Decadence in the Biographical Sense: Taking a Distance from Actor-Network Theory

This article summarizes the author's 2016 book Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, outlining the book's five criticisms of actor-network theory (ANT) and its fifteen provisional rules of object-oriented method in social theory. The article also considers Bruno Latour's criticism of Immaterialism, in particular his view that such terms as “symbiosis” and “decadence” rely too heavily on an inappropriate “biological” metaphor that has no place in discussion objects in a wider sense. In response, the authors claims that the primary meaning of the symbiosis and decadence is not biological, but biographical.