Busca louca [mad pursuit] pela origem lógica da sociedade e das técnicas (Latour 1994)

LATOUR, Bruno. 1994. Pragmatogonies: a mythical account of how humans and nonhumans swap properties. American Behavioral Scientist 37(6):791-808.

HUMANO e NÃO HUMANO

In this article, I […] want to offer an alternative myth to help us suspend our knowledge of what constitutes the human subject and the nonhuman object. (Latour 1994:791)

Humans for a few millions of years now have extended their social relations to other actants with which, with whom, they have swapped many properties, and with which, with whom, they form a collective. There is no sense in which the notion of a human can be disentanbled from the nonhumans into whose fate it has woven more and more intimately over the ages. (Latour 1994:793-4)

So who eventually is responsible for the action? Both [humans and nonhumans]. The responsibility has to be shared, symmetry restored, and the role of humanity shifted sideways from being the sole transcendant cause to that of mediating mediators. (Latour 1994:794)

AÇÃO TÉCNICA (socialização de não humanos, ou delegação de ações a não humanos)

[L]et me define technical action as the form of delegation that allows us to mobilize in an interaction movements which have been executed earlier, farther away, and by other actants, as though they are still present and available to us now. (Latour 1994:792)

The traditional definition of techniques as the imposition of a form consciously planned in advance onto some shapeless matter should be replaced by a […] definition as the socialization of non-humans (Latour 1994:792-3)

TECNICAS como MEDIAÇÕES

[T]echniques […] are not means, but mediators, that is, means and ends at the same time (Latour 1994:793)

They [artifacts] mediate our social action? No, they are us. (Latour 1994:807)

A TECNOLOGIA É A SOCIEDADE TORNADA DURÁVEL

Society is not stable enough to inscribe itself onto anything. On the contrary, most of the features of social order – scale, asymmetry, durability, power, division of labor, role distribution, and hierarchy – are impossible even to define without bringing in socialized nonhumans. (Latour 1994:793)

SOCIOTÉCNICA

Beause every time we use the word social, we implicate many types of nonhumans, and every time we speak of techniques, we also bring in definitions of society, the only way out […] is to attempt a genealogy of these associations. (Latour 1994:795)

There are not two parallel histories, the first for the technical infrastructure and the other for the social superstructure, but only one sociotechnical history. (Latour 1994:804)

According to my origin myth, it is impossible even to conceive of an artifact that does not incorporate social relations, or to define a social structure without the integrations of nonhumans into it. Every human interaction is sociotechnical. (Latour 1994:805-6)

We are sociotechnical animals. (Latour 1994:806)

JAMAIS FOMOS MODERNOS

We used to deride primitive people who thought that some disorder in their society, some pollution, could threaten the natural order to the point of letting the sky fall on their heads. We do not laught anymore when we abstain from pressing the button of an aerosol for precisely the same reason. We too are now afraid that the sky could fall on our heads because of our pollution, our negligence. We have become much more primitive, that is, much more cautious – or, should I say, much more civilized? (Latour 1994:796)

We now understand that we must literally and not just sybolically manage the planet and practice the politics of things. (Latour 1994:797)

TROCA DE PROPRIEDADES ENTRE NÃO-HUMANOS E RELAÇÕES SOCIAIS

[T]he point of my little genealogy is to be able to identify inside the seamless web the properties which are borrowed from the social world to socialize the nonhumans, and, vice versa, from the nonhumans to naturalize and expand the social realm. For each layer of meaning, everything happens as if we were learning, through our contact with one side, ontological properties, which are then reimported to the other side, generating new, completely unexpected effects. (Latour 1994:798)

According to the reproductive principle of my genealogy, we know that the way to proceed is to look for the nonhumans when we cannot understand the emergence of a social feature, and to look for the state of social relations whenever we cannot understand how a new type of object enters the collective. (Latour 1994:802)

At every stage, according to my pragmatogony, it is through the commerce with nonhumans that the necessary social skills and properties are learned, and it is only by reimporting those skills back to the nonhumans that they are made to do different things and play different roles. (Latour 1994:804)

[T]he properties of humans and nonhumans cannot be swapped haphazardly. […] [W]hat has been learned from the nonhumans and reimported back onto the social link, what has been rehearsed in the social realm and exported back to the nonhumans. Nonhumans too have a history. There is no longer one single big vertical dichotomy between society and techniques, and in its stead we can make many horizontal distinctions between the various meanings of sociotechnical hybrids. (Latour 1994:806)

We do indeed have to alternate between the state of social relations and the state of nonhuman relations, but this is not the same as alternating between humanism and objectivity. (Latour 1994:806)

ELÉTRONS E ELEITORES

What can be done with the electrons, can also be done with the electors. (Latour 1994:798)

HISTÓRIA DA MATÉRIA

In the philosophy and sociology of techniques, we often imagine that there is no difficulty in defining material entities because they are objective, they just stand there, unproblematically composed of forces, of atoms, of elements. Only the social, the human side, would be difficult to interpret, we believe, because it is so complex, hermeneutic, and historical. The principle of my genealogy, however, is that whenever we talk of matter as a given, we are in fact considering a package of multiple layers of former crossovers between social and natural elements so that what we take as primitive and pure terms are belated and mixed ones. Just by retracing the most recent three steps, we can already see that matter is vastly different depending on the different layers I have called political ecology, technology, or networks of power. Far from being a primitive term, always immutable in contrast to a fast changing society, matter has a genealogy too, and nonhumans can in no way be limited to their material definition, which, on the contrary, we should be able to retrace. (Latour 1994:799)

It is only because we do not do […] the anthropology of our modern world, that we can overlook the strange and hybrid quality of matter as it is seized on and implemented by industry. (Latour 1994:799)

The matter of an outside world is not a given, but a recent historical creation. (Latour 1994:800)

INDÚSTRIA

The extraordinary feat that I will call industry is to grant nonhumans the possibility of being related to one another in an assemply of actants that we call a machine or an automaton. Which is endowed with some sort of autonomy and which is submitted to regular laws that can be measured through instruments and accounting procedures. From tools held in the hands of human workers, we shift to an assemply of machines where tools are relatedto one another, creating a massive array of labor and material relations in the new factories (Latour 1994:799)

INDÚSTRIA e ALIENAÇÃO

The paradox of this stage of the relations between humans and nonhumans is that it is seen as alienation, dehumanization, as if this was the first time that poor and exploited human weakness was confronted with an all-powerful objective force. However, to relate nonhumans together in an assemply of machines, ruled by laws, and accounted for by instruments, is still to grant them some sort of social life. Indeed, the whole modernist project consists of creating that peculiar hybrid: a fabricated nonhuman that has nothing of the character of society and politics, but that builds the body politic all the more effectively because it seems completely estranged from humanity […]. This famous shapeless matter, celebrated so fervently throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, which is there for man’s – but not woman’s – ingenuity to mold and fashion, is only one of the many ways to socialize nonhumans. They are socialized so much that they are granted the possibility of creating an assembly of their own, an automaton, checking and surveying, pushing and triggering one another, as if they had full autonomy. It is the megamachine […] extended to nonhumans. (Latour 1994:799)

MEGAMÁQUINA (gestão de pessoas precede organização de não humanos)

From where does industry come? […] First comes the megamachine, that is, the organization of large numbers of humans through chains of command, deliberate planning, and accounting procedures. This change of scale through the imperial machinery of legal commands is what has first to be invented. The local interactions of humans are now extended through the large, stratified, externalized body politic. which can keep track of many nested subprograms of action through the invention of such intellectual techniques as writing, counting, and accounting. According to Mumford, before having any notion of wheels, gears, works, and movements, you first need to have set up the very possibility of a larte-scale organization. Large-scale management is the template for large-scale technologies. Then and only then, by substituting some but not all of its subprograms by nonhumans, may you generate machinery and factories, indstries and automatons The nonhumans, in this view, enter the organization and take up the role of obedient servant which has already been rehearsed for centuries by humans enrolled in the imperial megamachine. (Latour 1994:800)

Before being able to delegate action to nonhumans, and before being able to relate nonhumans to one another in an automaton, you first need to be able to nest many subprograms of action into one another without losing track of them. Management, in a way, always preceds the expansion of material techniques. Or rather, if we want to keep with the logic of my story, every time we learn something about the management of humans, we shift this new knowledge to the nonhumans, endowing them with more and more organization properties. (Latour 1994:800)

Industry transfers to nonhumans the management of people learned in the imperial megamachine […] What has been learned from the nonhumans is then reimported to reconfigure people (Latour 1994:800)

REVOLUÇÃO NEOLÍTICA

How can we define domestication and agriculture better than by considering it as the granting of socialness and intimacy to nonhuman actants? I will call this process internalized ecology; where so many animals, plants, and materials are submitted to such an intense socialization, re-education, and reconfiguration, that they change shapes, functions, and even genetic makeup (Latour 1994:801)

SOCIEDADE (Durkheim+Garfinkel)

In the Durkheimian interpretation, a society is what precedes individual action, what lasts much longer than any interaction, what dominates us, the realiti in which we are born, live, and die. Society is this corporate body that is so overarching that it socializes us, the humans, giving us a role, a shape, and a funcion; yes, it domesticates us by teaching us how to behave and to conform. It is externalized, it is reified, it is more real than ourselves. The origin of all religions and sacred rituals, for Durkheim, are nothing but the return, through figures and myths, of what is transcendant over any individual interaction: society. […] And yet we build our society solely through interactions. No matter how many roles and functions we have been disciplined into, we still repair the social fabric out of our own knowledge and ethnomethods. Durkheim may be right, but so is Garfinkel. (Latour 1994:802)

We are not alone in our interactions. We also bring the long-lasting influence of all the actions which we, or others, have taken in the past through technical mediation. What Durkheim mistook for the effect of a sui generis social order is simply the effect of having brought so many techniques to bear on our social relations. From them, we learned what it was to last longer, to be spread over space and time, to occupy a role, to be dispatched into a funcion. By reimporting this competence into the definition of society, we learned how to reify it, to make it stand independently of fast-moving interactions. And indeed, we learned how to delegate to this externalized body even the task of delegating us into roles and funcions. Yes, society exists for real, but no, it os not socially constructed. (Latour 1994:802)

TÉCNICAS COMO SOCIALIZAÇÃO DE FERRAMENTAS (estabilização do social)

As we learn from archaeologists, techniques imply articulated subprograms of action which are spreading in space and time (Leroi-Gourhan […]). In other words, they imply not a society, which is a later hybrid, but some sort of social organization to hold together nonhumans extracted from very different seasons, matters, and places. A bow and arrow, a hammer, a net, a piece of clothing, are made of many different bits and pieces which have to be recombined in a time and space sequence bearing no relation to their natural settings. So, techniques are what happened to tools and nonhuman actants when they were processed by a form of social organization that allowed them to be extracted, recombined, and socialized. (Latour 1994:803)

Why would the enrollment of nonhumans be of any use? Because they can stabilize social negotiations. At this stage, nonhumans offer an extraordinary feature: they are at once pliable and durable; they can be shaped very fast, but, once shaped, they last much longer than the interaction that has fabricated them. Social interactions, on the other hand, are extremely labile and transitory. More exactly, they are either negotiable but transient, or, if they are encoded for instance in the genetic makeup, they are extremely durable but impossible to easily renegotiate. By bringing in nonhumans, the contradiction of durability and negotiability is solved. It is now possible to trace interactions, to blackbox them, to recombine highly complicated tasks, to nest subprograms one into another. What was impossible for highly complex social animals to do becomes possible when prehumans transfer the use of tools not to gain access to food, but to trace, fix, underline, and materialize their interactions. The social realm, although still made only of interactions, becomes visible and gains some durability through its own tracers. (Latour 1994:803)

FERRAMENTAS

What is a tool, then, in my genealogy? It is the extension of social tools to nonhumans! […] They [baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, and vervets] have few techniques, to be sure, but are perfectly able […] to devise social tools through the manipulation and modification of one another in their complex strategies […]. If you grant the prehumans of my own mythology at least the same kind of social complexity […], you may generate tools simply by shifting this ability, through a crossover, to nonhumans. Just treat pieces of stone and wood as social partners and modify them so that you can act on another. Prehuman tool use […] would then be the extension of a skill rehearsed in the realm of social interaction. (Latour 1994:805)

PRIMATAS (Maquiavel e Garfinkel)

We are now back to the […] Machiavellian intelligence of primates, engaged in Garfinkelian interactions so as to repair the constantly decaying social order, manipulating one another to survive in groups of many conspecifics who are constantly interfering with one another. (Latour 1994:805)

DOIDERA

[T]his mad pursuit into the logical origin of society and techniques. (Latour 1994:805)

HUMANIDADE no PASSE

Humanity should be positioned in the crossover, in the middle column of Figure 2, as the very possibility of mediating between different mediators. (Latour 1994:806)

ESCALA

When we wanted to understand how an object comes to the collective, we looked at what type of social relevance with which it had first to be endowed, and when we wanted to understand how a social interaction could sustain a durable social link, we looked for those nonhumans which could lend their properties so as to render the social order more durable. This meant retracing the creation of a collective by the enrollment of nonhumans. I wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to pay respect to technical mediation without using the dualist paradigm, without inventing those two artifacts, a society, on the one hand, and an objective world, on the other. But scale is another feature of that movement. At each of the 11 moves I have retraced, a much larger number of humans are mixed with a much larger number of nonhumans, to the point where, today, the whole planet is internalized in the making of our politics, of our legal system, and, soon, of our morality. (Latour 1994:807)

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