Latour - Angela and Adam

Latour is trying to get away from the duality between object and subject prevalent in Western philosophy and science. He describes the concepts 'human' and 'non-human' and envisions 'technique' as the socialization of the non-human. He sees the traditional relationship between society and technology as a tautology and instead develops a 'genealogy' of sociotechnological development as a swapping of properties between humans and non-humans.

This involves many dependent layers, leading from 'social complexity' - that is, prehumans manipulating each other to survive - to 'political ecology' - in which nonhumans are given full social relations and therefore rights. Each layer is either human or non-human, and each layer also confers human or non-human properties onto the other group. For example, 'internalized ecology' is the stage where domestication and agriculture have occured due to relevant plants/animals and materials (non-human) being fully socialized, or internalized by the the 'society' (human) of the previous layer.

"Latour's universe consists of actors that stand in relation to each other and interact via networks" (p 149). Actors are not to be understood as only human, but any entity that exists in relation with others in a network. Similarly, entities do not 'enter into' relationships with each other, but are defined by them (car example). For Latour, this emergent concept of an 'existance' is more important than a predefined 'essance'. Essence is constructed by the networks of existances.

Latour defines four modes of technical mediation: Translation, in which a program of action (of a human) is transformed or translated by the program of action of another entity (gun example); Composition, in which the responsibility for action is not due to one entity, human or not, but is spread over the network in which that entity exists (hotel key example); Reversible black boxing, where the network blending human and non-human is quite often normally invisible, but that invisibility breaks down when the normal function of technical entities is interrupted (projector example); Delegation and Scripts, where the program of action of an entity is delegated or enscribed into another entity (speedbump example).

(Also, issues of postphenomenology! Asking different questions leads to different answers! We were never modern!)