Objects that have agency

Objects that have agency

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of May 19, 2025 (Week 12)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/12

Main reading: Schnitzler (2016b)

Other reading: Schnitzler (2016a)

Before we begin, take 5 minutes to complete the USS for this class

You can find the USS for the class on this page: https://student-surveys.sydney.edu.au/students.

This class is a conversation

• I learn a lot from student comments, and I read every one.
• Most students don’t ever fill out the USS for their classes.

USSs change classes

FASS analyzes the qualitative open-ended comments in the USS for all of the units in the Faculty to look for common problems or themes.

• If you see the same thing over and over, then you have to make a change.
• ANTH and SSPS is particularly interested in feedback on its feedback. It’s a Mobius strip of learning.
• They are also interested in comments on how intellectually rewarding, challenging, or meaningful your classes are. Did you feel challenged? Did you see progress in yourself?

All of this is to say that it is actually worth it to fill out every USS for every class.

Ryan takes Introduction to Chickenology and learns about anthropology

Ryan’s first exposure to the social sciences was in a class on feminist social research methods

• Ryan’s first college class was in social research methods, taught by Professor Michal McCall.
• Professor McCall focused on qualitative research and its connection to feminist social science, particularly “action research.”
• “Action research,” as described by feminist social researcher Shulamith Reinharz, involves researcher immersion in a community, establishing relationships, and understanding perspectives before formulating research (Reinharz 1992, 181).
  • To engage his audience, Ryan then poses a rhetorical question.

“Actually, I’m not a sociologist…”

• Professor McCall’s research would normally be seen as rural sociology with a feminist angle. Among other topics, she studied the lives of rural women on Minnesota farms.
• She collected life histories through interviews to understand how they conceptualized and narrated their experiences (see e.g. McCall and Wittner 1990).
• McCall humorously identified herself not as a sociologist but a “chickenologist,” emphasizing her study of the configurations of humans, chickens, tools, and technology on the farm, not just human social systems in isolation.
  • This is followed by, “I put chickens and humans together and see what they do.”

We live in a neighborhood populated by houses of cards

Bruno Latour and the proliferation of hybrids

• Michal McCall, as well as Marianne Lien and John Law, were influenced by Bruno Latour. (And for Michal, the work of Donna Haraway (i.e. 1991; 1988) was important also.)
• Latour’s message was that conventional categories are insufficient to understand a world dominated by “hybrids” of nature and culture.
• Lien and Law’s study of salmon farming in Norway illustrated that domesticated salmon are Latourian hybrids, existing only within a network of relationships to people and technology.

Hybrids don’t exist in isolation; A hybrid is a house of cards

• Hybrids, like domesticated salmon or the systems McCall studied, do not exist in isolation and depend on their network of relationships.
• Disconnecting a hybrid from these relationships causes it to cease to exist, likening these systems to a “house of cards.”

An activity for tonight to explore the idea of a relational ontology

• Get a pack of cards and build a house.
• While interacting with the cards, one might perceive the structure as a “house,” possessing an essence of “house-ness,” distinct from simply being a collection of cards.
  • This challenges smirking, snide nominalist views (that it’s “just cards”).
  • But then what happens when you finish and walk away?
• The “house” as an entity exists only in relation to the builder and the act of building; when the interaction ceases and the activity of building ends, it reverts to being “just cards.”
• We need a relational ontology to understand this, one that is neither nominalist nor essentialist. In this relationalist view, the only real, objective things are networks, systems, and relationships, rather than essences or names. Entities like people, things, or houses are outcomes of networks of relations.
• For better or worse, chickens, salmon, Brassica species, and the freakish USU Footbridge General Store apples have no existence outside of their connections to humans and technology.

Humans in the state of nature–culture “quench [their] thirst at the first [faucet]”

Pace Rousseau ([1755] 1964, 105), we have never lived in a state of nature. The human condition is itself relational and hybrid.

• This concept of hybrids applies to many aspects of the contemporary world, including seemingly simple systems like turning on the tap, which Antina von Schnitzler also describes as a hybrid of technical and social systems.
• The core idea is to challenge the social sciences’ traditional focus solely on humans, arguing for the study of entire configurations of humans, non-humans, and technology.

Interested in more? Watch out for ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs (S2, 2025) and ANTH 3604: The Anthropocene (S1, 2026)

What is infrastructure? What nested boxes (tokens) do we put in it? And what bigger box does infrastructure (type) go in?

• Lead contamination in water systems in Flint, Mich.: 2014–present
• Jackson, Miss. residents have observed boil-water warnings August to November 2022, and then several times later.

A 2022 Weekend Edition Sunday report on Jackson included the following:

“In many ways, it’s a miracle that we don’t have more Jackson, Mississippis, and Flint, Michigans, in this country,” he says. “And that’s for the grace of God and infrastructure that ties most communities’ infrastructures together.”

He says on the whole around the country, infrastructure ties together communities that are Black and white, rich and poor, creating a shared interest in keeping the systems working properly.

But “when we don’t see those same communities being served by the same physical infrastructure systems, we see more of these cases” like Jackson, he says. (Ludden and Watson 2022)

What else “ties together communities” of different, unequally-positioned groups?

• Talk about your neighborhoods, and the technical systems you use. Who else uses them?
• Do these systems always work? (No.) Then what happens?

Science and technology are political. Here’s why that is hard to think.

Knowledge is power

In 2025, it is not hard to agree with the statement that

• Scientific knowledge and technological design are political.

Yet, as we discussed in Week 8, the classical view still dominates

• The basic sense of the term politics is that it is collective decision making about collective resources. We live in a commonwealth, so we all have to decide who gets what?
• Weber’s view of power is: A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957, 202–3).
  • Power by A over B should be legitimate, and politics helps us make sure that it is. Politics exists to solve conflict.
• Weber defines the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber [1921] 1946, 78).

In other words, politics is for humans. Hence, we lack a language for politics in a world of hybrids.

In the classical view of politics, a human community decides how to use nature as a resource to shape its material conditions.

• A cannot get B to do what B would otherwise do if B is a salmon, Brassica species, or a chicken, at least not in any way that we would classify as a political choice or decision.
  • Salmon, Brassica species, and chickens do not have rights, cannot vote, and do not have interests or preferences to express in public.
  • Human A and Human B can have conflicts and disagreements; Animal A and Plant B can’t.
• Yet humans are hybrids also. We have a relational, cybernetic network of connections to technology, expert systems, animals, and nature, which exist in relation to us and the environment we create.

We leave the relational, hybrid part of our own human existence out when we appear in public, take a stand on political questions, and act as citizens.

Private persons making use of their reason in public: A bourgeois cultural ideal that became everyone’s normative theory of democracy

Marx is to Habermas as political economy is to critical theory

• Marx was the last great political economist. Everything after him—yes, even David Graeber—is footnotes on Marx.
• Habermas is a critical theorist in the spirit of Thesis 11, “…the point is to change it” (Marx [1845] 1978, 145).
  • He says, OK, sure, let’s change it and get it right this time.
  • But after that has been much more than just footnotes
    • He’s still alive. (He’s 95!)
    • He has his critics.
    • He loves to debate and learn from his critics.
    • So, he’s not done; the conversation on his questions is ongoing.

Habermas’s concept of the public sphere originates from a specific historical context

• The rise of the bourgeois class in Europe fostered a culture of individualism and interiority, where personal thoughts were emphasized and shared.
• This culture led to the ideal of a “public sphere” where private individuals could openly debate issues and influence the state, with everyone participating as equals (Habermas [1962] 1992).

The historical bourgeois public sphere had significant limitations

• Participation was largely restricted to white, educated, property-owning men, excluding women, people of different cultures, and the poor.
• Habermas acknowledges that this original form was not truly democratic or egalitarian and is not a model for today.
• However, he believes this historical development contains the seed of a normative model for genuinely democratic and egalitarian public discourse.

Hybrid humans need other means to act as citizens besides exercising individual rights in a humans-only public sphere

• Scholars like Fraser (1992), Landes (1988), Ryan (1992) have questioned Habermas’s empirical and normative claims, using their own research to develop different theories of democratic participation.
  • The concept of multiple “subaltern counterpublics” offers an alternative model for democratic politics (Fraser 1992, 123).
  • Counterpublic membership is not based on a categorical definition of a citizen, but by individuals recognizing shared experiences and collectively articulating political issues (e.g., women identifying sexual harassment as a common problem).
  • This model acknowledges humans as social beings shaped by experiences within an unequal society, unlike the singular public sphere which requires participants to downplay their unique identities.
• von Schnitzler intervenes in this debate to identify yet another alternative to politics based on either the singular Habermasian public sphere and or the idea of multiple counterpublics.

AI acknowledgement

Portions of the original text of this lecture were created with the assistance of a generative AI tool, which transcribed, rewrote, and corrected an audio file into full sentences, ensuring accurate spelling of specific names as requested.

Also several slides, which refer to the speaker as “Ryan,” were then generated by the same AI tool based on the AI-generated text, structuring the main points with sentence-case second-level headings and bullet points as requested. The conversation history leading to this output can be found at: https://g.co/gemini/share/284fc82c3f31.

Ryan’s acknowledgement

Then I spent about 90 or so minutes reworking the text and the slide to sound less 🤮 and to add citations.

References and further reading

Becker, Howard S. 1953. “Becoming a Marihuana User.” The American Journal of Sociology 59 (3): 235–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771989.

Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2 (3): 201–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303.

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–42. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1962) 1992. “The Public Sphere in the World of Letters in Relation to the Public Sphere in the Political Realm.” In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, edited by Thomas McCarthy, translated by Thomas Burger, 51–57. London: Polity Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Landes, Joan B. 1988. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Ludden, Jennifer, and Walter Ray Watson. 2022. “Avoiding the Tap Water in Jackson, Miss., Has Been a Way of Life for Decades.” National Public Radio, September 4, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/04/1120887065/jackson-mississippi-race-water-divide-politics.

Marx, Karl. (1845) 1978. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 143–45. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.

McCall, Michal M. 1977. “Art Without A Market: Creating Artistic Value In A Provincial Art World.” Symbolic Interaction 1 (1): 32–43. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.1977.1.1.32.

———. 1985. “Life History and Social Change.” Studies In Symbolic Interaction 6: 169–82.

———. 2006. “Performance Ethnography: A Brief History and Some Advice.” In The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 421–33. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage. https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1573950400969693568.

———. (1993) 2017. “Social Constructionism in Critical Feminist Theory and Research.” In Constructionist Controversies: Issues in Social Problems Theory, edited by Gale Miller and James A. Holstein, First edition. London: Taylor and Francis.

McCall, Michal M., Howard S. Becker, and Paul Meshejian. 1990. “Performance Science*.” Social Problems 37 (1): 117–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/800798.

McCall, Michal M., and Judith Wittner. 1990. “The Good News about Life History.” In Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Studies, edited by Michal M. McCall and Howard S. Becker, 46–89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.7208/9780226041056-004/pdf?licenseType=restricted.

Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://archive.org/details/feministmethodsi0000rein.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1755) 1964. “Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men [The second discourse].” In The first and second discourses, edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters, 77–228. New York: St. Martin’s Press. http://archive.org/details/firstseconddisco00rousrich.

Ryan, Mary. 1992. “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 259–88. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Schnitzler, Antina von. 2016a. “Measuring Life: Living Prepaid and the Politics of Numbers After Apartheid.” In Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid, 132–67. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400882991-006.

———. 2016b. “The Making of a Techno-Political Device.” In Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid, 105–31. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400882991-005.

Weber, Max. (1921) 1946. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press.