While Latour (1987) and Latour and Woolgar (1986) emphasize the discursive production of scientific facts while hinting at the agency of non-human entities in the form of instruments and tools as materializations of scientific and engineering practices, his later work (e.g. Latour, 2005; 2013) foregrounds the agency of these non-human actors through the concept of actants. Representing a slight departure from human and non-human subjects as stable entities, “an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman” (Bennett, 2010, p. 9). The scientific activity that constitutes the production of scientific instruments discussed in Laboratory Life, in other words, would constitute an interaction of actants.
Bennett (2010) picks up on Latour’s notion of the actant and extends it through her analysis of thing-power. Thing-power does not aim to anthropomorphize non-human actions within an environment, but rather “gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects.” (Bennett, 2010, p. xvi). In other words, a theory of thing-power seeks to understand how humans and non-human actants assemble to construct the trajectories of social action – trajectories that often exceed the apparent sum of their constitutive parts. In terms of storytelling, therefore, things constitute “characters in a speculative onto-story…[a tale that] hazards an account of materiality, even though it is both too alien and too close to see clearly and even though linguistic means prove inadequate to the task” (p. 4). By exceeding the linguistic, Bennett therefore exceeds the bounds of social constructivism – a paradigm wedded to the triadic relationship between thought, language, and social action.
Latour (1987) represents the predominant social constructivist approach within STS – a practice of unpacking the black box of sedimented social action stratified into what scientists and laypeople alike perceive uncritically as “facts.” This perspective emphasizes that scientific facts are not merely discovered but are constructed through historical, social, and thereby linguistic processes (Davies, 2022; Feyerabend, 1974; Montgomery 1996). A social constructionist lens of STS also lends itself to more critical or postcolonial approaches to science, exposing “science, technology, and society to critical assessment and interrogation” (Felt et al., 2017, p. 2). This includes critical and postcolonial framings of science and technology and its entailing societal discourses (Law & Lin, 2017).
Another side of STS, however, endorses a realist perspective. Realism in STS refuses to accept that science exists solely within the social construction of facts. Instead, it maintains that science also refers to objective natural phenomena in the world. Hacking (1999), while not a hardcore realist, provides a nuanced critique of social constructivism, instead proposing a compromise called constructive realism. This approach attempts to reconcile the critical insights of constructivism with the acknowledgment of an external natural world – a conundrum Hacking (1999, p. 6) summarizes as “the social construction of what?” (emphasis added). Put differently, Hacking argues that social constructivism presupposes an ontological entity to deconstruct, unmask, or critique – an entity most scientists would describe as the “natural world.” This distinguishes STEM fields from humanities and social sciences. Critical social scientists turn a reflexive mirror onto categories of humans constructed by humans while STEM researchers examine categories of natural phenomena – phenomena whose categories may be constructed by humans, but whose existence appears independent of and indifferent to humans. Hacking (1999, p. 32) emphasizes this point through the example of quarks – “Quarks…do not form an interactive kind; the idea of the quark does not interact with quarks. Quarks are not aware that they are quarks and are not altered simply by being classified as quarks” (see also Pickering, 1999).
While irrelevant at first glance, this aside into realist-constructivist tensions within STS mirrors the impositionalist–anti-referentialist debate in Section 2.1. More importantly, it epitomizes the tension between science and storytelling. As a process of forging coherence onto a self-selected (and at times embellished) retrospective subset of experience and knowledge, storytelling and narrative thinking constitute a sensemaking practice (Bruner, 1986; Weick, 1995) and is therefore inherently constructivist. Such sensemaking practices are always exclusionary, excluding information of poor fit to the story being told (note the right-facing Janus in Figure 1) – echoing Katz’ (2013) concerns that storytelling will misrepresent the messiness of science. Yet this commonplace proposition – that stories are socially constructed – invites its inversion: social constructions are storied. While a reader may be skeptical at this claim, I ask for a suspension of disbelief. We will unpack this inversion further in Section 4.
Ontogenetic Reflection
As I read this section almost 6 months later, I’m really struck by the last sentence, talking about the fact that social constructions are storied. What strikes me most is how these days I have sent storytelling very much into the operative background, as I think through my dissertation. Now I have adopted the view—no, nowadays I prefer to think through this problem of social constructionism versus ontogenetic realism through the lens of Zhuangzi.
This reminds me of a paper that I was just reading this morning where philosopher Kanghun Ahn (2026) talks about the relationship between ideology and what Jasper calls the limit situation in relating Zhuangzi with continental philosophy. In short, Ahn draws from Louis Althusser, who talks about ideology as a kind of mystifying and, in some ways, deceiving social force that clouds people’s ability to see the world with clarity or as it is. Althusser suggests that a reading of Spinoza and Marx provides the clarity that people need to step outside of ideology.
On the other hand, Jasper discusses the limit situation as a kind of ontological barrier that every person ultimately brushes up against when we realize the limits that our human body puts on us, not only through dimensions of space but also through dimensions of time. And the brushes that we have with these limit situations often cause great pain or suffering and sometimes even violence. What’s interesting is that Ahn reads this brushing up against an ontological barrier as not only a source of suffering but also as a source of personal transformation. He does this through reading the Zhuangzi and the way that Zhuangzi relates to the death of his wife. In this famous passage, Zhuangzi is seen sitting on the floor and drumming playfully while grieving his wife’s death. And when people question Zhuangzi as to why he doesn’t feel more sad, Zhuangzi admits that he did feel sad. But then encountering the grief of the death of his wife also opened him up to a broader perspective of his wife’s passing being not just only an end but also really a movement of qi or life energy throughout other parts of Tao or the movement of nature.
In a similar path, Deleuze and Nietzsche both talk about the ways that when humans encounter ontological limits such as death or grief or other limit situations, that these can be sources of not only suffering but also of a transformation, of a reorientation or a deterritorialization of one’s way of being in the world. I say this not because I think that storytelling has become unimportant in the way that I approach research, but rather that storytelling is only one component of a much larger pre-discursive or, I might say, extra-discursive world of affective bodies in which we live. And it’s this more new materialist position that I draw from scholars like Rosi Braidotti or Karen Barad that I believe carries a lot of possibility not only for thinking beyond language but also to form a more affirmative ethic than the common negative ethic that I see in much critical applied linguistics research.
Ahn, K. (2026). Breaking the Self: Ideology and the Limit Situation in Zhuangzi and Continental Philosophy. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 01914537251391450.
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