Latour desde Peirce: reinscribiendo la Teoría del Actor-Red en una semiótica peirceana

Juan Javier Nahabedian

doi:10.48160/18517072re59.369

Authors

Juan Javier Nahabedian Universidad Nacional de Moreno https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5764-6687

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48160/18517072re59.369

Keywords:

Actor-Network Theory, Semiotics, Latour, Peirce, Circulating reference

Abstract

The article traces the links, explicit or suggested, between semiology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), promoted mainly by Bruno Latour. The concepts of “circulating reference” and “actor/actant”, central to the Latourean theoretical edifice, enable this contact with the “science of signs”. However, specialized literature tends to link ANT almost exclusively with the semiological branch influenced by De Saussure. This comes from the coincidence between De Saussure's relational conception of sign value and the ANT's analytical practice of establishing networks of interdependence between humans and non-humans that would lead to the stabilization of techno-scientific facts. After commenting on these relations, recovered from Latour's own writing as well as from other theorists of this intellectual movement, we argue that the typically structuralist treatment of associative networks casts a framework that is too narrow to be able to contain the demanding explanations and reticular reconstructions of the ANT. As these networks are characterized by their complexity, heterogeneity, multidetermination and irreducibility, we seek to reinscribe the ANT within the framework of Peircean semiotics. This theoretical space is more related to principles shared by ANT studies such as: the material heterogeneity of the components of the networks that form techno-scientific phenomena, the unpredictable condition of communication processes during instances of production, the central place of relational aspects among the ontology of phenomena, the translatability or material transposition as a function that dominates the network and the irreducibility to a single organizing or explanatory principle.

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