Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door
Contents
1. people are not circumspect disciplined and watchful especially not Walla Walla drivers after the happy hour on Friday night Well that s exactly the point that the note made The groom is on strike for God s sake keep the door closed In our societies they are two systems of appeal nonhuman and super human that is machines and gods This note indicates how desperate its frozen and anonymous authors were I have never been able to trace them back and to honor them as they deserved They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans This failed the door was always left open Then they appealed to what we technol ogists consider the supreme court of appeal that is to a nonhuman who regularly and conve niently does the job in place of unfaithful humans To our shame we must confess that it also failed after a while The door was again always left open How poignant their line of thought is They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is there was and ever will be If human and nonhuman have failed certainly God will not deceive them 2 The author in the text is Jim Johnson technologist in Columbus Ohio who went to Walla Walla University whereas the author in the flesh is Bruno Latour sociologist from Paris France who never went to Columbus nor to Walla Walla University The distance between the two is great but similar to that between Steven Jobs the inventor of Macintosh and2. 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 in order to keep inside or to keep outside all the things and people that left to themselves would go the wrong way As Maxwell could have said imagine his demon working without a door Anything could escape from or penetrate into the department and there would soon be com plete equilibrium between the depressing and noisy surrounding area and the inside of the building Techniques are always involved when asymmetry or irreversibility is the goal it might appear that doors are a striking counter example since they maintain the hole wall in a reversible state but the allusion to Maxwell s demon clearly shows that such is not the case The reversible door is the only way to irreversibly trap inside a differential accumulation of warm sociologists knowledge papers and also alas paperwork the hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order or information If you let the drafts get inside the drafts will never get outside to the publishers Now draw two columns if I am not allowed to give orders to the reader of Social Problems then take it as a piece of strongly worded advice In the right column list the work people would have to do if they had no door in the left column write down
3. when Paul was delivered from his prison they appeal to the respect for God in human hearts This was their mistake In our secular times this is no longer enough Nowadays nothing seems to do the job of disciplining men and women and forcing them simply to close doors in cold weather It is a similar despair that pushed the road engineer to add a Golem to the red flag to force drivers to beware although the only way to slow drivers is still a good traffic jam You seem to always need more and more of these figurated delegates aligned in rows It is the same with delegates as with drugs you start with soft ones and end by shooting up There is an inflation for delegated characters too After a while they weaken In the old days it might have been enough just to have a door for people to know how to close it But then the embodied skills somehow disappeared people had to be reminded of their training Still the simple inscription keep the door closed might have been sufficient in the good old days But you know people they no longer pay attention to such notices and need to be reminded by stronger devices It is then that you install automatic grooms since electric shocks are not as acceptable for men as for cows In the old times when quality was still good it might have been enough just to oil it from time to time but nowadays even automa tisms go on strike It is not however that the movement is always from softer to harder devices
4. 298 Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together The Sociology of a Door Closer JIM JOHNSON Columbus Ohio School of Mines Is sociology the study of social questions or is it the study of associations In this paper the author takes the second position and extends the study of our associations to nonhumans To make the argument clearer the author chooses one very humble nonhuman a door closer and analyzes how this purely technical artifact is a highly moral highly social actor that deserves careful consideration Then the author proposes a vocabulary to follow human and nonhuman relations without stopping at artificial divides between what is purely technical and what is social The author builds its or his own text in such a way that the text itself is a machine that exemplifies several of the points made by the author In particular the author is constructed and deconstructed several times to show how many social actors are inscribed or prescribed by machines and automatisms The most liberal sociologist often discriminates against nonhumans Ready to study the most bizarre exotic or convoluted social behavior he or she balks at studying nuclear plants robots or pills Although sociology is expert at dealing with human groupings when it comes to nonhumans it is less sure of itself The temptation is to leave the nonhuman to the care of technologists or to study the impact of black boxed techniques upon the evolution of socia
5. and devices Instead of sending the listener of a story into another world the technical shifting out inscribes the words into another matter Instead of allowing the reader of the story to be at the same time away in the story s frame of reference and here in his armchair the technical shifting out forces him to chose between frames of reference Instead of allowing enunciators and enunciatees a sort of simultaneous presence and commu nion with other actors technics allow both of them to ignore the delegated actors and to walk away without even feeling their presence To understand this difference in the two directions of shifting out let us venture out once more onto a Columbus freeway For the umpteenth time I have screamed to Robin don t sit on the middle of the rear seat if I brake too hard you re dead In an auto shop further along the freeway I come across a device made for tired and angry parents driving cars with kids between two and five that is too old for a baby seat and not old enough for a seat belt and from small families that is without other persons to hold them safely and having cars with two separated front seats and head rests It is a small market but nicely analyzed by these Japanese fellows and given the price it surely pays off handsomely This description of my self and the small category into which I am happy to subscribe is transcribed in the device a steel bar with strong attachments to the head r
6. ce In the first relationship hinges vis a vis work of many people you not only had a reversal of forces the lever allows gentle manipulations to heavy weights but also a reversal of time Once the hinges are in place nothing more has to be done apart from maintenance oiling them from time to time In the second set of relations groom s work versus many people s work not only do you fail to reverse the forces but you also fail to modify the time schedule Nothing can be done to Technology and Social Relationships prevent the groom who has been reliable for two months from failing on the sixty second day at this point it is not maintenance work that has to be done but the same work as on the first day apart from the few habits that you might have been able to incorporate into his body Although they appear to be two similar delegations the first one is concentrated in time whereas the other is continuous more exactly the first one creates a clear cut distinction between production 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 A profound tempo ral shift takes place when nonhumans are appealed to time is folded Disciplining the Door Clos
7. d expect from a well trained butler Especially clever is its way of extracting energy from each and every unwilling unwit ting passer by My military friends at the academy call such a clever extraction an obligatory passage point which is a very fitting name for a door no matter what you feel think or do you have to leave a bit of your energy literally at the door This is as clever as a toll booth This does not quite solve all the problems though To be sure the hydraulic door closer does not bang the noses of those who are not aware of local conditions so its prescriptions may be said to be less restrictive But it still leaves aside segments of human populations Neither my little nephews nor my grandmother could get in unaided because our groom needed the force of an able bodied person to accumulate enough energy to close the door To use the classic Langdon Winner s motto 1980 because of their prescriptions these doors dis criminate against very little and very old persons Also if there is no way to keep them open for good they discriminate against furniture removers and in general everyone with pack ages which usually means in our late capitalist society working or lower middle class em ployees who even coming from a higher strata has not been cornered by an automated butler when he or she had their hands full of packages There are solutions though the groom s delegation may be written off usually by blocking it
8. e plots or scenariis as Madeleine Akrich 1987 calls them of dozens of delegated and interlocking characters so few people know how to appreci ate The label inhuman applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices that exist for figuring or de figuring personifying or abstracting em bodying or disembodying actors For instance on the freeway the other day I slowed down because there was a guy in a yellow suit and a red helmet waving a red flag Well the guy s moves were so regular and he was located so dangerously and had such a pale although smiling face that when I passed by I recognized it to be a machine it failed the Turing test a cognitivist would say Not only was 303 304 LATOUR the red flag delegated not only was the arm waving the flag also delegated but the body appearance was also added to the machine We engineers could move much further in the direction of figuration although at a cost we could have given him her careful here no sexual discrimination of robots electronic eyes to wave only when there is a car approaching or regulated the movement so that it is faster when cars do not obey Also we could have added why not a furious stare or a recognizable face like a mask of President Reagan which would have certainly slowed drivers down very efficiently But we could also have moved the other way to a ess figurative delegation the flag by itself could have done t
9. ension payments Time off Landscaped offices Yet it is no use being indignant because it is very true that nonhumans are not so reliable that the irreversibility we would like to grant them is complete We did not want ever to have to think about this door again apart from regularly scheduled routine maintenance which is another way of saying that we did not have to bother about it and here we are worrying again about how to keep the door closed and drafts outside What is interesting in the note on the door is the humor of attributing a human character Technology and Social Relationships to a failure that is usually considered as purely technical This humor however is more profound than the synonymous notice they could have posted the groom is not working I constantly talk with my computer who answers back I am sure you swear at your old car we are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance not to mention cracks in the concrete belt of our nuclear plants Yet this behavior is considered by moralists I mean sociologists as a scandalous breach of natural barriers When you write that a groom is on strike this is only seen as a projection as they say of a human behavior onto a nonhuman cold technical object one by nature impervious to any feeling They call such a projection anthropomorphism which for them is a sin akin to zoophily but much worse It is thi
10. er It is at this point that you have this relatively new choice either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated nonhuman character whose only func tion is to open and close the door This is called a door closer or a groom The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one nonhuman and may safely leave the others bell boys included to their erratic behavior No matter who they are and where they come from polite or rude quick or slow friends or foes the nonhuman groom will always take care of the door in any weather and at any time of the day A nonhuman hinges plus another nonhuman groom have solved the hole wall dilemma Solved Well not quite Here comes the deskilling question so dear to social historians of technology thousands of human grooms have been put on the dole by their nonhuman brethren Have they been replaced This depends on the kind of action that has been trans lated or delegated to them In other words when humans are displaced and deskilled nonhumans have to be upgraded and reskilled This is not an easy task as we shall now see We have all experienced having a door with a powerful spring mechanism slam in our face For sure springs do the job of replacing grooms but they play the role of a very rude uneducated porter who obviously prefers the wall version of the door to its hole version They simply slam the door shut The interesting thing with such impoli
11. ests and in the advertisement on the outside of the box It is also pre inscribed in about the only place where I could have realized that I needed it the freeway Making a short story already too long I no longer scream at Robin and I no longer try to foolishly stop him with my extended right arm he firmly holds the bar that protects him or so I believe against my braking I have delegated the continuous in junction of my voice and extension of my right arm with diminishing results as we know from Feschner s law to a reinforced padded steel bar Of course I had to make two detours one to my wallet the second to my tool box Thirty bucks and five minutes later I had fixed 3 To the shame of our trade it is an art historian Michael Baxandall 1985 who offers the most precise descrip tion of a technical artifact a Scottish Iron Bridge and who shows in most detail the basic distinctions between delegated actors which remain silent black boxed and the rich series of mediators who remain present in a work of art 309 310 LATOUR the device after making sense of the instructions encoded with Japanese ideograms The detour plus the translation of words and extended arm to steel is a shifting out to be sure but not of the same type as that of a story The steel bar has now taken over my competence as far as keeping my son at arms length is concerned If in our societies there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we ha
12. f nonhuman relations We deal with characters delegates representatives or more nicely lieutenants from the French lieu tenant i e holding the place of for someone else some figurative others nonfigurative some human others nonhuman some competent others incompetent You want to cut through this rich diversity of delegates and artificially create two heaps of refuse society on one side and technology on the other That s your privilege but I have a less messy task in mind A scene a text an automatism can do a lot of things to their prescribed users at close range but most of the effect finally ascribed to them depends on a range of other set ups being aligned For instance the groom closes the door only if there are people reaching the Sociol ogy Department of Walla Walla These people arrive in front of the door only if they have found maps and only if there are roads leading to it and of course people will start bothering about reading the maps getting to Washington state and pushing the door open only if they are convinced that the department is worth visiting I will call this gradient of aligned set ups that endow actors with the pre inscribed competences to find its users a chreod a necessary path in the biologist Waddington s Greek people effortlessly flow through the door and the groom hundreds of times a day recloses the door when it is not stuck The result of such an alignment
13. has not completely solved how to discipline a youngster to reliably fulfill a boring and underpaid duty Although there is now only one human to be disciplined instead of hundreds in practice only dozens because Walla Walla is rather difficult to locate the weak point of the tactic is now revealed if this one 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 damned door will stay open remember that locking it is no solution since this would turn it into a wall and then providing every visitor with the right key is an impossible task Of course the little rat may be punished or even flogged But imagine the headlines Sociologists of science flog porter from poor working class back ground And what if he is black which might very well be the case given the low pay No disciplining a groom is an enormous and costly task that only Hilton Hotels can tackle and that for other reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the door properly closed If we compare the work of disciplining the groom with the work he substitutes for ac cording to the list defined above we see that this delegated character has the opposite effect to that of the hinge A simple task forcing people to close the door is now performed at an incredible cost the minimum effect is obtained with maximum spending and spanking We also notice when drawing the two lists an interesting differen
14. he job And why a flag Why not simply a sign work in progress And why a sign at all Drivers if they are circumspect disciplined and watchful will see for themselves that there is work in progress and will slow down The enunciator a general word for the author of a text or for the mechanics who devised the machine is free to place or not a representation of himself or herself in the script texts or machines The engineer may delegate or not in the flag mover a shape that is similar to him herself This is exactly the same operation as the one I did in pretending that the author of this article was a hardcore technologist from Colombus Ohio If I say we the technologists I propose a picture of the author of the text which has only a vague relation with the author in the flesh in the same way as the engineer delegates in his flag mover a picture of him that bears little resemblance to him her But it would have been perfectly possible for me and for the mechanics to position no figurated character at all as the author im the scripts of our scripts in semiotic parlance there would be no narrator I would just have had to say things like recent developments in sociology of science have shown that instead of I and the mechanics would simply have had to take out the dummy worker and replace it by cranks and pullies Appealing to Gods Here comes the most interesting and saddest lesson of the note posted on the door
15. here a human deals with a series of nonhuman delegates it can also be true of relations among nonhumans In other words when we get into a more complicated lash up than the groom we do not have to stop doing sociology we go on studying role expectation behavior social relations The non figurative character of the actors should not intimidate us The Lieutenants of Our Societies I used the story of the door closer to make a nonhuman delegate familiar to the ears and eyes of sociologists I also used reflexively the semiotic of a story to explain the relations between inscription prescription pre inscription and chreods There is however a crucial difference between texts and machines that I have to point out Machines are lieutenants Technology and Social Relationships they hold the places and the roles delegated to them but this way of shifting is very different from other types Latour 1988b In story telling one calls shifting out any displacement of a character either to another space or to another time or to another character If I tell you Millikan entered the aula I translate the present setting you and me and shift it to another space another time and to other characters Millikan and his audience I the enunciator may decide to appear or to disappear or to be represented by a narrator who tells the story that day I was sitting on the upper row of the aula I1 may also decide to posi
16. here would be no way to get in or out they would be mausoleums or tombs The problem is that if you make holes in the walls anything and anyone can get in and out bears visitors dust rats noise So archi tects invented this hybrid a hole wall often called a door which although common enough A version of this paper was delivered at Twente Holland in September 1987 This paper owes a lot to Madeleine Akrich s work 1 See page 304 for the social deconstruction of the authors SOCIAL PROBLEMS Vol 35 No 3 June 1988 Technology and Social Relationships has always struck me as a miracle of technology The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge pin instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledge hammer or a pick you simply gently push the door I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented this would over complicate the already highly complex story of this door Furthermore and here is the real trick once you have passed through the door you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed you simply push the door gently back I ignore for now the added complication of the pull and push signs 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 a gangster trying to rob a bank plus the work of those who rebuild either
17. humans and even angels are never sufficient in themselves and because there is no one direction going from one type of delegation to the other that it is so useless to impose a priori divisions between which skills are human and which ones are not human which characters are personified and which remain abstract which delegation is forbidden and which is permissible which type of delegation is stronger or more durable than the other In place of these many cumbersome distinctions why not take up a few simple descriptive tools Following Madeleine Akrich s lead we will speak only in terms of scripts or scenes or 305 306 LATOUR scenarios played by human or nonhuman actors which may be either figurative or non figurative Humans are not necessarily figurative for instance you are not allowed to take the highway policeman as an individual chum He she is the representative of authority and if he she is really dumb he she will reject any individualizing efforts from you like smiles jokes bribes or fits of anger He she will fully play the administrative machinery Following Akrich I will call the retrieval of the script from the situation description These descriptions are always in words and appear very much like semiotic commentaries on a text or like a programming language They define actors endow them with competences and make them do things and evaluate the sanction of these actions very much like the narrative program of sem
18. ioticians Although most of the scripts are in practice silent either because they are intra or extra somatic 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 uttered The gradient going from intra somatic to extra somatic skills through discourse is never fully stabi lized and allows many entries revealing the process of translation I have already listed sev eral entries user manuals instruction demonstration or drilling situations in this case a human or a speech synthesizer speaks out the user manual practical thought experiments what would happen if instead of the red light a policemen 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 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 training situation studied by anthropologists where 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 capture these situations in order to write down the scripts The analyst makes a thought experiment by comparing presence absence tables and collating all the actions done by actant
19. iven scene can prevent the inscribed user or reader from behaving differ ently from what was expected nothing that is until the next paragraph The reader in the flesh may totally ignore my definition of him or her The user of the traffic light may well cross on the red Even visitors to the department of sociology may never show up because Walla Walla is too far away in spite of the fact that their behavior and trajectory have been perfectly anticipated by the groom As for the computer user input the cursor might flash for ever without the user being there or knowing what to do There might be an enormous gap between the prescribed user and the user in the flesh a difference as big as the one between the I of a novel and the novelist It is exactly this difference that so much upset the authors of the anonymous appeal posted on the door It is because they could not discipline people with words notes and grooms that they had to appeal to God On another occasion how ever the gap between the two may be nil the prescribed user is so well anticipated so care fully nested inside the scenes so exactly dovetailed that it does what is expected To stay within the same etymological root I would be tempted to call the way actors human or nonhuman tend to extirpate themselves from the prescribed behavior des inscription and the way they accept or happily acquiesce to their lot subscription The problem with scenes is that they are usuall
20. l groups In spite of the works of Marx or Lewis Mumford and the more recent development of a sociology of techniques MacKenzie and Wacjman 1985 Bijker Hughes and Pinch 1986 Winner 1986 Latour 1987 sociologists still feel estranged when they fall upon the bizarre associations of humans with nonhumans Part of their uneasiness has to do with the techni calities of complex objects and with the absence of a convenient vocabulary allowing them to move freely from studying associations of human to associations of nonhumans In this paper I want to contribute to the reinsertion of nonhumans into the mainstream of American sociol ogy by examining an extremely simple technique and offering a coherent vocabulary that could be applied to more complex imbroglios of humans and nonhumans Reinventing the Door On a freezing day in February posted on the door of the Sociology Department at Walla Walla University Washington could be seen a small hand written notice The door closer is on strike for God s sake keep the door closed This fusion of labor relations religion adver tisement semiotics and technique in one single insignificant fact is exactly the sort of thing I want to help describe As a technologist teaching in an engineering school in Colombus Ohio I want to challenge some of the assumptions sociologists often hold about the social context of machines Walls are a nice invention but if there were no holes in them t
21. my computer The results of such distributions of skills between humans and nonhumans is well known members of the department of sociology will safely pass through the slamming door at a good distance from one another visitors unaware of the local cultural condition will crowd through the door and will get bloody noses This story is of the same form as that about the 301 302 LATOUR buses loaded with poor blacks that could not pass under driveways leading to Manhattan parks Winner 1980 So inventors get back to their drawing board and try to imagine a nonhuman character that will not prescribe the same rare local cultural skills to its human users A weak spring might appear to be a good solution Such is not the case because it would substitute for another type of very unskilled and undecided groom who is never sure about the door s or his own status is it a hole or a wall Am I a closer or an opener If it is both at once you can forget about the heat In computer parlance a door is an OR not an AND gate I am a great fan of hinges but I must confess that I admire hydraulic door closers much more especially the old copper plated heavy one that slowly closed the main door of our house in Colombus Ohio I am enchanted by the addition to the spring of an hydraulic piston which easily draws up the energy of those who open the door and retains it then gives it back slowly with a subtle variety of implacable firmness that one coul
22. ocial Studies of Science 17 257 93 Latour Bruno 1987 Science in Action Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1988a How to write The Prince for machines as well as for machinations Pp 20 63 in Brian Elliot ed Technology and Social Change Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 1988b A relativistic account of Einstein s relativity Social Studies of Science 18 3 44 MacKenzie Donald and Judy Wacjman eds 1985 The Social Shaping of Technology A Reader Philadelphia Milton Keynes and Open University Press Mumford Lewis 1966 The Myth of the Machine New York Harcourt Strum Shirley and Bruno Latour 1987 Redefining the social link from baboons to humans Social Science Information 26 783 802 Winner Langdon 1986 The Whale and the Reactor A Search for the Limits in an Age of High Technology Chicago University of Chicago Press 1980 Do artefacts have politics Daedalus 109 121 36
23. of set ups is to decrease the number of occasions in which words are used most of the actions become silent familiar incorporated in human or in nonhuman bodies making the analyst s job so much harder Even the classic debates about freedom determination predetermination brute force or efficient will debates which are the twentieth century version of seventeenth century discussions on grace will be slowly eroded away Since you have reached this point it means I was right in saying earlier that you were not at all free to stop reading the paper Positioning myself cleverly along a chreod and adding a few other tricks of my own I led you kere or did I Maybe you skipped most of it maybe you did not understand a word of it oh you undisciplined American sociologist readers There is one loose end in my story why did the little automatic rat go on strike The answer to this is the same as for the question earlier of why few people show up in Walla Walla It is not because a piece of behavior is prescribed by an inscription that the predeter mined characters will show up on time and do the job expected of them This is true of humans but it is truer of nonhumans In this case the hydraulic piston did its job but not the spring that collaborated with it Any of the words above may be used to describe a set up at any level and not only at the simple one I chose for the sake of clarity It does not have to be limited to the case w
24. ple Are they going to be so well behaved Closing a door 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 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 choice so well analyzed by Mumford 1966 is offered to you either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only function is to open and close the door This is called a groom or a porter from the French word for door or a gatekeeper or a janitor or a concierge or a turnkey or a gaoler The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behavior No matter who these others are and where they come from the groom will always take care of the door A nonhuman the hinges plus a human the groom have solved the hole wall dilemma Solved Not quite First of all if the department pays for a porter they will have no money left to buy coffee or books or to invite eminent foreigners to give lectures If they give the poor little boy other duties besides that of porter then he will not be present most of the time and the damned door will stay open Even if they had money to keep him there we are now faced with a problem that two hundred years of capitalism
25. s if I take this one away this and that other action will be modified I will call the translation of any script from one repertoire to a more durable one transcrip tion or inscription or encoding Translation does not have here only its linguistic meaning but also the religious one translation of the remains of St Christel and the artistic one translat ing the feelings of Calder into bronze This definition does not imply that the direction al ways 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 man by a traffic light One goes from machines to bodies whereas the other goes the other way Specialists of robotics have very much 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 moved away from incompetent humans I will call prescription whatever a scene presupposes from its transcribed actors and authors this is very much like role expectation in sociology except that it may be inscribed or encoded in the machine For instance a Renaissance Italian painting is designed to be viewed from a specific angle of view prescribed by the vanishing lines exactly like a traffic light expects that i
26. s arm or more prosaically its delegated action may be opposed by a foot salesman are said to be expert at this The foot may in turn be delegated to a carpet or anything that keeps the butler in check although I am always amazed by the number of objects that fail this trial of force and I have very often seen the door I just wedged open politely closing when I turned my back to it As a technologist I could claim that provided you put aside maintenance and the few sectors of population that are discriminated against the groom does its job well closing the door behind you constantly firmly and slowly It shows in its humble way how three rows of delegated nonhuman actants hinges springs and hydraulic pistons replace 90 percent of the time either an undisciplined bell boy who is never there when needed or for the general public the program instructions that have to do with remembering to close the door when it is cold The hinge plus the groom is the technologist s dream of efficient action at least it was until the sad day when I saw the note posted on Walla Walla Sociology Department s door with which I started this article the groom is on strike So not only have we been able to delegate the act of closing the door from the human to the nonhuman we have also been able to delegate the little rat s lack of discipline and maybe the union that goes with it On strike Fancy that Nonhumans stopping work and claiming what P
27. s sort of moralizing that is so irritating for technologists because the automatic groom is already anthropomorphic through and through Anthropos and morphos to gether mean either what has human shape or what gives shape to humans Well the groom is indeed anthropomorphic and in three senses first it has been made by men it is a construc tion second it substitutes for the actions of people and is a delegate that permanently occu pies the position of a human and third it shapes human action by prescribing back what sort of people should pass through the door And yet some would forbid us to ascribe feelings to this thoroughly anthropomorphic creature to delegate labor relations to project that is to say to translate other human properties to the groom What of those many other innovations that have endowed much more sophisticated doors with the ability to see you arrive in ad vance electronic eyes or to ask for your identity electronic passes or to slam shut or open in case of danger But anyway who are you you the sociologists to decide forever the real and final shape of humans to trace with confidence the boundary between what is a real delegation and what is a mere projection to sort out forever and without due inquiry the three different kinds of anthropomorphism I listed above Are we not shaped by nonhu man grooms although I admit only a very little bit Are they not our brethren Do
28. t Archimedes days a very good definition of a lever and of power the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely in order to produce the maximum effect Am I alluding to machines or to Syracuse s King I don t know and it does not matter since the King and Archimedes fused the two minimaxes into one single story told by Plutarch the defense of Syracuse I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the social construction of techniques and not at a hypothetical social context they are not equipped to grasp This little point having been made let me go on with the 299 300 LATOUR story we will understand later why I do not really need your permission to go on and why nevertheless you are free not to go on although only relatively so Delegating to Humans There is a problem with doors Visitors push them to get in or pull on them to get out or vice versa but then the door remains open That is instead of the door you have a gaping hole in the wall through which for instance cold rushes in and heat rushes out Of course you could imagine that people living in the building or visiting the department of sociology would be a well disciplined lot after all sociologists are meticulous people They will learn to close the door behind them and retransform the momentary hole into a well sealed wall The problem is that discipline is not the main characteristic of peo
29. te 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 An unskilled nonhuman groom thus presupposes a skilled human user It is always a trade off I will call after Madeleine Akrich the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman delegates prescription Akrich 1987 How can these prescriptions be brought out By replacing them by strings of sentences usually in the imperative that are uttered silently and continuously by the mechanisms for the benefit of those who are mechanized do this do that behave this way don t go that way Such sentences look very much like a program ming language This substitution of words for silence can be made in the analyst s thought experiments but also by instruction booklets or explicitly in any training session through the voice of a demonstrator or instructor or teacher The military are especially good at shouting them out through the mouthpiece of human instructors who delegate back to themselves the task of explaining in the rifle s name the characteristics of the rifle s ideal user As Akrich notes prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms In spite of the constant weeping of moralists no human is as relentlessly moral as a machine especially if it is she is he is they are as user friendly as
30. termination when they draw up their prescriptions This is what Gerson and his colleagues call articulation work Fujimura 1987 A lovely example of efforts at pre inscription is provided by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane where the hero not only bought a theater for his singing wife to be applauded in but also bought the journals that were to do the reviews bought off the art critics themselves and paid the audience to show up all to no avail since the wife eventually quit Humans and nonhumans are very very undisciplined no matter what you do and how many predeterminations you are able to control upstream of the action Drawing a side conclusion in passing we can call sociologism the claim that given the competence and pre inscription of human users and authors you can read out the scripts nonhuman actors have to play and technologism the symmetric claim that given the compe tence and pre inscription of the nonhuman actors you can easily read out and deduce the 307 308 LATOUR behavior prescribed to authors and users From now on these two absurdities will I hope disappear from the scene since the actors at any point may be human or nonhuman and since the displacement or translation or transcription makes the easy reading out of one repertoire into the next impossible The bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations is a mirror image of the other no less bizarre idea that techniques might be made up o
31. that is from an autonomous body of knowledge to force through the intermediary situation of worded injunctions as the Walla Walla door would suggest It also goes the other way Although the deskilling thesis appears to be the general case always go from intra somatic to extra somatic skills never rely on undisciplined men but always on safe delegated nonhumans this is far from true For instance red lights are usually respected at least when they are sophisticated enough to integrate traffic flows through sensors The delegated police men standing there day and night is respected even though it has no whistles gloved hands and body to enforce this respect Imagined collisions with the other cars or with the absent policemen are enough to keep drivers and cars in check The thought experiment what would happen if the delegated character was not there is the same as the one I recom mended above to size up its function The same incorporation from written injunction to body skills is at work with car user manuals No one I guess will cast more than a cursory glance at the manual before igniting the engine There is a large body of skills that we have now so well embodied or incorporated that the mediations of the written instructions are useless From extra somatic they have become intra somatic Incorporation in human or in nonhuman bodies is also left to the authors engineers Offering a Coherent Vocabulary It is because humans non
32. the figurative nonhuman character who which says welcome to Macintosh when you switch on your computer The reason for this use of pseudonym was the opinion of the editors that no American sociologist is willing to read things that refer to specific places and times which are not American Thus I inscribed in my text American scenes so as to decrease the gap between the prescribed reader and the pre inscribed one Editors Note Since we believed these locations to be unimportant to Bruno Latour s argument we urged him to remove specific place references that might have been unfamiliar to U S readers and thus possibly distracting His solution seems to have proven our point Corre spondence to the author in the flesh should go to Centre de Sociologie de l Innovation Ecole Nationale Sup rieure des Mines 62 boulevard Saint Michel 75006 Paris France Technology and Social Relationships I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this fatal February day the door was open Do not accuse God though because the note did not appeal directly to Him I know I should have added Her for affirmative action reasons but I wonder how theologians would react God is not accessible without mediators The anonymous authors knew their cate chisms well so instead of asking for a direct miracle God Him Herself holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel as has happened in several occasions for instance
33. the gentle pushing or pulling they have to do in order to fulfill the same tasks Compare the two columns the enormous effort on the right is balanced by the little one on the left and this thanks to hinges I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one by the word translation or delegation I will say that we have delegated or translated or displaced or shifted out to the hinge the work of reversibly solving the hole wall dilemma Calling on a sociologist friend I do not have to do this work nor even to think about it it was delegated by the carpenter to a character the hinge that I will call a nonhuman notice that I did not say inhuman I simply enter the department of sociology As a more general descriptive rule every time you want to know what a nonhuman does simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role or function of this little figure Before going on let me cash out one of the side benefits of this table in effect we have drawn a scale balance where tiny efforts balance out mighty weights The scale we drew at least the one that you drew if you have obeyed my orders I mean followed my advice 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 this is also since at leas
34. they not deserve consideration With your self serving and self righteous social problems you always plead against machines and for deskilled workers are you aware of your discriminatory bi ases You discriminate between the human and the inhuman I do not hold this bias but see only actors some human some nonhuman some skilled some unskilled that exchange their properties So the note posted on the door is an accurate one It gives a humorous but exact render ing of the groom s behavior it is not working it is on strike notice that the word strike is also an anthropomorphism carried from the nonhuman repertoire to the human one which proves again that the divide is untenable What happens is that sociologists confuse the di chotomy human inhuman with another one figurative non figurative If I say that Hamlet is the figuration of depression among the aristocratic class I move from a personal figure to a less personal one class If I say that Hamlet stands for doom and gloom I use less figurative entities and if I claim that he represents western civilization I use non figurative abstrac tions Still they all are equally actants that is to say entities that do things either in Shake speare s artful plays or in the commentators more tedious tomes The choice of granting actants figurativity or not is left entirely to the authors It is exactly the same for techniques We engineers are the authors of these subtl
35. tion you and any reader inside the story had you been there you would have been convinced by Millikan s experiments There is no limit to the number of shiftings out a story may be built with For instance IT may well stage a dialogue inside the aula between two characters who are telling a story about what happened at the Academy of Science in Washington DC In that case the aula is the place from which narrators shift out to tell a story about the Academy and they may or may not shift back in the aula to resume the first story about Millikan I may also shift in the entire series of nested stories to close mine and come back to the situation I started from you and me All these displacements are well known in literature departments and make up the craft of tal ented writers No matter how clever and crafty are our novelists they are no match for engineers Engi neers constantly shift out characters in other spaces and other times devise positions for human and nonhuman users break down competences that they then redistribute to many different actants build complicate narrative programs and sub programs that are evaluated and judged Unfortunately there are many more literary critiques than there are technologists and the subtle beauties of techno social imbroglios escape the attention of the literate public One of the reasons for this lack of concern may be the peculiar nature of the shifting out that generates machines
36. ts users will watch it from the street and not sideways In the same way as they presuppose a user traffic lights presuppose that there is someone who has regulated the lights so that they have a regular rhythm When the mechanism is stuck it is very amusing to see how long it takes drivers before deciding that the traffic light is no longer mastered by a reliable author User input in programming language is another very telling example of this inscription in the automatism of a living character whose behavior is both free and predetermined This inscription of author and users in the scene is very much the same as that of a text I already showed how the author of this article was ascribed wrongly to be a technologist in Technology and Social Relationships Ohio It is the same for the reader I have many times used you and even you sociolo gists If you remember well I even ordered you to draw up a table or advised you to do so I also asked your permission to go on with the story In doing so I built up an inscribed reader to whom I prescribed qualities and behavior as surely as the traffic light or the painting pre pared a position for those looking at them Did you subscribe to this definition of yourself Or worse is there any one at all to read this text and occupy the position prepared for the reader This question is a source of constant difficulties for those who do not grasp the basics of semio tics Nothing in a g
37. ve delegated competences it means that what defines our social relations is for the most part prescribed back to us by nonhumans Knowledge morality craft force sociability are not properties of humans but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters Since each of those delegates ties together part of our social world it means that studying social relations without the nonhumans is impossible Latour 1988a or adapted only to complex primate societies like those of baboons Strum and Latour 1987 One of the tasks of sociology is to do for the masses of nonhumans that make up our modern societies what it did so well for the masses of ordinary and despised humans that make up our society To the people and ordi nary folks should now be added the lively fascinating and honorable ordinary mechanism If the concepts habits and preferred fields of sociologists have to be modified a bit to accom modate these new masses it is small price to pay References Akrich Madeleine 1987 Comment d crite les objects techniques Technique et Culture 5 49 63 Baxandall Michael 1985 Patterns of Invention On the Historical Explanation of Pictures New Haven CT Yale University Press Bijker Wiebe Thomas Hugues and Trevor Pinch eds 1986 New Developments in the Social Studies of Technology Cambridge MA MIT Press Fujimura Joan l 1987 Constructing do able problems in cancer research articulating alignment S
38. y well prepared for anticipating users or readers who are at close quarter For instance the groom is quite good in its anticipation that people will push the door open and give it the energy to reclose it It is very bad at doing anything to help people arrive there After fifty centimeters it is helpless and cannot act for example to bring people to Washington state Still no scene is prepared without a precon ceived idea of what sort of actors will come to occupy the prescribed positions This is why I said that although you were free not to go on with this paper you were only relatively so Why Because I know you are hard working serious American sociologists reading a serious issue of Social Problems on sociology of science and technology So I can safely bet that I have a good chance of having you read the paper thoroughly So my injunction read the paper up to the end you sociologist is not very risky I will call pre inscription all the work that has to be done upstream of the scene and all the things assimilated by an actor human or nonhu man before coming to the scene as a user or as an author For instance how to drive a car is basically pre inscribed in any western youth years before he or she comes to passing the driving licence test hydraulic pistons were also pre inscribed for slowly giving back the en ergy gathered years before innovators brought them to bear on automated grooms Engineers can bet on this pre de
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