In regards to the above statement and to the rest of this
post, I would like to forward a bit of my own summer reading and
thinking.
From what I understand of Aramis and ANT in general,
as well as these notions of the power and agency of artifact we are
enjoying on this list, it seems to me that they are not so very different
from the very old concept of animism. It does not seem to be such
a very far leap in the mental landscape from "every object has
agency" to "every object has a soul" (especially if we reduce things
to anima/te).
I think that, shifted to this sense of the world, Latour et al. are
pointing to the false division of mind/body that animism does not appear
to have. My notes on this topic, however, come from Freud's _Totem and
Taboo_ (and if anyone has a better source to recommend, I would certainly
appreciate it), and it is a unified notion of the world that Freud scoffs at.
As well, Freud is pro "individual intelligence" whereas this "other
notion" (for lack of a formal term), as Jay and others have illustrated
(on this list and in other forums), this is not the case for a human
in the world.
>
>Humans do not "have minds" , i.e. participate intelligently in
>ecosocial processes where meaning relations are potentially as
>significant as energy relations, apart from our use-of-tools, our
>having-been-co-constructed-in-tool-use.
>
I think this well states the concept that when one makes a tool
of a thing, one equally becomes tool-like, one creates a world
where one (a human) can _be_ merely a tool. Again, this points
to the egalitarian quality of the world of tools (or in this case, artifacts,
as the statement of body as atrifact points towards).
>[Latour] relates this, more speculatively, to
>the emergence of tool-mediated intelligence in primates, but the
>key insight, I think, is that our neat systems theory separation
>of the micro, meso, macro, and all those in-between scales often
>fails completely when its material basis (space and time, energy
>and matter differences of scale) is short-circuited by meaning
>processes.
>
This appears totally in sync with the animsim disucssion,
as well as its accompanying disussion on magic and sorcery (in Freud).
Sorcery (and I will keep this brief), deals with a influencing the souls of
objects, "by the same methods that have proved effective with living
men." Though it seems that Latour makes use of the same "fundamental
principle of magic," whis is to "mistake an ideal connection for a real
one." I offer this with the full knowledge of how messy this "other notion"
has of mind/body, self/world. What is a connection? If we say something
is connected, is it? As Jay writes,
>This is more than simply _mediation_
>by artifacts in the simplest semiotic sense, it is more like
>acknowledgment of a full partnership, a co-participation in the
>construction of the very ground of what can be <snip> semiotic.
David
D S Hendler
Graduate English Department
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1122