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Show 84 pulled into assemblages and become more or less constituted (see Charland, 1987) by forces that hail them. This point, however, does not mean that Latour is a discourse analyst; rather, this point merely implies that subjects are oftentimes split among a host of assemblages that are more often than not in competition with each other. Subjects, in other words, are activated through mechanisms that produce their rhetorical emergence. Whereas Foucault (1982/2003) calls this a "technology of subjectivication," Latour (2005/2007) calls this subjective activation a "plug-in" (p. 207). The information-technology metaphor implies that subjects are like computer parts that become "activated" by technologies that enable us to participate in whatever assemblage is calling us. The phonetic alphabet, for instance, is an excellent example of how [human] plug-ins have taught humans to experience the world in a particular language-using way, which is radically different from subjects belonging to oral cultures (see Ong, 2012). Even the subject that learns language, written or oral, is a very different subject than the child that preceded it. And obviously, we have different languages, or rhetorical choices for different situations. When the competitive debater stands before the judge and her opponent to deliver her 8-minute constructive speech, she plugs in to the arguments and becomes an utterly different subject than she is when privately talking with her friends, colleagues, or family members. In other words, plug-ins are applications that actants "download" and activate to perform a particular function. The subject becomes an element of articulation (see DeLuca, 1999a; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) within the assemblage that gives it force. Latour (2005/2007) says: You don't have to imagine a ‘wholesale' human having intentionality, making rational calculations, feeling responsible for his sins, or agonizing over his mortal soul. Rather, you realize that to obtain ‘complete' human actors, you have to compose them out of many successive layers, each of which is empirically |
