Techno-Formalism, or Pulling Apart Russian Theory with Latour

This article undertakes a methodological reconstruction of the formalist and constructivist paradigm from the position of contemporary sociotechnical theory, objective ontology, and symmetrical anthropology. Beginning with the comparison of literary and scientific types of reference, the technique of narration, the construction of the act of utterance, the institutional atmosphere, and finally, the facts of both types distributed through socio-technical networks, one runs into the necessity of examining them both as comparable, and the phraseology of formalism and productivism, on the one hand, and actor-network theory and STS, on the other, as resonating with each other. By tracing the history of the parallels between literature and scientific and technical fact, the author proposes the concept of "technological unconscious" literature and a new means of reading, in which in which the technological grounding of literary (arti)facts takes the place of the hermeneutical depths.