First, these theorists argue that every so-called ‘social’ or ‘natural’ patterns are formed by the work of association and substitution of humans and non-humans. In saying this they point to the fact that we must follow the practices, the associations and dissociations of all the materials needed in the building of a collective: the name they give to our groups, in which humans and non-humans working together or hybrids, as they call them, are intertwined, forming networks that could be metaphorically described as a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). The rhizome metaphor opposes to classical taxonomies based on the root or tree metaphor.

As the Actor-Network theorists say (Latour, 2001), a way of life, an stabilized type of relationship can only exist thanks to a relational system of translations: all the redefinitions and changes of materials that are needed to act in a particular way (Callon, 1986); and mediators that are implied in this work of translation. Mediators are agents or more strictly ‘actants’ (for an agent, for them, does not necessarily have to be human), which are able to translate.

In employing these concepts their aim is to substitute Subject/Object reductionism by what they call a material relationism (Latour, 1993; Law, 1994). The networks that derive from such collective (human and non-human) work are growing or shrinking associations of heterogeneous materials that act recursively. Why recursively? Because the act of definition can have performative effects, defining and redefining constantly the elements that are held together. See FIGURE 2 for a visual depiction: the main problem of this image is that temporality has been neglected for the sake of the exposition of our argument.

 

 

 

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