TRABAJO CON PROYECTOS EN LA CLASE DE ESTADÍSTICA

It is only when power is seen as relational that a scientist can concentrate more on the different interests one might have over an issue. Through the process of enrolment, for example, several interests can be proposed and any of them can become achievable (and some, or all, is not). In Callon and Law’s (1982: 622) words, ‘the theory of enrolment is concerned with the ways in which provisional order is proposed, and sometimes achieved”.

In Callon’s (1986) study on the conservation of scallops, he demonstrated that enrolment is considered successful if the three marine biologists could let the scallops voluntarily enter the collectors for conservation purposes. However, Callon also found that enrolment is never a sure process. The enrolment of scallops into the anchor net involves various factors that may hinder enrolment (thus a form of resistance), including sea currents, parasites and visitors who visit the bay. In order to measure the most effective way of scallop enrolment, a group of scientific researchers are enrolled into the conservation study process, and in this case, without social resistance from the fishermen because they are all aiming to achieve similar interests. They allow the experts to study the scallops without questioning, in order to achieve the same interest: to discover ways to increase scallop reproduction (thus the best way of scallop enrolment into the anchors and restocking them in the market). This stabilises the enrolment process, which means that the scallops willingly enter the anchorage and scallop production increases.

What can be learnt in this process of stabilisation is that enrolment does not imply pre-established roles or identities. Rather, “[i]t designates the device by which a set of interrelated roles is defined and attributed to actors who accept them” (Callon 1986: 10). Callon found that

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each of the actors in this study was only able to identify their role after they understood what the other actors were doing. Thus, their identities were relational to the other actors’ roles.

Besides that, in terms of determining enrolment, there is no prior assumption on what makes the scallop enrolment a success. Again, there is also no pre-determined hierarchy imposed on the scientists, the fishermen or the scallops.’ In Callon and Law’s (1982) words:

The theory of enrolment is concerned with the ways in which provisional order is proposed, and sometimes achieved. One, but only one, of the ways in which such enrolment is attempted is via the category of interests. Actors great and small try to persuade by telling one another that 'it is in your interests to. .'. They seek to define their own position in relation to others by noting that 'it is in our interests to...’ What are they doing when they so attempt to map and transform interests? Our view is that they are trying to impose order on a part of the social world’ (Callon and Law 1982: 622).

Here, Callon and Law refer to the category of interests as different types of interests, such as political and ideological interests, and it is via these interests that an order can be (attempted to be) imposed. Applying this process to the study of news-making, the news angle is an important example that can be examined through this theory because constructing a news angle for a particular story can be based on various interests among journalists (Chapter 6). Besides that, in Chapter 5 we will see different tendencies of ‘interests’ in each newspaper in this study, which then become the collective identity of the newspapers. If this is seen from moments of translation, this is the stage when distinct interests (or newspaper identity) are being exposed to readers, telling them that ‘this is what they should read’ through specific ways of angling the stories that are distinct from other newspapers which they are competing with. By publishing stories with a certain slant of interest, newspapers are trying to impose ‘order’ for their readers. If they succeed, this suggests that the message of the newspaper ‘enrols’ into the life of its readers, by stating “it is in your interest to read this article or paper”. For example, a newspaper that published community news can be seen as imposing on the readers to ‘read this news as it will interest you’.

Thus, examining the process of enrolment further enables the ‘unseen’ process of the inclusion of non-human actants into social studies, by mapping and transforming interests among actants involved in a social action. This can only be executed when enrolment rejects the pre-determined conception that non-humans contribute less. Konopasek (2005) observed that the

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success of communism in Eastern and Central Europe becomes ‘real’ when all humans and non-human actants are included together in understanding the process, including “family origins, church communities, special motives for joining the Party, professional achievements, old friendships, personal integrity, and other people’s identities are challenged and mobilised to prove their “realness”, and their “strength” (Konopasek 2005: 8).

This also suggests the status of non-human actants in ANT and is termed the principle of generalised symmetry. Associations are made both from the human and non-human actants.

Callon and Latour (1992) define generalised symmetry:

Our general symmetry principle is… to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity … network building, or collective things, or quasi-objects, or trials of force (Callon and Latour 1992: 348).

Donna Haraway (1991) proposes that both human and non-human actors live together in a world called the “cyborg”. Cyborg is a part cybernetic machine and part living organism which is both “a creature of solid reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway 1991: 149). She rejects the dualism that exists in Western philosophy in explaining the relationship between human and non-human and the distinction, as she would call it, which appears only as an ‘optical illusion’ (Haraway 1991: 149).

It is the inclusion of non-human actors in the formation of networks that makes ANT a very different or ‘radical’ theory compared to what tends to dominate media studies. As Emma Hemmingway (2007) has emphasised:

…what made ANT such a radical departure…lies in Latour’s determination to recognise the construction of networks of both human and non-human actors, paying as much attention to the behaviour of technologies, machines, scripts and tools as to the human actors who use them (Hemmingway 2007: 16; original emphasis).

It is from here that ANT considers invisible objects as significant in understanding social actions, that such objects can affect a network, and this includes the ‘virtual object’.

4.4 Accounts

Thus, when the position of non-human actants is assumed to have similar importance to its human counterpart, even a text can act (e.g. it can “tell a story”) and have an impact in

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understanding social action. From the ANT perspective, a text or what is termed by Latour (2005) as ‘an account’, such as a report of a study, is able to connect reality and what is being reported.

Consequently, an account can be seen as a ‘virtual object’. The notion of virtual object suggests that the meanings of a particular object need to be fixed in specific (discursive) practices (Law 1996; Mol 1998). This renews the way representation is understood, when representation is “not about describing something which is already there…[but] it is about making the knower and making what is known (Law 1996: 283), hence emphasis (again) on the performativity of objects.

Examples of virtual objects have been discussed by Law (1996), Mol (1998) and Van Loon (2002a). John Law (1996) took the example of accountability in a particular organisational setting and learnt the heterogeneity of accountability could emerge from various performative actions by either a single actor or by various actors. Examples of accountability that emerge as virtual objects are “systems of tracking and monitoring, procedures of enhancing ‘transparency’, increasing calculability, evaluability and of course enabling judgment” (Van Loon, 2002b: 57).

This accountability is not a single entity but defined in multiplicity by the actors in the organisation.

Annemarie Mol (1998) found that atherosclerosis is also a virtual object because there is always a gap between the diagnosis and the treatment of atherosclerosis and what is being said in the medical textbooks. From her observation, what is being written in the text book is just a singular reality been reported, while in reality the case of diagnosing arthrosclerosis can be much more multiple than the textual explanations. Generally, there are two ways of diagnosing arthrosclerosis, from the view points of the clinicians and of the pathologists. The former involves more discussion with the patient and the medical practitioner about the symptoms, while the pathologists focus on examining parts of the patient’s body in the laboratory. However, the link between the clinicians and pathologists is only imaginary or as it is written in the text book, because the real link emerges only when there is a need to remove a body part from the patient. However, doctors are cautious about taking such actions just to stabilise the virtual object unless the patient is in extreme pain and no further treatment would be effective. Thus,

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clinicians also perform extra diagnosis methods that include using stethoscopes and Doppler tests to reveal and order the atherosclerosis virtual object.

Similarly, Van Loon (2002a: 48) sees risks as virtual objects which exist performatively.

Van Loon said “[r]isks are happenings, not of the bads or catastrophes that they refer to do, but of a ‘coming-into-being’ of a probability of harm, sometimes indeed in the form of anticipated annihilation”. These studies lead us to conclude that entities do not exist ‘out there’ but they are actually enacted and performed into being through heterogeneous practices (Mol 2002), where

“technology as ordering and revealing could indeed be seen as a form of constructing a reality, but never Reality as such” (Van Loon 2002a: 55; original emphasis). Multiple forms of objects enacted from virtual objects suggest that distinct realities emerge from distinct practices, thus, the generic Reality (with the capital R that suggests Reality appears as if it speaks for itself) (Van Loon 2002a: 55) is a disputable way of understanding the social.

Thus, the ontology of virtual objects supports the claim that nothing exists without relations, associations and networking that hold the entities together. It also suggests the importance of the emergent nature of different objects which can be shown clearly when reality is seen as associations (Latour 2005) and the main motive of representation is to hold the associations (Van Loon 2002b) rather than reality as simply existing “out there” and to be described with ‘objective’ social aggregates referred to as context.

Consequently, an account is also a mediator which plays its role as the connector within or between networks. “Mediators transform, translate, distort and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005: 39). Thus,

[m]ediators, … cannot be counted as just one; they might count for one, for nothing, for several, or for infinity. Their input is never a good predictor of their output; their specificity has to be taken into account every time (Latour 2005: 39).

This enables “a point-to-point connection…to be established which is physically traceable and thus can be recorded empirically” (Latour 2005: 132). This suggests that, because a mediator connects even the most trivial point with another point within a network, thus, it is now possible for us to record the empirical evidence of such connections. Here, mediators can also act as the connector between practice and recorded reality, or even what is not seen (imaginary, thus an account) and concrete practice. Hence, the distance between ‘reality’ and what has been

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recorded can be determined, mainly because what is being recorded is the result of the stabilisation (and subjectification) of heterogeneous actors by the mediators. In examining these situations, the more mediators are found in a network, the shorter the chain of achieving the concrete actors. However, if there are more intermediaries, the distance is farther.

Latour (2005) also differentiated a mediator and an intermediary. An intermediary is what transfers meaning or force without difference, thus it can be ignored in a network.

However, although it can be ignored, it is considered as slowing the process of reaching the

‘final destination’ in the network ‘chain’ because it still needs to be ‘passed by’ by the other actors that only later to be found has no contribution to the network—hence a longer distance to reach the final point in the network chain.

This then enables the examination of how an actor is really taken into an account. Taken into an account, from an ANT perspective, is not merely rhetoric. Latour (2005) explains how this can be done, which is by

“…externalise[ing] some elements and to internalise[ing] others to take them, literally, into the account, are going to follow nonetheless every little detail of the ‘technical dispute’ because explaining what is a profit, an exploitation, or a plus value depends entirely upon such niceties” (Latour 2005: 229).

Latour then gives an example of how the tracing process of taking into account can be made visible when the North American accounting format is changed to the European Union format. This is how different ‘sites’ can be connected. The sites referred to are the reality and the documented reality.

Thus, this view suggests that virtual actors can never become real actors. When different sites can be connected through a connector such as an account, how exactly a real actor is understood must always come back to an effort to trace the various connections. Latour (2005) added that to examine this, an actor needs to be ‘subjectified’, which is to be active; then only can they become a real actor. Such a statement can only be supported when the reality is assumed to be formed of associations, rather than the invisible wider social structure or context.

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