Material Semiotics
(After read Material Semiotics, John Law, 30th Jan. 2019)
This is another new theoretic topic relevant with science technology for me. I need more time to get familiar and understand about this, so I decided to make some abstract first, which I arranged, and also include some of my feelings and summary.
Abstract:
“Material semiotics us a set of tools and sensibilities for exploring how practices in the political world are woven out of threads to form weaves that are simultaneously semiotic and material.”
There are two parts that the article mentions: Act Network Theory and Feminist Material Semiotics.
Act Network Theory:
the “case studies” , “ scandals”, “ sandbox” experiments.
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Sandbox: fishy ethnography. Talking about the experience of catching the salmon fry.
Conclusion:
- the bits and pieces in the experiment are materially heterogeneous (people, fish, technologies, clothes, words, concerns), material semiotics does not be confined in a narrow meaning of “ the social”.
- the methodology of waving different elements together.
“the core sensibility of material semiotics is to explore how the heterogeneous elements of the social-and-material overlap, influence one another, and generally fit themselves together or not.”
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Case study: the Scallops of Saint Brieuc Bay. Talking about a case of pursuing fishers go to other places fishing, and protect the Saint Brieuc Bay scallops by fishers scientists’ prototype collectors, which succeeded, but then the fishers came back and stripped the nursery scallops.
Conclusion:
- principle webs are fragile.
“You cannot build a network, lock it in place, and throw away the key. It has to be done again and again and again if it is to hold. Everything is process.”
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Scandal: humans and non-humans. Talking about the scandal can be an empirical tool. And also mentioned ‘flat ontology’.
Conclusion:
- Everything becomes an ‘actor’ not because people aren’t human but because this is methodologically useful.
- No essential distinctions between different kinds of things.
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“Webs are endless, so when should we stop following these? And which webs should we loo at anyway?”
- Equal treatment. (“it is productive to treat human beings and animals in the same terms, both on actors and relations.”)
- Special methodology at special environment. (anthrax vaccination can only be effective with the appropriate webs have been put in place.)
- Advancement, coherent with the time. (Portugal from an insignificant nation became to an imperialist power a century, because of the performative effect of a web of maritime technologies, navigational instruments, charts, markets, etc..)
- Survival of the fittest. ( the world is a fragile weave of changing relations, but they adapt themselves quickly, change shapes, models to fit the environment.)
Material semiotics is a set of tools and sensibilities that may be used to explore a wide range of concerns. Concerns about which case to choose, which weave to trace, when stop the weave. Concerns about gendering, the women and ethnographers. There are many different webs that might be followed, but we need to choose which are the most important for us.
How does scientific dominate particular social and material weaves?
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Feminist Material Semiotics:
Donna Haraway put forward “Feminist objectivity” and “Feminist cyborg”.
“Feminist objectivity”, quite simply situated knowledges.
“Feminist cyborg”, against the ideal, enhanced masculine all-seeing and all-powerful being. It is an imperfect and embodied set of partial connections endowed with split vision and therefore the privileged recognition that total knowledge and total mastery are simultaneously dangerous and impossible.