Entities as Embodied Networks

Power, Capital, and the Structuration of Socio-Biotechnical Totality

Abstract

This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyse human and non-human entities as socio-biotechnical configurations shaped by historically sedimented power relations. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, post-ANT developments, and Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism, the argument integrates these perspectives within a Marxist approach that foregrounds the dialectic between contingency and necessity. The concepts of threads and fabrics conceptualise how networks stabilise asymmetries, consolidate exclusions, and produce fractured totalities. Capital is theorised not as a background condition but as a structuring actant that inscribes values, configures topologies, and organises the logic of valorisation. Technical codes materialise hegemonic positions within socio-biotechnical entities, while resistance and obduracy mark the persistence of the non-identical. The paper further examines how class position and subjective identification mediate technological design, showing how socio-biotechnical entities embody contested inscriptions of meaning, function, and control. Through this lens, technology is reinterpreted as a site of struggle within a historically structured socio-biotechnical totality.