The Ghost in the Music, or The Perspective of an Improvising Ant David Borgo University of California, San Diego Ants are remarkable creatures. They inhabit almost every landmass on Earth, survive in most every climate, and make up nearly one quarter of the total biomass on the planet. They are industrious and exhibit impressive physical abilities. They are masters of exploiting the cracks, crevices, gaps and hollows that other creatures often avoid or ignore. 1 Ants work together. They are fearless, even militaristic and conniving at times, but also generous to the point of self sacrifice. Most often they appear to follow their own agenda, yet they secretly communicate with each other, solving complex problems together and organizing the group without supervision. The largest ant colonies are frequently described as superorganisms or vivisystems, since the individuals operate as a unified entity to maintain the colony. Yet from the perspective of humans, ants are barely noticeable. And when they are noticed, they are most often perceived as a nuisance. Although I briefly discussed actor-network theory (ANT) in my book Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, Bruno Latour’s recent overview of the field titled Reassembling the Social has reinvigorated my belief that it offers an important “material-semiotic approach” that could be invaluable to the study of improvisation. 2 Briefly, ANT begins with the realization that any given interaction overflows with elements from some other time, some other place and generated by some other agency. But rather than get paralyzed by the “actor/system quandary” (essentially the question of whether the actor is “in” a system, or the system is made up of actors), or even attempt to articulate a “happy medium” that considers at once the actor and the network in which it is embedded, ANT redraws the map of the social such that “action is always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated.” 3 p. 1 1 Mark W. Moffett, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 10. 2 David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle edition. 3 Latour, Reassembling the Social, location 2225.