Actor-Networks and the Possible Ends of Human Historical Agency

In many humanities and social science disciplines, the concept of agency has for a long time carried a neutral or even negative value, tainted by one or another theory of association from the past, whether methodological individualism or political liberalism. The situation in history has always been somewhat different, the agent hanging on. This historian's agent has almost always been conceived as the human agent. In recent years, however, spurred especially by the social scientist of science Bruno Latour and his associates in what is called Actor-network theory, an apparently very different use of the notion of the actor and of agency has come to the fore. In conjunction with other posthumanistic theories, we see an inclination to treat different kinds of things--animals, aspirin, or Asia--as comparable to human actors in trying to work out the character of chains of events, of networks and to replace conventional structure and agency both.

Working with an empirical historical project on later medieval English travel and communication networks, this paper will try to test the advantages of these posthumanistic approaches for routine historical work, sketching the advantages of this networked, thing-sensitive approach, including its sensitivity to a wide variety of connections and a new way of thinking of historical context. By the same token, something seems left out and the question of whether and how to fit choice, consciousness, and thought in is a challenge the paper argues is essential for historians to meet. Reflection on Latour's notions of mediators, intermediaries, and actants alongside classical ideas like causes, selves, and agents will let us assess whether historians can really give up these notions in our accounts of the past, or whether we'll need to re-establish or redescribe a new theory of the distinctly human in history.