In this essay I have been arguing for another way of seeing actors and actants— and consequently another way of working to position scientists and science in important struggles in the world. I have stressed actants as collective entities doing things in a structured and structuring field of action; I have framed the issue in terms of articulation rather than representation. Human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things. These same humans also think the traces of inscription devices are like names—pointers to things, such that the inscriptions and the things can be enrolled in dramas of substitution and inversion. But the things, in my view, do not pre-exist as ever-elusive, but fully pre-packaged, referents for the names. Other actors are more like tricksters than that. Boundaries take provisional, never-finished shape in articulatory practices. The potential for the unexpected from unstripped human and unhuman actants enrolled in articulations—i.e., the potential for generation-remains both to trouble and to empower technoscience. Western philosophers sometimes take account of the inadequacy of names by stressing the "negativity" inherent in all representations. This takes us back to Spivak's remark cited early in this paper about the important things that we cannot not desire, but can never possess—or represent, because representation depends on possession of a passive resource, namely, the silent object, the stripped actant. Perhaps we can, however, "articulate" with humans and unhumans in a social relationship, which for us is always language-mediated (among other semiotic, i.e., "meaningful," mediations). But, for our unlike partners, well, the action is "different," perhaps "negative" from our linguistic point of view, but crucial to the generativity of the collective. It is the empty space, the undecidability, the wiliness of other actors, the "negativity," that give me confidence in the reality and therefore ultimate unrepresentability of social nature and that make me suspect doctrines of rep­ resentation and objectivity.  314


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