Posthuman Agency: Between Theoretical Traditions

Abstract

With his recent introduction of posthumanism, a decentered variant of constructivist sociology of science, Andrew Pickering advertises novel conceptual resources for social theorists. In fact, he tenders nothing less than a fundamental reordering of social thought. By invoking the concept of material agency, Pickering seeks to redefine the relationship between Nature and Society, while dismissing the humanist bias inherent in sociological inquiry. However, for all its ambition and good intentions, posthumanism delivers only analytical inconsistencies, the consequences of an uneasy synthesis of pragmatist and poststructuralist influences. When translated into the language of conventional sociological theory, these problems surface as an inadequate treatment of human agency. The works of the original pragmatists, particularly C.S. Peirce and G.H. Mead, illustrate how the objectives of posthumanism can be achieved without decentering, suggesting a renewed appreciation of humanist sociologies

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.