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from: NEGOTIATING THE VALUE(S) OF DESIGN(ING)
#surface #las
As Latour (2008) points out: From a surface feature in the hands of a not-so-serious-profession that added features in the purview of much-more-serious- professionals (engineers, scientists, accountants), design has been spreading continuously so that it increasingly matters to the very substance of production. (p. 2)
Latour (1993a) shows that Pasteur—who is essentially remembered as a great scientist—was a combination of heterogeneous elements, such as notebooks, statistics, bacteria, sheep, laboratories; Pasteur-the-great-scientist, the argument goes, did not exist outside of this network—he was a network.
Commenting on the variety of misinterprations in relation to ‘actor-network theory’, Latour (1999a) concedes that a more accurate descriptor for ANT could have been ‘actant-rhizome ontology.’ Indeed, the ontology of ANT is strongly influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose version of distributed materialism is foundational to the notion of ‘network’ as an assemblage of heterogeneous components. For a detailed treatment of Deleuze’s assemblage theory see DeLanda (2006; 2016).