via: http://circlingsquares.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/steve-fuller-on-dark-ecology.html

At the slowlorisblog there’s an interesting guest post from Steve Fuller. It’s a good read but I have a quibble with one of his comments:

To understand OOO and dark ecology (I take the latter as a specific extension of the former), one needs to understand the intuitive appeal of actor-network theory, which is that you’re better placed to understand the full range of agency in the world if you yourself are not an agent, but simply a mouthpiece for agency.

I really like the essay but that’s false. There are plenty of human actors and agents in ANT. The central tenet of ANT is that every node in a chain of translations transforms what it carries, conducts, transmits. Therefore, humans can’t be written off as mouthpieces; or, equally, even mouthpieces translate what they mouth.

The problem with ANT is that it’s a method that got…