Heterogeneity and material agency

that replaces the dualist notion of IR theories that either reduces agency to techno-determinism or to social reductionism. The latter rest on René Descartes’ strict division between matter and mind. Perpetuated and reframed by various modern thinkers, it was handed down by Hume, Kant, and others (Latour 1993, 1999) and still has a considerable effect on current IR theories (see Patomäki and Wight 2000, pp. 219ff). As the deep analysis of Man, State, and War in Chapter 5 demonstrated, the construction of the current IR framework has escaped technological determinism only through imposing a rigid social world in which material artifacts make no significant difference. IR's privileging of social agents or human intentionality that sharply restricts ontology speaks to a long-standing logo-centric and “anti-realist” tradition within social sciences more generally (Braver 2007). As theorists concentrated on a purely “social” turf, all “natural”,

“physical”, and/or “material” traits of reality were sorted out (see Latour 2005, p. 83, Barry 1999, Deudney 1999). Most conceptual frameworks reaffirm the social domain of symbols, meaning, rationality, or subjectivity, and while the prevalent conceptual language clearly shaped the boundaries of the proper domain as non-material (Mitchell 2002, Paterson 1995, Hovden 1999), only a few theorizations suggest otherwise.

Carroll provides an interesting option to replace the mind-matter divide in his analysis of the expansion of the modern British statehood on the Irish island. In describing the modern state formation, he avoids dualist conceptualizations such as

“socio-nature” or “socio-technical”. Instead, Carroll suggests granting the material, the semiotic, and the practical dimensions equal agential potential. Mapping these three dimensions onto the state produces a tripartite model comprising the idea, the state-country, and the state system. Writes Carroll:

“All three dimensions of cultural formation—discourse, practice, materiality—can be granted their peculiar agential power, though in a manner, and this is a crucial point, that does not theoretically subordinate one dimension to the other. The relative agency of discourse (symbolic meaning, representation, and cognitive structure), practice (social activity variously organized), and materiality (constructed environments, spaces, and technologies) in processes of cultural formation can be treated as an empirical issue to be settled in each case by research.” (Carroll 2006, pp. 14-15)

Analytically, Carroll suggests that state formation proceeds in three mutually embedded

gravitational zones of social practices, symbolic discourse, and materials – this maintains a “reference to embeddedness and internal relatedness.” (Carroll 2006) As he splits the world into three fields, he does not assume substantive differences between allegedly different worlds (materials vs. meanings) with other approaches from anthropology.

Carroll’s idea to study technical engineering, public debates and social policies as sites of similarly important sites of state activity, represents a significant improvement upon earlier binary juxtapositions of political institutions, or social frames on the one hand and technological infrastructures on the other (Chandler 1977, Winner 1977, White 1962). It also affirms that reductionism, regardless if it is the idealistic or materialistic version, is mistaken from the beginning. Clearly, neither side is reducible to its opposite. Instead, on the empirical level, we must learn to see the world as it is. But is the world simply

“hybrid”, a mixture of the social and the material? This notion and related language are mistaken if they indicate the collapse of two originally separated domains. The anthropologist Descola substitutes the social-nature divide at once with the notion of collectives of humans and non-humans:

“Once the ancient nature-culture orthogonal grid has been disposed of, a new multi-dimensional anthropological landscape may emerge, in which stone adzes and quarks, cultivated plants and the genome map, hunting rituals and oil production may become intelligible as so many variations within a single set of relations encompassing humans as well as non-humans.” (Descola 1996, p. 99)

Similarly, Donna Haraway (1991), Sheila Jasanoff (2004a) and Bruno Latour (1993) argue each in their own way that social theory should overcome the axiom of the “great divide”. For Latour this represents an analytically misleading dichotomy between nature and society that is, however, constitutive for the ordering of both modern sciences and politics (Latour 1993). A key modern thinker such as Hobbes bases his Leviathan on a dualist order of knowledge: on the one side the objective “Nature” that is without history, and on the other side the societal sphere that is rife with power struggles over constructed values without any substance (Shaw 2004).

Importantly, the proposals to move beyond the great divide are not merely exercises in speculative philosophy. They are rather supported by three large bodies of empirical work. First, feminist writers have stressed the connected character of the female body

where materiality, technology, politics, and identity are inseparably intermingled (Haraway 1991, Butler 1993, Sylvester 1994). Second, researchers who started exploring the practice of natural sciences in laboratories from the 1970s onwards stress the

“fabrication” of scientific facts. Their careful observations render substantial differentiation between a pre-existing objective nature at the one hand and agency-given subjects discovering laws of nature at the other hand a fiction (Latour and Woolgar 1979, Knorr Cetina 1981, Knorr Cetina and Mulkay 1983, Pickering 1992, Latour 1987, Pickering 1995, Mol and Law 1994, Aronowitz 1988, Mol 2002).¹²⁰⁠ Thirdly, studies about evolving technological systems and infrastructures have shown the profound

“socio-technical” nature of technologies. Clearly, their results indicate that reality is not reducible to social interaction. But, against historical materialism, materiality, built environments or technological infrastructures are not determining but highly interactive, constitutive and interwoven with human practices and meaning (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987, Law 1991a, Bjiker and Law 1992, Galison and Hevly 1992, Hughes 1994, Star 1999, Misa, Brey and Feenberg 2003, Jasanoff 2004a, Galison 2006, Dolata and Werle 2007, Ribes and Lee 2010).¹²¹

Bruno Latour, arguably the most decisive proponent for a new method of exploring

“society”, advances a symmetrical methodology. This leads him to an understanding that agency is no longer compartmentalized:

“we have to accept that the continuity of any course of action will rarely consist of human-to-human connections (for which the basic social skills would be enough anyway) or of object-object connections, but will probably zigzag from one to the other. To get the right feel for ANT, it’s important to notice that this has nothing to do with a ‘reconciliation’ of

120 This understanding diverges from classical treatment of scientific knowledge and expertise in IR. For example, Peter Haas’ influential approach relates scientific knowledge in a linear manner to politics, while science functions unambiguously and apolitically in order to realize international cooperation. He only is concerned with the “effective use of consensual knowledge” (Haas 2008, p. 4). Even though Haas refers to Fleck’s and Kuhn’s writings, he adheres to the idea of unproblematic objective scientific truth as, in principle, strictly separated from politics (Litfin 1994). Cumulative, universal knowledge, thus, is by definition not mixed with powerful political interests. Its great leverage stems from as many (relevant) people as possible sharing their knowledge with other, equally relevant people.

121 This is not to say that this vast literature does agree on the different emphasis put on the social shaping of technology (e.g. Bijker 1993) or the “material” side (Woolgar 1991, Law 2002). This is itself a matter of controversy. Nevertheless, this body of literature seriously tries to tackle the heterogeneous nature of technologies.

the famous object/subject dichotomy. To distinguish a priori ‘material’ and ‘social’ ties before linking them together again makes about as much sense as to account for the dynamic of a battle by imagining a group of soldiers and officers stark naked with a huge heap of paraphernalia—tanks, rifles, paperwork, uniforms—and then claim that ‘of course there exist some (dialectical) relation between the two’. One should retort adamantly ‘No!’

There exists no relation whatsoever between ‘the material’ and ‘the social world’, because it is this very division which is a complete artifact. To reject such a divide is not to ‘relate’

the heap of naked soldiers ‘with’ the heap of material stuff: it is to redistribute the whole assemblage from top to bottom and beginning to end. There is no empirical case where the existence of two coherent and homogeneous aggregates, for instance technology ‘and’

society, could make any sense. ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humans and non-humans’. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations.” (Latour 2005, pp. 75-76)

Concepts of performativity in social sciences come close to Latour’s understanding.

Various post-structuralist writers have employed this notion to capture the theoretical practice of IR as well as de facto international relations (Ashley 1988, Weber 1998, pp.

464ff.). However, these approaches, which mainly draw on Butler or Searle (Butler 1990;

Searle 1995), frame agency mainly in terms of linguistic constructions or the enactment of “social fictions”. This violates the symmetry principle towards both humans and non-humans. Particularly, the concentration on “agency” conveyed through language, cognition or self-consciousness does not justice to the hybrid character of the contemporary forms of agency.

Against the prevalence of the “IR theory of the social”, we can assume ontological categories that comprise of different degrees of agency structured in layers and describe a state of becoming instead of a state of being (Connolly 2011, pp. 21-32, Coole 2013).

Often, matter itself performs as is suggested in Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter. Things, in this sense, are vital; they possess a “thing-power” (Bennet 2010). Empirically, it can be shown that artifacts, stuff, and materials can align, bond, entangle and connect with other actors and ensembles (Sultana 2012, Coward 2012). The issue of vitality or the “agentic capacities” of human bodies is also at stake in the recent debate about the ways in which bodies are conceptually incorporated in IR studies (Wilcox 2014).

In a similar line, DeLanda suggests choosing emergent phenomena as a main research focus. His macro-approach stresses that, though mechanism of emergence can be distinguished, emergence itself remains unexplainable (DeLanda 2011). So, even with respect to what IR scholars have dubbed as “rump materialism” (Wendt 1999, p. 136) – that is, biophysical entities and atomic and subatomic particles – we must assume differentiated agency and specific vitality (Bakker and Bridge 2006, DeLanda 2011, Barad 2007).

“The very dynamism of matter (unto ‘itself’, as it were, without the need for some supplement like culture or history to motor it), its agential and affirmative capacity for change with every doing, is its regenerative un/doing. Matter is always already open, heterogeneous, noncontemporaneous with itself. Matter is always shifting, reconfiguring, re-differentiating itself. Deconstruction is not what Man does (it is not a method), it is what the text does, what matter does, how mattering performs itself. Matter is never settled but is agentive and continually opens itself up to a variety of possible and impossible reconfigurings. Matter is ongoing hauntological transformation. Nature is not mute, and culture the articulate one. Nature writes, scribbles, experiments, calculates, thinks, breathes, and laughs” (Barad 2010, p. 265/FN11).

It is obvious that this ontological understanding runs opposite to critical realist views and also Wendt’s quantum account of emergent material agency (see Wendt 2015, pp. 243ff).

The former advance a metaphysical approach that tries to improve upon ontological reductionism a la social constructivism. Critical realists in IR advance an integral perspective, stressing “that the material and ideational have to be viewed as a whole”

(Patomäki and Wight 2000, p. 235). Their stance treats “nature” as complex activities governed by, at least in principle, clearly discernible natural laws. Consequently, this approach has critical limitations. For one thing, it ultimately comes down to keeping up a dualist ontology (see Lawson 2007). For another, by virtue of foregrounding “natural laws”, critical realism privileges a determinist reality, which relegates the material to the natural sciences, and therefore ultimately deemphasizes any agentic capacities of matter (see also Wendt 2015, pp. 280ff.).

Alexander Wendt, on the other hand, proposes a “vitalist sociology” in his brilliant Quantum mind and social science. Wendt rejects the critical realist worldview mentioned