On 24 January 2008 I had the privilege of chairing Noortje Marres’s ISRF talk at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In her presentation, entitled “Devising Affectedness: Eco-Homes and the Making of Material Publics,” Marres used the case study of climate change and eco-homes to reflect on various conceptualisations of what she called ‘material publics.’ At the same time she also engaged with some of the fundamental questions of political theory, sociology and philosophy. As a student of business organisations and e-commerce technologies, I was of course interested in possible parallels with business and management research, and my curiosity was rewarded.
The slides and an MP3 recording of Marres’s talk are available on the ISRF website and there is also a high-quality WMA recording on the ANTHEM website. Indeed Marres’s presentation requires some careful listening for the uninitiated, as it draws on a variety of disciplinary areas and fields of study, from sociology to political philosophy, pragmatist philosophy, science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT). By way of preparation I looked up Marres’s doctoral dissertation (No Issues, No Politics, 2004 [PDF]) and some of her other papers (Marres 2004; 2007), including the excellent summary of her work in Latour and Weibel’s (2005) Making Things Public.
Marres’s talk revolved around the question: How to conceptualise material publics? The term ‘material public’ hinted at the relatively recent turn in the social sciences towards an understanding of the role of objects in society, in addition to the traditional subject of political theory and sociology, i.e. the human subject. This bifurcation between the subject- vs. object-centric conceptualisation of publics seems to be played out in the two opposing efforts to engage the public in the issue of climate change: one that focuses on creating public awareness and informing human subjects, and another that focuses on the role of household appliances in engendering civic responsibility. Studies of the former tend to privilege the role of mass media, while studies of the latter tend to be situated accounts of practices involving domestic energy-efficient appliances. The reflexivity between these studies and the corresponding efforts to assemble material publics is probably not accidental and is suggestive of the performativity of social science.
To some extent this opposition between media-based efforts and accounts and household-based efforts and accounts reproduces the notorious macro-micro quandary of social theory. Indeed, Marres’s intention seems to be the problematisation of this opposition in order to suggest an alternative notion of both publics and materiality. While she seems to be drawing directly on actor-network theory and especially Latour’s (2004) notion of ‘matter of concern,’ she is also critical of the ways in which STS and ANT have adopted some static notions of politics and democracy. Marres draws on pragmatist philosophy and in particular her study of the Lippmann-Dewey debate (summarised in Marres 2005) to develop an issue-based conceptualisation of material publics.
One of the key learning points of the Lippmann-Dewey debate seems to be that a public emerges when established political institutions fail: it is precisely the inability of existing structures and routines to deal with an emerging issue that galvanises a public to assemble. Marres conceptualises the emergence of a public as a heterogeneous assemblage and a socio-ontological event: the issue that brings a medley of previously unrelated actors into close association is also an articulation of being and knowledge (and we should also add power then). The key problem of course concerns the very nature of that peculiar translation (in the Latourian sense) by way of which the many assemble into one. How does the ’social’ happen? But the question could also be rephrased as “What is a public?” “What material is it made of and how exactly?”
By way of the interpretation of the case study that Marres discussed, she made a number of tentative suggestions. First, the media, the mass media especially, have an important role to play in assembling the public and this aspect gets neglected by situated accounts of appliance use in a domestic setting. Second, affectedness, the ability to be affected by an issue, is key to the mobilisation of humans. Third, the assembly of a public has the character of a trial: it is an experiment that can either succeed or fail.
By adding the agency of mass media into the cauldron where material publics are made, Marres effectively bypasses – in good ANT fashion – the dualism set up between large-scale macro-actors (e.g. mass media) and local, situated actors (e.g. energy-efficient appliances) and refocuses attention on the conundrum of the materiality of the ‘issue’ itself. She was of course careful not to suggest that some kind of an easy answer exists: indeed her main contribution seems to be bringing the question of the materiality of the ‘issue’ to the forefront. To some extent it felt as if Latour’s notion of the ‘matter of concern’ was being given further articulation here.
Talk of affectedness however hinted at one key ingredient of any issue (shall we say ’tissue’?), the human body itself. Besides the (post-) Foucauldian references, the central place that affectedness took in Marres’s talk also reminded me strongly of Harman’s (2005) discussion of carnal phenomenologists and made me wonder what such fleshy, sensuous accounts may tell us about causality and object-relations. Mass media on one hand, and the human body on the other, seem to provide at least some of the necessary ingredients needed to construct a material public.
What surprised me however, given Marres’s ANT-ish background, was that she argued against material traceability, the possibility to trace material relations of affectedness. Unless I misunderstood her point and this was meant as shorthand for arguing against local, situated accounts in reference to a very narrowly defined materiality, this would go against ANT’s “no trace, no actor” maxim. Perhaps this is a minor case of misunderstanding on my part and it may not make sense to speculate any further on the significance of this here. Such a stance however would suggest a call for some kind of respect for the ‘untraceable’ in what sparks an issue into existence, or possibly even point to Harman’s (2002, 2005) argument about the inaccessibility of objects.
As for the adoption of Isabelle Stenger’s experimentalist definition of the public, it seems to be fully consistent with the emphasis that ANT scholars have been placing on trials of strength. It also chimes with the Deleuzian view of reality as ‘actualised virtualities’ (as opposed to ‘realised potentials’), which, as Harman (2007) points out in his manuscript on Latour’s metaphysics, underpins the ANT perspective.
While reading the work of Marres and listening to her presentation, one central question emerged for me that concerned the role of elites in constructing material publics. On the one hand, Marres’s interpretation of the Dewey-Lippmann debate suggested that an issue is a socio-ontological phenomenon in which history itself is articulated. In this sense it is a thoroughly emergent and distributed collective event. On the other hand, the construction of material publics by way of trying to make the climate change issue stick smacks of the involvement of various elites.
In Britain a great deal is made out of the absence of continental-style intelligentsia that would dominate public discourse. Yet the elites that seem to be involved in the inoculation of affectedness into the tissue of the ‘general’ public on this issue of climate change could be defined in terms of educational and perhaps even cognitive and affective characteristics, as the elites that know better and care about the environment. These elites (or perhaps just one unified elite) become visible even in the traces in Marres’s PowerPoint slides, such as the environmentalist eco-home owners who collaborate with journalists in order to use their homes as devices of publicity; journalists themselves, such as the resident ‘green guys’ of newspapers and television news programmes; the editors of such outlets; the Mayor of London; members of parliament and MEPs; and of course sociologists and other academics. It would be interesting to explore what role such cognoscenti play in ‘inflaming’ the public ’tissue,’ to stay with the metaphors of body and heat.
In the introduction I suggested that Marres’s work may also make a contribution to management and organisation studies, which seemingly deal with much smaller chunks of reality, namely business organisations. Yet some very interesting parallels emerge when considering the notion of constructing competences of affectedness in the public, in order to construct material publics. Isn’t that what marketing professionals do after all? A whole assemblage of elites, all highly educated, from marketing departments to advertising agencies all the way to the sales departments of mass media, work together closely to sustain the circulation of products of various degrees of materiality by engendering a certain kind of affectedness in a particular public. The obesity epidemic may be just one highly visible fleshy example of the durability of some of these publics.
Another interesting parallel between Marres’s account of issue-formation and organising practices in business organisations is the importance of innovation. Marres (2004, 2007) draws on Dewey to define issue-formation in terms of innovation and the breaking of routines. This is very reminiscent of the work of Joseph Schumpeter and his notion of creative destruction, especially the way Ghoshal et al (2002) have revived it for economic strategy research. Thus there seem to be similar processes sustaining the growth of a firm, a micro-phenomenon, to those that are continually constructing and reconstructing large-scale material publics.
Marres’s work also suggests that perhaps it is a mistake for management and organisation studies to be so obsessively focused on the micro-accounts of business practices when the organisations in question may be parts of much larger complex bodies or issues from which they gain their relevance. (I hasten to add that I am not advocating a return to the dominance of industrial organisation economics but something rather different.) Just as the mass media are necessary for an issue-based public to emerge, so is the existence of a small e-commerce retailer predicated on the mass-mediation of the marketplace that is Google or eBay.
References
- Ghoshal, S., M. Hahn, et al. (2002). Organizing for Firm Growth: The Interaction between Resource-Accumulating and Organizing Processes. Competence, Governance, and Entrepreneurship: Advances in Economic Strategy Research. N. Foss and V. Mahnke. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 146-67.
- Harman, G. (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago, Open Court.
- Harman, G. (2004). Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago, Ill., Open Court.
- Harman, G. (2007). Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Unpublished manuscript. [Contact Graham Harman at graham@rinzai.com]
- Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, Mass., London, Harvard University Press.
- Marres, N. (2004). “Tracing the Trajectories of Issues and Their Democratic Deficits on the Web: The Case of the Development Gateway and Its Doubles.” Information, Technology and People Actor-network Theory and Information Systems – Special Issue. 17(2): 124-49.
- Marres, N. (2005). Issues Spark a Public into Being: A Key but Often Forgotten Point of the Lippmann-Dewey Debate. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. B. Latour and P. Weibel. Karlsruhe/Cambridge, MA/London, England, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the MIT Press: 208-17.
- Marres, N. (2005). No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of Politics [PDF]. Department of Philosophy. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam. PhD dissertation.
- Marres, N. (2007). “The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy.” Social Studies of Science 37(5): 759-80.
Tags: affectedness, citizenship, climate change, eco-home, Noortje Marres, Politics, sociology
12 February 2008 at 1:01 pm |
I’m not sure if this is good blogging practice but I removed one sentence from my original post as it was based on a misunderstanding that was probably misleading. The sentence said “This is perhaps why the presentation was billed as a ‘post-Foucauldian’ approach, a label that I was interested in querying further.” However, as Marres’s abstract shows, her talk itself wasn’t actually ‘billed’ as a post-Foucauldian approach. The post-Foucauldian perspective was just one of the three theories Marres discussed in relation to the conceptualisation of the materiality of publics and eco-homes. In fact it seems to be the one that is associated with the informational approach and the privileging of mass media (if I understand it correctly).
17 February 2008 at 12:33 am |
The term “material public” may soon become a touch more material if Ray Kurzweil is right about his predictions that in 20 years humans and machines will have finally merged. I imagine Heidegger would have seen this as the fulfilment of Gestell (enframing) where the essence of being human is being fundamentally challenged by technology. From an ANT perspective and considering Latour’s specific critique of Heidegger, this would only just mean that action and cognition would be distributed even more widely, smoothly and quickly than over existing heterogeneous assemblages. This raises some interesting questions about political action and the assembling of material publics. Dystopian visions of the borg (Star Trek) or the matrix are fairly well-known. Would an optimistic scenario mean a whole new way of doing politics, where cyborgs form much better informed alliances much quicker than it was ever possible before to address the emerging issues of the day?
I hesitated for a moment whether I should post this here or look for a science fiction blog somewhere instead. But since the BBC broadcast this today as part of their main news bulletin, perhaps this brave new world is already much more real than we may be prepared to accept.
19 May 2008 at 12:29 pm |
Noortje Marres’s paper that served as a basis for her LSE talk is now available from the Goldsmiths website, in the form of a working paper (PDF). A video of the talk is now also available on the LSE website.