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STUDY NOTE

April 16, 2021

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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):

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A �rst sense of mediation […] is the program of action, the series of

goals and steps and intentions, that an agent can describe in a story
[…] (�g. 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gun’s script have superseded those of Agent 1; it is human action that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 de�ne 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 �re the gun), then you are modi�ed
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 �xed. […] It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility
for action must be shared among the various actants. And this is the
�rst of the (four) meanings of mediation. (Latour 1994:31-4)

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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 modi�es 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 �gurative or non�gurative 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)

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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 �ies,” “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 �y, the U.S. Air Force �ies. 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 de�ned 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)

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Look around the room in which you are puzzling over �gure 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 �ction, 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:

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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 de�nitive 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 ef�cient as the art of �lm, 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

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It designates, �rst, 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 �rst”. Here, the deviation might not lead
us back to the main road, as with the �rst 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
�rst types of translation that I de�ned above. (Latour 1994:43-4)

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Technical also designates a very speci�c 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:

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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 �y, airlines �y. (Latour 1994:46)

THE NEW PARADIGM (Fig.6)

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In the newly emerging paradigm (�g. 6), we substitute collective –

de�ned 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, �nally, 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 �nely 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 �nds, 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”

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(Latour 1994:48-9)

DURKHEIM x SOCIOGENESIS:

(Latour 1994:49-50)

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

(Latour 1994:50)

RECONCILING ETHNOMETHODOLOGY & MAINSTREAM SOCIOLOGY:

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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 de�nition 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)

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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 de�nition 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 de�ne 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:

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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 de�nitions 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 de�ne 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

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[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 �rst 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:

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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 �rst 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
recon�gure people. (Latour 1994:59)

INTERNALIZED ECOLOGY (Level 6)

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agriculture and the domestication of animals. The intense

socialization, reeducation, and recon�guration 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 de�nition 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)

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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 de�ne 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)

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[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 dif�cult 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 �x, 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)

Gar�nkelian interactinos to repair a constantly decaying social order.

(Latour 1994:62)

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SOCIOTECHNICAL

My little origin myth makes conceivable the impossibility of an artifact

that does not incorporate social relations, and makes conceivable the
impossibility of de�ning 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 �nal diagram (�g. 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

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

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