Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
immediately within a natural environment, where meanings dictate the activity
of living beings, but rather in a mediated social world, where meanings reflect
possibilities of action”. Therefore action involves making decisions based on one’s
cognitive and emotional attitude to external events in a relational context. Here,
my agreeing to copy-edit E’s work was not merely an effect of W’s request. It also
derived from my knowledge of the war via media and personal accounts, coupled
with an emotional reaction of outrage, in the context of a network of ‘Bosnia/
former-Yugoslavia people’ sharing similar political views, where W created the
link between myself and E.2.3.2 Relation, discourse and networks
Critical psychology fits the acting subject into a mesh of relations with other act-
ing subjects. To analyze these relations, I use network-based models of how
groups of people act and interact to produce things or ideas. Three possible
“orders” of network may be identified, depending on the group’s size, degree of
person-to-person contact, and aims (extending Milroy 1987: 46–47). These are
described below.2.3.2.1 First-order networks
In first-order networks or “teams” (Milroy; Goffman 1970), relatively few people
interact tightly together for a certain purpose – in this case, myself, E, T1 and P,
plus (initially) W.
These are similar to Latour’s Actor Networks (1987; cf. Frohmann 1995, Ryder
2010a, 2010b; applied to translation research by e.g. Buzelin 2004, 2005, Abdallah
2005 and Jones 2009). In Actor Network Theory, some actors in a working net-
work are human. Others are artefacts created by humans, but which exert power
autonomously: these allow us to examine how texts, such as Dizdar’s Kameni
spavač or T1’s translated version, interact with human actors. According to
Frohmann (ibid.), Actor Network Theory’s power in modelling human action de-
rives from its “insistence on the interpenetrations of the discursive, the social and
the real”: in other words, that language, relation and action are inseparably inter-
twined. For example, a key phase in a network’s action is when one actor ‘recruits’
another into the network – which, with human actors, involves linguistic commu-
nication. Thus conversations with W and E brought me into the network, enabling
the action of copy-editing and publishing the English manuscript.
In Actor Network Theory, the goals of action are negotiated within the net-
work (Buzelin 2005: 197). Shared goals, however, may often cause a network to
form. A framework which models complex goal behaviour is Activity Theory
(Axel 1997: 137, after Leont’ev; Engeström and Miettinen 1999). This distinguishes