This is a landing page for our wiki discussions regarding Bruno Latour's Assembling the Social. Below are several categories that I am imagining might be useful in organizing the kinds of texts and media we will produce. However feel free to alter and add new categories.

Course Discussion and Agenda

[n.b., if you have particular questions or issues that you would like to see us address in class, please include them here.}

• Course Notes: Latour
• Bruno Latour et al, Paris the Invisible City (This site is mentioned in our reading for this week. It provides an example of Latourian cartography. It's also an interesting example of digital scholarship.)

General or Chapter Summaries

Key Terms, Concepts, and Quotations

(some suggestions) (n.b. I'm not thinking so much about "definitions," though that might part of what you'd do. Instead I'm thinking about drawing conceptual connections with other theoretical approaches to related problems. E.g., oligopticon and panopticon; or Latour's mapping and Jameson's cognitive mapping or Deleuzian mapping.)

• group
• agency
• actor
• network
• matters of concern
• mapping/cartography 
• oligopticon
• panoramas
• articulators/localizers
• plasma

Critiques/Critical Responses

• Actor-network theory and the composition program (a post on A. Reid's blog)
• The horizon of digital literacy (another blog post)
• Latour and Antagonism, Compositionism to what end
• Matthew Rigilano's critical posts, Latour and the Dark Precursor & Reassembling Flatland

Useful Resources

[n.b., please provide links to resources where available]

• Texts/Media by Bruno Latour

• Other Actor-Network Theory

AAAARG.ORG resources on ANT

Lingua Franca article on Latour

Richard Grusin's blog post on Latour and "compositionism"

From Grusin's blog:

Latour then explained that composition is the opposite of critique, which depends upon the fundamental opposition between illusion or delusion and reality. In so doing, Latour maintained, critique creates a massive gap between what is felt and what is real and must depend upon a belief in a world beyond this world on which to base critique. Composition, on the other hand, is completely mundane, and entails a question of having the right tools for the right jobs. So while a hammer may be a good tool for destroying idols it is less good at stitching together heterogeneous elements that make up a composition. Iconoclasm depends upon a sturdy or juvenile belief in the beyond, which can only be reached by destroying the idols that stand between the critic, the iconoclast, and reality. We must leave the 20th century behind, Latour proclaimed, let the dead bury the dead.

Video Material

[n.b. please embed any useful videos you find below]

Wordle Image of Reassembling the Social