Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
“Hybrids ourselves, installed lodsidedly within scientific institutions, half engineers and half philosophers, ‘tiers instuits’ (Serres, 1991) without having sought the role, we have chosen to follow the imbroglios wherever they take us” (3).
“and this is why I will use the word ‘collective’ to describe the association of humans and nonhumans and ‘society’ to designate one part only of our collectives, the divide invented by the social scientists” (4).
Everything is “simultaneously real, social, and narrated” (7).
“As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. At the same time we stop having been modern, because . . .” (11).
“the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes” (12).
Modern Constitution
1) “It is not men who make nature; Nature has always existed and have always already been there; we are only discovering its secrets” (30).
2) “human beings, and only human beings, are the ones who construct society and freely determine their own destiny” (30).
3) “there shall exist a complete separation between the natural world (constructed, nevertheless, by man) and the social world (sustained, nevertheless, by things); secondly, there shall exist a total separation between the work of hybrids and the work of purification” (31).
4) Remove God “from the dual social and natural construction, while leaving Him presentable and usable nevertheless” (33).
Again:
1) “guaranteed Nature its transcendent dimension by making it distinct from the fabric of Society” (139).
2) “guaranteed Society its immanent dimension by rending citizens totally free to reconstruct it artificially” (139).
3) “assured the separation of powers, the two branches of government being kept separate, watertight compartments” (139).
4) “guarantee of the crossed-out God made it possible to stabilize this dualist and asymmetrical mechanism by ensuring a function of arbitration, but one without presence or power” (139).
“They have not made Nature; they make Society; they make Nature; they have not made Society; they have not made either, God has made everything; God has made nothing, they have made everything” (34).
“To undertake hybridization, it is always necessary to believe that it has not serious consequences for the constitutional order” (41).
“It is the impossibility of changing the social order without modifying the natural order—and vice versa—that has obliged the premoderns to exercise the greatest prudence” (42).
“The less moderns think they are blended, the more they blend. The more science is absolutely pure, the more it is intimately bound up with the fabric of society” (Latour 43).
“a nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the populations of hybrids that the Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (47).
“Up to that point, dualism had seemed to work, since the ‘hard’ part of society was used on the ‘soft’ objects, while the ‘hard’ objects were used only on the ‘soft’ part of society” (54).
“Society is neither that strong nor that weak; objects are neither that weak nor that strong. The double position of objects and society had to be entirely rethought” (55).
“Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of full-fledged society” (Latour 55).
“They [quasi-objects] raise what had been only a distinction, then a separation, then a contradiction, then an insurmountable tension, to the level of an incommensurability” (Latour 59).
“The moderns declare that technology is nothing but pure instrumental mastery, science pure Enframing and pure Stamping [Das Ge-Stell], that economics is pure calculation, capitalism pure reproduction, the subject pure consciousness. Purity everywhere! They claim this, but we must be careful not to take them at their word, since what they are asserting is only half of the modern world, the work of purification that distils what the work of hybridizations supplies” (66).
“The moderns have a peculiar propensity for understanding time that passes as if it were really abolishing the past behind it” (68).
“The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; they more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museum. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation” (70).
“An intermediary—although recognized as necessary—simply transports, transfers, transmits energy from one of the poles of the Constitution. It is void in itself and can only be less faithful or more or less opaque. A mediator, however, is an original event and creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role” (Latour 77-78).
“How did the modern manage to specify and cancel out the work of mediation both at once? By conceiving every hybrid as a mixture of two pure forms” (Latour 78).
“Instead of denying the existence of hybrids—and reconstructing them awkwardly under the name of intermediaries—this explanatory model allows us instead to integrate the work of purification as a particular case of mediation. The only difference between the modern and the nonmodern conception is therefore breached, since purification is considered as a useful work requiring instruments, institutions, and know-how whereas in the modern paradigm there was no explicit function and no apparent necessity in the work of mediation” (Latour 78-79).
“Nature does revolve, but not around the Subject/Society. It revolves around the collective that produces things and people. The Subject does revolve, but not around Nature. It revolves around the collective out of which people and things are generated. At last the Middle Kingdom is represented. Natures and societies are its satellites” (79).
“History is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well” (82).
“Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being: such are the quasi-objects that the moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behoves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we have never ceased to be: amoderns” (90).
“‘The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth’ . . . (Serres, 1974)” (93).
“If we are to be realist in the one case, we have to be realist in the other; if we are constructivist in one instance, then we have to be constructivist for both. Or rather, as our investigation of the two modern practices has shown, we must be able to understand simultaneously how Nature and Society are immanent—in the work of mediation—and transcendent—after the work of purification” (Latour 95).
“the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures—different or universal—do not exist any more than Nature does” (104).
“All collectives are different from one another in the way they divide up beings, in the properties they attribute to them, in the mobilization they consider acceptable. These differences constitute countless small divides, and there is no longer a Great Divide to take one apart from all the others” (107).
“This is because the principle of symmetry aims not only at establishing equality—which is only the way to set the scale at zero—but at registering differences—that is, the final analysis, asymmetries—and at understanding the practical means that allow some collectives to dominate others” (107-108).
“In other words, the differences are sizeable, but they are only of size. They are important (and the error of cultural relativism is that it ignores them), but they are not disproportionate (and the error of universalism is that it sets them up as a Great Divide)” (108).
“Relativists, who strive to put all cultures on an equal footing by viewing all of them as equally arbitrary codings of a natural world whose production is unexplained, do not succeed in respecting the efforts collectives make to dominate one another. And universalists on the other hand, are incapable of understanding the deep fraternity of collectives, since they are obliged to offer access to Nature to Westerners alone, and to imprison all others in social categories from which they will escape only by becoming scientific, modern and Westernized” (108).
“Modern knowledge and power are different not in that they would escape at last the tyranny of the social, but in that they add many more hybrids in order to recompose the social link and extend its scale” (109).
“There are indeed differences, but they are differences in size. There are no differences in nature—still less in culture” (109).
“Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification” (112).
“Through this opening, sciences and technologies will emerge in society in such a mysterious way that this miracle will force Westerners to see themselves as completely different from others. The first miracle gives rise to a second (why don’t the others do the same?), then a third (why are we so exceptional?). This feature generates a cascade of small differences that will be collected, summarized, and amplified by the Great Divide, the great narrative of the West, set radically apart from all cultures” (112).
“The universalists defined a single hierarchy. The absolute relativists made all hierarchies equal” (113).
“Why do we get so much pleasure out of being so different not only from others but from our own past? What psychologist will be subtle enough to explain our morose delight in being in perpetual crisis and in putting an end to history? Why do we like to transform small differences in scale among collectives into huge dramas?” (114).
“How could we be chilled by the cold breath of the sciences, when the sciences are hot and fragile, human and controversial, full of thinking reeds and of subjects who are themselves inhabited by things (Pickering, 1992)?” (115)
“Just as the adjectives ‘natural’ and ‘social’ designate representations of collectives that are neither natural nor social in themselves, so the worlds ‘local’ and ‘global’ offer points of view on networks that are by nature neither local nor global, but are more or less long and more or less connected” (Latour 122).
“But instead of seeing these processes as the modernizers do—as glorious, albeit painful, conquests—the antimoderns see the situation as an unparalleled catastrophe. Except for the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same convictions. The postmoderns, always perverse, accept the idea that the situation is indeed catastrophic, but they maintain that is to be acclaimed rather than bemoaned” (123).
“What do the antimoderns do, then when they are confronted with this shipwreck? They take on the courageous task of saving what can be saved: souls, minds, emotions, interpersonal relations, the symbolic dimension, human warmth, local specificities, hermeneutics, the margins and the peripheries. An admirable mission, but one that would be more admirable still if all those vessels were actually threatened” (123).
“The more the antireductionists, the romantics, the spiritualists seek to save subjects, the more the reductionists, the scientists, the materialists imagine that they possess objects” (124).
“But if the centre and its totality are illusions, acclaim for the margins is somewhat ridiculous” (124).
“No, we do not fall from Nature into the Social, from the Social into Discourse, from Discourse into God, from God into Being. Those agencies had a constitutional role to play only so long as they remained distinct. No one of them can cover, fill, subsume the others; no one of them can serve to describe the work of mediation and translation” (128).
“It is the conception of the terms ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ that ends up being modified by the moderns’ return to nonmodernity” (128).
“When we abandon the modern world, we do not fall upon someone or something, we do not land on the an essence, but on a process, on a movement, a passage—literally a pass, in the sense of this term as used in ball games” (129).
“What sort of world is it that obliges us to take into account, at the same time and in the same breath, the nature of things, technologies, sciences, fictional beings, religions large and small, politics, jurisdictions, economies, and unconsciousnesses? Our own, of course. That world ceased to be modern when we replaced all essences with the mediators, delegates and translators that gave them meaning” (129).
Postmodernism: “Having been slapped in the face with modern reality, poor populations now have to submit to postmodern hyperreality. Nothing has value; everything is a reflection, a simulacrum, a floating sign; and that very weakness, they say, may save us from the invasion of technologies, sciences, reasons. Was it really worth destroying everything to end up adding this insult to that injury?” (131).
“If, as I have been saying all along, the Constitution allows hybrids to proliferate because it refuses to conceptualize them as such, then it remains effective only so long as it denies their existence” (132).
“Let us keep what is best about them, above all: the premoderns’ inability to differentiate durably between the networks and the pure poles of Nature and Society, their obsessive interest in thinking about the production of hybrids of Nature and Society, of things and signs, their certainty that transcendences abound, their capacity for conceiving of past and future in many ways other than progress and decadence, their muliplication of types of nonhumans different from those of the moderns” (133).
“The expression ‘anthropomorphic’ considerably underestimates our humanity. We should be talking about morphism. Morphism is the place where technomorphisms, zoomorphisms, phusimorphisms, ideomorphisms, theomorphisms, sociomorphisms, psychomorphisms, all come together. Their alliances and their exchanges, taken together, are what define the anthropos. A weaver of morphisms—isn’t that enough of a definition?” (137).
“How could the anthropos be threatened by machines? It has made them, it has put itself into them, it has divided up its own members among their members, it has built its own body with them. How could it be threatened by objects? They have all been quasi-subjects circulating within the collective they traced. It is made of them as much as they are made of it. How could it be deceived by politics? . . . How could it be manipulated by the economy? . . . Where does the threat come from? From those who seek to reduce it to an essence and who—by scorning things, objects, machines and the social, by cutting off all delegations and senders—make humanism a fragile and precious thing at risk of being overwhelmed by Nature, Society, or God” (137-138).
“The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms. Of course it is not a thing, but things are not things either. Of course it is not a merchandise, but merchandise id not merchandise either. Of course it is not a machine, but anyone who as seen machines knows that they are scarcely mechanical. Of course it is not of this world, but this world is not of this world either. Of course it is not in God, but what relation is there between the God above and the God below? Humanism can maintain itself only by sharing itself with these mandatees” (138).
“It is the third guarantee of the modern Constitution that must therefore be suppressed, since that is the one that made the continuity of their analysis impossible. Nature and Society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies-natures, of collectives” (139).
New nonmodern Constitution:
1) “The first guarantee of our new draft thus becomes the nonseparability of quasi-objects, quasi-subjects” (139).
2) “The second guarantee of our new draft thus makes it possible to recover the first two guarantees of the modern Constitution but without separating them” (140).
3) “The third guarantee, as important as the others, is that we can combine associations freely without ever confronting the choice between archaism and modernization, the local and the global, the cultural and the universal, the natural and the social” (141).
4) “The fourth guarantee—perhaps the most important—is to replace the clandestine proliferation of hybrids by their regulated and commonly-agreed-upon production. It is time, perhaps, to speak of democracy again, but of a democracy extended to things themselves” (142).
“Every concept, every institution, every practice that interferes with the continuous deployment of collectives and their experimentations with hybrids will be deemed dangerous, harmful, and—we may as well say it—immoral. The work of mediation becomes the very center of the double power, natural and social” (139).
“Every new call to revolution, any epistemological break, any Copernican upheaval, any claim that certain practices have become outdated for ever, will be deemed dangerous, or—what is still worse in the eyes of the moderns—outdated!” (141).
“When we amend the Constitution, we continue to believe in the sciences, but instead of taking in their objectivity, their truth , their coldness, their extraterritoriality—qualities they have never had, except after the arbitrary withdrawal of epistemology—we retain what has always been most interesting about them: their daring, their experimentation, their uncertainty, their warmth, their incongruous blend of hybrids, their crazy ability to reconstitute the social bond” (142).
Showing posts with label -Posthumanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label -Posthumanism. Show all posts
Crawford, T. Hugh “Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Mathew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour” Configurations 5.1 (1997) 1-21.
“In a novel that primarily concerns the actions and passions of humans (authors, critics, characters), nonhumans continue to assert themselves as central to the functioning of the ship and the act of reading” (2).
“In other words, the actant in the network includes nonhumans as well as humans. Generally these actants by themselves have little power; however, "no actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others." 7 This notion is, in some ways, a restatement of Ishmael's assessment of Ahab's strategies, but it is important to note that Latour insists on a symmetrical analysis that never reduces a situation to the merely social or technological” (3).
“These essences--reality and actants--even though they remain human or nonhuman, are not stable. They are neither simple substantives in a sentence nor characters in a novel, but are instead events as trajectories in a network of socio-technical relations” (3).
“it also describes in some detail the difficulty involved in producing such a network--the need to enlist nonhuman allies 13 as well as a broad range of human actants. In other
words, it is a textbook example of actor-network theory” (4).
“Latour explains this element of actor-network theory in "A Relativistic Account of Einstein's Relativity," where he argues that Einstein "state[s] that an effect of reality is built in by the superimposition of reports sent from at least two frames of reference
to a third one." Taking his cue from the subject of his essay (Einstein's short book Relativity: The Special and General Theory), Latour makes clear that these multiple points of view are not just different perspectives. Rather, the delegates must send back reports that can, given the proper transformations, be superimposed at a “centre of calculation" 15 in order to produce a form of reality (to trace the trajectory of an actant). In Latourian terms, Maury's problem was to find a way to somehow [bring] home these events, places and people” (6).
“Of course, as Latour argues (and Maury's text demonstrates), the universal laws of meteorological science exist on a local level and become "universal" only through the extension of the network” (8).
“Even given the possibility of such standardization, Maury's network still requires fidelity, "those upon whose co-operation the successful prosecution of the scheme must rely." The lesson to be learned from this text is the fragility of these networks that produce reality” (8).
“Melville's often murky text invites attention to the language used to capture the events and characters being depicted, and he even (in proper Latourian fashion) turns the reader's attention to inscriptions produced by nonhumans” (15).
“The point then becomes, not whether the things are "really" there or whether they are adequately represented, but rather what state of affairs (a socio-technical set of practices) exists or can be produced to know and use the things that both predate and are produced by a particular network” (15).
“The point here is simple. Without doubt, the gap between words and things is unbridgeable. Scholars--philosophers, literary and cultural critics--can circle the question endlessly” (16).
“Melville invites that binarism, but his text focuses instead on the various forms of mediation between those poles, which is where all the action is. As Latour says in We Have Never Been Modern, "The two extremes, local and global [substitute Man and Nature], are much less interesting than the intermediary arrangements that we are calling networks" (18).
“As a character in the novel, Ahab is locked in what Latour calls the world of the ‘modern constitution.’ For him, the answer to his quest is to be had by an idealistic/realistic encounter with a specific object. He symbolically and (in part) literally strips himself of socio-technical apparatuses and raises the whale. He famously tosses his pipe aside and smashes his quadrant--but, it must be remembered, he still uses his logbooks, charts, chronometer, line and log, and compass. And, of course, he must continue to rely on the fidelity of his crew and the (relative) durability of his ship” (18).
“Latour's position requires a new definition of humanism, one that traditional intellectuals may view with dismay: Modern humanists are reductionists because they seek to attribute action to a small number of powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but mute forces. It is true that by redistributing the action among all these mediators, we lose the reduced form of humanity, but we gain another form, which has to be called irreducible. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms. . . . Humanism can maintain itself only by sharing itself with all these mandatees. Human nature is the set of its delegates and its representatives, its figures and its messengers” (20).
“In other words, in a Latourian humanism there is room for purposive human actions, as long as one grants the nonhuman the capability of purposive action (an obviously constrained definition of purposive is operable here)” (21).
“In a novel that primarily concerns the actions and passions of humans (authors, critics, characters), nonhumans continue to assert themselves as central to the functioning of the ship and the act of reading” (2).
“In other words, the actant in the network includes nonhumans as well as humans. Generally these actants by themselves have little power; however, "no actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others." 7 This notion is, in some ways, a restatement of Ishmael's assessment of Ahab's strategies, but it is important to note that Latour insists on a symmetrical analysis that never reduces a situation to the merely social or technological” (3).
“These essences--reality and actants--even though they remain human or nonhuman, are not stable. They are neither simple substantives in a sentence nor characters in a novel, but are instead events as trajectories in a network of socio-technical relations” (3).
“it also describes in some detail the difficulty involved in producing such a network--the need to enlist nonhuman allies 13 as well as a broad range of human actants. In other
words, it is a textbook example of actor-network theory” (4).
“Latour explains this element of actor-network theory in "A Relativistic Account of Einstein's Relativity," where he argues that Einstein "state[s] that an effect of reality is built in by the superimposition of reports sent from at least two frames of reference
to a third one." Taking his cue from the subject of his essay (Einstein's short book Relativity: The Special and General Theory), Latour makes clear that these multiple points of view are not just different perspectives. Rather, the delegates must send back reports that can, given the proper transformations, be superimposed at a “centre of calculation" 15 in order to produce a form of reality (to trace the trajectory of an actant). In Latourian terms, Maury's problem was to find a way to somehow [bring] home these events, places and people” (6).
“Of course, as Latour argues (and Maury's text demonstrates), the universal laws of meteorological science exist on a local level and become "universal" only through the extension of the network” (8).
“Even given the possibility of such standardization, Maury's network still requires fidelity, "those upon whose co-operation the successful prosecution of the scheme must rely." The lesson to be learned from this text is the fragility of these networks that produce reality” (8).
“Melville's often murky text invites attention to the language used to capture the events and characters being depicted, and he even (in proper Latourian fashion) turns the reader's attention to inscriptions produced by nonhumans” (15).
“The point then becomes, not whether the things are "really" there or whether they are adequately represented, but rather what state of affairs (a socio-technical set of practices) exists or can be produced to know and use the things that both predate and are produced by a particular network” (15).
“The point here is simple. Without doubt, the gap between words and things is unbridgeable. Scholars--philosophers, literary and cultural critics--can circle the question endlessly” (16).
“Melville invites that binarism, but his text focuses instead on the various forms of mediation between those poles, which is where all the action is. As Latour says in We Have Never Been Modern, "The two extremes, local and global [substitute Man and Nature], are much less interesting than the intermediary arrangements that we are calling networks" (18).
“As a character in the novel, Ahab is locked in what Latour calls the world of the ‘modern constitution.’ For him, the answer to his quest is to be had by an idealistic/realistic encounter with a specific object. He symbolically and (in part) literally strips himself of socio-technical apparatuses and raises the whale. He famously tosses his pipe aside and smashes his quadrant--but, it must be remembered, he still uses his logbooks, charts, chronometer, line and log, and compass. And, of course, he must continue to rely on the fidelity of his crew and the (relative) durability of his ship” (18).
“Latour's position requires a new definition of humanism, one that traditional intellectuals may view with dismay: Modern humanists are reductionists because they seek to attribute action to a small number of powers, leaving the rest of the world with nothing but mute forces. It is true that by redistributing the action among all these mediators, we lose the reduced form of humanity, but we gain another form, which has to be called irreducible. The human is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms. . . . Humanism can maintain itself only by sharing itself with all these mandatees. Human nature is the set of its delegates and its representatives, its figures and its messengers” (20).
“In other words, in a Latourian humanism there is room for purposive human actions, as long as one grants the nonhuman the capability of purposive action (an obviously constrained definition of purposive is operable here)” (21).
Latour, Bruno. “When Things Strike Back: A Possible Contribution of ‘Science Studies’ to the Social Sciences.” British Journal of Sociology. Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 1 (January/March 2000) 107-123.
“when social scientists claim to comprehend something they have left aside what the thingness of this thing actually is!” (112)
“This contribution would of course be lost immediately, if one was again separating out objects into two pots, one for the fetishes which can and should be accounted for as ‘mere social constructions’ because they are soft, and the other for facts, which, by definition, escape all social explanations because they are hard (Latour 1996c). Hence, I devised the neologism ‘factishes’ to remind us o the uselessness of such a dichotomy” (113).
“The old tired theme of social construction has been turned on its head since scholars are now busy trying to show the ingredients with which some lasting order is being maintained” (114).
“Mastery, impartiality, community and disinterestedness are not the hallmarks of those laboratory set-ups” (114).
“A laboratory experiment is a rare, costly, local, artificial set up in which it becomes possible for objects to become relevant for statements made by scientists” (115).
“Nothing is more difficult than to find a way to render objects able to object to the utterances that we make about them” (115).
“If microbes, rock seams, do not have to be protected against biasing the experiments, it is not because they are fully mastered by their scientists, but because they are utterly uninterested in what human scientists have to say about them. It does not mean that they are ‘mere objects’, but that, on the contrary, they will have no scruples whatsoever in objecting to the scientist’s claim by behaving in the most undisciplined ways, blocking the experiments, disappearing from view, dying, refusing to replicate, or exploding the laboratory to pieces. Natural objects are naturally recalcitrant; the last thing that one scientist will say about them is that they are fully masterable” (116).
“To sum up. As I see it, things are unfairly accused of being just ‘things’. More exactly, it might be more rewarding to go back to the etymology of the world (in Anglo-Saxon as well as Roman languages) and to remind ourselves that all things (res and causa in Latin, see Thomas 1980) also means an assembly of a judicial nature gathered around a topic, reus, that creates both conflict and assent” (117).
“When social scientists try to find a hidden structure ‘manipulating’ agents in spite of themselves, they believe they have to imitate the natural sciences’ formidable invention of a divide between primary and secondary qualities, to sue an old but convenient philosophical vocabulary. Primary qualities define the real stuff out of which nature is made, particles, strings, atoms, genes, depending on the discipline, while secondary qualities defines the way that people subjectively represent this same universe. For instance, this table looks brown, polished and quaint, whereas it is really made up of atoms and vacuum” (118).
“Modernist dream—...Natural scientists deal with the primary qualities of the natural world while the social scientists deal with those of Society. The knowledge of what the universe is really like will allow the natural scientists to define all secondary qualities as irrational, private, subjective or culturally respectable (depending on his or her diminishing degree of militancy). While the knowledge of what Society is really like will allow the social scientists to reject all interjections of the actors themselves as so many irrational, subjective, private distorted, perverse, irrelevant or culturally respectable illusions (depending again on the decreasing level of arrogance” (119).
“Things (or quasi-objects or risk, the word does not matter) have the peculiar feature of not being divisible into primary and secondary qualities. They are much too real to be representations, and much too disputed, uncertain, collective, variegated, divisive to play the role of a stable, obdurate, boring primary qualities, furnishing the universe once and for all. What the social sciences, together with the natural, can do, is to represent those things in all of their consequences and uncertainties to the people themselves” (119).
“‘Things’, in the sense given to them by the shocking influence of STS on the natural and social sciences, do not have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain” (120).
“when social scientists claim to comprehend something they have left aside what the thingness of this thing actually is!” (112)
“This contribution would of course be lost immediately, if one was again separating out objects into two pots, one for the fetishes which can and should be accounted for as ‘mere social constructions’ because they are soft, and the other for facts, which, by definition, escape all social explanations because they are hard (Latour 1996c). Hence, I devised the neologism ‘factishes’ to remind us o the uselessness of such a dichotomy” (113).
“The old tired theme of social construction has been turned on its head since scholars are now busy trying to show the ingredients with which some lasting order is being maintained” (114).
“Mastery, impartiality, community and disinterestedness are not the hallmarks of those laboratory set-ups” (114).
“A laboratory experiment is a rare, costly, local, artificial set up in which it becomes possible for objects to become relevant for statements made by scientists” (115).
“Nothing is more difficult than to find a way to render objects able to object to the utterances that we make about them” (115).
“If microbes, rock seams, do not have to be protected against biasing the experiments, it is not because they are fully mastered by their scientists, but because they are utterly uninterested in what human scientists have to say about them. It does not mean that they are ‘mere objects’, but that, on the contrary, they will have no scruples whatsoever in objecting to the scientist’s claim by behaving in the most undisciplined ways, blocking the experiments, disappearing from view, dying, refusing to replicate, or exploding the laboratory to pieces. Natural objects are naturally recalcitrant; the last thing that one scientist will say about them is that they are fully masterable” (116).
“To sum up. As I see it, things are unfairly accused of being just ‘things’. More exactly, it might be more rewarding to go back to the etymology of the world (in Anglo-Saxon as well as Roman languages) and to remind ourselves that all things (res and causa in Latin, see Thomas 1980) also means an assembly of a judicial nature gathered around a topic, reus, that creates both conflict and assent” (117).
“When social scientists try to find a hidden structure ‘manipulating’ agents in spite of themselves, they believe they have to imitate the natural sciences’ formidable invention of a divide between primary and secondary qualities, to sue an old but convenient philosophical vocabulary. Primary qualities define the real stuff out of which nature is made, particles, strings, atoms, genes, depending on the discipline, while secondary qualities defines the way that people subjectively represent this same universe. For instance, this table looks brown, polished and quaint, whereas it is really made up of atoms and vacuum” (118).
“Modernist dream—...Natural scientists deal with the primary qualities of the natural world while the social scientists deal with those of Society. The knowledge of what the universe is really like will allow the natural scientists to define all secondary qualities as irrational, private, subjective or culturally respectable (depending on his or her diminishing degree of militancy). While the knowledge of what Society is really like will allow the social scientists to reject all interjections of the actors themselves as so many irrational, subjective, private distorted, perverse, irrelevant or culturally respectable illusions (depending again on the decreasing level of arrogance” (119).
“Things (or quasi-objects or risk, the word does not matter) have the peculiar feature of not being divisible into primary and secondary qualities. They are much too real to be representations, and much too disputed, uncertain, collective, variegated, divisive to play the role of a stable, obdurate, boring primary qualities, furnishing the universe once and for all. What the social sciences, together with the natural, can do, is to represent those things in all of their consequences and uncertainties to the people themselves” (119).
“‘Things’, in the sense given to them by the shocking influence of STS on the natural and social sciences, do not have the unity the modernists believed they had, nor do they have the multiplicity postmodernists would like them to retain” (120).
Auslander, Philip. “Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology.” Performing Arts Journal. 14.1 (1992): 30-42.
Early in the film [Home of the Brave],
She then gives examples of letters, numbers, and a musical phrase expressed as digital combinations, zeroes and ones filling the projection screen behind her. As she concludes, she counts off a two-beat rhythm (‘and zero—and one’). Projections of a large zero and large one alternate behind her, accompanied by a metallic, rasping sound. 37
In this section of her performance,
The passage is comic in that the lecturer’s hyperbole and the seeming inefficiency of expressing a simple number, letter or musical note as a huge number of ones and zeroes appear somewhat ridiculous, yet underlying this gently deflating humor is the suggestion of the deep technological utopia Haraway has in mind. Computer logic cannot abolish binaries—it cannot exist without them—yet those binaries imply no value judgments; unlike the societies and cultures it has had such an impact on, digital technology itself is genuinely indifferent to the differences between the terms of the binaries it employs.
Through the mediation of electronics, Anderson’s and Burroughs’s voices merge: the voice that emerges from the tape-bow violin is his, yet it is not. It is her ‘voice’ in that she plays the instrument, yet it is not her voice. He ‘authored’ the sentence by speaking it, yet she wrote the words and actually controls the articulation of the spoken text with her bow. The homosexual-junkie-misogynist-Beat novelist, and the heterosexual-feminist-postmodernist entertainer-performance artist achieve a strange and unstable unity of the kind described by Haraway for the duration of the song by speaking through a single voice that belongs to both, yet to neither. 40
Her work reflects a provisional glimpse of the cultural environment that will become possible if new technologies are indeed permitted to realize their potential as ‘technologies of freedom.’ 41
Auslander, Philip. “Intellectual Property Meets the Cyborg: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Technology.” Performing Arts Journal. 14.1 (1992): 30-42.
Early in the film [Home of the Brave],
"the building blocks of the modern computer age. Anything that can be expressed in words or numbers, in any language, can be communicated using this simple, foolproof system. It’s all here in a nutshell—the entire alpha numerical system, A to Z, the zero to infinity of digital intelligence." [Anderson
She then gives examples of letters, numbers, and a musical phrase expressed as digital combinations, zeroes and ones filling the projection screen behind her. As she concludes, she counts off a two-beat rhythm (‘and zero—and one’). Projections of a large zero and large one alternate behind her, accompanied by a metallic, rasping sound. 37
In this section of her performance,
The passage is comic in that the lecturer’s hyperbole and the seeming inefficiency of expressing a simple number, letter or musical note as a huge number of ones and zeroes appear somewhat ridiculous, yet underlying this gently deflating humor is the suggestion of the deep technological utopia Haraway has in mind. Computer logic cannot abolish binaries—it cannot exist without them—yet those binaries imply no value judgments; unlike the societies and cultures it has had such an impact on, digital technology itself is genuinely indifferent to the differences between the terms of the binaries it employs. 38
Through the mediation of electronics, Anderson’s and Burroughs’s voices merge: the voice that emerges from the tape-bow violin is his, yet it is not. It is her ‘voice’ in that she plays the instrument, yet it is not her voice. He ‘authored’ the sentence by speaking it, yet she wrote the words and actually controls the articulation of the spoken text with her bow. The homosexual-junkie-misogynist-Beat novelist, and the heterosexual-feminist-postmodernist entertainer-performance artist achieve a strange and unstable unity of the kind described by Haraway for the duration of the song by speaking through a single voice that belongs to both, yet to neither. 40
Her work reflects a provisional glimpse of the cultural environment that will become possible if new technologies are indeed permitted to realize their potential as ‘technologies of freedom.’ 41
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” 1985. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology, it gives us our politics…the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. 2270
It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. 2270
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. 2270
Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. 2271
Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s moster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; i.e., through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and a cosmos…The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden. 2271
By the late twentieth century in
Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. 2271
But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert. 2272
It is certainly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (e.g., the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature—a source of insight and a promise of innocence—is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost and with it the ontology grounding “Western” epistemology. 2273
Ultimately the “hardest” science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. 2274
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. 2275
I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of “us” have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of “them.” Or at least “we” cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (i.e., were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category “woman”. . .Cyborg feminists have to argue that “we” do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. 2278
…inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualism ordering discourse in “the West” since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been “techno-digested.” The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. 2284
Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. 2285
To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive/ reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. 2296
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. Insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (e.g., biology) and in daily practice (e.g., the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. 2296
Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated—given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized—reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relationship are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. 2297
Students who have learned to take modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader’s search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. 2297
There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exceptions. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. 2298
There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. 2299
Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. 2299
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