If I may stand in for Andy's interactionist protagonist (assuming he
is not referring to me ;-) ), my primary concern with Latour has to do
with the treatment (or lack thereof) of discourse. This need not be a
concern and it has a quick fix.
The concern is that this takes us down a road that leads toward an
increased ignorance about linguistic and discursive forms as mediating
artifacts. Neither language nor discourse nor forms of either are
considered as "technologies" in this paper by Latour (and I haven't
seen it in his other writings, but I haven't read much either). To put
it simply, his focus on the "hammer" comes at the expense of the "word".
The quick fix comes in recognizing that language and discourse (and
the forms of these) are technologies and artifacts. With this fix,
Latour makes perfect sense to me. I can see the kinship with
Silverstein and Urban's book Natural Histories of Discourse which
traces out "the secret live of texts" (which also happens to be the
title of Silverstein's chapter). In a sense it seems we could say that
Latour is pointing to "the secret life of objects," but I just wish he
would make clear that those objects can be "texts" and language, and
forms of discourse and so on. This would also make relevant Foucault
and Bakhtin and so many others that have looked at how forms of talk
are consequential in their own right. Linguistic and discursive forms,
far more than simple intermediaries that fill a function, are true
mediators, they speak back to the speaker (and hearer). They are not
mere instrumentality but rather they have a life of their own.
Can anyone help me make this leap with Latour?
Or am I jumping into a great abyss? (of idealism?).
-greg
p.s., I believe that this post articulates with a prior post about the
process of writing as if words are simple instruments that express
one's ideas in one's head. If only it were so... (but be careful what
you wish for!).
On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Thanks for that, Martin. How timely was our recent conversation
about Hegel, mediation and the "cunning of reason"!
I was interested to know who this "accusation" was directed
against, i.e., exactly what an "instrumental" social theory would
look like, and in particular how ANL vs LSV came into the picture.
Mike answered this nicely for me. My understanding of this issue
was in terms of the source of a person's motivation in activities.
As I tell the story, LSV showed how cultural norms enter an action
via the tool/symbol and its use, but ANL pointed out that the
artefact does not provide the ends to be pursued (only affordance
to use a modern term). ANL situated these ends in society (in the
5 Year Plan, to parody somewhat) and the Activity is the pursuit
of this "objective" motive; the person's "subjective" ends are
distinct from these "objective" ends, and it is down to the mode
of production to harmonise objective and subjective ends. My
position is that rather being objective and suibjective, the aim
must be seen as /immanent/ in the activity, rather than external
to the activity. I had not thought of this as "instrumentalism"
but I can now see that this exactly characterises ANL's approach.
So great. I am on the same page after all!
The other reason I asked for further explanation was my persistent
struggle to get my interactionist protagonist to see the
importance of artefact-medation in human life. They see it in a
way which could be called "instrumentalist" and your exposition of
Latour's critique fits the bill nicely. But there are two
different kinds of "mediation" aren't there? and two different
species of "ideal": the tool-artefact - material instantiations of
the universal, and the institution, forms of practice organised by
means of symbolic-artefacts. How does Latour see mediation by
activities?
Andy
Martin Packer wrote:
As Mike mentioned earlier, it was me who sent around the
Latour article, so I feel a certainly responsibility to also
respond to Andy's question about avoiding a reduction to
instrumentalism. Here goes...
Latour's article was published in a special issue of Theory,
Culture & Society on the topic of "the status of the object" -
that is, the ontological character of the material world - the
"co-performance of sociality/materiality." In his
contribution, Latour is keen to break away from the means-ends
instrumentalism in which humans are said to form 'ends' -
goals and purposes - and objects then serve as the 'means' to
satisfy or procure these ends. Part of his argument is based
on the phylogenesis of tool use, part is based on an
ontological analysis of tools.
Starting with the first, Latour points out that it's becoming
increasingly clear that homo sapiens evolved from earlier
species that were already using tools. I just showed my
students the wonderful YouTube excerpt from a BBC documentary
on capuchin monkeys:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABqRg_RbQlM>
As Latour puts it, biologically modern humans "appeared within
a nest or a niche already inhabited by abilities, by know-how
and technological objects." One consequence of this is that we
will not be able to draw a line between being human and using
technology. We grew from technology, not the other way around.
As Latour puts it, "A being that was artificially torn away
from such a dwelling, from this technical cradle, could in no
way be a moral being, since it would have ceased to be human."
So, any model that puts humans first and then posits us taking
charge of the material objects we encounter in the world
around us has things back to front: "the image of a human
being at the helm manipulating inert objects to achieve ends
through the intermediary of ‘efficient action on matter’
appears increasingly muddled." We are, in fact, children of
technology (really technolog*ies* plural); tool use was the
cradle of humankind. Our human ends are not prior to or
independent of the tools we grow up with, the objects that we
inherit.
Next, the ontological analysis. Latour picks up a hammer (he's
read his Being & Time) and argues that it "folds" various
temporalities - that of the ore from which the metal was
abstracted, that of the wood of the handle, that of its
production for the market. It also folds various spatialities:
of forest, mine, factory, and store. These connections have
become invisible, and they are especially invisible when we
simply heft the hammer and use it, but they are nonetheless
operative, and they can be traced and unfolded.
Furthermore, the modern hammer "has inherited" the variety of
forms of its ancestral tools - so when a human uses a tool we
should think not just about the origins and evolution of the
human, but also the phylogeny of the hammer.
Contra any proposal that a tool, or an artifact, such as a
cup, perhaps, comes with some kind of specific practice
somehow built in to it, Latour points out that any tool
"overflows the strict limits" of every attempt to define a
specific function for it. The hammer has many affordances, all
of them both "permission and promise," and so it can be used
to a wide variety, perhaps an infinity, of ways.
Equally important, if not more so, is the fact that a person
becomes changed by using a tool such as a hammer. This is why
any notion that a tool is simply an extension of a limb (or
even an extension of the whole person) doesn't make sense: the
person is *transformed* by the tool. Recalling the moment in
Kubrick's movie 2001 when the bone, flung high into the air,
to the fascination of the early hominids, becomes the slowly
rotating space station, Latour suggests that "all technologies
incite around them that whirlwind of new worlds." Kubrick
grasped something central to human existence.
Things are mediators "precisely because they are not simple
*intermediaries* which fulfill a function." Technological
systems proliferate and they become opaque, and this makes it
clear that a simple transparent means-ends rationality is not
what they involve. But their invisibility makes as think that
this *is* what they amount to. In fact, though, tool use is
not a matter of "mastering" technology as means to our ends.
Using a technology inevitably transforms, displaces, and
modifies our original intention, our plan, our end. We must
"detour" through the technology, and we are transformed in the
process. We become more god-like, in the cunning of mediation
(if I may smuggle in a little Hegel), and we also become more
entangled with and dependent upon other people.
And it is all this that makes human beings what we are.
Without technologies we would be "contemporaneous with our
actions, limited solely to proximal interactions." Our
existence would simply be like that of primates, "a
passionate, intense existence" but one that we would not call
truly human.
Latour then goes on to provide a third argument against the
means-ends instrumental account of tools and technology:
namely that there is a morality in our apparatuses. The
standard story, of course, is that morality is about the
choices among ends, so that it is all about human beings, and
tools and their means are outside moral consideration. Latour
argues that on the contrary, there is a morality in technology.
Consider a simple example: Latour has one of those desks where
to open one drawer one must close the others. He is bound by
this constraint, designed into the device itself. Not a
super-ego, but an "under-ego." Morality, Latour proposes, is
based not on obligation (because we find obligation in other
domains as well, such as law and economy), but on the
uncertainty about the relation between means and ends that is
inherent in any technical apparatus. The electricity we use is
generated by nuclear reactors, whose possibilities, whose
consequences, we can only guess at. The guessing is a moral
matter. We shouldn't assume, then, that technologies are
neutral, to be put to good or bad uses by good or bad people.
But nor should we assume that technology is inherently evil.
Technology engenders new worlds, new dispositions. In doing
so, it pulls everyone and everything together into a common
fate. We humans can face up to and acknowledge the concerns
that this fate gives rise to, or we can ignore them, but they
are there nevertheless. Morality deals with the same materials
as technology, but from a different viewpoint, with a
different concern. Morality is about *how* we live with the
things of this world.
Latour, B. (2002). Morality and technology: The end of the
means. Theory, Culture & Society, 19(5-6), 247-260.
doi:10.1177/026327602761899246__________________________________________
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Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego