Latour Through the Eyes of a Child

Latour's ideas concerning the delegation to humans and nonhumans sent my mind racing backward, to an earlier time in my life when I encountered these elements of delegation and agency all at once. The way all these ideas converge on top of each other is important to understand the impact of shared agency in terms of these types of situations. In this case, it involves a revolving door--much the same as Latour's example.

At my childhood doctor's office, there were three entrances. One was a wide door built specifically to enable wheelchair access. Another was a manual door designed for foot traffic. The third door was an automatic revolving door with four panels through which a person could walk without touching (or contaminating) a doorknob or lever. I chose the third one most often, simply because I thought it was cool.

One unique feature of the revolving door was that while it was turning, it could also be forced to turn because there was a bar on each glass panel that could be grasped and pushed in case of emergency. My younger siblings and I would often use this to speed up the process of moving through to the other side. This is an example of shared agency that is totally dependent on situation. It gives the user ownership through an option, and it also gives the machine ownership through an opposite option.

By the same token, at some point in my youth, the doctor's office felt the need to put a sign outside the door urging people not to put their hands on the glass. While done mostly for appearance's sake, this sign also provides an example of shared delegation. On one hand, the sign's message causes a reaction from the user, giving it agency in this scenario. On the other hand, doesn't the creator of the sign--who crafted the message in a specific way--have some share in the agency because of the reaction the message elicits? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the whole concept, but it seems to me that following the trail of any nonhuman entity back in its existence will reveal the existence of a creator that conceived of the idea and gave it life. If that assumption is true, then all functions of the nonhuman entity can ultimately be traced back to him or her, giving some agency to the creative being.

This idea seems to go around and around like a merry-go-round in my mind, with very little chance of a definitive answer. I just thought about those early experiences and how each piece of the revolving door shares a little of the credit when discussing the idea of agency.

Actor-network theory

In Latour's The Sociology of a Few Mundane Objects, he brings up many interesting points that are relevant more today than they have ever been.  When he discusses "Delegation to Nonhumans (231)," appointing a non-human to replace a human in a mundane task is something that can be practical.  He cites an automatic groom that closes the door behind patrons.  The non-human spring that has been given a human task can be more efficient but less personal than the person politely closing the door behind someone.

The Actor-network theory is an interesting way to approach the formation of a network.  Not only are the humans involved forming relationships with each other, but it also contains the physical, non-human objects that create the network as a whole.  This approach made me think of the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks.  The movie only had one "human" character, but the network was an entire island.  He also assigned human traits and responsibilities to a non-human.  He painted a face on a volleyball and named it Wilson, and this object served as his social outlet through the movie while he was attempting to escape from the island.

I liked the inter-dependence Latour refers to regarding a relationship between a human and non-human object.  Non-humans can take human roles, humans can take non-human roles, and they can both perform the duties of each other in certain situations.  He refers to the term "actor" for this, and says that actors are able to interchange roles and duties regardless of their origin.  We have drawn very similar ideas and concepts from our Social Media class.  Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together and Greg Ulmer's book Electronic Monuments both bring up the exact same arguments and question our relationship and dependency on technology.

In Cast Away, Tom Hanks relied on Wilson for companionship, much like many of the people studied in Turkle's book when they were given robots to interact with.  The same can be said with video games and the interactions they create.  In World of Warcraft, people are using something non-human to create a human relationship and many treat this as real, with everyone in the relationship becoming actors rather than humans or non-humans.

Kairos as Environment

In his article, "Invention in the Wild," Thomas Rickert investigates the varying meanings and descriptions of "kairos" over time.  He points out that the original use of kairos had a spatial connotation, as Homer used it to refer to the "deadliest spot" on the body at which an arrow may strike.  While this went with later interpretations of kairos as a sort of window of opportunity, it also informs a certain importance on place.  Kairos exists not just as an opportunity, but as a specific opportunity in a specific place brought forth by a specific situation.  Rickert proceeds to trace the varying meanings of kairos through the ages, from spatial to temporal to contextual.  The main idea that he seems to be countering is the idea of kairos as it relates to an autonomous human subject:  that kairos isn't simply an opportunity that the rhetor seizes.  Rickert moves more toward the dispersion of the subject by painting kairos as not just as a contextual opportunity with an autonomous subject/rhetor attaining agency through acting; but rather he describes the "kairotic experience" as "one that encompasses all elements composting the situation."  From this stance, he goes on to emphasize how all the elements of a given situation (not just speaker and audience and opportunity) intermingle to call forth a response.  The rhetor (or actor) is not independent of the situation, but acts/speaks as a result of the kairotic web of relations which compel him (or enable him) to do so.  "(O)ur words and actions emerge as willed by kairos," as Rickert says.

Rickert uses the example of air traffic controllers to show how an environment produces kairos, and how the lines are blurred between subject/object in the response to the "kairotic moment."  The controllers do not simply act as a response to the environment (the common conception of kairos- acting in response to an opportune situation,) however they are not simply controlled by the environment either.  Subjectivity is dispersed into a web of interrelations which shape a moment that may be considered kairotic.  I found one particular line from Rickert helpful in capturing the general thrust of his argument:

The air traffic control center is a series of events in a specific environs of kairotic moments in a generative place, which form an ambient whole... the environs here are not just a material reality to which we adapt or which somehow "determine" us.  Instead, the environs are what enable us, but they enable inclusively of human beings, insofar as human beings are part of the environs.   Thus the emplacement of the controllers is essential to their activity, for the context makes all that occurs possible.... their choices are already immersed in the context in which they get played out.

When I consider kairos as a situation, an environ of interacting elements, it changes the way I view many things involving a "subject" or an actor.  Take the stage of improvisational comedy, for example.  One such show of "improv" comedy is "Whose Line is it Anyway?"  Actors get on stage and perform improvisation given a set of rules or situations.  The traditionally, "seizing an opportunity" mode of looking at kairos would say the kairos of the moment is the improvisational prompt, which the actors seize in an attempt to derive the desired response from their audience (here, laughter.)  However, when we look at kairos the way Rickert does, he would argue that the actors, the stage,the show, the audience (local and television,) the prompts, the television network, the host, the cultural context... all blend together to form kairos, which produces or calls forth a particular response/action from the actor.  In the scene below, the traditional (subjective or Platonic) way of looking at kairos would attribute all power and agency to the actor for his lines and the humor found there.  However, in looking at kairos the way Rickert does, we would understand that the situation itself, and all the elements involved, play a role in eliciting the humor that comes from the actor.  Not to say the actor does not himself choose to say the words he says, rather his choice is but one factor in a web of relations that form the kairotic moment.  In looking at things this way, Rickert seemingly takes a great deal of agency away from the actor and attributes it to kairos itself.  Perhaps it is not surprising then that we humans would rather look at things such as stage-comedy from a subjective standpoint and applaud the actor for his creativity and ability to respond to what we view as an opportune moment.  However, Rickert has a good point that we might understand kairos itself better if we were to look at it in terms of place, as well as context, situation, actors, audience, etc.

Part Human, Part Non-human

In "The Sociology of a Few Mundane Objects," Bruno Latour uses a number of examples to discuss the complexity and intertwined nature of networks. Instead of visualizing these networks as a simple hybrid occupying the space between humans and non-humans, Latour describes how social theories need to take into account the inter-dependence and negotiation of humans, non-humans, parts of humans, parts of non-humans, humans that perform non-human roles, and non-humans that perform human roles. He writes that "students of technology are never faced with people on the one hand and things on the other, they are faced with programs of action, sections of which are endowed to parts of humans, while other sections are entrusted to parts of non-humans."

The main example he uses to illustrate his point is the automatic groom. This program of action involves a complex network of relationships and roles--the usefulness of the door itself, the apparent inability of humans to close the door properly, the problems/difficulties of various door-closing technologies, the possibility of a groom malfunction, the anthropomorphic qualities ascribed to the groom, and the range of humans and non-humans that direct user to the door or museum. Obviously, the groom does not fit neatly into the human/non-human binary. In addition to these complexities, issues of morality and motivation also come into play. Could the groom be considered more moral than a human because it will always remember and be available to close the door? What about the groom's apparent "discrimination" against those who walk slowly or are carrying large packages?

In the film Moon, astronaut Sam Bell is nearing the end of his three-year assignment at a lunar space station owned by Lunar Industries. Sam's only companion on the station is a computer named Gerty. Throughout the course of the film, however, Sam discovers that he is actually one of a series of clones used to man the station--the real Sam Bell is actually still on Earth. With Gerty's help, two of the Sam clones work together to return to Earth and reveal the human cloning activities of Lunar Industries.

Moon Trailer

The network of relationships between the Sam clones and Gerty is incredibly complex. Gerty functions as Sam's assistant, carrying out traditionally "human" tasks. However, his functionality also relies on the cooperation of Sam and the communication Gerty has with Lunar Industries. Gerty's morality is complicated by his knowledge of the clones and the assistance he gives the Sam clones in rebelling against Lunar Industries. Throughout the film, Sam speaks to Gerty by name, as a human. Gerty's anthropomorphic qualities include his name, his voice (Kevin Spacey), and the smiley face that expresses his emotions on screen.

The network is made more complex by the presence of human clones, which have been delegated to perform the lunar tasks that humans are unable or unwilling to accomplish. The ways in which Lunar Industries creates these clones and embeds memories into their consciousness affects the way they interact with Gerty and the rest of the station. These clones think and behave like humans, but their humanity is ultimately called into question.

Nonhuman Substitution: Are we really filling any gaps?

Latour attempts to convince the reader that material artifacts play an important role in creating and reaching the level of morality that we employ. He turns down the idea that individual humans are the base of all responsibility and instead makes the point that what is morally desirable depends on the interaction between humans and technologies. He says “To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans” (227). He also points out that here are the social masses that make up our morality. “The distance between morality and force is not as wide as moralists expect; or more exactly, clever engineers have made it smaller” (253). However, “The paradox of technology is that it is thought to be at one of the extremes” (244).

Nonhuman artifacts are part of the negotiations between people, institutions, and organizations that help to develop sociotechnical systems. “The beauty of artifacts is that they take on themselves the contradictory wishes or needs of humans and nonhumans” (247). For example, Latour illustrates his argument by using the example of a door groom that automatically closes a door after people pass through it. This then replaces the need for individuals to act responsibly and shut it behind them. This and Latour’s other examples demonstrate that the task of maintaining duties, values, and ethics can be delegated to a non-human entity. This is done with technological design and the replacing, compelling, and circumventing of human action through it.

These nonhumans don’t think like people do or decide how they will act, but their nature can play a comparable role. Artifacts can be deliberately designed to replace, constrain, and shape human action. They can appear to determine or compel certain actions. They are able to shape the decisions we make, the effects of our actions, and even the way we work in the world. “When humans are displaced and deskilled, nonhumans have to be upgraded and reskilled” (232). The behavior imposed back onto a human by a nonhuman delegates prescription, which is the “moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms” (232). Therefore, these non-humans are important in mediating human relationships.

Latour points out that we are not only able to delegate force to nonhumans, but also values, duties, and ethics. It is due to this morality that we behave so ethically, thus, “the sum of morality does not only remains stable but increases enormously with the population of nonhumans” (232).

Latour claims that he does not hold a bias or discriminate between the human and inhuman, but instead sees only actors that exchange their properties (236). He proposes that this attribution of roles and action is also a choice. “The label ‘inhuman’ applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices that exist for figuring or defiguring, personifying or abstracting, embodying or disembodying actors” (241).

In the end of the article, Latour says that “It is that society itself is to be rethought from top to bottom once we add to it the facts and the artifacts that makeup large sections of our social ties” and what appears in place is not the extremes of society and technology, nor a hybrid, but a “sui generis object: the collective thing” (254). He points out that what we are missing is not in the supposedly cold, efficient and inhuman technologies, but instead in our traditional social theories (254). I think what Latour’s getting at is that we can’t really understand how society works without looking at and understanding the influences that non-humans and technology has on our daily lives.

            Latour asks if humans have been replaced by nonhumans, stating that this depends on the kind of action that has been translated or delegated to them (232). The discussion of this replacement in Latour’s article served as another connection to Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together. He points out that nonhumans serve as a solution in certain instances because they substitute the unreliable human with a delegated nonhuman character (231). These nonhumans are able to make up for where we as humans are lacking. Similarly, in her discussion of robots, Turkle describes technology as seductive because it offers what meets our human vulnerabilities (1). According to her, we are drawn by the illusion of companionship with convenience and without the demands of intimacy. However, this presents risks of emotional dislocation.  Turkle points out that since we already filter companionship through machines we now look to accept machines as companions. Robots have the power to dramatically alter our social lives by offering contact. However, they pose psychological risks by making us vulnerable to simplicities that may diminish us. In her discussion of AIBO, a robotic dog, Turkle points out that it is not the practice for the real, but a possible alternative that is not necessarily second best. There is a possibility that after robots serve as a better-than-nothing substitute; they might become equal or even preferable, to a pet or person (64). 

Turkle asks what are we sacrificing when we look to robots as electronic companions? With this in comparison to Latour’s piece, I ask, is the nonhuman substitution of small things, such as a door groom, going to lead us to substitutions of a larger scale, such as nonhuman childcare? While the nonhuman artifacts may work better in some situations, are they best for all? Is it more efficient to replace humans with nonhumans? When is this true or not true? How would our relationships with each other change with increasing substitution? Even further, how would our ideas of morality change if we were to replace humans in various aspects of life? Surely our outlook would change in many ways altering this. So with the substitution of nonhumans for humans, are we really filling any gaps? These are many questions that come to my mind when reading both pieces. Additionally, both authors advocate that in order to understand our society, we must consider the role of technologies and their effects on our lives.

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. New York: Basic Books.

Location as Invention

11.29.11 Object Lesson

Byron Hawk's discussion of post-techne and ecologies was reminiscent of Jenny Edbauer's "Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies." In this same sense, the idea of post-techne and how it functions in ecologies (or perhaps Latourian networks?) reminded me of the Japanese concept of kaizen or "continual improvement." I would argue that kaizen should be applied to curriculum and teaching more often than it is, but that could get long-winded and wouldn't explain how it helps understand Hawk. Instead, I'll explore how the idea of kaizen itself may align with what Hawk is arguing for in terms of pedagogy.

If you're unfamiliar with kaizen, Wikipeidia provides a good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen. Kaizen's goal is continuous improvement and its process has been applied to multiple sectors in the business world. Kaizen looks to improve efficiency and reduce waste throughout the entire business process, from manufacturing to management, from technology to human capital. Even once improvements have been made, kaizen doesn't allow for complacency. It looks to improve on those improvements, creating the idea of continuous improvement.

It's the continual evaluation part of kaizen that made me think of ecologies. Kaizen never stops when implemented successfully. It continues to improve on improvements; it doesn't matter if those improvements concern human or technological components of the process. Hawk's use of Harmon seems to illustrates this well. "...all things show up only as something specific to a particular constellation or to a particular encounter. Readiness-to-hand, then, is not about technology's usefulness for dasein but the immediate relation of one thing to another thing. It does not subsume the world under dasein but puts dasein on an equal plane as a body in relation to all other bodies" (375). In looking to improve processes, kaizen doesn't care if it's improving on a technological or human component. It is evaluating the relation of one part of the process to another. Human components are on an equal plane with technological components."The key, as Harmon notes, is not that there are different things that operate differently in different contexts but that bodies, technologies, and texts are their context. There is no separation...There is only relationality--techne emerges only through enacting relationships" (378).

Hawk proposes to turn the idea of enacting relationships to pedagogy. I propose applying kaizen to pedagogy more often, in fact making it a norm. The article's abstract notes that "ecological and posthuman perspectives" have been applied to interface design (371). To me it seems that kaizen has been embraced by interface design more so than by pedagogy, tying into my argument for implementing it. Hawk explains that "A posthuman understanding of techne would mean teachers accept the ecological and ambient nature of rhetorical situations and begin to develop techniques for simultaneously enacting and operating in these complex, evolving contexts" (379). To me this sounds like implementing kaizen. Enact and put an improvement into operation after considering the ecologies at play. Reevaluate it in operation. Improve on the improvement. Repeat continuously to account for evolving contexts. "If techne is a technology...as well as a technique that operates through both conscious and unconscious means, then it becomes crucial to think about how techniques situate students within particular contexts with any and all objects" (379). So in using kaizen with respect to pedagogy, students are considered. They're part of the academic ecology. Hawk's use of Jim Henry as an example considers this well. Hawk notes that Henry planned to "remake, or rearticulate the discourses, the subjectivities, and the lines of power that emerge from them" (385). Henry took the constellation he was working with rearticulated how to approach it. He considered every component affecting and making up that constellation. Based on what we know about him, I sense he'll continually improve his process based on changes within that constellation. And I would argue that this parallels continuous improvement in the kaizen cycle.

Just as Hawk uses Tabeaux's argument in support of his position, it supports advocating for applying kaizen to pedagogy. "...the best advantage teachers can give their students is the ability to learn and adapt to new and changing contexts" (388). Applying Hawk's posthuman approach to pedagogy would do well to also consider kaizen.

Humans vs Nonhumans and missing mass

Latour opens his article by explaining that sociologists are looking for a missing mass: "moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly." Latour argues that the missing mass can be found in nonhumans. When humans don't act properly the nonhuman can, and vise versa.

The example Latour uses is that of a door. To go through a wall, humans would have to break the wall down, walk through the hole, and then build the wall up again. A hinge (nonhuman) fixes this. But then humans must be relied upon to open and close the door, which Latour demonstrates we aren't good at doing. A hydraulic door can then be substituted to open and close for us. The trade off is that hydraulic doors my "discriminate" against smaller people who don't weigh enough to operate the door or older people who don't move fast enough through the door before it closes.

Throughout the article is a question of morality, with the idea that machines can be "relentlessly" moral and humans cannot. But it seems to me as nonhumans grow more advanced the concept of morality grows less solid, especially when we get into "discrimination." Latour states there are ways around this, such as jarring the door with your foot to keep it from shutting in your face. And programmers can work to create a "smarter" door.

At this point, it seems the concept for morality is shifting. First, humans were unreliable, so a hinge was introduced. Humans proved unreliable again, so hydraulics stepped in. But then the nonhuman proved unreliable and so humans must act. This, I think, is what Latour is talking about regarding the social "missing mass." The moral laws find themselves in balance between humans and nonhumans.

All of this brought to mind the movie I, Robot. Jump the following clip to 1:10 and go to 5:10.

What interested me most about the clip is Spooner's story about Sarah. He insists that a human would have known to save Sarah over him, pointing out unreliability in nonhumans even though the robots are built specifically for morality:

Robots are built with three laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

According to Spooner's story, however, even with these laws, robots are without a moral compass. He believes humans should reduce their dependence on robots. As Latour would probably put it, Spooner believes humans need to balance out the missing mass or the morality factor.

What is interesting is that Sonny, the main robot in the film, is built so that he can choose to ignore the three laws. This perhaps demonstrates an effort on the part of his creator to balance out the missing mass by creating a robot that can make choices for itself that goes beyond logical processes.

Object Lesson VI: Actors

This week’s reading from Latour helps to clarify his understanding of the role “nonhumans” play in our lives. He, like Carolyn Miller, attributes agency to mechanized systems (such as the humble hinged door) and suggests that the rhetorical capacity these automata possess arises from our anthromorphization of their functions, pointing to the hydraulic door closer which, he observes, takes the place of a human groom or butler and can be spoken of in the same way. This example, for me, draws attention to the various other ways we, as humans, engage with objects on the same level as we would other humans—or, to use Latour’s terminology, how we participate as “actors” alongside nonhumans in “programs of action.”

Over Thanksgiving break I found myself back in my hometown of Greenville, SC, and wanted to take advantage of my time there by doing some Christmas shopping. Greenville has evolved a lot in the four-or-so years since I actually lived there, with new shopping centers sprouting up all along Pelham road (a road which, my dad likes to remind me, was made of dirt when he built his house there), so for navigation assistance I plotted my course on Google maps before leaving home. My dad, seeing this, remarked, “How did we ever find anything before online maps?” I responded that I wouldn’t know, old man, but the Latour reading made me recall this situation and consider the vast number of human actors replaced by instant online mapping. Although I don’t yet own one, GPS units are especially interesting to consider because of how they function rhetorically—they fill the role of the navigator, what my parents used to call the “co-pilot” on family trips, and manage to overcome all the difficulties human actors used to face in that role. As Latour notes, “when humans are displaced and deskilled, nonhumans have to be upgraded and reskilled”—these increasingly sophisticated GPS units have utterly displaced humans due to their their incredible accuracy (no human would be able to tell me to turn right in exactly 358 feet), and as a result have come to possess considerable ethos in peoples’ minds.

Here’s a situation from The Office:

Steve Carell’s fanatical insistence that “the machine knows!” as he follows its directions into a lake reveals his trust in the delegation of navigation to a nonhuman (despite the other human in the passenger seat trying to reason with him). As a rhetor, the GPS commands all the Aristotelian virtues of persuasion: ethos from its sophisticated programming and accuracy, logos for its confident instructions based on a clear map, pathos from its comforting voice-module (my friend’s GPS has a British accent so he named it Basil—I found that you can actually download celebrity voices for your GPS, although I don’t know if I could trust Flavor Flav’s directions even if they came from a computer), and of course kairos for the extremely timely delivery of instructions while a person is driving, with humans requiring immediate feedback yet still enough time to mentally plan for each turn. As an actor, however, the GPS lacks autonomy and requires some human input before it can function, and obviously must be updated frequently lest its maps go out of date. It is in this way that the “program of action” for moving from point A to B has increasingly shifted sections of itself to nonhumans. The sections which still rely on parts of humans mainly involve our sense of judgment, which the above clip shows is not necessarily good.

A Sense of Place

     I was intrigued by Thomas Rickert's "Invention in the Wild" and the discussion of the place as well as the timing for kairos. I was trying to think of examples of a situation where you could seize an opportunity but didn't need to be in a specific place. I couldn't come up with any. You can only steer a boat on a boat, and more specifically, while you are out at sea with the sea tossing and turning around you, as Hawk refers to Atwill in his "Toward a Post-Techne" (381). However, thinking back to the discussion of President Obama's speech in Cooper's "Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted" I wondered if his speech, because of technology, would have had the same impact were it given from just anywhere.

     Because of technology Obama could have given his speech from just about anywhere. His aides and speechwriters could construct a set to make it look like Obama was in the Oval Office, if they wanted. They could also just find a nice professional, presidential backdrop to film in front of. However, does his location in the world, not just the backdrop, matter? Let's say that Obama was in China at the time of giving the speech. He was there on a diplomatic trip and wanted to address the remarks made by Reverend Wright quickly and he did not want to leave for home early and risk offending the Chinese people. Would his speech have been so well received? Perhaps. I would guess that yes, the speech would have been well received by the American people even from across the globe. It was the (approximate) appropriate time to address the situation and comments that had been made. Obama was making the speech from far away for a reason Americans could rationalize.

     Let's say instead that Obama had been on vacation with his family in the Caribbean. Would the speech have been well received then? I would guess perhaps not. If there was a crisis that needed addressing so badly that Obama had decided to address the whole nation, why would he be on vacation in the first place? Perhaps is was planned before the scandal? Then, he should have canceled it, right? So perhaps location can be just about anywhere, but the reason (exigence?) for being in that location is what matters now. It might be all right if Obama had been on a diplomatic trip, but a trip for pleasure would probably have been unacceptable.

     Later in his article, Rickert discusses Dr. Blakesley's take on the film The Usual Suspects and says "that the ambient environs invent us in kairotic moments" (85). So how would the ability to be (almost) anywhere and broadcast a presidential speech affect the speech being given? How would being in China affect the speech versus being "at home" in the Oval Office? Or how would being in the Caribbean affect the speech?

Latour and Hybrids

Certain parts of Latour's book were very dense and difficult to read, but I did enjoy reading about his concept of "Hybrids" and how he explained them.  He makes very interesting statements about the division of nature and culture, and uses very controversial topics as examples of hybrids that we have today.  I think the first paragraph of the book is actually the most significant.

"On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists; their talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Shouldn’t we wait? Is it already too late? Towards the bottom of the page, Third Would countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development. (1)."

Reading this paragraph the second time after reading the rest of this book made me think about certain parts in Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together.  The idea of people relating to different forms of artificial intelligence can certainly be viewed as a hybrid that has evolved in our society.  After reading several of Turkle's studies, an artificial form of intelligence can certainly be a hybrid between nature and society.  A robot is not created as a product from nature, yet we use materials from nature to form it.  Many of the people studied then assigned personal value to it, giving it social significance.  The case of Edna, a grandmother being exposed to a "My Real Baby" stood out the most to me.

“Edna takes My Real Baby in her arms. When it starts to cry, Edna finds its bottle, smiles, and says she will feed it. Amy tries to get her great grandmother’s attention but is ignored…
Edna’s attention remains on My Real Baby. The atmosphere is quiet, even surreal: a great grandmother entranced by a robot baby, a neglected two-year-old, a shocked mother, and researchers nervously coughing in discomfort.” (p. 117)

Turkle painted a very vivid picture and did a tremendous job explaining the emotions that were in the room during the interaction between Edna and Amy.  The fact that a robot was able to overpower an actual child for an adult’s care and attention completely floored me.  I know that people become increasingly lonely as they become older, and maybe the My Real Baby gave Edna a sense of ownership that she could not have with Amy since it was not her actual child.  No one had ownership of the doll, and this allowed Edna to take it upon herself to care for it.  As Turkle continued describing the situation, I could almost feel Edna snap out of it and return her attention back to the “real world.”


Some of the concepts and ideas that Latour propose still don't quite make sense to me, but I did enjoy the separation he makes between nature and society.  It is interesting to think about nature as a stand alone entity that exists regardless of what we as a society does, but that we have such a strong ability to assign significance to certain parts of it.  I agree with his ideas of this separation, but I also see how they can never be completely separate from each other.

Smartphones as Quasi-Objects

Bruno Latour, in his book/essay "We Have Never Been Modern," argues that the Modernist Constitution is inherently self-contradictory. Modernists argue that all objects have been constructed by free and rational humans--"mere receptacles for human categories" (52). On the other hand, Modernists "debunk and ridicule [a] naive belief in the freedom of the human subject and society" (53). According to Latour, this way of "seeing double" makes it almost impossible for social scientists to agree on the nature of objects. They are regarded by Modernist thinking as simultaneously "too weak or too strong" (53). The result of this thinking is what Latour terms "quasi-objects," those things that are fabricated and constructed, yet real and objective. In attempting to retain their distinction between subjects and objects, Modernists have succeeded only in creating more "quasi-objects" that challenge that line of thinking.

Latour's explanation of quasi-objects and the contradictory thinking behind them is illustrated in the book Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future--and Locked Us In by Brian Chen, a writer for Wired Magazine. (An excerpt from the book can be found on NPR.) From a Modernist standpoint, smartphones are objects of technology that humans have constructed for their own uses. Modernists would regard the smartphone as an amalgamation of circuits, lights, and batteries that has no inherent meaning or agency apart from that granted to it by its user. As this article points out, however, smartphones are playing an increasingly large role in controlling and changing their Modern subjects.

Although the book mainly focuses on the business and marketing implications of the iPhone, the author raises some interesting implications for the role of "quasi-objects" in contemporary life. Three of the specific examples discussed by the author are education, medicine, and law. In all three of these fields, smartphone applications are changing the ways humans interact with each other and with technology. Today's human subjects have embraced these new objects of technology to such an extent that the smartphone begins to take on a life of its own. How does the Modernist subject-object distinction hold up when faced with a society of humans that rely on their phones to tell them when to get up in the morning, what weather-appropriate outfit to wear, or what highly recommended restaurant to try? Latour would argue that it can't.

Like the "quasi-objects" Latour describes, smartphones are problematic to Modernist thinking. In one sense, the Modernist smartphone user views himself or herself as an "always-on, all-knowing being." Ironically, the subject role that the Modernist attributes to himself or herself is actually created by the smartphone (or object) itself. Smartphone users (consciously or unconsciously) acknowledge the agency of smartphones in their fears about how the phones impact the privacy of their digital lives or how they threaten the overall intelligence of society. By attributing this agency to the phone, the human subject views the smartphone as a "meaningless" object, all the while knowing the smartphone is actually more. Perhaps, a quasi-object?

Quasi-Object Lesson: Latour

In describing the modern situation Latour emphasizes a divide between Culture and Nature. This is the source of the main exigency in modernism—that these two spheres are irreconcilable becomes apparent by attending to just about any contemporary public debate, from global warming to abortion. Latour frequently describes these two camps in terms of their treatment of objects: of objects in culture he states, “They are just there to be used as the white screen on to which society projects its cinema,” while in science “they are so powerful that they shape the human society, while the social construction of sciences that have produced them remains invisible.” The issue of objects’ social construction brings to light the disparity which exists in our understanding of society itself; Latour is thus led to pose a crucial question:

If religion, arts or styles are necessary to ‘reflect’, ‘reify’, ‘materialize’, ‘embody’ society—to use some of the social theorists’ favorite verbs—then are objects not, in the end, its co-producers? Is not society built literally—not metaphorically—of gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles?... Maybe social scientists have simply forgotten that before projecting itself on to things society has to be made, built, constructed? And out of what material could it be built if not out of nonsocial, non-human resources? (Emphasis mine)

These non-human resources are what Latour calls “quasi-objects,” and in my reading I struggled to understand this concept. I must have reread section 3.2, “What Is a Quasi-Object?”, a dozen times and stared at the charts on those pages until my head ached in seeking that answer, to no avail. After Wikipedia failed to supply an article on that subject I simply Googled “quasi object theory” and was pleased when “Theory of the Quasi-Object” by Michael Serres instantly popped up. This PDF offers the amazing example of soccer which I feel clarifies quasi-objects:

A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it. Over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function, and no value. Ball isn’t played alone. Those who do, those who hog the ball, are bad players and are soon excluded from the game…. Let us consider the one who holds it. If he makes it move around him, he is awkward, a bad player. The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it…. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws… IN most games, the man with the ball is on offense; the whole defense is organized relative to him and his position. The ball is the center of the referential, for the moving game. With few exceptions… the only one who can be tackled is the one who has the ball. This quasi-object designates him. He is marked with the sign of the ball.

Here, the ball is given agency; good soccer players must adjust their behavior according to the non-human nature of the ball, not merely manipulating it but anticipating it. The ball therefore operates a role somewhere between object and subject by actively influencing us while we influence it—thus, “quasi-object.” I am not a sports person so I popped over to Youtube to see if I could recognize this phenomena in action, and indeed, one particularly impressive montage of clips emphasized the beauty and true synergy between player and ball inherent in good teamwork-- keep your eye on the ball:



The soccer ball is a quasi-object around which human activities take form; I think Latour is arguing for us to reexamine the sources of our understandings of human society, which almost certainly reside not entirely in humanity and not entirely in objective forces, but in the interplay between them.

hYbrids: The 'Y' and the 'why'

Addressing the contradiction posed by modernity, Latour points out that the coproduction of nature and society has always gone on in modernity and always will, it is just that the modern constitution is blind to this. Latour argues that modernism only pretends to make these separations; in reality it produces lots of nature-culture hybrids. Latour argues that we need to stop looking at modernism as break from the past when in fact because modernity proliferates hybridized forms it has never really been so different from the past. We have never been modern, we have only found a way of thinking that we were. This contradiction shows that the clear lines of a nature/culture dualism are no longer possible. Because of the contemporary state of our society and nature, nothing by itself can be reduced to anything else, but instead only through the mediation of something else. Thanks to a world filled with constructed nature and naturalized social facts, this interaction makes more sense. It becomes more and more difficult to pretend that nature exists on its own with its own rules, while the subject or society is separate. Latour states, “the modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies” (34). These hybrids are made by the public interaction of people, things and concepts, making the object/subject distinction of modernism inapplicable. As the number of these hybrids grows, it is more difficult to keep nature and society/culture separate. Latour suggests we should instead rethink our distinctions.

Latour argues that in fact “No one has ever been modern” (47). Thus, he introduces a new approach, what is the non-modern. This view addresses the contradiction that modernism poses and “takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the populations of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (47). Latour’s method recognizes the connections between nature and culture and blurs the boundaries of distinction. He proposes that nature and society are no longer explanatory terms, so we must leave behind the purification of the two and instead use something that requires a conjoined explanation (81). Therefore, he introduces the idea of quasi-objects that help us to trace these networks of conjoined explanations. He explains that this explanation starts from quasi-objects, so we cannot use nature and society to explain things but must explain through these quasi objects and networks (95).

While very different arguments and concepts, I was able to make a connection between Latour’s points and some of the ideas in Electronic Monuments by Gregory Ulmer. Ulmer’s book proposes a new way to look at society through commemoration.  In an effort to apply his concepts, particularly in how society works as a whole, Ulmer connects the idea of Lacan’s Y and the tree, where the tree was “schematized in the letter Y as the sign of the diverging paths of vice and virtue” (151). Here, Ulmer uses the Y to illustrate how we link things together. He talks about the letter Y as a metaphor for the separation and re-tangling that happens when the concepts come back together. He says that as an idiom it serves as “an assemblage linking together a series of disparate items (indexes) on the basis of the letter and shape “Y”” (158). In his discussion of the Y, he asks what responsibility the community has for choices made at the fork in the why (159). This is how the Y kind of symbolizes a point of convergence. He talks about the Y in terms of a diagram, where it is not a series of branching alternatives but a formless (holistic) tangle of discursive lines (160). He says “in these terms the Y marks not a parting of the ways but a merging (an interdependence)” (160). Also, he uses the Y as a double meaning, also implying ‘why’ to reflect on reasoning. He applies this to his idea of a project MEmorial that does not aim for a whole or a separation of different parts into branches, but instead a look at the tangle of meanings and how they work together.

Overall, the point behind Ulmer’s connection is that instead of working from the bottom up of the ‘Y,’ where we try to separate and delineate things to understand ‘why,’ we should work from the top down, where the ‘why’ comes together by understanding things together. I connected this to Latour’s rejection of distinction and promotion of hybrids. Just like Latour sees things as needing to be looked at through networks of conjoined explanations, Ulmer sees things as existing in a matrix with a tangle of meanings. It is no longer possible to look at something without considering the mediation of something else. In both cases, it makes more sense to look at how things work together instead of trying to keep things clear and separate. The world today is so intertwined and complicated by many things that it is almost impossible to do this anyway. Instead, maybe we should converge at the fork of this Y and see how it all works together through h‘Y’brids!

Ulmer, G. L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

     I found threads running throughout Latour’s essay that I can use in my final paper. I’ll be looking at the rhetoric of science and the disconnect between scientists and the public caused by language. At the beginning of chapter four Latour discusses the asymmetry of anthropology and how to end it. This asymmetry is a problem because he would like to use anthropology to describe the world. However it’s inadequate to compare moderns and premoderns.

Here is the difference, for Bachelard and his disciples, between history and the history of sciences. History may be symmetrical, but that hardly matters, because it never deals with real science; the history of science, on the other hand, must never be symmetrical, because it deals with science and its utmost duty is to make the epistemological break more complete. (p. 92)

     Symmetry will be restored (or “stored” in the first place) when we can confront “the true knowledge to which we adhere totally” (p. 92).

     A science is only sanctioned when it can tear itself away from all contexts (versus ethnosciences that are open to study). However, it is interesting to note that even these sciences which are thought to be incontrovertible are as constructed as anything else in our world. “The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth” (qtd Serres, p. 93). I think most of the disconnect between science and the public comes from the differences in vocabulary and how language is used. We all speak in the first person and most other texts are written this way. They are personal. Scientific research and writing is supposed to transcend the researchers and authors. The knowledge “discovered” is the property of everyone and should be available to everyone so scientists have extracted themselves from their work using the passive voice. While this is an important tenet of science, it makes it much harder for the public to relate to. As Jay L. Lemke puts in it Talking Science: Language, Learning and Values (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1990) “These are subtle features of scientific style. Their cumulative effect very often is to project science as a simple description of the way the world is, rather than as a human social activity, an effort to make sense of the world” (p. 131).

11.21.11 Object Lesson

The idea of networks is important to Latour's point throughout We Have Never been Modern. I recently came across a YouTube video called “Social Networking in Plain English” that does a good job of depicting a network visually.

The example of getting from Chicago to Santa Fe is similar to Latour's example of the railroad. "Is a railroad local or global? Neither. It is local at all points, since you always find sleepers and railroad workers, and you have stations and automatic ticket machines scattered along the way. Yet it is global, since it takes you from Madrid to Berlin or from Brest to Vladivostok. However, it is not universal enough to be able to take you just anywhere." (117). In this same way we have to go to St. Louis and Dallas before we can get to Santa Fe in "Social Networking in Plain English." So the ultimate trip from Chicago to Santa Fe is both local and global. "There are continuous paths that lead from the local to the global, from the circumstantial to the universal, from the contingent to the necessary, only so long as the branch lines are paid for" (Latour 117). The entire trip is  is a continuous pass of local to global paths. One leg of the trip (i.e. Chicago to St. Louis) is local; the entire trip is global. I think it's important that Latour points out that networks are neither global nor local. Aspects of local and global can be applied but just one won't work alone.

Latour continues in his explanation of networks saying, "Between the lines of a network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all: no train, no telephone, no intake pipe, no television set....They are connected lines, not surfaces" (118). It seems that the lines between components of a network allow for humans and nonhumans to come to terms with one another and to attribute meaning to one another. It may be an opportunity for mediation. As Latour notes "Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else. Never by itself, but always through the mediation of another" (113). This mediation explains why humans can't successfully "verify the tiniest fact, the most trivial law, the humblest constant, without subscribing to the multiple metrological networks, to laboratories and instruments" (119). The use of networks allows us to do this. Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It relies on the connections we made through networks to mean something.

"Social Networking in Plain English" shows that many relationships in networks are hidden and that social networking sites can help in making relationships visible. This seems to be the idea of the Nonmodern Constitution, to make such connections visible. "Social Networking in Plain English" implies that you won't find love or a job if you're unable to see hidden relationships. Social networking sites allow those hidden links to become visible. In the same way Latour's Nonmodern Constitution seems to unveil or make visible the idea of continuity and combinations. It draws importance to mediation and emphasizes avoidance of placing items in containers, disallowing interaction. "The third guarantee...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" (Latour 140).