Battles

“The performativity approach makes it possible to exhibit the struggle between worlds that are trying to prevail; it makes the struggle for life between statements visible. Each statement, each model, battles to exist. But the Darwinian metaphor stops there. In reality this struggle between statements is a struggle between sociotechnical agencements. It is not the environment that decides and selects the statements that will survive; it is the statements that determine the environments required for their survival.”

-Michel Callon, 2007 (“What does it mean to say that economics is performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 332)

Hunting budies

“The ethnographer pressed the point, asking what they would think or say if, through some impossibility, this eventuality [a man sleeping with his sister] managed to occur.  Informants had difficulty placing themselves in this situation, for it was scarcely conceivable: ‘What, don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none?  With who will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?…Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable.  The incredulous exclamatiuon from the informant: ‘So you do not want a to have a brother-in-law?’ provides the veritable golden rule for the state of society”

-Claude Levi-Strass, 1969 (The Elementary Structures of Kinship.  Boston: Beacon Press. Pg. 485)

More than connect-the-dots

“…not a network connecting agents which are already there, but a network which configures ontologies.  The agents, their dimensions, and what they are and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are involved…

“In the social network…the agents’ identities, interests, and objectives, in short, everything which might stabilize their description and their being, are variable outcomes which fluctuate with the form and dynamics of relations between these agents…

“This means that the agent is neither immersed in the network nor framed by it; in other words, the network does not serve as a context.  Both agent and network are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. “

-Michel Callon, 1998 (“Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics” In The Laws of Markets.  Malden MA: Blackwell.  Pg. 8)

Got some ‘splaining to do

“Explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further.  We do not look for a stabilized and simplified description before we begin to propose and explanation.  On the contrary, we use what they do to an innovation or a statement to define the actors, and is from them and them alone that we extract any ’cause’ we might need.”

-Bruno Latour, 1991 (“Technology is Society Made Durable” in A Sociology of Monsters.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 121)