Latour, Bruno (b. 1947)

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Oxford

Oxford University Press

2005

"They [the vehicles that transport individuality, subjectivity, personhood, and interiority] could be called 'subjectifiers', 'personnalizers', or 'individualisers', but I prefer the more neutral term of 'plug-ins', borrowing this marvelous metaphor from our new life on the Web."

Surely the question we need to ask then is where are the other vehicles that transport individuality, subjectivity, personhood, and interiority? If we have been able to show that glorified sites like global and local were made out of circulating entities, why not postulate that subjectivities, justifications, unconscious, and personalities would circulate as well? And sure enough, as soon as we raise this very odd but inescapable question, new types of clamps offer themselves to facilitate our enquiry. They could be called subjectifiers, personnalizers, or individualisers, but I prefer the more neutral term of plug-ins, borrowing this marvelous metaphor from our new life on the Web. When you reach some site in cyberspace, it often happens that you see nothing on the screen. But then a friendly warning suggests that you 'might not have the right plug-ins' and that you should 'download' a bit of software which, once installed on your system, will allow you to activate what you were unable to see before. What is so telling in this metaphor of the plug-in is that competence doesn't come in bulk any longer but literally in bits and bytes. You don't have to imagine a 'wholesale' human having intentionality, making rational calculations, feeling responsible for his sins, or agonizing over his mortal soul. Rather, you realize that to obtain 'complete' human actors, you have to compose them out of many successive layers, each of which is empirically distinct from the next. Being a fully competent actor now comes in discreet pellets or, to borrow from cyberspace, patches and applets, whose precise origin can be 'Googled' before they are downloaded and saved one by one.
(p. 207)

Machine::Computer::Web

Reading

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

01/06/2016