective. All of the sciences have been inventing ways to move from one standpoint to the next, from one frame of reference to the next, for God’s sake: that’s called relativity.
S — Ah! So you confess you are a relativist!
P — But of course, what else could I be? If I want to be a scientist and reach objectivity, I have to be able to travel from one frame of reference to the next, from one standpoint to the next. Without those displacements, I would be limited to my own narrow point of view for good.
S — So you associate objectivity with relativism?
P — ‘Relativity’, yes, of course. All the sciences do the same. Our sciences too.
S — But what is our way to change our standpoints?
P — I told you, we are in the business of descriptions. Everyone else is trading on clichés. Enquiries, polls, whatever—we go, we listen, we learn, we practice, we become competent, we change our views. Very simple really: it’s called field work. Good field work always produces a lot of new descriptions.
S — But I have lots of descriptions already! I’m drowning in them. That’s just my problem. That’s why I’m lost and that’s why I thought it would be useful to come to you. Can’t ANT help me with this mass of data? I need a framework!
P —‘My Kingdom for a frame!’. Very moving; I think I understand your desperation. But no, ANT is pretty useless for that. Its main tenet is that actors themselves make everything, including their own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics, even their own ontologies… So the direction to follow would be more descriptions, I am afraid.
S — But descriptions are too long. I have to explain instead.
P — See? This is where I disagree with most of the training in the social sciences.
S — You would disagree with the need for social sciences to provide an explanation for the data they accumulate? And you call yourself a social scientist and an objectivist!
P — I’d say that if your description needs an explanation, it’s not a good description, that’s all. Only bad descriptions need an explanation. It’s quite simple really. What is meant by an ‘explanation’, most of the time? Adding another actor to provide those already described with the energy necessary to act. But if you have to add one, then the network was not complete, and if the actors already assembled do not have enough energy to act, then they are not ‘actors’, but mere intermediaries, dopes, puppets. They do nothing, so they should not be in the description anyhow. I have never seen a good description in need, then, of an explanation. But I have read countless numbers of bad descriptions to which nothing was added by a massive addition of ‘explanations’! And ANT did not help…
S — This is very distressing. I should have known —the other students warned me not to touch ANT stuff even with a long pole… Now you are telling me that I shouldn’t even try to explain anything!
P — Student, Student, I did not say that: simply that either your explanation is relevant and, in practice, you are adding a new agent to the description — the network is simply longer than you thought— or it’s not an actor that makes any difference and you are simply adding something irrelevant which helps neither the description nor the explanation. In that case, throw it away.
S — But all my colleagues use a lot of them: ‘IBM corporate culture’, for instance, or ‘British isolationism’, or ‘market pressure’, or ‘self-interest’. Why should I deprive myself of those contextual explanations?
P — You can keep them if this amuses you, but don’t believe they explain anything— they are mere ornaments. At best they apply equally to all your actors, which means they are absolutely superfetatory since they are unable to introduce a difference among them. At worst, they drown all the interesting actors in a diluvium of bad ones. As a rule, context stinks. It’s simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired or too lazy to go on.
S — But that’s exactly my problem: to stop. I have to complete this PhD. I have just eight more months. You always say ‘more descriptions’, but this is like Freud and his cures: indefinite analysis. When do you stop? My actors are all over the place! Where should I go? What is a complete description?
P — Now that’s a good question because it’s a practical one. As I always say: a good thesis is a thesis that is done. But there is another way to stop than by ‘adding an explanation’ or ‘putting it into a frame’.
S — Tell me it then.
P — You stop when you have written your 50.000 words or whatever is the format here, I always forget.
S — Oh! That’s really great! So my thesis is finished when it’s completed… so helpful, many thanks! I feel so relieved…
P — Glad you like it! No seriously, don’t you agree that any method depends on the size and type of texts you promised to deliver?
S — But that’s a textual limit, it has nothing to do with method.
P — See? That’s again why I totally dislike the ways doctoral students are trained. Writing texts has everything to do with method. You write a text of so many words, in so many months, for so much grant money, based on so many interviews, so many hours of observation, so many documents. That’s all. You do nothing more.
S — Of course, I do: I learn, I study, I explain, I criticize, I…
P — But all those grandiose goals —you achieve them through a text, don’t you?
S — Of course, but it’s a tool, a medium, a way of expressing myself.
P — There is no tool, no medium, only mediators. A text is thick. That’s an ANT tenet, if any.
S — Sorry, Professor, I told you, I have never been into French stuff; I can write in C and even C ++, but I don’t do Derrida, semiotics, any of it. I don’t believe the world is made of words and all of that…
P — Don’t try to be sarcastic, it doesn’t suit the engineer in you. And anyway I don’t believe that either. You ask me how to stop, I am just telling you that the best you will be able to do, as a PhD student, is to add a text read by your advisors and may be a few of your informants, three or four fellow doctoral students, to a given state of affairs. Nothing fancy in that. Just plain realism. One solution for how to stop is to ‘add a framework’, an ‘explanation’; the other is to put the last word to the last chapter of your damned thesis.
S — I have been trained in the sciences! I am a systems engineer— I am not coming to Organisation Studies to abandon that. I am willing to add flow charts, institutions, people, mythologies, psychology to what I already know. I am even prepared to be ‘symmetric’ as you teach us about those various factors. But don’t tell me that science is about telling nice stories. This is the difficulty with you. One moment you are a completely objectivist, naïve realist even —‘just describe’— and the other moment, completely relativist —‘tell some nice stories and run’. Is this not so terribly French?
P — And that makes you so terribly what? Don’t be silly. Who talked about ‘nice stories’? Not me. I said you were writing a PhD thesis. Can you deny that? And then I said that this so-many-words-long PhD thesis —which will be the only lasting result of your stay among us— is thick.
S — Meaning?
P — Meaning that it’s not just a transparent window pane, transporting without deformation, the information about your study. Can you deny that? “There is no in-formation, only trans-formation”, translation if you want. I assume that you agree with this slogan of my class? Well, then this is surely also true of your PhD thesis, no?
S — Maybe, but in what sense does it help me to be more scientific, that’s what I want to know. I don’t want to abandon the ethos of science.
P — Because this text, depending on the way it’s written, will or will not capture the actor-network you wish to study. The text, in our discipline, is not a story, not a nice story, it’s the functional equivalent of a laboratory. It’s a place for trials, experiments and simulations. Depending on what happens in it, there is or there is not an actor and there is or there is not a network being traced. And that depends entirely on the precise ways in which it is written —and every single new topic requires a new way to be handled by a text. Most texts are just plain dead. Nothing happens in them.
S — But no one mentions ‘text’ in our program. We talk about ‘studying organisation, not ‘writing’ about it.
P — That’s what I am telling you: you are being badly trained! Not teaching social science doctoral students to write their PhDs is like not teaching chemists to do laboratory experiments. That’s why I am teaching nothing nowadays but writing. Really, I feel like an old fart always repeating the same thing: “describe, write, describe, write…”
S — The problem is that that’s not at all what my supervisor wants! He wants my case studies to be generalisable. He does not want ‘mere description’. So even if I do what you want, I will have one nice description of one state of affairs, and then what? Then, I still have to put it into a frame, find a typology, compare, explain, generalise. That’s why I’m starting to panic.
P — You should panic only if your actors were not doing that constantly as well, actively, reflexively, obsessively: they too compare, they too produce typologies, they too design standards, they too spread their machines as well as their organisations, their ideologies, their states of mind. Why would you be the one doing the intelligent stuff while they would act like a bunch of morons? What they do to expand, to relate, to compare, to organise is what you have to describe as well. It’s not another layer that you would have to add to the ‘mere description’. Don’t try to shift from description to explanation: simply go on with the description. What your own ideas are about your company is of no interest whatsoever compared to how this bit of the company itself has managed to spread.
S — But if my people don’t act, if they don’t actively compare, standardize, organize, generalize, what do I do? I will be stuck! I won’t be able to add any other explanations.
P — You are really extraordinary! If your actors don’t act, they will leave no trace whatsoever either. So you will have no information at all. So you will have nothing to say.
S — You mean when there is no trace I should remain silent?
P — Incredible! Would you raise this question in any of the natural sciences? It would sound totally silly. It takes a social scientist to claim that they can go on explaining even in the absence of any information! Are you really prepared to make up data?
S — No, of course not, but still I want…
P — Good, at least you are more reasonable than many of our colleagues. No trace left, thus no information, thus no description, then no talk. Don’t fill it in. It’s like a map of a country in the 16th century: no one went there, or no one came back, so for God’s sake, leave it blank! Terra incognita.
S — But what about invisible entities acting in a hidden way?
P — If they act, they leave some trace, then you have some information, then you can talk about them. If not, just shut up.
S — But if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P — Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without bringing in the proof of their presence. That proof might be indirect, exacting, complicated, but you need it. Invisible things are invisible. Period. If they make other things move, and you can document those moves, then they are visible. Again: period.
S — ‘Proof, proof’. What is a proof anyway? Isn’t that terribly positivistic?
P — I hope so, yes. What’s so great about saying that things are acting whose existence you can’t prove? I am afraid you are confusing social theory with conspiracy theory —although, these days, I agree, most of critical social science comes down to that.
S — But if I add nothing, I simply repeat what actors say.
P — What would be the use of adding invisible entities that act without leaving any trace and make no difference to any state of affairs?
S — But I have to make the actors learn something they didn’t know; if not, why would I study them?
P — You social scientists, you always baffle me. If you were studying ants, instead of ANT, would you expect ants to learn something from your study? Of course not. They know, you don’t. They are the teachers, you learn from them. You explain what they do to yourself, for your own benefit, or for that of other entomologists, not for them, who don’t care a bit. What makes you think that a study is always supposed to teach things to the people being studied?
S — But that’s the whole idea of the social sciences! That’s why I’m here at the LSE: to criticize the ideology of management, to debunk the many myths of information technologies, to gain a critical edge over all the technical hype, the ideology of the market. If not, believe me, I would still be in Silicon Valley, and I would be making a lot more money —well, maybe not now, since the bubble burst… But anyway, I have to provide some reflexive understanding to the people…
P — … who of course, before you came, were unreflexive!
S — In a way, yes. No? They did things but did not know why… What’s wrong with that?
P — What’s wrong is that it’s so terribly cheap. Most of what social scientists call ‘reflexivity’ is just asking totally irrelevant questions to people who ask other questions for which the analyst does not have the slightest beginning of an answer! Reflexivity is not a birthright you transport with you, just because you are at the LSE! You and your informants have different concerns-- when they intersect it’s a miracle, and miracles, in case you don’t know, are rare…
S — But if I have nothing to add to what actors say, I won’t be able to be critical.
P — See, one moment you want to explain and play the scientist, while the next moment you want to debunk and criticize and play the militant…
S — I was going to say: one moment you are a naïve realist —back to the object— and the next you say that you just write a text that adds nothing but simply trails behind your famous ‘actors themselves’. This is totally apolitical. No critical edge that I can see.
P — Tell me, Master Debunker, how are you going to gain a ‘critical edge’ over your actors? I am eager to hear.
S — Only if I have a framework. That’s what I was looking for in coming here, but obviously ANT is unable to give me any.
P — And I am pretty glad it doesn’t… This framework of yours, I assume, is hidden to the eyes of your informants, and revealed by your study?
S — Yes, of course. That should be the value of my work —I hope so at least. Not the description, since everyone knows that anyway, but the explanation, the context they have no time to see, the typology… See, they are too busy to think. That’s what I can deliver, and, by the way, at the company they are interested, and ready to give me access to their files, and willing to pay for it!
P — Good for you… What you are telling me is that in your six months of field work, you can by yourself, just by writing a few hundred pages, produce more knowledge than those 340 engineers and staff that you have been studying?
S — Not ‘more’ knowledge maybe, but different, yes, I hope. Shouldn’t I strive exactly for that? Is this not why I am in this business?
P — I am not sure what business you are in, but how different is the knowledge you produce from theirs, that’s the whole question.
S — It’s the same kind of knowledge as all the sciences, the same way of explaining things: by going from the case at hand to the cause, and once I know the cause, then I can generate the effect as a consequence. What’s wrong with that? It’s like asking what will happen to a pendulum that has been moved far from equilibrium; if I know Galileo’s law, I don’t even need to look at any concrete pendulum anymore; I know exactly what will happen-- provided I forget the perturbations, of course.
P — Of course…! So what you are hoping for is that your explanatory framework will be to your case study what Galileo’s law is to the fall of the pendulum— minus the perturbations.
S — Yes, I guess so, sort of, though less precisely scientific, naturally. Why? What’s wrong with that?
P — Nothing, it would be great, but is it feasible? It means that, whatever a given concrete pendulum does, it will add no new information to the law of falling bodies. The law holds in potentia everything there is to know about the pendulum state of affairs. The concrete case is simply, to speak like philosophers, the ‘realization of a potential’ which was already there.
S — Is not that an ideal explanation?
P — That’s just the problem: it’s an ideal, and squared: it’s the ideal of an ideal explanation. I doubt somewhat that your company subsidiary behaves that way. And I am pretty confident that you can’t produce the law of its behaviour which will allow you to deduce everything as the realization in concreto of what was already there potentially.
S — Minus the perturbations…
P — Yes, yes, yes, this goes without saying… your modesty is admirable…
S — Are you making fun of me here? Striving for that sort of framework seems feasible to me …
P — But is it desirable? See, what you are really telling me is that the actors in your description make no difference whatsoever. They have simply realized a potential —apart from minor deviations. Which means they are not actors at all: they simply carry the force that comes through them. So, my dear Student, you have been wasting your time describing people, objects, sites that are nothing, in effect, but passive intermediaries, since they do nothing on their own. Your fieldwork time has been simply wasted. You should have gone directly to the cause.
S — But that’s what a science is for! Just that: finding the hidden structure that explains the behaviour of those agents you thought were doing something but in fact are simply place-holders for something else.
P — So you are a structuralist! Out of the closet, finally. Place-holders, that’s what you call actors?! And you want to do Actor-Network Theory at the same time! That’s stretching the limits of eclecticism pretty far!
S — Why can’t I do both? Certainly if ANT has any scientific content, it has to be structuralist.
P — Have you realized that there is the word ‘actor’ in actor-network? Can you tell me what sort of action a place-holder does in a structuralist explanation?
S — Yes of course: it fulfils a function, that’s what is so great about structuralism, if I have understood it correctly. Any other agent in the same position would be forced to do the same…
P — So a place-holder, by definition, is entirely substitutable to any other?
S — Yes, that’s what I am telling you is so great.
P — But that’s also what is so silly and what makes it radically incompatible with ANT: an actor that makes no difference, in my vocabulary, is not an actor at all. An actor, if words have any meaning, is exactly what is not substitutable for anyone else, it’s a unique event, totally irreducible to any other. Except, that is, if you render one commensurable with another one by some sort of standardization —but even that requires a third actor, a third event.
S — So you are telling me that ANT is not a science!
P — Not a structuralist science, that’s for sure.
S — That’s the same, any science…
P — No! If information is transformation, Organisation Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Business studies, Information studies, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, whatever the field, they cannot rely, by definition, on any structuralist explanation.
S — ‘Systems of transformations’, that’s exactly what structuralism is about!
P — No way, my friend, since in structuralism nothing is really trans-formed. You don’t seem to fathom the abyss that exists between it and ANT. A structure is just a network on which you have only very sketchy information. It’s useful when you are pressed for time, but don’t tell me it’s more scientific. If I want to have actors in my account, they have to do things, not to be place-holders; if they do something they have to make a difference. If they make no difference, drop them, start the description anew. You want a science in which there is no object.
S —You and your stories… Eventful stories, that’s what you want! I am talking about explanation, knowledge, critical edge, not writing scripts for soap operas on Channel 4!
P — I was getting to that. You want your bundle of a few hundred pages to make a difference, no? Well then, you have to be able to prove that your description of what people do, when it comes back to them, does make a difference to the way they were doing things. Is this what you call having a ‘critical edge’?
S — I guess so, yes.
P — But, then, you would agree that it wouldn’t do to provide them with irrelevant appeal to causes that make no difference at all to what they do, because they are too general?
S — Of course not; I was talking about real causalities.
P — But those won’t do either because if they existed, which I doubt very much, they would have no other effect than transforming your informants into the place-holders of other actors, which you call function, structure, etc. So in effect they would be not actors anymore but dopes, puppets —even less than puppets since those are making their puppeteers do quite a lot of unexpected things… Well, anyway, you are making actors to be nothing: at best they could add some minor perturbations like the concrete pendulum which only adds slight wobbles.
S — …
P — Now you have to tell me what is so politically great about transforming those you have studied into hapless, ‘actless’ place-holders for hidden functions that you, and you only, can see and detect?
S — Hmm, you have a way of turning things upside down… I am not so sure now. If actors become aware of the determinations imposed on them… more conscious… more reflexive… is their consciousness not raised somewhat? They can now take their fate in their own hands. They become more enlightened, no? If so, I would say that now, at last, in part thanks to me, yes, there are more actors now, fully.
P — Bravo, bravissimo! So an actor for you is some fully determined agent, plus a place-holder for a function, plus a bit of perturbation, plus some consciousness provided to them by enlightened social scientists? Horrible, simply horrible… and those folks want to do ANT! After you have reduced them from actors to place-holders you want to add insult to injury and generously bring to those poor blokes the reflexivity they had before and that you have taken off by treating them in a structuralist way! Magnificent! They were actors before you came in with your ‘explanation’ —don’t tell me that it’s your study that might make them so. Great job, Student. Bourdieu could not have done better…
S — You might not like Bourdieu very much, but at least he was a real scientist, and even better, he was politically relevant. As far as I can tell, you are neither…
P — Thanks. I have been studying the links between science and politics for about thirty years, so I am hard to intimidate with talks of which science is ‘politically relevant’.
S — Arguments of authority don’t intimidate me either, so your thirty years of study make no difference to me.
P — Touché… But your question was: ‘What can I do with ANT’? I answered it: no structuralist explanation. The two are completely incompatible. Either you have actors who realize potentialities and they are not actors at all, or you describe actors who are making virtualities actual (this is Deleuze’s parlance by the way), and that requires very specific texts, and your connection with those you study requires very specific protocols to work — I guess this is what you would call ‘critical edge’ and ‘political relevance’.
S — So where do we differ? You too want to have a critical edge.
P — Yes, maybe, but I am sure of one thing: it’s not automatic, and most of the time, it will fail. Two hundred pages of interviews, observations, etc. will not make any difference whatsoever just like that. To be relevant requires another set of extraordinary circumstances. It’s an event. It requires an incredibly imaginative protocol. As great, as rare, as surprising as Galileo with his pendulum, or Pasteur with his rabies virus.
S — So what should I do? Pray for a miracle? Sacrifice a chicken?
P — But why do you want your tiny little text to be more automatically relevant to those who might be concerned by it —or not— than, say, a huge laboratory of natural sciences? Look at how much it takes for Intel™ chips to become relevant for mobile phones! And you want everyone to have a label ‘LSE™ inside’ at no cost at all? To become relevant you need extra work.
S — Just what I need: the prospect of even more work!
P — But that’s the whole point: if an argument is automatic, across the board, all purpose, then it can’t possibly be scientific. It’s simply irrelevant. If a study is really scientific, then it could have failed.
S — Great reassurance, nice of you to remind me that I can fail my thesis!
P — You are confusing science with mastery. Tell me, can you imagine one single topic to which, for instance, Bourdieu’s critical sociology, which you are so fond of, could possibly not apply?
S — But I can’t imagine one single topic to which ANT would apply!!
P — Beautiful, you are so right, that’s exactly what I think…
S — That was not meant as a compliment.
P — But I take it as a true one! An application of anything is as rare as a good text of social science.
S — May I politely remark that, for all your exceedingly subtle philosophy of science, you have yet to tell me how to write one...
P — You were so eager to add frames, context, structure, to your ‘mere descriptions’, how would you have listened to me?
S — But what’s the difference between a good and a bad ANT text?
P — Now, that’s a good question!
S — At last?
P — At last! Answer: The same as between a good and a bad laboratory. No more, no less.
S — Well, okay, um, thanks… It was nice of you to talk to me. But I think after all, instead of ANT… I was thinking of using Luhmann’s system theory as an underlying framework— that seems to hold a lot of promise, autopoiesis and all that. Or maybe I will use a bit of both.
P — …
S — Don’t you like Luhmann?
P — I would leave aside all ‘underlying frameworks’, if I were you.
S — But, your sort of ‘science’, it seems to me, means breaking all the rules of social science training.
P — I prefer to break them and follow my actors… As you said, I am, in the end, a naïve realist, a positivist.
S — You know what would be real nice? Since no one seems to understand what is ANT around here, you should write a guide about it; that would make sure our teachers know what it is and then, if I may say, I don’t want to be impolite… but they might not try to push us too hard into it… if you see what I mean…
P — So it’s really that bad? Um, a guide?
S — See, I’m just a PhD student. You’re a professor. You have published a lot, you can afford to do things that I can’t. I have to listen to my supervisor. I simply can’t follow your advice too far.
P — Why come to me then?
S — For the last half hour, I have to confess, I’ve been wondering the same thing…