ANT against itself

I wanted to contextualize the Latour reading for this week with some basic facts about actor-network theory (ANT), maybe selfishly :), since you guys should not feel obligated to read a giant blog post about it. These definitions draw on Latour's remarks in the intro and first part, and also add those of ANT's other founders and scholars. Our discussion of the social in Latour got me interested in ANT, the theory for which the book is meant to serve as an introduction. My discussion of his part 1 on Monday night may draw on some of the same material I'm offering here, so apologies for any repetition.

The most basic fact about ANT is that it doesn't exist, according to Latour's essay, "On recalling ANT." He problematizes it systematically, showing why it's not a theory, why the uses of the terms "actor" and "network" are inaccurate, and even why the hyphen between them doesn't make sense. The proper term, as he has insisted over the years, is "actant rhizome ontology," and he actually says, in the essay, that ANT has stayed in currency, as a term, because it sounds better than ARO.

Since we're reading an introduction to ANT, written by him almost a decade after that essay, the term clearly shows something of a comfortable fit, but Latour's ambiguity points back to one of the basic aspects of ANT, in the little that I've read: the documents tend to marvellously imitate the networks that they describe, reversing their conclusions, striving for complexity. The most consistent conclusion in the essay mirrors the one in the part of "Reassembling the Social" that we're reading for Monday: ANT functions, not as a theory, but as an ontology, or way of describing being, that critiques traditional notions of the social.

John Law, the other key figure in ANT (according to Jeff Rice), offers similar
caveats about ANT: it can't be essentialized, since complexity is one of its key features; it can't really be seen as a theory, since that would imply some fixed idea that might take away from its emphasis on fluidity; and it should not exist, as a term, but does for the sake of convenience. Again, this approach to ANT really metarhetoricizes the ANT conception of the network: it doesn't hold a consistent reality, and any motion toward a stable idea is a convenience.

As in Latour's essay, though, Law offers a couple of key features of ANT. First, it emphasizes "relational materiality." This means a couple of things, from what I can gather. First, these guys draw on Foucault's idea that relationality, the idea that we're defined by each othher, applies to much more than just language. In ANT terms, this extends further--they see the networks that we live in being defined by things other than language, but also other than individuals. Second, ANT emphasizes "performativity." That means that relationality is defined by performance--there is no static network of connections that we exist in; the network is performed. Law, and other ANT theorists, don't see the individual as a fixed site of social construction, but as something much more dynamic.

Aside from Foucault, the thinkers who seem to have clearly influenced ANT are DeLeuze and Guattari. Their ideas about social structure have given rise to ANT's conception of the network, and to the "actant-rhizome" idea. That idea basically says that society can be seen in two ways: as arboreal, meaning hierarchical and beaureaucratic; or as rhizomatic, meaning indeterminate, acentric, and dynamic. Latour's references to them show his continuing sense of debt.

If ANT is perplexing at all to you, as it has been to me in reading "Reassembling the Social," it may help a tad to know that that perplexity is part of its mission. It doesn't so much offer a set of tidy ideas as do the postmodern thang of problematizing long-standing ones, and offering hints of revolutionary alternative. ANT's influence seems to have been pretty intense in the quarter century that it's existed, possibly mostly in sociology, and in contributing to our understanding of networks. However, Latour stresses the difference between ANT's sense of network and the computer network that has so informed popular understanding. The network that they talk about is transformative, dynamic, fluid, and holds none of the illusion of fixity commonly ascribed to the virtual world.

My understanding of ANT is definitely teeny, and please feel free to chime in, add, or correct any bogus info above.