Using actor network theory
ANT and Objects
Actor network theory, and specifically the work of Bruno Latour (2004, 2005, 2010), John Law (2002), and Annemarie Mol (2003), is productive to this project, as they have been used in rhetoric and writing studies to understand heavily technologically mediated environments (Spinuzzi 2008; Swarts 2008), cultural-historical views of rhetorical activity (Prior et al. 2007) and technological artifacts (Van Ittersum 2008). It was developed to understand the complicated relationship between people and things, especially at the level of associations. We think ANT is useful for following, theorizing, and then designing assignments around the distributed nature of space in mediated writing work. In other words, we use ANT to think about all the spaces where learning about writing occurs, not just spaces on campus. We then discuss how we have designed and assembled assignments that take advantage of all the spaces in which students live and write. We discuss how we try to use our assignments and digital tools to link them together; doing so integrates, rather than replaces, formal writing assignments and theories about writing into the lives of students. To do that, we first make some claims about the core ways of thinking involved in ANT. That is to say, we have to examine how ANT assembles itself in science and technology studies. We begin by considering the rhetorical landscape of ANT.
There is a key difference in ANT between “things” and “objects,” and each is extremely important to the other and key to understanding “space.” For Latour (2004), “things” are gatherings of people, resources, nonhumans, technologies, and ideas that are deployed by, or in response to, a matter of concern. Things make associations through activity. They help to align other things, and, sometimes, when those associations have a great number of actants involved, where there is lots of activity, things become objects. Vast and complicated arrays of things become greater than the sum of their parts when they become objects. For example, first-year writing programs are made up of a network of teaching assistants, writing program administrators, students, instructors, offices, upper administrators, university policies, class number designations like “ENG 101,” and organizational resources. These elements coordinate a great deal of activity. To the extent that they cohere through activities like teaching, those elements come together and function as something called a “writing program”—a coherent object.
The reverse is true as well. Objects that were once held together by effort begin to fall apart into things again if people and nonhuman actors aren’t paying attention. In “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” Latour (2004) described moving back and forth between C-SPAN channels in 2003 as Colin Powell assembled things in the United Nations—using slideshow presentations, documents, resolutions, alliances, and language (things) to make an object: war. At that moment, war was not yet. Powell was trying to make it happen. Meanwhile on C-SPAN 2, Latour watched coverage of whole regional populations of the United States being deployed to pick up the things that used to be the orbital space shuttle Columbia, an object. The object, Columbia, was a single stable object but was also made of very sophisticated technologies and people. Columbia’s break up on reentry turned that stable object from a space shuttle into many bits and pieces and, in the process, became something else people and resources are gathered around: grief, regret, and investigations. As Latour pointed out, the shuttle was so stable an object that its launch was hardly covered by the news media. However, when it failed and became a series of things again, media coverage happened. This is one example of how things can be turned into objects and objects fall apart into things.
Another example that might resonate closer to home is the typical college essay in first-year writing classes. While it is a coherent object for many of us, it is also made up of many things and people that become coordinated through it. Assignment sheets, teachers, students, writing technologies, assessment technologies, state mandates, and their accompanying histories are all present to some extent as things that shape the object of a freshman college essay. Some of these things can be swapped out or changed, such as moving from one institution to another, but the essay's relative stability of “essay” across contexts means we can talk about the college essay in first-year writing as an object.
Objects are complicated “black boxes” that are so useful for doing whatever they are designed to do that we rarely understand how exactly they work. Often people want to figure out how they work when something goes wrong, and not before. Think of that same freshman essay. When you read a “good one,” you assume that the student paid attention in class, read the assignment sheet, read the class readings, and so forth. Perhaps you mark something like “good job,” then you move on to others. When you have a student who needs more help, you spend time thinking about what help he or she needs, wondering what you should point out, or contemplating what comment will help the student. Objects work this way as well; we only pay attention to them when they stop working, or when they don’t do a good job.
One of the ways to talk about objects is to talk about the spaces they construct. John Law (2001) defined objects differently from the traditional views of ANT in that in his view, objects—or the stabilized arrays of things in a network—generate spaces. According to Law (2001), an object exists in and generates two kinds of spaces. One is the physical knock-on-wood world of Euclidian geometry. We sometimes call this material space. The other is the ontological and conceptual world of networked space created by social associations. We sometimes call this social space. Together and in relationship, Law called these the topology of objects.
Sometimes Western thinkers have a tendency to conceptualize Euclidian space as being “empty” or “neutral” before an object arrives. However, spaces are not neutral and waiting to be filled. Spaces are enacted with objects in Euclidean space, objects that are rooted in networked space of the social. So one ends up with an object that both generates and exists in a certain Euclidian space because it also is part of a network space through a process called homeophoric enactment. The object stretches a great deal before it breaks in Euclidian space, which means it functions the same way in networked social space. Here then is the key: “To generate network homeomorphism it is also necessary to work in Euclidean space.” That is to say that the physical space that a network-object generates must be understood because, as Law (2002) noted, “objects are always enacted in a multi-topological manner” (98), both Euclidian and networked.
Take the “writing classroom,” for example. We both teach in a stand-alone Writing and Rhetoric department. When we teach classes, we teach classes in Euclidian spaces filled with desks, whiteboards, laptops, and so on. Yet, both of us have found if we deprive students of the “things” of classrooms—like desks, screens, and whiteboards—and ask the class to go outside, in, say, the fifth week of the semester, they will assemble the space of the classroom again. They will gather around the instructor, sometimes sitting in the exact same places relative to other students that they sit near within the walls of a classroom. In terms of the theory of space we have borrowed from ANT, because the networked/social space of a “classroom” is so strong, it allows that classroom to move and reassemble itself in various different Euclidian places. Students will use their tight networked/social idea to replicate the classroom in different Euclidian places, thus re-creating the classroom again. Repeated, coordinated, and networked activities are what allow the object to come into being in the first place. The same thing wouldn’t happen on the first day of the semester because the students haven’t engaged in enough repeated activity of their classroom.
ANT has helped us think about how we might generate assignments that assemble stable objects that travel through networked (social) and Euclidian (material) spaces as well as across sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces for writing work. Stable arrays of things and activities become objects. That is why kitchen tables can become places of empowerment when they are used to organize grant writing through repeated activity. Blog writing becomes public when enough people read it. Objects do not fill an “empty” space, but rather generate their own kind of social and material space around them. As we mentioned earlier, the extent to which an object can bend before it becomes something else is called homeophoric enactment. For example, in Gere’s (1994) article, we can imagine that if the person brought a new kitchen table to the writing workshop, everything would still be fine and function normally. Change that table too much (make it a stool, perhaps) and those changes might begin to interfere with the collaborative writing process.
We attempted to design writing assignments and the writing those assignments generated, objects, that expanded the “space” of our classes into the extracurricular without co-opting students’ “kitchen tables.” We wanted to design assignments that emerged from daily life and allowed students to participate in our classes through mundane literate activity but also allowed those objects to disappear as quickly as they formed, the same way that using a kitchen table for writing work doesn’t stop it from being a place where eating with families occurs.
Our goal with our technologically rich writing assignments is to distribute objects that travel well between sanctioned and nonsanctioned writing spaces in an effort to break down student-held distinctions between those barriers. Students struggle with seeing writing theory and instruction as something that is as ubiquitous as cell phones and web browsers. In other words, early in our classes we often have to push students to recognize that texting, social media postings, and list-making are all kinds of writing that they have learned how to do. Our attempt to create these writing assignment objects is to validate the extracurricular without making it become the curriculum.