Technical Intermediaries and the Agency of Objects

Abstract

Cultural production is increasingly understood through the prism of science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), which emphasize the role of objects and the material environment in social processes. We take the case of sound engineers—a category of cultural producers dedicated to creating meaning using primarily materials and objects—to investigate the role of materiality in processes of cultural production. In most studies of music production, this category of workers is lumped together in the amorphous category of “support personnel.” To designate these people—endogenously labeled as the “tech crew”—we introduce the concept of technical intermediaries, as intermediaries of cultural production that, unlike cultural intermediaries, modify the material content of the symbolic goods produced by an art world. Through an ethnographic study of live music sound technicians in France, we show that the working practices of technical intermediaries are explained more by their relationships with other members of the art world than by properties of their material environments, hence questioning the “generalized symmetry” central to ANT and material semiotics.