How to use ANT in inventive ways so that its critique will not run out of steam?

Guggenheim, Michael

doi:10.4324/9781315111667-8

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Sociologists contribute to the formatting of social constructions and aggregates as they study them, working alongside actors. More precisely, critique requires that scholars abandon presuppositions that we know best how to change the world towards our interventions’ conclusions, opening possibilities for actors to intervene with us (Guggenheim, 2020: 71).…”

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Latourianism describes how actors aggregate together to clean the sea, including industrial firms. But saying actors unite to claim water is polluted is not critique: claiming that industrialism empowers manufacturers to pollute the water is (Guggenheim, 2020: 65). To say this, we must go beyond the local potential cooperation between neighborhood associations and industry: to see that larger aggregations have more influence than smaller ones, more power.…”

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But rather than simply analyzing such moments of sculpting, the critical constructivist aims to create them with people he associates with. Our critical constructivism consists in a kind of collective ‘experimental modification of practices’ (Guggenheim, 2020: 70). As an inventive method, critical constructivism, informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, aims to change the world thanks to others’ significations/understandings/dispositions inherited from their worlds.…”

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importantly, these methods allow Latour’s flat constructivism to become critical. Practitioners can ‘intervene in practices by giving actors in the field the resources at hand to clarify and change their situation’ (Guggenheim, 2020: 71). Critical sociologists can help aggregating actors see patterns in their critiques which can more fully challenge previously more weakly challenged ideas inherited from those that are dominant.…”

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking Critical Sociology, Transcending the Transcendental

Frère,

Jaster

2024

Theory, Culture & Society

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This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors’ power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour’s constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists’ practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application.

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Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Stable Transcendentalism To Volatile and Elastic Aggreg...mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Rethinking Critical Sociology, Transcending the Transcendental

Frère,

Jaster

2024

Theory, Culture & Society

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“…Oversimplifying, the humanities 'school' studies value and values starting with theoretical presuppositions and concepts; the valuation studies 'school' starts with material and semiotic networks and seeks to stay 'local', 'situated' and 'empirically descriptive' (Law 2004;Guggenheim 2020). The sociology of valuation can be perhaps located somewhere in-between in that it shows a range of different points of emphasis, e.g.…”

Section: Between T Heor Ies Of Value and Valuation Networ Ksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valuation through Narrative Intelligibility

Kaszynska

2023

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Narrative intelligibility is central to making sense of valuation. Narrative intelligibility is a framing device that combines empirical observation and situated interaction with teleological, purpose-oriented, normative inquiry. Thus understood, narrative intelligibility provides a useful analytical frame to explain how the phenomenon of valuation is practised. At the same time – and on the level of research – it bridges synthetically different traditions of thought, including actor–network theory’s descriptive accounts of valuation practices and humanities-grounded, normative theories of value. As such, narrative intelligibility offers a way of avoiding the alleged weakness of overstating the agency of devices and material actors in actor–network informed approaches, without however seeking to relocate analysis into the ‘ineffable’ realm of purely theoretical constructs, the way some humanities scholars are said to have done. The argument shows that the humanities-derived understanding of values, approached in terms of standards of justification and norms of criticism, can be combined with the vernacular concepts of valuation from actor–network theory in a way that promises a unified research agenda going forward.

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