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Show 43 within particular communities. Although Cronon and Williams predate Latour, we can nonetheless see how their methods of investigation are largely consistent with his actornetwork theory perspective because they both assemble material-semiotic networks from heterogeneous objects. In doing so, categorical distinctions between nature and culture12 become dissolved into the same democratic arena to make way for a reconstruction of what we consider social. In sum, actor network theory usefully allows critics to trace the networks of relations that have produced and sustained corporate subjectivity within specific assemblages. It encourages critics to become cartographers who trace the webs of relations within natural and social worlds to "describe the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that produce and reshuffle" (Law, 2008, p. 141) actants, assemblages, and networks. This method is used to study corporations on a plane of immanence, not some structure of verticality that begins the critical act with humanist assumptions about how subjects ought to exist. The hegemony of humanism has stood for too long, and the time has come to begin again. Rather than banging our heads against the wall out of moral outrage from Citizens United and corporate involvement in the global warming debate, this dissertation hopes to show that there is a way forward. Let us take a look. 12 It should thus be clear that Latour opens the door wide open for environmental communication critics because he quite simply rejects the nature/culture distinction, which to him is nothing more than a modernist invention in an a-modern world. "The modernists," as Latour (1991/1993) likes to call them, have problematically divided the world between what is natural and what is social for epistemological authority. In an attempt to reconnect social phenomena with natural phenomena, he unabashedly calls for a "new constitution" of non-moderns that observes major social concerns, such as global warming, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and biotechnology, through their hybrids that involve public, technical, and natural components. |
