Week 4: The body is in the eye of the doctor
Seminar notes
Ryan Schram
ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society
August 29, 2025
Slides available at: https://anthrograph.rschram.org/cyborgs/2025/week-4/seminar
Agenda for the seminar discussion
- Presentations
- Lila S.
- Haley N.
- Johann S.
Co-texts: Go or no go?: A Mentimeter poll at https://menti.com (using code
2181 6242) or https://www.menti.com/al8djoa742na.Pros and cons: make, construct, perform, enact… other verbs?
Did Annemarie Mol’s work do the job? Is it successful?
How do we as ethnographers choose what we write about when reality is multiple?
Ethnography is other people’s stories. Mol can only build on or interpret people’s reports of their experiences. How can she know anything?
Is atherosclerosis real?
What is a disease? Disease is a process. When does it start? (And what was it before?)
What is self-diagnosis?
A presentation by Ryan on several loose threads
Several loose threads
- The history of the social sciences is a history of decentering and
recentering
- The “social” is a response to the Enlightenment subject
- The modernist concept of the social recapitulates a lot of Western intellectual traditions, especially dualism
- Most explanatory concepts in the social sciences, and particularly
the conventional approach to semiotics, are dualistic
- A group norm implies individual deviance
- A sign is a signifier and a signified. A symbol is a form that stands for an idea.
- Monism has always been with us and will always be with us
- Monism is the principle that there is only one thing.
- Dialectical materialism is arguably a special kind of substance monism.
- Nonhumans are not actors and do not have agency. Neither are humans.
- Agency is an effect of networks. The action (or event) precedes the actor. This is why Latour prefers the term actant. It is meant specifically to banish the idea that there are actors, actors have intentions, and the intentions, wants, desires, or nature of actors (of any species) causes and leads to actions.
- As Latour says, in any moment of time, “[w]e must learn to attribute—redistribute—actions to many more agents than is acceptable to either the materialist or the sociological account” (Latour 1994, 33). Note especially the irony in the phrase many more agents.
- A network is woven. It’s not a system of connections between points. Atherosclerosis is woven, for instance. To follow a phenomenon is in fact to unravel the weaving that sustains the appearance of it as an object.
- ANT stands for ANT’s not a theory. Like how GNU stands for
GNU’s not UNIX.
- A more descriptive noun phrase would be “monad-unravelling method”
- Law and Mol prefer the term “patchwork,” which emphasizes that all networks are local.
- Latour is interested in ethnomethodology, but he likes the word even less than network.
- In an ethnomethodology, the observer allows phenomena to describe themselves, because that process of self-description is constitutive of its being.
Questions for discussion
If ANT is not a theory, but a method, then it provides no claims of an explanatory nature. Does this matter?
In a separate but related discussion, Mol says that method is not observation (which presumes a dualism of representation and reality) but intervention. Knowledge is furthermore a partaking of reality (Mol 2003, 154–55). Does this apply to following, tracing, patchwork, or the methods associated with networks? If so, what does it tell us? If not, why are these methods exempt?