2. 2009/10 Referencialization and Ontogenesis – the Making of Things.

The actor-network theory is as much a media-ontological as a media-anthropological theory (or neither of the two): for example, it makes statements about the manner in which referents as scientific or social facts are constituted by being referencialized, that is, integrated into material sign references. “Referencialize“ here means distinguish, filter, mark, code, record, transport, translate etc. a more or less labyrinthine sequence of acts, it being possible to apply each of these acts, in turn, to the result of a part of the chain of operations. The referent is not therefore something that ontologically precedes the medial practices of representation; on the contrary, the referent is produced by reference, and reference consists of a chain of operations in which human and non-human actors are, in turn, enmeshed. While »written form« can be interpreted as a kind of representation, »writing« must be viewed as a practice that represents a network in which those that write and that which is written down are produced.
What is only being cautiously indicated in the German-speaking discussion of cultural technologies and image media has already been tried and tested in different variants in the French and American anthropology of technology: the practical and historical priority of the chains of operation over the epistemic things generated by them or, in very general terms, referents. This enables science historians and sociologists of technology to re-transcribe the ontogeneses that take place every day in the experimental systems of science. The essence of the referent is very similar to the essence of social bonding with the Melanesians: a kind of »hau« or »mana« (Mauss). Reference is a property of this chain of operations in its entirety. The film that was itself experienced as a medium of vitalization or personification of things can be regarded, in the same way as an experimental system, as an acting field of thought that allows the processes of such emergence to be reconstituted. The interlocking, the enmeshing or intermeshing of human and material agents into agencies capable of action and reflection is part of the oldest-established topoi of film theory. It begins with the work and operation of the film camera itself as a machine and as a »mechanical eye« in early film theory and poetics. The camera appears here both as part of the material world and as the agent of an independent, human-like subjectivity, as an »extended« eye. The film image itself therefore represents both object and subject status of the observation; a fusion which, for example, is described as »photogénie« in early French film theory. A cross-disciplinary method transfer is only just beginning to test the way in which, on analogy with the experimental systems of the natural sciences, it is possible to describe not only laboratories, but also cultic, technical or artistic artefacts as »agencies«, not to mention social techniques or »history«. Film, art, religion and technology are »acting fields of thought«. The social as well as the object-like or subject-like or image-like is materialized in them.