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Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane

1. 2924 Madeleine Akrich 9 In the French there is a play of words on dessein design in the sense of plan and dessin design in the sense of drawing The two have the same Etymol ae 10 I am drawing here on the distinction between marchand and civique discussed by Boltanski and Thevenot 1987 11 Naturally the different parts of the system are reconnected automatically once conditions change breakdown is relevant to this issue and deserves further 12 The question of ue consideration A breakdown relates closely to the definition I have offered of a technical object This is because it can only be understood as a part of pene that is as the collapse of the relationship between a piece of apparatus an bes A breakdown is thus a test of the solidity of the sociotechnical network ee iz by a technical object The rapidity with which the search for the causes of break down can be completed is a measure of this solidity Ean 13 Perhaps it would be better to say that the stablization of a ieehnie sheet 3 inseparable from the constitution ofa form of knowledge of greater or aa Semin ance This hypothesis is powerfully supported by the case described by Misa volume there an industry a market and the notion about what was to count as steel were all constructed simultaneously 14 As is well known Foucault 1975 has described the links between the technol ogy of the penitentiary power relations and ne
2. groom is Frenglish for an automated door closer or butler This fusion of labor relations religion advertisement and technique in one insig nificant fact is exactly the sort of thing I want to describe in order to discover the missing masses of our society As a technologist teaching in the School of Mines an engineering institution I want to chal lenge 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 there would be no way to get in or out they would be mausoleums 228 Bruno Latour or tombs The problem is that if you make holes in the walls any thing and anyone can get in and out cows visitors dust rats noise La Halle aux Cuirs is ten meters from the Paris ring road and worst of all cold La Halle aux Cuirs is far to the north of Paris So architects invented this hybrid a wall hole often called a door which although common enough 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 sledgehammer or a pick you simply gently push the door I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented this would overcomplicate the al ready highly complex story of La Villette s door furthermore and here is the real trick once you have passed through the door you do not have to find trowel and c
3. but through a detour and a translation I now hold together my will and my son The detour plus the translation of words and extended arm into steel isa 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 arm s length is concerned From speech and words and flesh it has become steel and silence and extrasomatic Whereas a narrative program no matter how complicated always remain a text the program of action substitutes part of its character to other nontextual elements This divide between text and technology is at the heart of the myth of Frankenstein Latour 1992 When Victor s monster escape the laboratory in Shelley s novel is it a metaphor of fictional characters that seem to take up a life of their own Or is it the metaphor of technical characters that do take up a life of their own because they cease to be texts and become flesh legs arms and movements The first version is not very interesting because in spite of the novelist s clich a semiotic character in a text always needs the reader to offer it an independant life The second version is not very interesting either because the autonomous thrust of a techni AND Association Programs c Antiprograms rder do not standin Robinson is left loose and utterly middle of the car uninterested shift from a disobedient to an obedient kid
4. devious engineer could have linked the engine ignition to an electric sensor in the seat belt so that I could not even have started the car before having put it on Where would the morality be in those two extreme cases In the electric currents flowing in the machine between the switch and the sensor Or in the electric currents flowing down my spine in the automatism of my routinized behavior In both cases the result would be the same from an outside observer say a watchful policeman this assembly of a driver and a car obeys 226 Bruno Latour Normal Conditions Emergency Conditions Seat Belt Seat Belt 4 Ratchet Mechanism A Bar Pendulum Pendulum Figure 8 1 The designers of the seat belt take on themselves and then shift back to the belt contradictory programs the belt should be lenient and firm easy to put on and solidly fastened while ready to be unbuckled in a fraction of a second it should be unobtrusive and strap in the whole body The object does not reflect the social It does more It transcribes and displaces the contradictory interests of people and things the law in such a way that it is impossible for a car to be at the same time moving AND to have the driver without the belt on A law of the excluded middle has been built rendering logically inconceivable as well as morally unbearable a driver without a seat belt Not quite Because I feel so irritated to be forced to behave well
5. shift from words to steet Steel ber and Robinson and order firmly attached to one another oR Substitution Figure 8 7 The translation diagram allows one to map out the story of a script by following the two dimensions AND the association the latitude so to speak and OR the substitution the longitude The plot is defined by the line that separates the programs of action chosen for the analysis and the antiprograms The point of the story is that it is impossible to move in the AND direction without paying the price of the OR dimension that is renegotiating the sociotechnical assemblage 252 Bruno Latour cal artifact is a worn out commonplace made up by bleeding heart moralists who have never noticed the throngs of humans necessary to keep a machine alive No the beauty of Shelley s myth is that we cannot chose between the two versions parts of the narrative pro gram are still texts others are bits of flesh and steel and this mix ture is indeed a rather curious monster i f To bring this chapter to a close and differentiate once again between texts and artifacts I will take as my final example not a flamboyant Romantic monster but a queer little surrealist one the Berliner key 8 1 push the key in the keyhole and on the other side I have to relock it in order to get it back 2 I turn it anti clockwise T 4 have to push the by 270 key through the hole 3 try to withdraw the ke
6. that exchange their properties So the note posted on the door is accurate it gives with humor an exact rendering of the groom s behavior it is not working it is on strike notice that the word strike is a rationalization carried from the nonhuman repertoire to the human one which proves again that the divide is untenable Built in Users and Authors The debates around anthropomorphism arise because we believe that there exist humans and nonhumans without realizing that this attribution of roles and action is also a choice 3 The best way to understand this choice is to compare machines with texts since the inscription of builders and users in a mechanism is very much the same as that of authors and readers in a story In order to exemplify this point I have now to confess that I am not a technolo gist I built in my article a made up author and I also invented possible readers whose reactions and beliefs I anticipated Since the beginning I have many times used the you and even you sociolo gists I even asked you to draw up a table and 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 a traffic light or a painting prepare a position for those looking at them Did you underwrite or subscribe this definition of yourself Or worse is there any one at all to read this text and occupy the position prepar
7. A nonhuman hinges plus another nonhuman groom have solved the wall hole 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 translated or delegated to them In other words when humans are displaced and deskilled nonhumans have to be upgraded and re skilled 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 faces For sure springs do the job of replacing grooms but they play the role of a very rude uneducated and dumb 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 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 An unskilled nonhuman groom thus presupposes a skilled human user It is always a trade off I will call after Madeleine Akrich s paper this volume the behavior imposed back onto the human by nonhuman delegates prescription 8 Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms In spite of the constant weeping of moralists no human is as relentlessly mo
8. Cuirs a differential accumulation of warm historians knowledge and also alas a lot of paperwork the hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order or information Ifyou let the drafts get inside these renowned courants d air so dangerous to French health the paper drafts may never get outside to the publishers Now draw two columns if I am not allowed to give orders to the reader then I offer it as a piece of strongly worded advice in the The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 229 right hand column list the work people would have to do if they had no door in the left hand column write down the gentle pushing or pulling they have to do to fulfill the same tasks Compare the two columns the enormous effort on the right is balahced by the small one on the left and this is all thanks to hinges I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one by the words displacement or translation or delegation or shifting 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 Calling on Robert Fox I do not have to do this work nor even think about it it was delegated by the carpenter to a character the hinge which I will call a nonhuman I simply enter La Halle aux Cuirs As a more general descriptive rule every time you want to know what a non human does simp
9. MANUAL PAGE 30 This instruction might be backed up by homemade labels DON T ADD THE TONER YOURSELF CALL THE SECRETARY which limit still further the number of people able to troubleshoot But then other more serious crises are addressed by labels like CALL THE TECHNICAL STAFF AT THIS NUMBER while there are parts of the machine that are sealed off entirely with red labels such as DO NOT OPEN DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE HEAT or CALL THE POLICE Each of these messages addresses a different audience from the widest everyone with the rather largely disseminated competence of using photocopying ma chines to the narrowest the rare bird able to troubleshoot and who of course is never there Circumscription only defines how a setup itself has built in plugs and interfaces as the name indicates this tracing of circles walls and entry points inside the text or the machine does not prove that readers and users will obey There is nothing sadder that an obsolete computer with all its nice interfaces but no one on earth to plug them in Drawing a side conclusion in passing we can call soctologism the claim that given the competence pre inscription and circumscrip tion of human users and authors you can read out the scripts non human actors have to play and technologism the symmetric claim that given the competence and pre inscription of nonhuman actors you can easily read out and deduce the behavior prescribed
10. Soft humans and weak moralities are all sociologists can get The society they try to recompose with bodies and norms constantly crumbles Something is missing something that should be strongly social and highly moral Where can they find it Everywhere but they too often refuse to see it in spite of much new work in the sociology of artifacts T expect sociologists to be much more fortunate than cosmologists because they will soon discover their missing mass 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 non human masses that beg us for understanding Description of a Door I will start my inquiry by following a little script written by anony mous hands On a freezing day in February posted on the door of La Halle aux Cuirs at La Villette in Paris where Robert Fox s group was trying to convince the French to take up social history of science could be seen a small handwritten notice The Groom Is On Strike For God s Sake Keep The Door Closed
11. 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 this note is the humor of attributing a human characteristic to a failure that is usually considered purely technical This humor however is more profound than in the notice they could have posted The groom is not working I con stantly 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 sociologists as a scandalous breach of natural bar riers 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 non human cold technical object one by nature impervious to any feeling This is anthropomorphism which for them is a sin akin to zoophily but much worse It is this sort of moralizing that is so irritating for technologists because the automatic groom is already anthropomorphic through and through It is well known that the French like etymology well here is another one anthropos and morphos together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans The groom is indeed anthropomorphic in three senses first it has been made by humans second it substitutes for th
12. large hotels can tackle and then for other reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the door properly closed The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 231 If we compare the work of disciplining the groom with the work he substitutes for according 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 discipline We also notice when drawing the two lists an interesting difference in the first relationship hinges vis vis the work of many people you not only had a reversal of forces the lever allows gentle manipulations to displace heavy weights but also a modification of time schedule 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 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 con
13. replaced by real officers 23 Why did the automatic groom go on strike The answers to this are the same as for the question posed earlier of why no one showed up at La Halle aux Cuirs 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 employed above may be used to describe a setup 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 where a human deals with a series of nonhuman delegates it can also be true of relations among non 258 Bruno Latour humans yes you sociologists there are also relations among things and social relations at that 24 For the study of user s manual see Norman 1988 and Boullier Akrich and Le Goaziou 1990 25 Re inscription is the same thing as inscription or translation or delegation but seen in its movement The aim of sociotechnical study is thus to follow the dynamic of re inscription transforming a silent artifact into a polemical process A lovely example of efforts at re inscription of what was badly pre inscribed outside of the setting is provided by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane where the hero not only bought a theater for his singing wife to be applauded
14. the door and the cook no longer has to turn the skewer The enunciator a general word for the author of a text or for the mechanics who devised the spit is free to place or not a representation of him or herself in the script texts or machines Le Petit Bertrand is a delegated version of whoever is responsible for the mechanism This is exactly the same operation as the one in which I pretended that Figure 8 3 i Le Petit Bertrand is a mechanical meat roaster from the sixteenth century that ornaments the kitchen of the Hotel Dieu de Beaune the hospital where the author was born The big handle bottom right is the one that allows the humans to wind up the mechanism the small handle top right is made to allow a little nonhuman anthropomorphic character to move the whole spit Although the movement is prescribed back by the mechanism since the Petit Bertrand smiles and turns his head from left to right it is believed that it is at the origin of the force This secondary mechanism to whom is ascribed the origin of the force is unrelated to the primary mechanism which gathers a large scale human a handle a stone a crank and a brake to regulate the movement The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 243 4 a policeman human figurative A the cut out of a policeman non human figu rative sign a a flag waving robot non human GRADIENT figurative a sign non human non figurative s
15. to authors and users From now on these two absurdities will I hope disappear from the scene because the actors at any point may be human or nonhuman and the displacement or translation or tran scription makes impossible the easy reading out of one repertoire and into the next 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 of nonhuman relations We deal with characters delegates representatives lieutenants from the French lieu plus tenant i e holding the place of for someone else some figurative others nonfigurative some human others nonhuman some competent others incompetent Do you want to cut through this rich diversity of delegates and artificially 240 Bruno Latour create two heaps of refuse society on one side and technology on the other That is your privilege but I have a less bungled task in mind A scene a text an automatism can do a lot of things to their prescribed users at the range close or far that is defined by the circumscription but most of the effect finally ascribed to them depends on lines of other setups being aligned For instance the groom closes the door only if there are people reaching the Centre d Histoire des Sciences these people arrive in front of the door only if they have found maps another delegate with the built in pre scription I like m
16. Do not accuse God though because the note did not make a direct appeal God is not accessible without mediators the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well so instead of asking for a direct miracle God holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an angel as has happened on several occasions for instance when Saint Peter was delivered from his prison they appealed to the respect for God in human hearts This was their mistake In our secular times this is no longer enough Nothing seems to do the job nowadays of disciplining men and women 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 French drivers is still a good traffic jam You seem to 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 up 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 246 Bruno Latour 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 the notice and need to be reminded by s
17. a negotiation to associate dissident elements requires more and more elements to be tied together and more and more shifts to other matters We are now witnessing in technology studies the same displacement that has happened in science studies during the last ten years It is not that society and social relations invade the certainty of science or the efficiency of machines It is that society itself is to be rethought from top to bottom once we add to it the facts and the artifacts that make up large sections of our social ties What appears in the place of the two ghosts society and technology is not simply a hybrid object a little bit of efficiency and a little bit of sociologizing but a sui generis object the collective thing the trajectory of the front line between programs and anti programs It is too full of humans to look like the technology of old but it is too full of nonhumans to look like the social theory of the past The missing masses are in our traditional social theories not in the supposedly cold efficient and inhuman technologies Notes This paper owes to many discussions held at the Centre de Sociologie de P Innova tion especially with John Law the honorary member from Keele and Madeleine The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 255 Akrich It is particularly indebted to Frangoise Bastide who was still working on these questions of semiotics of technology a few months before her death I had no room to i
18. and I no longer try to foolishly stop him with my extended right arm he firmly holds the bar that protects him against my braking I have delegated the continuous injunction of my voice and extension of my right arm with dimin ishing 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 250 Bruno Latour wallet the second to my tool box 200 francs and five minutes later I had fixed the device after making sense of the instructions encoded with Japanese ideograms e We may be able to follow these detours that are characteristic of the technical form of delegation by adapting a linguistic tool Linguists differentiate the syntagmatic dimension of a sentence from the paradigmatic aspect The syntagmatic dimension is the possibility of associating more and more words in a grammatically correct sen tence for instance going from the barber to the barber goes fishing to the barber goes fishing with his friend the plumber is what linguists call moving through the syntagmatic dimension The number of elements tied together increases and nevertheless the sentence is still meaningful The paradigmatic dimension is the possi bility in a sentence of a given length of substituting a word for another while still maintaining a grammatically correct sentence Thus going from the barber goes fishing to the plumber goes fishing to the but
19. centrated at the time of installation whereas the other is con tinuous 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 The first one is Newtonian the second Aristotelian which is simply a way of repeating that the second is nonhuman and the other human A profound temporal shift takes place when nonhumans are appealed to time is folded Delegation to Nonhumans It is at this point that you have a relatively new choice either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated nonhuman character whose only function is to open and close the door This is called a door closer or a groom groom is a French trademark that is now part of the common language The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one nonhuman and may safely leave the others bellboys 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 232 Bruno Latour will always take care of the door in any weather and at any time of the day
20. cher goes fishing is a tantamount to moving through the paradigmatic dimension Linguists claim that these two dimensions allow them to describe the system of any language Of course for the analysis of artifacts we do not have a structure and the definition of a grammatically cor rect expression is meaningless But if by substitution we mean the technical shifting to another matter then the two dimensions become a powerful means of describing the dynamic of an artifact The AND Association ing with his friend the plumber SYNTAGMATIC the barber goes fishing with S p DIMENSION the plumber his buddy the butcher je hisenemy the maid biking doa the rater OR PARADIGMATIC DIMENSION Substitution Figure 8 6 4 Linguists define meaning as the intersection of a horizontal line of association the syntagm and a vertical line of substitution the paradigm The touchstone in linguistics is the decision made by the competent speaker that a substitution OR or an association AND is grammatically correct in the language under consideration For instance the last sentence is incorrect The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 251 syntagmatic dimension becomes the AND dimension how many elements are tied together and the paradigmatic dimension be comes the OR dimension how many translations are necessary in order to move through the AND dimension I could n t tie Robin son to the order
21. cs 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 7 See Authier 1989 on Plutarch s Archimedes 8 We 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 its users will watch it from the street and not sideways French engineers often hide the lights directed toward the side street so as to hide the state of the signals thus preventing the strong temptation to rush through the crossing at the first hint that the lights are about to be green this prescription of who is allowed to watch the signal is very frustrating 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 9 In this type 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 set of competences is distributed through various entities 10 Interestingly enough the oldest Greek engi
22. d 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 exclusive 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 heavy copper plated one that slowly closed the main door of our house in Aloxe Corton I am enchanted by the addition to the spring of a hydraulic piston which easily draws up the energy of those who open the door retains it and then gives it back slowly with a subtle type of implaca ble firmness that one could expect from a well trained butler Espe cially clever is its way of extracting energy from each unwilling 234 Bruno Latour unwitting passerby My sociologist friends at the School of Mines 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 of the problems though To be sure the hydraulic doo
23. e actions of people and is a delegate that permanently occupies 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 translate other human properties to the groom What of those many other innova 236 Bruno Latour tions that have endowed much more sophisticated doors with the ability to see you arrive in advance electronic eyes to ask for your identity electronic passes or to slam shut in case of danger But anyway who are sociologists to decide the real and final shape morphos of humans anthropos To trace with confidence the bound ary 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 nonhuman grooms although I admit only a very little bit Are they not our brethren Do they not deserve consideration With your self serving and self righteous social studies of technology you always plead against machines and for deskilled workers are you aware of your discriminatory biases You discriminate between the human and the inhuman I do not hold this bias this one at least and see only actors some human some nonhuman some skilled some unskilled
24. ed for the reader This question is a source of constant difficulties for those who are unaware of the basics of semi The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 237 otics or of technology Nothing in a given scene can prevent the inscribed user or reader from behaving differently 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 La Halle aux Cuirs may never show up because it is too complicated to find the place 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 forever 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 14 It is exactly this difference that upset the authors of the anonymous appeal on which I comment On other occasions however the gap between the two may be nil the prescribed user is so well anticipated so carefully nested inside the scenes so exactly dovetailed that it does what is expected The problem with scenes is that they are usually well prepared for anticipating users or readers who are at close quarters For in stance the groom is quite good in its anticipation that people wil
25. eenth time I have screamed at my son Robinson Don t sit in 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 too old for a baby seat and not old enough for a seat belt and from small families without other persons to hold them safely with cars with two separated front seats and head rests It is a small market but nicely analyzed by the German manufacturers and given the price it surely pays off handsomely This description of myself and the small category into which I am happy to belong is transcribed in the device a steel bar with strong attachments connecting the head rests 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 To be honest and give credit where credit is due I must say that Antoine Hennion has a similar device in his car which I had seen the day before so I really looked for it in the store instead of coming across it as I wrongly said which means that a there is some truth in studies of dissemination by imitation b if I describe this episode in as much detail as the door I will never been able to talk about the work done by the historians of technology at La Villette Making a short story already too long Ino longer scream at Robinson
26. elations between inscribed and real users However Norman speaks only about dysfunction in the interfaces with the final user and never considers the shaping of the artifact by the engineer themselves 15 To stay within the same etymological root we call the way actants human or nonhuman tend to extirpate themselves from the prescribed behavior de inscription and the way they accept or happily acquiesce to their lot subscription 16 We 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 nonhuman before coming to the scene as a user or an author For instance how to drive a car is basically pre inscribed in any Western youth years before it comes to passing the driving test hydraulic pistons were also pre inscribed for slowly giving back the energy gathered years before innovators brought them to bear on automated grooms Engineers can bet on this predetermination when they draw up their prescriptions This is what is called articulation work Fujimura 1987 17 We call circumscription the organization in the setting of its own limits and of its own demarcation doors plugs hall introductions 18 See Suchman for a description of such a setting 1987 19 We call ascription the attribution of an effect to one aspect of the setup This new decision about attributing efficiency for instance to a person s genius to workers efforts to users
27. ement 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 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 a door Anything could escape from or penetrate into La Halle aux Cuirs and soon there would be complete equilibrium between the depressing and noisy surrounding area and the inside of the building Some technologists including the present writer in Material Resistance A Textbook 1984 have written that techniques are always involved when asymmetry or irreversibil ity are the goal it might appear that doors are a striking counter example because they maintain the wall hole in a reversible state the allusion to Maxwell s demon clearly shows however that such is not the case the reversible door is the only way to trap irreversibly inside La Halle aux
28. erence is that the latter is an anthropomorphism and the former a techno morphism or phusimorphism For instance a meat roaster in the H tel Dieu de Beaune the little groom called le Petit Bertrand is the delegated author of the movement figure 8 3 This little man is as famous in Beaune as is the Mannekenpis in Brussels Of course he is not the one who does the turning a hidden heavy stone collects the force applied when the human demonstrator or the cook turn a heavy handle that winds up a cord around a drum equipped with a ratchet Obviously le Petit Bertrand believes he is the one doing the job because he not only smiles but also moves his head from side to side with obvious pride while turning his little handle When we were kids even though we had seen our father wind up the machine and put away the big handle we liked to believe that the little guy was moving the spit The irony of the Petit Bertrand is that although the delega tion to mechanisms aims at rendering any human turnspit useless the mechanism is ornamented with a constantly exploited character working all day long Although this turnspit story offers the opposite case from that of the door closer in terms of figuration the groom on the door does not look like a groom but really does the same job whereas le Petit Bertrand does look like a groom but is entirely passive they are similar in terms of delegation you no longer need to close
29. f an artifact becomes fascinating when you see that every wheel and crank is the possible answer to an objection The program of action is in practice the answer to an antiprogram against which the mechanism braces itself Looking at the mechanism alone is like watching half the court during a tennis game it appears as so many meaningless moves What analysts of artifacts have to do is similar to what we all did when studying scientific texts we added the other half of the court 26 The scientific literature looked dull but when the agonistic field to which it reacts was brought back in it became as interesting as an opera The same with seat belts road bumpers and grooms 248 Bruno Latour Texts and Machines Even if it is now obvious that the missing masses of our society are to be found among the nonhuman mechanisms it is not clear how they get there and why they are missing from most accounts This is where the comparison between texts and artifacts that I used so far becomes misleading There is a crucial distinction between stories and machines between narrative programs and programs of action a distinction that explains why machines are so hard to retrieve in our common language In storytelling one calls shifting out any displacement of a character to another space time or charac ter If I tell you Pasteur entered the Sorbonne amphitheater I translate the present setting you and me and shift it to ano
30. f installing the groom and maintaining it and agree to ignore the few sectors of the population that are discriminated against the hydraulic groom does its job well closing the door behind you 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 bellboy who is never there when needed or for the general public the program instruc tions that have to do with remembering to close the door when it is cold The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 235 The hinge plus the groom is the technologist s dream of efficient action at least until the sad day when I saw the note posted on La Villette s door with which I started this meditation 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 human lack of discipline and maybe the union that goes with it On strike 12 Fancy that Nonhumans stopping work and claiming what Pension 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 always 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
31. f the Berliners in a more realist key The program once translated appears innocuous enough UNLOCK THE DOOR But here lies the first novelty it is impossible to remove the key in the normal way such a move is proscribed by the lock Otherwise you have to break the door which is hard as well as impolite the only way to retrieve the key is to push the whole key through the door to the other side hence its symmetry but then it is still impossible to retrieve the key You might give up and leave the key in the lock but then you lose the competence of the tenant and will never again be able to get in or out So what do you do You rotate the key one more turn and yes you have in effect relocked the door and then only then are you able to retrieve the precious sesame This is a clever translation of a possible program relying on morality into a program relying on dire necessity you might not want to relock the key but you cannot do otherwise The distance between morality and force is not as wide as moralists expect or more exactly clever engineers have made it smaller There is a price to pay of course for such a shift away from morality and signs you have to replace most of the locks in Berlin The pre inscription does not stop here howev r because you now have the problem of keys that no decent key holder can stack into place because they have no hole On the contrary the new sharp key is going to poke holes in your
32. h 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 avail able 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 There are dangers in such a counterfactual method as Collins has pointed out Collins and Yearley 1992 but 256 Bruno Latour it is used here only to outline the semiotics of artifacts In practice as Akrich this volume shows the scripts are explicit and accountable 6 We call the translation of any script from one repertoire to a more durable one transcription inscription or encoding This definition does not imply that the direc tion 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 roboti
33. id not understand a word of it o you undisciplined readers Figurative and Nonfigurative Characters Most sociologists are violently upset by this crossing of the sacred barrier that separate human from nonhumans because they confuse this divide with another one between figurative and nonfigurative actors 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 that is class If I say that Hamlet stands for doom and gloom The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 241 I use less figurative entities and if I claim that he represents west ern civilization I use nonfigurative abstractions Still they all are equally actors that is entities that do things either in Shakespeare s artful plays or in the commentators more tedious tomes The choice of granting actors figurativity or not is left entirely to the authors It is exactly the same for techniques Engineers are the authors of these subtle plots and scenarios of dozens of delegated and interlocking characters so few people know how to appreciate The label in human applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mecha nisms and the many choices that exist for figuring or defiguring personifying or abstracting embodying or disembodying actors When we say that they are mere automatisms we project as much as when we say that they are loving creatures the only diff
34. ign nothing just works in progress lt 23___ a road bumber non human non figurative non sign Figure 8 4 Students of technology are wary of anthropomorphism that they see as a projection of human characters to mere mechanisms but mechanisms are another morphism a nonfigurative one that can also be applied to humans The difference between action and behavior is not a primary natural one the author of this article was a hardcore technologist when I really am a mere sociologist which is a second localization of the text as wrong as the first because really I am a mere philosopher If I say we the technologists I propose a picture of the author of the text as surely as if we place le Petit Bertrand as the originator of the scene But it would have been perfectly possible for me and for the mechanics to position no figurated character at all as the author in the scripts ef our scripts in semiotic parlance there would be no narrator I would just have had to say things like recent develop ments in sociology of technology have shown that instead of I and the mechanics would simply have had to take out le Petit Bertrand leaving the beautiful cranks teeth ratchets and wheels to work alone The point is that removing the Petit Bertrand does not turn the mechanism into a mere mechanism where no actors are acting It is just a different choice of s
35. 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 because the wife eventually quit Humans and non humans are very undisciplined no matter what you do and how many predetermi nations you are able to control inside the setting i For a complete study of this dynamic on a large technical system see Law this volume and in preparation and Latour forthcoming 26 The study of scientific text is now a whole industry see Callon Law and Rip 1986 for a technical presentation and Latour 1987 for an introduction 27 The linguistic meaning of a paradigm is unrelated to the Kuhnian usage of the word For a complete description of these diagrams see Latour Mauguin and Teil 1992 28 I am grateful to Berward Joerges for letting me interview his key and his key holder It alone was worth the trip to Berlin 29 Keys locks and codes are of course a source of marvelous fieldwork for analysts You may for instance replace the key excorporation by a memorized code incor poration You may lose both however since memory is not necessarily more durable than steel 9 A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour Semiotics The study of how meaning is built but the word mean ing is taken in its original nontextual and nonlinguistic interpreta tion how one
36. in the rifle s name the characteristics of the rifle s ideal user Another way of hearing what the machines silently did and said are the accidents When the space shuttle exploded thousands of pages of transcripts suddenly covered every detail of the silent machine and hundreds of inspectors members of congress and engineers retrieved from NASA dozens of thousands of pages of drafts and orders This description of a machine whatever the means retraces the steps made by the engineers to transform texts drafts and projects into things The impression given to those who are obsessed by human behavior that there is a missing mass of morality is due to the fact that they do not follow this path that leads from text to things and from things to texts They draw a strong distinction between these two worlds whereas the job of engineers instructors project managers and analysts is to continually cross this divide Parts of a program of action may be delegated to a human or to a nonhuman The results of such distribution of competences between humans and nonhumans is that competent members of La Halle aux Cuirs will safely pass through the slamming door at a good distance from one another while visitors unaware of the local cultural condition will crowd through the door and get bloody noses The nonhumans take over the selective attitudes of those who engineered them To avoid this discrimination inventors get back to their drawing boar
37. is a computer the plugs the screen the disk drive the user s input What is nicely 238 Bruno Latour CITE DES SCIENCES ET DE L INDUSTRIE Chantier du Parc Cite administrative ia POSTE CHANTIER Cite de la musique Cite dela musique Figure 8 2 This is the written instruction sent through the mail by people from the Centre d Histoire des Sciences to endow their visitors with the competence of reading the signs leading to their office La Halle aux Cuirs Of course it implies the basic preinscribed competence understanding French and knowing how to read a map and it has no influence on the other programs of action that lead people to want to go to the Centre It extends the mechanism of the door its conscription but it is still limited in scope Like users manuals it is one of those many inscriptions that cover the gap of execution between people and settings The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 239 called interface allows any setup to be connected to another through so many carefully designed entry points Sophisticated mechanisms build up a whole gradient of concentric circles around themselves For instance in most modern photocopy machines there are troubles that even rather incompetent users may solve themselves like ADD PAPER but then there are trickier ones that require a bit of explanation ADD TONER SEE
38. isciplined and watchful will see for themselves that there is work in progress and will slow down But there is another radical nonfigurative solution the road bumper or a speed trap that we call in French un gendarme couch a laid policeman It is impossible for us not to slow down or else we break our suspension Depending on where we stand along this chain of delegation we get classic moral human beings endowed with self respect and able to speak and obey laws or we get stubborn and efficient machines and mechanisms halfway through we get the usual power of signs and symbols It is the complete chain that makes up the missing masses not either of its extremities The para dox of technology is that it is thought to be at one of the extremes whereas it is the ability of the engineer to travel easily along the whole gradient and substitute one type of delegation for another that is inherent to the job 3 Figurative Non Figurative Science e Human shows that le Petit a door closer Non Human Bertrand Figure 8 5 The distinction between words and things is impossible to make for technology because it is the gradient allowing engineers to shift down from words to things or to shift up from things to signs that enables them to enforce their programs of actions The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 245 From Nonhumans to Superhumans The most interesting and saddest lesson
39. key or a jailer 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 it is and where it comes from the groom will always take care of the door A nonhuman the hinges plus a human the groom have solved the wall hole dilemma Solved Not quite First of all if La Halle aux Cuirs 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 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 has not completely solved how to disci pline a youngster to reliably fulfill a boring and underpaid duty 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 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 remember that locking it is no solution because this would turn it into a wall and then providing everyone with the right key is a difficult task that would not ensure that key holders will lock it back Of course the porter may be punished But disciplining a groom Foucault notwithstanding is an enormous and costly task that only
40. l 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 on the maps spread around La Villette to explain where La Halle aux Cuirs is figure 8 2 Still no scene is prepared without a preconceived 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 that because you bought this book you are hard working serious English speaking technologists or readers committed to understand ing new development in the social studies of machines So my injunc tion to read the paper you sociologist is not very risky but I would have taken no chance with a French audience especially with a paper written in English This way of counting on earlier distribu tion of skills to help narrow the gap between built in users or readers and users or readers in the flesh is like a pre inscription The fascinating thing in text as well as in artifact is that they have to thoroughly organize the relation between what is inscribed in them and what can could should be pre inscribed in the users Each setup is surrounded by various arenas interrupted by different types of walls A text for instance is clearly circumscribed the dust cover the title page the hard back but so
41. ly 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 Before going on let me point out one of the side benefits of this table 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 ofa lever and of power what is the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely to produce the maximum effect Am I alluding to machines or to Syracuse s King I don t know and it does not matter because the King and Archimedes fused the two mini maxes into a single story told by Plutarch the defense of Syracuse through levers and war machines I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the social construction of techniques and not a hypothetical social context that they are not equipped to grasp This little point having been made let me go on with the story we will understand later why I do not really need your permission to go on and why never theless you are free not to go on although only relatively so Delegation to Humans There is a problem with doors Visito
42. ncorporate a lengthy dispute with Harry Collins about this article but see Collins and Yearley 1992 and Callon and Latour 1992 Trevor Pinch and John Law kindly corrected the English 1 The 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 A program of action is thus close to what Pinch et al this volume call a social technology except that all techniques may be made to be a program of action For the technical semiotic vocabulary of this chapter and the next see the appendix that follows 2 In spite of the crucial work of Diderot and Marx careful description of techniques is absent from most classic sociologists apart from the impact of technology on society type of study and is simply black boxed in too many economists ac counts Modern writers like Leroi Gourhan 1964 are not often used Contempo rary work is only beginning to offer us a more balanced account For a reader see MacKenzie and Wacjman 1985 for a good overview of recent developments see Bijker et al 1987 A remarkable essay on how to describe artifacts an iron bridge compared to a Picasso portrait is offered by Baxandall 1985 For recent essay by a pioneer of the field see N
43. neering myth that of Daedalus is about cleverness deviousness Dedalion means something that goes away from the main road like the French word bricole In the mythology science is re presented by a straight line and technology by a detour science by epist m and technology by the m tis See the excellent essay of Frontisi Ducroux 1975 on the semantic field of the name Daedalus 11 We use actant to mean anything that acts and actor 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 opposi tion 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 12 I have been able to document a case of a five day student strike at a French school of management ESSEC to urge that a door closer be installed in the student cafeteria to keep the freezing cold outside 13 Itis of course another choice to decide who makes such a choice a man a spirit no one an automated machine The scripter or designer of all these scripts is itself himself herself themselves negotiated The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 257 14 This is what Norman 1988 calls the Gulf of Execution His book is an excellent introduction to the study of the tense r
44. oble 1984 For a remarkable and hilarious description of a list of artifacts see Baker 1988 3 Following Madeleine Akrich s lead this volume we will speak only in terms of scripts or scenes or scenarios or setups as John Law says this volume played by human or nonhuman actants which may be either figurative or nonfigurative 4 After Akrich I will call the retrieval of the script from the situation de seription They define actants endow them with competences make them do things and evaluate the sanction of these actions like the narrative program of semioticians 5 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 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 work shop where most of the objects to be devised are still at the stage of projects com mitted to paper if we had a device doing this and that we could then do this and that market analysis in whic
45. of the note posted on the door at La Villette is that people are not circumspect disciplined and watchful especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometers an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130 I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white no one else seems to bother except the mourning families Well that is exactly the point of the note The groom is on strike for God s sake keep the door closed In our societies there are two systems of appeal nonhuman and superhuman that is machines and gods This note indicates how desperate its anonymous frozen authors were I have never been able to trace and 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 technologists consider the supreme court of appeal that is to a nonhuman who regularly and conveniently 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 left open How poignant their line of thought They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is there was and ever will be If humans and nonhuman have failed certainly God will not deceive them I am ashamed to say that when I crossed the hallway this February day the door was open
46. ost you are here circled in red on the map and only if there are roads leading under the Paris ring road to the Halle which is a condition not always fullfilled and of course people will start bothering about reading the maps getting their feet muddy and pushing the door open only if they are convinced that the group is worth visiting this is about the only condition in La Villette that is fulfilled This gradient of aligned setups that endow actors with the pre inscribed competences to find its users is very much like Waddington s chreod people effortlessly flow through the door of La Halle aux Cuirs and the groom hundreds of times a day recloses the door when it is not stuck The result of such an alignment of setups is to decrease the number of occasions in which words are used most of the actions are silent familiar incorporated in human or in nonhuman bodies making the analyst s job so much harder Even the classic debates about freedom determina tion predetermination brute force or efficient will debates that are the twelfth century version of seventeenth century discussions on grace will be slowly eroded Because you have reached this point it means I was right in saying 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 here or did I May be you skipped most of it maybe you d
47. pockets So the black 254 Bruno Latour smiths go back to the drawing board and invent specific key holders adapted to the Berliner key The key in itself is not enough to fulfill the program of action Its effects are very severely circumscribed because it is only when you have a Berliner endowed with the double competence of being a tenant and knowing how to use the surrealist key that the relocking of the door may be enforced Even such an outcome is not full proof because a really bad guy may relock the door without closing it In that case the worst possible antiprogram is in place because the lock stops the door from closing Every passerby may see the open door and has simply to push it to enter the house The setup that pre scribed a very narrow segment of the human population of Berlin is now so lax that it does not even discriminate against nonhumans Even a dog knowing nothing about keys locks and blacksmiths is now allowed to enter No artifact is idiot proof because any artifact is only a portion of a program of action and of the fight necessary to win against many antiprograms Students of technology are never faced with people on the one hand and things on the other they are faced with programs of action sections of which are endowed to parts of humans while other sections are entrusted to parts of nonhumans In practice they are faced with the front line of figure 9 2 This is the only thing they can observe how
48. privileged trajectory is built out of an indefinite number of possibilities in that sense semiotics is the study of order building or path building and may be applied to settings machines bodies and programming languages as well as texts the word socio semiotics is a pleonasm once it is clear that semiotics is not limited to signs the key aspect of the semiotics of machines is its ability to move from signs to things and back Setting A machine can no more be studied than a human be cause what the analyst is faced with are assemblies of humans and nonhuman actants where the competences and performances are distributed the object of analysis is called a setting or a setup in French a dispositif Actant Whatever acts or shifts actions action itself being defined by a list of performances through trials from these performances are deduced a set of competences with which the actant is endowed the fusion point of a metal is a trial through which the strength of an alloy is defined the bankruptcy of a company is a trial through which the faithfulness of an ally may be defined an actor is an actant endowed with a character usually anthropomorphic Script description inscription or transcription The aim of the academic written analysis of a setting is to put on paper the text of what the various actors in the settings are doing to one another the de scription usually by the analyst is the opposite movement of the in
49. r closer does not bang the noses of those unaware of local conditions so its prescriptions may be said to be less restric tive 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 later To use Langdon Winner s classic 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 packages which usually means in our late capitalist society working or lower middle class employees Who even among those from higher strata has not been cornered by an automated butler when they had their hands full of lt packages There are solutions though the groom s delegation may be writ ten off usually by blocking its arm or more prosaically its dele gated 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 Anthropomorphism As a technologist I could claim that provided you put aside the work o
50. ral as a machine especially if it is she is he is they are as user friendly as my Macintosh computer We have been able to delegate to nonhumans not only force as we have known it for centuries but also values duties and ethics It is because of this morality that we humans behave so ethically no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are The sum of morality does not only remain stable but in creases enormously with the population of nonhumans It is at this time funnily enough that moralists who focus on isolated socialized humans despair of us us meaning of course humans and their retinue of nonhumans How can the prescriptions encoded in the mechanism be brought out in words By replacing them by strings of sentences often 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 you may do so be allowed to go there Such sentences look very much like a programming language This substitution of words for silence can be made in the analyst s thought experiments but also by instruction booklets or The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 233 explicitly in any training session through the voice of a demonstra tor 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
51. ranslation of the unreachable goal DON T DRIVE TOO FAST into another less difficult be cause it is a more selfish goal IF YOU DO DRIVE TOO FAST AT LEAST DON T KILL YOURSELF But accidents are rare and most of the time the seat belt should not tie me firmly I need to be able to switch gears or tune my radio The car seat belt is not like the airplane seat belt buckled only for landing and takeoff and care fully checked by the flight attendants But if auto engineers invent a seat belt that is completely elastic it will not be of any use in case of accident This first contradiction be firm and be lax is made more difficult by a second contradiction you should be able to buckle the belt very fast if not no one will wear it but also unbuckle it very fast to get out of your crashed car Who is going to take on all of these contradictory specifications The seat belt mechanism if there is no other way to go for instance by directly limiting the speed of the engine or having roads so bad that no one can drive fast on them The safety engineers have to re inscribe in the seat belt all of these contradictory usages They pay a price of course the mech anism is folded again rendering it more complicated The airplane seat belt is childish by comparison with an automobile seat belt If you study a complicated mechanism without seeing that it re inscribes contradictory specifications you offer a dull description but every piece o
52. rent actors and build complicated narrative programs and subprograms that are evaluated and judged by their ability to stave off antiprograms Unfortunately there are many more literary critics than technologists and the subtle beauties of technosocial 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 and devices Instead of send The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 249 ing 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 an armchair the technical shifting out forces the reader to chose between frames of reference Instead of allowing enunciators and enunciatees a sort of simultaneous presence and communion to other actors techniques allow both to ignore the delegated actors and walk away without even feeling their presence This is the profound meaning of Butler s sentence I placed at the beginning of this chapter machines are not talking actors not be cause they are unable to do so but because they might have chosen to remain silent to become agreeable to their fellow machines and fellow humans To understand this difference in the two directions of shifting out let us venture once more onto a French freeway for the umpt
53. rs 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 230 Bruno Latour course you could imagine that people living in the building or visiting the Centre d Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques would be a well disciplined lot after all historians 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 disci pline is not the main characteristic of La Villette s people also you might have mere sociologists visiting the building or even peda gogues from the nearby Centre de Formation Are they all going to be so well trained 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 recrim inations 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 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 turn
54. scription by the engineer inventor manufacturer or designer or scribe or scripter to use Barthes s neologism for instance the heavy keys of hotels are de scribed by the following text DO NOT FORGET TO BRING THE KEYS BACK TO THE FRONT DESK the in scription being TRANSLATE the message above by HEAVY WEIGHTS ATTACHED TO KEYS TO FORCE
55. that I instruct my garage mechanics to unlink the switch and the sensor The excluded middle is back in There is at least one car that is both on the move and without a seat belt on its driver mine This was without counting on the cleverness of engineers They now invent a seat belt that politely makes way for me when I open the door and then straps me as politely but very tightly when I close the door Now there is no escape The only way not to have the seat belt on is to leave the door wide open which is rather dangerous at high speed Exit the excluded middle The program of action IF a car is moving THEN the driver has a seat belt is enforced It has become logically no it has become sociologically impossible to drive with out wearing the belt I cannot be bad anymore I plus the car plus the dozens of patented engineers plus the police are making me be moral figure 8 1 The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 227 According to some physicists there is not enough mass in the universe to balance the accounts that cosmologists make of it They are looking everywhere for the missing mass that could add up to the nice expected total It is the same with sociologists They are constantly looking somewhat desperately for social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly When adding up social ties all does not balance
56. ther space middle of Paris another time mid nineteenth century and to other characters Pasteur and his audience I the enunciator may decide to appear disappear or be represented by a narrator who tells the story that day I was sitting on the upper row of the room I may also decide to position you and any reader inside the story had you been there you would have been convinced by Pasteur s experiments There is no limit to the number of shiftings out with which a story may be built For instance I may well stage a dialogue inside the amphitheater between two characters who are telling a story about what happened at the Acad mie des Sciences between say Pouchet and Milnes Edwards In that case the room becomes the place from which narrators shift out to tell a story about the Academy and they may or not shift back in the amphitheater to resume the first story about Pasteur P 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 Latour 1988b and make up the craft of talented writers No matter how clever and crafted are our novelists they are no match for engineers Engineers constantly shift out characters in other spaces and other times devise positions for human and non human users break down competences that they then redistribute to many diffe
57. they are sophisticated enough to integrate traffic flows through sensors the delegated policemen standing there day and night is respected even though it has no whistles gloved hands and body to enforce this respect Imagined collisions with other cars or with the absent police are enough to keep them drivers check The thought experiment what would happen if the delegated char acter was not there is the same as the one I recommended above to size up its function The same incorporation from written injunction to body skills is at work with car manuals No one I guess casts more than a cursory glance at the manual before starting the engine of an unfamiliar car There is a large body of skills that we have so well embodied or incorporated that the mediations of the written instructions are useless 24 From extrasomatic they have become intrasomatic Incorporation in human or excorporation in non human bodies is also one of the choice left to the designers The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 247 The only way to follow engineers at work is not to look for extra or intrasomatic delegation but only at their work of re inseription 2 The beauty of artifacts is that they take on themselves the contradic tory wishes or needs of humans and non humans My seat belt is supposed to strap me in firmly in case of accident and thus impose on me the respect of the advice DON T CRASH THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD which is itself the t
58. to the economy to technology is as important as the others but it is derivative It is like the opposition between the primary mechanism who is allied to whom and the secondary mechanism whose leadership is recognized in history of science Latour 1987 20 Waddington s term for necessary paths from the Greek creos and odos 21 We call conscription this mobilization of well drilled and well aligned resources to render the behavior of a human or a nonhuman predictable 22 Trevor Pinch sent me an article from the Guardian 2 September 1988 titled Cardboard coppers cut speeding by third A Danish police spokesman said an advantage of the effigies apart from cutting manpower costs was that they could stand for long periods undistracted by other calls of duty Additional assets are understood to be that they cannot claim overtime be accused of brutality or get suspended by their chief constable without explanation For God s sake don t tell the Home Office Mr Tony Judge editor of the Police Review Magazine in Britain said after hearing news of the Danish study last night We have enough trouble getting sufficient men already The cut outs have been placed beside notorious speeding blackspots near the Danish capital Police said they had yielded excellent results Now they are to be erected at crossings where drivers often jump lights From time to time a spokesman added they would be
59. tronger devices It is then that you install automatic grooms since electric shocks are not as acceptable for people 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 automatisms go on strike Tt is not however that the movement is always from softer to harder devices that is from an autonomous body of knowledge to force through the intermediary situation of worded injunctions as the La Villette door would suggest It goes also the other way It is true that in Paris no driver will respect a sign for instance a white or yellow line forbidding parking nor even a sidewalk that is a yellow line plus a fifteen centimeter curb so instead of embodying in the Parisian consciouness an intrasomatic skill authorities prefer to align yet a third delegate heavy blocks shaped like truncated pyramids and spaced in such a way that cars cannot sneak through given the results only a complete two meter high continuous Great Wall could do the job and even this might not make the sidewalk safe given the very poor sealing efficiency of China s Great Wall So the deskilling thesis appears to be the general case always go from intrasomatic to extrasomatic skills never rely on undisciplined people but always on safe delegated nonhumans This is far from being the case even for Parisian drivers For instance red lights are usually respected at least when
60. tyle The distinctions between humans and nonhumans embodied or disembodied skills impersonation or machination are less inter esting that the complete chain along which competences and actions are distributed For instance on the freeway the other day I slowed down because a guy in a yellow suit and red helmet was waving a red flag Well the guy s moves were so regular and he was located so dangerously and had such a pale though smiling face that when I passed by I recognized it to be a machine it failed the Turing test 244 Bruno Latour a cognitivist would say Not only was 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 road engineers see I can do it again and carve out another author could move much further in the direction of figuration although at a cost we could have given him electronics eyes to wave only when a car approaches or have regulated the movement so that it is faster when cars do not obey We could also have added why not a furious stare or a recognizable face like a mask of Mrs Thatcher or President Mitterand which would have certainly slowed drivers very effi ciently But we could also have moved the other way to a less figurative delegation the flag by itself could have done the job And why a flag Why not simply a sign work in progress And why a sign at all Drivers if they are circumspect d
61. w forms of knowledge ac ON aU NNNON CY 7 8 Where Are the Missing Masses The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts Bruno Latour To Robert Fox Again might not the glory of the machines consist in their being without this same boasted gift of language Silence it has been said by one writer is a virtue which render us agreeable to our fellow creatures Samuel Butler Erewhon chap 23 Early this morning I was in a bad mood and decided to break a law and start my car without buckling my seat belt My car usually does not want to start before I buckle the belt It first flashes a red light FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT then an alarm sounds it is so high pitched so relentless so repetitive that I cannot stand it After ten seconds I swear and put on the belt This time I stood the alarm for twenty seconds and then gave in My mood had worsened quite a bit but I was at peace with the law at least with that law I wished to break it but I could not Where is the morality In me a human driver dominated by the mindless power of an artifact Or in the artifact forcing me a mindless human to obey the law that I freely accepted when I get my driver s license Of course I could have put on my seat belt before the light flashed and the alarm sounded incorporating in my own self the good behavior that every one the car the law the police expected of me Or else some
62. y and I can t Figure 8 8 The key its usage and its holder The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts 253 Yes this is a key and not a surrealist joke although this is not a key because it is picture and a text about a key The program of action in Berlin is almost as desperate a plea as in La Villette but instead of begging CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND YOU PLEASE it is slightly more ambitious and orders RELOCK THE DOOR BEHIND YOU Of course the pre inscription is much narrower only people endowed with the competence of living in the house can use the door visitors should ring the doorbell But even with such a limited group the antiprogram in Berlin is the same as everywhere undisciplined tenants forget to lock the door behind them How can you force them to lock it A normal key endows you with the competence of opening the door it proves you are persona grata but nothing in it entails the performance of actually using the key again once you have opened the door and closed it behind you Should you put up a sign We know that signs are never forceful enough to catch people s attention for long Assign a police officer to every doorstep You could do this in East Berlin but not in reunited Berlin Instead Berliner blacksmiths decided to re inscribe the pro gram of action in the very shape of the key and its lock hence this surrealist form They in effect sunk the contradiction and the lack of discipline o

Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane

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