a problem I hadlived but not labeled, so to speak.

longitude and latitude,

‘there’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret’

‘Philosophy’s like a novel: you have to ask “What’s going tohappen?,” “What’s happened?

‘built upon the not-so-controversial ideathat how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it.’

is reading with love.

So you will never get to the bottom of a concept like multiplicity, you will never beable to figure out what it really means, nor, if you become the least bit Deleuzian,will you want to

German and Russian Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) move-ments of the 18th and 19th centuries whose creed could be summed up as “be aJew at home and a man abroad.”

Durability after foundations

This study displays all the ingredients of actor network theory 1990. There is semiotic relationality (it’s a network whose elements defi ne and shape one another), heterogeneity (there are different kinds of actors, human and otherwise), and mate- riality (stuff is there aplenty, not just “the social”). There is an insistence on process and its precariousness (all elements need to play their part moment by moment or it all comes unstuck). There is attention to power as an effect (it is a function of network confi guration and in particular the creation of immutable mobiles), to space and to scale (how it is that networks extend themselves and translate distant actors). New for actor network theory, there is an interest in large-scale political history. And, crucially, it is a study of how the Portuguese network worked: how it held together; how it shaped its components; how it made a center and peripher- ies; in short, of how differences were generated in a semiotic relational logi

t can also be understood as an empirical version of Gilles Deleuze’s nomadic philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1988).

All of which were the effects of a set of materially heterogeneous relations

actor network theory can also be understood as an empirical version of poststructuralism.

materially heterogeneous relations analyzed with semiotic tools; a sym- metrical indifference to the truth or otherwise of what it is looking at; concern with the productivity of practice; an interest in circulation; and the predisposition to exemplary case studies

t is obvious to most engineers that systems are made not simply of technical bits and pieces but also include peopl

A tiny handful of these suggestions subsequently get trans- muted into the much harder statements about nature that circulate in scientifi c papers (“the fi gures in the table show . . .

it is better to talk of “material semiotics” rather than “actor network theory.”

A paradigm can be understood, they said, as a culture .

Second, the actor network approach is not a theory. Theories usually try to explain why something happens, but actor network theory is descriptive rather than foundational in explanatory terms, which means that it is a disappointment for those seeking strong accounts

Actor network theory is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities, and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located.