ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the adage that “concepts are going downhill all the time” to explore whether and how this harsh but possibly fair fate applies to the concepts, and methods, of actor-network theory (ANT). My charting of the undoing of ANT is undertaken purposefully, with the express aim of identifying tasks for a redoing of ANT. The first half of the chapter discusses the quintessential ANT idea that there can be “no re-composition without de-composition.” I argue that this conceptual coupling elaborates the American pragmatist concept of “the problematic situation.” But ANT added two decisive elements: (a) Problematic situations can generate new entities (variable ontology); (b) the problematic situation is a force of “heterogenization”: Its constituent entities marked by boundary-crossings. I then consider how both these propositions proved too much, for ANT, for social theory more widely, and, in a manner of speaking, for the world. The second half discusses three specific undoings of ANT, each of which has to do with the resurfacing, both empirically – in the world – and methodologically – as problems for research – of categories that ANT claimed to have put to rest – which I rather grandiosely sum up as: (1) Interpretation is back. (2) Society is back. (3) Epistemology is back. If we are to move on from these redoings of modern critical theory’s guiding concepts, I propose that we should focus on ANT’s experimentalism – its affirmation that knowing the world and changing the world are intimately connected – and that it has this in common with other experimentalisms, in sociology, the sciences, social movements, tech culture and the arts.
