subjectivation, or adding strings

The positive strain throughout Latour's work--his making good on the introductory promise to cast ANT as a means (not a theory, for God's sake, ANT is not a theory) of working beyond the skepticism of postructuralism--really becomes apparent in the second half. I was about to post on the near-absence of Bourdieu in places where we might expect to find him (like Foucault, Bourdieu's notion of the habitus seems relegated to footnotes or taken up by Mauss on pp 210-211); then, in the section I just mentioned, I came across a passage I liked for its sense of possibility:

"What I am trying to do here is simply show how the boundaries between sociology and psychology may be reshuffled for good. For this, there is only one solution: make every single entity populating the former insider come from the outside not as a negative constraint 'limiting subjectivity', but as a positive offer of subjectivation" (212-213).

Here Latour would seem to be taking on Foucault (on the subject of the "construction of human interior psyches") and Bourdieu, who would suggest that what seems interior, what seems like "second nature" or reflex, is embodiment of custom and comes from the exterior. The difference for Latour is that the exterior is not seen as a terminal terministic screen (a "negative constraint 'limiting subjectivity') as Bourdieu, some of Foucault, and certainly much of Baudrillard's work in the late 70's/early 80's might suggest. Relatedly, we're not described as "puppets manipulated, in spite of themselves, by so many invisible threads" so much as potential puppets (and potential puppeteers) more focused on the "something that happens along the strings that allows the marionettes to move" (213; 214). Or, a page later, Latour distills it down to "the outside is not a context 'made of' social forces and it doesn't 'determine' the inside" (215).

So, Latour offers interesting possibilities for relocating the idea of "agency" (partly the subject of my paper) and, potentially, for rethinking what the "end goals" are of "emancipating students" through the reading/writing tools of the social turn. An previous question we raised was, ok, so we put students through a Berlinesque semester, what do we hope to leave them with? Instead of a grimmer sense of "society is to blame and though we may never fully penetrate the infinite strata of mystification, we can at least read critically to warn others" (my imitation of myself, circa 1994), we have something like "being politically motivated now starts to take a different and more specific meaning: we look for ways to register the novelty of associations and explore how to assemble them in a satisfactory form."