Material Semiotics

Definition

Material semiotics is an approach in science and technology studies which holds that meaning and materiality are produced together, in relations — that things and their significance are not two separate orders to be connected but effects of the same networks of association.

The term is John Law's preferred label for the tradition more commonly called actor-network theory. Law has argued repeatedly that "actor-network theory" is a misleading name — it is not a theory, and "network" has since acquired connotations from computing that it did not carry originally — and that material semiotics better describes what the approach actually does.

The Core Move

Semiotics, as developed by Saussure and Greimas, holds that meaning is relational: a sign means what it does because of its differences from other signs, not because of any intrinsic property. Material semiotics takes this principle and applies it beyond language, to materials, bodies, objects, institutions and texts alike.

The consequences are specific:

• Entities are effects, not causes. A scallop, a scientist, a state and a door-closer do not enter a network with their properties already fixed. What each is — what it can do, what counts as its boundary — is produced by the relations it is held in. This is the principle of relational materiality.
• Symmetry. The same analytic vocabulary is used for humans and non-humans, for the successful and the failed, for the true and the false. This is a methodological commitment, not a metaphysical claim that people and things are equivalent.
• Durability is achieved, not given. Social arrangements last to the extent that they are inscribed in materials that hold their shape. A rule written on paper, a wall, a piece of software and a trained habit are all ways of making a relation persist without continuous effort. Latour's standing example is that most of what makes a society stable is not social at all.

Key Texts and Figures

Michel Callon's study of scallop fishing in St Brieuc Bay (1986) introduced translation — the process by which one actor comes to speak for others. John Law's Aircraft Stories (2002) analyses a cancelled British military aircraft as a set of overlapping, partially incompatible objects. Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social (2005) is the field's manual. Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple (2002) develops the strongest version of the ontological claim: that a disease is not one object described several ways but is enacted differently in different practices, so that the pathology lab's atherosclerosis and the clinic's are not the same object.

Criticism

The standing objections are that symmetry dissolves questions of intention and responsibility; that describing everything as relational makes structural inequality hard to name, since power becomes an effect to be traced rather than a force to be indicted; and that the descriptions become unmanageably long. Feminist STS, particularly Susan Leigh Star's work, pressed the point that networks look different from the position of those they exclude — "the ecology of the invisible."

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Material semiotics supplies the analytic vocabulary for the field's central claim: that a person and a device in relation constitute something that is not adequately described as a person using a tool. Its insistence that entities are effects of relations is the technical version of the argument that there is no pre-technological human to compare the cyborg with.

Related Reading

• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
• Gilles Deleuze
• Sharon Traweek
• Cyborg
• Affordance