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be an effect of the former (see Callon and Law, 1995; Hardie and MacKenzie, 2006;
Phillips, 2006; Palmas, 2007). Hence, as writers like Sarah Whatmore and Steve
Hinchliffe both emphasise, the capacity for any particular thing to cause affects -
whether this thing be human or nonhuman - must be seen to belong not to the
individual thing, as humanism teaches us, but to the larger collectivity out of which
any actor is composed. Indeed, the term 'actant' has long been confusing in this
regard, since its singular emphasis -
an
actant - obscures the distributed notion of
agency, which Latour borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, and thus loses some of
the force of
agencement
. Some have suggested that all of this gives us a 'fl at' ontol-
ogy that cannot account for the differential power relations that we see in our
everyday lives. In response, advocates of this position have suggested that there is
nothing in the above which suggests that agency is ever evenly
distributed, only that
power - or the capacity to cause effects - does not exist apart from the arrangements
that constitute entities with more or less power. So, while it is true that humans
wield far more power than grizzly bears, to draw upon an example from the interior
mountains of British Columbia, if you strip the human of her car, binoculars and
rifl e, the tables are quickly turned. In other words, power is itself an emergent effect
of heterogeneous networks, not an innate quality of autonomous bodies.
All of this has crucial implications for a
fourth
area: epistemology. Earlier I noted
that one of the challenges to Marxist theories of nature came from critics, such as
this author, who felt that its economism led it to underplay the role of nature's
cultural construction. Not only were ideas about nature provisional and power-
laden, we argued, they also had very material effects, and were part and parcel of
how
the production of nature occurred. It is precisely this constructivist emphasis,
however, that new materialists have vigorously questioned. Or, more to the point,
they have questioned the assumption that knowledge about human and nonhuman
nature can or should be understood primarily in
representational
terms. There are
several reasons for this. The fi rst is because for the most part constructivist accounts
remain wedded to a subject-object dichotomy, even if the subject is itself constituted
in and through ideology or in relation to particular disciplinary practices. In other
words, constructivist accounts of nonhuman world leave no room for the nonhuman
world! It is presumed that knowledge is acquired through a detached contemplation,
or through an arbitrary and differential system of signs, where signs obtain their
meaning through their relation to other signs. What this elides, new materialist
argue, is the possibility that we know the world through our practical engagements
with it, rather than through a passive and detached observation. By this view,
science is not just about 'seeing', or about the application of a disembodied reason,
but about a set of embodied practices through which nonhuman entities are encoun-
tered and subsequently translated into matters of fact. Scientists are not merely
detached observers and nature is never a passive or inert fi eld (Latour, 2004b). Put
in more philosophical terms, science is located on the same plane of immanence as
the things it purports to study. Hence the 'matters of fact' produced by science are
seen to emerge from the conjoined capacity of scientists and nonhuman nature to
affect and be affected by each other.
Equally as important, critics of constructivism have argued that there are myriad
non-cognitive ways of knowing that cannot be reduced to representation, such as
through touch or smell, or in relation to movement and rhythm (Harrison, 2000;
McCormack, 2004; Lorimer, 2005; McCormack, 2005; see also Ingold, 2000).
These non-cognitive knowledges can be traced in activities as diverse as gardening,
