In a recent response to one of my posts, Ross writes:
Ah, well, with all this reading of Leibniz it’s no wonder that you ascribe some sort of teleological agency to nature, and for that matter, the entire non-human universe.
Here it’s incredibly important to emphasize that I don’t ascribe teleology to all things. Indeed, I believe that teleology is even rather limited in the case of humans and social systems. Do I often speak of nonhuman objects as “doing” things, “wanting” things, “aiming” at things, and having goals? Absolutely. These anthropomorphisms– rife also in evolutionary theory, sociology, and Marxist thought –are not intended to suggest that things really have aims and purposes, but merely to draw attention to the contributions that nonhuman things make in the world and to us. They are designed to break the bad anthropocentric habit of treating nonhumans as passive stuffs upon which we project meanings and which merely obstruct us.
read on!
In The Politics of Nature Latour gives a succinct definition of what an actant is. As Latour puts it, actants are anything that “…modif[ies] other actors through a series of…” actions (75). Does the entity modify other entities, contributing something new to the assemblage that cannot be reduced to the other entities in the assemblage, or doesn’t it? If the entity does contribute something new to the assemblage, then it’s an actant. If it does not, then it’s not. It’s as simple as that. There is no weird teleology here that suggests that rocks, for example, have goals and aims. There is no suggestion here that street lamps really do want something. All that is to be attended to in the concept of actants is the manner in which they modify the action of other entities.
Here are a few examples of actants:
* Vinegar poured on baking soda. In its encounter with vinegar the baking soda behaves in ways that it would not otherwise behave.
* A surprising result in a laboratory experiment. In the moment of surprise in a laboratory experiment a substance other than the scientists and theories rises forth and announces itself, effectively participating in the dialogue. It is not just the scientists that here participate in the dialogue, but the substance has said something too. This speaking is provoked, of course, by the scientists, but it has nothing to do with the scientists’ intentions or meanings. It participates in the dialogue in the sense of modifying everything within that dialogue. Does this entail that the substance wanted to speak, that it intended to speak, that it demanded to be heard? No, of course not. Nonetheless it does speak or announce something in the course of the experiment and is every bit as much a participant in the experiment as the scientists. Indeed, often the scientists would prefer that the substance hadn’t spoken as in many cases the “speech” of the substance can spell the ruin of their work.
* The Krippen Virus in Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend starring Will Smith. In the film, the Krippen Virus is intended to cure cancer. However, as soon as it is released on the human population, it fundamentally modifies human beings, transforming them into nearly mindless vampire like beings. The Krippen Virus does not aim to do this, it doesn’t have the goal of doing this, it does do this.
In the grand scheme of things, there’s nothing really controversial about the concept of actants. Most reasonable people, in their day to day activity, would readily concede that entities do things or modify the behavior of us and other entities in all sorts of ways. My blog is an actant for me– and hopefully for others! –in the sense that it modifie(s)(d) my actions in all sorts of ways. With the blog, a whole set of goals, ordinary values, aims, and practices emerged that weren’t a part of my daily activity before. It’s no exaggeration to say that the blog fundamentally changed the very nature of my thought. Of course, the term “blog” here is shorthand for a variety of actants ranging from surprising remarks that appear in my comment section, posts that appear on other blogs, the software that constrains and affords the nature of my writing in a variety of ways, the temporality of blogs or the particular pace at which discussion here unfolds, the encounters with others that have taken place, the technologies I use to blog (blogging is very different depending on whether I’m using my phone, my iPad, or my laptop), etc.
The problem is that in our theorizing we often don’t do a very good job tracking or attending to actants. This happens in one of two ways. On the one hand, given the predominance of correlationo-idealistic thought, there’s a tendency to reduce the entities of the world to mere vehicles of human thought and intention, ignoring altogether the differences that entities contribute. We cease asking what entities do in particular circumstances– how, for example, our smart-phones modify us –and instead simply reduce them to vehicles of our use, meaning, or intentions. On the other hand, we can fall prey to something akin to what Heidegger had in mind when he referred to “sendings of Being”. In Heidegger’s strange reading of the history of philosophy, a sending of Being is something like a master-term that dominates a philosophical epoch and defines the ground of all beings within that epoch. These master-terms have the tendency to blind us to the action of actants by predetermining the ground of all beings in advance. Here it bears noting that whether or not a master-term occludes in this way is a functional property of the term, a feature of how the term functions, and not intrinsic to the term itself. Terms like power, capital, signifier, life, etc., can all begin to function in this way, giving us answers in advance and preventing us from seeing the world about us.
The concept of actant is a battle cry to attend to the manner in which entities modify other entities. By speaking in anthropomorphisms about actants we gradually develop a form of vision that helps to break the habit of seeing humans as the only actants. Rather, we come to look at the interplay of entities and how they modify one another. In particular, we develop a taste for events, that which surprises, or that which is unexpected in the course of things. The questions are always the same: what are the actants? what do they modify? how do they modify?
It is clear that the concept of actants is a relational term. Insofar as an actant consists of one entity modifying another (whether human or otherwise) we are attending to relations between entities. Within the framework of my onticology, actants thus fall under the domain of local manifestations and regimes of attraction, exploring the way in which entities are imbricated with one another and how they modify one another. Latour’s tendency is to reduce entities entirely to actants, arguing that entities only are insofar as they modify other entities. As Harman has argued, this is to confuse the being of entities with how they affect other entities. Entities in their being are always in excess of any of their affects, such that entities can exist that affect nothing, yet nonetheless exist and be real despite that. Nonetheless, the concept of actant draws our attention to a rich domain of interactions absolutely necessary as objects of analysis if we are to understand why our social world is as it is.
May 24, 2011 at 10:22 pm
“Latour’s tendency is to reduce entities entirely to actants, arguing that entities only are insofar as they modify other entities. As Harman has argued, this is to confuse the being of entities with how they affect other entities. Entities in their being are always in excess of any of their affects, such that entities can exist that affect nothing, yet nonetheless exist and be real despite that.”
Isn’t that what you do as well Levi? You indentify an objects substantiality (virtual proper being) with its ‘powers’, or it’s capacity to affect/make a difference, non?
May 24, 2011 at 10:26 pm
IMO, an object/assemblage is not real if it does not make a difference/affect the world. All actually existing entities have force and consequence.
May 24, 2011 at 10:34 pm
No Michael,
I hold that entities are in excess of whatever they happen to do and regardless of whether they do anything at all.
May 24, 2011 at 10:56 pm
Michael,
And, of course, I can’t prove that there are any objects that exist that are currently making no difference to other objects. For that they’d have to be currently making a difference to you and I, but that’s precisely what they aren’t doing! Rather, I take this as a logical consequence of the thesis that the being of objects is always in excess of any of the effects they might happen to produce in other objects at any particular time. Personally, I find it rather sublime, fascinating, and even a little terrifying to imagine a universe populated by all sorts of “dark objects” of which anything is scarcely aware. And here I add that these objects would be entirely actual, they just wouldn’t be affecting anything else. At any rate, returning to your initial comment, a capacity is not at all the same thing as the exercise of a capacity. You seem to take me as claiming that entities are only real when they are exercising their capacities on others. Anyway, we’ve gone back and forth over these issues many a time before and I don’t really wish to go over such well trodden ground. I don’t think we’re going to reach agreement here, so feel free to treat my “dark objects” as a peculiar metaphysical quirk or commitment on my part.
May 25, 2011 at 12:36 am
Well said! Good reminder of actants’ relationality. I also appreciate your discussion of anthropomorphisms and think it would be interesting to put your views in dialogue w/ Jane Bennett’s on this topic. About actants, I have a question: I would think that actants proliferate. So, when that vinegar hits the baking soda, the baking soda, too, is an actant because it (along with other variables, like the specific container) affects how the vinegar reacts.
May 25, 2011 at 12:49 am
I might be a bit behind the curve in asking, but doesn’t Latour also hold that actants exceed their relations in that they are capable of surprise, disturbance, and are in fact always “trouble makers” of a sort? Is your view different than Latour’s?
May 25, 2011 at 12:50 am
[…] me the case is very different. If I draw a distinction between things and actants, then this is because I hold that things are irreducible to their effects on other objects. On the […]
May 25, 2011 at 12:52 am
Adam,
I think Latour waffles on this point. Logically it would seem that he’s necessarily committed to such a thing, but often he speaks as if actants are exhausted in producing effects on other things.
Ana,
Absolutely! We get actants arising out of actants arising out of actants.
May 25, 2011 at 3:43 am
I don’t see why it’s necessary to posit agency in terms of a stilted neologism like “actants” when we already have concepts like force, energy, and power. These aren’t just static pressures like “resistance” or “inertia.” They behave, depending on the natural or nonhuman object being described, in their own very spontaneous and chaotic way, or slowly and methodically, and so on. Of course these things impact society, and Marx and those who followed in his vein would never hesitate to admit that. In fact, Marx himself and many Marxist historians attribute climatological shifts (a long series of brutal winters from 1380-1450, for example) in creating the conditions for primitive accumulation after the towns were reopened to long-range commercial capital.
May 25, 2011 at 3:48 am
Ross,
You’re objecting on the grounds of vocabulary choice? Next you’ll be railing against germans using the term “grun” rather than “green”. The term “actant”draws attention to agencies other than humans and helps to break us of the habit of treating only humans as agents. Above all, it reminds us that humans never act alone, but that the media we use transform us. Your crude and fictional means-end human rationality doesn’t even begin approaching this and thereby presents a thoroughly distorted picture of the social world. Of course, like many the theologian or religious man you do always have an answer within that crude framework.
May 25, 2011 at 4:04 am
Levi,
Where in my post do I say anything about means-ends rationality?
Regardless, saying that nonhuman objects have forces and emit energies of their own accord, such that often they modify or disrupt the smooth transition from a clear purpose as envisioned in advance by a human agent to its reality, grants plenty of spontaneous activity to nature. The problem I have with the idea of “actants” and the “agency” of nonhuman beings or objects is that the concept of “agency” carries with it the connotation of not only being able to act, but being able to act otherwise. I cannot have true agency if my actions are determined completely heteronomously; I only possess agency if I can act autonomously, not from crude external efficient causation, or even by some internal compulsion.
May 25, 2011 at 6:22 am
From your lexicon:
“Power: Capacities or abilities of an object that belong to the virtual proper being of an object. What an object can do. To be contrasted with local manifestation, exo-quality, or endo-quality, or what an object has done.”
Ok, I see the nuance here. You are saying the ‘capacity’to affect is a potentiality that exceeds whatever affects actually manifest.
Of course you are wrong (;-), but that’s besides the point of me trying to understand how you differ from Latour.
I’m with Latour on this point. All reality is the relational time-space opened up by ‘actants’ and flows. As implied above, I think the powers/potency/efficacy of things is an emanation (cf. Tom Sparrow) of an entity’s actual properties (embodiment) as expressed in relation.
To be sure, the achievement of organizational ‘depth’ or extension (objects per se) generates a material or structural excess – but within the immanent ecology of being all particular instances of territorialization or assembly are vulnerable to the conditions (or network) within which it’s existence is afforded.
May 25, 2011 at 7:19 am
REVISED VERSION:
“I take [the existence of dark objects] as a logical consequence of the thesis that the being of objects is always in excess of any of the effects they might happen to produce in other objects at any particular time.
I think that is indeed the logical consequence of the thesis that objects have an absolute excess. But i argue that all aspects of objects, no matter how ‘deep’ or complex, are always vulnerable to entering into relations with the particular aspects of other objects – but not all objects, nor all aspects – if only by virtue of being differential extensions of actual properties on the same ontological plane.
The logical consequence here, then, is that all objects are capable of affects and being affected, but not in the same way or to the same degree. There must be a spectrum of object efficacy from almost zero (but never zero) to extremely high potency.
In fact, when an object reaches zero efficacy it crosses a threshold from being an individual assemblage towards dissolution. Any so-called entity that has zero capacity to affect or be affected is thus without boundaries – or endo-structural demarcation.
Such a limitless non-entity, or “dark object”, thereby quickly approaches the status of God.
You seem to take me as claiming that entities are only real when they are exercising their capacities on others.
No, not really. I was reminded of the nuance of your perspective on the ‘split’ nature of objects – of the difference you theorize between potential (virtual) and expression (manifestation) – after looking again at your lexicon for onticology.
I think your conclusions here make sense within your framework, but i still don’t agree with the basic premise of split or totally withdrawn entities, and so i fail to arrive at the same conclusions. As you have noticed on several occasions, I’m an actualist. And i reject, like Harman, the notion of inherent potentiality.
“Potentiality”, for me, is a concept born from a un-recognition of how differential material-energetic flows and assemblages interact in ways that make possible novel associations and emergent expressions. There is, in this view, no ‘potentiality’ in excess of the actually existing properties and historical contingencies embodied as individual entities. It is the relational, catalytic nature of material-energetic assemblages which makes the change/shift from a particular actuality to another actuality possible.
May 25, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Ross,
You talk about means-end rationality in the post I was responding to. As for heteronomy and autonomy, wishing does not make it so. I do not believe pure autonomy of the sort you describe ever or anywhere exists. A number of the extended mind posts and discussions have been making precisely this point.
May 31, 2011 at 8:34 pm
The onus is on AI and anti-AI folks to prove that consciousness is teleological. I take your view Levi to be totally in line with the smart neurobiological money.
In New Zealand I met one of these guys who argued about animals that don’t have brains, and how some of their behavior is mind-like. He referenced sponges and sponge larvae. I’ll look back over my notes, but as this post shows, we discovered a lot of similarities between OOO and enactive theories of mind.
March 4, 2012 at 1:26 am
[…] be read by human or machine. It, thus, represents a logic that runs parallel to the arguments of Actor Network Theory, and Object Oriented Ontology, regarding the importance of non-human actors producing an effect. […]
December 17, 2012 at 9:55 am
[…] of baking soda and vinegar that when combined become actants causing each to behave differently. (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/a-brief-remark-on-actants/) Manuel Delanda talks of hurricanes, events formed from the air that take on personalities and […]