Fashion mediators and distributed agency

This paper discusses agency in aesthetic and cultural settings. It takes as its premise, that agency is multiple and diverse, and may reside in non-humans as well as in humans, and that agency is an effect a network - not the other way around. Thus, the paper forms a part of a recent and growing sociological direction that may be referred to as post-critical, or pragmatic. This sociological direction is closely related to ANT and STS (Callon 1986, Latour 1993).
The paper suggests the term of "mediator" (Hennion, 1997). "Mediation" is an activity rather than an actor; a co-constructive relation that creates what it mediates - the producer and the consumer. Hennion argues "that something effectively `happens´ in this process, which transforms the ways things were before" (Hennion & Grenier 2000, p. 346). Mediation is not necessarily performed by human actors - as opposed to e.g. Bourdieu's "cultural intermediaries" (Bourdieu, 1984) which designates a certain class of people.

Empirically, the paper works with the cultural and aesthetic economies - and with fashion in particular. Using the mediator as central concept, the paper presents empirical stories from the field of fashion, and fashion marketing, highlighting how mediators are central in organizing the relations between aesthetics and social contexts. Thus, the paper argues empirically that aesthetics and sociality are co-constituted, that cannot be regarded as separate - and that agency is distributed through the lines of mediation in a very radical sense.

The data for the paper is produced using ethnographic methods - especially observation and interviews.