Follow the Actants
In The You On AI Encyclopedia
The rule has two components, and both matter. The first is negative: do not begin with categories. Do not assume that humans act and machines compute, that creators originate and tools execute, that the interesting participants are the ones with consciousness. These assumptions are not neutral starting points. They are philosophical commitments that determine the outcome of the analysis before the analysis has begun. The second component is positive: trace the network. Follow the concrete chains of action that produce the outcome under investigation. Identify every entity that makes a difference. Let the network show its composition rather than imposing your preferred composition on it.
The rule applies with unusual force to the AI-assisted builder's situation. When Edo Segal describes the thirty-day sprint that produced Napster Station, the default narrative places him at the center — his vision, his team, his judgment. An honest tracing places him at one node in a vast network that includes Claude, the training corpus, the CES deadline, the existing codebase, the cloud infrastructure, the semiconductor supply chain, and more. None of these is optional. Remove any one, and the artifact that emerged does not exist in the form it took. The network, traced honestly, is always larger than the myth suggests.
The method is empirical rather than ideological. It does not dictate what the network will contain before the tracing. It requires only that the tracer be willing to follow the chains wherever they lead — including, uncomfortably, into the non-human infrastructure that the human-centered narrative systematically backgrounds. Latour's analysis of Deep Blue versus Kasparov is the paradigmatic example: what looked like human versus machine was, when the actants were followed, one assemblage of human and non-human entities confronting another such assemblage. Neither side was purely anything.
The discipline is demanding because it resists the comfort of familiar stories. The solitary genius, the visionary founder, the heroic builder — these narratives feel true because they organize complexity into legible plots. Following the actants produces accounts that are messier, less heroic, and more accurate. It also produces accounts that are governable, because governance that addresses only the visible human nodes while ignoring the non-human infrastructure is governance of the surface rather than the substance.
Origin
The method crystallized in Latour's early laboratory ethnographies, most influentially in Laboratory Life (1979, with Steve Woolgar) and The Pasteurization of France (1988). Studying scientists at the Salk Institute and reconstructing Pasteur's nineteenth-century experimental practice, Latour repeatedly found that what scientists called 'discovery' was produced by assemblages of instruments, protocols, texts, animals, and institutional arrangements that no conventional account of individual scientific genius could capture.
The injunction became a formal methodological principle in Science in Action (1987) and Reassembling the Social (2005), where Latour argued that sociology had failed precisely because it began with pre-formed categories — 'society,' 'power,' 'structure' — and then forced observations into those categories. The alternative was to follow the actors' own formulations and let the network's composition emerge from the tracing.
Key Ideas
Empirical humility. Begin without knowing who the important participants are. Let the network tell you, rather than telling the network what it must contain.
Flat starting point, hierarchical finding. Treat all candidate participants with equal analytical attention at the start. The actual hierarchy produced by the network will emerge from the tracing, not from prior stipulation.
Refusal of purification. Do not separate humans from non-humans, facts from values, technical from social before the analysis begins. Hybrids are the rule, not the exception.
Networks larger than myth. The concrete network that produces an outcome is almost always vaster than the story told about it. Following the actants reveals the invisible collective that sovereign-subject narratives conceal.
Governance prerequisite. Institutions cannot govern what they cannot see. Honest tracing of the network is the prerequisite for any regulatory or democratic framework that aspires to address the actual mechanism of production.
Debates & Critiques
Critics object that the method is deflationary — that refusing to distinguish between humans and machines dissolves the moral weight of human experience into a flat ontology of effects. Latour replied that the method is methodological, not metaphysical: the tracer suspends the distinction during the tracing, but nothing prevents her from observing, at the end of the analysis, that certain kinds of actants bear stakes, feel pain, and deserve moral consideration in ways other actants do not. The flatness is an analytical discipline, not a denial of difference. The objection that actually holds more force is pragmatic: the networks are so vast that complete tracing is impossible, and every actual analysis must stop somewhere. Latour's reply — stop where you can, be explicit about where you stopped, and acknowledge the unfollowed chains — is honest but leaves the question of sufficient tracing unresolved.
Further Reading
- Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005)
- Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton University Press, 1986)
- Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Harvard University Press, 1988)
- Michel Callon, 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation' in Power, Action and Belief (Routledge, 1986)
- Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Duke University Press, 2002)