User:Emily/Thematic Project/Trimester 03/04

"No-Matter-What" & Bruno Latour, Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts, 1992 in: Object Reader, p. 229-254

Latour's notion of artifacts

flat look at human and thing (equal)

technology has profound impact on sociality

"The bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations is a mirror image of the other no less bizarre idea that techniques might be made up of nonhuman relations"

"any artifact is only a portion of a program of action and of the fight necessary to win against many antiprograms"

Draw two columns:

in the left-hand column write down the gentle pushing (or pulling) they have to do to fulfil the same tasks)

in the right-hand column, list the work people would have to do if they had no door

Tristan Garcia, Form and Object - A Treatise on Things, Edinburgh University Press 2014 (Presses Universitaires de France 2010), p. 19-38: "No-Matter-What"

Garcia's notion of things

speculative realism -->talks about concrete objects and also non-existed object

make human things -->critique "today, universal humanism and animal ethics clearly embody this spirit by distinguishing human beings, or the set of sentient, suffering beings from other things" -->"a system of exceptions in the world of things is never an 'ethical' or 'just' system, but rather a metaphysical system of the determination of inequalities between things, of 'more-than-things', which cannot be elements of this system"

"a thing cannot derive from anything other than another thing. No philosophical magic trick will ever give us the appearance of things from a more fundamental principle of a non-differentiation or supper-difference of things"