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Show 83 representation and moralism that so many Althusarian, Fiskeian, or Stuart Hallian cultural critics are still indebted to. According to this model, "cultural critics" begin by isolating a poorly written TV show or another Leonardo DeCaprio movie and then purify it as a text that is suppose to tell us about identity politics or dominant ideologies. In doing so, critics assume that there is a more primordial truth that begs human observers, equipped with godlike powers of modernity, to peel back the secret layers of representation that are supposed to inform us about communicative behaviors in cultural political economies. Not only does this line of work reduce cultural objects into nicely packaged communicative black boxes (see Latour, 1984/1988, 2005/2007), but it moreover assumes ontological disparities between actants, truths, and translations. In sum, Latour's subject is a reticulate actor that is given force by the alliances that it has created to give it force. These alliances create assemblages, or agencements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), of heterogeneous structures that include both human and nonhuman objects. Assemblages are always in motion and under constant reconfiguration. Subjectivity is a feature, an attribution, a property of assemblages carried by its network of associations. In Reassembling the Social, Latour plainly states, …every assemblage that pays the price of its existence in the hard currency of recruiting and extending is, or rather, has subjectivity. This is true of a body, of an institution, even of some historical event which [Whitehead] refers to as an organism. Subjectivity is not a property of human souls but of the gathering itself - provided it lasts of course. (p. 218) Human and nonhuman subjects thus have life and mobility that is contingent upon the energies and forces of its network. In other places, Latour refers to actions that articulate subjects, such as "legal papers which designate ‘you' as being someone," as "quasisubjects" (2005/2007, p. 208). This concept usefully gets at the ways that actants are |
