{"id":219,"date":"2021-04-15T16:52:05","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T16:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.laspa.slg.br\/?p=219"},"modified":"2025-10-22T16:05:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T16:05:53","slug":"onde-estao-as-massas-ausentes-latour-1992","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.laspa.slg.br\/en\/2021\/04\/15\/onde-estao-as-massas-ausentes-latour-1992\/","title":{"rendered":"Onde est\u00e3o as massas ausentes? (Latour 1992)"},"content":{"rendered":"

LATOUR<\/strong>, Bruno. 1992<\/strong>. Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In: Wiebe E. Bijker; John Law (eds.). Shaping technology\/building society: studies in sociotechnical change<\/em>. Cambridge: The MIT Press, pp.225-58.<\/p>\n

O SIL\u00caNCIO e a GL\u00d3RIA das M\u00c1QUINAS (Samuel Butler)<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Latour 1992:225)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

PROGRAMA DE A\u00c7\u00c3O (script)<\/strong><\/p>\n

A program of action is the set of written instructions that can be substituted by the analyst to any artifact. Now that computers exist, we are able to conceive of a text (a programming language) that is at once words and actions. How to do things with words and then turn words into things is now clear to any programmer. (Latour 1992:225 nota 1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

THE SCRIPT and the SCRIPTER (god?)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The scripter<\/em> or designer of all these scripts is itself (himself, herself, themselves) negotiated. (Latour 1992:256 nota 13)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

COLOQUE O CINTO DE SEGURAN\u00c7A (moralidade distribu\u00edda=fortalecida e a lei do terceiro exclu\u00eddo)<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Latour 1992:226)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DISTRIBUI\u00c7\u00c3O DE COMPET\u00caNCIAS (Latour 1992:233)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AS MASSAS AUSENTES DA SOCIOLOGIA<\/strong><\/p>\n

To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans. Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding. (Latour 1992:227)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[SCRIPTS que s\u00e3o DESEMPENHADOS por [ACTANTES; que podem ser HUMANOS ou [N\u00c3O-HUMANOS; que podem ser FIGURATIVOS ou N\u00c3O-FIGURATIVOS]]] (Madeleine Akrich)<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Latour 1992:255 nota 3)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DESCRI\u00c7\u00c3O (manuais, instru\u00e7\u00f5es, demonstra\u00e7\u00f5es, treinamentos, experimentos mentais de alternativas, processo criativo, grupos focais, deciframentos de funcionamentos desconhecidos, tabelas abstratas de aus\u00eancias-presen\u00e7as)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will call the retrieval of the script from the situation de-scription<\/em>. They define actants, endow them with competences, make them do things, and evaluate the sanction of these actions (Latour 1992:255 nota 4)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although most of the scripts are in practice silent, either because they are intra- or extrasomatic, the written descriptions are not an artifact of the analyst (technologist, sociologist, or semiotician), because there exist many states of affairs in which they are explicitly<\/em> uttered. The gradient going from intrasomatic to extrasomatic skills through discourse is never fully stabilized, and allows many entries revealing the process of translation: user manuals, instruction, demonstration or drilling situations, practical thought experiments (“what would happen if, instead of the red light, a police officer were there”). To this should be added the innovator’s workshop, where most of the objects to be devised are still at the stage of projects<\/em> committed to paper (“if we had a device doing this and that, we could then do this and that”); market analysis in which consumers are confronted with the new device; and, naturally, the exotic situation studied by anthropologists in which people faced with a foreign device talk to themselves while trying out various combinations (“what will happen if I attach this lead here to the mains?”) The analyst has to empirically capture these situations to write down the scripts. When none is available, the analyst may still make a thought experiment by comparing presence\/absence tables and collating the list of all the actions taken by actors (“if I take this one away, this and that other action will be modified”). […] In practice [not a priori<\/em>] […], the scripts are explicit and accountable. (Latour 1992:255-6 nota 5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character. (Latour 1992:229) [MAIS PRECISAMENTE: O TRABALHO HUMANO QUE IMAGINAMOS SER AN\u00c1LOGO AO TRABALHO N\u00c3O-HUMANO GERALMENTE N\u00c3O \u00c9 O TRABALHO QUE O N\u00c3O-HUMANO EFETIVAMENTE SUBSTITUI, MAS SIM O TRABALHO QUE OS HUMANOS PASSAR\u00c3O A TER QUE FAZER NA AUS\u00caNCIA DO N\u00c3O-HUMANO. I.E.: antes do autom\u00f3vel ningu\u00e9m se deslocava muito, ent\u00e3o ele n\u00e3o substitui um trabalho de deslocamento pr\u00e9-existente, mas cria este trabalho para aqueles que n\u00e3o t\u00eam autom\u00f3vel)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

INSCRI\u00c7\u00c3O<\/strong><\/p>\n

We call the translation of any script from one repertoire to a more durable<\/em> one transcription, inscription, or encoding. This definition does not<\/em> imply that the direction always goes from soft bodies to hard machines, but simply that it goes from a provisional, less reliable one to a longer-lasting, more faithful one. For instance, the embodiment in cultural tradition of the user manual of a car is a transcription, but so is the replacement of a police officer by a traffic light; one goes from machines to bodies, whereas the other goes the opposite way. Specialists of robotics have abandoned the pipe dream of total automation; they learned the hard way that many skills are better delegated to humans than to nonhumans, whereas others may be taken away from incompetent humans. (Latour 1992:256 nota 6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

AG\u00caNCIA GENERALIZADA (a\u00e7\u00e3o-rede)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this kind of analysis there is no effort to attribute forever certain competences to humans and others to nonhumans. The attention is focused on following how any<\/em> set of competences is distributed<\/em> through various entities. (Latour 1992:256 nota 9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DAEDALUS<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Latour 1992:256 nota 10)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

ACTANTE, ATOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

We use actant<\/em> to mean anything that acts and actor<\/em> to mean what is made the source of an action. This is a semiotician’s definition that is not limited to humans and has no relation whatsoever to the sociological definition of an actor by opposition to mere behavior. For a semiotician, the act of attributing “inert force” to a hinge or the act of attributing it “personality” are comparable in principle and should be studied symmetrically. (Latour 1992:256 nota 11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DESCRI\u00c7\u00c3O DE UMA PORTA (O porteiro est\u00e1 em greve, pelo amor de deus mantenham a porta fechada)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This fusion of labor relations, religion, advertisement, and technique in one insignificant fact is exactly the sort of thing I want to describe in order to discover the missing masses of our society. (Latour 1992:227)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

PORTA = PAREDE M\u00d3VEL (o trabalho da dobradi\u00e7a e o dem\u00f4nio de Maxwell)<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, to size up the work done by hinges, you simply have to imagine that every time you want to get in or out of the building you have to do the same work as a prisoner trying to escape or as a gangster trying to rob a bank, plus the work of those who rebuild either the prison’s or the bank’s walls. If you do not want to imagine people destroying walls and rebuilding them every time they wish to leave or enter a building, then imagine the work that would have to be done to keep inside or outside all the things and people that, left to themselves, would go the wrong way. As Maxwell never said, imagine his demon working without<\/em> a door. […] [T]he hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order, or information. (Latour 1992:228)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DESLOCAMENTO=TRADU\u00c7\u00c3O=DELEGA\u00c7\u00c3O=ALTERA\u00c7\u00c3O (displacement=translation=delegation=shifting)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one by the words displacement<\/em> or translation<\/em> or delegation<\/em> or shifting<\/em>; I will say that we have delegated (or translated or displaced or shifted down) to the hinge the work of reversibly solving the wall-hole dilemma. (Latour 1992:229)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MINI-MAXES (Arquimedes e tecnopol\u00edtica)<\/strong><\/p>\n

in effect, we have drawn a scale where tiny efforts balance out mighty weights; the scale we drew reproduces the very leverage allowed by hinges. That the small be made stronger than the large is a very moral story indeed (think of David and Goliath); by the same token, it is also, since at least Archimedes’ days, a very good definition of a lever and of power: what is the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely to produce the maximum effect. […] I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the social construction of techniques (Latour 1992:229)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A ESCOLHA MUMFORDIANA (substituir muitos humanos indisciplinados por um humano disciplinado)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Closing doors would appear to be a simple enough piece of know-how once hinges have been invented, but, considering the amount of work, innovations, sign-posts, and recriminations that go on endlessly everywhere to keep them closed (at least in northern regions), it seems to be rather poorly disseminated. […] This is where the age-old Mumfordian choice is offered to you: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only funcion is to open and close the door. […] The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behavior. […] A nonhuman (the hinges) plus a human (the groom) have solved the wall-hole dilemma. […] Solved? Not quite. […] Although there is now only one human to be disciplined instead of hundreds, the weak point of the tactic can be seen: if this one<\/em> lad is unreliable, then the whole chain breaks down; if he falls asleep on the job or goes walkabout, there will be no appeal: the door will stay open (Latour 1992:230)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

SUBSTITUI\u00c7\u00c3O 1 (humano=>n\u00e3o-humano) x SUBSTITUI\u00c7\u00c3O 2 (muitos humanos=>um humano) = passado X presente<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although they appear to be two similar delegations, the first one is concentrated at the time of installation, whereas the other is continuous; more exactly, the first one creates clear-cut distinctions between production, installation, and maintenance, whereas in the other the distinction between training and keeping in operation is either fuzzy or nil. The first one evokes the past perfect (“once hinges had been installed…”), the second the present tense (“when the groom is at his post…”). There is a built-in inertia in the first that is largely lacking in the second. (Latour 1992:231)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

O FECHADOR AUTOM\u00c1TICO DE PORTA e a PRESCRI\u00c7\u00c3O<\/strong><\/p>\n

A nonhuman (hinges) plus another nonhuman (groom) have solved the wall-hole dilemma. […] Solved? Well, not quite. […] We have all experienced having a door with a powerful spring mechanism slam in our faces. […] The interesting thing with such impolite doors is this: if they slam shut so violently, it means that you, the visitor, have to be very quick in passing through and that you should not be at someone else’s heels, otherwise your nose will get shorter and bloody. […] I will call […] the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman delegates prescription<\/em>. Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. (Latour 1992:232)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n