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„Der Diskurs ist […] eine Population von Aktanten, die sich mit den Dingen und Gesellschaften mischen […].“[10] Diese Aktanten – diese Monster, diese Hybriden, die das Reich der Mitte bevölkern – übersetzen, vermitteln und erweitern die Netze, sie „bahnen Netze“: Sie bilden „Akteur-Netzwerke“.
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Latour’s non-modern constitution is made up of “actants”. The notion of actant comes from Beneviste’s theory of narrative. Here humans and non-humans play roles in such narratives. Insofar as they play such roles they are “actants” in the narrative. Latour’s non-modern quasi-objects and quasi-subjects and even his discourses figure as such actants. “Discourses is a population of actants that mix with things as well as societies.”[9] These actants – these monsters, these hybrids populating the middle kingdom – all translate, mediate and extend the networks, they “trace networks”: they build the “actor-networks”. At points Latour speaks of various types of actants: quasi-subjects, quasi-objects, discourses and even “existential” actants. But on a more fundamental level, non-modern (like pre-modern) actants are comprised of four sorts of “properties”, four sorts of “ontological substance”. Each of these monsters, each of these actants, is comprised of subject properties, object (or nature) properties, discourse properties and existential properties. And each is comprised of different measures of each. Thus machines are hybrids, with accentuated quasi-object properties, or poems as actants have most pronounced linguistic and existential properties.[10] In modernity each of these properties occupied a separate realm. God is “crossed out” from the world and is only fully transcendent in the Reformation (and Counter- Reformation): God was at that point separate and fully differentiated from the social, from nature and from language. Subject and object took on their autonomy, as did language, as we see in the various theories of semiotics – from Saussure to Peirce to even Barthes – and their assumption of the autonomy of the signifier. This followed a much less differentiated pre-modern constitution; in which the “natives” “saturated mixes of the divine, the human and natural elements with concepts”.[11] This is well known from classical theories of modernization. But Latour asks the further question: what is it in the West that allows this dualism, this hybrid proliferating dualism, to emerge? His answer to the question of the “Great Divide” is that we in the West are the only culture “which mobilises nature. We mobilise nature, not as signs, but as it is. And we mobilise nature through science.”[12] Thus Lévi-Strauss writes that the savage mind “arrives at the physical world by the detour of communication”, whereas the West “arrives at the world of communicatio
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