ANT: Burrowing between deconstruction and absolutist frameworks

. . . or at least I'm hoping that's part of what we'll get to discuss. On pg. 11 Latour suggests a "third and more difficult test" will be whether ANT study "aims at reassembling the social or still insists on dispersion and deconstruction" as he clarifies how (easily) ANT has "been confused with a postmodern emphasis on the critique of the 'Great narratives'." He is careful in his own rhetoric to suggest ANT's rhyzomatic nature will continually determine or "influence" its own (myriad?) directions, so that he (or we) couldn't say whether it will or it won't "reassemble. . . or deconstruct." He does say that "dispersion, destruction, and deconstruction are not the goals to be achieved but what needs to be overcome" even as he insists that "the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations" (and, thus, the outcomes of those associations and what they will "mutate" beyond) (11).

Is he suggesting a purer, framework-free standpoint of observation, sans any a priori "range of acceptable entities" or prescription (as opposed to the description of "a slogan from ANT . . .[that suggests] you have 'to follow the actors themselves,' that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands. . .") (12-13)? It would seem so. Even Latour, by the end of his intro, uses a "travel guide" analogy to describe how he will help us merely "find our bearings" once we are "bogged down in the territory" (17).

More traditional sociologists are those who, as Latour distinguishes in his first category, "interupt the movement of associations instead of resuming [them]" by labeling, categorizing, or, simply, beginning with "society or other social aggregates" instead of "end[ing] with them" (8). ANT theorists are more interested in charting the vast network in terms of influence, which to me puts them outside an older structuralism (early Barthes, Levi-Strauss, etc.) and not exactly in the tradition of Derrida. In terms of deconstruction, I always think of the desire to "return the free play of fixed opposites" or binary oppositions, etc. ANT theorists seem to want to avoid impeding the "free play" of the network, not by constructing or deconstructing the narrow parameters of "center vs. the margin" but in order to map a broader system of influence (i.e. all the things within the system that lead us to act the way we do).

Sorry if this turned into me typing my way through a few of Latour's "propositions" in efforts to understand them. The above may be way off, but I am interested in how this isn't just the awkward collision of a turn literary theory took in the same era (late 80's / 90's) rhetoric took its social one.

See you tomorrow,

Kevin