CONCEPT
Actant
Latour's minimal term for any entity — human, machine, institution, or inanimate object — that modifies a state of affairs. The concept that dissolves the subject/object divide and lets the AI network declare itself honestly.
In actor-network theory, an actant is any entity whose presence makes the network produce different outcomes than it would in its absence. The definition is deliberately spare: it does not require consciousness, intention, or biological life — only the capacity to make a difference. A speed bump is an actant. A contract is an actant. A deadline is an actant. And Claude, whose transformative contributions shape every artifact that passes through it, is emphatically an actant. The term replaces the modern philosophical vocabulary of agents and instruments with a flatter, more empirical language that refuses to pre-sort the world into active subjects and passive objects before the tracing has even begun.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerges from Latour's discomfort with the central operation of modern thought — what he called purification: the clean separation of humans from non-humans, subjects from objects, society from nature. Purification is not neutral description. It is a philosophical