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Show 85 distinct from the next. (p. 207) In other words, the concept of plug-ins helps us understand the world and our role as subjects of a particular assemblage. Latour (2005/2007) seems to be speaking directly to rhetoricians and cultural critics when he notes that clichés, novels, and magazines educate us about the social environments that we are part of (pp. 209-211). They are much like Jacques Derrida's supplement that aids our understanding of something deemed natural or original. For example, Derrida states "if supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process, writing is the supplement par excellence since it proposes itself as the supplement of the supplement, sign of a sign, taking the place of a speech already significant" (Derrida, 1967/1998, p. 281). Plug-ins are quite similar in that they "activate" subjects through networks, circuits, and connections that articulate subjects a certain way. "On the condition that we add another flow, another circuitry, through which plug-ins lend actors the supplementary tools - the supplementary soul - that are necessary to render a situation interpretable" (2007, p. 209). Cultural packages such as vernaculars or "one-liners," therefore, help subjects plug-in to situations that call on them to act. Even face-to-face encounters are on plug-ins that "depend on a flood of entities allowing them to exist" (p. 208). Unlike Derrida's supplement, however, plug-ins do not stay confined to the interiority of language to "play" with its contradictory logics of representation. Latour moves on and envisions a world without epistemological hierarchies and metaphysical privileges. "‘To be an ‘actor' is now at last a fully artificial and fully traceable gathering: what was before true only of the Leviathan is now also true for each of its ‘components'" (p. 208). It should be realized that rhetoric is now more important than ever since it is the driving force that puts all actants in motion. To be sure, though, |
