Why is making networks, things and the relationship between humans and nonhumans visible both so difficult and so important?
Sociology that focuses primarily on interactions between humans assigns an inactive role to objects and other non-human things. Non-humans can, and sometimes do, indeed figure prominently in traditional sociology, but they are not evaluated as anything more than passive tools that humans employ in order to reach our various ends. Traditional sociology holds that humans act on through, nonhumans, but nonhumans do not act on or through humans. Theories that focus more on making visible networks of humans and nonhumans instead center the role of nonhumans in creating and shaping our desired ends. Network and thing theories …show more content…
Many things are dependent on humans (to be created, refined, or used), and humans are likewise dependent on things. Rice paddies, for example, rely on human labor, which in turn relies on the calories generated by those very rice paddies. These bidirectional relationships are taken for granted and, like the complex machinery inside a printer, edited out of our day-to-day experiences. What remains is an understanding of human choice unbound by dependence and entanglement.
The centrality of human agential power is a concern in formal and academic theories of action as much as it is in a typical person’s self-understanding. While many theorists and philosophers have described the human will as fundamentally divided and contradictory, most theories of human action still center the human will, imperfect as it may be, as the sole location of agential …show more content…
Making things visible is a slow and partial process, and the choices of what to first make visible are fraught with power. Constant attention must be paid to how things are rendered visible, who elected to make them visible, and how they did so. The power to make visible is a power that can set bounds on or otherwise influence others’ knowledge and ideology. Making visible a thing, a relationship, or a network can at once be a revealing and a concealing. The elevated vantage points from which fair-goers observed museological simulated villages at Paris’ 1889 World Exhibition, for example, revealed an array of peoples and cultures while concealing the operations of power that afforded the observer such a “dominating vision”. The image from up high gave the viewer (typically a plain Parisian) a sensation of governance and rational order that would perhaps be invisible or visible yet unjust to someone more present down below. Such a view placed the single Parisian citizen as overseer of a vast complex of cultures, situating him as the subject exerting power and governance, rather than the object of those
Sociology that focuses primarily on interactions between humans assigns an inactive role to objects and other non-human things. Non-humans can, and sometimes do, indeed figure prominently in traditional sociology, but they are not evaluated as anything more than passive tools that humans employ in order to reach our various ends. Traditional sociology holds that humans act on through, nonhumans, but nonhumans do not act on or through humans. Theories that focus more on making visible networks of humans and nonhumans instead center the role of nonhumans in creating and shaping our desired ends. Network and thing theories …show more content…
Many things are dependent on humans (to be created, refined, or used), and humans are likewise dependent on things. Rice paddies, for example, rely on human labor, which in turn relies on the calories generated by those very rice paddies. These bidirectional relationships are taken for granted and, like the complex machinery inside a printer, edited out of our day-to-day experiences. What remains is an understanding of human choice unbound by dependence and entanglement.
The centrality of human agential power is a concern in formal and academic theories of action as much as it is in a typical person’s self-understanding. While many theorists and philosophers have described the human will as fundamentally divided and contradictory, most theories of human action still center the human will, imperfect as it may be, as the sole location of agential …show more content…
Making things visible is a slow and partial process, and the choices of what to first make visible are fraught with power. Constant attention must be paid to how things are rendered visible, who elected to make them visible, and how they did so. The power to make visible is a power that can set bounds on or otherwise influence others’ knowledge and ideology. Making visible a thing, a relationship, or a network can at once be a revealing and a concealing. The elevated vantage points from which fair-goers observed museological simulated villages at Paris’ 1889 World Exhibition, for example, revealed an array of peoples and cultures while concealing the operations of power that afforded the observer such a “dominating vision”. The image from up high gave the viewer (typically a plain Parisian) a sensation of governance and rational order that would perhaps be invisible or visible yet unjust to someone more present down below. Such a view placed the single Parisian citizen as overseer of a vast complex of cultures, situating him as the subject exerting power and governance, rather than the object of those