On recalling ant

Abstract

This paper explores the four difficulties of actor-network theory: the words "actor," "network," "theory," and the hyphen. The originality of ANT lies in the fact that this not so much an alternative social theory as it is a method of unravelling the activities of the actor who constructs their own world. By focusing on operations of structuring and summation rather than on concepts of "actor" and "network," we are able to show that the tension between the macro and the micro levels in the social sciences is largely artificial. ANT allows us to overcome this tension by channeling our attention away from objects and towards circulations instead. According to the author, the main contribution of this theory to the social sciences is the transformation of the social from the surface, territory, or region of reality into circulation. In the latter half of the paper, the author discusses the potential of ANT as a symmetrical anthropology of the modern and the defining structure of modernity. This implies accounting for the emergence of the ontological opposition between "out there" and "in there" (the nature and the subject), and (the deletion of) political and theological interests. The difference between ANT and many kinds of reflection on modernity, post-, hyper-, pre-, and antimodernity, is simply that it took to task simultaneously all of the components of what could be called the modernist predicament. According to the author, ANT is not a theory of the social any more than it is a theory of the subject, or a theory of God, or a theory of nature. It is a theory of the space or fluids circulating in a non-modern situation. In the conclusion of the article, the author offers an optimistic take on the potential of developing ANT further and giving it new forms.