ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene diagnosis and its accompanying calls for sustainability have become an attractive object of analysis for scholars inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and ANT is now one of the dominant theoretical and methodological frameworks in the environmental humanities. However, the narrative genre of ‘the ANT account’ suffers from an inherent formalism, making it difficult to grasp radical political changes on par with what is needed in the case of climate change and sustainability. Inspired by Fredric Jameson and his idea of a politics of form, I analyze two texts written by Bruno Latour in the 1980s, when ANT was still in its formation, and strongly influenced by semiotics. This was when the genre of ANT solidified, setting the basic parameters for the further development of ANT as a theoretical and methodological framework. The contention is that the implications of the formalistic politics of translation in the ANT account make it difficult to formulate a concrete politics of sustainability without supplementing ANT with conceptual tools from other theoretical traditions.
