THE ‘PERFORMATIVE TURN’ IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

This short article aims to consider some of the new paths which Judith Butler’s analysis of performativity offers for current research in the Sociology of Science and Technology and in Communication Studies, and more particularly for understanding what information and communication technologies actually ‘do’ in communication events. I will endeavor to show that, by combining some issues related to the performativity of utterances, such as Butler’s current emphasis on failures (this issue) together with the socio-technical networks of agency on which the Actor Network Theory rests, one reaches new resources for understanding the situated use of technical devices. It can serve as a basis for an anthropology of ‘technology in action’, sensitive to the way in which, in any kind of technology-mediated situation, the performative relevance of artefacts is related to the socio-technical networks through which they become ‘present’ in the first place.