ABSTRACT
ANT claims that all things, human and non-human alike, are collective accomplishments made and in the making. Thereby, ANT un/wittingly contributes to the speculative metaphysics that spans from Gabriel Tarde’s neo-monadology to A. N. Whitehead’s process-ontology. As an empirically oriented research heuristic, ANT also insists that all societal issues can’t be understood as relationships between mere matter of facts, but as the emerging effect of affective relations that assemble ‘matters of concern’ (Latour). Although ANT highlights the temporal and immaterial aspects of embodied and material actor-networking, the relations between the temporal and the affective often remain empirically and conceptually black boxed. Drawing on qualitative data from issues of ‘forgetfulness,’ this paper rethinks some of ANT’S central propositions with the help of dementing bodies and the process-ontology of A. N. Whitehead. It argues that thinking with dementing bodies and Whitehead’s metaphysics may contribute to a better understanding of bodies as affected/ing societies in action.
