User:Themsen/TT3-2
Synopsis, Bruno Latour: Where Are The Missing Masses?
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Man is ruled by artefacts according to a preset morality, is it artificial? Where is the morality in electronic artefacts such as a seat belt?
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Humans work as artefacts, where the middle has been cut out; only right and wrong remains. We can remove the artefact and introduce the excluded middle. “IF a car is moving THEN the driver has a seatbelt”. We’re making artefacts to impose the law of the exclusion of the middle.
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Like cosmologists, sociologists want to find the missing mass which equals the total mass. "“The Groom [electric door] is on strike, For God’s Sake, Keep The Door Closed "The Door serves as a fusion for labor relations, religion, advertisement, and technique in one significant fact”
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The hinge solves the wall hole dilemma (the door dilemma), a nonhuman; a character which’s solution is delegated by a carpenter, not by the one who needs the door hinged. A middle hand. If you want to know what a nonhuman does, imagine what you’d do without it.
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Closing doors might not be as obvious as it seems, there will only be a proper closing of the door if you have the law behind it? Mumford mentions that you either have to discipline those who don’t do it well until they do, or substitute those who don’t do it well with someone/something which does it well. The hinges + a groom opening the door correctly solves the wallholle dilemma. The hinge is effective because it performs a simple task, while having a human groom makes for all manner of complexities (spending & disciplining). Artifact is infallible as long as it is maintained, the complexity of humans make grooms targetable due to the common understanding that humans aren’t simple like nonhumans.
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Artifact excludes the middle(-man). Artefacts work in past-tense (once it has been installed), Humans work in present tense (when the groom is at his post). Artifacts control us by their simplicity, efficiency and single-usage. They are put there to work, and if a human doesn’t work according to it then it is not the system’s fault, it;s the humans’.
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The lesson with artefacts is that you have to learn how to live around them, and those people who haven’t lived around them must relearn in the place that they ended up in. The engineers are those who select what kind of person is best at handling the artifact.
Media Object Ideas so far:
- Saving prompt in Photoshop
- http://www.popuptest.com/
- http://mischiefmakersmanual.com/tools/annoy/homepage.html
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Both texts and artifacts have good and bad user prescriptions designed into them, like "change paper" in a printer, or "add toner" which is more difficult. Manuals are good examples of texts which require different amounts of competence to use. Sociologism, people have different skills for using an artifact depending on how often you use them.
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Technologism, by looking at the construction of a nonhuma actor you can deduce the target-group of human users which it was made for.
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lieutenant=placeholder. We do what we do because our artifacts allow us to do so. Society is not only made up of nonhuman actors, the nonhuman actors are acting according to how their designers wanted society and its users to function.
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Like authors, engineers create their narratives by constructing nonhuman actors which can then be analyzed according to the competence of their ideal user. When we see a character, or a text as 'loving' we inscribe our own prejudices onto it. One of the differences between non human text-actors and non human artifact-actors is that the latter is embodied, and the earlier isn't.
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'Le Petit Bertrand' is a anthropomorphization, an inscription of a human into a machine. It shows the former place of the human groom but is in fact a machine that
Media Object Idea: - The bartender android, the classical servant android
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nonhuman and superhuman: machines and gods, represent the systems of appeal in our societies. They are nonhuman actors which you can take your cares/angers onto and they will either not care (machine) or care with a passion (superhuman), yet they are still static and alien from us.
245 A story about substituting Bruno's protests that his son shouldn't sit at the curb with a steel bar at the curb which keep his son from sitting there. Intention to construct.
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The difference between text and machines, though. The text is outspoken while the machine might not need to talk, because if it's good at what it's doing it's invisible; by that I mean it's part of the every day business of society, and fits in well with the users it grooms.
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linguism/syntagmatic: a grammatically correct sequence of words/paradigmatic: the substitution(replacement) of words in a sentence while still keeping the grammar intact.
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An analysis of Mary SHelley's "Frankenstein" as showing the divide between text and technology. "Is it a metaphor of fictional characters that sem to take up a life of its own? Or is it the metaphor of technical characters that do take up a life of their own because they cease to be texts and become flesh, legs, arms, and movements?". He dismisses both as not very interesting because a reader still needs to give it life as a text. The second is that, again, a machine needs maintenance, and so does a text.
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The berliner key forces you, once you've unlocked the door, to remove it on the other side. How can you keep the door locked? You keep it locked at all times, and when you want to enter you use the key to open the door. . Clever engineers, like those of the berliner key make the morality of the artifact more direct. The missing masses belong, according to Latour, in the traditional social theories.
(what is the morality which he keeps mentioning?) (I have a similar door like the berliner in my apartment, but this one uses a spring in order to keep the door closed) Don't the missing masses belong in between the artifacts (the texts of theories) and the machines (which make printing those theories, or writing them, so much easier)?