Page 52 - KATE_JOHNSTON_2017

These arguments also suggest that the multiple sites for ethnographic fieldwork, that

is the seascapes and landscapes that are implicated in the production of objects, are

biocultural collaborations – in the sense that Val Plumwood argues when she says that ‘the

outcome of any given landscape is at a minimum a biocultural, a collaborative product that its

multiple species and creative elements must be credited for’ (2006, p. 125). Likewise, the

social is ‘simultaneously technical, architectural, textual, and natural’ (Law 1991, p.166). An

understanding of place as a collaborative product rejects the polarisation of the domains of

culture and matter/nature. Such an idea can be furthered through Bruno Latour’s notion of the

“flat social”, which Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce expand on when writing about the

16
relationship between power and the material (in Bennett & Joyce 2010, p. 6) . They argue

for the social to be understood as more than a backdrop to a material world, or culture to exist

not merely in terms of the representational. In an intellectual departure from culture as

representation they advocate ‘the social is performed by material things just as much as by

humans’ (2010, p. 3).

[I]n this “flat” social, forms of addressing the social that are part of a disciplinary
common sense, such as foreground and background, figure and context, actor and
system, and therefor micro and macro, are all dissolved. Historical outcomes and
events are not therefore the reflection of something else which lies hidden beneath
the surface of things [footnote taken out]. It is the “surface” itself that constitutes
the effective level at which material and semiotic relations are entangled with one
another. (Bennett & Joyce 2010, p. 6)

A methodological challenge that arises is how to research what Bennett & Joyce call

the ‘surface’ (2010, p. 6). If the surface consists of a configuration of social, material and

semiotic relations, then how does one study the surface of a site? And what do we do with

local/global scales in relation to the surface? Latour, of course, takes the network as a starting

point. The word network ‘designate[s] a mode of inquiry that learns to list, at the occasion of

40