Game play and social networking.

Joost Van Loon's encounter with the MMORPG Runescape engages some questions in relation to Derrida's reworking of the gift.

As an avid gamer myself, I have started to consider how I might combine my so called ‘addiction’ (passion sounds too much like ‘X-Factor talk’) and my professional role as an academic researcher. Being a member of the steering committee of NTU’s Centre for Contemporary Play, I am involved in attempts to bring game-research into a truly interdisciplinary field. The CCP already has a footing in four key areas of gaming: computing science, art and design, social science and humanities. This enables us to develop a unique platform to create truly exciting cross-disciplinary research projects.

My own research focuses on one particular MMORPG (Massively Muliplayer On Line Role Playing Game) called Runescape. Quite recently, I have finished a bit of research on the role of the gift and reciprocity in engendering associations. This is to be published in the journal Parallax in 2010.

This article reflects on the coming into being of ‘networked actors’. Its aim is to provide some reflections on what could be a more productive way of conceptualizing ‘action’ in relation to questions over embodiment and disembodiment. Rather than engaging with questions about subjectivity and agency, or the nature of authenticity in virtual worlds, or the ontology of virtual bodies, it simply asks what happens if we start thinking about the gift as constitutive of actors (rather than the other way round)? Starting with a critical engagement with Derrida’s reworking of Mauss’ theory of the gift, it seeks to distantiate itself from the implicit subjectivism that underpins the axiom that gifts and commodities are different in essence. Instead, it provides an understanding of gifts and reciprocity that does not treat gifts as ‘mere objects’, but instead shifts attention to the central roles played by gift-objects as modes of enactment. It thereby posits in place of the ever-deferred subject, a net¬-worked¬ being whose existence is always already heterogeneous and dispersed.

It is this ‘networked being’ that I would now like to encounter in a larger variety of empirical situations. I am particularly interested in the ambivalent relationship between on-line and off-line transactions and associations.

(Photo credit: marti macg, permissions)

Actor Network Theory and Journalism Studies: 'clearly' incompatible???

Can Actor Network Theory have anything to say about journalism? Joost van Loon wants to open up a discussion about the place of ANT in media, communication and cultural studies.

‘Actor Network Theory is clearly unsuited to the field of journalism studies; in fact, journalists themselves will find it strange… This theory is clearly out of place in trying to explain and explore the cut and thrust of newsroom dynamics’ (anon).

The downside of anonymous reviewing of proposals for research funding is that reviewers can exercise judgment without being held accountable. This statement, taken from a review of a research proposal of a friend of mine, is able to invoke the adjective ‘clearly’ twice without having to reveal from what light this clearness comes. In addition, the knee-jerk reaction that ‘journalists will find it strange’ was very revealing. Having spent about 7 years around practicing journalists I can safely state that many journalists find most things that academics write at best ‘strange’, but more often pedantic, pointless and irrelevant waffle. On that count, perhaps being found merely strange is a huge compliment!

But on the bright side, we have blogs now and the gauntlet has been laid down. Journalism studies, claiming to be a ‘field’, has nothing to learn from actor network theory. Why would this be the case? What is so special about journalism studies? What is so unique about ‘news room dynamics’ that these can be granted a priori immunity (because this was only a research proposal) against empirical philosophy? Where are the empirical studies that tell us that ANT has nothing interesting to say about journalism? In what court have the advocates of immunity made the conclusive case for their special status?

I have been making some preliminary enquiries amongst those closer to cultural studies and they stated that whereas there was perhaps not much interest in ANT (outside a few places in the UK), there were some areas where closer contact is easier to facilitate, for example in the area of material culture. There seems to be less of a sense that ANT is ‘clearly’ unsuitable.

I, for one, would welcome an opportunity for an open, rather than semi-anonymous, debate about this. Perhaps a blog such as this one can kick something off; as I suspect that the irritations invoked by ANT have not only ruffled the feathers of those colonizing a field with the name journalism studies, but probably also dwellers of the wider constituencies of communication studies, cultural studies and media studies. We would like to hear from you.

Translation Deficits

Joost van Loon examines the 'translation deficit' between Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies.

Although Actor Network Theory (ANT) is now a well-established, albeit often misunderstood, domain within the social sciences, it has not travelled very well beyond Science and Technology Studies (STS). Using a phrase from Latour himself, one could argue that ANT suffers from a 'translation deficit' when it comes to social science research beyond STS. It is not very interesting to dwell too long on the reasons for this translation deficit but it helps to distinguish three possible factors:

1. The radical nature of the philosophical roots of Latour’s ANT which are an unusual mixture of William James’ radical empiricism, A.N. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism and Friedrich Nietzsche’s accomplished nihilism (or relativism as Latour prefers to call it).
2. The fundamentally empirical nature of ANT-analyses, which forces one to do ANT rather than talk about it.
3. A reluctance of social theorists, in particular, to separate critique from prejudice and thereby to start taking actors and action seriously. That is to say, when attempts are being made to ‘export’ ANT-analyses across boundaries, there are significant numbers of gatekeepers blocking the passageways like security guards at airports.

As Latour himself has insisted over and over again, Actor Network Theory is deceptive and therefore perhaps not a very good phrase to describe what is done under that heading. It has led to the suggestion that it is merely a theoretical position that aims to describe networks of actors and in that way it has been interpreted as another version of network theory along the lines of, for example, Ohmae and Castells. In order to avoid such confusion, Latour has toyed with a number of phrases that better describe what ANT might be, such as ‘sociology of translation’ and more recently, ‘sociology of associations’ (Latour, 2005). I prefer Annemarie Mol’s label: ‘empirical philosophy’.

The Matter of Associations

Joost van Loon explores the 'stuff' of networking.

Last week, I attended a conference in Leicester entitled The State of Things: Towards Political Economy of Artifice and Artefacts, organized by the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy (CPPE), which is situated within the School of Management at the University of Leicester. It was a really interesting conference with a wide diversity of papers and topics. One of the most unique aspects of it was that it turned out to be meeting point between more traditional political economy, Autonomous Marxism, and Actor Network Theory. This produced a fascinating exchange of ideas which hopefully will continue in the near future.

Emma Hemmingway and myself also wrote a short paper for this conference in which we asked the basic question: what is the “stuff” of networking. Below is a small passage from that paper.

Clicking is not networking. This is the hard lesson anyone familiarizing themselves with Actor Network Theory has to learn before being able to move on. In fact, Latour has been accredited as having said that ‘the hyperlink destroyed the network’. In a world where the Internet rules supreme, this sounds ludicrous. The hyperlink, it is generally believed, is the ultimate vehicle for building networks. Facebook is a prime example of this. By a few simple clicks, friends can be added to create an ever expanding database of connected web pages. The hyperlink has made networks easy, fast and instantly retrievable.

However, there is a price to pay. Taking the work out of the network, leaves us with just a net. The net catches and traps, but it does not live. Friends on Facebook are not differentiated; if everyone is a friend, then no-one is. The click destroys the gift. For Mauss, the gift is the inauguration of ‘association’; for Derrida, the gift creates an event. It is not hard to see that one of the key problems of Facebook is that it is extremely uneventful.

What makes the hyperlinked net uneventful is that it functions as an intermediary; a simple device for moving information from A to B without adding or changing anything to the mater that is being moved. There are no matters of concern as far as intermediaries are concerned, only matters of fact. That is, intermediaries do not engender gifts; instead they merely ‘take for granted’. As we are interested in the ‘state of things’, the objection to intermediaries is obvious. Intermediaries make things disappear; devalue them, erode them of significance. Intermediaries do not invest and do not commit anything.
(photo credit: luc legay. Permissions.)

Actor Network Theory and Cultural Studies

Joost van Loon introduces us to some key issues from Latour to mark the introduction of a new reading group at NTU.

Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social has been given quite considerable attention across the social sciences. It is a provocative and somewhat controversial book that has a tendency to polarize opinions (see for example contrasting book reviews on the Space and Culture blog.) Apart from controversies, the book has also lent itself to considerable misinterpretation, which, sadly, reflects a longer history within social sciences as failing to properly engage with empirical philosophy.

Whereas ANT has at least been subject to debate within social sciences, it is largely left untouched within media and cultural studies. It is for this reason that we must seek to open up debate around what its underlying empirical philosophy might mean for the ways in which media and cultural studies analyze the world. And this should not be taken as another excursion into methodological debates around ethnography. Instead, it goes at the hart of the implicit philosophical grounding of this subject area. Can it afford to abandon the Cartesian split between res extensa and res cogitans? Can it afford to question the Hegelian optimism that knowledge will engender emancipation? Can it afford to abandon Kant’s sacred vowels that still serve as the principles for a critique of reason, ethics and aesthetics?

The Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University will host a short series of sessions based on a collective reading of Reassembling the Social which hopefully lead to a fruitful debate about the pros and cons of a different, radically empirical, philosophy, that has its roots in a metaphysics that takes a different turn from the one that has dominated modern thought for the last 300 years.

Networked Beings in the Newsroom

Joost van Loon and Emma Hemmingway are presenting a paper entitled 'Networked Beings in the Newsroom: Transactions, Translations and Transformations' at 'The State of Things: towards an economy of artifice and artefacts' conference at the University of Leicester in April. Below they discuss the key ideas informing their paper and their research in this area:

The economic turn within Actor Network Theory asks: What is the matter of associations? What flows constitute networking? These questions are reminiscent of, in particular, Deleuze & Guattari's earlier explorations of the assemblage, which implies a radically non-anthropocentric understanding of the subject.

Tracing some of the lineages further back to Whitehead and Spinoza, we can detect an undercurrent in thinking about ontology that have been dubbed 'philosophy of organism' (Whitehead) as well as 'empirical philosophy' (Dewey). In this paper, we describe a very modest 'event' in a newsroom which involves an accreditation of a particular association which in classical anthropological research would be called 'a rite of initiation'. We focus on the role of the post-broadcast evaluation as the configuration in which membership is affirmed through specific transactions or gifts.

However, we go further and argue that these gifts do more than merely establish a matter of associating, they also imbue significance and bestow this upon the actor-network-in-formation. This is the work of translation and it is the domain of particular mediators. Finally, the 'sign value' of accreditation becomes confirmed in the transformation of the moment in which the news product itself becomes collectivised as a member of the network; as deemed worthy of being affirmed as an actor.