An exploration of the economization of the ocean through the small modifications that enable grea... more An exploration of the economization of the ocean through the small modifications that enable great transformations of nature. The ocean is the site of an ongoing transformation that is aimed at creating new economic opportunities and prosperity. In Nature-Made Economy, Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse explore how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation, and how living nature is wrested into the economy even as nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy. The authors' innovative methodological and conceptual approaches examine the economy by focusing on surprising and numerous “little tools”—such as maps and policy documents, quality patrols, and dietary requirements for the enhancement of species' biological propensities—that value, direct, reorder, accomplish, and sometimes fail to serve our ends, but also add up to great change. Throughout Nature-Made Economy, Asdal and Huse follow one species, the Atlantic cod, and ex...
Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experimen... more Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating consumers' valuations of farmed fish, and these are almost comical in their painstaking attention to mundane details. However, when looked into closely, they provide key insights into commodification processes and the scholarly literature to understand them. Most importantly, their analysis allows us to grasp how commodities do not simply emerge as the outcome of a one way process directed towards the market, but through a relational process that jointly works with and acts upon things and people, markets and production. The paper works with the notion of co-modification to trace an...
In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with polit... more In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with politics. Nevertheless STS research tends to disregard the work of conventional political institutions such as parliaments, especially in the politics of nature, which is often seen as delegating 'nature' to science. Parliaments work on nature-objects through documents; paperwork is crucial in its procedures for delegating an issue to be further worked upon at other sites, for securing the issue's return and for enabling a decision. This mode of circulating an issue amounts to a central infrastructure for taking nature into account in politics; this infrastructure enables 'assembling work' as a specific mode of parliamentary practice. In the late nineteenth century the Norwegian parliament handled a controversy over whaling. New species, questions and publics were entangled with the whale issue through the parliament's work, its tools and procedures. As such, parliament enabled, worked upon and modified the issue. By assembling the whale issue it performed a politics of nature in rich, complex ways. Hence, understanding the specific site where an issue is taken up is necessary in order to grasp its trajectory and to understand how conventional political sites do politics of nature in practice
Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in w... more Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call ‘modifying work’. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to ‘materiality’ or the ‘materialities of objects’, a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take ‘the environment’ into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to ‘materiality’ or ‘materialities’ is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together.
In `Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lyn... more In `Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lynch (1988) explores how the animal body is transformed into a scientific object in the laboratory. How did the laboratory become a (relatively) closed space in which scientists, the experts, were delegated the task of negotiating and transforming the interpretative sense of the animal — from sentient beings to analytic objects — as tools in a scientific machinery? By exploring a parliamentary controversy on experimental medicine at the turn of the 20th century I argue that this depended on a reworking of the status of the animal body, as well as the status of the laboratory. Crucial to this was social theory; specifically, utilitarian reasoning. Thus, what we need to study — this paper argues — is not simply the ways in which the practices of annual experimentation were met with opposition and critiques, but also how these practices came to be culturally and politically accepted, and what...
Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanato... more Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article ex...
What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and ... more What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting.
In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and ... more In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the 'critical limits' of nature under the impact of acidiWcation was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not 'Nature' as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the eVect of this process was to produce 'a nature as a whole', in a process of uniWcation. This I argue can only be understood relationally: 'Nature' is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour's work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look Wrst at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2008
The aim o f this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather ho... more The aim o f this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities o f government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way o f a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context o f the microphysics o f power, as techniques o f domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion 'tool o f democracy'. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics o f emissions down to earth, thus enabling the environmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracywas never like we thought it to be.
It often seems to be taken for granted that numbers produce effects and that practices of account... more It often seems to be taken for granted that numbers produce effects and that practices of accounting enhance authority. This also goes for accounting and the environment. This paper shares this belief and argues that practices of accounting have been a crucial technology for taking nature or 'the environment' into account in the postwar era. Nevertheless, the 'constitutive turn' in the studies of accounting should not tempt us to leave unexplored the limitation of accounting practices and the inabilities to govern by numbers. With a point of departure in a pollution control agency, the paper explores the making of a nonauthoritative office. It points to the emergence of what is labelled 'accounting intimacy' rather than the exertion of government at a distance. The paper also points to the ways in which the agency, rather than building a separate and distinct authority, came to reproduce the actor subjected to being governed, i.e., the polluting factory, within its own office. The author argues that this can be related to the investment in a shared 'technical interest' and the belief that the right (emission) number in itself would be sufficient to move the factory. The paper then explores the conditions for which numbers nevertheless came to have effects. The argument is that this should be seen as inextricably linked to the emergence of an 'interesting object', i.e., 'the environment' and an environmental interest, within the office. Thus, we need to pay attention to the formation of interests, and as accounting scholars turn to 'the environment', the latter should not be taken for granted.
Crying out for more science does not solve all problems; rather, it makes it easy to shrug off re... more Crying out for more science does not solve all problems; rather, it makes it easy to shrug off responsibility for them. This is rightly pointed out by the influential Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim in his critique of positivist science. The critique of positivism in itself is to steer clear of problems that we all ought to be addressing. In confronting Skjervheim's critique of positivism with post-constructivism, this article deals with social science's circumvention of the nature–culture relationship.
What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and ... more What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting. Keywords academic disciplines and traditions, archiving and collecting practices, engagement, intervention, other Those who believe it is possible to reduce one actor to another suddenly find themselves enriched by something that comes from beyond: beyond the facts,
In the last few years the tradition of science studies has started to turn âoutwardsâ and eng... more In the last few years the tradition of science studies has started to turn âoutwardsâ and engage in empirical studies of politics. This article is part of this movement. I present a cluster of selected stories to show how a specific form of governable nature was created in a particular set of scientific and technical practices. Through these stories I show how a new governable entity called âfluorineâ altered established policies in Norway. I also show that this material entity âfluorineâ became governable because it was quantified. This quantification helped to create âpolitical fluorineâ as a crucial object in real political events. Thus, the article is on the significance of numerical technologies in the making of the political. However, the politics of nature and its objects, come into being (or not) when they encounter other entities, such as the factory or âthe economyâ. The ambition of this is article is to demonstrate the ways in which these clashes or co...
An exploration of the economization of the ocean through the small modifications that enable grea... more An exploration of the economization of the ocean through the small modifications that enable great transformations of nature. The ocean is the site of an ongoing transformation that is aimed at creating new economic opportunities and prosperity. In Nature-Made Economy, Kristin Asdal and Tone Huse explore how the ocean has been harnessed to become a space of capital investment and innovation, and how living nature is wrested into the economy even as nature, in turn, resists, adapts to, or changes the economy. The authors' innovative methodological and conceptual approaches examine the economy by focusing on surprising and numerous “little tools”—such as maps and policy documents, quality patrols, and dietary requirements for the enhancement of species' biological propensities—that value, direct, reorder, accomplish, and sometimes fail to serve our ends, but also add up to great change. Throughout Nature-Made Economy, Asdal and Huse follow one species, the Atlantic cod, and ex...
Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experimen... more Social studies of science have for many years analyzed and demonstrated the key role of experiments to science and the making of facts. But what is the role of experiments in market work? And what, if anything, can we learn from them about markets and commodities? It is perhaps tempting to say that we can learn very little. This paper investigates a series of market research experiments investigating consumers' valuations of farmed fish, and these are almost comical in their painstaking attention to mundane details. However, when looked into closely, they provide key insights into commodification processes and the scholarly literature to understand them. Most importantly, their analysis allows us to grasp how commodities do not simply emerge as the outcome of a one way process directed towards the market, but through a relational process that jointly works with and acts upon things and people, markets and production. The paper works with the notion of co-modification to trace an...
In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with polit... more In the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with politics. Nevertheless STS research tends to disregard the work of conventional political institutions such as parliaments, especially in the politics of nature, which is often seen as delegating 'nature' to science. Parliaments work on nature-objects through documents; paperwork is crucial in its procedures for delegating an issue to be further worked upon at other sites, for securing the issue's return and for enabling a decision. This mode of circulating an issue amounts to a central infrastructure for taking nature into account in politics; this infrastructure enables 'assembling work' as a specific mode of parliamentary practice. In the late nineteenth century the Norwegian parliament handled a controversy over whaling. New species, questions and publics were entangled with the whale issue through the parliament's work, its tools and procedures. As such, parliament enabled, worked upon and modified the issue. By assembling the whale issue it performed a politics of nature in rich, complex ways. Hence, understanding the specific site where an issue is taken up is necessary in order to grasp its trajectory and to understand how conventional political sites do politics of nature in practice
Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in w... more Paperwork does not simply describe an external reality ‘out there’: Documents also take part in working upon, modifying, and transforming that reality. That is the overriding argument of this paper, which uses a practice-oriented approach to demonstrate how this is being done. The paper pursues the argument by analyzing what the author suggests we call ‘modifying work’. Very concretely, the paper demonstrates how a bureaucratic document, as the result of a series of modification work, may come to transform an issue radically. The paper is written, in part, as a contribution to the discussion related to what is often called the scholarly turn to ‘materiality’ or the ‘materialities of objects’, a turn that is often considered as a way of taking seriously the materiality of nature objects and pressing questions relating to how scholars within the social sciences and humanities may take ‘the environment’ into account in our studies. The argument of this paper is that if we are to analyze and take nature objects into account, a thorough attention to ‘materiality’ or ‘materialities’ is not sufficient. Rather than suggesting that there might be a conflict or an opposition between a turn to words and a turn to objects or materialities, it suggests that we think about this differently: Words and materialities, the material and the semiotic, must be handled together.
In `Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lyn... more In `Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object' Michael Lynch (1988) explores how the animal body is transformed into a scientific object in the laboratory. How did the laboratory become a (relatively) closed space in which scientists, the experts, were delegated the task of negotiating and transforming the interpretative sense of the animal — from sentient beings to analytic objects — as tools in a scientific machinery? By exploring a parliamentary controversy on experimental medicine at the turn of the 20th century I argue that this depended on a reworking of the status of the animal body, as well as the status of the laboratory. Crucial to this was social theory; specifically, utilitarian reasoning. Thus, what we need to study — this paper argues — is not simply the ways in which the practices of annual experimentation were met with opposition and critiques, but also how these practices came to be culturally and politically accepted, and what...
Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanato... more Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article ex...
What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and ... more What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting.
In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and ... more In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the 'critical limits' of nature under the impact of acidiWcation was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not 'Nature' as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the eVect of this process was to produce 'a nature as a whole', in a process of uniWcation. This I argue can only be understood relationally: 'Nature' is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour's work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look Wrst at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.
Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2008
The aim o f this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather ho... more The aim o f this paper is not to explore what democracy is in some normative sense, but rather how, and with what, democracy gets carried out in practice. In doing this the author seeks to rework the focus on the tactics and materialities o f government developed within Foucault's work on governmentality, as well as in actor-network theory, by way o f a deliberative approach: Political technologies are not to be understood in a context o f the microphysics o f power, as techniques o f domination exclusively, but as tools for public involvement, for democratisation and deliberation as well, it is argued. Hence the notion 'tool o f democracy'. Empirically the paper attends to the early 1970s and explores the contestation over a power plant that never came into existence. It demonstrates that non-existent objects may have long lasting political effects: The power plant took part in bringing a politics o f emissions down to earth, thus enabling the environmental issue as well as another political landscape. By exploring these events, closely and historically, the paper argues that perhaps democracywas never like we thought it to be.
It often seems to be taken for granted that numbers produce effects and that practices of account... more It often seems to be taken for granted that numbers produce effects and that practices of accounting enhance authority. This also goes for accounting and the environment. This paper shares this belief and argues that practices of accounting have been a crucial technology for taking nature or 'the environment' into account in the postwar era. Nevertheless, the 'constitutive turn' in the studies of accounting should not tempt us to leave unexplored the limitation of accounting practices and the inabilities to govern by numbers. With a point of departure in a pollution control agency, the paper explores the making of a nonauthoritative office. It points to the emergence of what is labelled 'accounting intimacy' rather than the exertion of government at a distance. The paper also points to the ways in which the agency, rather than building a separate and distinct authority, came to reproduce the actor subjected to being governed, i.e., the polluting factory, within its own office. The author argues that this can be related to the investment in a shared 'technical interest' and the belief that the right (emission) number in itself would be sufficient to move the factory. The paper then explores the conditions for which numbers nevertheless came to have effects. The argument is that this should be seen as inextricably linked to the emergence of an 'interesting object', i.e., 'the environment' and an environmental interest, within the office. Thus, we need to pay attention to the formation of interests, and as accounting scholars turn to 'the environment', the latter should not be taken for granted.
Crying out for more science does not solve all problems; rather, it makes it easy to shrug off re... more Crying out for more science does not solve all problems; rather, it makes it easy to shrug off responsibility for them. This is rightly pointed out by the influential Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim in his critique of positivist science. The critique of positivism in itself is to steer clear of problems that we all ought to be addressing. In confronting Skjervheim's critique of positivism with post-constructivism, this article deals with social science's circumvention of the nature–culture relationship.
What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and ... more What is context and how to deal with it? The context issue has been a key concern in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This is linked to the understanding that science is culture. But how? The irreductionist program from the early eighties sought to solve the problem by doing away with context altogether—for the benefit of worlds in the making. This special issue takes its points of departure in this irreductionist program, its source of inspirations, as well as its reworkings. The aim is not to solve the context problem but rather to experiment with context and what we label contexting. Keywords academic disciplines and traditions, archiving and collecting practices, engagement, intervention, other Those who believe it is possible to reduce one actor to another suddenly find themselves enriched by something that comes from beyond: beyond the facts,
In the last few years the tradition of science studies has started to turn âoutwardsâ and eng... more In the last few years the tradition of science studies has started to turn âoutwardsâ and engage in empirical studies of politics. This article is part of this movement. I present a cluster of selected stories to show how a specific form of governable nature was created in a particular set of scientific and technical practices. Through these stories I show how a new governable entity called âfluorineâ altered established policies in Norway. I also show that this material entity âfluorineâ became governable because it was quantified. This quantification helped to create âpolitical fluorineâ as a crucial object in real political events. Thus, the article is on the significance of numerical technologies in the making of the political. However, the politics of nature and its objects, come into being (or not) when they encounter other entities, such as the factory or âthe economyâ. The ambition of this is article is to demonstrate the ways in which these clashes or co...
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Papers by Kristin Asdal