At the inverse, occurs then the agency of non forms: by “a)”: An single object can be subject of communication of several systems, so, the object also creates disruoptions, and, by b), the physical and non human actor in general, determines the perfomativity of the system.

My goal to see and participate in a vibrant online discussion regarding ANT, questions of agency, etc. is more a wish than a reality at the moment – I too am being pulled in 100 different ways by competing obligations. So, no worries – if a discussion emerges here or elsewhere, great.

I agree with you that Latour’s a particularly invigorating and engaging writer; he has a way of putting things just so that manages to be provocative and unsettling of established ways of thinking.

With respect to your comments about the nature/society divide, I agree and I’d encourage you, if you haven’t already, to look up his We Have Never Been Modern, a short book that can be read fairly quickly. I find the breaking down of the asymmetry between the ’social’ and the ‘natural’ to be a signal development in the social sciences and its replacement with a world of complex and contingent assemblages of different agencies / actants a potentially very valuable perspective.

What I question – where I am undecided – relates specifically to the quote you cite above from Reassembling the Social: yes, the disciplines are working to extend the range of entities at work in the world, creating widening networks of stable intermediaries. And yes, objects of knowledge would not be possible without the creation of experts and fields of expertise in which these objects are created and called forth.

What a Luhmannian would want to emphasize, I think, is that in the extension of the network of stable intermediaries there is a complex dynamic between seeing and not seeing, between observing and not observing, at work; our use of computers, for example, allows us to collect much more information than what was once possible – but also creates new ‘blind spots,’ new forms of information overload and unmanageability – that didn’t exist before, which in turn provides a surplus of future possibilities for social reproduction. That’s why Latour’s emphasis on the recalcitrance of the non-human world, the fact that is both necessary for human action and yet in fundamental respects opaque to human observation, is attractive to a systems theoretic perspective: because this paradoxical combination of observability and non-observability, which frustrates a ‘control’ oriented approach, is a key to the dynamism of modern societies.

I think both the Latourians and the Luhmannians appreciate the fact that to talk about ‘nature’ and ’society’ is to proceed at a level that’s no longer sufficient to capture the complexities of what goes on in social reproduction. From a Latourian perspective, Luhmann’s constant emphasis on the reproduction of systems (economy, science, law, etc.) is still too abstract, even though Latour himself has indicated that Luhmann was write to refuse the idea that there is a central point from which social dynamics can be observed in their entirety; both see such processes as taking place at multiple sites according to different dynamics of assembly in the case of Latour, or frameworks of observation in the case of Luhmann.

I haven’t gotten around to reading the article you referred to, maybe I’ll get around to read it – but it doesn’t exactly feed into my current work.

I catched on to this in your post:

“But humans could not speak for the virus unless there existed a host of other non-human actors available to aid in this process of translation: the AIDS test, diagnostic equipment, and so on, that allows for a stable set of associations between humans and the virus.”

I think Latour’s point would be that there would be not virus without humans and vice versa. He writes in Reassembling the Social:

“… each discipline is at once extending the range of entities at work in the world and actively participating in transforming some of them into faithful and stable intermediaries. Thus economists, for instance, are not simply describing some economic infrastructure which has always been there… Without economics there are no economies; without sociology there is not society; without psychology there is not psyche; without geography there is not space. What would we know of the past without historians?” (Latour, 2005, p. 257)

I believe this quote feeds directly into your comments above. Furthermore, Latour’s mindblowing – to me – point is show that in order to move on we have to overcome the artificial dichotomy of nature/society:

I provide you with another of Latour’s really inspirering ways of words:

“So in the end, what is ANT’s political project? Since this tiny school is nothing more than a complicated way to go back to the surprise at seeing the social unravel…. What ANT has tried to do is make itself sensitive again to the sheer difficulty of assembling collectives made of so many new members once nature and society have been simultaneously put aside.” (Latour, 2005, p. 258-59)

Where would Luhmann be in these (to Latour) matters of concern?

I look forward to sharing more mental confetti .

I’ve been meaning to do a follow-up to this post, as the issues raised by the various authors mentioned above are really very fascinating. I’d love to see a vibrant discussion in the blogosphere about ANT- and systems-theoretic conceptions of personhood and agency.

There’s a question in my mind regarding the still-developing social networking services and communication / interactive technologies. Are these extending personhood, providing new mechanisms for allowing a pre-constituted ‘person’ to operate across wider and wider socio-temporal contexts? Or, more radically, are they mechanisms whereby the very idea of the person is being deconstructed and reconstructed, such that these technologies are not only things we confront and use but become prosthetics of personality – i.e., obligatory points of transition, points of passage through which our inchoate ambiguous wishes, desires, inclinations, and thoughts must pass in order to condense or crystallize into more or less stabilized, concrete ‘personalities’? I’m not sure that we’re there yet, but there is an extent now where computers and laptops, e-mail, various software products, communication technologies aren’t merely things we use but our sometimes unreliable and frustrating partners who have a large say in defining who we are, in ways perhaps less subtle but more deceptively significant than the clothes we wear. Certainly, these technologies could disappear tomorrow and our bodies would still be here, and we would think our ‘values’ and our ‘identities’ as well. But we’d be living in a different society, and this would put our values and identities to very different kinds of what Latour calls ‘trials of strength.’