“Actor-Network Theory” and International Relationality: Lost (and Found) in Translation

Abstract

Like any multiplicity, “actor-network theory” is many things: an influential current within the sociology of science and technology; a relational and anti-essentialist form of materialism; an insistence that notions of agency not be confined to human subjects but embrace objects, devices, and other non-human entities; and much else besides. Actor-network theory was initially developed as a way of making sense of the social life of the laboratory and the complex paths that scientific knowledge takes from untidy practice to incontestable “fact.” Its founders, including Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and their collaborators, have since sought to apply these initial insights to a wide range of other arenas of social and political life. In the process, actor-network theory (ANT) has given us a wealth of concepts. The idea of the actor network itself embodies a productive tension, putting structure and agency into an intimate relationship in which the network is made up of actors who are, in turn, the effects of the network. In their attention to the concrete and contested ways in which knowledge is produced and circulated, ANT scholars have also pointed to the centrality of what Callon and Latour have called inscriptions , the various pieces of paper, devices, graphs, and computer programs through which actors seek to translate the messiness of the world—the laboratory, the battlefield or the market—into usable, mobile knowledge. The ultimate goal …