Delegation of agency in the concept of Bruno Latour: how to build up a heterogeneous collective of cyborgs and anthropomorphs?

Abstract

This work deals with a separate story in actor-network theory of Bruno Latour - delegation of agency to technological objects. The author shows how French explorer uses the tools of the Paris School of semiotics for this purpose. A particular attention is paid to «the reassembling of society», i. e. conceptualization of a heterogeneous collective of humans and nonhumans, as well as to clarifying what it means to speak on behalf of objects. The author demonstrates non-obvious implications of using semiotic mechanism to delegate ability to act to technological objects on a par with human agents. One of those implication is human cybernatization i. e. reduction of their internal complexity to the state of purely reflexive calculating subjects.