In Flux

Actor-Network Theory, Poetry, & Critical Making

Kelsey Dufresne


keywords

poetry, actor-network theory, feminism, critical making, pedagogy

  Artist Statement

“But in any case, such an interweaving of language and things, in a space common to both, presupposes an absolute privilege on the part of writing” - Michel Foucault, 1966



“Literature was never only words, never merely immaterial verbal construction. Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other.” - Katherine Hayles, 2002



“[Glitch] mobility is gorgeous, slippery, keyed up, catastrophic. It is the thing that keeps us blurry and unbound, pushing back against hegemony” - Legacy Russell, 2020

1   Introduction

In literature courses, a pervasive task is unlearning the association and identification of the author as speaker - especially for poetic works. When readers exclusively read the poet as the speaker, or the “I” of the work, then symbolism, infused meaning, and illustrative images become dubbed as biographical markers - even when fictionalized. In decentering the author as speaker, students and readers are challenged to understand the text as an individual work in addition to, rather than a direct result of, the biographical context it may carry. As Zach Payne writes: “So, when you are reading a poem, your first question shouldn’t be What is the poet saying? Rather ask, What is the speaker saying? In adding that extra lens of nuance, there is a whole world of understanding” (2020). Similarly, Jason Miller identifies that a poem is what a moment feels like (2017). But what connections, memories, relationships, ideas are entangled and exasperated by that moment and that feeling?

Further complicating this dynamism: texts are in flux. In engaging with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” through an arts-based approach with a community of non-experts, Chelsea Bihlmeyer writes: “I observed a relationship between text and context, author and audience in this specific discourse community, who demonstrated three arguments. First, a work is not singular and fixed. Second, meaning is not inherent to a work. And third, meaning is not singular and fixed” (74). As Bihlmeyer’s work emphasizes, we tend to associate literature as that which is stagnant; however, texts change because we do. The way and manner we read something, and what we learn from it, will be different in five, ten, and fifty years. Texts, their lessons and meanings, are in flux because we are.

The fluidity of literature, especially in relation to time, readers, and understanding, aligns with Actor-Network Theory (ANT). ANT posits a greater focus on all facets of a network of associations, including non-human actants (such as trees, worms, clouds, and a feeling of joy) and can assist in encouraging students to consider broader relationships written into the poem, as well as those manifested by the relationship/s between the reader, writer, speaker and poem itself. Thus, this work contributes to the growing field of digital and experiential learning and falling at the nexus of theory and praxis for poetry pedagogy and digital humanities.

By employing critical making to construct a video portrayal of the poetic elements and networks, we are able to see how they are constantly in flux, moving and evolving, and specific to any specific reader of a poem. All the more, the fluidity of networks, namely with ANT, juxtaposes the static-nature of poetic materiality. As such, ANT may lead students to also ask What is the very page saying, and what is it saying to the speaker and to me? How are these different?

In exploring this argument, I studied "Morning Glories” by Mary Oliver (1994) to address: How can we study and learn from a poem by prioritizing ANT?

2   Groundings

In calling for ANT considerations among the literary, Rita Felski (2016) notes: “What is an actor? For ANT, it is anything that makes a difference” (748) and “All actors exist via their relations to other actors, and humans are no different in this regard; we depend not only on obvious support systems—food, air, early care-givers—but also on the less obvious: software, serotonin inhibitors, and shoes” (2016, p. 748). Felski’s framing of ANT aligns with John Law’s emphasis the role of non-humans in the social: “networks are composed not only of people, but also of machines, animals, texts, money, architectures - any material you care to mention” (1992, p. 381-382). Similarly, Bruno Latour pointedly addresses that “An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action” (1996, p. 373).

Latour demonstrates the capacities of ANT as a method, where “ANT is not about traced networks, but about a network-tracing activity” (1996, p. 378). Such tracing then aligns with Law’s vivid claim that “social structure is better treated as a verb than as a noun” (1992, p. 389). And of the network, Felski explains that network, and networking, refers to “including as many actors as feasible in our research, the researcher included, and tracing the complexities of their interactions” (2016, p. 749).

And as we look to a poem on a page, digitally rendered, and mediated through artistic adaptation - Jörgen Schäfer reminds us that “Computer systems and networks are not mere channels for the transmission of messages” (2010, p. 26), and that the digital, the technical, and the electronic are elements needing great consideration in networks (2010, p. 55). As Katherine Hayles writes: “[digital technologies] put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language” (2008, p. 186).

In studying Rita Wong’s poetic works, Matthew Zantingh (2013) similarly argues: “ANT seeks to make materiality and the nonhuman matter by granting them agency, thereby including them in accounts of the social… This theory stems from an attempt to rectify the artificial divide that [Latour] argues emerges from the modern period between the (human) subject and its (nonhuman) object” (p. 627). Importantly, this deconstruction of binaries (namely the human and the nonhuman) aligns strongly with the principles of Data Feminism. As such, I draw upon D'Ignazio and Klein’s call to “embrace emotion and embodiment” as a facet of data feminism (2020, p. 77). They illustrate the harm of false binaries, such as of reason and emotion, which carries a lengthy gendered history, and how “Decorative elements… are associated with messy feelings--or, worse, represent stealthy… attempts at emotional persuasion. Data visualization has even been named as ‘the unempathetic art’ by designer Mushon Zer-Aviv because of its emphatic rejection of emotion” (p. 77). I lean into emotion through this analysis, which also aligns with Donna Haraway’s framing of situated knowledge (1988) as a “practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (p. 585).

Concrete poetry, which prioritizes the visual as a rendering of the poem, serves as a valuable framework that this project falls in line with. The Poetry Beyond Text project and research team (Roberts et al., 2011) explains that concrete poetry is a facet of visual poetry: “Drawing upon both textual and visual modes of signification, concrete poetry is thus a hybrid between text and image, and forces readers to oscillate between reading and viewing modes.” Importantly, they emphasize the role of the reader in concrete poetry: “Concrete poetry puts the reader centre-stage: it offers merely incentives, naked linguistic structures, mental play-areas, but it is up to the reader and his or her poetic imagination to fill in the blanks.” As such, we can see how ANT applies to this poetic genre in that it is reliant on the recognition of associations brought in by the reader. Similarly, both concrete and visual poetry are evident in digital poetry (Roberts et al., 2011), where “the digital medium [is used] in a meaningfully distinct manner” with poetic works. Zakiah Noh, Siti Zaleha Zainal Abidin, and Nasiroh Omar (2019) write: “Digital visual art is a nontraditional, computer-generated art form. It conveys information from the poem without emphasizing the detailed features of the poem text. Researchers extract the poem’s meaning and identify its metaphor as a main element in their visual art illustration” (p. 173) and “The advancement in digital technology has brought the traditional method of poetry learning into the digital platform” (p. 193).

Lastly, I am cognizant of the fact that I am working with a published, existing, tangible, and material work - with actants and relationships I may never be fully aware of. As Bihlmeyer (2021) asks: “How does an audience understand and co-create meaning in an object after it has been offered for consumption?” (p. 72). Thus, I rely on critical making to explore this published poetic work. Here, I follow Garnet Hertz’s identification of critical making as a concept and methodology of making -- prioritizing intentionality, critical analysis, and the opportunity to learn through experimentation and doing (2016). With critical making, I draw upon Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020) and the role of remixing: “The spirit of remixing is about finding ways to innovate with what’s been given, creating something new from something already there” (p. 134).

As these groundings strive to illuminate, there is much work illustrating the applicability of ANT in the literary realm, yet this work pointedly aims to conjoin ANT, feminist strategies, and digital-based critical making to continue contributing to ANT’s methodological goals as a “network-tracing activity” (Latour, 1996, p. 378).

3   Methods

In order to address how ANT can help students and readers better engage with poetry and further differentiate the author and the speaker, I look to upon Latour (2005) and Law (1992) and their work with ANT to develop a visual-based moving depiction to study "Morning Glories” by Mary Oliver (1994) where I investigate how utilizing this theory and drawing it into poetry lessons can help decenter the role of the author as the “I,” help encourage students to consider non-human actants, and potentially provide richer, more dynamic readings. In doing so, I explored how ANT may permit the reader to create distance from a text by tracing and identifying networks and patterns that they too are part of by identifying and mapping the different relationships, networks, and connections revealed in a poem.

I selected this poet because I have never read, studied, or worked with Mary Oliver’s poetry in the past, and I gravitated towards this particular poem because of the titular flowers and my personal affinity for nature. Of great note - this poem does not actually invoke the “I” - rather there is an omniscient narrator and speaker, which perhaps furthers my emphasis on divorcing the author from the speaker (with no specificity with the “I” or speaker, we can assess that the speaker could be anyone/everyone/no one).

As Hayles notes: “the [electronic literature] medium lends itself to experimental practice” (Hayles, 2008, p. 17). Thus, this work relied on great experimentation through creation. In using a standard Windows Video Editor, I generated a video-based collage of my personal network with “Morning Glories.” Before I read the poem, I thought briefly of how I could visually relay the experience of engaging with a poem and its corresponding network, and this continued to evolve as I read the poem, studied it, and tried to represent my readership in relationship to the written word. After generating the video rendition of the network, I also created three data visualizations that explore the same network and relations with data I compiled from the poem.

Through this, I strived to offer a supplement to the video, but also craft a juxtaposition between what is traditionally understood as indicative of data - and that which is not.

4   Morning Glories: Poem and Representations

Morning Glories by Mary Oliver

Blue and dark blue
rose and deepest rose
white and pink they

are everywhere in the diligent
cornfield rising and swaying
in their reliable

finery in the little
fling of their bodies their
gear and tackle

all caught up in the cornstalks.
The reaper's story is the story
of endless work of

work careful and heavy but the
reaper cannot
separate them out there they

are in the story of his life
bright random useless
year after year

taken with the serious tons
weeds without value humorous
beautiful weeds.








For the purpose of this description, I am focusing on four key facets: 1) me and Mary Oliver, 2) pacing and cutting of video and/or image, 3) the inclusion of audio, and 4) time.

The above video is deeply personal; rooted in me as a reader at this exact time, in this place, in this particular moment of living and being. The video opens with my hands flipping through my copy of Mary Oliver’s poetry collection, Devotions (2019), emphasizing the identification of a reader. Yet, the absence of a reader’s face, my face, illustrates the ambiguity of my relationship with this poem, this poet, and my understanding. I, like this work, am in flux. Conversely, a singular image of Mary Oliver demonstrates my limited knowledge of her, her work, and her life. The singularity of her representation illustrates how I currently know her.

Quick cuts between each individual word of the poem deconstructs the whole into parts; echoing how we would read a poem out loud, word for word. Yet, as the video progresses, this linearity quickly crumbles, as the visualized reading relies on drawn connections and tracings that relays associations: colors, scenes, images.

The audio provides another layer to this work. Firstly, my auditory reading of the poem does not align with the visual display of the poem. The disjointed sensory displays thus relay the poem in flux. Secondly, and simultaneously, the sound of birds can be heard -- which I heard and recorded from my home as I read this poem for the first time.

The video itself relays a set time: after a few minutes, it ends. One can watch it again, or not. I see this as a limitation, yet also a great advantage. The finitude revels in the ending, cutting off the display of the networks -- despite the reality of the networks, the associations, and the tracings not bound by this scope of time. Yet, this also illustrates how my reading of this poem, and my connections with and through this poem, may be different tomorrow. A new visualization, or an extended one, would be necessary to capture this.

Conversely, the below visualizations serve as juxtaposing network displays.





This visualization relays the quantified points of the network -- allowing certain relationships to be highlighted and emphasized. Created with Data Sketch, I aimed for this visualization to mirror the shape of a morning glory: a circular bloom. In doing so, I looked to nature in striving to relay data -- as also seen in the coloring of the visual that mirrors the rose and deep rose of Mary Oliver’s morning glories. Yet, this visual is limited due to its narrow capacity for interactivity and engagement - which I explore more fully below.

 

Unlike the circular display, this web-based visualization constructed with Flourish prioritizes user-interactivity and exploration. Only when the user clicks on the dots are the words and their connections made clear. Additionally, there is great user autonomy in that the visual can be modified, moved, and completely rearranged -- aligning with Law and Latour’s understandings of ANT as an action to be performed and explored (Law, 1992, p. 389; Latour, 1996, p. 378). Yet, we once more see the coloring of morning glories carried into the poetic representations and mappings.

 

 

The final visualization is a circular hierarchy art, also made with Flourish. Like the initial circular visualization, the shape of the focal flowers is once more represented with earth tones, yet greater interactivity is incorporated to display the numerical weight of words, images, and associations. Also important here is the display of weight: nature carries a heavier weight, or more space in the visual, than time or memories. Additionally, from this visual it is clear that the words “the” and “and” are mentioned the most from this visual, but it also illustrates how I experienced the poem as mediated by the page and the computer screen.

In further considering the role of interactivity across all these depictions, the interactivity found in varying in degrees with these charts aligns with that which is elicited by this very website: to read and to learn, a user must scroll and engage. Thus, you, the reader, are brought into the experience of tracing and exploring networks - just as ANT calls for (Latour, 1996; Felski, 2016). Moreover, this embracement and emphasis on multimodality, from the website and the static poem to the video and visualizations, strives to illuminate the capacity of networks that exist through and within technologies (Hayles, 2008).

Collectively, all these products relay similar data across their various styles and modalities, and their unified positioning here demonstrates the difference between that which we readily accepted as data (such as the above charts) and that which is not (such as the above video). All the more, they all display a differentiated understanding of this poem, as well as a differentiated manner and method of understanding this work.

5   Comparative Reflection

I initially came to this poem and broader project wanting to decenter the “I,” the speaker of the poem, away from the poet, but rather, in prioritizing ANT, I realized how much we, as readers, bring to a poem and how fully we can saturate ourselves within the networks that this text is a part of.

I compare my reading and my understanding of the networking embedded within and through this poem as that which is cyclical and drill-like: the more time I engaged with the poem and strived to represent it, the more I felt tethered to the poem, to its symbols and images, and the more I identified my own personal and lived experience within the text. As the video strives to illustrate, my understanding of this poem went from visual-symbolism to an eco-feminist reading, and then ultimately to a deeper, far more personally-enriched reading. More specifically, when I started to associate the “reaper” as a farmer, I sifted through digitized family photo albums to find relics of my family’s farm. Boldly apparent to me now is the fact the farm, carrying the family name, is called “Story’s Farm” -- which begs strong alignment to the lines: “The reaper’s story is the story/of endless work… (11-12) and “the story of his life” (16). Thus, the crux of the poem, and my understanding, transitioned from the “beautiful weeds'' (21) to the history of farmers toiling and tending to the earth, season after season, day after day -- enveloping time, space, and my own memories. This practice and methodology strongly speak to Hayles’s claim that “Literary texts, like us, have bodies, an actuality necessitating that their materialities and meanings are deeply interwoven into each other” (2002, p. 107).

This project could never end; perhaps a more fully and authentic ANT practice would not end and fully embrace the fluidity of networks throughout time and space. Yet, for this limited and scoped work of tracing networks, as Law (1992, p. 389) and Latour (1996, p. 378) call for, I arrived at a more dynamic understanding of this poem that reflected my own complicity and attachment to the various actants relayed in the text through the process and practice of critical making via remixing and reconstructing (Hertz, 2016; Russell, 2020). All the more, the process in which I utilized to arrive at this fluid understanding illustrates a break from a fixed and stagnant interpretation of meaning - and favors one that can grow, change, and even diminish without me, beyond me, and with all variations of me.

Poetry is meant to be read out loud, but it is also to be experienced -- and this project strives to achieve just that.

6   Conclusion

In constructing ANT-based visualizations, namely a video-based display, that strived to trace various connections between, across, and through Mary Oliver’s “Morning Glories,” I explored how poetic elements and networks are constantly in flux, moving and evolving, and specified to the reader of a poem. By prioritizing ANT, I focused on all facets of a network of associations, including non-human actants to consider broader relationships written into the poem, as well as those manifested by the relationship/s between the reader, writer, speaker and poem itself. Moving forward, this standalone project could lead into a more interactive opportunity to invite all readers to engage with tracing networks with this poem.

In the future, more research, spanning the ludic to the academic, should strive to construct and trace networks, such as I have illustrated here, to continue exploring the capacities of ANT, digital concrete poetry, and feminist methodologies in the realm of critical making.

7   For Teachers

Discussion Questions

How does our experience of reading poetry change when it is not bound to a page?
What poetic network systems can you identify with this poem or with another one?
How would you represent the networks you are a part of with literature?
What does it mean to read poetry in this way?

Activity

Invite students to work in groups of 3-5 and collaboratively network a poem all together. The various visuals in this website can be used as models for your students. The following points could be used as a scaffolded networking process. (estimated time 20-45 minutes)



Identify all nouns. How can you categorize them?
Ex. Nature, City, Places

Identify all verbs. What are connected to? What do they reveal?

Identify the themes and symbols. What connections are they reliant upon? Or, what connections do they foster?

Identify the speaker. What role do they play in the poem? How are they connected to the action and the nouns of the poem?

Identify the poet. In what ways, if at all, is the poet represented and connected to the poem?

Identify the readers. How are you connected to the poem?



After students work through these guiding points and questions, facilitate a class discussion on this process. What was familiar? What was difficult? And what did you learn?

8   References

Bihlmeyer, C. (2021). Fragmented interpretations: Constructing the arts-based text. Comunicazioni Sociali; Arts-Based Research in Communication and Media Studies, (1), pp. 71-78.

D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.

Felski, R. (2016). Comparison and translation: A perspective from actor-network theory. Comparative Literature Studies, 53(4), pp. 747–765.

Foucault, M. (2005 [1966]). The writing of things. In The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences (Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines), Routledge, pp. 38-45.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575-99. doi:10.2307/3178066.

Hayles K. N. (2002). Writing machines. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

Hayles K. N. (2008). Electronic literature: New horizons for the literary. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Hertz, G. (2016). What is critical making? Current. https://current.ecuad.ca/what-is-critical-making.

Latour, B. (1996). On actor network theory: A few clarifications. Soziale Welt, 47, pp. 369-381.

Latour, B. (1999). On recalling ANT. The Sociological Review, 47(1), pp. 15-25.

Latour, B. (2005a). Introduction: How to resume the task of tracing associations. In Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (pp. 1-17). New York: Oxford University Press.

Latour. B. (2005b). Conclusion: From society to collective—Can the social be reassembled?. In Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (pp. 247-262). New York: Oxford University Press.

Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 5(4), 379-393.

Miller, J. (2017). Personal communication.

Noh, Z., Abidin, S.Z.Z., Omar, N. (2019). Poetry visualization in digital technology. In M. Handzic & D. Carlucci (Eds.), Knowledge Management, Arts, and Humanities, 7. Springer, Cham, pp. 171- 195. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10922-6_9

Oliver, M. (1994, October). Morning Glories. Poetry; preserved by JSTOR and the Poetry Foundation, pp. 2. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39078

Payne, Z. (2020). Find the speaker of the poem. Medium. https://medium.com/ninja-writers/find-the-speaker-of-the-poem-72a34f1db51b

Poetry Foundation. (nd). Concrete poetry. In Poetry Foundation’s Glossary of Poetic Terms. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/concrete-poetry

Roberts, A. M., Fischer, M., Modeen, M., Otty, L., Schaffner, A. K., Weger, U., Knowles, K., Richards, J., Marttin, J., Gough, C., Murphy, K., Duffy, S., Ather, C., Keasey, H., Prigmore, N., Rathband, A., Elder, K., Spark, G., Rushton, R., … Wood, L. (2011). Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text + Cognition. http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/index.html

Russell, L. (2020). Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Verso.

Schäfer, J. (2010). Reassembling the literary: Toward a theoretical framework for literary communication in computer-based media. In Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, Transcript, pp. 25-70.

Zantingh, M. (2013). When things act up: Thing theory, actor-network theory, and toxic discourse in Rita Wong's poetry. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 20(3), pp. 622–646.




This article is published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics - Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer 2024.