What algorithms do in these cases, however, cannot simply be understood by opening up the black box, as it were. This is not because, as Winner (1993) suggests, we risk finding it empty when we open the box; but, rather, as Latour (1999) reminds us, all black boxes are black boxes because they obscure the networks and assemblages they assume and were constituted by. For Latour, all scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success through a process of blackboxing. In a much-cited example of an overhead projector breaking down, Latour suggests that the black box reveals itself as what it really is—not a stable thing but, rather, an assemblage of many interrelated parts (1999: 183). When a machine runs smoothly, nobody pays much atention, and the actors and work required to make it run smoothly disappear from view (Latour, 1999: 34). For Latour, the black box ultimately hides its constitution and character as a network, while blackboxing refers to the process in which practices become reified. If the metaphor of the black box is too readily used as a way of critiquing algorithms, Latour’s notion of blackboxing reminds us that we might want to scrutinize critically the ways in which algorithms become.
A core tenet of a relational ontology is the principle of relational materialism, the idea that “objects are no mere props for performance but parts and parcel of hybrid assemblages endowed with difused personhood and relational agency” (Vannini, 2015: 5). Concepts such as sociotechnical and sociomateriality are often used to express the idea of a radical symmetry between human and nonhuman actors.15 According to this view, the social and technical are not seen as separate entities that can be considered independently of each other. The social and technical are always already engaging in symbiotic relationships organized in networks, assemblages, or hybrids.16 What is important on a relational account is that the enactive powers of new assemblages or composite entities cannot merely be reduced to its constituent parts. Rather, these new composite entities are able to “produce new territorial organisations, new behaviours, new expressions, new actors and new realities” (Müller, 2015: 29). This agential force is, perhaps, most explicitly expressed in the concept of assemblage or, more specifically the French term agencement. As Callon points out, “agencement has the same root as agency: agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in diferent ways depending on their configuration” (2007: 320).
These discussions, of course, raise the tricky question of how we should think about agency in the first place. After all, it is not for nothing that agency has been called “the most dificult problem there is in philosophy” (Latour, 2005: 51). If algorithms are multiple and part of hybrid assemblages or even hybrid assemblages themselves, then where is agency located? Who or what is acting when we say that algorithms do this or that? Although scholars commited to a relational ontology may difer in terms of the ontological status they ascribe to entities and relations, the general answer would be to see agency as distributed.17 For a theory of the agential capacities of algorithms, adopting a relational view implies discarding any “neatly ordered flow of agency” (Introna, 2016: 9). As Karen Barad puts it, agency is not an atribute that someone or something may possess but, rather, a name for the process of the ongoing reconfiguration of the world (2003: 818). In a similar vein, actornetwork theory sees agency as a mediated achievement, brought about through forging associations (Müller, 2015: 30). Anything—whether human or nonhuman— can potentially forge an association. As Barad emphasizes, “agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity” (2003: 826). According to Latour: “any thing that does modify a state of afairs by making a diference is an actor”; one needs simply to ask whether something “makes a diference in the course of some other agent’s action or not” (2005: 71). At the core of a relational ontology lies the importance of acknowledging the relationality and agential capacities of nonhumans. Perhaps more so than any other concept, the notion of assemblage has served as way to account for the ways in which relations are assembled for diferent purposes. Deleuze and Parnet view assemblage as a “multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them,” where the only unity “is that of co-functioning” (2007: 69). This notion of co-functioning usefully describes “how diferent agents within the assemblage may possess diferent resources and capacities to act” (Anderson et al., 2012: 181). Viewed in these terms, the agency of algorithms cannot be located in the algorithm as such but in the “ever-changing outcome of its enactment” (Passoth et al., 2012: 4).
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