Actor Networks: Infinite Distribution

        For Kant, critique differs from dogmatism insofar as it rejects the possibility of knowing the absolute; for Nietzsche, God is dead.   Such perspectives entail infinite possible worlds in which the inexistence of any given object is a reality--all entities depend on an infinite set of contingent facts. This clearing, crystalized by the phrase, “things might have been otherwise,” sets the conditions in which I would like to situate Bruno Latour’s treatment of the subject.
         According to Latour, “whenever you…define an entity (an agent, an actant, an actor) you have to deploy its attributes, that is, its network;” a network is “what takes any substance that had seemed at first self contained…and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers.” (5)  But if any entity is constituted by its essential relations,  does an actor network cease to be finite?  Because finitude is the very condition that delegitimizes positing the absolute, actor network theory (ANT) presents a complex case to critical philosophy.
       When Latour asserts that a given individual is "defined by the list of other individuals necessary for its subsistence," what happens if essential relations are infinite?  I suggest that, in the era of critique, identifying the subject with its essential relations eliminates finitude from the horizon of thinking the subject.  After Kant, to think the subject as an actor network is to contemplate it as an infinite set--a formal cousin to the set of all natural numbers.

         As infinite, does an individual become absolute?   To address this question let us consider whether or not a given network carries existential necessity.
       The network I would like to focus on is one stanza from Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path.  By attempting to determine whether or not the stanza is necessitated by its relations, it becomes immediately obvious that it necessarily depends on them.  However, this does not answer the question of whether such relationships make the stanza absolute.  As a network, its infinite distribution means that each word  refers to an entity existentially dependent on infinite facts.  But as a totality, a spatially located finite set of graphemes, the stanza allows us to contemplate its infinite series of textual relations, while, at the same, revealing whether those relations make the stanza an inevitable being.

For the rain made little

                 Affective adjustments

to the architecture.

For the architecture was a long

lecture lost on me, negative

mnemonics reflecting

               weather

and reflecting

                reflecting.

       Lines, words, phonemes, and graphemes all mediate identity in such a way that everything is made of everything else.  Keeping in mind, that for ANT “every individual is part of a matrix whose line and columns are made of the others as well," consider how the spacing of "Affective adjustments" implicates "rain" in the first line as playing a causal role to the second.   An enjambment between lines one and two allows us to visualize "the rain" making "little/ Affective adjustments" on the material page. This arrangement reinforces a parallel relation between the repetitive sound of rain drops and "a", "l" and "r" sounds repeatedly falling as the eye runs down the page.  In other words, the sonic parallel between rain and repetition in the stanza does not rely on rhythmic similarity alone.    In a downward motion, we see "a" sounds moving into "l" sounds, which in turn move into "n" sounds, and finally into "r" sounds.  Staccato placement of the word "reflecting" becomes the final equivalent to rainfall only because of the stanza's previous connections.  The infinite series produced by the words "...reflecting/ reflecting" is, indeed, distributed throughout the entire stanza.
           However, in no way do these relationships make the stanza necessary.   Infinite dependence does not generate necessity.  As such, insofar as the object's infinitude does not determine its inevitability, the stanza unravels any possibility of it being absolute.  Nothing in our analysis of textual dependence entails that the stanza "had to be."  Consequently, ANT appears to offer a way to think the infinite subject without thinking dogmatically--a leap in the history of thought.