Kyongju Things: Assembling Places (review)

Robert Oppenheim, Kyongju Things: Assembling Places. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 296 pp, $24.95. Michael M. J. Fischer Received: 22 July 2009 /Accepted: 22 July 2009 /Published online: 29 May 2010 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2010 The title, Kyongju Things, Assembling Places, signals two subjects of interest for EASTS: conflicts over the legacies of the ancient capital of Silla versus development (especially the routing of the high-speed train pictured on the cover); and a strategy of narration, the actor network theory (ANT) of Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. The virtue of ANT is its double focus on (1) the active work that goes into the reproduction of power relations, networks, obligatory points of passage for authoritative information collection, processing, and dissemination; and (2) the ways in which matters of fact (technological calculations for instance) become matters of concern, and the ways “matters of fact” in turn are deconstructed by the contestation of social actors with differential interests into elements that can be reconfigured in new ways. “Assembling” signals the active work of recruitment or enrolling social actors in a “project,” for Latour in Aramis, or The Love of Technology, the efforts to recruit and hold together coalitions of interest in the building of an “intelligent transportation system” in Paris; for Oppenheim in Kyongju, the reconstruction of urban and historical “Places,” involving “Things” such as the routing of the high-speed train, and also the building of a stadium, the preservation of South Mountain (Namsan) a heritage site of royal and Buddhist pasts, and the reconstruction of the wanggyon or royal palaces of Silla. Latour is fond of the Icelandic etymology of “thing” from the Islandic Althing (parliament), or also res publica (public things), and of proposing a “parliament of things” in which things are themselves given representation as agentive subjects in “matters of concern.” He invokes John Dewey’s notion of the “public” as composed or called into existence through the unintended consequences of planning and administrative acts. In these formulations, Latour attempts to overcome the flat engineering language of actor network theory. In a similar effort of overcoming the limitations of actor network theory, Robert Oppenheim, towards the end of his book, draws upon the work of two key science, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2010) 4:161–164 DOI 10.1007/s12280-010-9124-3 M. M. J. Fischer (*) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: mfischer@mit.edu technology and society (STS) anthropologists, Timothy Choy and Kim Fortun. Choy provides a comparative model from Hong Kong, much better attuned to Oppenheim’s Korean case than say Latour’s analysis of the (according to Latour) failed Aramis (he does admit it had productive spin-offs that might be narrated as successes; he does not admit that other intelligent transportation projects were seen to be successful). In the Hong Kong case, dueling experts are recruited by different parties in an environmental dispute with a Greenpeace international expert arguing the case for localism, and local Chinese experts using universalistic standards to impose solutions on unwilling villagers (the story is complicated also by tenancy, lineage, and migration issues). It is precisely the kind of case that Oppenheim wants to argue for Kyongju in contrast to what he criticizes as the more usual accounts of universalistic transnational activism. That is, multiple interests at different scales are brought into play in ways that the simple language of networks and actants (assemblages of humans and non-humans, coalitions and alliances of groups) fail to dramatize (indeed at the time of writing Aramis, Latour noted that the novelist Richard Powers was able to do things in Galatea.2.2 that ANT was unable to achieve). For such reasons, Oppenheimer draws upon a more dynamic narrative device: Kim Fortun’s “double binds.” Oppenheim uses it mainly to mean the conflicting demands upon an actor to balance stable but seemingly opposed imperatives (preservation vs. development) or audiences (experts vs. users), or constituencies (national vs. regional). In Advocacy after Bhopal (2001), Fortun uses it instead dynamically for a Dewey-like “calling into existence” and “finding a voice or articulation” amidst numerous contending demands for unstable and temporary political moves...