The Materiality of What?

Abstract

A singularly influential sense of ‘material worlds’ has been developed by actor‐network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between ‘humans’ and ‘non‐humans’. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Conseil d'Etat. Interestingly, this study turns out to be not so much an actor‐network theory of law as occasion to add a new dimension to the material worlds of actor‐networks, namely, the communicative dimension of ‘regimes of enunciation’. My hypothesis is that this distinction between the sociality of actor‐networks and the logic of enunciation is problematic because it uncritically adopts the premise that there is an institution such as ‘law’ that has to be explained or materialized by social science, thereby diminishing the critical energy that the theory of actor‐networks or of dispositifs might bring to the study of law.

The “Paper Case”: Evidence and Narrative of a Terrorism Trial in Delhi

“…In contrast to his work on science, Latour's seminal ethnography of France's Conseil d'Etat (Latour 2010) gives little space to understand how the law produces facts (Pottage 2012;Van Oorschot and Schinkel 2015). As he tracks the file's movement in the court's bureaucracy, Latour's work on law is concerned with the "processes of enunciation" (Pottage 2012) and the movement between different types of writing (Latour, 2010: 86).…”

“…In contrast to his work on science, Latour's seminal ethnography of France's Conseil d'Etat (Latour 2010) gives little space to understand how the law produces facts (Pottage 2012;Van Oorschot and Schinkel 2015). As he tracks the file's movement in the court's bureaucracy, Latour's work on law is concerned with the "processes of enunciation" (Pottage 2012) and the movement between different types of writing (Latour, 2010: 86). Latour does not engage with how "facts" are constituted by the file and seems to assume that they are simply brought on record by the various parties to a case (79) and the various iterations of the file are meant to "constitute a domain of unquestionable fact" (229) which will allow for an "unquestionable decision" (230).…”

Law and ANT (and its Kin): Possibilities, Challenges, and Ways Forward

“…Although a significant part of ANT and law scholarship has brought the former's attention on artefacts to the fore, thinking in law through ANT has also always involved more than a focus on materiality for its own sake. 54 Indeed, the material shift was always inherently linked to ANT's other tenets: the relationality of the social, the fluidity of ordering, (un)settlements and world-making, the multiplicity of realities and actors, the undoing of categorizations and boundaries in social analysis, the work away from structural frameworks to micro-events. In law, as elsewhere, these tenets enable us to reopen what looks settled, solid, and black-boxed, to unpick the scripts that objects, technologies, documents, or humans, may carry, and to observe the unfolding of those scripts through new connections and relations.…”

IP Things as Boundary Objects: The Case of the Copyright Work

“…Sometimes one simply needs a word to use" (Cohen 2012, p. 18). To the extent that one needs to marry that view to a mechanism by which culture (ideas) change, consider the hypotheses of the field of epistemological evolution (Plotkin 1997), and the data collected by evolutionary biologists studying material culture. See (Tëmkin and Eldredge 2007).…”