“There can be daemons in a secular cosmos, Garviel. Just as long as we understand the use of the word.”
– Warmaster Horus, Horus Rising
One of the primary contributions of Bruno Latour’s scientifictional text Aramis, Or the Love of Technology, is the methodological conceit of allowing non-humans to ‘speak’. This method of generalized symmetry gives the non-human a voice, because technical agents exercise agency within networks that cannot be understood if the non-human is treated as passive instruments of human intention. In the universe of Warhammer 40k, the ranks of the non-human extend beyond the technical; they incorporate the incorporeal.
This paper argues that 40k’s cosmology performs a speculative extension of Latourian Actor-Network Theory (ANT), expanding the principle of generalized symmetry from the socio-technical to the socio-immaterial. Through the lens of ANT, the warp can be understood as a network in which rage, despair, desire, and change achieve actancy through the Chaos Gods. The Chaos Gods are not background conditions or human psychological states, but rather immaterial actants with the capacity to enroll, translate, and reshape the network. This presentation examines three case studies: the network emergence of Slaanesh from the accumulated emotional output of the Eldar; the enrollment and translation mechanics of Nurgle; and the structural consequences of non-symmetrical analysis in the Imperial Truth’s refusal to acknowledge incorporeal actants.
Author bio
Dr Richard Aubrey Slaughter has a degree in Informatics from the University of California, Irvine. He currently teaches ethics in information science, and uses Warhammer as a teaching tool.
