Re: [xmca] latour

Bruce,

Latour claims that he's been misunderstood:

³ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd Œsymmetry
between humans and non-humans¹. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to
impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a
material world of causal relations²

His point seems once again to be that researchers have generally presupposed
a rigid distinction between subjects and objects, humans and artifacts,
rather than examining the particular differences and relations in an
assemblage. Objects may have agency, and equally people may become objects.
If I need eye surgery I will be happy if the surgeon can treat me as a soft
machine. Perhaps more relevantly, I think that current testing practices in
US schools reduce children to objects, and the tests themselves have an
agency, an influence, an impact that the children are powerless to resist.

Martin

On 3/9/08 7:53 AM, "Bruce Robinson" <bruce@brucerob.eu> wrote:

> 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.

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Received on Sun Mar 9 10:42 PDT 2008