2.2. Global and Local Networks
Law and Callon introduce the concept of global and local networks:
...an actor attempts to mobilize and stabilize what we call a global network in order to obtain resources with which to build a project. In our language, then, a global network is a set of relations between an actor and its neighbors on the one hand, and between those neighbors on the other. It is a network that is built up, deliberately or otherwise, and that generates a space, a period of time, and a set of resources in which innovation may take place. Within this space—we call it a negotiation space—the process of building a project may be treated as the elaboration of a local network—that is, the development of an array of the heterogeneous set of bits and pieces that is necessary to the successful production of any working device.
The creation of Amtrak can be analyzed as a local network which operates within a global network of punctualized actors, which included a host of federal and state governing and administrative bodies, rail labor unions, rail advocacy groups (like the National Association of Rail Passengers), individual riders, etc. Over the course of the negotiation space, the local network was transformed from a large but loose confederation of privately-owned and -run operations to a smaller, unified network controlled by the government-owned corporation, Amtrak.
In keeping with the ascription of agency to non-human actors characteristic of ANT, aeromobility and automobility might also be considered actors in the global network. Those socio-technical systems are themselves complex actor-networks of relationships that are punctualized for analytical convenience. A number of individual human actors like Senator Claiborne Pell and President Richard Nixon also emerge as pivotal figures in the negotiations between actor-networks.
In analysis by Law and Callon, the British TSR.2 military aircraft project involved the
elaboration of a local network with the ultimate goal of production of a military jet airplane [
23]. However, the specifics of what that airplane would look like, what problems it would solve, and whether it should exist at all were the result of negotiations between neighboring actors in the global network that had different answers to those questions.
A similar situation existed for locomobility in the 1950s. Secular cost and ridership trends clearly presaged a juxtaposition of some kind, but different actors responded in contradictory ways. This reflects the variable geometry/interpretive flexibility where the passenger rail system meant different things to different actors.
Some company managers attempted to maintain high levels of service and others made intentional efforts to alienate customers and suppress ridership (such as stopping trains in the middle of runs or suppressing operating schedule information) as a pretext for discontinuance of money-losing services ([
29], pp. 10–11, 65; [
37], pp. 223–55; [
40], p. 23).
Unions fought to keep jobs and advocates of service in different communities used political influence to prevent the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) from permitting private passenger train discontinuances. However, the non-advocate populace in those communities was abandoning those trains for autos and airplanes while other departments and branches of the government were engaged in heavy public subsidy for that same auto and aviation infrastructure ([
36], pp. 14–35).
As part of the negotiation process, the flows of intermediaries between these actor-networks included money, political power, legal and regulatory action, infrastructure, and rail service itself. However, in these negotiations, the local actor-network of locomobility was unable to obtain sustaining resources from the global network and the crisis worsened.
In 1962, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell gave a Senate speech (which he codified into the book
Megalopolis Unbound in 1966) advocating federal investment in high-speed service in the Northeast Corridor, which, through his advocacy, ultimately resulted in the successful
Metroliner service. Pell also proposed a solution for the problems of the system as a whole: “The answer is to divide the railroad system into a public authority that would carry passengers while the existing private companies would continue their more profitable function of hauling freight” ([
41], p. 2). This intermediary in the negotiation process largely codified the structure chosen for Amtrak nine years later.
The account by Phillips of the formation of Amtrak gives Pell credit for saving passenger rail in the United States, and Pell himself provides support for this position [
40,
42]. However, Whittle and Spicer note that ANT has:
...sought to move beyond deterministic models that trace organizational phenomena back to powerful individuals, social structures, hegemonic discourses or technological effects. Rather, ANT prefers to seek out complex patterns of causality rooted in connections between actors
From this perspective, the Claiborne Pell of this narrative becomes less of a heroic individual than a spokesperson for a punctualized local network of relationships with other government leaders, businesses and businessmen, staffers, constituents, family, friends, and others that even Pell may not have been conscious of. Pell’s effort can be praised or reviled, but, regardless, he would not have accomplished the same things outside of his particular actor-network of relationships. Questions about the political future of national intercity locomobility in the US dictate a similar unpacking of the complex local networks of governance.
Pell’s conversations with President Kennedy led to a White House task force that recommended a coordinated transport program in the Northeast Corridor. After Kennedy’s assassination, Pell continued his advocacy with President Johnson, who saw the proposal as intermediary that could be used in an election-year strategy to bolster weak support in the Northeast—translating a transportation actor-network into the political actor-network of which Johnson was the spokesperson. With Pell standing behind him, newly-reelected President Johnson signed the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act into law on 30 September 1965, which resulted in highly-successful Metroliner service between Washington and New York and the audacious but somewhat less-successful TurboTrain service between New York and Boston. The first revenue runs of the Metroliner took place on 16 January 1969. In this case, translation brought additional support for the local network from a global network that included a local network of selected voters in the Northeast.
However, the Metroliner as an intermediary did little to address the growing instability in the local rail system network. The managers (spokespersons) of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) and the New York Central Railroad (NYCRR) were desperate for a merger. The Northeast Corridor demonstration project was partially funded by the PRR and the project was quickly approved by the PRR in hopes of gaining political capital for getting the merger approved.
The zeal for merger led to approval of additional intermediaries with the New Haven Railroad (to be included in the merger) and labor union demands (layoff restrictions and rehires) that would ultimately make the agglomeration too unstable to persist. This strategy by a local network to gain resources from the global network resulted in destabilization of the local network. Hobbled by the contractual arrangements, continued business decline, the ending of postal service mail carriage by rail, questionable management and accounting practices, and an apocalyptically harsh winter, the merged Penn Central went bankrupt on 21 June 1970.
The impending Penn Central bankruptcy, along with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the continuing and growing level of instability in the local networks of the individual railroads was increasingly being translated through the global network, making it difficult for the federal government to continue to ignore. This translation increased the federal government’s dominance of the negotiation space, although since the federal government is also a heterogeneous local network, this translation did not reduce the complexity of the ongoing translation process.
The most serious concern in 1970 was freight rail service, which was still quite vital to industrial concerns. However, while passenger rail could likely have been terminated completely or absorbed by states with little effect on the global network, bubbling under the surface of the powerful commercial and governmental actor-networks was a somewhat less obvious local network of rail fans.
Lyon notes that, in contrast to the established local networks of industry, shipping and labor advocates, the passenger actor-network was uncoordinated and largely spokesperson-less ([
37], p. 233). This began to change in 1966 when attorney Anthony Haswell formed the advocacy group The National Association of Rail Passengers. However, Phillips asserts that an influx of letters to Capital Hill in the crucial years of 1969 and 1970 appeared to be a spontaneous expression of concern by significant numbers of voters that Congress could not ignore ([
40], p. 28). Regardless of the amount of centralized organization, the local actor-network of rail passengers was translating the global network for their benefit.
The members of this local advocacy actor-network were not exclusively civilian. Aside from the aforementioned Senator Pell, Phillips names a number of rail fans in government with the power to shape policy [
40]. Wilner even asserts that President Nixon was a closeted rail fan, noting that Nixon’s father was a streetcar conductor and that Nixon’s memoir includes recollections that as a child his aspiration was to be a railroad engineer— something common in that era ([
36], pp. 42–43; [
44]; [
45], pp. 53–54). This demonstrates how the networks of ANT are dynamic, interlocking mesh structures, in contrast to the more static
a priori structures of conventional sociology.
A variety of proposals for federal subsidies to private railroads or ownership of passenger equipment began circulating in Congress in 1969 ([
36], pp. 36–51). The compromise that emerged from the process of negotiation between liberal and conservative local networks was
Railpax, which involved a conception of a nationalized passenger rail system as a for-profit corporation. This imagined new local network had little basis in any possible material network. While the for-profit intermediary was a vital part of negotiation, it has left a persistent legacy in discursive instability and rhetorical vulnerability to conservative attacks.
The legislation was proposed by Transportation Secretary John Volpe, introduced into the Senate by Senators Vance Hartke and Winston Prouty and introduced into the House by Representative Harley Staggers ([
40], p. 30; [
46], p. 153). The Senate passed the
Railpax bill with little debate on 1 May 1970. The bankruptcy of the Penn Central on 21 June 1970 was an intermediary that spurred similar action in the House, and the reconciled
Railpax bill (HR 17849) passed both houses by voice vote on 14 October 1970. Despite last-minute rumors of a pocket-veto, President Nixon signed the bill into law on 30 October 1970 with no official ceremony.
Furious negotiation and translation then ensued as the new actor-network became fully elaborated. Of the 259 intercity trains still running at the time, 110 were cut. Twenty of the 26 eligible railroads chose to join Amtrak. After a number of storied trains took their final, well-publicized runs, Amtrak—a new local network of intercity passenger rail—began operation at 12:01 am on 1 May 1971.
2.3. Network Durability
Law ascribes the durability of actor-networks to three aspects: material, strategic, and discursive ([
13], pp. 148–49). While these three aspects are views of actor-networks and, therefore, interdependent, use of these perspectives provides a framework for building some measure of understanding of complex network dynamics.
Law notes that the focus of ANT is on
hows in opposition to the focus of traditional sociology on
whys (the Aristotelean efficient causes rather than end causes). This leaves questions about whether this ideographic methodology can reveal any useful nomothetic knowledge about regularities. Law asserts that ANT responded by “exploring the logics of network architecture and looking for configurations that might lead to relative stability” ([
13], p. 148).
In asking why intercity passenger rail has survived in the US, the ANT perspective transforms this into a question of how Amtrak has survived, and by using the durability framework of ANT, some larger insights into the logic of that survival and into the future may result.
2.3.1. Material Durability
Law notes the obvious in stating that, “some materials last longer than others”. However, this statement highlights an absence in explanations for the state of passenger rail that rely solely on technological, economic or social influences ([
13], p. 148). Since ANT acknowledges the interdependence of the human and non-human, ANT suggests that the vast material and formal durability of the physical railroad may offer an explanation for its persistence.
Level rights-of-way, steel track, stone ballast and monumental structures are all materially-durable non-human actors that facilitate the exertion of massive energies in the transportation of goods and people. They require massive infusions of capital and energy to construct, and are stable, defining fixtures of both urban and rural landscapes. Rail lines are active participants in the life of the community in ways that can be viewed as positive (commodity supply, mobility) or negative (noise, pollution, traffic congestion).
Even when abandoned, portions of this infrastructure will often physically persist for generations unless equally massive energies are exerted to obliterate their form. Adaptive reuse of stations as malls (e.g., St. Louis, Denver) or rail-banking of right-of-way as recreational trails preserves the mythology of the railroad in fetishized sacred spaces. The material persistence of the sacred space promotes the social reproduction of this mythology in the same way that the physical majesty of the religious cathedral promotes social reproduction of submission to the nominal mortal representatives of the eternal. The translation of the material mythology of the railroad through the performative “kinetic art” of Amtrak ([
29], pp. 75–78) is a driver of ridership and revenue.
However, Law is careful to point out that material durability begets tendencies rather than deterministic pathways ([
13], p. 148). ANT focuses on relationships rather than actors. Although the physical durability of a massive non-human actor like a cathedral railroad station will promote the durability of relationships with the surrounding community, physical durability does not guarantee immortality. The abandonment and extensive destruction of physically durable housing stock within a single generation in the South Bronx, Highland Park, MI or central St. Louis, MO is testimony to the way in which relationships between humans and non-humans are performative, quickly mutable, and not inherent in the materials themselves. Understanding the durability of a performative institution like Amtrak requires understanding strategies and discourses.
2.3.2. Strategic Durability
Networks are elaborated through actions that are often deliberate strategies to create durable sets of relationships (the Aristotelean end causes). These strategies often involve the translation of strategies developed in other actor-networks. In addition, these strategies can also be said to include non-human actors from the biophysical environment that follow, “teleologically ordered patterns of relations indifferent to human intentions” ([
13], p. 148).
The
Railpax bill that formed Amtrak was the product of direct, deliberate action by actors like Secretary Volpe and Representative Staggers. These actors were operating in the context of relational network forces, such as constituent advocacy, failing railroad economics, the highway lobby,
etc. Different actors and groups of actors had differing intentions for their actions (
variable geometry). While many in the private railroad actor-network had supported
Railpax as a strategy for preserving their own durability through the dissolution of the material passenger rail network, and many elected officials saw
Railpax as an actor-network that could be translated for political benefit,
interpretive flexibility allowed proponents inside and outside of government to advocate for the
Railpax compromise as the beginning of a long-term strategy for creating a durable new actor-network of national intercity rail ([
47], pp. 93–97).
Weaver notes the presence in federal governance of multiple veto points. This meta-strategic legacy of the founding fathers was intended to make governing cumbersome and inhibit tyranny ([
48], p. 20). The result has been a system of governance where radical change is difficult and where programmatic actor-networks can endure long after the original rationale for their creation has ceased.
Strategies are not always successful. Chen notes that high-speed rail (HSR) proposals have appeared in Congress in perennial waves that coincide with economic downturns and Keynesian calls for economic stimulus and job creation [
49]. Accordingly, these long-term projects have attempted to translate short-term needs, and, once the crises have abated, the initiatives have subsequently receded to fight another day.
The conservative political actor-network elaborated in the 1970s has had remarkable success in translating the discourses of politics in the US toward neoliberalism. However, despite the fervently-articulated and highly-detailed ideological arguments promulgated by conservative think-tanks—notably the Cato Institute (founded 1977) and the Reason Foundation (founded 1978)—the actor-network embodied by Amtrak thus far been too durable to translate out of existence ([
47], p. 101). The budgetary arguments against Amtrak are discourses that attempt to translate multiscalar economic angst to the benefit of the broader neoliberal agenda. However, the benefits of the proposed systemic juxtaposition (devolution and dissolution) do not translate into legitimate material benefits outside of the ideologically-motivated minority network. Hence, there is no translation of the strategies of the supporters and local beneficiaries who would suffer in such a juxtaposition.
Strategic durability extracts an opportunity cost in constraining the ability to adapt to changing conditions. A competitive equilibrium developed between ossified Gilded-Age-era regulatory actor-network and the longstanding administrative and financial actor-network of the private railroads, constraining vision and the capacity for strategic thought and action. As government and industry focused strategies for durability on highways and air travel, the network durability of the rail/regulation interlock precipitated the post-WW-II railroad crisis ([
47], p. 12). The new strategies for creating durability that were represented by Amtrak and Conrail could only be pursued once the crisis had compromised the durability of the actor-network to the point where the actors could be juxtaposed and the needs of the actor-networks could be translated into new sets of relationships.
By contrast, in Europe and Asia, the destabilizing crisis was WW-II itself, which resulted in the catastrophic disruption of material, economic, political, and geopolitical networks. In the multi-generational process of building both new infrastructure and new identities, inadequacies in the rail components of their passenger transport actor-networks necessitated the development of new strategies to restore durability. In addition to expansion of automobility and aeromobility echoing that in the US (albeit at somewhat lower volumes), many European countries began construction of high-speed rail systems, which adapted established locomobility to the circulatory demands of late capitalism and reinforced the strategic and material durability of their legacy rail networks.
2.3.3. Discursive Durability
Law borrows the idea of mini-discourses from Foucault and defines them as modes of ordering (e.g., entrepreneurial, bureaucratic, charismatic,
etc. ([
13], p. 149; [
50], p. 53). Discourses, “define conditions of possibility, making some ways of ordering webs of relations easier and others difficult or impossible”. Since realities beyond a single mode of ordering must be dealt with, stable actor-networks usually must operate multi-discursively, or in multiple modes of ordering.
Leatherby and Reynolds analyze passenger rail as, “a set of practices based on mutually shared understandings”, and note the role of discourses in that, “these shared understandings are based in language” ([
51], p. 53).
ANT focuses on understandings as meanings, and consistent with the aforementioned
variable geometry, the multiple meanings of Amtrak are shaped by differing discourses. For the environmentalist, Amtrak is sustainable mobility. For the neoclassical economist, Amtrak is a failed corporation and a waste of public funds. For the new rider, Amtrak is a novelty. For the politician, Amtrak is a means to mobilize political capital (both for proponents and opponents). For the rail worker, Amtrak is a job and source of identity. For the nostalgic rail fan, Amtrak is a kinetic connection to the past and orderly frame for a disorderly world. For the founding advocates of Amtrak, it was a way to reverse passenger rail decline through public investment ([
47], p. 97). For the progressive rail advocate, Amtrak is an intermediate evolutionary stage on the way to the truly robust rail network that America deserves. For the elderly patron, Amtrak is a source of convenient mobility (in contrast to inconvenient aeromobility and inaccessible automobility). For the poor, Amtrak is a more comfortable alternative to the bus. For some rural communities, Amtrak is a vital form of connection to the outside world.
All of these associations of discourses with groups are generalizations and individual perspectives are shaped by multiple (and often contradictory) discourses. Yet from the viewpoint of ANT, it is this richness of meanings that might offer some clues to the durability of locomobility in the US via Amtrak.
If Amtrak were only highly localized political pork, it would be as systemically vulnerable as the handful of purely “political trains” in Wyoming and West Virginia that were discontinued when their congressional patrons (Mike Mansfield and Robert Byrd, respectively) retired or no longer had a direct role in Amtrak affairs ([
36], pp. 47–48; [
46], pp. 262–63; [
47], p. 106). As a diverse set of variable networked meanings, Amtrak retains a diverse set of networked constituencies that are strong enough to survive, but not visible enough outside the actor-networks of advocates or opponents to either thrive or attract fatal predators.
The discursive and the strategic are interdependent. For many advocates, Amtrak was a way of freeing locomobility from the destructive strategies of the private railroads, and, for many, it still represents the last hope for preserving the institution of passenger rail in the United States—which, once gone, would likely be difficult to revive ([
47], p. 104; [
48], p. 95; [
52], p. 43). The capital investment in the physical network of track, structures and rolling stock promotes an (arguably fallacious) sunk-cost discourse for continuity ([
29], p. 78).
While preserving the featherbedding of the traditional 150-mile workday limit that had been in effect since the slow steam locomotive era, during the negotiations that created Amtrak, labor also retained a traditional railroad severance package requiring six years of continued salary ([
47], p. 98; [
53]). The stated intention was to ease the impact on workers of a dissolution of passenger rail service, but this also served as a strategic poison-pill to prevent dissolution of Amtrak that, while of only minor economic significance in the context of the massive federal budget, is a discursive counterpoint to economic attacks based on the myth of profitability ([
46], p. 269; [
54]).