Re: [xmca] latour

Martin,

the concept of 'actant' and the abandonment of the distinction between
human agency and material causality is one of the things I find most
problematic about Latour. He seems to equate agency with something being
an active factor in what he would call a network. This seems to me to
succumb to reification and fetishism (see e.g. his description of the
agency of the Berlin Wall in 'We Have Never Been Modern'). I think there
is something distinct about human agency, namely consciousness and as
part of it self-aware goal directedness.

How then do we best conceptualise programmed but autonomous agents? As
mediating artefacts, as part of a cyborg or something else? I am not
sure - though I don't think they have anything comparable to human
agency. Perhaps we have to go back to the longstanding debates about the
philosophy of articificial intelligence and try and see how they fit
with a CHAT perspective.

Bruce R

Martin Packer wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
>
> This parallel is exactly what Latour is emphasizing, on my reading. For
> Greimas the "actants" may be human but they may also be non-human. Latour
> insists that we avoid imposing in advance an asymmetry between human agency
> and material causality. All sorts of things, human and otherwise, have
> agency. And, just as in good fiction or a fairytale, "actors incessantly
> engage in the most abstruse metaphysical constructions by redefining all the
> elements of the world." So the kinds of smart agents that you describe would
> certainly be part of an ontology. But for Latour pretty much every kind of
> object should be considered a smart agent, or can be so under specific
> (assembled) circumstances.
>
> Martin
>
> On 3/8/08 2:46 PM, "Kevin Rocap" <Kevin.Rocap@liu.edu> wrote:
>
>
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Received on Sun Mar 9 04:59 PDT 2008