One of the goals of the course is to make a jam session connecting us, our tools, and the environment we are in. This may refer to Actor network theory developed by Bruno Latour back in 80s. The idea comes from a sociologic point of view, where Bruno Latour distinguishes the traditional meaning of social (=human, community focussed) adding to it other non-human "actors" like objects or activities like law, science, technology, etc.
Black box
Black box is the term usually described by computer scientists. Latour comes with it in his book "Science in Action" (Latour 1987).
"The concept of the "black box" is also important in Actor–network theory as it relates to simplification. As Michel Callon notes, an actor-network is a system of discrete entities or nodes, while the reality that it represents is theoretically infinite. Therefore, in order to describe something in terms of an actor-network, complex systems must be simplified down to individual nodes, ignoring their internal workings and focusing only on their interactions with other nodes within the network. However, if the simplified "black box" is insufficient modeling the system in question, it must be opened, creating a "swarm of new actors."(Callon (986)
Actor network theory
Bruno Latour (1987). Science in Action. Introduction: File:latour-introduction-to-ant-theory.pdf
“Especially since the publication of Latour’s Science in Action (1987), ANT has dominated theoretical discussions in STS, and has served as a framework for an enormous number of studies. Its successes, as a theory of science, technology, and everything else, have been mostly bound up in its relational materialism. As a materialist theory it explains intuitively the successes and failures of facts and artifacts: they are the effects of the successful translation of actions, forces, and interests. As a relationalist theory it suggests novel results and promotes ecological analyses: humans and non-humans are bound up with each other, and features on neither side of that apparent divide can be understood without reference to features on the other. Whether actor-network theorists can answer all the questions people have of it remains to be seen, but it stands as the best known of STS’s theoretical achievements so far.”(Sismondo 2010)
Latour proposes two positions which distinguishes traditional sociology from the ANT perspective. The first one could be compared with Niklas Luhmann social systems and the other with Deleuzian rhizomatic systems.
“In the course of the book we will learn to distinguish the standard sociology of the social from a more radical subfamily which I will call critical sociology.7 This last branch will be defined by the following three traits: it doesn’t only limit itself to the social but replaces the object to be studied by another matter made of social relations; it claims that this substitution is unbearable for the social actors who need to live under the illusion that there is something ‘other’ than social there; and it considers that the actors’ objections to their social explanations offer the best proof that those explanations are right. To clarify, I will call the first approach ‘sociology of the social’ and the second ‘sociology of associations’ (I wish I could use ‘associology’). .. I may be forgiven for this roughness because there exist many excellent introductions for the sociology of the social but none, to my knowledge, for this small subfield of social theory8 that has been called—by the way, what is it to be called? Alas, the historical name is ‘actor-network-theory’, a name that is so awkward, so confusing, so meaningless that it deserves to be kept.”(Bruno Latour 2005:8-9)
References
- Michel Callon (1986). "The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle". In Callon, M.; Law, J.; Rip, A. Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World. Sheridan House Inc. pp. 29–30. ISBN 0333372239.
- Bruno Latour (1987). Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
- Bruno Latour (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
- Sergio Sismondo (2010). "Actor-Network Theory" in An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies.