zerodraft

It's time to admit I'm not a trained sociologist. Now, for Latour, this is probably a good thing, because then I don't have to UNlearn all of the conventions and categorizations that he's working against.

However.

While I am excited about ANT, how I think that the ideas that drive it are compelling and important to a construction of a networked-writers theory, I'm afraid that I can't use ANT.

Here's why. It's in the problem of groups. ANT has a problem with groups; specifically, it has a problem with externally-defined groups. Latour explains that in the naming or formation of groups, sociologists make the mistake of discrediting or ignoring that which may be part of that group or that which the group itself might include or exclude. Essentially, groups aren't what exist, it's their traces or their actions that do, and therefore the group only exists as long as a specific action happens. When the action ceases, the group is gone as well. Therefore, the business of ANT is to “follow the actors’ own ways and begin [with] the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (29).

The trouble I have with this is that I am right now working to delimit the "group" or subject pool of my study. I am doing what Latour warns us against:

…the central intuition of sociology [is] that at any given moment actors are made to fit in a group—often more than one…they [sociologists] never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are … artificial, imaginary, transitional, illusory…(28)

In doing so, I get to pick "which grouping is preferable to start a social inquiry" (28); therefore, I am committing sin #1: Ordering stuff into neat boxes. Privileging certain connections over others. Pretending that "social" is the stuff that makes those groups stick together and not the shifting associations that appear and disappear between and among people, objects, and ideas.

There might be a way around this, though. If there was a way that I could argue that the "traces" left behind by bloggers were an indication of their own grouping--that is, I can argue that the texts are those of "spokespeople" who, by linking to others in blogrolls, are constructing the groups themselves.

Further, I can engage in the recent discussion about which writers declared themselves to be "mommy-bloggers" and those who explicitly eschewed that title.

Second, whenever some work has to be done to trace or retrace the boundary of a group, other groupings are designated as being empty, archaic, dangerous, obsolete, and so on. It is always by comparison with other competing ties that any tie is emphasized. So for every group to be defined, a list of anti-groups is set up as well. (32)

I'm not sure if such strategies on my part would be sufficient, however, if i were to claim to be deploying ANT as a method. As I talk through it, it kind of sounds as though I'm forcing things to fit. *sigh*