Latour and Actor-Network Theory:

Latour draws a distinction between the mechanical, engineered network, that is the dominant mode of understanding networks, and what he calls an ‘actor-network’. He also dispels the notion that ANT has anything to do with the study of social-networks, a misapprehension under which I was most certainly labouring – extending the metaphor to all  of society, non-human actors included.

Latour then suggests that networks can be understood as having multiple dimensions with as many nodes as there are connections. LT makes the interesting point that networks do not require an ‘aether’ through which to operate… perhaps this is to finally dispel the mechanical characterisation of a network. Unlike the classic idea of the network, the network of the ANT can exist without a substrate.

“A network notion implies a different kind of social theory”… the egalitarian hopes of techno-utopians are always lovely sentiments but quite often, when it comes the machinery used to control networks, we are at the mercy of powerful and not always benevolent actors, consider the companies implicated in PRISM as a reference. But, this is me falling towards the ‘substrate’ idea that LT just removed from the equation.

“The granting of humanity to an individual actor, or the granting of collectivity, or the granting of anonymity, of a zoomorphic appearance, of amorphousness, of materiality, requires paying the same semiotic price”. All is one and one is all? Sure. I like that. What I believe LT means here is that trying to separate, actors/networks/society/pastrami sandwiches from one another is a falsehood and deceptive. All things are connected, a product of networks… I believe that human categorisation functions as part of, not apart-from the larger world we inhabit – but after or simultaneous to... the place we inhabit, not before. I may be repeating myself here. And may be wrong. Just writing thoughts as they occur doesn’t necessarily lead to anything worthwhile reading. Am I a Deleuzian? Or just deluded? I don’t think narratives exist without human observation, but once observed, can only exist. Nothing observed is without narrative. “There is no difference between explaining and telling how a network surrounds itself with new resources”. Yes and yes.

Perhaps the gap between semiotics and what LT calls scientism, is not a gap but a matter of relative diffusion? Apples will always and inevitably fall from trees but a stop-sign, will always mean stop, whether we believe the stop-sign as open to interpretation or not. And so on down the path into ever greater abstraction and interpretation, our thoughts pull back from the sharp-end of materialist philosophy, negotiating each other and ourselves till we’re awash in the great ocean, alone in the superstitious and mystical universe of the inner-subjective. Now do we have absolute signs and meaning by collective agreement or hard, scientific-fact? Both?  Are they contingent on the specific universe they inhabit? There might be somewhere in the multiverse where apples, sometimes, fall upwards.

Esther also speaks http://countingletters.wordpress.com/