The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

140 Edges
Perhaps in the ontological inversion of graph theory and networks a
new kind of “politics of desertion” will be discovered.
Pure Metal
A theme often repeated in poststructuralist thought is the so - called
decentering of the liberal - humanist subject, a trend that led to charges
of antihumanism against such thinkers. There is no presocial, universal,
or essential self, one is told; there is only the play of surface
effects and signs, themselves largely determined by social, economic,
and political forces. The question is not “who am I?” but rather “how
did an ‘I’ become so central to our social, economic, and political existence?”
This cultural constructionism therefore focuses less on an
innate self or identity than on the ways that gender/ sexuality, race/
ethnicity, and class/ status form, shape, and construct a self.
In this debate over the decentering or the recentering of the human
subject, we wonder: what of the nonhuman, that which seemingly does
not concern us at all? The term “nonhuman” has in fact been used in
science studies and media studies, for example, by Bruno Latour. Focusing
on knowledge production in the sciences, Latour notes that any
scientific experiment involves not only human investigators but a range
of “nonhuman actants” (rather than human actors) that may include
laboratory technologies, organisms, materials, research grants, institutions
and corporations, and so on. Latour gives a simpler, if more mundane,
example: the speed bump. Speed bumps do nothing on their
own; they simply exist as inert matter. Yet their presence affects our
human actions (slowing down, swerving). Human made, yes, but their
being crafted by humans (or, more appropriately, machines) says
nothing about their interactions with human beings and their integration
into the everydayness of the human world. This integration
leads Latour to speak of a “parliament of things,” a “nonmodern Constitution”
in which even “things” seem to be democratic. Yet despite
Latour’s emphasis on the way that human actions are influenced by
nonhuman actants, there is a sense in which the nonhuman is still
anthropomorphized, a sense in which the circumference of the human
is simply expanded.