<nettime> parliament of things

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.org>]

[was: <nettime> bartering money digest [hart, holmes]

> An emphasis on exposing how durable social organisation is constructed
> might be represented as being subversive

To stay with Callon/Latour. Their political agenda is a bit complicated.
They are mostly concerned with how science, and technology, have been
politizied by being established outside the realm of politics. In other
words -- and we see that every day -- science is powerful weapon in many
political disputes precisely because it is understood as being outside of
it. Politics are about (social) values, science is about (natural) facts.
Callon/Latour goal is to show the political/ideological nature of this
distinction.

On the deepest, and most controversial, level, their argument is
ontological: there is no fundamental difference between people and things.
In fact, they are inseparable.

Now, so far so good. Your average social constructivist/postmodernist will
agree and argue: science is the same as politics, it's constructed as a
historically contingent process, shaped by the same forces than any other
aspect of history. The difference between fact and fiction is not found in
nature (which remains essentially inaccessible) but in the power games of
the discourse about it (which is essentially autonomous). This has been
called "the linguistic turn". Everything is text.

To break out of the dead end of social constructivism/postmodernism,
Callon/Latour argue that, yes, science is a social discourse, but a very
special one. It's special because not only humans speak, but also
non-humans.

Say, when Louis Pasteur, 'discovered' the bacteria, he did not simply
pointed at them, but he shaped them in the most literal sense of the word:
he gave them a distinct shape to which he could then point. Through a
series of complex experiments (translations), he made them speak. But
bacterias are finicky divas. While they cannot speak for themselves, they
cannot be assigned arbitrary roles (as the postmodernists would have it),
they have to be enticed to speak. Brute force doesn't help.

In a complex "negotiation process" -- involving a series of experiments,
the construction of new laboratory equipment, demonstrations to farmers,
enrollment of funding agencies, etc -- new identities are shaped: Pasteur,
the great scientist, on the one side, bacterias which infect cattle and
which can be controlled through the means of Mr. Pasteur, on the other.

Only in the end of this process, are the bacterias in a shape so that the
scientist can call them "out there", because the "out there" as been
transformed in such a way to make them visible. In other words, the
division between the social and the natural (or technological) is not the
beginning of the scientific enterprise, but its end result.

The problem is that in everyday life, these analytically cleanly separated
domains (nature, society, technology), are mixed up into all kinds of
hybrids (just think of a BSE steak lying on your plate). Even though these
different domains -- and the actors that constitute them -- are mixed into
one another, politics can only talk about one of them. As a result, in our
scientifically saturated times, politics have turned into a shell game. The
real thing is always somewhere else.  One side always points to the other
to negate responsibility.

What we need now, is a way to bring the other half into the game.
Analytically, it's by considering how objects constitute society (or how
people constitute technology), politically, and now things get a bit more
vague, by creating what Latour calls a "parliament of things", an arena in
which we can talk about the political constitution of objects, or, in the
more radical version, a place in which the objects can debate their role in
the constitution of the social.

Latour as recently elaborated on this, in his latest book, La politique de
la nature, but I'm too lazy, I must admit, to read an entire book in
French, so I have to wait for the translation to come out.


--------------------++-----
Les faits sont faits.
http://felix.openflows.org

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