Assemblages
In some ways Bruno Latour’s, “Actor-Network Theory” seems a bit broad, although the idea of “flat-ontology” does create a simpler idea in terms of understanding and funnily enough deconstructing the term assemblage. Before even reading up on the “ANT,” I automatically connected the notion to the idea of semiotics, which in a simple definition is the study of meaning and processes. The Wikipedia page described the concept as, “explaining how material–semiotic networks come together to act as a whole, generating explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory.) In week 3 I researched the idea of “convenience,” and spoke about the ‘Semantic Web’ and how it used information to connect and build digital structures of information almost in the same way humans use filing cabinets to organise physical content.
Though it seems like a bit of a gargantuan example, the internet itself seems like the most obvious illustration linking to the ‘ANT.’ If we take the actants, again simply being the computers, the optical networking technologies, the capacity for information and of course humans themselves, we can start to understand how the digital world or internet was constructed or assembled. Interestingly Shaviro, Stevens writes in, ‘DeLanda: A New Philosophy of Society’ about the importance of these actants, stating “the entities themselves are the absolutes.” While Steven’s writes about Margaret Thatcher’s well known quote, “there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and their families,” he later goes on to make an interesting point that the individual could never survive if it wasn’t for the society that he or she were living in.
Really the ‘Actor-Network Theory,’ can be applied to anything and in terms of ‘assemblage,’ it is important to understand even the most minimal contributions to any sort of process. Stevens writes how, “this is not to say that the entity is entirely determined by these relations.” Really the theory developed by Latour, can only really give insight to the development of a project, not to how this construction will effect society and will lead to change.
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