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.