Translations Artifacts From An Actor-Network Perspective
Translations Artifacts From An Actor-Network Perspective
Translations Artifacts From An Actor-Network Perspective
JohnShigaPh.D. Candidate
To cite this article: JohnShigaPh.D. Candidate (2007) Translations: Artifacts from an Actor-
Network Perspective, Artifact, 1:1, 40-55, DOI: 10.1080/17493460600658318
iPods, MP3s and file-sharing networks perform a series of actions that are often reserved for Keywords: Actor-network theory,
human agents, such as the intellectual and taste-driven labor involved in selecting, sequencing, Nonhuman agency, Politics of design,
and rediscovering forgotten sound recordings. At the same time, the familiar understanding of Digital audio, File-sharing, Copyright
artifacts as stable, material, objective things ‘‘out there’’ is also being eroded by the infinite law
replicability, malleability, and ephemeral flickering of things online. These trends lead to questions
regarding the ontological status of artifacts and reopen the question of how to distinguish
technical and material artifacts from human and social relations. In this article, the author explores
actor-network theory’s (ANT) concept of translation, which advances an alternative framework for
understanding the role of artifacts in everyday life.
network theory (ANT) provides a useful cally with regard to human and nonhuman # 2007 Taylor & Francis
7
Latour (1988) wrote under the pseudonym Jim Johnson in this particular article. The actor-network theorists used the term ‘‘translation’’ in a variety of ways. In
some cases, it seems to refer to a stage in a broader process of coordinating and mediating action. In other cases, it is used as a kind of shorthand for the entire process
of coordinating action. Latour (1994a) later used translation to refer to a stage in the extension of social fabric to nonhumans. Translation is ‘‘the means by which we
inscribe in a different matter features of our social order’’ (p. 45), setting the stage where nonhumans receive human properties, and are enrolled into and mobilized
within the collective. At other times, translation is used to refer to this whole process of collective formation, modification, and movement/action, as in the ‘‘socio-logic
of translation’’ (Callon, 1980).
8
Latour & Woolgar (1979/1986) similarly found that money itself was not the motivation for scientific activities, even though actors consistently understood their
work, associations, and productions as investments.
9
Lawrence Lessig’s work (1999, 2002) provides a cautionary note against the utopian strand of literature on digitalization. Lessig has repeatedly argued that
creative uses of online artifacts such as MP3 files are constrained and monitored in an unprecedented way through software patents and copyright law and through the
technical codes that regulate social and cultural activities online. In Lessig’s view, the reduced malleability and constrained replicability of online artifacts is a
consequence of the imposition of economic interests by certain powerful human actors, in particular, ‘‘largish’’ entertainment conglomerates that seek to maximize
their control over the circulation and use of online artifacts (Lessig, 2002, chap. 11).
10
The clearest example of this point is in Latour’s (1988) study of Louis Pasteur’s mobilization of France (and much of the rest of Europe) into a program of action
which, at the time, would have seemed like a rather extreme measure (injecting people with fluids; heating all fermenting drinks, etc.). The success of Pasteurization
cannot be reduced to the sheer force of his discovery but is a result of modification of identities and the establishment of links between humans and nonhumans.
Sickness, for example, is caused by material overlaps between species. Although bacteria occupy a different place in moral, political, and ethical orders, they are
usefully understood as distributions across the human/nonhuman divide. The social world was redefined in terms of groups formed by that distribution (the sick, the
infected, the contagious, the immune, etc.).
11
In the sociological concept of ‘‘actor’’, agency is unquestionably located in the human universe, not that of things (Pels et al., 2002, p. 2; Hetherington & Law,
2000).
12
‘‘As a principle of methodological symmetry’’, Alex Preda (2000) writes, ‘‘it just states that the sociologist has to analyze the human beings and artifacts
embedded in such a nexus as knots of socially sanctioned (and primarily tacit) knowledge, and that these kinds of knowledge are contingent upon each other’’ (p. 286).
Preda notes that a variety of approaches including ethnomethodology and the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu accept this methodological principle and view things
as social actors insofar since they act as ‘‘knowledge-bearers’’.
13
‘‘The right documents, the right devices, the right people properly drilled put together they would create a structured envelope for one another that ensured
their durability and fidelity’’ (Law, 1986b, p. 154).
14
This is particularly evident in Karin Knorr Cetina’s notion of postsocial relations, which has been developed on the basis of ANT’s arguments about the way
science and technology have been crucial sites for the socialization of nonhumans (Knorr Cetina, 1997; Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2002). She argues that the
importance of nonhumans in sociality has increased over time due to knowledge practices in science, economics, and elsewhere, and requires a redefinition of social
relations.
15
‘‘Engineers constantly shift out characters in other spaces and other times, devise positions for human and nonhuman users, break down competences that they
then redistribute to many different actants’’ (Latour, 1988, p. 309).
16
CRIA. (2005). http://www.cria.ca/freemusicmyth.php#mythsanswers. Accessed February 23, 2005.
17
Latour (1986): ‘‘Those who are powerful are not those who ‘hold’ power in principle, but those who practically define or redefine what ‘holds’ everyone together.
This shift from principle to practice allows us to treat the vague notion of power not as a cause of people’s behavior but as the consequence of an intense activity of
enrolling, convincing and enlisting’’ (p. 273).
18
I refer here to Michel Foucault’s (1986) definition of structuralism: ‘‘the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis,
an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of
configuration’’ (p. 22).
19
In approaching such controversies, the analyst may attempt, as I have done in this article, to trace the actions attributed to individuals back to the alliances
established in the primary mechanisms of translation. However, pointing to the heterogeneous materials that perform a particular definition of socio-technical reality
does not resolve the problem of representativity. As Latour (1998) points out, ‘‘We cannot simply say that ‘all of them’ count in the making of an observation. If we
were stopping at that, something would be missing from the mere deployment of heterogeneous associations’’ (p. 434). Although ANT advocates a ‘‘distributed
monism’’ (Barron, 2003), Latour argues that new distinctions are necessary: ‘‘If sociology is the study of society it has to take full account of those crowds of non-
humans mingled with humans. To take full account of this retinue of delegates, sociologists have to look carefully at their conflicts over who is the most representative’’
(1988, p. 16).
20
Like de Laet, Jonathan Murdoch (1998) finds the link between immutability and mobility overly simplified when applied to patent law. He suggests that patents
perform a connection between the standardized, classificatory schemes of law or genetic science and the more fluid and heterogeneous relations of other modes of
ordering.
21
‘‘These representations assemble and transform the similitude of the materiality of space into the ordered arrangement of a place. They arrange, order, include
and exclude, they make knowable a space to everyone who might choose to look at these representations and also make it possible to compare it with another space.
The subjective world of memory, image, dream and fantasy, so often associated with place, operates by assembling materials into representations and using those
representations to establish the difference between one place and the next. Those representations contain truth claims (not necessarily scientific) about a space’’ (p.
189).