From a romantic to a baroque approach to knowledge

The way post-structuralist theories such as ANT approach large and complex phenomena is illustrated by material-semiotic philosopher Chunglin Kwa (2002). Kwa draws a distinction between two approaches to knowledge, which he terms ‗romantic‘ and ‗baroque‘. Metaphors which can be associated with these terms include the experience of looking down at pedestrians from the top of a tower block versus that of looking through the eyes of an ant (the creature). Kwa locates the development of the former, romantic perspective in the systems theories of the 60s, with their computer and anatomy-based analogies. The analogy of the tower block stresses that the romantic approach to research is one of climbing up and looking down at the world below in an attempt to find trends and patterns; the whole is viewed as greater than the sum of its parts. The romantic view is thus receptive to the idea that cities are guided by some form of coherent rules, such as individuals‘ attempts to maximise the satisfaction they derive from spending money. Similarly, a view of the city as an organism might lead to a particular, problematised neighbourhood being seen as a dysfunctional part of that organism. If cities are indeed subject to strong systemic pressures such as these then the specific ‗paths‘ that have led to the adoption of a planning policy or a particular organisation become less important. What matters is how that policy or organisation affects the functional workings of the city in the present. The romantic view can be found in use in the analyses of housing markets that have underpinned the case for housing market renewal and its sub-regional implementation. Van Wezemael (2006) locates the successfulness of this perspective in its use as a basis for prediction and for making ‗logico-deductive‘ intervention. But he notes that ‗this is directly related to the two basic assumptions of linearity: large causes will produce large scale effects (and vice versa), and the same cause always produces the same effect‘ (p. 6), but non-linear science explicitly rejects the notion that these assumptions actually hold fast in real life.

35 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY A consequence of adopting a romantic perspective is that it legitimises the claim that those who can comprehend the whole gain a privileged view of how society functions. Statistics are thought to hold the key to this holistic, or bird‘s-eye, view of how society works. However, to generate statistics researchers are required to define categories and populate these with observed phenomena. In this sense, both the categories and the resultant phenomena respond to the particular concerns, motivations and conceptual outlooks of the researchers. The researchers are then obliged to interpret patterns of correlation and causality within these data sets. Complexity is made visible by reducing the potential for multiple explanations and competing narratives to emerge. Researchers become empowered to provide the interpretation which frames the dominating narrative. Romantic researchers cannot avoid having to make political decisions about how to approach the mass of potential information before them and how to interpret what their synthesis then yields.

For ANT theorists, the romantic goal of finding a system is challenged by the chaos and complexity of everyday life, and the fact that researchers are always part of, never ethically or normatively detached from, society (Cilliers, 2002; Law, 2004; Van Wezemeal, 2006).

Law (2004) draws on Leibniz‘s (1973) advice to look for a world of ponds within ponds and gardens within gardens. By this he means to say that, in following the movements of the ant, or the person on the street, wide-ranging elements are brought together. Strange and seemingly random things become connected. Law‘s example is of a military aircraft where the G forces and plane design sicken and prevent pilots and navigators from operating comfortably and effectively. As the case is analysed further it first leads to arrays of navigational and flight technology, their engineers and commissioners, but later to the plans and projects of occupational medicine, research projects in hospitals and the work of meteorologists. Here again it is action and relations that form the bedrock of the ANT methodology. Yet the movements of those involved do not lead to a coherent system but instead to a series of collisions between fragmented actors and concepts at all different scales.

Indeed, a conventional understanding of scale becomes confused, with elements of national government bound, both directly and indirectly, to the local and to other disparate sites of interest. Similarly, abstract concepts are found to be manifested in the plane‘s technologies which shake and discomfort the pilot.

36 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY The baroque, then, looks toward discarding traditional dualist conceptions as foundational and these include our conventional notions of scale (see, for example, Callon and Latour‘s early paper on scale (1981)) and distinctions between humans and objects. Instead, it gains an understanding of large, potentially ‗non coherent‘, wholes by drawing links outwards, often beginning with an instance which appears, initially, to be spatially bounded. Because a baroque approach refuses to assume the existence of strong, systemic or causal processes it necessarily becomes more attuned to the factors which lead to the existence or form of a particular planning policy or organisation. The way these phenomena are constituted is seen as the result of constantly evolving webs of relations between actors. The ‗path‘ which has formed an organisation‘s structure in a particular way may therefore have relevance to the way that organisation acts in the future. In the case of the housing associations in this thesis, for example, political decisions in the late 1970s to encourage them to accommodate more vulnerable households would have implications for their ability to respond to high vacancy rates two decades later. In this sense it is sometimes argued that the baroque approach to complexity represents a new relationship to using data in its totality, seeking out and using information that might otherwise by disregarded under romanticism as erroneous or anomalous (Murdoch, 1997; Latour, 2005; Van Wezemael, 2006).

3.2.3 Translation

ANT emerged as an alternative to two philosophical camps in the social study of science. On the one hand, realists sought to establish scientific findings as objective representations of physical phenomena. On the other, the strong programme, also known as the sociology of scientific knowledge, sought to locate scientific findings within a psychological, social and cultural context or paradigm. In contrast, Latour argues that it makes no sense to talk of context in this way, as if it were some kind of abstract set of ideas and practices

There is no need to go searching for mysterious or global causes outside networks. If something is missing it is because the description is incomplete.

Period. Conversely, if one is capable of explaining effects of causes, it is because a stabilized network is already in place. (Latour, 1991, pp. 129-130)

The ANT perspective seeks a more precise understanding of the ‗actors‘ that influence researchers to conclude one thing and not another. Rather than inferring an explanation for events from broad, cultural characteristics, ANT sets out to define in minute detail, at every stage in the development of a narrative of scientific explanation, the key, causal contributions.

37 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY One of the defining features of ANT which emerged from this environment was its acceptance that non-human actors could have substantial agency through relations with other actors in the scientific process, and this would later lead Murdoch (2001) to describe the ANT approach as ‗co-constructionist‘. Murdoch refers to Latour‘s study of how Louis Pasteur identified the bacillus bacteria that causes anthrax. Latour argues (says Murdoch) that ‗we should not imagine the bacillus as a thing ‗out there‘ waiting to be discovered… it is the co-construction of a complex socio-natural assemblage or network that allows the (natural) substance (and also the ‗great scientist‘) to emerge.‘ (ibid, pp. 118-119). Latour (1999) goes as far as saying that the bacillus did not exist before it became a feature of Pasteur‘s research.

Although, the truth is that such a question is outside the scope of ANT. ANT is material-semiotic. Strictly speaking, before an actor has a bearing on a story it is not that it cannot exist, it is simply that it is not important: it has no effect either materially or semiotically. In Law‘s words ANT ‗asks us to treat different materials- people, machines ‗ideas‘ and all the rest – as interactional effects rather than primitive causes‘ (Law, 1992, p. 389).

This relational approach allows ANT to strike a middle way between the realist and the strong programme camps. Figure 3.1 illustrates science‘s relationship in society, in an environment where particular groups of actors call on scientists to address a problem in the world in a way that will respond to their interests (translation 1). An example of this could be anything from mothers seeking help to tackle childhood leukaemia to agri-businesses seeking to genetically modify more ‗efficient‘ crops. Translation 2 sees scientists seek seclusion in an attempt to test how non-human actors might be enlisted into new relations with humans. The potential uses and implications of new possibilities are then negotiated in a process named translation 3, in which new technologies must be tried out and their unexpected consequences estimated. For Callon et al, science does engage with real non-human entities but it is also an inescapably political process.

How else, other than politics, could we describe the movement from macrocosm 1 to macrocosm 2, the exploration of possible worlds, and the choice between them? What is at stake in this movement is actually the form and composition of the collective in which we live. What better political questions are there …? (Callon et al, 2009, p. 68).

An important clarification about this view of politics is that it is not constrained to interactions between humans; it also establishes a political relationship with non-human

38 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY actors by allowing or constraining the agency of such actors in a desired future version of the world. Further detail of the stages within processes of translation is provided in part three.

3.2.4 Power

One of the implications of using actor-network theory to understand cases of knowledge creation or policy control is a need to think carefully about, and clarify, some longstanding definitions of power. To illustrate this, two definitions are given below as examples, starting with a Weberian definition.

(Power is) the chance of a man or a number of men to realise their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action (Gerth and Mills, 1947, p. 180, emphasis added).

A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B‘s interests. Lukes (1974, p. 30, emphasis added).

Figure 3.1: science as a political process of generating new human and non-human assemblages

Source: Callon et al (2009, p. 69)

39 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY One of the characteristics which distinguishes ANT from the definitions above is its attention to understanding power in an environment of networks of performance. The need to understand power in this context leads Latour to define it as follows.

When an actor simply has power nothing happens and s/he is powerless; when, on the other hand, an actor exerts power it is others who perform the action. It appears that power is not something one can possess- indeed it must be treated as a consequence rather than as a cause of action. (Latour, 1986, p. 264, emphasis added)

This view of power as consequence is crucial to supporting the methodological procedure advocated by ANT theorists. They contend that an understanding of activities such as scientific procedures, policy making or governance can only be gained by identifying each stage of how networks change. Part of this thesis, for example, therefore looks in detail at how more and more organisations were recruited into a movement lobbying for a housing market renewal initiative, and how social scientific research findings contributed to the engagement of these new actors. An ANT approach here involves identifying points of network expansion and then working backwards, gathering evidence that seems to account for this change.

Another distinction between ANT and the approaches to power highlighted above arises from ANT‘s commitment to viewing life as constantly evolving networks of human and non-human actors. The focus here on endowing non-non-human actors with the potential to actively contribute to network construction questions the linear and straightforward notion that power exists as part of a relationship between human rivals with intentional strategies. In doing so, it emphasises uncertainty, understood as the potential for unexpected events and path-dependent eccentricities to emerge. This is because networks are viewed as having varying levels of ability to control events and understandings. In Callon‘s example of the meltdown at Chernobyl, the nuclear power station could be seen to act initially as an intermediary, merely conforming to the role ascribed to it by human actors: converting fuel to energy for distribution to consumers. But, when the meltdown occurred, the power station became an actor, actively creating a new network of relations; the consequence of this new network was that sheep and reindeer became radioactive and environmental protestors were mobilised (Callon, 1991).

40 NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY Before moving on to discuss the wider implications of ANT‘s insistence that non-human actors should be given full rights of agency it is worth reflecting on an one further perspective on power which has become increasingly popular in planning. This is the notion that we are now living in a ‗network society‘. Despite sharing an emphasis on networks, this notion should not be equated with ANT as the networks it focuses on are concerned principally with the globalisation of manufacturing and the rise of information technologies. Its proponents, such as Booher and Innes (2002), attribute increased importance to whoever can put together innovative new networks of actors in a joint venture. One consequence of this view is that planners are seen as increasingly able to circumvent traditional state and bureaucratic forms of control, and sometimes this is accompanied by a hope that communicative planning processes can harness this potential for more equitable and effective planning (Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003).

The idea of a network society is based on a model or heuristic, which attempts to define how social relations are now practised, and this contrasts with a strict interpretation of ANT, which seeks to build up detailed understandings rather than impose preconceptions. While a network society model sees a new form of society, which planners can exploit by facilitating more equitable configurations of actors, an actor-network view sees a process, where some actors have been able to construct powerful networks to support their interests. It argues that certain actors, such as quangos or successful businessmen, have become that way through their ability to command at a distance, which they have gained by finding ways to prescribe the form networks should take and by making them difficult for other actors to contest (Callon and Latour, 1981). Such a view is unlikely to lead to a general optimism about new possibilities for the empowerment of progressive planning. Rather, ANT encourages greater attention to the particularities of how actors have built positions of strength, and then seeks to follow how these positions are used to prevail, or otherwise, in arenas of conflict over the future of local environments.