His main point, I think, is:
"In either sense, the whole network, including the human and the
non-human, is necessary to achieve the _information_. All them, in
their heterogeneity, have to be connected and working properly."
He says this very well and I agree entirely with it. I wish that it were
better understood in many contexts.
Engineers have a low intellectual status in the academic world, largely
because they are concerned with practice as their object rather than theory
for its own sake, and because they would rather find a concrete solution in
the world of action than an abstract solution in the domain of discourse.
But just for these reasons engineers are often better placed, if they are
also deeply concerned about the role that theory and cultural assumptions
play in their work, to understand that _nothing_ has meaning, or works,
outside 'the whole network' that Luiz describes. This is also the
perspective of Latour, who is one of the few intellectual-theorists who
places the study of technology (really the pre-cleavage unity of
'technoscience') at the heart of philosophical discourse itself -- much to
the scandal of academic philosophers and the anger of 'pure' scientists.
If we are coming to the end of the Age of Theory (called the 'age of
science' of course), it is because we have finally begun to figure out
something, not truer, but more useful for the purposes of more of us, and
less dangerous to our interests, political and ecological.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------