Blog Week 11

Notes on John Law Material Semiotics, and Donna Haraway Reads ‘The National Geographic’ on Primates.

John Law describes Material Semiotics are a range of social analysis tools and approaches which study the world as social assemblages — actors linked in fragile and performative webs of meaning and connections.

In the video Donna Haraway Reads ‘The National Geographic’ on Primates, Harraway discusses how she approaches studies, in this case The National Geographic magazine, as a cultural critic. She uses the analogy of untangling a ball of yarn, pulling threads and untangling the strings of meaning, and how the social elements are connected. She asks “What gets to count as nature? For who, and when? And how much it costs to produce nature at a particular moment in history, for a particular group of people?”. She goes on to analyse different examples of imagery of nature produced by the white colonial gaze, to decode what the imagery reflects about American ideas of race, sex, and class.

Material semiotics contrasts from the colonial and militaristic assumption of mainstream science, which believes itself to be viewing the world through a lens of perceived objectivity — Donna Harraway points out that objectivity implies detachment, however from a material semiotic standpoint, there is no way of detaching oneself from the material semiotic web. She instead proposes the idea of situated knowledge — an understanding that all forms of knowledge reflect the social conditions that they were produced in.

Law points out some assumptions that Material Semiotics take — firstly that non-human actors in a network are viewed as socially equal with human actors. This is important because it allows one to analyse how every element of a social assemblage influences each other. Another assumption is that the networks are “performative and fragile”. “Performative”, meaning that the connections between actors actually act, they play a role in the social situation, and “fragile”, because the connections are very much non-permanent — they can change or be broken at any time. Another assumption is that the links networks are “messy and multiple”. By assuming that there is no way of shortcutting the complexity of these networks, material semiotics avoids reducing or trying to oversimplify any part of a network.

John Law (2019) Material Semiotics. The Open University: http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2019MaterialSemiotics.pdf

Donna Haraway Reads ‘The National Geographic’ on Primates: https://vimeo.com/123872208