“For we ourselves, just like Neanderthals, sparrows, mushrooms, and dirt, have never done anything else than act amidst the bustle of other actants, compressing and resisting them, or giving way beneath their blows.”
Throughout this text, the writer seems to bridge the gap between humans and– well, everything else that is literally not the homo-sapien, in terms that humans are, in fact, mere actants. This begs the question of what is the actor? If everything is the effect and affected, what is the cause? Does every tangible thing (and maybe intangible thing) act as both the cause and effect, the actor and the actant?
“If we want to understand their movement, we have to go down into those searing rifts where the magma erupts and on the basis of this eruption are produced…” (p. 59)
It seems to me that Harman is attempting to call everything in existence an actor. The cause likely has no beginning, since as long as anything has existed there has been some sort of relationship between existing things. Even before anything existed there had to be something that brought existence into existence. The more I think about it, the more time seems to move both ways, as if there can really be no beginning. I understand these actions in a similar way to the way I understand wind: I don’t know where or how wind began but it races through at varying levels all over the world.
I think there’s much in the last paragraph, especially, to support what you’re saying about time, Kaleb. I find your wind analogy particularly apt.
I feel that Kaleb is pretty spot on with his explanation with the wind, which outlines how all things are actants (according to this text) and therefore one actant acts upon another, and another, and so on, which leaves us without a defined beginning. The final section of the reading illustrates this quite well in saying that “we cannot say that times passes in terms of irreversible revolutions, but only that it whirls and eddies according to shifts in the networks of actants.” The author is marking the passage of time with events (interactions of actants) rather than from a starting point to an ending point.
This question confuses me in several levels. What is the actor? I may be misunderstanding the readings but I feel that actor and actant are in this discourse almost interchangeable. Im also.confused by the effect and affected the wording is vague. Are you trying to say if all objects are actants then where is the effect of their affect? Cause and effect are ineed a part of this anology but affect I see in terms of coincidental results of objects actors acting on each other. Humans tend to always need a causaul reason for everything and I feel that harmon is trying to move us away from this.
Latour’s comparison of the modern zoning of nature and culture to the sixteenth century idea of a “supralunar world that knew neither change nor uncertainty” kind of shows how moderns think the humans are the only actors. As we now know, there is a lot of action in space which is not at all separate from or unrelated to action on earth. Galileo, in disagreeing with this view of the universe, “gave the upper hand” to physics and placed humans on the non-actor level. Latour would disagree with this in that he thinks everything is both an actor and an actant. It is the division of things into either actor or actant that Latour seems to be against. The deconstruction of everything into distinct (and tangible) categories gives comfort to our sense of dignity as human beings, but it does not really get at the reality of how things are.