Nature - autonomous learning

after nature 231non-representational theory, and is also now having a wider influence inanglophone human geography. Jonathan Murdoch, of Cardiff University,has been an effective, but not uncritical, populariser of ANT thinking (seeMurdoch 1997a; 1997b). Like non-representational theory, ANT is not a‘theory’ in the strict sense of the term. Instead, it’s a set of overlappingpropositions intended to alter conventional thought and research regardingthe relationships between those things we routinely think of as ‘social’and ‘natural’ respectively. Fundamentally, it challenges the ‘two spheres’assumption underpinning the discursive and material versions of socialconstructionism discussed in Chapter 3, as well as the ‘natural realism’discussed in the previous chapter.In the first place, ANT suggests that the society–nature dualism illicitlysimplifies a world that is much messier than we allow. This world doesnot divide neatly into two ontological domains but is, rather, characterisedby myriad qualitatively different but intimately related phenomena.Second,ANT makes much of the network metaphor I used in the previoussection of this chapter. It sees the world as consisting of multiple,cross-hatching networks: that is, assemblages of human and non-humanthings that are aligned in more or less ordered ways. For instance, ratherthan seeing OncoMouse – a genetically modified kind of mouse used incancer-drug experiments – as a ‘material construction’ of scientists andpharmaceutical firms, we can see it as part of a network. Its existence inthe particular ‘unnatural’ form it assumes is not simply attributable tointentional human actions. It also depends upon a whole array of highlyspecific non-human instruments, including sophisticated laboratoryequipment, scientific papers containing information on how to modifymice genetically, and electronic flows of money to fund OncoMouse’songoing production.These non-human instruments are utterly essential forhuman intentions to be realised in this case: they are indispensable‘intermediaries’ that connect OncoMouse to its human originators.Third,this brief example allows us to see why ANT talks about actor-networks ratherthan networks alone. Networks of human and non-human phenomena areneither more nor less than their constituent parts in ANT. Each part haswhatever role (agency) it has not only by virtue of its intrinsic propertiesbut also because of its position relative to other agents in the network.This is why ANT uses the neologism ‘actant’ rather than the conventionalterms actor or agent to describe the material role of human or non-humanphenomena.