Subjectivity (2017) 10:313–328

DOI 10.1057/s41286-017-0030-1

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A singularity: where actor network theory breaks

down an actor network becomes visible

Hélène Mialet1

Published online: 21 June 2017

 Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2017

Abstract In this article I propose we rethink the nature of the individual human
subject in a landscape where cognition has been distributed (Hutchins, Clark),
individuality has been transformed into associations between heterogeneous actors,
and human and non-human agency has been reconceived as a product of attribution
(Actor Network Theory). Reengaging with the material developed in my book
Hawking Incorporated, where I did an ethnographic study of Stephen Hawking, the
man and the persona, I will extend my original analysis to extract and map the
processes through which the individual human subject is constituted. Turning upside
down all the notions of which the ‘‘subject’’ is supposed to be made by exterior-
izing, materializing, collectivizing, and distributing, mind, body, and identity, I will
make visible the ramifications that constitute the subject through processes of dis-
tribution and singularization. To the powerful myth of the ‘‘disincorporated brain,’’
I propose an antidote—the concept of the distributed-centered subject.

Keywords Singularity
Exchange of properties
Distributed-centered subject

ANT
Individual
Human being

In this article, I propose we rethink the nature of the individual human subject in a
landscape where cognition has been distributed (Hutchins, Clark), individuality has
been transformed into associations between heterogeneous actors, and human and
non-human agency has been reconceived as a product of attribution (Actor Network
Theory). Reengaging with the material developed in my book Hawking Incorpo-
rated, where I did an ethnographic study of Stephen Hawking, the man and the
persona, I will extend my original analysis to extract and map the processes through

& Hélène Mialet

hmialet@yorku.ca
1
Department of Science and Technology Studies, Bethune College 218, York University, 4700
Keele St., Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
314 H. Mialet

which the individual human subject is constituted. Turning upside down all the
notions of which the ‘‘subject’’ is supposed to be made by exteriorizing,
materializing, collectivizing, and distributing, mind, body, and identity, I will
make visible the ramifications that constitute the subject through processes of
distribution and singularization. I will also recuperate in these processes a
singularity (a human being?) that can be captured through the traces left by its
resistance to these processes and or by its entanglements with them. Finally, I will
re-interrogate the nature of the associations at play in the constitution of the subject.
Far from being only the product of force or rhetoric, these associations can be
rethought as a complex exchange of properties—between humans and humans, and
between humans and non-humans—made of love, identification, imitation, influ-
ence, metamorphosis, or attunements of all sorts. To the powerful myth of the
‘‘disincorporated brain,’’ I propose an antidote—the concept of the distributed-
centered subject.
Like a singularity, a point in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, where the
theory doesn’t apply anymore, the topic I chose for my most recent book seemed
to be the point where the sociology of translation, more commonly called Actor
Network Theory, breaks down. Interested in questions related to creativity,
intuition, flashes of inspiration, cognitive breakthrough, I was repeatedly told that
these seemingly products of the brain were made of the same fabric as our fairy
tales, a patchwork of words, a collection of stories reconstructed after the fact
(Latour and Woolgar 1979). As for my desire to understand the texture of the
individual, I was told that s/he was only a point in a network, a node, a
crossroad between two lines (Callon and Law 1995, 1997). Like in the Mikado
(the pick-up sticks game) if you pull a stick, the individual disappears with it.
With regard to human agency, whose specificity in the animal kingdom resides
in her ability to have goals, intentions, rationality, desires, emotions, reflexivity,
consciousness, she seemed to have lost her power and landed on the same plane
as the non-humans; or conversely, she was surrounded by them, they had
suddenly risen to her level: we were told, indeed, that non-humans, also, had
agency (Callon 1986; Callon and Law 1995; Johnson/Latour 1988; Bloor
1999a, b; Latour 1999a).
I decided to focus on a node, a point, a singularity, or to be more concrete, a man
whose power seemed to be reduced to the functioning of his brain (Mialet 2012a).
Indeed, how could a man give talks, write, think, act, based solely on a twitch of an
eyebrow, the only way he can communicate today? It doesn’t seem strange to most
of us as we are used to thinking about thinking as a product of the mind alone: no
work of the hands, no back and forth, no errors, no wandering, no preparation, no
rehearsal, no talking to ourselves, no talking to other selves. We are born, said
Descartes (and we are still very much influenced by this tradition), with innate,
clear, and distinct ideas; or according to Kant, with a framework capable of
matching the structure of the world. Popper was right; there is something dangerous
about this idea. As he said, if Descartes and Bacon were revolutionary by distancing
themselves from the dogmatic tradition of their time, they were reintroducing
another form of authoritarianism by founding our knowledge, respectively, on our
reason or our senses: the value of knowledge was guaranteed by its origin (Popper
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 315

1969).1 As for Kant, well… whatever we say, we are still the heirs of an era of
critique, the Enlightenment, aren’t we? ANT, like STS in general, distanced itself
from this tradition—there isn’t an article written by Bruno Latour where he does not
attack this particular representation of the knowing subject.2 With Latour and his
fellow travelers, ideas and intuitions were becoming tropes, ways of expressing
ourselves or forgetting collective practices (Latour and Woolgar 1979); creativity
was thought of as being the product of common cognitive processes (ibid.);
cognitive processes were easily explained by mapping our relations to instruments,
graphs, and inscriptions (Dagognet 1969, 1973; Goody 1977; Lynch 1985, 1988;
Latour 1986, 1991, 1998; Hutchins 1995a, b; Goodwin et al. 1997; Goodwin 2000;
Kaiser 2005); and individuality was a product of network(s) always on the edge of
collapsing or being reconfigured at the same time as the identity of those who were
emerging through their ties (Callon 1986; Latour 1987, 2005). The myth of our
modernity was melting like a snowman… Can we still save it? Should we? Do we
need to?
This is where Hawking arrived.
Some epistemologists or philosophers of science could not stop but clap, seeing
in this case a confirmation of what they thought all along: unable to move or speak,
Hawking proves that thinking scientifically is the product of the mind alone. He is a
beautiful example that speaks for this.3 Sociologists of science would argue that he
is a social construction.4 Actor network theorists would probably transform him into
another Pasteur, a semiotic actor (Latour 1988). This case is definitively a wager
that forces the analyst to lean in one direction or another, or to invent another way of
talking about subjectivity, individuality, intuition, or creativity altogether. This is
the way I decided to go. Not a biography, but a work of empirical philosophy.5
Hawking became a thought experiment, a case study, a metaphor embodying
everything against which STS has constructed itself. Does his very presence make
STS and the sociology of translation break down? Is he, indeed, a ‘‘singularity’’
capable of thinking with his mind alone? Or is he a window into a world—an
1
Interestingly, Popper reintroduces in the production of scientific knowledge a scientist full of dreams
and fantasies, but very quickly evacuates him/her by creating a distinction between the context of
discovery (where imagination strives) and the context of justification (where theories are tested through a
universal methodology); his desire is to create a science without a subject, on this point see Mialet
(Forthcoming, 2012b).
2
This particular representation can be a caricature.
3
Hawking has Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. Because he has lost the ability to move while his brain has
remained untouched, he is often portrayed as ‘‘a pure mind.’’
4
I refer here to SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) more commonly called the School of
Edinburgh. The all point of this school was to move away from the figure of the rational scientific
individual and explain sociologically the production of scientific statements (see, for example, David
Bloor, Barry Barnes, Trevor Pinch, and Steven Shapin).
5
Although my approach is situated in the STS tradition (ethnomethodology, ethnography, and ANT), it
has some resonance with other work like that of Estrid Sorensen who argues for ‘‘a posthumanist
approach to experience Subjectivity’’ and an emphasis on the empirical (Sorensen 2013, pp. 6, 112–129).
However, as we will see later, the fact that I was ‘‘there’’ made me lose the sense of being in the presence
of a subject altogether as his agency was distributed and reconfigured by the situation in such a way that I
didn’t know where he was anymore. I thus stipulated that being ‘‘far away’’ could sometimes be an
advantage.
316 H. Mialet

exemplum? With these questions in mind, I conducted an ethnographic study that

lasted ten years where I observed and interviewed Stephen Hawking, his colleagues,
students, physicists, archivists, artists, designers of software, journalists. I also
engaged with the non-humans with which they were entangled: computers, articles,
equations, diagrams, movies, archives, statues, etc.
If Hawking’s body was not able to move on its own, and assuming that we need
a body at all, others had to act for him. I remember the first time I interviewed his
secretary, I discovered long strings of equations on her screen. It struck me that
maybe SHE was Hawking. It didn’t seem to be the case, however. I understood
quickly that she knew very little about mathematics. How to proceed, then? How
was it possible to reconstruct what was impossible to see—a mind in action? Were
we supposed to become historians tracking clues, anthropologists embedded in the
field, or sociologists analyzing questionnaires? If unexpected associations were
made in the language of my interviewee, leaving traces through grammatical
references to the presence of the one I wanted to study, interesting connections
were also visible in the texts I was reading about him. There was something
deeply material (or tangible) about these associations. I had to follow them to
reconstruct what allows a man to think, act, be, and perform. What happens
between A and B? What happens between a movement of a cheek (meaning: ‘‘yes,
I want to go to this conference’’) and a star performing in front of a large audience
(‘‘there he is, in person, talking to an audience!’’)? How does a twitch of an
eyebrow transform itself into an actor on stage?6 This slight movement had to be
connected to a machine that was already structured in such a way that words could
be completed and sentences could be formed; individuals around him had to be
organized in such a manner that they could mobilize the environment that was
about to receive him in the form of questions or requests to be acted upon; flights
had to be booked, and Hawking/voice/computer transported from the office to the
stage.7 I was studying a small organization similar to the one Charles and Marjorie
Goodwin had studied, with the exception, that in their case, the problem was not
to transform a twitch of an eyebrow into an actor on stage, but to send planes into
the sky! We were talking with them about a much larger scale…not an individual,
but an airport (Goodwin et al. 1997). Each time, I was following a new trajectory,
from what I call a collective body to another, like in a spiral staircase in search of
an answer to a question systematically asked: ‘‘why does what you have shown
have anything to do with science?’’ I had to move closer to ‘‘where science is
produced’’: to ‘‘the lab.’’8

6
Hawking communicates via an infrared beam attached to his glasses that allows him to select words on
his computer by twitching his cheek. He also communicates in part through body language with his
assistants. Both students and machines have learned his patterns of communication.
7
On the transformation of Hawking the man into Hawking The Speaker see Hawking Incorporated,
chap. 1. There is also an obvious analogy here between Ryle’s The Thinker reused by Clifford Geertz in
the creation of the notion of Thick Description, see Hawking Incorporated, 2012, especially, chapter 7.
8
I here refer to ethnographic studies of laboratories that were crucial to study science in action. They
made visible how scientific facts were socially and materially constructed (see, for example, Latour and
Woolgar 1979; Lynch 1993; Knorr Cetina 1981).
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 317

How can Hawking write a scientific article? What happens between the moment he
decides to write an article and the moment an article is printed with his name on top of
its title page? One more time, to answer this question, I had to reconstruct and make
visible the organization of the collective necessary to transform a twitch of an
eyebrow into an article: students were picked according to their interests and the
subjects Hawking wanted to pursue, subjects were re-contextualized, interpreted,
transformed, and calculations were made. Often, Hawking would do very little, even
if his name landed on the front page.9 Does this mean that his cognitive competences
were the equivalent of this collective? Was he the only product of the hands of his
acolytes? ‘‘No,’’ his students kept shouting in one voice: ‘‘he has amazing intuitions.’’
Taking seriously the processes of attribution that singularize him, I had to
investigate where his intuitions came from. As we tend to forget, to resolve
equations we have to be able to write them down; they are the work of the hands;
they ask to be written and rewritten from left to right and from right to left,
something Hawking obviously can’t do. Should we stop our story here then? No,
because equations (that have to be manipulated with the hands) have been replaced
by diagrams (that can be manipulated with the mind). Hawking is said to think
geometrically. But, one more time, diagrams have to be drawn thanks to Hawking’s
students’ skills and hands. To do theory one needs a body. Of course, he couldn’t do
experiments, he would need a mobile body, but he can have his students perform
and draw diagrams and see them at work to be able to project himself in the
universe.10 One more collective down then, before they all disappear… thanks to
the work of another collective body this time: the media.
Multiple mechanisms are at stake through processes of writing, erasing, making
short cuts, re-contextualizing, or repeating the same stories, using similar tropes, or
images, in print or movies. I have in mind here a crew filming Hawking for ‘‘The
Hawking Paradox.’’ Like me the director was puzzled, and kept learning about how
Hawking’s students worked rather than how Hawking worked. In the final product
however, only Hawking’s eye appeared on the screen as a window onto his mind
through which we, the spectator, could travel across the universe. The subject/object
dichotomy and the mind/body dichotomy had a face on film. He was at last the
Hawking we know.11
Leaving the collective body that transforms him into a man without a body, I
decided to confront him. I had to cut the branches to see the man in person. O
surprise, the collective made of assistants and machines were around him, but
sometimes so visible that though they were allowing the interaction to take place,
9
On the organization of Hawking’s ‘‘laboratory’’ see Hawking Incorporated, chap. 2. ‘‘Here I show how
‘‘this pure mind,’’ far from being isolated, makes visible the material and collective practices of
theoretical work (e.g., the hierarchical organization of students and supervisors in the laboratory, the way
topics are assigned (ensuring the continuity of work done by previous students), and the mechanisms of
authorship whereby supervisors are credited with the work students do (regardless of his or her actual
contribution)’’ (p. 62). I also describe the techniques used in the work of calculation, etc.
10
On the ways in which Hawking can think through the use of diagrams see Hawking Incorporated,
chap. 3.
11
‘‘The Hawking Paradox’’ was directed by William Hicklin for Mentorn Films in 2005. For a detailed
description of the ways in which the media transforms Hawking into a mind without a body, see Hawking
Incorporated chap. 4.
318 H. Mialet

they were disrupting it as well: time and space were reconfigured by the machine
and the intervention of his assistants when they were repairing his body.12
Hawking’s gestures were absent; moreover, temporality and spatiality, that make
the interaction legible, were not aligned in the right way, thus, like in a laboratory,
where the reference is constructed though the alignment of chains of reference,
when an element breaks down, the reference disappear.13 Here, through the
disruption of the alignment or coordination of gestures (or the lack thereof), words,
and voice, Hawking’s agency was distributed to the point that his immobile body
was on one side, his discourse in front of him on the computer screen, his ‘‘voice’’ at
his side: we didn’t know where the individual was anymore. He was gone again.
Vanished.14
Then, I looked at another collective body constructing and maintaining his
agency through time, that is, how the archivists at Cambridge were collecting all the
articles that have been produced by and about him, wondering what kind of
Hawking would be reconstructed after his death.15
Finally, as I was wandering in the corridor of the Department of Applied
Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge, I was asked to come into
Hawking’s office where he was being presented with a draft of a statue of himself in
plaster that was to be made into bronze.16 In this context, the artist, his assistants,
and his colleagues who were asked to comment on the statue started to compare the
‘‘true’’ Hawking and the ‘‘fake’’ Hawking (the statue). The clash between Hawking
and the statue made emerge, in the mind and words of those who were observing
their interaction, the properties of one and the other and the boundary between the
two. The qualities often swapped in strange ways making legible what a human
being is, what an object is, what people thought about Hawking, etc. Who is the
original? Who is the replica? Who is who? Who is what? Flesh or plaster, small or
big head, smile or straight face? What is at stake here is what kind of Hawking will
survive under the rain and the sun of lovely Cambridge and the world.
What I was witnessing then was a work of art (life?) that creates and chisels a
reality, a reality that takes the form of a man endowed with the capacity to talk,
write, and speak, and be a genius. What I was about to demonstrate here is that even
if we take the smallest scale of analysis as a focus of study, that is, an individual (or
even better, a part of an individual, a brain) and look at the different facets that
12
For example, while Hawking was ‘‘talking’’ to me, the word ‘‘leg’’ started flashing on the screen.
Suddenly an entire assemblage that was then invisible (nurses and assistants) appeared to take care of
him. The flesh and blood body had become visible, written before him on the computer, collectively taken
care of, and omnipresent.
13
On the notion of reference, see Bruno Latour (1999b), Circulating Reference, Sampling the Soil in the
Amazon Forest Pandora’s Hope: essays on the reality of science studies.
14
For an ethnographic study of an interview with Hawking and the complexity of reading an interaction
with him face-to-face, see Hawking Incorporated, chap. 5. Here I show how ‘‘all the categories we
normally use in thinking about a person, a body, a machine, a mind, an interaction, a conversation, a text
and speech, are blurred. In his presence, we no longer know ‘who’ or ‘where’ he is’’ (pp. 136–137). See
also (Mialet 2003).
15
For a description of the processes through which Hawking’s writings are preserved and collected, see
Hawking Incorporated, chap. 6.
16
See Hawking Incorporated, chap. 7.
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 319

constitute him: the speaker, the writer, the thinker, the actor, the conversant, the
author, the icon, we see that each facet is the equivalent of a collective at work (of
which the main actor might be a part). Even the imagination, the most private and
interiorized act of all, seems to be its product. In other words, each collective body is a
re-construction that stands for a capacity, an act, a statement, a process of attribution,
or creates a missing link between the flesh and blood person and the statement or final
product that encapsulates and represents his or her actions. Instead of a few words
pronounced hastily ‘‘he thinks,’’ ‘‘he gives a talk,’’ etc., we have replaced each
statement by a collective body or a multiplicity of collective bodies working at a
different pace or at a similar rate, internally or externally breaking down or losing
touch with each other, or internally and externally co-organized and/or enmeshed in
each other. Sometimes beings made of similar ontologies start to melt or bleed into
one another, acolytes anticipate what their master wants and start referring to
themselves as him (e.g., talking about Hawking’s voice, his assistant said ‘‘we need a
new voice’’), or beings made of different ontologies start becoming one another (e.g.,
Hawking’s artificial voice becomes him, he doesn’t want to change it, it has become
his identity), or human beings find ways of being transported to another space and
being expropriated from their bodies to inhabit other spaces again thanks to actors
made of a different ontology (e.g., the physicist starts inhabiting spaces through
projections onto paper-tools or diagrams). The inner workings become visible,
collective through and through: mind and body and identity.
Distribution then, because, things are not reduced to a point—a body, but always on
the edge of being delegated to something or someone else, stretched out, but not too
much, we certainly don’t want it to break. Reality is so fragile, so easily fractured, so
easily dissolved. We work hard at maintaining it, at creating it. Revolution and
breakthrough are thus not made from the collapse of stable tectonic plates, but are the
creation, imposition, and maintenance of a new reality. Collective bodies could
disappear, one after another, swallowing with them the reality of the individual: no
travel anymore, no talks, no articles, no thought experiments, no documentary, no
archives, no statue, no new elements, though old ones would still circulate in the
world. Unable to detach himself from the hic and nunc, the moment, the present, the
reality of the situation, the man would be stuck in a body, in one’s body, his own body.
Materialization, because competences are inscribed in bodies, bodies made of flesh or
silicon, blood or circuits, cells or trees or dreams. Visible, because we can observe the
gestures, the bodies in action, the machines at work, the glitches, the disconnections,
and the breakdowns. Pace to ethnographic work. Although the notion of visibility is
murky: even when we are in the presence of our subject, we have to reconstruct the
unsaid and the unseen: we have to make present the absent to make sense of the
situation. Moreover, seeing requires adjustment. Reaching out to the man in person
meant, surprisingly, bouncing back, unable to grasp simultaneously the multiplicity of
layers (voice, gestures, discourse) that constitute him as they were suddenly dispersed
in the environment. When conversely, thumbing through the multiplicity of images
and prints that were mentioning him was making visible the contour of a relatively
stable entity: a person. Zooming in and out was becoming my motto, a new kind of
methodology, though paradoxically, the closer I was to my subject, the more I was
moving away from it, and the further away I was, the better I could grasp it (Mialet
320 H. Mialet

2003). Associations, because things and humans are linked, attached to each other,
and/or stick to each other. They organize themselves in such a way that they can
produce a product, an identity, they have a job, they have a duty, they have a goal.
Associations? Yes, but they are not only created through force or seduction, as we
have been told; indeed, there is so much more to it than that. ‘‘The glue,’’ so to speak,
that makes all these entities stick, function, attune to each other is also made of love,
transfer, identification, imitation, repulsion, disgust, resistance, the material that so
often slip though the networks of Actor Network Theory and is so difficult to account
for.17 Indeed, which angle, theory, infra theory, stories should we adopt to describe
‘‘this glue’’? As I mentioned previously, we can talk about exchange of properties
between humans and humans, between humans and non-humans; they start to look
like each other or to become each other (Mialet 2009, 2012a, 2014). But again, how
far can we go? How far can we stretch this envelope? Like a rubber band, do things
stretch to the point of snapping back to their origin? When things break, does the
individual really disappear?
This is where the processes of singularization that link an action to its origin
came into place. If things and beings are made and remade, extended, realized,
through the work of others, how are origins formed? How, for example, does an idea
stay attached to the one who conceived it? ANT talks about secondary processes of
attribution that do not have any links with the primary processes participating in the
creation of knowledge that are eminently material and collective. Still, someone had
an idea and even if this idea becomes real only through the work of others’ multiple
translations, a singular idea was formed, and not only as a result of these material
and collective processes. What does it mean when a Professor asks a student to work
on a particular problem, the student spends 6 months trying to resolve this problem,
comes back with a solution, makes a demonstration, and is sent away again for more
clarification, and so on and so forth. Who does what? The student did a lot (maybe
all of it), but still attributes his accomplishments to ‘‘the original idea of his
professor.’’ Processes of attribution are perhaps made of the same flesh as
psychoanalytic interpretation, they touch a nerve, open a reality, make people act.
These processes of attribution are also performative—they singularize the presence
of those they designate. By singularizing them, they paradoxically generalize their
presence (Mialet 2008).
Yet, processes of singularization do not operate only at the level of discourse;
they can also be inscribed and materialized into spatial arrangements. I’m thinking
here of a stage where a movie star is under the spotlights when everything is left in
the dark, or of an official ceremony, the ceremony of grieving for example,
organized by the Elysee after the Paris attack at the Bataclan where the President,

17
Like in psychoanalysis, the analyst records associations and retranslates them as a form of mirror to
the analysand who works with them, and through this process of co-construction, an individual emerges.
On the notion of ‘‘attunement’’ see (Despret 2004; Blackman 2012). See, also, the role of suggestibility as
a means of examining the potentiality of affect (Blackman 2008, p. 32). This notion of suggestibility
seems a possible pathway towards the study of certain mechanisms through which associations are made.
Moreover, the dissolution it entails, as Blackman argues, between ‘‘self and other, inside and outside, the
human and non-human, the material and ethereal, etc.’’ resonates and fleshes out one of the processes that
make possible what I call the exchange of properties.
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 321

François Hollande, was sitting alone physically detached from his government
standing behind him. Processes of singularization are physically incarnated through
discourse or spatial arrangements that detach the individual from the collective and
the background, but they are also detectable in the action of the person who
singularizes him or her. Again, Hawking is not entirely absorbed by the desires of
others, or made into a puppet in their hands, but resists what others want him to do;
he resists their translation, or conversely, he works with them to construct himself as
being at the center of the action.
The persona, then, is a collective—or a multiplicity of collectives—made of
processes of distribution and materialization of competences simultaneously accom-
panied by processes of singularization composed of discourses and narratives or
physical and spatial devices that make a man emerge at its center. When simultane-
ously, we see in action the resistance (or nudge) of a man through the traces he leaves
that reboot and reenergize the collective or make them move in another direction, again
these multiple directions have to stay attached to him through the processes of
singularization previously described.18 The knowing subject has become what I call a
distributed-centered subject, that is, the more his cognitive competences, his identity,
and even his body are distributed and materialized, the more he is singularized though
the processes of singularization of which he plays a part. The more he is connected, the
more he is individualized (Mialet 2008, 2012a, Forthcoming).
Is Stephen Hawking, then, an individual or a collective? Is he an individual or a
society? Strange question indeed, we have been used to thinking about the
individual and the collective, the individual and society as antithetical. One is
thought against the other, inside the other, or made of the other, that is, one talks of
an individual against society, an individual in a society, a society made of
individuals. Or we could also imagine, a society in an individual, or an individual
made of a society. But could they be the same thing? It is, perhaps, just a question of
scale. In the same way Marylin Strathern showed, according to Viveiros de Castro,
that for Melanesians: ‘‘the individual is society in miniature and society is the
individual expanded. Both are relational mixes’’ (de Castro et al. 2008, p. 35), I
showed the collective dimensions of the Euro-American individual who is
constituted through processes of distribution and singularization. We are close
here to the Melanesian conception of human beings as ‘‘hybrids and (literally)
heterogeneous’’ though I’m also reintegrating another dimension, that is, the
phenomenon of singularization.19 Indeed, if we argue, as I did, that the individual is
a collective, I have also tried to capture different points in time and space that mark
the presence of this particular individual. Indeed, how then are we to think the

18
This notion of resistance overlaps with some aspects of resistance as it articulated by Stengers (2010),
Despret (2008), Savransky (2014).
19
Marcio Goldman notes that: ‘‘The Latourian hybrid musters entities like animal, machine and human.
A certain methodological or discursive presupposition that these things are both relatively homogeneous
and exterior to one another seems necessary so that they can cross and hybridize. But in Melanesia this is
not necessary. The social relations are already hybrid in themselves. Human beings are hybrids and
(literally) heterogeneous.’’ Ibid, 39. I’m wondering to what extent this is not a misconception of the
Latourian hybrid which is closer it seems to me to the notion of ‘‘social relations as being hybrid in
themselves’’ (see de Castro et al. 2008, pp. 38–39).
322 H. Mialet

general and the particular? If every individual is a collective, can we assume that
each entity is distributed and singularized in different ways?
If we start thinking about the human being ‘‘as hybrid and (literally)
heterogeneous,’’ we have to think about what extends and singularizes his/her
presence in new terms. What is the link between Hawking in his office and Hawking
on stage, or as a signature, or as a name in print, or flying in a wheelchair on film, or
in picture and ink in archival boxes, or as a statue? Are we dealing with one and a
unique entity made of different materialities? And if this is the case, how are these
different materialities conceived as being the equivalent of the man in flesh and
blood? In the same way that relics, in the 13th century, were locked away and
removed from the immediacy of touch, other mechanisms had to be created to allow
people to be in their presence. Since touching with the hands and touching with the
eyes were similar processes, new ways of being in the presence of the sacred were
invented through material depiction (Diedrichs 2001). In the same way, these
different materialities—stage performances, printed names, signatures, pictures and
statues—extend and singularize Hawking’s presence. From this complex work,
emerges like a sweater made of patient knitting, an individual or a collective person
made of a patchwork of bodies, spatial arrangements, newspapers, scientific articles,
books, statues, and so many things that have to be accounted for.20 Where should we
stop? Does the boundary that delimitates the individual depend on where the social
scientist or the ethnographer decides to stop her story—another process of
singularization? Where is the man or where does he appear in these different
processes of extension and singularization? It is like seeing an accordion in action,
stretching and contracting. His physical presence or traces are often integrated in
other layers collectively or conventionally designed to singularize individuals. The
man is there in person on stage, a stage designed to make visible those who stand on
it. His name written on top of the first page of the article conforms to the convention
of authorship. He expresses the uniqueness of his thought experiments, discourses
that coincide with what the others say about him. He is visually represented on film
swallowed in the common tropes that circulate around our notions of individuals
and geniuses; he is made visible and invisible through the apparatus and prosthetic
of human and non-humans to which he is attached; he is reconstructed in action
through the collection and collage of printed traces left by his presence in
accordance with the processes of classification organized by trained archivists; he is
incarnated by a statue, made of some of the elements that constitute him and that
have been retrieved by the artist like fingerprints—the statue is made of the artist’s
inspiration, her skills, certain conventions, the plaster, and the feedback Hawking
and others gave her about it. In other words, the artist wants to use Hawking to
extend her own presence; he, also, wants to be extended through her work, and has
something to say about how he wants to be represented. Thus, it is at the intersection
of the complex desires of the actors that, in different ways, want to extend their
presence by using others and take them into their own projections and desires that a

20
There is a link here with an embodied ‘‘multiperson’’ to borrow Marylin Strathern’s term (Strathern
1988) or Jeanne Favret Saada compound subject of witchcraft in Deadly Worlds (Favret-Saada and Cullen
1980).
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 323

reality is created, roles are attributed, won, imposed, and renegotiated. Without
knowing it, my analysis was echoing the Tardien description of a society made of
desires and beliefs (Debaise 2008). As Didier Debaise remarks: ‘‘The concept of
‘belief’ for Tarde, is a perception; it is the link that operates inside a monad between
the realities that she ‘overarches’, that is, her possessions. Belief in this sense is not
identifiable with a specific content, it is uniquely a power of linkage, immanent to
the monad, of the multiplicity that composes her at a particular moment’’ (Debaise
2008, p. 455, my translation).
The subject, then, is spatially made (Thrift 2008). We can see her though all her
extensions. Each element extends her presence and materializes her in different
ways. Yet, s/he appears as one and unique. It is because we are not dealing with
representations of the subject, but with parts of the subject: with relics.
Or, one can make a parallel here with a painting of Christ represented by multiple
traces of his presence (the veil of Veronica, the dice of the soldiers playing under the
cross, Jesus himself on the cross, etc.): a snapshot of his presence taken at different
times and in different places and organized and displayed on the same canvas (e.g.,
the Mass of St. Gregory by Meckenem): again, we see a picture made of a collage of
all the events that mark his presence in different spaces and times. Contraction
again. We could imagine here another analogy: an article that backs up any of its
statements by a footnote. A painting, an article, or a book that make a presence
tangible, or a concept that ‘‘emerges’’ from what it describes—the distributed-
centered subject. A concept that could have implications on our way of thinking
about ourselves, or of presenting ourselves to others, or on rethinking the artistic
genius, the scientific genius, the political figure, or the manager. Concepts are
performative and open and create new and concrete realities. They augment the
reality they are touched by.
Here, I talked then about spatiality, connection and ‘‘mise en présence.’’ I
suggested that the individual is created through a multiplicity of collectives that
extend and singularize her, and the addition of traces of her presence taken in
different times and spaces and sometimes reassembled or subsumed under one
medium: a painting, a book, a concept. But can we talk as well about a vertical
movement where the individual emerges when we touch something unique and not
de-constructible that makes the person who he or she is?
Indeed, peeling off the different layers that constitute an individual, opening
black boxes, going from one collective body to the next, I was searching, it seems,
for ‘‘the real or true self,’’ or the origin of all these actions, a point of non-return, a
stable core that is not only the product of processes of attribution and
singularization, but that is constitutive, idiosyncratic, not changeable, not
interchangeable, and unique. I was looking for a core, something indestructible
and something ‘‘that is him,’’ something ‘‘that is her,’’ or to echo Montaigne:
‘‘because it was him, because it was me.’’ O how much a constructivist I wanted to
be, a little voice kept coming back whispering in my ear: how many human beings
have the power to take risks, invent new concepts, new ways of looking at the
world? Are smiles, humor, intelligence, charm, reducible to a link between two
lines? Is he or is she a dot emerging at the intersection of a crossroad? If we are the
additions of the associations or attachments that constitute us, how do we create
324 H. Mialet

these links, convince others, and maintain those links? Are we constantly
constituted and reconstituted? Are our competences the product of our perfor-
mances? Or, is everything already there potentially present inside us from the start?
Is it really possible to avoid making a distinction between human and non-human
agency? If it is true that at each point of this assemblage something can break down,
which part of this assemblage can I get rid of and still deal with a stable identity? To
what extent can we exteriorize cognitive and corporeal competences? What does it
mean to only be able to study the visibility of cognitive processes? When an entity is
thinking alone what happens in her mind? Is it something we can study or not? How
can one transcribe experience into a narrative? Why does all of it matter? And what
does it mean to reconstruct the mediations that make an individual and ‘‘see’’ her?
Whatever you do, everything that plays in a situation cannot be accounted for, so
many mediations have been forgotten, erased, overlooked, too many layers, how
thick a thick description might be, the dream of grasping all the elements that makes
a reality, is impossible. If we are headshrinkers, we are also butchers; we have to
disfigure, to displace, to reconfigure a reality and transform it into something
graspable (Hirschauer 1991). We are creating a concept that dramatizes what we
talk about (Deleuze and Guattari 2014); it is a re-construction on one side, but it is
not a representation; the concept emerges in the book as a word that captures what it
describes, but also it is the equivalent of the entire book, one talks about the other.
Or like an artist, we create a reality.21 I have in mind here an art teacher seized in
the act of teaching: ‘‘everything is so wrong and everything is so right in this
picture,’’ she said, ‘‘we don’t know what makes it the way it is, you just caught an
expression on the fly, if you put more black on the corner, it will be closer to the true
model, but it might also make the expression disappear.’’ And she added, her eye
half closed, moving her thumb back and forth as to make the picture move with it:
‘‘we don’t know what makes it the way it is. It’s the mystery of a composition.’’
This is why it is so fearful to add even the tiniest layer of color that could make the
charm of the assemblage disappear. Again, everything is so fragile…. It is all about
equilibrium and the possibility of transforming it: ‘‘The notion of equilibrium refers
to what Simondon calls a ‘metastable’ equilibrium, that is, a tensed equilibrium,
beyond stability, linked by a strong potential energy. Without this metastable equi-
librium, a singularity could in no case ‘crack an equilibrium.’ It is the fragile and
unstable character of a heterogeneous relation that gives the singularity the
possibility to transform the equilibrium’’ (Debaise 2016, p. 17, note 6).
Reality is made through brush strokes; a person and all her different
manifestations (they are not representations) are not made of the same material,
so to speak, they move her somewhere else, in another domain, we touch her
differently through the smile of a statue, through an idea made of words spoken or in
print, through a talk, or an image on film, or by what we left behind, a voice, a story,
an energy, a breath of wind. Indeed, we stay printed in the memory of others, friends
or foes, reconstructed, distorted; we touched them, but where, we don’t know.
Conversely, we often read them through the multiple layers that constitute our

21
On the idea that knowledge doesn’t reduce or describes but adds, augments, and extends experience,
see William James (1977) and Antoine Hennion’s article (2015).
A singularity: where actor network theory breaks down… 325

history; suddenly they inhabit another space; as we do with them, traces of our
presence are left in other brains, or traces of others inhabit our bodies; sometimes
we smile like our ancestors; our legs have the shape of their legs; our eyes the colors
of their eyes, our desires have been forged by them or entirely against them; they
continue living with and within us, acting through us; more than we know, our
presence is also left in our computers, or bills, or receipts, or taxes, though
everything is not expressed in print, or materialized, traces disappear, we are dust, or
we will become so.
Thus, who controls whom? Who is indispensable? What happens when we get rid
of the ‘‘most powerful’’? Are the acolytes just the equivalent of hands and bodies?
Are they losing their identity or their agency when they lend it to the one who is
constituted by them? How can the master ‘‘control’’ anything? Is working with a
small group similar to working with a large corporation? Scale again? Does a
figure of the past work differently from a figure of the present? All these questions
have to be explored empirically. This is the only way we will be able to understand
the texture of the individual(s) or what society is made of: a node, a singularity, a
seemingly point of no return, a point where STS and the sociology of translation
breaks down, or…
Let’s rewind and go back to the beginning of this essay. It seemed indeed that
everything I was interested in, intuition, cognitive breakthrough, individuality,
human agency was what ANT was running from. No intuition or flashes of
inspiration, but material devices and practices; no individuality, but a collective; no
actors, but actants, whose attributes change according to whom they are attached to
and what emotions, moods, they are crossed through and bombarded with; no
specificity attributed to human agency, but equal treatment given to non-humans.
Contrary to what I thought, I showed that intuition is materially made, cognition is
visible, the individual is a collective, and humans and non-humans have agency.
However, I went even further by showing that the more the subject and the human
being was distributed, materialized, and collectivized, the more s/he was singular-
ized: a distributed-centered subject. Intuition was the product of the hands (of
others) and the use of diagrams, though only this particular human being could
inhabit certain localizations of the diagrams; cognition is visible in so far as we can
follow the hands, practices, and materiality that makes it possible, but only this
particular human being was able to push as far as he could the memorization of
these intellectual tools; the individual is a collective, but this particular human being
is singularized through processes of singularization of which he plays a part; non-
humans matter and are indispensable in the construction of cognition, identity,
corporeality, but this particular human being resists or make move these
assemblages in a particular way. Describing, recuperating, reconstructing, making
visible, and stretching as far as I could the complex associations made of processes
of distribution and materialization through which the individual takes form, I was
also pointing out to certain limits: we need to recuperate the unsaid and the invisible
to make sense of the visible, leaving open an important question: what kind of
materiality is the invisible made of? We need to adjust our probes against the naı̈ve
conception of anthropology that the closer we are to our subjects, the better we
know them; indeed, sometimes the closer we are, the farther we seem to be from
326 H. Mialet

them, and the further we seem to be, the closer we are to them; the connection and
combination between closeness, proximity, and intimacy needs to be rethought; we
need to look at associations not only as links, constituted through force, warlike
avidity, or rhetoric, but as complex exchanges of properties between humans and
humans, between humans and non-humans made of love, identification, imitation,
influence, metamorphosis, etc.22 The individual is constituted through processes of
distribution made possible through materiality and phenomena of extension and
singularization, and… everything that slips through our analysis, which however
adds and doesn’t subtract from the reality it describes. Thus, starting with a node, I
opened, made visible the complex ramifications that constitute a monad, an actor
network, and tried to describe this phenomenon of extension, multiplicity, and
contraction. What has been recuperated and was missing from the classical
conception of the knowing subject were the mediations. What have been
recuperated (to a certain extent) and was missing from STS and ANT in particular
is a living example on the smallest scale of analysis: an individual and a tentative
description of certain modes of associations and singularization and their nature.23
Against the grain of the powerful myth of the ‘‘disincorporated brain,’’ which has
permeated and justified hierarchies in our society (intellectuals versus workers, chief
versus technicians) and how the world is partitioned (us and the other), I have
proposed the concept of the distributed-centered subject. Far from being an
abstraction (though there is nothing abstract about abstraction) or another tool added
to our anthropological and philosophical tool kits, it might perform the real in a
more fertile way. We are all after all, as I have argued here, like Stephen Hawking,
more or less distributed and more or less centered.24 What, would it mean, then, to
think about ourselves and to present ourselves to others—as interconnected cyborgs,
actor networks, collective individuals, and distributed-centered subject?

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Hélène Mialet teaches STS at York University. She is the author of L’Entreprise Créatrice (Hermès,
2008) and Hawking Incorporated (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She is a philosopher and
anthropologist of science interested in questions related to the body, subjectivity, creativity, cognition,
and human–machine interaction. She is currently working on a new project concerned with issues having
to do with the management and control of data and their relationship to experience, sensation, and
expertise.