Translating the Sociology of Translation

Abstract

Actor-network theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation… The precise name of the domain in question is not itself entirely stable, and rightly so. In the ANT scheme of things, society is far less stable, representation and governance considerably more disputed, and order quite a bit more precarious, than most other frameworks would allow. Flux and impermanence are minor and tangled threads running throughout the history of the Western political imaginary: from Heraclitus and Lucretius to Nietzsche and Deleuze. No other research framework has married this minor current with empirical inquiry in a manner that is as thorough, practical, and relentlessly materialist as ANT. Bringing the Heraclitean worldview down to earth is one of its foremost accomplishments. While ANT scholarship has seen certain prominent attempts to define and delimit it as an approach (Latour ⇓), others have resisted this move (Law ⇓), insisting that we keep things fluid. We side quite definitely with this latter position. It seems to us utterly consistent with the epistemology that ANT has done so much to advance. Not another school, another theory to be imported, but an open-ended play of translation. What does it mean to translate the sociology of translation? What it most certainly is not is translation in the style of Berlitz: the writing of a phrasebook that makes a foreign country navigable to an outsider. Neither is it a matter of setting out ANT's principles in order to apply them like a formula to the subject matter of IR. Instead, it is the transformative aspect of translation that we emphasize in this short essay. Translate a text and certain meanings will change, some more than others. Our call to translate the sociology of translation is therefore more than an invocation to connect concepts, guidelines, sensibilities, and sensitivities drawn from ANT to …