Note : What follows should NOT be considered a definitive or accurate depiction of ANT.  I finished reading Latour’s Reassembling the Social today and am still ruminating on it.

What can ANTs tell us about online surveillance?

Literally, nothing.  In a stylized dialog with a graduate student, Bruno Latour tells the confused, probably overworked graduate researcher that actor-network-theory (ANT) does not apply to any case study or research site or sociological concern.  Later, Professor Latour comments

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.  (Latour 2005:142)

Latour’s introduction to ANT, Reassembling the Social, contributes to social theory and to method, but at the end of the (occasionally baffling, occasionally brilliant) text I know nothing substantive about what world the ANT researcher should constuct.  This is what Latour means when he says that ANT is “mostly a negative” method.  ANT’s concepts are socially voided; though agent and network and “plug-in” mean something within the method they are not (supposed to be) maps of the social world. For example, (and to brutalize ANT), a network is as big or small as it is.  This approach forgoes a priori definitions of group size or micro and macro “forces.”

What I find most useful about ANT is that it vacuums up the social; in other words, it offers an alternative method of sociology that does not assume that social structures, social constructs, or social forces dilly-dally behind interactions.  It is strange for me to celebrate a sociological method that kills off the social.  After all, I just spent days on an email conversation with friends arguing about the social construction of knowledge and perception. 

Thing is, I largely agree with Latour when he writes that the mobilization of a social explanation of a phenomena largely obscures that actual practices involved in the making of that phenomena. 

This does not mean that we are all free, rational individuals radically uninvolved with this thing that used to be called the social.  Latour actually describes us as puppets, but he means it in the best of ways.  Actors – which are both human and non-human – are involved (caught?) in a web of relations with other actors.

It is all very interesting and I’d like to get to know ANT better, but I want to focus on in this entry is a exchange between the Professor of ANT (P) and the graduate student (S) on the topic of the visible and invisible.

S : But what about invisible entities acting in some hidden ways?
P : If they act, they leave some trace.  And then you will have some information, then you can talk about them.  If not, just shut up.
S : But what if they are repressed, denied, silenced?
P : Nothing on earth allows you to say they are there without brining in proof of their presence.  That proof might be indirect, farfetched, complicated, but you need it.  Invisible things are invisible.  Period.  If they make things move, and you can document those moves, then they are visible.
S : 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 most of critical social science comes down to that.  (2005:150)

To be clear, Latour does not deny the existence of ghosts and their brethren.  He implores social scientists to count an actor’s accounts of events, actions, motives, including those informed by spectral forces … say God or the ghost of some influential theorist.  The catch is that that ghostly actor has to leave a trace.  Sociologists are not allowed, when using ANT, to presume the presence of a structure, a false consciousness, etc., that hides behind the actor.

Which brings me to surveillance.  As I note in my previous entry, I’m beginning to consider the questions and sites and methods with which I can construct a dissertation.  I like what ANT does to the social, would like to know it better, &, perhaps, would like to use it in (not apply it to!) my research. 

In The Simulation of Surveillance, William Bogard writes that

Since earliest times, the exercise of surveillance has been dependent on masking. […] At the same time, masks are precisely what surveillance strips from its object.  Surveillance, we shall see, is all about breaking through surfaces of appearance, closing gaps between appearance and reality, practices which themselves demand stealth, deception, and attention to controlling appearances.  (1996:20)

So what can ANT do with actors who, by definition, mask, if not actually erase, the proof of their presence? 

All I can come up with so far is :

Beginning with the actors - FaceBook users or bloggers, for examples – the ANT researcher can initially ignore the question of what the surveyor is doing.  However, rather than assume that the invisible presence of a marketer, or the invisible presence of a university administrator, is internalized by the web user, who reflexively acts in accordance with that internalized observer, the ANT researcher can pay attention to how that web user acts within a collective of blogs and bloggers, computers, private and public spaces, articles that s/he does or doesn’t read on internet privacy, knowledge of those surveyors, etc. 

The ANT researcher might find … and if s/he does find it, is forced to accept that … the observers out there, even if nefarious or authoritative, are not part of certain web users’ collectives.

If that is the case, does that mean surveillance is impotent or doesn’t matter?  No, but it would mean that we cannot assume, despite coming-to-age with Foucault’s panopticon or Orwell’s Big Brother, or, even, Goffman’s presentation of self, how surveillance matters.

Maybe.  I think I have probably fumbled ANT & its concepts pretty badly.  But it’s a start, huh?

EP