Actantiality

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantial model – Greimas; Actor; Actor-Network Theory; Affordances; Heterarchy; Human actantiality; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices

“Why should you always have live things in stories? said the Professor. “Why don’t you have events, or circumstances?”

“Oh, please invent a story like that!” cried Bruno.

The Professor began fluently enough. “Once a coincidence was taking a walk with a little accident, and they met an explanation — a very old explanation — so old that it was quite doubled up, and looked more like a conundrum —” he broke off suddenly.

“Please go on!” both children exclaimed.

The Professor made a candid confession. “It’s a very difficult sort to invent, I find … “

Lewis Carroll (1893) Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London, UK: Macmillan and Co, p376

At the outset, it might be said that actantiality is a way of trying to understand acting amid complexity, acting in the middle of things, without a transcendent overview-horizon, an originating fundamental grounding or, indeed, an immanent purpose or drive: acting, we might say, in a heterarchy, in which there is more than one governing or determining principle. In addition, while such mediated and mediating action may be teleonomic, that is, purposeful or goal oriented, it is not necessarily teleological, that is, goal-determined.

Agency-Affordance Negotiation in the theory of actantiality

The argument presented here is that the term ‘design’ is preferable to the notions of ‘art’ and ‘technology’, that is, of ars and tekhne (techne), in order to discuss the matters which are of concern. Two Derridean terms are relevant here. First, design may be understood as an ‘original supplement’, in the sense that designs appear supplementary to what it means to be human but are simultaneously necessary to the definition of being human. Second, the meaning of any given ‘design’ is undecidable: in the form of a pharmakon, it can be a poison or a remedy-therapy, given the situation or the context. This brings to attention the importance of such notions as ‘value’, for example, inherent value, use value, exchange value, situational value and contextual value.

French paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1993) argues in a number of books, especially in Gesture and Speech, that human evolution, or socio-genesis, is technological through and through, that is, it implies a corresponding techno-genesis. Humanity and technology, or rather humanity and ‘design’, have co-evolved and are co-evolving (Lemmens, 2013). One way of expressing this is to say that Dasein is design, on which implies a phenomenology of worldliness or appearance.

Anthropogenesis, as socio-genesis, is a process, according to Stiegler (1998: 45) that must be understood in terms of a technogenesis, or, in other words, in terms of design as anthropo-socio-techno-genesis.

Humanity and design, which includes both ‘art’ and ‘technology’, are co-extensive in this view. The argument is that the human condition is, and has always been, a ‘design’ condition or a co-emergent conditionality. Human situatedness is, in some sense, a designing-designed condition. ‘Design’, here, takes on a much wider array of meanings than those conventionally ascribed to the term.

Actor-network theory and affordance

Bruno Latour (1999) discusses how actor-network theory addresses, but does not overcome, dissatisfactions arising in the context of the social sciences. These dissatisfactions concern, on the one hand, the micro level, focused on the actor or agency, which turns attention away from norms, values, culture and so on. On the other hand, they concern the macro level, focused on structure or system, whose abstractions gloss over incarnated, in the flesh practice. Latour proposes that perhaps the social is not made of agency and structure at all but is, rather, a circulating entity. If this is the case, he continues, then, “actantiality is not what the actor does … but what it provides actants, with their actions, with their subjectivity, with their intentionality, with their morality”.

In interpreting this passage, David Webster (2002) argues that ‘actantiality’ refers not to agency but to the facticity of agency through which results come to pass, that is, affordance. Webster models his conception of affordance upon Derridean differance, specifically, “the minimal event of the articulation [of] timed-space and spaced-time that takes the form of the generation of differences and the deferral of the meaning of those changes having taken place.” In so doing, he sets up an ontological framework of affordance as agency in medias res, a reformulation of distributed agency as agency-in-the-middle-of-things, as ergon (work) in the framework of parergon, that which is beside or in addition (supplementary) to the work, its ‘context’. For Derrida, the work (ergon) is not primary and the ‘outside work’ (parergon) secondary. Both are fundamental to one another: it is the parergon that renders the ergon self-same, a self-sameness arising through (Derridean) differance and supplementarity (adding to and displacing or replacing).

Webster continues,

“What a thing is (quidditas) is what it does (haecceitas), its agency. Agency, in its most general form, depends upon placement within the frame of a parergon, constituted by an “absent” centre as historicity, and an “absent” circumference as potentiality to be, the parergon supplements the thing to make up for what it will always lack to be what it would be, i.e., a framework of past facticity and future possibility.”

Furthermore, a thing’s self-identity, what it is, is what it can do, its agency, given what it is and what it can do. In this case, ‘is’ equates to structure while ‘does’ equates to agency. As a consequence, ‘is’ and ‘does’ cannot be stratified in either time or space. A thing is the summation of difference at that point, its historicity. What it does, is to endure through the ‘invariance’ of being the same but not identical, by deferring the meaning of that lack of self-identity.

Webster concludes, “Affordance does not happen to something, for the thing is co-terminus with affordance: Activity is built through the concatenation of affordance.”

Questions

The relationship between actantiality and affordance is central to what actually happens or transpires, between the ‘I can’ and the ‘I did’, between potentiality and actuality. Might Jerome Bruner’s conception of ‘agentivity’, as a focus on agent and action, and Husserl’s notion of ‘I cans’, as in I can throw, I can calculate, I can judge and so on, contribute to the development of this nexus?

Further notes on actantiality

Another term for actantiality might be ‘agentic in-between-ness’ (Kuby, 2017). In this understanding enacted agency is the relationship between human and nonhumans, which may reproduce existing conditions or may produce newness (Barad, 2007). In Derrida’s sense, this allows for ‘invention’ as the ‘incoming of the other’. Such agency does not lie within the human nor the nonhuman but rather in the in-between-ness of humans with the material world. Reality is, or realities are, about more than humanity.

References

Husserl, E. (1989) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Knappett, C. and Malafouris, L. (eds) (2008) Material agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach. New York, NY: Springer.

Kuby, C. R. (2017) ‘Why a paradigm shift of “more than human ontologies” is needed: putting to work poststructural and posthuman theories in writers’ studio’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30 (9), pp. 877–896. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2017.1336803.

Latour, B. (1999). On recalling ANT. The Sociological Review, 47 (S1), 15–25. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1999.tb03480.x/abstract [Accessed 13 July 2014].

Lemmens, P. (2013) ‘The posthuman condition as the misapprehended concretization of the danger of technology? A Heideggerian-Stieglerian critique of posthumanism’ [Draft], in The Posthuman – Rome, 11-14 September 2013: 5th Beyond Humanism Conference. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/6674204/The_posthuman_condition_as_the_misapprehended_concretization_of_the_danger_of_technology_A_Heideggerian_Stieglerian_critique_of_posthumanism?email_work_card=view-paper (Accessed: 26 August 2021).

Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993) Gesture and speech. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time 1. The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford: University Press.

Webster, D. S. (2002) Affording expertise: integrating the biological, cultural and social sites of disciplinary skills and knowledge. [PhD thesis] Durham University. Available at: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4096/ (Accessed: 8 April 2021).