Alfredo González-Ruibal

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) conceives societies as constituted by collectives of people and things. The relations among them take the shape of networks of human and non-human actors that are defined and come into being through those relations—what Law (1999) calls “relational materiality”. The analysis of these complex networks is the main aim of ANT researchers. For ANT, society and technology cannot be separated: they espouse a generalized symmetry in dealing with people and things. This means that, from an epistemological point of view, things are as important as people in the constitution of collectives (Latour 2005). A theory that bestows such prominence on things cannot but hold a great promise for revaluing the place of archaeology among the social sciences (Witmore 2007). It is inadmissible that archaeology is left behind in the material turn that is shaking other disciplines. Archaeology, a science that has always worked with non-human actors, can contribute decisively to this material turn (Webmoor 2007). 

    However, there are, at least, three potential problems in symmetrical approaches: on the one hand, they have originated in contexts of industrial technoscience typical of capitalist societies. Things such as airplane factories and hospitals have been explored to date. Unfortunately, there are no examples so far of symmetrical anthropology applied to small-scale groups relying on pre-industrial technology, either in the past or in the present. This does not mean that symmetrical theory cannot be applied in those contexts (González-Ruibal 2006), but a critical translation and reworking of concepts is necessary. Secondly, Actor-Network Theory does not seem to be especially good at exploring the long term. There are no examples of the evolution of complex networks through historical time. ANT tends to work in the ethnographic present or the short term. Finally, due to its symmetrical approach and its emphasis on agnostic empiricism, ANT looks at first sight as a quite depoliticized theory. This is also due to the fact that ANT researchers look at how collectives and situated networks hold (or not hold) together: from this point of view, they tend to interpret conflict as resulting from localized malfunctions in the system, rather than in structural political terms.

    Several authors have examined the role of politics and critique in Actor-Network Theory. Some scholars consider that an ANT approach is not appropriate for a true sociological critique (Whittle 2008), although this does not necessarily detract from its theoretical power; others think that ANT theories have some potential, but it has not been developed in a proper way (Saldanha 2003), and within this group a few researchers have tried to combine ANT with Critical Theory in the wake of the Frankfurt School – for example, Whitley’s (1999) work inspired in Habermas. A third group defend ANT as critical per se. They consider that revealing the way collectives hold together and work can be categorized as a form of critique in itself. Doolin and Lower (2002: 74) argue that “the very act of tracing the network and the actions of its constituents... enables a critical light to be shone on the assumed, the mundane and the status quo”. Following the work done by humans and things in their manifold relations may show failures and incongruities in the way networks are constituted and function. John Law, one of the main proponents of ANT, has espoused this view and has developed it in his Aircraft Stories (Law 2002), a research into the failed construction of a fighter jet in the UK. This notion of revelation is present also in Bruno Latour’s works, for example, in Aramis or the love for technology (Latour 1996), another technological failure: this time a suburban automatic train. Latour has offered a more explicit approach to politics in recent years, through his concept of Dingpolitik. According to Latour (2005), politics are not just made of ideas and institutions and not even people, but of things as well; the problem is that they are never represented. Latour asks for a parliament of things, a democracy that is able to re-present things and make them public. After all, etymologically, a thing is what brings people together because it divides them.

    The problem with the idea of revelation inherent to some Actor-Network Theory has been pointed out by Arun Saldanha (2003). According to this author, showing material messiness and incoherence or revealing how things could have been otherwise is usually not enough to criticize a collective. Some collectives and networks should not exist in the first place (a nuclear-weapon factory or Guantanamo prison, for instance). Thus, ANT might be adequate for criticizing the way a factory or a laboratory works (or fails to work), but not for a deep and radical critique of military power or global capitalism, for example. The critique of Actor-Network Theory, so far, seems too local, limited and conservative. At worst, it can become a mere administrative tool to fix things up in complex organizations. As for Latour’s Dingpolitik, it is not clear how his politics may actually be performed in practice: a space for dissension and debate is open in which things are included, but we are left without clues as to how to pass judgement and evaluate conflicting positions. This model seems suspiciously closer to neoliberal democracy with a material twist.

    In my opinion, ANT does have potential for a political critique, but it needs refashioning. There are many things that can be retained from ANT: ontological symmetry, the idea of revelation, the emphasis on empiricism, and the idea that things have to be brought into the political. What has to be changed is the divide between the researcher as a subject and the object of research that Actor-Network Theory paradoxically produces (see Saldanha 2003); the excessive localism and situatedness, and the anti-essentialism, the last two of which are issues inherited from postmodern politics.

    Essentialism and universalism are unavoidable for a truly radical political project, but they have to be emancipatory and counter-hegemonic. My concept of essentialism draws upon Terry Eagleton, whereas universalism is framed in the neo-Marxian terms of Rancière, Badiou and Zizek, that is, a universalism that emerges from below, from the perspective of the oppressed. Eagleton (2004) understands that we need to tackle the essence of being human, if we want to be critical with the social world. For this essence to be fulfilled, the dignity of the human being, not just as an individual, but as a social being, has to be respected and promoted. With regard to universalism, Slavoj Žižek notes that every universality is hegemonized/particularized, but there is a sort of universality that can bee redeeming: it is the universality of those who are “below us”, the abject, neglected and outcast. It is a negative universality to be opposed to Western universalism (Žižek and Daly 2004: 160). As for Alain Badiou (2006) and Jacques Rancière (1995), they relate universality to equality and justice. Rancière (1995: 84) considers that equality is not a goal, but a supposition that has to be posited from the outset. For both philosophers, this kind of universalism is a creative process which has to be continuously updated. In my opinion, a Neo-Marxist approach is needed to develop critical perspectives on society. Neo-Marxism compels us to go beyond the local, the context and the situation—that is, where Actor-Network Theory usually stops—and address structural problems in political terms. It also re-politicizes conflict, as opposed to the managerial approach provided by ANT.

    What I propose is to superimpose ANT theories on the social onto Marxist universalistic tenets on the political. That is, any symmetrical analysis of the social reality should not be afraid of being anchored a priori in universalistic and essentialist notions of truth if it intends to be truly critical. The overlapping, I think, is less violent that it might seem. After all, in both cases, we are dealing with empirical, materialist theories that criticize the linguistic approach to the real.

 Empires are (lethal) artefacts
In the remaining of this paper, I will try to show with an example how both approaches may be fruitfully combined. I will outline an agenda for an archaeological inquiry into the fascist Italian empire in Africa, a topic in which I have been working for the last four years. 

I start from the assumption that fascist colonialism was against the dignity inherent to human nature. That a regime based on racism, political repression, economic exploitation, and mass killings is perverse belongs, for me, to the realm of absolute truths. I do not think that this can, or should, be approached impartially, although I do think that it has to be studied empirically and with objectivity. I would also argue that an empire cannot be grasped locally, although it can be addressed fractally (sensu Law 2002)—if we do not lose sight of the whole to which the fragments refer.

    An archaeological research into this phenomenon is necessary for at least two reasons: firstly, because the “feats” of modern colonialism tend to be forgotten and to be colored in a positive light, tinged with nostalgia and fantasy through the colonial imagery mediated by books and films. Archaeology can provide another imagery to challenge this one, based on the debris of fascism, instead of on its monumental facade and its hollow discursive rhetoric. Secondly, fascist colonialism relied heavily on materiality to make the empire work: archaeology is especially well suited to disentangle past materialities and their ramifications in the present. 

    Benito Mussolini ordered the invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. A few months later, in May 1936, he proclaimed the Italian Empire, which comprised four African countries and several possessions in the Mediterranean. This short-lived empire vanished into thin air even before the armistice of 1943. The network that was the fascist empire has been often misrepresented and idealized in scholarly accounts, political statements and popular memory since 1945. This misrepresentation has occurred in different ways: the intricate industrial technologies that allowed the empire to exist have been often forgotten; the role of things in general has been downplayed, and the atrocities of fascism concealed. Industrial technical knowledge, artefacts and political atrocities are strongly related to each other. Yet there is a four element that is misrepresented or forgotten: the non-modern collectives which were opposed to those spawned by fascism and which eventually defeated it. Those collectives included a particular landscape and environment, traditional knowledge, paths in the forest, ancestors and memories, caves and churches. This topology of African resistance infiltrated and disrupted the topology of domination established by the Italians.

    The Italian Empire was a complex, yet flawed, political machine. Its existence was only possible thanks to the creation of sophisticate yet unstable collectives of humans and non-humans, which were inserted into a thick network of global and historical connections (Nazi Germany, the Second Industrial Revolution, Capitalism). There would have never been an African Italian Empire if it were not from bomber airplanes, mustard gas and tanks, which themselves implied intricate relations of humans and things. The Italians tried to conquer Ethiopia in 1896 and failed, their colonial army vanquished by feudal retinues. What the particular collective that was the Italian colonial army of the late 19th century failed to achieve, the industrial-technological collective of 1935 could carry it out swiftly. Roads, telegraphs and railways, as in any colonial enterprise, were fundamental in the making of the empire. A symmetrical approach to the Italian Empire has to trace the links between telegraphs, colonial manifestos, administrative buildings, futurist aesthetics, fascist ideas and modern weapons. Archaeology, however, should go beyond revealing those links—a task than can be reasonably undertaken by a historian. The role of archaeology, in my opinion, lies in extending the examination to the material outcomes of the collectives’ work: the debris of the network, the whole chaîne-operatoire involved in the production, reproduction and recycling of collectives. Actants, as the name imply, produce actions, but these actions have an effect on the world, which is simultaneously productive and destructive. Sociologists tend to focus on the generative power of collectives and forget the wastage involved in any productive process. Colonial actions implied the generation of racial policies, the urbanization of the land, the building of roads and the exploitation of mines. The destruction entailed by those actions has left archaeological scars: mass graves, burnt-down villages, abandoned agricultural schemes, places of massacre. Archaeology has a second task to fulfil: the exploration of that subtle topology of resistance that I mentioned and that is best approached from material culture and archaeological traces, given the scarcity of texts and oral testimonies.

    With my research team, I have been looking for the many actants and collectives that composed the brutal artefact that was the Fascist Italian Empire in Ethiopia: we have explored the construction of new urban spaces, the factories that exploited the riches of the country, the military bases, and the roads that made the land accessible to the conquerors. But we have also started to look at the elements of the network that resisted and disrupted the smooth functioning of the exploitative machine: the ambiguities and incongruities of the colonial army, as represented by the archaeological artefacts left in abandoned military camps, and the anxieties revealed by fortified places, that point at the instability of the Italian occupation. But that the empire was a lethal artefact is better understood in the places of massacre: the imperial machine was fuelled by blood as much as by gold and steel. A few months ago, we had the occasion to investigate a cave where the Italians killed 800 people, women and children included. The place was abandoned after the massacre in 1939 and since then it has lied as a forgotten testimony of the brutality on which fascist colonialism was based. 

    In conclusion, in an analysis of Italian colonialism in Eastern Africa I do not think that we have to show only how the empire held together (if only for a while) through complex relations between humans and non-humans, as ANT researchers would do; nor to look at the workings of the empire as a localized system, without taking into account its many historical ramifications. I do not think either that we ought to explain its troubles and conflicts as imbalances or incongruities (or not only), but as political and ethical problems. Nevertheless, what we could certainly do is to understand the empire as a complex artefact that gathered around itself people, things, ideas and techniques which simultaneously elicited the creation of opposing networks—other empires and resistance movements. From a symmetrical point of view, an empire is not different from an aircraft or a laboratory. The difference of my approach with that of Latour or Law is that I do not start from a safe distance or from agnosticism, but I consider myself already implicated, ethically and politically, into the object of study and I am not afraid of taking sides. I start from a very clear political position and with a very clear political aim: revealing the doings of fascism in the past as a lesson for the present. Relational materiality is, for me, a good place to begin.

References

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