Distant yet existent: actor–network theory and the communicative constitution of functionally estranged family relationships

ABSTRACT

Interpersonal and family communication scholarship retains a dualistic approach to relationships and communication. This prevailing logic constrains the ability of critical interpersonal and family communication (CIFC) scholarship to identify communication practices that stabilize unjust operations of power. We argue that CIFC scholarship should make a nonhuman theoretical turn. Specifically, we propose that Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory (ANT) provides a way forward for CIFC scholars to identify and critique unjust operations of power that are rendered more and less durable by human and nonhuman communication. To appreciate how ANT could benefit CIFC scholarship, we first identify the ontological and epistemological shifts ANT requires of CIFC scholars. Second, we explore the core uncertainties/controversies of ANT. Third, we embody ANT as a framework to interrogate and critique the communicative constitution of functionally estranged family relationships. Finally, we discuss the value of inviting new materialist approaches to CIFC scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• critical interpersonal and family communication
• actor-network theory
• power
• new materialism
• Bruno Latour

Notes

1 For discussions of CIFC and humanism, see: Jordan Allen, “‘What Is the Big ‘D’? Contemporary Approaches to Discourse in Interpersonal and Family Communication,” Communication Theory 29, no. 1 (2019): 107–27; Jordan Allen and Nicole Allen, “The Promise of a Nonhuman Turn for CIFC Scholarship,” Annals of the International Communication Association 43, no. 4 (2019): 297–315; Julia Moore and Jimmie Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research? A Review of an Emerging Field of Inquiry,” Annals of International Communication Association 43, no. 1 (2019): 40–57.

2 Alan Sillars, Wesley Shellen, Anne McIntosh, and Maryann Pomegranate, “Relational Characteristics of Language: Elaboration and Differentiation in Marital Conversations,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 4 (1997): 403.

3 Allen and Allen “The Promise of a Nonhuman Turn for CIFC Scholarship,” 298.

4 Richard Grusin, ed., “Introduction,” in The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), vii–xxix.

5 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–43.

6 See Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, eds., Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015).

7 Dennis Schoenborn et al., “The Three Schools of CCO Thinking: Interactive Dialogue and Systematic Comparison,” Management Communication Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2014): 290–91.

8 We base this recommendation off periodization provided by Lynda Walsh et al., “Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 47, no. 5 (2017): 403–62. See also Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, http://modesofexistence.org/.

9 Jordan Allen and Julia Moore, “Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement,” Western Journal of Communication 81, no. 3 (2017): 298.

10 Kristina M. Scharp, “Family Estrangement,” in Encyclopedia of Family Studies, ed. Constance L. Shehan (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119085621.wbefs458.

11 Kristina M. Scharp, “‘You’re Not Welcome Here’: A Grounded Theory of Family Distancing,” Communication Research 46, no. 4 (2019): 427–55.

12 Allen and Allen, “The Promise of a Nonhuman Turn for CIFC Scholarship,” 233.

13 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9.

14 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 85; John W. Lannamann, “Interpersonal Communication Research as Ideological Practice,” Communication Theory 1, no. 3 (1991): 179–203; Jimmie Manning, “Exploring Family Discourses about Purity Pledges: Connecting Relationships and Popular Culture,” Qualitative Research Reports in Communication 15, no. 1 (2014): 92–99; Julia Moore, “Performative Face Theory: A Critical Perspective on Interpersonal Identity Work,” Communication Monographs 84, no. 2 (2017): 258–76; Katherine J. Denker and Debbie Dougherty, “Corporate Colonization of Couples’ Work–Life Negotiations: Rationalization, Emotion Management and Silencing Conflict,” Journal of Family Communication 13, no. 3 (2013): 242–62; Allen and Moore, “Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement”; Elizabeth A. Suter et al., “Motherhood as Contested Ideological Terrain: Essentialist and Queer Discourses of Motherhood at Play in Female–Female Co-Mothers’ Talk,” Communication Monographs 82, no. 4 (2015): 458–83.

15 Moore and Manning, “What Counts as Critical Interpersonal and Family Communication Research?”

16 François Cooren, “Materializing Communication: Making the Case for a Relational Ontology,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 279.

17 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 31.

18 Ibid., 30.

19 See Jay Joseph, The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology under the Microscope (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004).

20 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 97.

21 Ibid., 38.

22 Ibid., 61, 46.

23 Ibid., 65.

24 Ibid., 8.

25 Julia Moore, “Where Is the Critical Empirical Interpersonal Communication Research? A Roadmap for Future Inquiry into Discourse and Power,” Communication Theory 27, no. 1 (2017): 2.

26 Leslie A. Baxter, Voicing Relationships: A Dialogic Perspective (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 121.

27 Stuart J. Sigman, “Handling the Discontinuous Aspects of Continuous Social Relationships: Toward Research on the Persistence of Social Forms,” Communication Theory 1, no. 2 (1991): 106–27.

28 Ibid., 108.

29 Colleen Mills and François Cooren, “Special Issue Editorial: Discursivity, Relationality, and Materiality in the Life of the Organization: Communication Perspectives,” Communication Research and Practice 2, no. 3 (2016): 268.

30 Jordan Allen, “What’s the Big ‘D’?” 120–22.

31 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 135.

32 John Law, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 141.

33 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 6.

34 Ibid., 27.

35 Ibid., 43.

36 Ibid., 57.

37 Kristina M. Scharp, Lindsey J. Thomas, and Christina G. Paxman, “‘It Was the Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back’: Exploring the Distancing Processes Communicatively Constructed in Parent–Child Estrangement Backstories,” Journal of Family Communication 15, no. 4 (2015): 343.

38 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 54 original emphasis.

39 Ibid., 43.

40 Ibid., 63.

41 Ibid., 64.

42 Manning, “Exploring Family Discourses about Purity Pledges,” 100.

43 Allen and Moore, “Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement,” 291.

44 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 87.

45 Ibid., 121.

46 Ibid., 129.

47 Elizabeth A. Suter, “Introduction: Critical Approaches to Family Communication Research: Representation, Critique, and Praxis,” Journal of Family Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 1–8.

48 Scot Barnett, “Rhetoric’s Nonmodern Constitution: Techne, Phusis, and the Production of Hybrids,” in Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 81–96.

49 Sarah J. Tracy, “The Toxic and Mythical Combination of a Deductive Writing Logic for Inductive Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Communication Research 1, no. 1 (2012): 117–21, doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/qcr.2012.1.1.109.

50 Here we intentionally chose the preposition “with” instead of “to” because it obscures the figuration of an investigating subject and isolated object of study.

51 Allen and Moore, “Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement.”

52 Christine Rittenour et al., “Communication Surrounding Estrangement: Stereotypes, Attitudes, and (Non)Accommodation Strategies,” Behavioral Sciences 8, no. 10, 96 (2018): 2, doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/bs8100096.

53 All participant names mentioned are pseudonyms.

54 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 196.

55 Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions,” The Sociological Review 38, no. 1_suppl (1990): 47.

56 Allen and Moore, “Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement,” 281.

57 Star, “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions,” 53.

58 Ibid., 48.

59 Lannamann, “Interpersonal Communication Research as Ideological Practice,” 185.

60 Elizabeth D. Wilhoit and Lorraine G. Kisselburgh, “The Relational Ontology of Resistance: Hybridity, Ventriloquism, and Materiality in the Production of Bike Commuting as Resistance,” Organization 26, no. 6 (2019): 890.

61 Stevie M. Munz, “Oral Histories: Stories from The Farmer’s Wife in Western Illinois,” Women and Language 42, no. 2 (2019): 263–83.

62 Katie Warfield, “Making the Cut: An Agential Realist Examination of Selfies and Touch,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 2 (2016): 1–10, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641706.

63 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 246.