Diagramming the Social by Russell Dudley-Smith Natasha Whiteman

Author:Russell Dudley-Smith, Natasha Whiteman [Russell Dudley-Smith, Natasha Whiteman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Methodology, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429574764
Google: TmLyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-09-13T01:00:25+00:00

Latour (1993: 11) opposes the productive work of translation to processes of purification that produce essentialised categorial oppositions such as nature: society. He illustrates the latter in his own diagrams with separated circles. As with the metaphors of containment we explored in Chapter 2, these are diagrams of purification. Latour can then contrast social action which transforms from that based on the containment of equivalence. Equivalence can be thought of as the making of identity; enabling everything to be put in its proper place. Such classification is emergent from, and itself opposed to, the active transformations of actants’ work.

This is also the basis of ANT’s (otherwise difficult to come to terms with) rejection of ‘networks’: for example, someone using the internet (Latour, 1999) is faced by hyperlinks that, by clicking, change one page of hypertext to another – as if in equivalent exchange. This, as Latour (1999) clarifies, is the very opposite of ANT’s focus on transformative work.

Spider diagrams thus confront essentialised categorial thinking head-on. However, such is the generality of Latour’s schema that it leaves open how these insights might be operationalised in social research. The way in which chains of translation materialise as purified containers is left underdetermined. There have, nonetheless, been highly productive developments made in relation to some aspects of Latour’s work by social theorists such as John Law. It is characteristic that these supplement Latour’s vision to gain traction with the empirical.

In both Organizing Modernity and After Method, for example, Law (1994, 2004) has argued for the adoption of some key pragmatic principles for social research. His concern has been to establish “non-human”, processual and inter-active regard on the social. But, in the “mess” (Law, 2004) of action on action, how is ordered practice (at least for a while) achieved?

Law puts emphasis on the autopoietic nature of such regularity (to which he gives the name “recursion” – a word we relied on from time to time in the previous chapter). If, empirically, a tendency of the drive to order is to establish self-evident dualisms then these feed upon themselves in ever more specific ways. For Law, the resulting structuration is composed by “modes of ordering”. A way of establishing such modes is described in detail in Chapter 4. There, rather than risking ‘algorithmic’ readings of recursion (something Law himself is concerned by), we will move to a fractal notion of strategic action – one that allows self-similarity in description from the local to the general.

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