Role Playing Materials - Rafael Bienia

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or vocabulary with which the analyst can describe an empirical phenomenon, such as role playing, because “they don’t designate what is being mapped, but how it is possible to map anything from such a territory” (Latour, 2005, p. 174). In this regard, actor-network theory continues the tradition of social constructivism in that it provides a vocabulary for methodology. Moreover, the legacy of post-structuralism in actor-network theory becomes apparent with the necessity to reflect language when it connects concrete reality with abstract ideas. Law (2009) suggests that “actor-network theory can also be understood as an empirical version of post-structuralism.” (p. 6). Thus, the examination of concepts as words is one methodological step, because the relation between words and what is being mapped should not be taken for granted. Before I can use a word as an analytical tool, I need to establish a relation to an empirical fact and reflect instead of looking for data that fits to established concepts.

      The book Reassembling the Social leans against my computer monitor that stores most of my notes, data samples, and previous versions of this book. I say “most” because in 2012 I began to draft my chapters with pencil and paper. What happened was that my writing slowed down. I am a fast writer with a typewriter or computer keyboard, but writing by hand forced the word count to drop. I gained time to think more before I wrote down the words. This new collaboration—hand, pencil, and paper—changed the way I was writing the book. In its core, this example of writing makes a point about an “actor”.

      An actor makes a difference to other elements. Actor is a word that refers to an element that is part of a process, for example a pencil in the process of writing. Again, actor is a word that requires empirical evidence to be of analytical value, because an actor ties to a process that the researcher observes at a specific site. A researcher can only speak of an actor when there is empirical evidence of its action. Evidence or trace of an action is observable, because “anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor” (Latour, 2005, p. 71). Thus, it remains uncertain what an actor is unless there is a trace of action. When there is a trace, it is not because there is an actor, but because an actor works.

      Because of this uncertainty, actor-network theory is not a theory in the sense of a stable framework that answers ontological questions, such as what an actor is, but a mode of inquiry or a tool that encourages rethinking whether the phenomenon is what it seems to be. In the example of writing with pen and paper, is it the human who is the sole actor responsible for the process of writing, or could it be otherwise?

      An actor is “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general” (Latour, 1996b, p. 375). The pencil is an actor, because it made me write differently. The paper itself can be an actor, too. But actor-network theory makes me aware that effects do not originate in an intrinsic essence of one element but result from the collaboration or cooperation of actors (Latour, 2011). It is the pencil, paper, and hand that change my writing compared to typing on a keyboard.

      An actor has a recognizable identity only through its actions in collaboration with other actors. I can speak of the pencil as an actor in relation to hand and paper when they write together. At this point, the inter-relation between vocabulary and empirical data becomes apparent. When I sit at my desktop and remove one of these collaborators from the process, writing does not work anymore. The pencil does not write without paper or hand, the paper does not show traces of words without pencil or hand, the hand does not write without a writing device or a piece of paper. I cannot talk about a collaboration of actors anymore, because the identity-giving action of writing is missing here, and it is the identity-giving action in a collective that allows me to speak of actors, be they pencils or (later) materials in role-playing games.

      This is the reason why actor-network theory does not define an actor as an element that has an intrinsic essence. An analyst refers to a pencil as a material actor, when there is a trace of action. When the graphite core that is part of the pencil collaborates with the paper and follows the movements and pressure of the hand. Non-human actors, such as pencils, “are endowed with a certain set of competencies by the network that they have lined up behind them,” for example the graphite that makes the pencil, and at “the same time, they demand a certain set of competencies by the actors they line up, in turn” (Sayes, 2014, p. 138). The pencil demands from the hand the competency to write. This competency is not inherent in a hand but is the result of years of training.

      Before I introduce “network”, which refers here to the inter-relation of pencil and hand, in more detail, I need to explain how it is possible to say that unconscious elements like pencils demand something.

      Human, non-human, and material actors. Above, I wrote that an actor is any element that acts in relation to other elements. This understanding works to recognize actors that act, but are non-humans. So far, players, designers, and researchers have understood role playing as a human endeavor, as I will elaborate in more detail below. But if non-human actors can be part of action, this study needs not only to explore how the group of non-human actors cooperate with other actors in role-playing processes, but also how to talk about this process without replacing anthropocentricism with materialism.

      Actor-network theory does not claim “that objects do things ‘instead’ of human actors” (Latour, 2005, p. 72). The point is to examine how action emerges as a process in and by heterogeneous relations. This is the reason why I wrote in Chapter 1 that it is not enough to solve the ontological problem of what role playing is in general, and how materials collaborate. The inclusion of heterogeneous actors, referring also to non-human actors, addresses the epistemological level of the problem, how to know about role playing. When I use the adjective heterogeneous, I refer to a group of actors that includes different actors, be they human or non-human. The point is not to replace human action with non-human action to understand role playing, but to start with the assumption that anything could be part of the process. To avoid the dichotomy that the word “non-human” evokes, I use the word material.

      The group of material actors includes “things, objects” (Latour, 1993, p. 13), “microbes, scallops, rocks, and ships” (Latour, 2005, p. 11), tools and technical artifacts, material structures, transportation devices, texts, and economic goods (Sayes, 2014, p. 136). Material actors include the scale between objects and raw materials. Objects designate elements that are physically constituted, spatially defined and functionally determined. Examples in this book are paper, computers, and clothes. Some of them can be labelled as toys, but the word toy as well as object does not help, because I want to look at raw materials, too.4 Raw materials, such as rocks, water, or metal, lack a predefined functional determination.

      When I refer material actors or materials, I have observed action on the physical level and noted a trace of their actions. The pencil, for example, might have a nostalgic meaning for me, because it was a present from my former employer, but when I speak of the pencil as a material actor, I refer to the physical actions of the pencil. The pencil has a certain weight, shape, and durability, because the pencil consists of other material actors that are lined up behind it.

      I do not use the word object, because I refer in this study to elements that do not have a defined function. For example, the leather that makes a costume in live action role playing is a component. Using the term material allows me to refer to players themselves as material actors, because players last and consist of matter that could be part of role playing, such as skin, hair, etc. Thus, material actors differ from symbolic, emotional, and similarly abstract actors, not because they are not able to act in these ways, but because the focus is on their physicality.

      Material action does not mean that I refer only to action that the laws of causality can express, but physical action that can collaborate with mental processes. Formulating sentences and physical gravity might seem unconnected, but they need no longer be when I think about a sentence and use a pencil that leaves graphite traces on paper. The gain is an alternative understanding of writing as a process that involves material and mental action alike, where the mind/matter dichotomy dissolves because such a dichotomy is not helpful to understand how a graphite core cooperates with the rephrasing of a sentence.

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