Entanglement theories

They seek to develop an understanding of a socio-material world that moves beyond the socio-natural and cultural-material dualisms that have characterised modernity. 

The dualistic notion of how the intentional mind models the passive, material world to its liking has become deeply ingrained in engineering and consequently became part of HCI’s cultural heritage. However, with the influence of postmodern thinking, this started to change. 

Heidegger’s phenomenology sought to overcome this mind-body dualism by moving to a notion of ‘Dasein’ that required an embodied mind to be present in the world [Heidegger 1967]. This embodiment became central to third-wave HCI [Dourish 2001], particularly with the rise of mobile and tangible user interfaces [e.g., Hornecker 2011]. 

Entanglement theories take this line of thought one step further by questioning the locus of agency, and asking which active contributions tools make to what humans do.

Another common feature of entanglement theories might be useful to delineate them from previous perspectives on human-material relationships: the decentering of the social, sometimes labelled as philosophical posthumanism or new materialism. 

Entanglement theories mostly originate from the field of STS, which takes a sociological lens on the subject of science and technological innovation. 

Again, modernity had entrenched a dualist view that there is an external reality that the mind could empirically conquer. Increasingly, however, this positivist view was undermined by evidence that showed how knowledge was socially constructed. The seminal work of Kuhn [1970], referred to above played a key role in this. 

Without going into the depths of the science wars between realists and social constructivists, entanglement theories seek to reframe the problem by making things social actors, i.e., knowledge neither stems from an objective, inanimate reality, nor is entirely fabricated in the social realm or language, but describes a reality that is co-constituted in materially discursive productions. In other words, they are not denying the social construction of our knowledge about the world, but seek to emphasise that the world is no passive object in this process, but rather is intimately entangled in knowledge production.

This is what leads them to a position of a relational ontology that is expressed as socio-material configurations, networks, associations, assemblages, ensembles and so on.

The knowledge production debate in HCI reflects its way of grappling with the positivist vs. constructivist perspective. Within the field’s body of literature, we still see a wide range of studies that refer to one or the other. 

While the author would argue this heterogeneity is one of the great features of HCI, the minimal common ground in terms of underlying epistemological stances limits the cross-fertilisation between these ways of knowing. 

Relational ontologies may offer strategies to coherently underpin current practices without descending into new science wars.

The following takes up four streams of thought in this realm and reviews existing intersections with current HCI literature: 

• ANT as originally developed in the 1980’s by sociologists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon.

• Post-Phenomenology by Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek and others, 

• OOO and its main proponents Graham Harman and Levy Bryant.

• Agential Realism by quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karan Barad.