Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994)

Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994):

Questions:

35: symmetry (what does this mean?)

42: Materialism and antihumanism relation (lateral v vertical symmetry in the graph)

50: History and mediation

39: What stakes in discourse (“cement” of the engineers) / ~ nondiscourse

62: “not dialectics” to crossover and genealogy (but how not dialectic)

46: Parallel concept to dispositif

51/61: What motivates the enrollment of nonhuman in the making of collectives? (what are the conditions such that enrollment of nonhumans takes place?) nonhuman as durable and negotiable?

51/61: one example/employment of technical mediation is the enrollment of nonhumans

- v. sociology inertia giving causative force to rather than the change that happens between two things.  Is there a durability of the nonhuman that allows them to hold the transformation

39: Can we shift on behalf of a nonhuman/object

- objects have capabilities (like monkey getting banana) but the object always does what the object does consistently

- Two things at stake - how empirical can we / do we want to be? How does this cache out in terms of collectives.

50: history and mediation (“An action in the distant past…”) - insufficient to account for temporal distance because there is soooooo much work to account for all these? (flippant about history); 

- How much of the network do we have to trace? Seems like too much

- silver lining of storm cloud is that his point is precisely that to give a good explanation we have to do much more work than we are accustomed to doing. we can no longer make big promises.

- How much does the black box help? the process by which you just bracket some questions (partially bracket of some things while others you bring to the fore); a black box is always there to be opened.

          —> does this allow for us to jump process scales so how do we hold ourselves to some consistency?

          - one justification that’s used is to admit the project isn’t objective but interested

          —> or are we bracketing TOO much? what is obligating you to unpack? 

          - can’t we account for the relations and the transformations of the relations in presence/absence, past/present in a way that is not reducible to flattened mediators of (rather than saying they are just structures of the present, look at how these forms endure)

- Can this method help us ask: “what would a technical mediation of race look like?"

          - racial history in texas textbooks then structure students’ later lives.. mediated by, understood through, the benign stories in these past books

          - but what about the “no longer in discourse” (39)

          - the Latourian story would account for the teacher, the book, etc… such that the student knows, prior to reading the text, that they “believe the text/teacher” (rather than an ideational account that just says the idea goes from the book to the students’ head); his view is contentious then because that he is committed to the idea tha tit is not the case in advance that every association is that which every single classical sociological category is operational - Latour would say those are not given, you would have to show that. There are NO givens. 

- No social structures are for him operative (bad theory of race that sociologists gave us, or bad theory of capital accumulation that marxists give us). But we can give a technical account of race, or of capital accumulation

- Caution against taking a certain feature of the network and using that to describe the whole network.

- Can you say intentionality? Can that be part of this?

               - 46: purposeful actions as properties of institutions, dispositions. Collectives can have intentions - 

               - attitudinal racism can only exist through technical mediation. Intentionality is moralizing (like the NRA has); we are trying to describe intentional action, it is just there are techniques that are able to get going according to these maps…you need the maps (ostensibly there were people who were way more racist than the real estate agents, but the real estate agents enrolled the maps and thus were able to shape the future of racism in Chicago)

- // historical methods compared to Foucault who, for part of the mapping is tracing the relations/transformations from one to another. 

- Can you see patterns in collectives? 

- Mapping the network is contingent on the 

          - what are the boundaries of a network? even when necessarily vague

- less interested in characterizing network and rather in how the networks are working, what are some actants within

- Identifying the patterns is not a disinterest practice - the boundaries of relevance have to do with why you are trying to figure out the patterns (but Latour is not interested in this - partly why people critique/describe him as apolitical)

               - he is interested in Foucault’s  how things Foucault calls disciplinarily actually functions but not interested in political functioning of power. How are these functioning hierarchically…  

- not interested in institutional racism - though he talks about institutions 

39: “No longer in discourse” - we have meanings not only located in linguistics - he means this simply, in the sense that “speed bump means ‘slow down’ but it doesn’t say that"

- // Foucault wanting to move away from discourses 

     - if you want to move away from the sociology of the social then it makes sense to move away from something that is easily construed as ideational (like discourse) and instead can use something like cement

- Why isn’t the speed bump just a tool? one of the central claims of the text seem to be what we consider to be actants/agents are symmetrical 

- Don’t we lose an ability to account for WHY, node of action or interests that motivates the use of that technology

- See Government of Paper 

- Ambiguity in the text - the action is a property of the association of chancellor and speed bump. There are certain actions that are not possible without associations. In order for traffic to stop, you need the whole imbroglio, the whole network… is there room for the unique human contributions (beliefs, etc.), the special things that humans bring (but not special things that make humans the only actors)

- The concept and the doctor are a corporate body… 

33: ‘Subindividual” // Deleuizian ‘dividual  (????)

- can you remain faithfully Latourian while doing something more than that, like something other than negation while also avoiding saying this is what is produced, or is producing?

- If all a pattern did was act as a hunch to direct you to another site of empirical controversy maybe that is not a problem … willing to allow that concept to be informed, moving (not sedimented)

          - not interested in the nation state and seeing the nation state configuration everywhere. More interested in the how the nationstate functions in a network ∆ the one-ups-manship sociology disappears

- What the Latorian has to show is why what they’re doing matters

- social structures have to be actual structure - things that come into being, degrade, and have to be repaired, buttressed… that is out in favor of the particular structures. there is not a DEEP social structure but a really long network where things are maintained 

(// “There is no single locus of great refusal” - Foucault) —> makes things harder and emphasizes that we need to work on the technical level