Mike certainly seems to be aware (I enjoy his Latourian
mischiefs) that the whole point of paying attention to artifacts
is extend our notion of the socio-cultural to include the role
played by these other participants in its networks of
interconnected activities. 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 -- I hesitate even
to say "for us" -- semiotic.
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 am here deliberately
dropping the tool vs. symbol distinction. There are many
interesting questions about the tool-view vs. the symbol-view of
our material artifacts, but increasingly I am sure the richest
understanding comes from seeing every tool as also functioning
semiotically and every sign as also a material artifact. But the
focus in our discussion lately is more on how the artifacts (and
I take the lived-in human body to be also such an 'artifact',
however more generally biological the medium of our artifice-
with-bodies may also be) should be considered in taking the units
of measure/analysis of individual-sociocultural-historical-
biological becomings.
The neatness of divisions by scale may be badly misleading. My
own recent theoretical work has been following up on Latour's
suggestions (in the recent MCA issue) that the meaning-dimensions
of how we interact with artifacts in the here-and-now link the
scale of here-and-now to the scales of production histories of
(the actual) artifacts. He 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. There are certainly some cases, and some kinds of
systems, for which the usual hierarchical (in the technical, not
the political sense) scale-homogeneous (one scale, one level of
analysis) models are a good approximation. These are quite common
in physics and chemistry, not bad in many areas of biology ...
but they may have an enormous loophole, one through which our
cultures and intelligences come into being ... in the case of
physical systems where meaning processes matter.
This sets up a rather stark contradiction with the program of
levels of analysis for precisely such systems. Latour's models
are probably rather flatter than most of us feel fully
comfortable with (me included), but the challenge is to see how
to reconstitute levels-like phenomena out of a base that has the
networks-only topology Latour insists on. Latour's models also
are not especially dynamical ones, nor do they really examine
carefully what happens when the histories of heterogeneous (part
people, part thing; part meaning, part matter) network systems
are studied in substantial time-depth. (There are some
interesting comments on the origins of different kinds of time
from the activities of networks at places in Latour's _Aramis_.)
But the dilemma lies precisely in this: it is just those kinds of
systems that BREAK homogeneity of scale, where processes on
vastly different space and time scales become directly relevant
to one another, which characterize what we are interested in when
we consider the role of artifact-involving activity in human
sociocultural processes.
One way to think of this is to see that any moment of any process
can also be a moment of other processes at very different scales:
a choice I make here and now is also a moment in human evolution,
and in the history of my community, and it can depend not just on
the matter in my hand, but on the history of my knowledge of its
cultural significance, and on the momentary state of my
neurotransmitter concentrations in a particular brain locus. The
sword in my hand can cut off a head. My body has the know-how to
wield it, now, and it has the material affordances for beheading.
But it is also a famous sword, passed down in my family and clan,
and since childhood I have learned more and more of its meaning
and sacredness. But my rage is nearly uncontrollable -- because
of the insult of the words, because of the social class of the
object of my ire, because of the history between our families,
and if my chemical balance shifts just a bit more against the
effectiveness of inhibitory excitations ...
To cut, or not to cut ...?
JAY.
----------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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