An Actor Network Theory Translation of the Bush Legacy and the Obama Collectif

7 Pages·2009·0.108 MB·English

by  Grant Kien

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
An Actor Network Theory 9(6) 796–802
© 2009 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
Translation of the Bush
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708609348581
Legacy and the Obama http://csc.sagepub.com
Collectif
Grant Kien1
Abstract
Employing Actor-Network Theory as an analytical framework, this article explores
presumptions of reality, power and authority expressed by the Bush collectif. The
article demonstrates both successes and failures of the Bush administration's attempts
to define the terms and contexts of its actions. The author discusses the Obama
administration's success in building of a strong network of alliances and challenges
towards its maintenance.
Keywords
translation, network power, politics
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Anonymous Bush insider (reported by Suskind, 2004)
Reality: Revealed in the practice of relations, reality is demonstrated and mea-
sured by lines of force drawn in the performance of relations (Latour in Kien,
2009).
Although many statements made by George W. Bush and his insiders map an 8-year
tragic comedy of ignorance and misunderestimations, the above quote is perhaps the
most revealing and astute illustration of the Bush collectif’s ontological and epistemo-
logical assumptions. Why collectif? Because in labeling themselves history’s actors
1California State University, East Bay
Kien 797
creating reality, the Bush collectif accidentally began its own actor network theory
(ANT) analysis of itself.1 I take it as my task here to finish what they started.
It turns out that this anonymous insight may have been the most accurate hubristic
prophecy of the lot, for here we are dutifully studying the realities they constructed
for us, as if we actually are the passive reactionaries we’ve been portrayed as. What
the Bush collectif didn’t realize is that in so doing we allocate a new position of
dominance for ourselves in the hybrid network, for it is only in our acts of turning the
actor network—its histories, struggles, victories, and everyday energy—toward our
own ends that we can position ourselves as the rightful voices in translating the
events and moments that comprise us, United States in the biggest sense, as a people.
Collectif, hybrid: An array of relations, links interpenetrations, and processes. A
hybrid collectif can be contrasted with a collective, which is a thing. A col-
lectif includes all that inspires, influences, and touches it. In this understand-
ing of agency, differences and dualism are generated out of partial similari-
ties. Collectifs allocate agency to a particular area of their network, and the
actants located there are then said to be agents (Callon & Law in Kien, 2009).
It may seem tritely simplistic to retranslate the Bush legacy as a comedy of ridicu-
lous statements and attempted redefinitions of the world we inhabit.2 Such reduction-
ism risks insulting people living out the often tragic consequences of these same
statements. Yet, whenever I’ve directly asked people to comment on the Bush legacy,
a list of Bushisms has unfailingly been the first response. Admitted, a casual survey
among my clearly nonconservative circle of friends, highly intelligent as they might
be, is hardly a scientific way to construct a credible definition of the former presi-
dent’s time in office, but then we don’t need to go that far. We can again turn to the
anonymous insider for an understanding of why this seems to be an automatic first
response:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based commu-
nity,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your
judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the
world really works anymore.” (reported by Suskind, 2004)3
The Bush administration invited an automatically comedic interpretation of their
activities by fighting ridiculous, quixotic battles for all the public to see. In their hubris,
the inner sanctum believed they could actually change the rules of reality by simply
saying the rules were changed, as if to inscribe its own translation of reality into the
citizenry through mere utterances. In their milieu of semantic claptrap, horribly cata-
strophic issues were redefined as mere punctuation marks in the fairytale story the
administration told about itself: 9/11, eavesdropping on the citizenry, Hurricane Katrina,
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the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, preemptive secret incarcerations, tacit
approval of torturous methods in American-made penal colonies populated indefinitely
by the elderly and youths, rampant corporate corruption and billions of dollars worth of
no-bid contracts, a willful ignorance toward environmental concerns, a mind-boggling
public debt, and an unprecedented economic catastrophe with global ramifications. The
Bush collectif did not understand that inscription works as a process, an experience
perhaps similar to interpellation. Inscription is not a string of wishful statements with
no firm contextual grounding. Interpreting their words and actions as comedy became
one of the few responses open to an otherwise cynical, disempowered populace; it
became the only avenue open for participation in the daily affairs of democracy. In
their world, it is our own fault that we could not grasp or could not fit into the new
reality that had been invented, which can be basically summed up in a single worn-out
mantra: “The whole world changed on 9/11!”
Inscribed reader: A person in whom a translation has been inscribed, thus an
inscribed reader is prepared to perform the relations the translation has pre-
scribed on encountering the context described by the translation (Latour in
Kien, 2009).
Like Benjamin’s angel of history, there is a certain aesthetic to the way the citizenry
acts that might suggest we have indeed been watching tragedy upon tragedy pileup in
our wake as we advance toward destiny. However, such fatalistic language only buys
into one of the greatest mistakes of the Bush collectif: that the public passively stands
apart from the state, rather than stabilizes it as its base. The language of we versus you
describes a naïve interpretation of power as something one entity holds over another.
It plays on technocratic notions of a core of powerful actors who manipulate and manage
a passive public through a basic hypodermic needle model of communication. It ignores
basic findings and premises well known to communications scholars: that media effects
are actually weak and that cultural factors rather than the content itself will determine
the way that people interpret and use media. Above all, it misjudges the audience by
ignoring the agency of every individual working to stabilize the network by building
alliances with the intent of becoming the dominant voice:
No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and
become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An
eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others. (Latour, 1988b, p. 159)
We are living in a networked world in which all human space has come to be
metaphorically represented by network, which works according to a system of
network power (Hardt & Negri, 2000). This is a dynamic system, the word network
itself describing transformations, translations, and transductions in constant mutation
(Latour, 1999). To rule by decree as the Bush administration operated is perhaps the best
way to make sure no one is part of the network voluntarily. It effectively turns
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everyone into an enemy. It is to rule by fear. It may enlist some new actors in the network
who fear estrangement, but it is even more effectively a sure way to aesthetically split
off part of the network into its own entelechy. However, on a primary level, it fails to
recognize that for all practical purposes there is nowhere else for them to go.
Entelechy: A matrix of networked actors and actants that appears as a singular
entity (Kien, 2009).
In essence, the Bush analysis of how our reality works misunderstands the nature
of network as the model of contemporary society in the context of a globalized world:
1. It assumes something called a nonactor can be part of the network. Rather,
networks are created by actors and actants.
2. It fails to comprehend that all actors and actants unceasingly strive to assert
their own translation and dominate the network with their voice.
3. It misunderstands the enlistment of actors and actants as a conquering of
will, the quashing of individual agency, and the abatement of resistance
when the very opposite is the fact: Even the most brutal force is a form of
persuasion, not dominance, and Newton’s third law is in effect (delayed
effect shouldn’t be misinterpreted as no effect).
After 9/11, we were told that network was the enemy; the Al Qaeda network in
particular. We were told that anyone within our personal networks could be a terrorist.
We were told that we needed policing for our own safety. Moreover, we were shown
that our safety networks were woefully inadequate (especially so in the cases of 9/11,
Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing market, and later the financial system).
The Bush administration posited its authoritarian voice as the solution to the insecu-
rities of the nation, but in so doing reified for itself a notion that it could contain within
itself all that it needed to succeed on its own terms. As if they believed they had magical
powers and merely needed to say some magic words, the Bush collectif did not see
itself as subject to a reality outside of its own desires. It must be recognized that to some
degree this strategy actually succeeded.
Enlistment: When one actant persuades another into an allied network (Latour
in Kien, 2009).
As if commanding a cult or mafia rather than the world’s self-declared defenders
of freedom, Bush stated, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” This tried and
true colonial strategy of divide and conquer worked for the past 8 years in so much
as anyone who was not deemed in was out, and once out of sight, out of mind. For
aesthetic purposes, this was a neat and tidy way to sweep problems under the carpet
in Guantanamo Bay, the federal courts, and other places out of the public’s view.
Unfortunately, that strategy also entailed ostracizing half the nation (deeply repressing
some segments of society) and systematically offending almost every nation that did
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not declare itself part of the coalition of the willing. This strategy was doomed to repeat
the same failings that brought the collapse of colonialism: It would be impossible
through this method to consolidate a network as vast as the United States, even if the
claim to empire were true. That wouldn’t stop them from trying though.
Network consolidation: The appearance of singularity of a network, since net-
works are ordered with materials and strategies, creating aesthetic patterns of
generated effects of power and hierarchy (Kien, 2009).
The weight of the system on an ever-shrinking inner core of authority figures con-
sidered trustworthy would inevitably lead to less capacity for checks, balances, and
enforcement even as policy demanded increasingly stricter oversight. The results:
cronyism that put ill-prepared yes men and women into positions of power in agencies
whose oversight arms had been ignored if not cut outright (case in point, the silencing
of CIA evidence that ran contrary to the justification for the war in Iraq). This strategy
left Mr. Bush at the end of his presidency sitting in the middle of a crumbling house
of cards, ironically somewhat alone as his former confidants began to see the wisdom
of distancing themselves from Bush’s legacy.
Authority figure: An actant that resists individuation in its performance as part
of an institution’s administrative machinery (Latour in Kien, 2009).
The Bush collectif’s heavy-handed approach lacked what Callon (1986) called
“generalized symmetry,” the explanation of conflicting viewpoints and arguments using
the same terms or voice for all points of view, not changing voices to highlight or
privilege specific understandings of a phenomenon. Rather, it shuts conflicting viewpoints
out of the system completely, forcing them to form their own collectifs. The Bush
collectif had misunderstood the very nature of opposition, seeing it as a force pushing
in from the outside. In a networked world, opposition comes from inside the array,
as new alliances form and struggle to usurp the array from which they came (Latour,
1988b). Under the philosophy of the Bush collectif, there could be no unifying vision
for the nation, let alone for a world in which entire nations and cultures had been labeled
evil, and here is exactly the point on which the Obama collectif was able to capitalize
so grandly.
As many pundits pointed out, the John McCain collectif realized early on that he
was running a presidential campaign not only against Barak Obama but also against
the entire 8-year Bush legacy. He scrambled to become a voice Americans could iden-
tify as their own, but in his overzealousness blundered into the same habit as Bush,
defining a real America that somehow stood as more authentic than fake Americas,
such as New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Truth: A declaration whose alliances are intact. A sentence with insufficient allies
appears false (Latour in Kien, 2009).
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However, in spite of attempts to characterize him as inauthentic, Barak Obama
spoke of a real America that wasn’t split by notions of validity but rather was fueled
by hope and opportunity. He spoke of real hopes and dreams, of real problems that
seemed to suggest real answers. He spoke clearly to the reality-based community that
characterizes everyday America. For most Americans—perhaps even for many global
citizens—Barak Obama appeared to be a figure prepared to speak truth to power. In
so doing, his national network found a broad and willing populace ready to use their
long-maligned agency to allocate him as their agent for change.
Agent: An actant located in an area that has agency allocated to it by a collectif
(Callon & Law in Kien, 2009).
To what extent can we expect Obama to remain an agent of change? Success
depends on how inclusively we’re inclined to think of the network. The ANT principle
of relativity (Latour, 1988b) tells us relations between actants are always unequal, that
everything is relative and imbued with inequity, that there are winners and losers in
every relationship. However, lines of force don’t have to be adversarial in nature. Positive
bonds of love, friendship, and loyalty on the whole outperform negative relations of
brute force.
That’s not to say there aren’t unequal relationships but rather that we have it in us to
give and take as we see fit. If we take the ANT measure of success to be the growth and
maintenance of the largest array possible, the Obama collectif will be best advised to
pay attention to create authority figures who take it as their task the enlistment of actors
through emphasis on their commonly inscribed experiences. At the same time, Obama
the agent must be mindful of voices within the actor network that threaten to rise and
claim part of it as their own collectif, to keep present in mind that the struggle for domi-
nance among actors is unceasing even in networks deemed virtuous. In short, it would
do Obama well to deal with reality as the reality-based community experiences it—as
the everyday practice of relations that demarcate lines of force—and to be flexible in
the range of techniques used to persuade the network into maintenance and stability.
Declaration of Conflict of Interest
The author declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author declared no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
Notes
1. With apologies to Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law, and the remainder of the actor
network theory collectif.
2. For example, see <http://www.plattbridger.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/bushisms.htm> or <http://
www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jRSQLtDQr4QS6lNdlP3ZGZlMloMQD
95FORSG0>, or simply search the keyword Bushism on the Internet.
802 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 9(6)
3. See <http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=
103x105517>
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Bio
Grant Kien, PhD, is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Communication at Califor-
nia State University, East Bay. His research focuses on Technography, qualitative approaches to
technology research, globalization, communication and culture, mobility and communications
networks as performative, symbolic, and interpretive spaces. Recent works include a full-length
book entitled Global Technography: Ethnography in the Age of Mobility (Peter Lang, 2009),
guest editing a partial special issue of the scholarly journal Qualitative Inquiry (Sage, 2008) on
technology and qualitative research, and co-editing the volume Everyday Life and Post-Global
Network (Peter Lang, in press).