This essay will elaborate on Bruno Latour’s philosophy in
regard to Actor-Network Theory and its sociological goals. To do this there
will be an analysis of the context surrounding Latour’s writing on the subject
and its theoretical implications. Through ANT’s emphasis on circulation, it
offers a unique perspective on the analysis of one form of the contemporary
documentary. In particular the documentaries of Harvard University’s Sensory
Ethnography Lab, specifically J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), which through their emphasis on rendering
the sensory experience into a cinematic form they tend to treat the non-human
actors as embodied with a form of agency.
***
Actor-Network
Theory
“When we believed that we were modern, we
could content ourselves with the assemblies of society and nature. But today we
have to restudy what we are made of and extend the repertoire of ties and the
number of associations way beyond the repertoire proposed by social
explanation.” – Bruno Latour
What Bruno Latour proposes throughout Reassembling the Social
is a wider definition of the
social, which is one of detailing micro-associations between actors instead of
utilizing broad social labels as explanations for their behavior. For Latour
this is the difference between the ‘sociology of the social’ and the
‘sociology of associations’. The difference between the two is that the former
tends to explain behavior and attempts to actively mobilize its data while for
the latter there is an emphasis on a return to empiricism and the value of
description.
Latour’s
writing on philosophy and sociology rose to prominence in the Early Nineties
during the height of the Science Wars. In We
Have Never Been Modern Latour argues with the rhetoric of the
postmodernist. For Latour the problem with the ‘modernist’ and the
‘post-modernist’ was that their framework overlooked non-human actors and the
networks between the different forms of actors. This was because, “Instead of moving on to empirical studies of
the networks that give meaning to the work of purification it denounces,
postmodernism rejects all empirical work as illusory and deceptively
scientific.” In preferring to be a ‘non-modern’ or an ‘a-modern’, Latour
attempted to create a new theory that was more liberating.
This
brings us to actor-network theory. But what exactly is it? Latour even
announces the difficulty of defining its label in the introduction of On recalling ANT, “I will start by
saying that there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory;
the word actor. the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!” One of the
goals of Latour’s sociology of associations is to learn from the actors and let
them speak for themselves, and this is without imposing on them an a priori definition of their social
world. Latour offers in more detail what makes for a good ANT account,
a narrative or a description or
a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit
there. Instead of simply transporting effects without transforming them, each
of the points in the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of
a new translation. As soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries but as mediators,
they render the movement of the social visible to the reader. Thus, through
many textual inventions, the social may become again a circulating entity that
is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being
part of society.
What is specific to ANT in contrast
to other forms of sociology is that the actor can take many forms: human or
object, insect or animal, microbe or machine. Latour cites the 19th
century French sociologist Émile Durkheim (even though Latour is not really
Durkheimian) as providing a good definition of what is an actor, “The first origins of all social process of
any importance should be sought in the internal constitution of the social
group. [italics in text]” It is
this internal constitution that is fundamental in defining the actor. For Latour, this emerges through their, actantiality
which is “what provides actants with their actions, with their
subjectivity, with their intentionality, with their morality.”
What ANT analyzes are the
performance of the actors and the movements that they create. But one of the
critiques of ANT is its flattening of the social and its potential to disregard
class, socio-economic background, race, and gender because it strives to
compose a common world which extends political participation to nonhumans.
Similarly to the emancipatory potential of Jacques Rancière’s concept of the
distribution of the sensible, Latour’s argument for this flattening is, “But it
is just because we wish to explain those
asymmetries that we don’t want to simply repeat
them – and even less to transport
them further unmodified. Once again, we don’t want to confuse the cause and the
effect, the explanandum with the explanans.”
Latour traces the pre-cursor
of ANT back to the 19th century in France to the sociologist Gabriel
Tarde who defined society as, “every thing is a society and that all things are
societies.” Tony Sampson elaborates on this quality of Tarde’s though when he
writes, “Tarde does not completely
dismiss the idea of social wholes but argues that the whole is a manifestation
of habitual repetitions of social invention and imitation.” Latour building
upon Tarde would form his own definition of the network as,
Thus, the network does not
designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected
points, much like a telephone, a freeway or a sewage ‘network’. It is nothing
more than an indicator of the quality of
a text about the topics at hand. It qualifies its objectivity, that is, the
ability of each actor to make other
actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many
translations.
ANT concentrates attention on a
movement because ANT transforms the social from a surface and territory into a circulation.
The dual definition of the social is then its substance and its movements.
Its emphasis is on the space between the tiny trajectories. This ‘in
between’ of the networks “are the most exciting aspects of ANT because they
show the extent of our ignorance and the immense reserve that is open for
change.” The network is then the series of transformations-translations that
are recorded. Actor-network theory is then the summing up of
interactions through various kinds of devices and inscriptions into a very
local and practical locus. Latour’s examples in Reassembling the Social includes the novelist Richard Powers in his
novel Gain on what constitutes a
business firm through the monologue of a CEO and the analysis of eight
photographs of a young woman voting in France.
Actor-Network
Theory and Documentary
Latour compares ANT to perspective drawing as it “does
not tell anyone the shape to be drawn – circles or cubes or lines – but only
how to go about systematically recording the world-building abilities of the
sites to be documented and registered.” So in the process of animating ANT into
the documentary form there are some preliminary questions that need to be
asked: How to give agency to a non-human actor? How would Latour’s concepts of
actors, circulation and networks look in a documentary? How would it differ
from other documentary forms? What type of forms should be prioritized?
Before proceeding
to analyze the work of the Sensory Ethnography Lab as examples of ANT-like documentaries,
I want to focus on Alain Resnais’ Le
chant du Styrène (1958) as an example of a documentary that gives agency to
a non-human actor. As Latour has stated numerous times, it is the actors
themselves that make up everything. Le
chant du Styrène accomplishes this through its study of styrene, a colorless
oily liquid that is used to make plastic, and then from its material bases the
documentary examines its relationships and traces at this one manufacturing factory.
The documentary begins with shots of its plastic creations, and with an
authoritative commentary guiding the viewer, it moves onward throughout the factory
to observe its multiple evolutions from pigmentation, storing, and finally its development
into a product.
Relevant to this discussion is
Martin Heidegger’s Insight Into What Is
and the conception of presence and the ‘Thing’. Heidegger’s thesis on objects
is similar to Latour’s emphasis on the agency of non-human actors. Graham
Harman in Heidegger Explained
emphasizes Heidegger’s main idea in it as being the distinction between a
thing’s mysterious internal constitution and its explicit appearance. Heidegger
elaborates on the concept of the fourfold
(of earth and sky, gods and mortals) and how the ‘Thing’ is a mirror-play of
all four terms. Harman writes, “Heidegger’s
four are present at all times in all things, though they may be more concealed
in some cases than in others.” For Harman the Heideggerian concepts ‘earth’ and
‘gods’ represent the past or the concealed realm and the concepts of ‘mortals’
and ‘sky’ the future or the revealed realm. Harman writes, “These
bulky-sounding terms simply refer to a kind of thinking that does not represent
things as objects viewed from the outside, but points toward their mysterious
inwardness as unique events.”
It’s this independence of the
thinghood of the thing to use Heidegger’s terms or the emphasis on non-human
actors and its surrounding networks to use Latour’s, which should be the focus
of identifying an ANT-like sociological documentary. Its aims should be also
empirical, descriptive and un-imposing. But what should it not look like?
Contemporary
documentary seems to be experiencing a renewed golden age due to the plethora
of human activity occurring in the world, the international connectivity due to
globalization, affordability of digital cameras to record these events, and new
ideas to engage with this unique film form. Some of recent highlights include Joshua
Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence
(2014) on the Indonesian genocide, Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me (2014) on his year on an experimental AIDS
medicine in Portugal, and John Gianvito’s Vapor
Trail (Clark) (2010) on the environmental contamination of an abandoned
American army base in the Philippines. Though all of these are interesting in
their own right, in regard to both content and form, they do not necessarily necessitate
an ANT approach to analyze them.
For the
purpose of my argument, Frederick Wiseman’s most recent documentary In
Jackson Heights (2015) will be used as an example of a ‘sociology of the
social’ type of documentary. Wiseman has been making documentaries since the
Sixties and since then, even though they all share a general poetic quality and
as he likes to describe them are more ‘reality fictions’, they are generally
filmed in a cinéma vérité method as they chronicle a broad spectrum of
institutional behavior. In Jackson
Heights is set in, as the title indicates, the Jackson Heights neighborhood
in Queens, New York and it focuses on the organizing of the Queens Pride Parade
and the effects of gentrification on its local business owners who are being
forced to relocate. Wiseman in this documentary is invested in broad social
labels, as much of the film takes place at identity-based group meetings and in
activist groups in opposition to the negative effects of the city’s neoliberal
policies. This interest in broad social statements and its disregard to
non-human actors makes it that In Jackson
Heights is not representative of ANT.
This
leads to the Sensory Ethnography Lab which in their innovative visual
ethnography propose a more satisfactory answer of what an ANT-like sociological
documentary would look like. The SEL emerged in the mid-2000s and some of its most
known documentaries are Sweetgrass (2009), Foreign Parts (2010), Leviathan (2012), Manakamana (2013), and The Iron Ministry (2014). There is an
emphasis on travelling the world and rendering an exotic setting into a
visually compelling documentary: Sweetgrass
follows a group of shepherds and their sheep through the Montana wilderness
and mountains, Foreign Parts looks at
a junkyard in Willets Point, New York which is in crisis due to a new
re-development project, Leviathan explores
the marine life and activities of an industrial fishing ship, Manakamana gently rides along with the
locals and tourist who are going both up and down a chairlift in India, and The Iron Ministry travels along the
public train system in China.
SEL describes their practice in
opposition to those of broadcast journalism and the standard discursive
practices of visual anthropology. On their website, they describe their work
as, “Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural
sciences, and the humanities, the SEL encourages attention to the many
dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with
difficulty, if it all, be rendered with propositional prose.” There is a
general disregard for commentary, broad social labels and stereotyping. And for
the purposes of this essay, the most direct connection between ANT and SEL is
that Véréna Paravel, who is part of the SEL faculty and director of two of
their films, studied directly under Bruno Latour.
How The Iron Ministry animates ANT is through its emphasis on non-human
actors and the circulation within its networks. Non-animate objects such as
fans, cigarette butts, miscellaneous animal parts, and the merchandise of a
food vendor receive agency as actors who can create action. It is also sociologically
descriptive for the human actors as through casual conversations and interviews
they can reveal their own interests and social reality. One passengers describes
what it is like being Muslim in contemporary China, another man describes his concerns
with the increase in housing cost in the urban centers, and another woman
describes her worries about China’s slow ascension into Tibetan society.
The networks of The Iron Ministry include the passengers, trains and its
infrastructure in Mainland China. The documentary begins in darkness and
all that can be heard are the noises of the train’s progression and its
vibrations. J. P. Sniadecki, the director of The Iron Ministry, in an interview with Mark Peranson discussed how
the project emerged out of what he described as ‘encounters’ in the Chinese
railway system, with the central one being Ning Ying’s Railroad of Hope. Sniadecki
spent three years filming train rides in China and turned his footage into one
long continuous ride where different passengers of different classes pass
through different trains going through different landscapes – all of this seamlessly
coming together in The Iron Ministry.
Sniadecki describes his approach as, “I took trains throughout China, striving
to be thorough without a need to be exhaustive, compelled more by the desire
for movement and encounter than by any documentary notion of ‘coverage.’”
ANT’s objectives offer a stimulating
entry into these SEL films as its non-conventional emphasis on non-human actors
and networks match some of their documentaries’ more experimental approach to
render the sensory into a cinematic form. Latour’s call for a return to
empiricism and description and letting the actors speak for themselves is a
guiding force for his ‘sociology of association’. This clearly parallels
Sniadecki’s approach in The Iron Ministry
which reaches a peak when the camera carefully captures the monologue of
one little Chinese boy riding a train at night. As the train is about the
depart, the child, rolling around in his bed compartment, speaks out to nobody
in particular,
All passengers, your attention
please. The 3838-438 Train from the United States to Afghanistan is about to
depart. We ask those who are not aboard please take someone else’s luggage,
take someone else’s wife, and hurry aboard. Those who have explosives, bombs,
and other inflammable materials with them. Please hurry aboard. And ignite them
where there are crowds, to contribute to our nation’s population control policy.
The train is moving fast so please extend your hands and head out of the window
as far as possible, making it easier to lose them all at once. This is a
civilized train, so please feel free to piss, shit, and throw trash all over
the aisle. Other passengers may spit in your face and you may spit in the mouth
of others, which is good for the thorough absorption of protein.
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