Nick Couldry: Actor Network Theory and Media: Do They Connect and on What Terms?

Couldry, Nick. “Actor Network Theory and Media: Do they Connect and on What Terms?” http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/pdf/Couldry/Couldry_ActorNetworkTheoryMedia.pdf [accessed August 10, 2008].

keywords: media, “the natural,” blackbox, sociology of knowledge, Latour and Woolgar, Tarde, Durkheim and Bourdieu, deconstruction, technical, the social, general skepticism, functionalism, agency, modernity, (invisible) mediation, embeddedness, Tarde, power asymmetries, symbolic resources, social experience, social organization, instantiation of power, the spatial dimension of power, cognitive and emotive frameworks, sociology of networks, sociology of action, asymmetries, liveness, co-presence, reified notion of networks as technical-social hybrids

It’s a question of presence and absence: what aspects, dynamics, constituents, elements, etc. does ANT emphasize and at the expense of what others? What does ANT make present and, in the process, make absent? According to Nick Couldry’s critique, Actor-Network Theory avoids questions of the social by privileging a reified notion of networks as technical social hybrids. Couldry acknowledges the value of ANT’s skepticism for unpicking “blackboxed” phenomena including media (viz. media as natural—as The Social—rather than a vector for channeling social participation). At the same time, he identifies three specific restrictions limiting ANT’s applicability to media studies: (1) its emphasis on the spatialization of power and a particular historical achievement, namely the creation rather than sustainability of networks; (2) its failure to adequately account for human agency and contestation by equating human and non-human actants as equal; (3) ANT’s reticence to recognize interpretation as an ongoing process: specifically, that/how networks and their outcomes are continuously reevaluated. This is especially true in cases like “the media” where ongoing interpretation is part and parcel of the system. To this end, argues Couldry, ANT excludes culture and by extension symbolic production—except in instances where industry puts in place stable networks of actors. While there are several possible explanations for this exclusion, it may relate to ANT’s inability to accommodate complex mediations, situations that are irreducible to easy (or rational) explanations, as in the case of things like love. And the result? ANT could be even more useful if it pushed beyond a sociology of networks into a sociology of actions—if it entertained a more complex and dynamic understanding of socio-temporal relations.

Enriching Couldry’s discussion—albeit superfluous to his declared interest in ANT and media theory—are his thoughts on “liveness” (as in a live moment—“We are live!”). Having established “liveness” as a way of naturalizing the dissemination of certain ideas and conditioning our shared attention to matters of social concern, he distinguishes two modes of liveness: online and group. If “online liveness” is our simultaneous presence in various windows of experience online (this chimes with Turkle), “group liveness” denotes the ways in which individuals and groups achieve co-presence through technologies such as mobile telephony. Though not completely clear how these forms of liveness relate to ANT, Couldry concludes his discussion by summoning Knorr-Cetina’s work on interpretation and representation: how images inform our understanding of the social order. But to repeat the above: what exactly this means to media theory Couldry fails to make clear.

As Corrado Morgana’s text of choice for the Ecoes reading group, “Actor Network Theory and Media: Do They Connect and On What Terms?” nicely compliments Jem Mackay’s selection: Bruno Latour's “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.” On the one hand, both papers consider spatialization: of how media functions as site/sites of knowledge production. This seems connected to situated knowledge and by extension (albeit a leap) to practice-based research. (Both embedded knowledge and practice-based research address the contingency of context and content, among other things) Additionally, both discussions consider the privileging of some practices over others and the resulting asymmetries of power. In the case of TV, for example, information predominantly flows in one direction: from the producers to the consumers. Exhibitions often operate similarly by ignoring the ways in which curating conditions certain kinds interpretation. Yet this (one-way)transmission is not, according to Couldry, sufficiently explored in discussions around mediatization. Moreover, both Latour and Couldry valorize ANT as a mechanism for critique. It offers a toolkit for deconstructing “The Social” as (re)assembled through various infrastructures. Both accounts claim ANT aim to equip the “reader” with critical skills for unpicking texts, a commitment signaling ANT’s interest in making things “better”—or, at the very least, more transparent and participatory.

And yet, one can’t help feeling that Couldry’s argument would benefit from comparing and contrasting ANT with other established methods of media analysis. Certainly, ANT’s not the only network-centred approach. Nor does its failure to recognize actant agency make it distinct. Indeed, if Couldry’s really interested in ANT as a methodology then describing this approach in relation to others may have thickened his argument by suggesting strategies for productively hybridizing ANT. True: he mentions Silverstone, Tarde, Durkheim. But a discussion of methodology as a comparison of methods requires, I think, a more comprehensive discussion of the similarities and differences between their various approaches.

Questions for Further Consideration:

1. One of Couldry’s main observations relates to Silverstone’s critique of Actor-Network Theory: ANT doesn’t consider how actants interpret their actions—let alone what impact this interpretation has on their networked performance. Does Ecoes adress this problem and if so, how? In what ways do the collaborators grapple with their “actanthood” through their participation? This seems like a question about performativity.
2. Couldry’s complementary discussions around time and space raise questions about the rhythm(s) of Ecoes as a collaborative project. How, for example, are the collaborators wrestling with this project as a kind of “moving target”? How can they ensure it continues to evolve—even after the project is completed? In what ways might art self-consciously register as something that’s always made in the present tense?
3. Couldry identifies ANT as one tool among many in the media theorist’s toolkit. While insufficient on its own, the rhetorical value of this approach challenges us to unpick our assumptions about facts: who, what, where, when, why and how they’re established. At the same time, he argues there’s something intrinsic to media limiting ANT’s analytical capacity. This something relates to interpretation. Consequently, “fact-orientated” disciplines (such as science, for example) benefit more from ANT than disciplines involving subject assessment—including art. What does all this mean to ANT as a methodology for making art? Might we see the rise of something called “A.R/N.T.” in the future?

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