>>I agree that we need to have some kind of notion of the person
>(not a >la Latour in his review of Hutchins an empty desk with
>everything >farmed out).
and he went on to explain
>for I don't think Latour meant in saying at one point that the
>desk was empty that there was no personal activity, or even
>agency (just not the sort of agency needed to support the
>classical notion of a psyche). I read Latour at this point as
>saying that while the desk is empty, we do still indeed have the
>desk itself.
Mike replied:
>I think it is really imporant to avoid thinking that anyone is talking
>of either-or alternatives when using metaphors like empty desks or
>coming "lightly equipped. In its dichtomous form a decade ago that
>was cognitivism versus gibsonianism in one prominent version. The toolikt
>(toolkit) metaphor seems useful to me in this regard. You have different
>kinds of tools, but without experience and the possibility of an
>appropriate contexts, they are naught.
I agree that emptying out the person isn't a useful strategy, and perhaps I
am misreading Latour's response, but I read the "lightly equipped human
agency" as Latour's reading of Hutchins.
In the empthy desk paragraph, Latour begins by arguing that the logical
conclusion of Hutchins' work is "the final dissolution of psychology since
there is *no* agency left that could sustain *a psyce at all*"
(*highlighting added) and he ends by saying that the desk is (*highlighting
added again) "empty since *everything else* has been delegated outside to
something or to someone else". In the next two pages, Latour questions
Hutchins for continuing to talk about persons and for trying to revise
rather than scrap the project that has been psychology.
In his response to Latour, Hutchins also seems to have read the empty desk
in a similar way, suggesting that Latour wanted him to go all the way, "to
dissolve the individual and the psychology of individuals as well".
In looking at the relationship between actant-network analysis and activity
theory, I've been struck by the way both emphasize tracing the history of
tools to understand what is embedded in them. However, while Latour and
others routinely approach scientific concepts, craft practices, and
machines from this developmental-historical perspective, I still have not
seen them take a comparable perspective on people--even in a book like
_Pasteurization_.
In the end, I'm not sure that Latour isn't advocating a truly empty desk,
hard as it is for me to make sense of that perspective.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign