Actor-Network Theory

Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as it appears in McCormick's conceptual history, is mobilized as a theoretical contrast-point that reframes the classical modern problem of the individual versus society. Rather than treating individuality as a stable, interiorized atomic unit set against an external social totality, ANT reconceives the subject as an assembled, relational node — constituted through 'extra-psychic' associations, networks, and mediations that are both multiple and reversible. Individuality, on this account, is not a given but an effect: a provisional aggregation of heterogeneous constituents rather than an expression of inner essence. The 'self' is not prior to its social relations but is continuously made and unmade through them.

McCormick's theoretical move, however, is not simply to endorse ANT but to expose a gap within it. ANT dissolves the self/society binary but lacks a theorization of the communicative dimension of its own 'modes of circulation' — the discursive, affective, and rhetorical registers through which networks are assembled and maintained. It is this gap that the conceptual history of chatter, idle talk, and empty speech (tracing from Kierkegaard through Heidegger to Lacan) is positioned to fill. The Lacanian register of Empty Speech — speech that circulates without anchoring itself in the subject's desire or the truth of the unconscious — becomes, in this argument, a kind of pre-theoretical anticipation of what ANT describes as networked, reversible association: talk that does not express a sovereign self but enacts and reproduces the very connections through which selves are assembled.

In samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, ANT appears at a pivotal moment in the argument's architecture — not as a framework the book operates within, but as a theoretical horizon the book's genealogy is shown to anticipate and supplement. Its presence is diagnostic: it names the contemporary theoretical space into which the conceptual history of idle talk/chatter/empty speech is offered as a contribution. This situates the concept at the intersection of sociology of science and Lacanian psychoanalysis, using ANT's dissolution of the individual/society binary as the problem-space that Lacan's Empty Speech — and its antecedents — helps resolve at the level of communicative praxis.

The cross-referenced canonical concepts — Alienation, Ego, Ego Ideal, Ideal Ego, Empty Speech, Identity, Imaginary Order, Neurosis — collectively map the Lacanian account of subjectivity that ANT's 'extra-psychic' assemblage logic implicitly challenges. Where Lacanian Alienation insists that the subject is constituted through entry into the Other's signifying chain at the cost of its being — a structural, irremediable condition — ANT's reversible, combinatorial model of individuality suggests a more fluid, non-tragic ontology of selfhood. The tension is productive: ANT's model of the assembled subject rhymes with the Lacanian insight that the Ego (i(a), the Ideal Ego) is not a natural interior but an imaginary construct borrowed from an external image, and that the Ego Ideal is a symbolic point in the Other rather than an inner standard. Yet ANT lacks the psychoanalytic account of how this assembly is libidinally invested, how it fails (neurosis), and how its communicative surface — empty speech, chatter — is itself a symptom of the subject's alienation from its own desire.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.308)

Instead of THE individual versus society problem, we are now faced with the multiplicity and fully reversible combinations of highly complex individual constituents and multiple and fully reversible aggregates.

The phrase "fully reversible combinations" is theoretically loaded because it directly negates the Lacanian principle of irreversibility that underlies Alienation — Lacan's vel produces a losing choice that cannot be undone, whereas ANT posits a flat ontology of assemblage without structural remainder or loss. The contrast between "THE individual" (the modern, unitary subject) and "highly complex individual constituents" maps onto the difference between the imaginary unity of the Ideal Ego and the dispersed, extra-psychic field of identifications that both ANT and Lacanian theory, in their different registers, seek to theorize.