theory still has only an attenuated notion of the event, of the fleeting contexts and
predicaments which produce potential. Though in recent years more and more
attention has been paid to the event in actor-network theory (see, for example,
Law 1998), the fact is that the troubling impasses and breakthroughs, the
trajectories and intensities of events ‘carried in by different voyagers and beings in
becoming’ (Deleuze 199 7 a: 66) are too often caught up and neutralized.
I think these two problems directly lead to a third one. In their surely correct
insistence that action is a property of the whole association, actor-network theorists
tend to recoil with horror from any accusation of humanism. Quite rightly, they
fear the taint of a centred human subject establishing an exact dominion over all.
But the result of their fear is that actor-network theory has tended to neglect
specifically human capacities of expression, powers of invention, of fabulation,
which cannot be simply gainsaid, in favour of a kind of flattened cohabitation of
all things.^4 But human expressive powers seem especially important in under-
standing what is possible to associate, in particular the power of imagination, ‘the
capacity to posit that which is not, to see in something that which is not there’
(Castoriadis 199 7 : 151), which is the fount of so many non-preexistent relations.
Imagination might be thought of as having a number of components: the defunc-
tionalization of physical processes as they relate to biological being, the domination
of ‘representational’ pleasure over organ pleasure, and the defunctionalization and
autonomization of affect and desire (Castoriadis 199 7 ). Though these processes
are ineluctably linked to the object world, they cannot be reduced to it. Let me
give just one example. Gell writes of ‘abduction’, the mode of inference brought
to bear on objects, ‘the tentative and hazardous tracing of signification rules which
allow the sign to acquire its meaning....[It] occurs with those natural signs which
the Stoics call indicative and which are thought to be signs, yet without knowing
what they signify’ (Eco 1989: 4 0). As Gell notes:
The usefulness of the concept of abduction is that it designates a class of
semiotic inferences which are, by definition, wholly distinct from the semiotic
inferences we bring to bear on the understanding of language, whose internal
understanding is a matter of observing semiotic conventions, not entertaining
hypotheses derived ad hoc from the case under consideration [Eco, 1989,
page 4 0]. Abduction, though a semiotic concept (actually it belongs to logic
rather than semiotics) is useful in that it functions to set limits to linguistic
semiosis proper, so that we cease to be tempted to apply linguistic models
where they do not apply, while remaining free to posit inferences of a non-
linguistic kind.^5
(Gell 1998: 1 4 –15)For me, these three all-but-missing elements of actor-network theory have
forced me to become interested in how events are shaped as they happen, with
how we can understand, if you like, what the possible can do with the possible.
This means moving away from the largely genetic outlook of the social sciences,
and equally from accounts which assume that a developmental account tells
Afterwords 111