Dear friends,
Thank you Jay and Ana for an instructive (to me) dialogue, and to Bill
for raising the question of history in ANT.
I have to confess I also am inclined to want to giggle when such heady
theoretical systems of thought result in relatively prosaic and
diminutive acronyms like ANT and CHAT. ;-)
If I might digress (devolve?), myself, for a moment to the realm of
musical culture and potentially to other cultural views on these
matters, I am reminded of the words of the Sweet Honey in the Rock song:
"Listen more often to things than to beings, Listen more often to things
than to beings/'Tis the ancestors breath, when the fire's voice is
heard/'Tis the ancestors breath in the voice of the waters/Oh Aaah,
Wsssh, Oh Aaah, Wssh/Those who have died have never never left//The dead
are not under the earth/They are in the rustling trees/They are in the
groaning woods/They are in the crying grass/They are in the moaning
rocks/The dead are not under the earth..."
As poetry, that was written by Birago Diop, of Senegal. It seems, to
me, to have bearing on this dialogue and relaxes my mind a bit to
imagine it as sweet music ;-)
Of course, this song focuses on references to "things" as "things in
nature" in a relatively traditional and pastoral sense of that term.
But my point is to consider other cultural views of ancestry-as-history,
to respond to Bill's point. Do or how do CHAT perspectives include
metaphors based on ancestral knowledge and wisdom, or must those always
give way to "meaning-making" as the preferred, material, scientific (?)
metaphor?
And, it seems to me, that by animating "things" as voices of ancestors,
or, we might prefer to say, "mediational objects of meaning-making" (?),
the view in this poem still privileges the "speaking," "listening,"
"voices" of people over things (and through things, even nature, which
exists in significant measure in human discourse as a thing "made," not
"found," or, to balance that out a bit, as Wordsworth suggests "part
perceived, half created").
Would that run counter to Latour? Doesn't "activity" also give more
privilege to human beings than to non-human actors in the sense of the
implied verb (the purposeful moving of stones referred to by Ana)? But
then, of course, via automation and use of other current and emerging
technologies typically intransitive "things" can become animate in their
own way, but by human design, no? (at least until Kurzweil's age of
Spiritual Machines is upon us).
In any case, my reflection ran to how CHAT might embrace or not
different cultural views and metaphors, such as the voices of ancestors
in things versus more Western metaphors of mediation and
meaning-making. The song also reminded me that nature, even in its
pastoral or sticks-stones-trees sense, when taken up by meaning-making
becomes artifact, no? And becomes part of Mind insofar as meanings are
shared and social, no? It also raised for me questions around the
privileging of "things" human, in thinking about Jay's point regarding
how we "treat" non-human things.
My musings.
In Peace,
K.
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