Geoscience Reference
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In effect all elements of any network are potential actors with agency, or rather
'actants' with 'actency' - terms devised to de-centre the human subject. For What-
more (1999, p. 26) agency is 'a relational achievement, involving the creative pres-
ence of organic beings, technological devices and discursive codes'. This redefi nition
of agency redistributes it on both sides of the nature/society divide rather than as
an exclusive property of humans alone. This recognition that, as Haraway (1992b,
p. 297) puts it, 'the actors are not all “us'' ', is central to ANT. Its force is not to
deny the uniquely distinctive capacities of humans, but rather to greatly expand the
notion of agency. Latour (2004a) has pointed out that the term agency needs to be
redistributed in order to account for the differing ways the global population of
things can act creatively. He stresses that:
No science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates
in action is not fi rst opened-up, even though it might mean letting elements enter, that,
for lack of a better term, we call nonhumans (2004a, p. 226).
ANT is particularly interested in devices which connect and can effectively transmit
agency/power from one part of a network to another. How are actants enrolled and
held in place? What manner of translations and translating devices are needed to
allow differing types of actants to pass power up-and-down the line?
The weaving together of diverse elements into networks has been termed 'het-
erogeneous engineering'. Thus, hybridity is another central motif of ANT and has
been developed alongside it as an approach itself (Whatmore, 2002). From this
perspective hybridity is about more than just the conjoining of differing elements
to make new compounds; hybridity is a characteristic of the elements themselves.
The elements of any network are themselves composed of other hybrid elements
that can be decomposed and recombined without end. This fl uid, anti-foundational
vision of ontology is common to other, related poststructuralist approaches. Bodies,
of various kinds, humans, organic/non-organic non-humans, all merge into each
other, or, more precisely perhaps, were never separated out. Pure, discrete corpo-
realities are rare. The human gut contains a complex bacterial fl ora without which
we could not digest our food. Likewise, machines are packed with 'natural' ele-
ments and minerals that enable them to function. Haraway's (1992a) cyborg
(organic, informational, technological, human/nonhuman) is one such fi gure. The
capacities of hybrid bodies or assemblages are greater than the sum of their parts.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss how rider, horse, and riding technology
combine to form a new entity with new spatial attributes and life making poten-
tials. But as Latour (1993) insists our divided disciplines and methods have made
us blind to the traffi c that routinely criss-crosses the nature/society border. Old
dualistic habits of mind allow monstrous formations to proliferate unnoticed and
un-policed.
Murdoch (2003) has made the case for deploying ANT with its sensitivity to the
non-human and hybridity within rural studies:
The idea that the countryside is simply a social construction, one that refl ects dominant
patterns of social relations, cannot adequately account for the 'natural' entities found
within its boundaries. There is something beyond the 'social' at work as the countryside
displays a material complexity that is not easily reducible to even the most nuanced
social categories
[ ] to paraphrase Sarah Whatmore (1999) the countryside is 'more
than human' (p. 264, emphasis added).
