Title: Mediators and the Material Stabilization of Society
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. An example I find particularly infuriating, perhaps because it is so close to home for me, is that of Jacques Brassard, the former Québec minister of Public security. After Latour's conference at HEC Montréal in April 2008, Brassard wrote a satirical piece in the newspaper Le Quotidien, in which he referred to Latour's ideas about the participation of things in the social as the “gibberish of an alleged philosopher” and “stupid decrees,” sarcastically claiming that Latour's “anti-humanism” would amount to holding elections for “marmots, poison ivy and dandelions.” Jacques Brassard, “Les fleuristes finiront bientôt en prison!” Le Quotidien, June 4, 2008, 11. 2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3. Bruno Latour, “On Interobjectivity,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, no. 4 (1996): 228–45. 4. Bruno Latour, “On Interobjectivity,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 3, no. 4 (1996): 233, emphases in original. 5. Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 6. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37, et seq. 7. Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 196–223. 8. For a reconsideration of the activity/passivity dichotomy, see François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Ventriloquism and Incarnation (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010). 9. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 40, emphases in original. 10. See also François Cooren, “Textual Agency: How Texts Do Things in Organizational Settings,” Organization 11, no. 3 (2004): 373–93. 11. Latour, “On Interobjectivity,” 237. 12. For Latour's famous gun control example, see Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 174–215. 13. For this concept, see Latour, Pandora's Hope, 24–79. 14. Maurice Blondel, L'action: Essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la pratique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). 15. Maurice Blondel, L’être et les êtres: Essai d'ontologie concrète et intégrale (Paris: Alcan, 1935), 317, my translation, empahsis in original. 16. See Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, La monadologie (1714; repr., Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 17. Cooren, “Textual Agency,” 377. 18. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (New York: Continuum, 2008). For a statement of his concept of immanentism, see Quentin Meillassoux, “Substration and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory,” in Collapse III: Philosophical Research and Development, ed. Robin James Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2007), 63–107. 19. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979). 20. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 222. 21. Nicolas Bencherki and Jeanne d'Arc Uwatowenimana, “Writing a Wikipedia Article: Data Mining and Organizational Communication to Explain the Practices by Which Contributors Maintain the Article's Coherence,” in Conference Papers—International Communication Association 2008 Annual Meeting (2008): 1–25, via EBSCO host (accessed September 3, 2011). 22. Bruno Latour, Petites leçons de sociologie des sciences (1993; repr., Paris: La Découverte, 1996). 23. For his discussion of locks, see Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key of How to Do Things with Words,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. M. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000), 10–21. 24. Peter Sloterdijk, Règles pour le parc humain: Suivi de La Domestication de l’être (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2010), 187. 25. See the security belt example in Latour, Petites leçons; and Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 31, no. 3 (2006): 361–80. Additional informationNotes on contributorsNicolas BencherkiNicolas Bencherki has just completed his PhD in communication studies (Université de Montréal) and in sociology (Sciences Po Paris). In his dissertation, he studied the practices through which humans and non-humans contribute to the constitution of organizations by attributing actions to them. He is starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at Mines ParisTech, where he will look at the consequences of such practices on ethics
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 10
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