A questão latouriana

LATOUR, Bruno. 2011. Avoir ou ne pas avoir de réseau: that’s the question. In: Madeleine Akrich; Yannick Barhe; Fabian Muniesa; Philippe Mustar (orgs.). Débordements: mélanges offerts à Michel Callon. Paris: Presses de Mines, pp.257-67.

DIDEROT

Depuis le début, c’est bien dans le Rêve de d’Alembert de Diderot que nous avions placé l’origine de ce terme de rets ou de réseau, bien avant que la toile d’Internet d’une part, l’analyse des réseaux sociaux, d’autre part, ne viennent ajouter d’autres affûtiaux à notre créature commune. (Latour 2011:1)

TRADUÇÃO (entre ator e rede)

Ce qui choque dans l’acteur-réseau et ce qui nous fait toujours accuser de duplicité, c’est que nous définissons un acteur par la liste de ses relations – son réseau donc – alors que nous ne définissons un réseau que par la liste des acteurs qui le composent. La duplicité vient de ce que si la première expression est juste – un acteur n’est que ses relations – on ne voit pas pourquoi on ne s’en tient pas tout simplement au réseau puisqu’il devrait suffire à définir tout ce qui est important dans les acteurs. Et pourtant, nous basculons aussitôt (car nous aussi nous avons notre jeu de bascule), dans un argument où, tout à coup, c’est l’originalité et, pour lui donner son nom exact, l’irréductibilité de l’acteur qui passe au premier plan. C’est qu’il manquait à la simple liste des relations cette transformation profonde que chaque acteur fait subir à ses relations si bien que, malgré ce que nous disions la minute d’avant, non, finalement, un acteur ne se définit plus simplement par la liste de ses relations… Ou plus exactement (mais s’agit-il simplement d’une habileté de langage ?), un acteur c’est la liste de ses relations plus la transformation que chacun des items de la liste a subi au voisinage ou à l’occasion de cette relation. Ce petit plus que nous ajoutons en douce a reçu un nom canonique : celui de traduction et a fait l’objet du premier article publié par Michel Callon (Latour 2011:1)

MEDIAÇÃO (princípio da irredução)

Avec ce principe [d’irréduction], apparaissait la notion clef de médiation qui a fait la fortune (intellectuelle en tout cas) du CSI. Pour résoudre le problème de l’acteur et du réseau, il faut toujours, en pratique aussi bien qu’en théorie, passer par un troisième terme, la médiation, qui permettra de suivre par quelle traduction précise telle ou telle
relation participe à la définition d’un acteur quelconque. (Latour 2011:4)

MEDIAÇÃO e TRADUÇÃO (entre o ator e a rede)

l’enquête commence par une médiation, suit ou enfile les traductions et tombe sur une série de surprises ou d’épreuves où se noue et se dénoue la question même des acteurs et de leur réseau (Latour, 2006). Notre intérêt n’a donc jamais été de définir s’il fallait « partir des individus » ou bien « partir de leurs relations » puisque ces deux étapes sont toutes les deux secondaires par rapport aux termes premiers de médiation et de traduction. (Latour 2011:5)

TAR (método de pesquisa e não ontologia social)

La théorie de l’acteur-réseau n’est pas une théorie sur la nature du monde social (ce n’est pas une métaphysique du social), mais une théorie sur l’enquête en science sociale. (Latour 2011:6)

[D]ans sa version graphique, l’acteur réseau n’est défini que comme un point dénué d’épaisseur défini strictement par la liste de ses liens. […] Mais […] l’acteur-réseau est une théorie de l’enquête et non pas une description des êtres du monde : le réseau, au sens technologique, est le résultat de la mise en place d’un acteur-réseau (soit par l’enquêteur, soit par ceux dont il suit la trajectoire). (Latour 2011:9)

SOCIAL x ASSOCIAÇÕES

les sociologues du social expliquent le social par une liste délimitée à l’avance d’êtres qui composent la société ; la théorie de l’enquête proposée par l’acteur-réseau consiste à inventer à chaque fois un compteur nouveau qui va permettre d’enregistrer par l’intermédiaire des associations surprenantes les êtres qui composent les associations (les « alliés » […]). (Latour 2011:7)

c’est le devoir des sociologues du social de définir d’avance les êtres, et c’est le devoir des sociologues de l’association de ne pas les définir d’avance. (Latour 2011:7)

RELAÇÕES entre NÓS x NÓS de RELAÇÕES

L’opposition est en effet totale si l’on prend le réseau au sens technologique ou visuel d’un graphe fait de points reliés par des lignes et si l’on définit un point par le croisement de deux lignes. (Latour 2011:8)

ONDA-PARTÍCULA

Donnez-vous une liste de qualités, vous ne définirez aucun acteur puisque l’acteur se définit par la modification (la traduction) qu’il va faire subir à chacune des qualités qui le définissent (et donc le définissent « mal » ou du moins « pas tout à fait »). Inversement, essayez de définir un acteur (une essence, une substance) et aussitôt vous serez dirigés ou déplacés parfois très loin dans la liste des relations ou des attributs qui le définissent. Autrement dit, les deux prises possibles – partir d’un acteur ou partir de ses attributs – manquent l’une après l’autre. Ce n’est plus un jeu de bascule, c’est un problème théorique fondamental qui rappelle un peu, toutes proportions gardées, l’onde-corpuscule de la physique d’entre-deux-guerres.. (Latour 2011:11)

OS 4 MOMENTOS DO MOVIMENTO DA PESQUISA (a “originalidade” da TAR)

Supposons qu’on vous parle d’un collègue que vous n’avez jamais vu […] [:] Ztefan Zhshizki. […] 1° quand j’entends pour la première fois parler de Ztefan Zhshizki, aucun attribut ne lui est justement attribué en propre et donc ce n’est même pas un nom propre, mais un simple flatus vocis aussitôt oublié ; 2° quand je commence peu à peu à enquêter sur le web, « Ztefan Zhshizki » est entièrement réductible à la liste peu à peu dressée de ses relations, à ceci près que, 3° à force de les entrer une à une dans la définition de Ztefan Zhshizki chacune commence à subir des modifications dues à la présence des autres déjà en place (par exemple : comme c’est étrange, ce même psychanalyste qui a travaillé avec Lacan est aussi champion de golf et l’inventeur d’un psychotrope qui fait de lui le conseiller d’une grande compagnie pharmaceutique suisse ? ) ; 4° à force de modifier chaque relation que j’entre dans ma base de données mentales à cause de ce que lui fait subir la présence des relations déjà recueillies, je vais commencer à inverser le sens des entrées et des sorties et me mettre à résumer l’ensemble de la base maintenant très longue par l’expression d’un nom devenu peu à peu enfin vraiment propre « Ztefan Zhshizki ». Dans quelques années peut-être j’utiliserai même ce nom propre comme un nouveau nom commun, une nouvelle relation pour définir quelqu’un d’autre en disant « décidemment, celui-là c’est un vrai Ztefan Zhshizki », transformation qu’ont subi aussi bien Kafka, Poubelle que Socrate ou Guillotin. (Latour 2011:15, 17)

tout le problème de se représenter les monades [atores-rede] c’est de pouvoir suivre visuellement ce mouvement d’accordéon par lequel, [1] à un moment donné de l’enquête, elles ne sont qu’un point sans attribut ; [2] au moment suivant un point composé de la simple intersection de qualités venues d’ailleurs ; [3] puis au moment suivant – tout est là – un espace composite propre et irréductible qui inclue dans une enveloppe (une sphère pour Sloterdijk, une société pour Whitehead) les attributs que l’on retrouve maintenant transformés et traduits [4] au point qu’ils semblent émaner d’elle […] avant peut-être de subir encore bien d’autres transformations, de se trouver réduits à un point par une autre monade ou au contraire de les englober toutes. (Latour 2011:21)

QUESTÃO DE VISUALIZAÇÃO

La question se pose donc de savoir pourquoi l’on s’est obstiné et l’on s’obstine toujours à représenter graphiquement le tracé d’un acteur-réseau en se limitant à l’une seulement de ses manifestations (le deuxième moment dans l’exemple choisi) alors que les suivants seraient bien plus significatifs. Est-ce un défaut définitif des techniques de visualisation numérique ? Est-ce un manque d’imagination de notre part ? Est-ce faute de comprendre exactement le mouvement propre de l’acteur réseau – un graphe n’est pas du tout un acteur-réseau ?. (Latour 2011:22)

O “MOVIMENTO-SANFONA” (tornado visível pelas tecnologias digitais)

[C]e phénomène d’accordéon par lequel je puis très vite passer des attributs à la substance et de celle-ci aux attributs, est rendu visible pour une multitude d’événements par les technologies numériques alors qu’il y a trente ans, quand nous avons commencé les science studies, on ne pouvait les percevoir que dans les seuls cas des innovations savantes et techniques. […] Avant les techniques numériques, nous n’aurions jamais eu cette expérience frappante de la composition et de la décomposition des images. Il y a bien une philosophie associée au numérique et c’est bien vrai, en fin de compte, que la théorie de l’acteur-réseau s’y trouve, malgré tous les dangers de confusion, comme un poisson dans l’eau. (Latour 2011:19, 20)

TOMAS SARACENO

On remarque en effet que les sphères (et même les sphères à l’intérieur d’une sphère comme les ribosomes à l’intérieur d’une cellule) sont bel et bien définies par des relations et uniquement par elles (comme les noms propres de tout à l’heure par l’ensemble de leurs attributs) et que pourtant, il y a bien une différence entre les points définis par de simples intersections (les réseaux anémiques que je critiquais plus haut) et les enveloppes. Mais cette différence n’est pas obtenue par un changement de vocabulaire ou de médium (comme si l’on passait des relations aux êtres, des fils aux enveloppes), mais seulement, et c’est là tout l’intérêt de cette œuvre d’art, par la densification des relations qui finissent localement par « faire bord » et « faire frontière ». Une enveloppe, après tout, n’est qu’un réseau plus ramassé de même qu’un réseau n’est qu’une enveloppe un peu plus lâche. On doit pouvoir passer de l’une à l’autre, sans avoir pour autant à sauter de l’approche par les attributs à l’approche par les substances. Or, ne pas faire de saut, c’est là l’exigence suprême de l’enquête puisque c’est la continuité de l’acteur et du réseau qui assure la traçabilité des données. L’œuvre de Saraceno résout visuellement l’un des puzzles de l’acteur- réseau puisqu’elle obtient les entités sans avoir à entourer des relations par un volume venu d’ailleurs et qui appartiendrait de ce fait à une autre ontologie. […] Inversement, on peut imaginer que si l’on avait le droit de tirer sélectivement sur les élastiques qui composent l’installation, on passerait peu à peu d’une enveloppe déchirée à une intersection puis à une simple droite. Comme le prouve cette installation, la rupture entre l’acteur et le réseau, l’être et les relations, l’imaginaire des sphères et l’imaginaire des filets n’est probablement due qu’à un manque d’imagination de notre part. (Latour 2011:24, 25)

Tarde’s idea of quantification (Latour 2015 [2010])

LATOUR, Bruno. 2010. Tarde’s idea of quantification. In Matei Candea (Ed.). The social after Gabriel Tarde: debates and assessments. London: Routledge, pp.145-62.

“CIÊNCIA” SIM, “NATURAL” NÃO, SOCIAL

What is so refreshing in Tarde (more than a century later!) is that he never doubted for a minute that it was possible to have a scientific sociology – or rather, an “ inter-psychology”, to use his term. And he espoused this position without ever believing that this should be done through a superficial imitation of the natural sciences. (Latour 2010:145-6)

THE “LAW-STRUCTURE/INDIVIDUAL COMPONENTS” DISTINCTION IS THE RESULT OF A DEFICIT-LACK OF INFORMATION

Tarde’s reasoning goes straight to the heart of the matter: the natural sciences grasp their object from far away, and, so to speak, in bulk. […] It is therefore quite normal that they should rely on a rough outline of the “societies” of gas and cells to make their observations. (Remember that for Tarde “everything is a society.”) […] Although the very distinction between a law or structure and its individual components is acceptable in natural sciences, it cannot be used as a universal template to grasp all societies. The distinction is an artifact of distance, of where the observer is placed and of the number of entities they are considering at once. The gap between overall structure and underlying components is the symptom of a lack of information: the elements are too numerous, their exact whereabouts are unknown, there exist too many hiatus in their trajectories, and the ways in which they intermingle has not been grasped. It would therefore be very odd for what is originally a deficit of information to be turned into the universal goal of any scientific inquiry. (Latour 2010:148)

What is perfectly acceptable for “sociologists” of stars, atoms, cells and organisms, is inacceptable for the sociologists of the few billions of humans, or for the economists of a few millions of transactions. For in the latter cases, we most certainly have, or we should at least strive to possess, the information needed to dissolve the illusion of the structure. (Latour 2010:146)

Structure is what is imagined to fill the gaps when there is a deficit of information as to the ways any entity inherits from its predecessors and successors. (Latour 2010:153)

[T]he opposition is not between a holistic view of the societies […] and an individualist one. It is between a first approximation through crude statistical records that loses most of the inner quantification of the organism, and a more refined one that has learned how to follow how each of those organisms inherits and transmits its own individual innovations. Change the instruments, and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them. The only thing to lose is the notion of a structure, distinct from its incarnations, this artifact that compensates for a deficit of information. (Latour 2010:153)

TARDE (distinguia o estudo das sociedades humanas do estudo das outras pelos motivos certos, i.e.: pelo fato de que cientistas são humanos e, portanto, conhecem a sociedade “de dentro”) e DURKHEIM (fez a mesma coisa, mas pelos motivos errados, i.e.: petições de princípio, argumentos de autoridade, fórmulas retóricas como “pela força das coisas” etc.)

The shibboleth that distinguishes their [Tarde’s and Durkheim’s] attitudes is not that one is “for society” while the other is “for the individual actor.” (This is what the Durkheimians have quite successfully claimed so as to bury Tarde into the individual psychology he always rejected.) The distinction is drawn by whether one accepts or does not accept that a structure can be qualitatively distinct from its components. In response to this test question, Durkheim answers “yes” for both kinds of societies. Tarde says “yes”, for natural societies (for there is no way to do otherwise), but “no” for human societies. For human societies, and for only human societies, we can do so much more. (Latour 2010:147)

MONADOLOGY (desire/belief)

[F]or Tarde: the very heart of social phenomena is quantifiable because individual monads are constantly evaluating one another in simultaneous attempts to expand and to stabilize their worlds. The notion of expansion is coded for him in the word “desire,” and stabilization in the word “belief” […]. Each monad strives to possess one another. (Latour 2010:148)

How many entities can one entelechy reach? – That is desire. How many can they stabilize, order, fix or keep in place? – That is belief. No providence whatsoever can produce any harmony over and above the interplay of desire and belief in each monad, let loose on the world. […] With extreme avidity (a term Tarde prefers to that of ‘identity’), all monads will seize every possible occasion to grasp one another in a quantitative manner. This accelerates and also simplifies their aggregation and cohesion; it modifies them and gives them another turn and another handle. (Latour 2010:156)

A SOCIOLOGIA DE TARDE NÃO É BASEADA NO INDÍDUO PSICOLÓGICO, MAS NA INDIVIDUAÇÃO COLETIVA (TRANSINDIVIDUAL)

Does this mean that we should always stick to the individual? No, but we should find ways to gather the individual “he” and “she” without losing out on the specific ways in which they are able to mingle, in a standard, in a code, in a bundle of customs, in a scientific discipline, in a technology – but never in some overarching society. The challenge is to try to obtain their aggregation without either shifting our attention at any point to a whole, or changing modes of inquiry. […] Following the “imitative rays” will render the social traceable from beginning to end without limiting us to the individual, or
forcing a leap up to the level of a structure. (Latour 2010:149)

IMITAÇÃO como AÇÃO-REDE (ação distribuída, mas sempre local em cada ponto)

Imitation, that is, literally, the “epidemiology of ideas.” With this notion, he [Tarde] could render the social sciences scientific enough by following individual traits, yet without them getting confused when they aggregated to form seemingly “impersonal” models and transcendent structures. The term “imitation” may be replaced by many others (for instance, monad, actor-network or entelechy), provided these have the equivalent role: of tracing the ways in which individual monads conspire with one another without ever producing a structure. (Latour 2010:149)

O DUALISMO INDIVÍDUO/SOCIEDADE É O EFEITO DE UMA “TRANSIÇÃO DE FASE” (entre “individualizar um grupo” e “ser um indivíduo num coletivo”) AINDA MAL COMPREENDIDA

For Tarde, if we were to believe that the first duty of social science is to “reconcile the actor and the system” or to “solve the quandary of the individual versus society,” we would have to abandon all hope of ever being scientific. This is tantamount to aping the natural sciences, which are perfectly alright in getting by with discovering a structure and neglecting minor individual variations because they are much too far to observe whether or not a “collective self” emerges ex abrupto from “its astonished associates.” Fortunately, in the case of human sciences, we know this emergence is different. We can verify every day, alas, that “leaders” are “born from fathers and mothers” and not “collectively.” This forces us to discover the real conduits through which any group is able to emerge. For instance, we might search for how associates might “individualize in themselves the group in its entirety” through legal or political vehicles. Once we have ferreted out what makes this phase transition possible we will be able to see with clarity, the difference between “individualizing a group” and “being an individual in a collective structure.” Each case requires a completely different feel for the complex ecology of the situation. (Latour 2010:150)

AÇÃO-REDE (trajetória) PARA ALÉM DA OPOSIÇÃO INDIVÍDUO/SOCIEDADE (o agregado é real, mas nunca separado de suas variações individuais)

We have (or should have) full access to the aggregated dynamic. What is called a “structural law” by some sociologists is simply the phenomenon of aggregation: the formatting and standardization of a great number of copies, stabilized by imitation and made available in a new form, such as a code, a dictionary, an institution, or a custom. According to Tarde, if it is wrong to consider individual variations as though they were deviations from a law, it is equally wrong to consider individual variations as the only rich phenomenon to be studied by opposition with (or distance from) statistical results. It is in the nature of the individual agent to imitate others. What we observe either in individual variations or in aggregates are just two detectable moments along a trajectory drawn by the observer who is following the fate of any given “imitative ray.” To follow those rays (or “ actor-networks” […]) is to encounter, depending on the moment, individual innovations and then aggregates, followed afterwards by more individual innovations. It is the trajectory of what circulates that counts, not any of its provisional steps. (Latour 2010:151)

[T]he distinction between structure and ingredient […] [is] due to a deficiency of information. If the researcher is in possession of this information, this chain of invention, this “imitative ray,” then there is no reason why they cannot follow the individual innovation as well as the aggregates, smoothly. If there is a map of a river catchment, there is no need to leap from the individual rivulets to the River, with a capital R. We will follow, one by one, each individual rivulet until they become a river – with a small r. (Latour 2010:152)

COMO ACESSAR-CONSTRUIR CENTRAIS DE CÁLCULO

Here resides the fourth and final reason why Tarde’s sociology seems so original and so fresh for us today. A judgment of taste, an inflexion in the way we speak, a slight mutation in our habits, a preference between two goods, a decision taken on the spur of the moment, an idea flashing in the brain, the conclusion of a long series of inconclusive syllogisms, and so forth – what appears most qualitative is actually where the greatest numbers of calculations are being made among “desires” and “beliefs.” So, in principle, for Tarde, this is also the locus where we should be best able to quantify. Providing, that is, that we have the instruments to capture what he calls “logical duels.” (Latour 2010:154)

O INDIVÍDUO É UMA SOCIEDADE

The reason why there is no need for an overarching society is because there is no individual to begin with, or at least no individual atoms. The individual element is a monad, that is, a representation, a reflection, or an interiorization of a whole set of other elements borrowed from the world around it. If there is nothing especially structural in the “whole,” it is because of a vast crowd of elements already present in every single entity. This is where the word “network” – and even actor-network – captures what Tarde had to say much better than the word “individual.” Contrary to what is often said, there is not even a hint of “methodological individualism” in this argument. There is no psychologism, nor of course any temptation toward “rational choice.” (Latour 2010:154)

Behind every “he” and “she,” one could say, there are a vast number of other “he’s” and “she’s” to which they have been interrelated. When Tarde insists that we detect specific embranchments and bifurcations behind every innovation, he is not saying that we should celebrate individual genius. It is rather that geniuses are made of a vast crowd of neurons!. (Latour 2010:155)

A monarch is to his people what conscience is to the brain, what ego is to the neurons, what Darwin is to the thousands of naturalists through the obscure work on which he depends for his “glory”! Once again, the “one” piggybacks on top of the “many” but without composing a “they.” This is where Tarde’s originality resides: everything is individual and yet there is no individual in the etymological sense of that which cannot be further divided. (Latour 2010:155)

CIÊNCIA É SOBRE E NA NATUREZA

science is in and of the world it studies. It does not hang over the world from the outside. It has no privilege. This is precisely what makes science so immensely important: it performs the social together with all of the other actors, all of whom try to turn new instruments to their own benefits. (Latour 2010:156)

TARDE VISIONÁRIO

It is quite amusing to imagine Tarde directing his statistical bureau, nurturing so many doubts about the quality of the data he was handing out to the Ministry of Justice (and also to Marcel Mauss who was helping his uncle to write his book, Suicide, in which Tarde was trashed every two footnotes …), while dreaming, at the same time, of the many interesting quantitative instruments he had no way of obtaining: the “gloriometer” for following reputation (so easily accessible now with page rankings); conversation for understanding economic transactions (now the object of so many tools following buzz and viral marketing – Rosen 2009); “phonometers” like those invented by Abbé Rousselot in order to follow the smallest inflexions of the native speakers (now accessible through the automated study of vast corpora of documents). […] When Tarde claimed that statistics would one day be as easy to read as newspapers, he could not have anticipated that the newspapers themselves would be so transformed by digitalization that they would merge into the new domain of data visualization. This is a clear case of a social scientist being one century ahead of his time because he had anticipated a quality of connection and traceability necessary for good statistics which was totally unavailable in 1900. A century later, networks and traces are triggering the excitement of social and natural scientists everywhere (Barabasi 2003; Benkler 2006). […] Digital navigation through point-to-point datascapes might, a century later, vindicate Tarde’s insights. (Latour 2010:158)

No embalo da rede: ritmo e reticulação

Onde estão as massas ausentes? (Latour 1992)

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

O SILÊNCIO e a GLÓRIA das MÁQUINAS (Samuel Butler)

(Latour 1992:225)

PROGRAMA DE AÇÃO (script)

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

THE SCRIPT and the SCRIPTER (god?)

The scripter or designer of all these scripts is itself (himself, herself, themselves) negotiated. (Latour 1992:256 nota 13)

COLOQUE O CINTO DE SEGURANÇA (moralidade distribuída=fortalecida e a lei do terceiro excluído)

(Latour 1992:226)

DISTRIBUIÇÃO DE COMPETÊNCIAS (Latour 1992:233)

AS MASSAS AUSENTES DA SOCIOLOGIA

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

[SCRIPTS que são DESEMPENHADOS por [ACTANTES; que podem ser HUMANOS ou [NÃO-HUMANOS; que podem ser FIGURATIVOS ou NÃO-FIGURATIVOS]]] (Madeleine Akrich)

(Latour 1992:255 nota 3)

DESCRIÇÃO (manuais, instruções, demonstrações, treinamentos, experimentos mentais de alternativas, processo criativo, grupos focais, deciframentos de funcionamentos desconhecidos, tabelas abstratas de ausências-presenças)

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

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 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 exotic situation studied by anthropologists in which people faced with a foreign device talk to themselves while trying out various combinations (“what will happen if I attach this lead here to the mains?”) The analyst has to empirically capture these situations to write down the scripts. When none is available, the analyst may still make a thought experiment by comparing presence/absence tables and collating the list of all the actions taken by actors (“if I take this one away, this and that other action will be modified”). […] In practice [not a priori] […], the scripts are explicit and accountable. (Latour 1992:255-6 nota 5)

As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little character. (Latour 1992:229) [MAIS PRECISAMENTE: O TRABALHO HUMANO QUE IMAGINAMOS SER ANÁLOGO AO TRABALHO NÃO-HUMANO GERALMENTE NÃO É O TRABALHO QUE O NÃO-HUMANO EFETIVAMENTE SUBSTITUI, MAS SIM O TRABALHO QUE OS HUMANOS PASSARÃO A TER QUE FAZER NA AUSÊNCIA DO NÃO-HUMANO. I.E.: antes do automóvel ninguém se deslocava muito, então ele não substitui um trabalho de deslocamento pré-existente, mas cria este trabalho para aqueles que não têm automóvel)

INSCRIÇÃO

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 direction always goes from soft bodies to hard machines, but simply that it goes from a provisional, less reliable one to a longer-lasting, more faithful one. For instance, the embodiment in cultural tradition of the user manual of a car is a transcription, but so is the replacement of a police officer by a traffic light; one goes from machines to bodies, whereas the other goes the opposite way. Specialists of robotics have abandoned the pipe dream of total automation; they learned the hard way that many skills are better delegated to humans than to nonhumans, whereas others may be taken away from incompetent humans. (Latour 1992:256 nota 6)

AGÊNCIA GENERALIZADA (ação-rede)

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

DAEDALUS

(Latour 1992:256 nota 10)

ACTANTE, ATOR

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 opposition to mere behavior. For a semiotician, the act of attributing “inert force” to a hinge or the act of attributing it “personality” are comparable in principle and should be studied symmetrically. (Latour 1992:256 nota 11)

DESCRIÇÃO DE UMA PORTA (O porteiro está em greve, pelo amor de deus mantenham a porta fechada)

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

PORTA = PAREDE MÓVEL (o trabalho da dobradiça e o demônio de Maxwell)

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. […] [T]he hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order, or information. (Latour 1992:228)

DESLOCAMENTO=TRADUÇÃO=DELEGAÇÃO=ALTERAÇÃO (displacement=translation=delegation=shifting)

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. (Latour 1992:229)

MINI-MAXES (Arquimedes e tecnopolítica)

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

A ESCOLHA MUMFORDIANA (substituir muitos humanos indisciplinados por um humano disciplinado)

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

SUBSTITUIÇÃO 1 (humano=>não-humano) x SUBSTITUIÇÃO 2 (muitos humanos=>um humano) = passado X presente

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

O FECHADOR AUTOMÁTICO DE PORTA e a PRESCRIÇÃO

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

PRESCRIÇÃO (a dimensão moral dos mecanismos)

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. (Latour 1992:256 nota 8)

EXPLICITANDO PRESCRIÇÕES

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 explicitly, in any training session, through the vo8ice of a demonstrator or instructor or teacher. […] Another way of hearing what the machines silently did and said are the accidents. […] This description of a machine […] retraces the steps made by the engineers to transform texts, drafts and projects into things. (Latour 1992:233)

PRESCRIÇÃO e DISCRIMINAÇÃO

Because of their prescriptions, these doors discriminate against very luittle 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 (Latour 1992:234)

MATERIALIDADE e MORALIDADE

We have been able to delegate to nonhumans not only force as we have known it for centuries but also values, duties, and ethics. […] The sum of moralityh does not only remain stable but increases enormously with the population of nonhumans. (Latour 1992:232)

The nonhumans take over the selective attitudes of those who engineered them. (Latour 1992:233)

OS TRÊS ANTROPOMORFISMOS DO FECHADOR AUTOMÁTICO DE PORTA

The groom is indeed anthropomorphic, in three senses: first, it has been made by humans; second, it substitutes for the 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. (Latour 1992:235)

ANTROPOMORFISMO COMO QUESTÃO (e não acusação)

But anyway, who are sociologists to decidee the real and final shape (morphos) of humans (anthropos)? To trace with confidence the boundary between what is a “real” delegation and what is a “mere” projection? […] 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. (Latour 1992:236)

SUBSCREVER (ou DESINSCREVER [de-inscript]) À PRESCRIÇÃO

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? (Latour 1992:)

There might be an enormous gap between the prescribed user and the user-in-the-flesh […]. On other occasions, however, tha 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. (Latour 1992:237)

PRÉ-INSCRIÇÃO

no scene is prepared without a preconceived idea of what sort of actors will come to occupy the prescribed positions. […] This way of counting on earlier distribution 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. (Latour 1992:237)

CIRCUNSCRIÇÃO

We call circumscription the organization in the setting of its own limits and of its own demarcation (doors, plugs, hall, introductions). (Latour 1992:257 nota 17)

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Redes que a razão desconhece (Latour 2004)

LATOUR, Bruno. 2004. Redes que a razão desconhece: laboratórios, bibliotecas, coleções. In: André Parente (org.). Tramas da rede: novas dimensões filosóficas, estéticas e políticas da comunicação. (Trad. Marcela Mortara) Porto Alegre: Sulina, pp.39-63.

Aqui, não nos encontramos nem numa biblioteca nem numa coleção, mas aquém delas, na costa da Nova-Guiné. O naturalista está em sua terra, mas longe, enviado pelo rei para trazer desenhos, espécimes naturalizados, mudas, herbários, relatos e, quem sabe, indígenas. Tendo partido de um centro europeu para uma periferia tropical, a expedição que ele serve traça, através do espaço-tempo, uma relação muito particular que vai permitir ao centro acumular conhecimentos sobre um lugar que até então ele não podia representar. Nesta gravura muito posada, onaturalista se desenohou a si proório em plena atividade de transformação de um lugar em outro, regisrando a transsição entre o mundo das matérias locais e o dos signos móveis e transportáveis para qualquer lugar. Notemos, aliás, que ele se retrata num quase-laboratório, um lugar protegido pela folha de bananeira que o abriga do sol e pelos grascos de espécimes conservados no álcool, Notemos também que o mundo indígena deve fazer-se representar a fim de ser colhido pelo movimento da informação. A escrava de formas generosas exibe o papagaio e permite ao desenhista detectar mais rapidamente os traços característicos do mesmo. O desenho produzido por esse quase-laboratório em breve irculará em todas as coleções reais; quanto aos espécimes, empalhados ou em frascos de álcool, irão enriquecer os gabinetes de curiosidades de toda a Europa. (Latour 2004:41)

INFORMAÇÃO:

A informação não é um signo, e sim uma relação estabelecida entre dois lugares, o primeiro, que se torna umaperiferia, e o segundo, que se torna um centro, sob a condição de que entre os dois circule um veículo que denominamos muitas vezes forma, mas que, para insistir em seu aspecto material, eu chamo de inscrição. (Latour 2004:40)

Verifica-se que a informação não é uma “forma” no sentido platônico do termo, e sim uma relação muito prática e muito material entre dois lugares, o primeiro dos quais negocia o que deve retirar do segundo, a fim de mantê-lo sob sua vista e agir à distância sobre ele. (Latour 2004:42)

Ora, a informação permite justamente limitar-se à forma, sem ter o embaraço da matéria. (Latour 2004:41)

A informação não é inicialmente um signo, e sim o “carregar”, em inscrições cada vez mais móveis e cada vez mais fiéis, de um maior número de matérias. (Latour 23004:42)

A produção de informações permite, portanto, resolver de modo prático, por operações de seleção, extração, redução, a contradição entre a presença e a ausência num lugar. Impossível compreendê-la sem se interessar pelas instituições que permitem o estabelecimento dessas relações de dominação, e sem os veículos materiais que permitem o transporte e o carregamento. (Latour 2004:42)

REDUÇÃO e AMPLIFICAÇÃO

Reencontramos as aves empalhadas de há pouco, mas no meio de todos os seus congêneres, trazidos, do mundo inteiro, por naturalistas dispersos no espaço e no tempo. Em comparação com a situação inicial, em que cada ave vivia livremente em seu ecossistema, que perda considerável, que diminuição! Mas, em comparação com a situação inicial, em que cada ave voava invisível na confusão de uma noite tropical ou de um amanhecer polar, que ganho fantástico, que aumento. O ornitólogo pode então, tranquilamente, em local protegido, comparar os traços característicos de milhares de aves tornadas comparáveis pela imobilidade, pela pose, pelo empalhamento. O que vivia disperso em estados singulares do mundo se unifica, se universaliza, sob o olhar preciso do naturalista. Impossível, é claro, copreender este suplemento de precisão, de conhecimento, sem a intuição que abriga todas essas aves empalhadas, que as apresenta ao olhar do svisitantes, que a marca por um fino jogo de escrita e de etiquetas, que as classifica por um sistema retificável de prateleiras, de gavetas, de vitrines, que as preserva e as conserva borrifando-as com inseticidas. Aí também, tanto para a amplificação como para a redução, a informação exige uma competência, um trabalho tão material quanto o do empalhador. Talvez o naturalista não pense diferentemente do indígena que percorria sua ilha em busca de um papagaio, mas ele vive, com certeza, num outro ecossistema. A comparação de todas as aves do mundo sinoticamente visíveis e sincronicamente reunidas lhes dá uma enorme vantagem sobre quem só pode ter acesso a algumas vaves vivas. A redução de cada ave se paga com uma formidável amplificação de todas as aves do mundo. (Latour 2004:44)

DA OPOSIÇÃO REALISTASxCONSTRUTIVISTAS para a CONSTRUÇÃO DA REALIDADE

Questão clássica que a filosofia das ciências quis enquadrar por muito tempo, opondo os realistas de um lado e os construtivistas do outro, como se não se tratrasse, ao contrário, de compreender a “construção da realidade” bem real dessa gente. (Latour 2004:45-6)

CARTOGRAFIA:

Inversão propriamente fantástica, pois aquele que seria dominado, na paisagem desenhada ao fundo, torna-se o dominante assim que entra em seu gabinete de trabalho e desdobra os mapas para rasurá-los. […] Prestemos atenção por um instante à inversão das relações de força entre aquele que viaja numa paisagem e aquele que percorre com o olhar o mapa recém-desenhado. (Latour 2004:46-7)

Quando Mercator utiliza pela primeira vez a palavra Atlas, para designar não mais o gigante que carrega o mundo em seus ombros, e sim o volume que permite segurar a terra entre as mãos, ele materializa a inversão das relações de força que a cartografia torna tão claramente visíveis – mas que se encontram em graus diferentes, em todas as disciplinas que entram sucessivamente na “via direta de uma ciência”. Resumo notável da história das ciências, este frontispício em que Atlas não tem mais nada a fazer, senão medir a bola que segura sem esforço nos joelhos. (Latour 2004:50)

Essas duas espécies de signos, mapas e placas, alinhados uns aos outros e mantidos ambos por grandes instituições […] nos permitem passar do mapa ao território, negociando com cautela a enorme mudança de nível que separa um pedaço de papel, que dominamos pelo olhar, de um lugar onde moramos e que nos cerca por todos os lados. (Latour 2004:60)

DIGITALIZAÇÃO e o PODER DA REDE

Hoje compreendemos melhor esta compatibilidade [de tipos de informações diferentes], pois todos utilizamos computadores que se tornam capazes de remexer, religar, combinar, traduzir desenhos, textos, fotografias, cálculos ainda agora fisicamente separados. A digitalização prolonga esta longa história dos centros de cálculo, oferecendo a cada inscrição o poder de todas as outras. Mas este poder não vem de sua entrada no universo dos signos, e sim de sua compatibilidade, de sua coerência ótica, de sua padronização com outras inscrições, cada uma das quais se encontra sempre lateralmente ligada ao mundo através de uma rede. (Latour 2004:49)

CENTRAL DE CÁLCULO e MAIS VALIA DE INFORMAÇÃO (ciência; móveis imutáveis; redes de transformações)

A partir do momento nem que uma inscrição aproveita as vantagens do inscrito, do calculado, do plano, do desdobrável, do acumulável, do que se pode examinar com o olhar, ela se torna comensurável com todas as outras, vindas de domínios da realidade até então completamente estranhos. A perda considerável de cada inscrição isolada, em relação com o que ela representa, se paga ao cêntuplo com a mais-valia de informações que lhe proporciona esta compatibilidade com todas as outras inscrições. (Latour 2004:48)

cada dado se liga, por um lado, a seu próprio mundo de fenômenos, e, por outro lado, a todos aqueles com os quais se torna compatível. (Latour 2004:50)

Não existe ciência, rígida ou flexível, quente ou fria, antiga ou recente que não dependa desta transformação prévia, e que não acabe por expor os fenôneos pelos quais ela se interessa numa superfície plana de alguns metros quadrados, em volta da qual se reúnem pesquisaqdores que apontam com os dedos os traços pertinentes, discutindo entre eles. O controle intelectual, o domínio erudito, não se e3xerce diretamente sobre os fenômenos – galáxias, vírus, economia, paisagens – mas sim sobre as inscrições que lhe servem de veículo, sob a condição de circular continuamente, e nos dois sentidos, através de redes de transformações – laboratórios, instrumentos, expedições, coleções. (Latour 2004:51)

Para compreender um centro de cálculo é preciso pois apreender o conjunto da rede de transformações que liga cada inscrição ao mundo, e que liga em seguida cada inscrição a todas as que se tornaram comensuráveis a ela pela gravura, o desenho, o relato, o cálculo ou, mais recentemente, pela digitalização. (Latour 2004:53)

Redes de transformações fazem chegar aos centros de cálculos, por uma série de deslocamentos – redução e amplificação – um número cada vez maior de inscrições. Essas inscrições circulam nos dois sentidos, único meio de assegurar a fidelidade, a confiabilidade, a verdade entre o representado e o representante. Como elas devem ao mesmo tempo permitir a mobilidade das relaçãoes e a imutabilidade do que elas transportam, eu as chamos de “móveis imutáveis” entre nós, para distingui-las bem dos signos. Com efeito, quando as seguimos, começamos a atravessar a distinção usual entre palavras e coisas, viajamos não apenas no mundo, mas também nas diferentes matéiras da expressão. Uma vez nos centros, outro movimento se acrescenta ao primeiro, que permite a circulação de todas as inscrições capazes de trocar entre si algumas de suas propriedades. A coerência […] dos fenômenos relatados autoriza de fato essa capitalização, que parece sempre tão incompreensível quanto a do dinheiro. (Latour 2004:55)

O conjunto desta galáxia emaranhada – redes e centro – funciona como um verdadeiro laboratório, deslocando as propriedades dos fenômenos, redistribuindo o espaço-tempo, proporcionando aos “capitalizadores” uma vantagem considerável, uma vez que eles estão ao mesmo tempo afastados dos lugares, ligados aos fenômenos por uma série reversível de transformações, e aproveitam o suplemento de informações oferecido por toda e qualquer inscrição a todas as outras. (Latour 2004:56)

Com efeito, trata-se sempre, pela invenção [a tradução errou aqui ao colocar “inversão”] de instrumentos cada vez mais sutis, de conservar o máximo de formas e forças através do máximo de trnasformações, deformações, provas. Ah, deter-se num ponto e, por uma série de simples transformações, de simples deduções, recriar todos os outros, à vontade! (Latour 2004:57)

De fato, como na relatividade de Einstein, existe sim um observador privilegiado, aquele que, no centro de cálculo, pode capitalizar o conjunto dos desenhos, dos dados, dos levantamentos, dos mapas, das observações, enviados por todos os observadores despojados de qualquer privilégio, e pode também, por uma série de correções, de transformações, de reescritas, de conversões, torná-los todos compatíveis. […] A partir do momento que um observador, um instrumento, um investigador se torna muito específico, muito particular, muito idiossincrático, ele interrompe o deslocamento dos móveis imutávies, acrescenta ruído à linha, enfraquece o centro de cálculo, impede o observador privilegiado de capitalizar, isto é, de conhecer. […] A perspectiva, a teoria da relatividade, a geometria são alguns dos veículos que asseguram às inscrições seja sua mobilidade, seja sua imutabilidade. Existem muitos outros, menos grandiosos, como o empalhamento, a imprensa, o modelo reduzido, a conservações no azoto líquido ou a perfuração para a extração de amostras. (Latour 2004:58)

A veracidade não vem da superprosição de um enunciado e de um estado do mundo, mas procede antes da manutenção contínua das redes do centro e dos móveis imutáveis que aí circulam. […] Deve-se ouvi-la [à palavra “verdade”] antes como o ronronar de uma rede que se otimiza [[a tradução errou aqui ao colocar “gira”] e que se estende. (Latour 2004:59)

Se desejamos entender como chegamos, às vezes, a dizer a verdade, devemos substituir a antiga distinção entre a linguagem e o mundo por essa mistura de instituições, formas, matérias e inscrições. (Latour 2004:61)

OS SIGNOS e o MUNDO

Que tenham sido necessários vinte anos de duros trabalhos e de inverossímeis aventuras para obter este meridiano [de Quito], eis o que não se deve esquecer, sob pena de crer que o signo representa o mundo sem esforço e sem transformação, ou que ele existe à parte, num sistema autônomo [a tradução errou aqui ao colocar “astronômico”] que lhe serviria de referência. (Latour 2004:54-5)

O LOCUS do FENÔMENO é a REDE

Onde se encontram os fenômenos?, perguntar-se-á. “Fora, na extremidade das redes que os representam fielmente”, dirão uns. “Dentro, ficção regulada pela estrutura própria do universo dos signos”, dirão outros. […] Infelizmente [?], os fenômenos circulam através do conjunto, e é unicamente a sua circulação que permite verificá-los, assegurá-los, validá-los. (Latour 2004:56)

Como se vê, os fenômenos não se situam nem no exterior nem no interior das redes. Eles residem numa certa maneira de se deslocar que otimiza a manutenção das relações constantes, apesar do transporte e da diversidade dos observadores. (Latour 2004:58)

O Novum Organum de Latour.

Depois das “regras do método sociológico” de Durkheim, vieram as “regras metodológicas” e os “princípios” de Latour.

LATOUR, Bruno. 2000. Regras metodológicas; Princípios. In: Ciência em ação: como seguir cientistas e engenheiros sociedade afora. (Trad. Ivone C. Benedetti) São Paulo: Editora Unesp, pp.421-4. [1987]

APÊNDICE I
REGRAS METODOLÓGICAS

REGRA 1: Estudamos a ciência em ação, e não a ciência ou a tecnologia pronta; para isso, ou chegamos antes que fatos e máquinas se tenham transformado em caixas-pretas, ou acompanhamos as controvérsias que as reabrem. (Introdução)
REGRA 2: Para determinar a objetividade ou subjetividade de uma afirmação, a eficiência ou a perfeição de um mecanismo, não devemos procurar por suas qualidades intrínsecas, mas por todas as transformações que ele sofre depois, nas mãos dos outros. (Capítulo 1)
REGRA 3: Como a solução de uma controvérsia é a causa da representação da Natureza, e não sua consequência, nunca podemos utilizar essa consequência, a Natureza, para explicar como e por que uma controvérsia foi resolvida. (Capítulo 2)
REGRA 4: Como a resolução de uma controvérsia é a causa da estabilidade da sociedade, não podemos usar a sociedade para explicar como e por que uma controvérsia foi dirimida. Devemos considerar simetricamente os esforços para alistar recursos humanos e não-humanos. (Capítulo 3)
REGRA 5: Com relação àquilo de que é feita a tecnociência, devemos permanecer tão indecisos quanto os vários atores que seguimos; sempre que se constrói um divisor entre interior e exterior, devemos estudar os dois lados simultaneamente e fazer uma lista (não importa se longa e heterogênea) daqueles que realmente trabalham. (Capítulo 4)
REGRA 6: Diante da acusação de irracionalidade, não olhamos para que regra da lógica foi infrigida nem que estrutura social poderia explicar a distorção, mas sim para o ângulo e a direção do deslocamento do observador, bem como para a extensão da rede que assim está sendo construída. (Capítulo 5)
REGRA 7: Antes de atribuir qualquer qualidade especial à mente ou ao método das pessoas, examinemos os muitos modos como as inscrições são coligidas, combinadas, interligadas e devolvidas. Só se alguma coisa ficar sem explicação depois do estudo da rede é que devemos começar a falar em fatores cognitivos. (Capítulo 6)

APÊNDICE II
PRINCÍPIOS

PRIMEIRO: O destino de fatos e máquinas está nas mãos dos consumidores finais; suas qualidades, portanto, são consequência, e não causa, de uma ação coletiva. (Capítulo 1)
SEGUNDO: Os cientistas e engenheiros falam em nome de novos aliados que conformaram e alistaram; representantes entre outros representantes, com esses recursos inesperados, fazem o fiel da balança de forças pender em seu favor. (Capítulo 2)
TERCEIRO: Nunca somos postos diante da ciência, da tecnologia e da sociedade, mas sim diante de uma gama de associações mais fracas e mais fortes; portanto, entender o que são fatos e máquinas é o mesmo que entender o que as pessoas são.
QUARTO: Quanto mais esotérico o conteúdo da ciência e da tecnologia, mais elas se expandem externamente; portanto, “ciência e tecnologia” é apenas um subconjunto da tecnociência. (Capítulo 4)
QUINTO: A acusação de irracionalidade é sempre feita por alguém que está construindo uma rede em relação a outra pessoa que atravessa seu caminho; portanto, não há Grande Divisor entre mentes, mas apenas redes maiores ou menores; os fatos duros não são regra, mas exceção, visto serem necessários em poucos casos para afastar um grande número de pessoas de seu caminho habitual. (Capítulo 5)
SEXTO: A história da tecnociência é, em grande parte, a história dos recursos espalhados ao longo das redes para acelerar a mobilidade, a fidedignidade, a combinação e a coesão dos traçados que possibilitam a ação [à] distância. [(Capítulo 6)]

A propósito de um livro sobre modos de existência (Latour 2012)

LATOUR, Bruno. 2012. Biografia de uma investigação – a propósito de um livro sobre modos de existência. São Paulo: Editora 34.

A VERDADE INTRÍNSECA DA MEDIAÇÃO

O que é certo é que eu saía desse período de formação [doutorado, 1975] armado de uma enorme mas muito paradoxal certeza no fato de que, quanto mais uma malha de textos fosse interpretada, transformada, artificial, retomada, recosturada, repetida e reformada, e a cada vez de forma diferente, mais chance ela teria em manifestar sua verdade intrínseca, com a condição […] de que se saiba distinguir de outro modo a verdade, a informação pura e perfeita [Duplo Clique]… Um longo combate contra a erradicação das mediações ia começar. (Latour 2012:4-5).

ASSIMETRIA (só antropologizar o centro da periferia e a periferia do centro)

Existe aí uma flagrante assimetria: os brancos antropologizam os negros – sim, e com muita eficiência -, mas eles mesmos não se deixam antropologizar. Ou então eles o fazem de modo falsamente distante, “exótico”, prendendo-se aos aspectos mais arcaicos de suas próprias sociedades – as festas municipais, a crença na astrologia, as refeições de primeira comunhão -, e não ao que me salta aos olhos (olhos que, na verdade, foram educados pela leitura coletiva do Anti-Édipo): as técnicas industriais, a economia, o “desenvolvimento”, a razão científica, etc., ou seja, tudo o que constitui o coro estrutural dos impérios em vias de expansão. (Latour 2012:6)

IDEOGRAFIA DE INSTRUMETOS

Como bom etnógrafo, eu sabia que precisava desconfiar das idéias que flutuavam no ar, mas eu não acreditava que a sequência dos “registros” de toda essa ideografia de instrumentos imprimisse nessas famosas idéias uma força tão fértil. E, no entanto, naquela misteriosa fábrica de acontecimentos, tudo se esclareceria subitamente caso eu aceitasse acompanhar passo a passo as transformações dos documentos aos quais os pesquisadores vestidos de branco destinavam um interesse ao mesmo tempo obsessivo e completamente descontraído. (Latour 2012:7-8)

AGÊNCIA NÃO-HUMANA

Então eu logo compreendi que os personagens não humanos também tinham aventuras que poderíamos acompanhar se abandonássemos a ilusão de que eles eram ontologicamente diferentes dos seres humanos. O que vale é apenas a agency, suas capacidades de atuação e os diversos papéis que lhes foram atribuídos. (Latour 2012:9)

A SEMIÓTICA DO ACTANTE

Um mundo então se revelava […]: os coletivos […] diferem-se pela atuação que eles atribuem aos actantes, pelos testes que eles destinam a seus personagens […]. O poder da semiótica derivava, justamente, de sua sublime e radical indiferença ao realismo aparente dos sujeitos e dos atores sociais: essa era a condição ideal para seguir a originalidade das ciências que foram aniquiladas pela tarefa de imitar o mundo, corrompidas por serem tantas vezes confundidas com a informação sobre lamentáveis “matters of fact” isolados de qualquer questão. Somente a semiótica dos escritos e das inscrições científicas, livre do realismo comum, poderia implantar esse modo totalmente original de referência. (Latour 2012:9)

INSCRIÇÕES (nem sujeito, nem objeto)

Na verdade, o caminho das inscrições ignorava ao mesmo tempo o sujeito conhecedor e o objeto conhecido; o modo de existência do conhecimento científico parecia merecer um habitat melhor do que o no man’s land entre as palavras e as coisas. (Latour 2012:10)

ETNOMETODOLOGIA

O estranho Gênio do jargão da etnometodologia vem da descoberta de que todo curso de ação, incluindo o mais comum, é constantemente interrompido por um minúsculo hiatus que requer, de tempos em tempos, a retomada inventiva do ator munido de seus próprios micrométodos. (Latour 2012:10)

[N]enhuma continuidade de um curso de ação pode acontecer sem uma repetição inventiva que fornecesse ao ator social as capacidades reflexivas, as fontes de inovação, e até mesmo as sociologias e ontologias cujo desdobramento ultrapassam em muito as capacidades do etnólogo. O pesquisado sempre sabe mais do que o pesquisador. (Latour 2012:10-1)

A ideia de que o ator não fosse mais considerado um “idiota cultural” (“a cultural dope“) ressoava maravilhosamente com o actante explorado pela semiótica. (Latour 2012:11)

SIMONDON

Assim como as ciências compreendidas em sua prática não podiam ser mantidas no estreito âmbito da epistemologia, as técnicas, sobretudo as mais modernas, não podiam ser mantidas na simples ideia de uma ação eficaz sobre a matéria: elas tinham a ver com a magia, com a religião, com a filosofia; elas tinham seu próprio mundo; eram cheias de métodos, artimanhas, cálculos, metafísica, e até mesmo moral; e, desconstruindo as fronteiras com os temas humanos, representavam um imenso desafio para a descrição etnográfica ou sociológica. Mas, além disso, de uma forma ainda mais radical, elas provoaram o coletivo com atores não humanos que, por um tipo de delegação, eram relevantes aos atores humanos pela quantidade vertiginosa de habilidades imprevistas. Na minha opinião e na de Callon, a armadura técnica era o que havia de mais “social” e uma sociedade, uma vez que se voltasse à etimologia do adjetivo e se permitisse seguir todas as associações necessárias à extensão de uma rede. Principalmente se a ela forem acrescentadas as técnicas intelectuais que se aprendeu a seguir a partir das pesquias de laboratórios, e que acabaram misturando-se em toda parte com as organizações técnicas. Às máquinas, devia-se acrescentar os escritórios; às engrenagens, as técnicas contáveis; à resistência dos materiais, as agências de padronização. (Latour 2012:12-3)

ANTROPOTECNIA, ANT e PERFORMANCE

Se os babuínos manifestavam uma complexidade social tão estraordinária, totalmente digna de Garfinkel, eles só faziam uso de suas patas. Era isso que confirmava – a Callon e a mim – nossas intuições sobre a fabricação técnica da sociedade: o que caracteriza os seres humanos não é a emergência do social, mas o desvio, a tradução, a inflexão de todos os cursos de ação em dispositivos técnicos cada vez mais complicados (mas não necessariamente mais complexos). Alguns anos depois de meu retorno desse trabalho de campo queniano, em 1979, escrevemos o texto que fundou a teoria do ator-rede, Unscrewing the great Leviathan, propondo uma teoria social bastante aberta para absorver as associações entre seres humanos e não humanos, sobretudo fazendo da mudança de escala a consequência de um emprego das técnicas materiais bem como organizacionais. A performatividade do social pelas ciências, incluindo a ciência econômica, financeira, administrativa, abria-se, assim, de forma mais ampla à pesquisa empírica. (Latour 2012:14-5)

DO SOCIAL às ASSOCIAÇÕES

Ao passar do social às associações, o analista aproveitava-se, enfim, de uma liberdade de manobra tão grande quanto a de seus informantes, em vez de se fechar no estreito quadro da “dimensão social” de fenômenos científicos, técnicos, cujo conteúdo deveria escapar-lhe completamente. O que se pretendia observar eram as redes socio-técnicas em vias de expansão. (Latour 2012:15)

IRREDUÇÕES

Com uma única intuição – a distinção entre as relações de força e as relações de razão faz com que tanto a força quanto a razão sejam incompreensíveis – misturada a uma completa e totalmente despercebida contradição: a intenção de conferir a todas as associações a mesma metalinguagem, em termos de tradução, redes e enteléquias. (Latour 2012:17)

O LIVRO COMO OBJETO TÉCNICO

A ausência de um narrador de carne e osso em uma narrativa ficcional não é uma propriedade semiótica da ficção mas do livro como objeto técnico; sem o livro, o narrador seria um contador tão pouco ausente daquilo que enuncia quanto o manipulador de marionetes em um espetáculo de bunkaru. (Latour 2012:18)

SCIENCE IN ACTION

Seguindo a circulação responsável pela produção de fatos e pela construção de máquinas, Science in Action pode ser lido como uma aplicação da teoria das redes, o que ele certamente não deixa de ser, mas também como um estudo de três regimes de verdade: a referência científica, os arranjos técnicos, ambos opondo-se a esse Gênio do Mal da informação Duplo Clique. (Latour 2012:20-1)

PESQUISA

Sem me contradizer, eu poderia ser ao mesmo tempo filósofo, antropólogo e sociólogo: tudo leva à pesquisa, tudo surge dela. (Latour 2012:23)

Mediação técnica (Latour 1994)

LATOUR, Bruno. 1994. On technical mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy. Common Knowledge 3(2):29-64.

DAEDALION & TECHNOLOGY (desvio, estratégia, mediação e evolução-civilização):

No unmediated action is possible once we enter the realm of engineers and craftsmen. A daedalion, in Greek, is something curved, veering from the straight line, artful but fake, beautiful and contrived. […] Daedalus is our best eponym for technique – and the concept of daedalion our best tool to penetrate the evolution of civilization. (Latour 1994:29-30)

:::::::::: PHILOSOPHY :.

CRÍTICA A HEIDEGGER:

(Latour 1994:30)

GUNS KILL PEOPLE x PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE:

(Latour 1994:30-1)

FIRST MEANING OF MEDIATION: TRANSLATION (Fig.1):

A first sense of mediation […] is the program of action, the series of goals and steps and intentions, that an agent can describe in a story […] (fig. 1). If […] the accomplishment of the agent’s goal is interrupted, for whatever reason […], then the agent makes a detour, a deviation: […] one cannot speak of techniques without speaking of daedalia. Agent 1 falls back on Agent 2, here a gun. Agent 1 enlists the gun or is enlisted by it – it does not matter which – and a third agent emerges from a fusion of the other two. […] The question now becomes which goal the new composite agent will pursue. If it returns, after its detour, to Goal 1, then the […] gun is a tool, merely and intermediary. If agent 3 drifts from Goal 1 to Goal 2, than the […] gun’s intent, the gun’s will, the gun’s script have superseded those of Agent 1; it is human action that is no more than an intermediary. Note that in the diagram it makes no difference if Agent 1 and Agent 2 are reversed. The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human can master are symmetrical. But a third possibility is more commonly realized: the creation of a new goal that corresponds to neither agent’s program of action. […] I call this uncertainty about goals translation. […] Who, then, is the actor in my vignette? Someone else (a citizen-gun, a gun-citizen). […] You are a different person with the gun in your hand. Essence is existence and existence is action. If I define you by what you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun), then you are modified by the gun – more so or less so, depending on the weight of the other associations that you carry. This translation is wholly symmetrical. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. What is true of the subject, of the gunman, is as true of the object, of the gun that is held. […] Neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed. […] It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants. And this is the first of the (four) meanings of mediation. (Latour 1994:31-4)

TRANSLATION (Serres e Callon): (Latour 1994:32 nota 3)

Like Michel Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents. (Latour 1994:32)

ACTANTS (agents) & PROGRAMS OF ACTION (goals-functions):

Agents can be human or […] nonhuman, and each can have goals (or functions, as engineers prefer to say). Since the word agent in the case of nonhumans is uncommon, a better term is actant, a borrowing from semiotics that describes any entity that acts in a plot until the attribution of a figurative or nonfigurative role […]. A single actant may take many different “actantial” shapes, and conversely the same actor may play many different “actorial” roles. The same is true of goals and functions, the former associated more with humans, the latter with nonhumans, but both can be described as programs of action – a neutral term useful when an attribution of human goals or nonhuman functions has not been made. (Latour 1994:33-4)

GOALS or FUNCTIONS?

That depends on the degree of anthropomorphism involved. (Latour 1994:34)

ACTOR-NETWORK:

[T]he prime mover of an action becomes a new, distributed, and nested series of practices whose sum might be made but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants mobilized in the list. (Latour 1994:34)

SECOND MEANING OF MEDIATION: COMPOSITION (Fig. 2)

Action is a property of associated entities. Agent 1 is allowed, authorized, enabled by the others. […] The attribution to one actor of the role of prime mover in no way weakens the necessity of a composition of forces to explain the action. It is by mistake, or unfairness, that our headlines read, “Man flies,” “Woman goes into space.” Flying is a property of the whole association of entities that includes airports and planes, lauch pads and ticket counters. B-52s do not fly, the U.S. Air Force flies. Action is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants, and this is the second sense of what I intend by technical mediation. (Latour 1994:35)

SYMMETRY:

Any given symmetry is defined by what is conserved through transformations. In the symmetry between humans and nonhumans, I keep constant the series of competences, of properties, that agents are able to swap by overlapping each other. (Latour 1994:35)

HOMO FABER (Hegel, Leroi-Gourhan, Marx, Bergson):

(Latour 1994:35)

THIRD MEANING OF MEDIATION: REVERSIBLE BLACKBOXING (Fig.3)

Look around the room in which you are puzzling over figure 3. Consider how many black boxes there are in the room. Open the black boxes; examine the assemblies inside. Each of the parts inside the black box is a black box full of parts. If any part were to break, how many humans would immediately materialize around each? How far back in time, away in space, should we retrace our steps to follow all those silent entities that constribute peacefully to your reading this article at your desk? Return each of these entities to step 1; imagine the time when each was disinterested and going its own way, without being bent, enrolled, enlisted, mobilized in any of the others’ plots. (Latour 1994:36-7)

FOURTH MEANING OF MEDIATION: DELEGATION (speed bumps) (Fig.4)

The copresence of enunciators and enunciatees has collapsed along with frames of reference. An object stands in for an actor and creates an asymmetry between absent makers and occasional users. Without this detour, this shifting down, we would not understand how an enunciator could be absent: Either it is there, we would say, or it does not exist. But by shifting down, another combination of absence and presence becomes possible. It is not, as in fiction, that I am here and elsewhere, that I am myself and someone else, but that action, long past, of an actor, long disappeared, is still active here, today, on me – I live in the midst of technical delegates. […] Think of technology as congealed labor. Consider the very notion of investment: A regular course of action is suspended, a detour is initiated via several types of actants, and the return is a fresh hybrid that carries past acts into the present and permits its many makers to disappear while also remaining present. […] The speed bump is not made of matter, ultimately; it is full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard calculations. (Latour 1994:40-1)

BLIND SPOT:

The mediation, the technical translation, that I am trying to understand resides in the blind spot where society and matter exchange properties. [….] I am struggling to approach the zone where some, though not all, of the characteristics of concrete become policemen, and some, though not all, of the characteristics of policemen become speed bumps. . . (Latour 1994:41)

RELOCATE HUMANISM:

We must learn to ignore the definitive shapes of humans, and of the nonhumans with which we share more and more of our existence. The blur that we would then perceive, the swapping of properties, is a characteristic of our premodern past, in the good old days of poiesis, and a characteristic of our modern and nonmodern present as well. (Latour 1994:42)

:::::::::: SOCIOLOGY :.

KUBRICK’S “2001: A space odissey”

Were scholarship as efficient as the art of film, I would have you progress as rapidly as Kubrick’s apes – from a band of primates linked only by social ties to a evolved species of sociotechnical humans who admit their inferiolr brethren, the nonhumans, to their social thinking. But to bring this about would be quite a miracle, since social theory is as devoid of artifacts as were Kubrick’s apes before the monolith arrived. (Latour 1994:43)

VARIOUS MEANINGS OF THE ADJECTIVE TECHNICAL

It designates, first, a subprogram, or a series of nested subprograms […]. When we say “this is a technical point,” it means that we have to deviate for a moment from the main task and that we will eventually resume our normal course of action, which is the only focus worth our attention. A black box opens momentarily, and will become black again, completely invisible in the main sequence of action. (Latour 1994:43)

Second, technical designates the subordinate role of people, skills, or objects that occupy this secondary function of being present, indispensable, but invisible. It thus indicates a specialized and highly circumscribed task, clearly subordinate in a hierarchy. (Latour 1994:43)

Third, the adjective designates a hitch, a snag, a catch, a hiccup in the smooth functioning of the subprograms, as when we say that “there is a technical problem to solve first”. Here, the deviation might not lead us back to the main road, as with the first meaning, but may threaten the original goal entirely. Technical is no longer a mere detour, but an obstacle, a roadblock. What should have been a means, may become an end, at least for a while. (Latour 1994:43)

The fourth meaning carries with it the same uncertainty about what is an end and what is a means. […] Technical people, objects, or skills are at once inferior (since the main task will be resumed), indispensable (since the goal is unreachable without them), and, in a way, capricious, mysterious, uncertain (since they depend on some highly specialized and badly circumscribed knack). […] So the adjective technical has a useful meaning that maps in the language the three first types of translation that I defined above. (Latour 1994:43-4)

Technical also designates a very specific type of delegation, of movement, of shifting, that crosses over with entities that have different timing, different properties, different ontologies, and that are made to share the same destiny, thus creating a new actant. Here the noun is often used as well as the adjective, as when we say “a technique of communication,” a technique for boiling eggs.” In this case, the noun does not designate a thing, but a modus operandi, a chain of gestures and know-how, bringing about some anticipated result. (Latour 1994:44)

TECHNICAL SKILL:

Technical skill is not a thing we can study directly. We can only observe its dispersal among various types of actants. […] Technical skill is not uniquely possessed by humans and reluctantly granted to nonhumans. Skills emerge in the zone of transaction, they are properties of the assembly that circulate or are redistributed among human and nonhuman technicians, enabling and authorizing them to act. (Latour 1994:44-5)

TECHNICAL ACTION FOLDS TIME (irreversibility):

Even my own action of a moment ago is now foreign to me, though still present in a new guise. Through my productive detour, my investment, a relative irreversibility is set in place. (Latour 1994:45)

PERSONNE MORALE, CORPORATE BODY, ARTIFICIAL PERSON:

If ever one comes face to face with an object, that is not the beginning but the end of a long process of proliferating mediators, a process in which all relevant subprograms, nested on into another, meet in a “simple” task (Latour 1994:45)

HUMAN EXISTENCE=ACTION:

There is no sense in which humans may be said to exist as humans without entering into commerce with what authorizes and enables them to exist (i.e., to act). (Latour 1994:45-6)

SOCIOLOGY OF OBJECTS:

an object is a subject that only sociology can study (Latour 1994:46)

BOING x AIRLINES

Boeing-747s do not fly, airlines fly. (Latour 1994:46)

THE NEW PARADIGM (Fig.6)

In the newly emerging paradigm (fig. 6), we substitute collective – defined as an exchange of human and nonhuman properties inside a corporate body – for the tainted word society. […] First there is translation, the means by which we inscribe in a different matter features of our social order; next, the crossover, which consists in the exchange of properties among nonhumans; third, the enrollment, by which a nonhuman is seduced, manipulated, or induced into the collective; fourth, the mobilization of nonhumans inside the collective, which adds fresh unexpected resources, resulting in strange new hybrids; and, finally, displacement, the direction the collective takes once its shape, extent, and composition have been altered. (Latour 1994:46)

MODERNS & NON-MODERNS

The difference between an ancient or “primitive” collective and a modern or “advanced” one is not that the former manifests a rich mixture of social and technical culture while the latter exhibits a technology devoid of ties with the social order. The difference, rather, is that the latter translates, crosses over, enrolls, and mobilizes more elements, more intimately connected, with a more finely woven social fabric than the former does. The relation between the scale of collectives and the number of nonhumans enlisted in their midst is crucial. One finds, of course, longer chains of action in “modern” collectives, a greater number of nonhumans (machines, automatons, devices) associated with one another, but one must not overlook the size of markets, the number of people in their orbits, the amplitude of the mobilization: more objects, yes, but many more subjects as well. […] Objects and subjects are made simultaneously, and an increased number of subjects is directly related to the number of objects stirred – brewed – into the collective. (Latour 1994:47)

O CASO “ARAMIS”

(Latour 1994:48-9)

DURKHEIM x SOCIOGENESIS:

(Latour 1994:49-50)

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

(Latour 1994:50)

RECONCILING ETHNOMETHODOLOGY & MAINSTREAM SOCIOLOGY:

The new paradigm I am proposing for the study of techniques obviates these disputes. Let us admit that the ethnomethodologists are right, that there exist only local interactions, producing social order on the spot. And let us admit that mainstream sociologists are right, that actions at a distance may be transported to bear on local interactions. How can gthese positions be reconciled? An action in the distant past, in a faraway place, by actors now absent, can still be present, on condition that it be shifted, translated, delegated, or displaced to other types of actants, those I have been calling nonhumans. […] When we say that “we” here present are engaged in our local interactions, the sum of those who are summoned must include all the other personae that have been shifted down previously. “We” is not a simple synoptic and coherent category. The notion of a present and local interaction is subverted by an immense crowd of nonhumans, each determined by its own shifts in time, space, and actant. […] Of course, ethnomethodologists are right to criticize traditional sociology with its fanciful macro level, but they are wrong to conclude that there is such a thing as an absolutely local interactions. No human relationship exists in a framework homogeneous as to space, time, and actants. However, the error that traditional sociology makes is as great, when it forgets to ask how a difference of scale is obtained, how power is exerted, irreversibility sets in, and roles and functions are distributred. Everything in the definition of macro social order is due to the enrollment of nonhumans – that is, to technical mediation. Even the simple effect of duration, of long-lasting social force, cannot be obtained without the durability of nonhumans to which human local interactions have been shifted. (Latour 1994:50-1)

:::::::::: GENEALOGY :.

KENYA BABOON SOAP OPERA:

(Latour 1994:51-2)

TECHNICAL ACTION as DELEGATION:

Technical actino is a form of delegation that allows us to mobilize, during interactions, moves made elsewhere, earlier, by other actants. It is the presence of the past and distant, the presence of nonhuman characters, that frees us, precisely, from interactions (what we manage to do, right away, with our humble social skills). That we are not Machiavellian baboons we owe to technical action. (Latour 1994:52)

TECHNIQUE as SOCIALIZATION OF NONHUMANS:

The traditional definition of technique as the imposition of a form consciously planned onto shapeless matter should be replaced by a view of technique – a more accurate view – as the socialization of nonhumans. (Latour 1994:52-3)

SOCIETY IS NOS SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED

Society is not stable enough to inscribe itself in anytyhing. On the contrary, most of the features of what we mean by social order – scale, asymmetry, durability, power, hierarchy, the distributino of roles – are impossible even to define without recruiting socialized nonhumans. Yes, society is constructed, but not socially constructed. (Latour 1994:53)

SHARING RESPONSIBILITY & REDIFINING HUMANITY:

Responsibility for action must be shared, symmetry restored, and humanity redescribed: not as the sole transcendent cause, but as the mediating mediator. (Latour 1994:54)

GENEALOGY OF SOCIOTECHNICAL ASSOCIATIONS:

What needs to be done, then, is to peel away, one by one, the layers of meaning and attempt a genealogy of their associations. (Latour 1994:54)

ASSOCIATION SPACE

It should be possible to imagine a space, that could be studied empirically, in which we could observe the swapping of properties without having to start from a priori definitions of humanity.(Latour 1994:54)

POLITICAL ECOLOGY (Level 11)

We have literally, not symbolically as before, to manage the planet we inhabit, and must now define a politics of things. (Latour 1994:55)

TECHNOLOGIES (Level 10)

While on this model […], automata have no rights, they are much more than material entities; they are complex organizations. (Latour 1994:56)

NETWORKS OF POWER (Level 9)

What can be done with electrons can be done with electors. (Latour 1994:57)

SWAPPING

[T]he point of my little genealogy is also to identify, inside the seamless web, properties borrowed from the social world in order to socialize nonhumans, and, vice versa, borrowed from nonhumans in order to naturalize and expand the social realm. For each layer of meaning, whatever happens happens as if we were learning, in contact with one side,ontological properties that are then reimported to the other side, generating new, completely unexpected effects (Fig. 7). (Latour 1994:56-7)

INDUSTRY (Level 8)

The extraordinary feat of what I will call industry is to extend to matter a further property that we think of as exclusively social, the capacity to relate to other sof one’s kind. Nonhumans have this capacity when part of the assembly of actants that we call a machine: an automaton endowed with autonomy of some sort and submitted to regular laws that can be measured with instruments and accounting procedures. From tools held in the hands of human workers, the shift historically was to assemblies of machines, where tools relate to one another, creating a massive array of labor and material relations in factories that Marx described as so many circles of hell. The paradox of this stage of relations between humans and nonhumans is thbat it has been termed “alienation”, dehumanization, as if it were the first time that poor and exploited human weakness was confronted wihtan all-powerful objective force. however, to relate nonhumans together in an assembly of amachines, ruled by laws, and accounted for by instruments, is to grant them a sort of social life. […] The “megamachine” […] has been extended to nonhumans. (Latour 1994:58)

MATTER:

Far from being primitive, immutable, and ahistorical, matter has a complex genealogy. […] Matter is not a given, but a recent historical creation. (Latour 1994:58)

MODERNITY:

Indeed,the mopdernits project consists in creating that peculiar hybrid: a fabricated nonhuman that has nothing of the charecter of society and politics yet builds the body politic all the more effectively because it seems completely estranged from humanity. (Latour 1994:58)

THE MEGAMACHINE (Level 7)

Before it is possible to delegate action to nonhumans, and possible to relate nonhumans to one another in an automaton, it must first be possible to nest a range of subprograms for action into one another without losing track of them. Management, Mumford would say, precedes the expansion of material techniques. (Latour 1994:59)

EVEN & ODD

The even-numbered episodes I have recounted so far follow this pattern: industry shifts to nonhumans the management of people learned in the imperial machine, much as technologies shift to nonhumans the large-scale management learned through networks of power. In the odd-numbered episodes, the opposite process is at work: what has been learned from nonhumans is reimported so as to reconfigure people. (Latour 1994:59)

INTERNALIZED ECOLOGY (Level 6)

agriculture and the domestication of animals. The intense socialization, reeducation, and reconfiguration of plants and animals – so intense that they change shape, function, and often genetic makeup (Latour 1994:60)

SOCIETY (Level 5)

What Durkheim mistook for the effect of a sui generis social order is simply the effect of having brought so many techniques to bear on our social relations. It was from techniques that we learned what it means to subsist and distend, to accept a role and discharge a function. By reimporting this competence into the definition of society, we taught ourselves to reify it, to make society stand independent of fast-moving interactions. We even learned how to delegate to society the task of relegating us to roles and functions. Society exists, in other worlds, but is not socially constructed. Nonhumans proliferate below the bottom line of social theory. (Latour 1994:60)

TECHNIQUES (Level 4)

By this stage in our speculative genealogy, we can no longer talk of humans, of anatomically modern humans, but only of social prehumans. At last, we are in a position to define technique with some precision. Techniques, we learn from archaeologists, are articulated subprograms for actions that subsist (intime) and extend (in space). Techniques imply not society (that late-developing hybrid) but a semisocial organization that brings together nonhumans from very different seasons, places, and materials. A bow and arrow, a javelin, a hammer, a net, an article of clothing are composed of parts and pieces that require recombination in sequences of time and space that bear no relation to their natural settings. Techniques are what happen to tools and nonhumans actants when processed through an organization that extracts, recombines, and socializes them. Even the3 simplest techniques are sociotechnical; even at this primitive level of meaning, forms of organization are inseparable from technical gestures. (Latour 1994:61)

SOCIAL COMPLICATION (Level 3)

[A]t this stage there is no society, no overarching framework, no dispatcher of roles and functions; merely interactions among prehumans. […] Complex interactions are now marked and followed by nonhumans enrolled for the purpose. Why? Nonhumans stabilize social negotiatins. Nonhumans are at once pliable and durable; they can be shaped very quickly but, once shaped, last far longer than the interactions that fabricated them. Social interactions are extremely labile and transitory. More precisely, either htey are negotiable but transient or, if they are encoded (for instance) in the genetic makeup, they are extremely durable but difficult to renegotiate. By involving nonhumans, the contradiction between durability and negotiability is resolved. It becomes possible to follow (or “black box”) interactions, to recombine highly complicated tasks, to nest subprograms into one another. What was impossible for complex social animals to accomplish becomes possible for prehumans – who use tools, not to acquire food but to fix, underlyne, materialize, and keep track of the social realm. Though composed only of interactions, the social realm becomes visible and attains through the enlistment of nonhumans – tools – some measure of durability. (Latour 1994:61)

THE BASIC TOOK KIT (Level 2)

What, then, is a tool? The extension of social skills to nonhumans. […] [T]reating a stone, say, as a social partner, modifying it, then acting on a second stone. Prehuman tools, in contrast to the ad hoc implements of other primates, represent the extension of a skill rehearsed in the realm of social interactions. (Latour 1994:62)

SOCIAL COMPLEXITY (Level 1)

Garfinkelian interactinos to repair a constantly decaying social order. (Latour 1994:62)

SOCIOTECHNICAL

My little origin myth makes conceivable the impossibility of an artifact that does not incorporate social relations, and makes conceivable the impossibility of defining social structures without accounting for the large role of nonhumans in them. […] In place of the great vertical dichotomy between society and techniques, there is conceivable (in fact, now, available) a range of horizontal distinctions between very various meanings of the sociotechnical hybrids. It is possible to have our cake and eat it – to be monists and make distinctions. (Latour 1994:62)

To conceive humanity and technology as polar is to wish away humanity: we are sociotechnical animals, and each human interaction is sociotechnical. We are never limited to social ties. We are never faced with objects. This final diagram (fig. 8) relocates humanity where we belong – in the crossover, the central column, the possibility of mediating between mediators. (Latour 1994:64)

THE ILLUSION OF MODERNITY:

(Latour 1994:64)

OBJECTIVITY & SUBJECTIVITY:

Objectivity and subjuectivity are not opposed, they grow together, and they grow irreversibly together. (Latour 1994:64)

THEY ARE US

They [artifacts] mediate our actions? No, they are us. (Latour 1994:64)

Redefinindo o elo social (Strum e Latour 1987)

STRUM, Shirley S.; LATOUR, Bruno. 1987. Redefining the social link: from baboons to humans. Social Science Information 26(4):783-802.

:::::::::: REDEFINING THE NOTION OF SOCIAL :.

OSTENSIVE vs. PERFORMATIVE:

In the last two decades this ostensive definition of society has been challenged by ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and by the sociology of science (Knorr and Mulkay, 1983), especially of the social sciences (Law, 1986) and the sociology of technology (Latour, 1986a). In the light of these studies, the conventional distinctions between micro- and macro-levels become less clearcut and it is more difficult to accept a traditional definition of society. Instead, society is more compellingly seen as continually constructed or “performed” by active social beings who violate “levels” in the process of ther “work”. (Strum; Latour 1987:784)

OSTENSIVE 1: It is, in principle, possible to discover the typical properties of what holds a society together […], although in practice, it may be difficult (Strum; Latour 1987:784)
PERFORMATIVE 1: It is impossible, in principle, to establish properties which would be peculiar to life in society, although, in practice, it is possible to do so. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

OSTENSIVE 2: These properties or elements are social. (Strum; Latour 1987:784)
PERFORMATIVE 2: A variety of elements or properties […] [,] not restricted to the purely social […] [,] contribute to the social link as defined by social actors. (Strum; Latour 1987:285)

OSTENSIVE 3: Social actors […] are in the society […] [,] they are only part of a larger society. (Strum; Latour 1987:784)
PERFORMATIVE 3: In practice, actors […] define, for themselves and for others, what society is (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

OSTENSIVE 4: Because the actors are […] only part of society, […] they can never see or know the whole picture. (Strum; Latour 1987:784)
PERFORMATIVE 4: Actors “performing” society know what is necessary for their success. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

OSTENSIVE 5: With the proper methodology, social scientists can discover the principles of what holds society together, distinguishing between actors’ beliefs and behaviour. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)
PERFORMATIVE 5: Social scientists […] are themselves “performing” society” […]. They may, however, have different practical ways of enforcing their definition of what society is. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

OSTENSIVE DEFINITION OF THE SOCIAL LINK:

According to the traditional paradigm, society exists, actors enter it adhering to rules and a structure that are already determined. The overall nature of the society is unknown and unknowable to the actors. Only scientists, standing outside of society, have the capacity to understad it and see it in its entirety. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

PERFORMATIVE DEFINITION OF THE SOCIAL LINK:

According to the performative view, society is constructed through the many efforts to define it; it is something achieved in practice by all actors, including scientists who themselves strive to define what society is. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

GARFINKEL:

[S]ocial actors are […] active achievers of society. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

FIRST INVERSE RELATIONSHIP CREATED BY THE PERFORMATIVE FRAMEWORK:

[T]he more active the actors, the less they differ from one another. […] [A]ctors are fully fledged social scientists researching what the society is, what holds it together and how it can be altered. (Strum; Latour 1987:786)

SECOND INVERSE RELATIONSHIP CREATED BY THE PERFORMATIVE FRAMEWORK:

[T]he more actors are seen to be equal, in principle, the more that practical differences between them become apparent in the means available to them to achieve society. (Strum; Latour 1987:786)

:::::::::: BABOONS: HISTORY OF IDEAS :.

DARWINIAN REVOLUTION (from pre-scientific chaos to scientific order):

It was the Darwinian revolution that initiated the modern scientific study of the behaviour and society of other animals. (Strum; Latour 1987:785)

SEX + DOMINANCE (1930s; laboratory studies) => MALE AGRESSION (1950s; field studies) => KINSHIP + FRIENDSHIP (1960s, 1970s; individualization methods) => SMART GENE (mid 1970s; sociobiology):

The socio-biological solution left moot the question of the proximate means by which society could be achieved. Smart gene calculators might be appropriate actors in an “ultimate” scenario but whole individuals coexisted, competed or co-operated as real participants in society. (Strum; Latour 1987:787-8)

SMART BIOLOGY x SOCIAL SKILLS:

If baboons are constantly testint, trying to see who is allied with whom, who is leading whom, which strategirs can further their goals, as recent evidence suggests, then both baboons and scientists are asking the same questions. And to the extent that baboons are constantly negotiating, the social link is transformed into a process of acquiring knowledge about “what the society is”. To put it in a slightly different waym if we grant that baboons are not entering into a stable structure but rather negotiating what that structure will be, and monitoring and testing and pushing all other such negotiations, the bariety of baboon society and its ill fit to a simple structure can be seen to be a result of the “performative” question. The evidence is more striking in reverse. If there was a structure to be entered, why all this behaviour geared to testing, negotiating and monitoring […; 7 linhas de referências]? (Strum; Latour 1987:788)

HIERARQUIA como RESULTADO de uma BUSCA POR ESTABILIDADE RELACIONAL:

[H]ierarchies might develop […] as the provisional outcome of their search for some basis of predictable interactions. Rather than entering an alliance system, baboons performing society would be testing the availability and solidity of alliances without knowing for certain, in advance, which relationships will hold and which will break. In short, performative baboons are social players actively negotiating and renegbotiating what their society is and what it will be. (Strum; Latour 1987:789)

:::::::::: SOCIAL COMPLEXITY AND SOCIAL COMPLICATION :.

THE INDIVIDUAL ACTOR and HIS PRACTICAL MEANS:

The performative paradigm suggests an important distinction. What differs is the practical means that actors have to enforce their version of society or to organize others on a larger scale, thereby putting into practice their own individual version of what society is.(Strum; Latour 1987:790)

BABOONS’ RESOURCES (body + skills = complexity)

If actors have only themselves, only their bodies as resources, the task of building stable societies will be difficult. This is probably the case with b aboons. […] [T]hey have no simple or simplifying means to decide these issues [group membership, group structure, group dynamics etc.] or to separate out one at a time to focus on. […] [E]ven age, kinship and kinship-linked dominance may be the object of negotiation at critical points […]. A profusion of other variables impinge simultaneously. This is the definition of complexity, “to simultaneously embrace a multitude of objects”. […] [B]aboons live in COMPLEX societies and have complex sociality. (Strum; Latour 1987:790)

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY = PRIMATOLOGY:

A baboon is, in our view, the ideal case of the COMPETENT MEMBER portrayed by ethnomethodologists, a social actor having difficulty negotiating one factor at a time, constantly subject to the interference of others with similar problems. (Strum; Latour 1987:790)

RESOURCES DETERMINE STABILITY:

These limited resources make possible only limited social stability. […] Greater stability is acquired only with additional resources; something besides what is encoded in bodies and attainable through social skills (Strum; Latour 1987:790-1)

MATERIAL RESOURCES + SYMBOLS = COMPLICATION:

Something is “complicated” when it is made of a succession of simple operations. Computers are the archetype of a complicated structure where tasks are achieved by the machine doing a series of simple steps. We suggests that the shift from complexity to complications is the crucial practical distinction between types of social life. (Strum; Latour 1987:791)

MODERN SCIENCE = COMPLICATION = SIMPLIFICATION:

Modern scientific observers replace a complexity of shifting, often fuzzy and continuous behaviours, relationships and meanings with a complicated array of simple, symbolic, clear-cut items. It is an enormous task of simplification. (Strum; Latour 1987:791)

SOCIAL COMPLEXITY = RELATIVE POWERLESSNESS:

(Strum; Latour 1987:791)

HUNTER-GATHERERS

Here language, symbols and matgerial objects can be used to simplify the task of ascertaining and negotiating the nature of the social order. Bodies continue their social strategies in the performation of society, but on a larger, more durable, less complex scale. Material resources and the symbolic innovations related to language allow individuals to influence and havemore power over others thereby determining the nature of the social order. (Strum; Latour 1987:791-2)

AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES:

[E]ven more resources can be brought to bear in creating the social bond. In fact, the social bond can be maintained in the relative absence of the individuals. […] [T]he performation of society is possibleon a larger scale because negotiations at each step are much less complex. (Strum; Latour 1987:792)

MODERN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES:

Here individuals, are able to organize and “mobilize” others on a grand scale. […] By holding a variety of factors constant and sequentially negotiating one variable at a time, a stable complicated structure is created. Through extra-somatic resources employed in the processes of social complication, units like multinational corporations, states and nations can be constituted (Strum; Latour 1987:792-3)

FROM BABOONS (complex sociality) TO HUMANS (complicated sociality):

Starting with individuals who have little power to affect others, or enforce their version of society, or make a lasting social order, we encounter a situation where individuals employ more and more material and “extra-social” means to simplify social negotiations. This gives them the ability to organize others on a large scale, even when those others are not physicallhy present. By using additional new resources, social actors can make weak and renegotiable associations, like alliances between male baboons, into strong and unbreakable units (Callon and Latour, 1981; Latour, 1986a). (Strum; Latour 1987:793)

:::::::::: THE EVOLUTION OF THE PERFORMATIVE SOCIAL BOND :.

PERFORMATIVE FRAMEWORK as SYMMETRIZATION (todos agem):

[I]t grants full activity to all social participants. (Strum; Latour 1987:793)

PERFORMATIVE FRAMEWORK as ASYMMETRIZATION (recursos para ação não são uniformemente distribuídos):

[N]ew asymmetries are introduced when we consider what practical means actors have to enforce their own definitino of the social bond and to organize other according to individual views of what society is. (Strum; Latour 1987:793)

SOCIAL as ASSOCIATION:

We can begin with the common definition of social – “to associate”. But how does an actor make the social link hold? Some associations are weaker while some are stronger and longer lasting. […] [R]esources play a role in the construction of society and in social stability. (Strum; Latour 1987:793)

The performative framework we are advocating, in effect, gives back to the word “social” its original meaning of association. (Strum; Latour 1987:794)

SHRINKING MEANING OF THE SOCIAL (follow, enrolling, allying, sharing)=>(market, contract, scientific objetc):

Starting with a definition which is coextensive with all associations, we now have, in common parlance, a use that is limited to what is left after politics, biology, economics, law, psychology, management, technology and so on, have taken their own parts of the associations. Using this definitino we can compare the practical ways in which organisms achieve societies. (Strum; Latour 1987:794)

Desparafusando o grande Leviatã (Callon e Latour 1981)

CALLON, Michel; LATOUR, Bruno. 1981. Unscrewing the big Leviathan: how actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In: K. Knorr-Cetina; A.V. Cicourel (eds.). Advances in social theory and methodology: toward and integration of micro- and macro-Sociologies. Boston: Routledge; Kegan Paul, pp.277-303.

HOBBES’S PARADOX:

For Hobbes – and for us too – it is not a question of classifying macro- and micro-actors, or reconciling what we know of the former and what we know of the latter, but posing anew the old question: how does a micro-actor become a macro-actor? How can men act ‘like one man’? (Callon; Latour 1981:279)

TRANSLATION:

By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes on, causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force […]. Whenever an actor speaks of ‘us‘ (Callon; Latour 1981:279)

SEMIOTIC DEFINITION OF ACTOR:

By the term ‘actor’ we mean, from now on, the semiotic definition by A. Greimas […]: ‘whatever unit of discourse is invested of a role’, like the notion of force, it is no way limited to ‘human’. (Callon; Latour 1981:301 nota 8 )

DELEUZE & GUATTARI (anti-étipo como “crítica devastadora da psicanálise”):

The unconscious, anyway, is not ‘individual’, so that in our innermost dreams we still act inside the whole body politic and vice versa. (Callon; Latour 1981:302 nota 9)

ACTORS as NETWORKS:

Two networks may have the same shape although one is almost limited to a point and the other extends all over the country (Callon; Latour 1981:280)

O ERRO DE DURKHEIM:

By changing the framework of analysis while this is under way they confirm the power relations, giving aid to the winner and giving the losers the ‘vae victis’. (Callon; Latour 1981:280)

(2) BABOONS, OR THE IMPOSSIBLE LEVIATHAN:

[T]he impossible Monkey-Leviathan, or the difficulty of building up macro-actors in a herd of baboons living in the wild. (Callon; Latour 1981:281)

EVOLUTION OF PRIMATOLOGY (from state of nature to state of society in 30 years)

Over 30 years, the study of primates has thus been used as a projective test: first, bestial chaos was observed, then a rigid, almost totalitarian system. Baboons have been obliged to restructure the Leviathan and to move from the war of all against all to absolute obedience. (Callon; Latour 1981:282)

PRIMATOLOGIA (Krummer e Haraway):

(Callon; Latour 1981:302 notas 17-9)

NOT CHAOS x ORDER, BUT DEGREES of ORGANIZATION:

The baboons do indeed have organization: not everything is equally possible in it. One animal does not go close to just any other; an animal does not cover or groom another by chance; nor does it move aside just at random; animals cannot go just where they wish. However, this organization is never regid enough to constitute an integrated system. […] There is no chaos, but no rigid system either. (Callon; Latour 1981:282)

SOCIAL SKILLS & SOCIAL COMPLEXITY:

A baboon’s life is not easy in the new society that has been forged for it and is no less difficult than our life as revealed by ethnomethodological works. He must constantly determine who is who, who is superior and who inferior, who leads the group and who follows, and who must stand back to let him pass. […] Each time it is necessary, as the ethnomethodologists say, to repair indexicality. Who is calling? What is it intending to say? […] Only the context will tell, but simplifying and evaluating the context is a constant headache. (Callon; Latour 1981:282-3)

SOCIAL=FOLLOW (Tarde):

Baboons are social […] in the sense that they follow each other, enrol each other, form alliances, share certain links and territories. But they are social [and not, for instance, ‘technical’], too, in that they can maintain and fortify their alliances, links and partitions only with the tools and procedures that ethnomethodologists grant us to repair indexicality. They are constantly stabilizing the links between bodies by acting on other bodies. (Callon; Latour 1981:283)

A DURAÇÃO DA ASSOCIAÇÃO DEPENDE DA DURABILIDADE DA SUA MEDIAÇÃO:

Although in order to stabilize society everyone – monkey as well as men – need to bring into play associations that last longer than the interactions that formed them, the strategies and resources may vary between societies of baboons or of men. (Callon; Latour 1981:283)

LEVIATHAN COMO CONCRETIZAÇÃO DE ASSOCIAÇÕES:

[I]f you transform the state of nature, replacing unsettled alliances as much as you can with walls and written contracts, the ranks with uniforms and tatoos and reversible friendships with names and signs, then you will obtain a Leviathan. […] [W]hat makes the sovereign formidable and the contract solemn are the palace from which he speaks, the well-equipped armies that surround him, the scribes and the recording equipment that serve him. The ethnomethodologists forget to include in their analyses the fact that ambiguity of context in human societies is partially removed by a whole gamut of tools, regulations, walls and objects of which they analyse only a part. (Callon; Latour 1981:284)

CRÍTICAS a LEWIS MUMFORD e A. LEROI-GOURHAN:

(Callon; Latour 1981:303 nota 22)

REASSEMBLING THE SOCIAL (aqui os materiais parecem não agir…):

Instead of dividing the subject with the social/technical, or with the human/animal, or with the micro/macro dichotomies, we will only retain for the analysis gradients of resistivity and consider only the variations in relative solidity and durability of different sorts of materials. […] By associating materials of different durability, a set of practices is placed in a hierarchy in such a way that some become stable and need no longer be considered. Only thus can one ‘grow‘. (Callon; Latour 1981:284)

BLACK BOX METAPHYSICS (social, technical, logical):

An actor grows with the number of relations he or she can put, as we say, in black boxes. A black box contains that which no longer needs to be reconsidered, those things whose contents have become a matter of indifference. The more elements one can place in black boxes – modes of thoughts, habits, forces and objects [fatos sociais?] – the broader the construction one can raise. Of course, black boxes never remain fully closed or properly fastened […] but macro-actors can do as if they were closed and dark. Although, as ethnomethodologists have shown, we are all constantly struggling for closing leaky black boxes, macro-actors, to say the least, do not have to negotiate with equal intensity everything. They can go on and count on a force while negotiating for another. If they were not successful at that, they could not simplify the social world. In mechanical terms, they could not make a machine, that is hide the continued exercise of a will to give the impression of forces that move by themselves. In logical terms, they could not make chains of arguments, that is stabilize discussion of certain premises to allow deductions or establish order between differente elements. (Callon; Latour 1981:284-5)

CREATING ASYMMETRIES-IRREVERSIBILITIES (black boxes, chreods):

In the first moments of fertilization, all cells are alike. But soon an epigenetic landscape takes form where courses are cut out which tend to be irreversible; these are called ‘chreods’. Then cellular differentiation begins. Whether we speak of black boxes or chreods, we are dealing with the creation of asymmetries. (Callon; Latour 1981:285)

PROCESSOS DE ASSOCIAÇÃO:

How can we examine macro-actors and micro-actors, we were wondering, without confirming differences in size? Reply: by directing our attention not to the social but towards the processes by which an actor creates lasting asymmetries. That among these processes some lead to associations which are sometimes called ‘social’ (associations of bodies), and that some of the others are sometimes called ‘technical’ (associations of materials), need not concern us further. Only the differences between what can be put in black boxes and what remain open for future negotiations are now relevant for us. [ou seja, essa diferença é uma caixa preta que Latour quer que aceitemos agora sem questionar] (Callon; Latour 1981:286)

DEFINITION OF ACTOR:

What is an ‘actor’? Any element which bends space around itself, makes other elements dependent upon itself and translates their will into a language olf its own. (Callon; Latour 1981:286)

GROWING ACTOR:

Weak, reversible interactions, are replaced by strong interactions. Before, the elements dominated by the actor could escape in any direction, but now this is no longer possible. Instead of swarms of possibilities, we find lines of force, obligatory passing points, directions and deductions. (Callon; Latour 1981:287)

TERATOLOGY (Renault X EDF):

So far we have not said whether for EDF this is a question of something dreamed up by engineers, or a reality. In fact no one can make this distinction a priori, for it is the very basis of the struggle between the actors. (Callon; Latour 1981:289)

ASSOCIOLOGY:

The actors can bond together in a block comprising millions of individuals, they can enter alliances with iron, with grains of sand, neurons, words, opinions and affects. All this is of little importance, providing they can be followed with the same freedom as they themselves practise. We cannot analyse the Leviathan if we give precedence to a certain type of association, for example associations of men with men, iron with iron, neurons with neurons, or a specific size of factors. Sociology is only lively and productive when it examines all associations with at least the same daring as the actors who make them. (Callon; Latour 1981:292)

METHODOLOGY (follow the actor’s associations but don’t be associated; differential perspective):

What concept will enable us to follow the actors in all their associations and dissociations and to explain their victories and defeats, though without our admitting belief in the necessities of every kind which they claim? […] What do we mean by ‘associate’? […] Two actors can only be made indissociable if they are one. For this their wills must become equivalent. He or she who holds the equivalences holds the secret of power. Through the interplay of equivalences, hitherto scattered elements can be incorporated into a whole, and thus help to stabilize other elements. (Callon; Latour 1981:292-3)

THE LEVIATHAN as an EPIGENETIC LANDSCAPE:

Steel plates, palaces, rituals and hardened habits float on the surface of a viscous-like gelatinous mass which functions at the same tiime like the mechanism of a machine, the exchanges in a market and the clattering of a teleprinter. Sometimes whole elements from factory or technical systems are redissolved and dismembered by forces never previously seen in action. These forces then in turn produce a rough outline of a chimera that others immediately hasten to dismember. (Callon; Latour 1981:294)

O DESENCANTAMENTO DO MUNDO como o ENCANTAMENTO DA TECNOLOGIA (Weber):

If Weber and his intellectual descendants found that this monster [Leviathan] was becoming ‘disenchanted’, this was because they allowed themselves to be intimidated by techniques and macro-actors. (Callon; Latour 1981:296)

HOW DOES AN ACTOR GROW:

In order to grow we must enrol other wills by translating what they want and by reifying this translation in such a way that none of them can desire anything else any longer. (Callon; Latour 1981:296)

What makes them grow or shrink? The other actors whose interests, desires and forces they translate more or less successfully, and with whom they ally or quarrel. (Callon; Latour 1981:296)

SOCIOLOGIST as ACTOR:

Self-designated and self-appointed, spolesmen of the people, they have, for more than a century now, taken over from Hobbes’s sovereign (Callon; Latour 1981:297)

Each time they construct a unity, define a group, attribute an identity, a will or a project; each time they explain what is happening, the sociologist, sovereign and author – as Hobbes used the term – add to the struggling Leviathans new identities, definitions and wills which enable other authors to grow or shrink, hide away or reveal themselves, expand or contract. (Callon; Latour 1981:298)

Sociologists are neither better nor worse than any other actors. Neither are they more external nor more internal, more nor less scientific. Common, too common. (Callon; Latour 1981:299)

We [sociologists] too work on the Leviathan, we too aim to sell our concepts, we too seek allies and associates and decide who it is we want to please or displease. (Callon; Latour 1981:300)

THE FIRST MISTAKE (micro-actors are not simpler than macro-actors, and this is good for the sociologist):

A macro-actor can only grow if it simplifies itself. As it simplifies its existence, it simplifies the work of the sociologist. (Callon; Latour 1981:299)

THE SECOND MISTAKE (micro-interactions are not more real than abstract macro-structures):

In a world already structured by macro-actors, nothing could be poorer and more abstract than individual social interaction. (Callon; Latour 1981:300)

A SOCIOLOGIST STUDIES PROCESSES OF ASSOCIATION-DISSOCIATION:

What then is a sociologist? Someone who studies associations and dissociations, that is all, as the word ‘social’ itself implies. Associations between men? Not solely, since for a long time now associations between men have been expanded and extended through other allies: words, rituals, iron, wood, seeds and rain. The sociologist studies all associations, but in particular the transformation of weak interactinos into strong ones and vice versa. This is of special interest because here the relative dimensions of the actors are altered. (Callon; Latour 1981:300)

O QUE DEFINE A SOCIOLOGIA NÃO É UM CONHECIMENTO PRÉVIO DO SOCIAL, MAS SIM UMA PERSPECTIVA DIANTE DOS PROCESSOS DE ASSOCIAÇÃO:

For the sociologist then the question of method boils down to knowing where to place oneself. Like Hobbes himself, he or she sits just at the point where the contract is made, just where forces are translated, and the difference between the technical and the social is fought out, just where the irreversible becomes reversible and where the chreods reverse their slopes. […] The sociologists – teratologists – are in the warm, light places, the places where black boxes open up, where the irreversible is reversed and techniques return to life; the places that give birth to uncertainty as to what is large and what is small, what is social and what technical. (Callon; Latour 1981:300-1)