Dear Pedro,

You provide interesting examples. I am especially attracted to the limiting case of psychosis (or should that be the unlimiting case?).

First to the ANT stuff. I think the central issue for me is the purposes for which one might want to use ANT and the purpose which objects as actors might have in the world of design. I find it exciting to suspend my anti-psychotic understanding of things, just a little and in special places and times. ANT can help encourage a passive dimension in which we reflect, as good sociologist might, on what just happened in a social situation and how the dynamics of networks include the things as partial actors or special actors.

If we allow Winnicott's kind of transitional objects (subject-objects) as part of a larger dimension of objects, all of which get involved in object relations with humans, then we can start to extend our permissions list for objects that we encounter as actors of some kind.

Doing this, we start to find ourselves operating on a stage. That is, we stage our object relationships, as happens in a play. For this time, in this place, this chair is the magic chair that the president sits on.

From this approach we can come up with an active account and predictive account of possible object relationships such as happens in dramaturgy. The dramaturgist decides the what why and how of the objects on the stage. Now, we can see a designer as a kind of dramaturgist which means that this stuff can leap from sociology to design.

Back to psychosis. The permissions we grant ourselves, in relations with objects, within the aesthetic dimension, are permissions that keep us on the side of the angels. We hold the psychotic possibilities at arms length for the thrill. To mix this all up and get even closer to the edge, we have the famous (or infamous) case of Japanese octopus sex or tentacle erotica (look up Wiki at your own risk). Here we have an animal going beyond its anticipated object relations.

This example reveals, I think, the reasons why we guard our openness to things. In Blade Runner we have "J. F. Sebastian . . . a genetic designer working for Tyrell. He is not allowed to emigrate off-world because he has Methuselah Syndrome. Because of this, he has 'accelerated decrepitude' in common with the Nexus 6 Replicants. With the Bradbury Building all to himself, he makes the most of his talents, even making his own Toy-friends" (Wikipedia). The toys are things as ANT actors independent of the drama and dramatization of just being things. They stumble and bumble around pathetically, with intense sadness, for us, because they don't get across the Toy Story barrier - they are haunted by the absence of their own knowledge that they are acting and not merely being animated.

We could go further, into the realm of the Otaku (Japanese anime/mangs fans) who form extensive relationships with fictional characters and their various material forms (dolls).

And yes, this has major implications for affects and objects, desires and objects and sentiments and objects. So, I think design has to come to terms with ANT while opening up a much larger theoretical and material space. 

Sit still chair, I am nearly finished. On Australian TV, for many years of many children's childhoods, we had an animated puppet blackboard on national TV. He had a grumpy relationship with Mr Squiggle, a hand puppet who drew everything upside-down. His one complaint was: "hurry up!"

cheers

keith





 
>>> Pedro oliveira <[log in to unmask]> 06/20/11 9:24 AM >>> 
Dear Jeremy, Dear all, 
 
'but that is one thing that actor-network means when we say agency, we mean that the thing acted in the world.  It doesn't matter if it has 'intent' or 'agency'.  It just has to action.  The machine is held accountable for its actions insofar as it removes the guilt or parts of it from the person'
 
I am not entirely convinced this is Latour's argument, or the ANT that follows from it. The whole point of Latour seems to me to revolve around the opening of an existencial possibility in which we could conceptualize a permanent state of indefinition between agency and intencionality, blurring the boundaries between humans and things. In that sense, in that conceptualization, whether things have agency matters, even if that agency, or better said, even if determining the degree of (in)definition between action and agency in a given thing, remains a human property, in Latour and elsewhere.  
 
As humans, I like to believe, we have the capacity to do what Grant MacCracken has called 'divestment rituals' and held things accountable in order to expurge our guilt or other parts of ourselves that we rather displace and locate somewhere else. Denying the process of displacement invests things with an apparent agency of their own. This opens the possiblity for things to come back at us, phenomenologically-speaking. 
 
People do kick cars while cars are less able to kick people unless someone is behind the steering wheel. Doors don't slam us that often as much as we slam doors. And this takes me to Fillipo's previous emails around AI while taking me to Gregory Bateson and the notion of deutero-learning. 
 
I know I can learn about a thing. I know I can learn to learn about things by generalizing procedures of learning (deutero-learning). If I am not great at recognizing that as a human I have the capacity for deutero-learning (and acknowledge this capacity as a part of myself, rather than divesting it) things will unravel to me quite often. They will emerge to me as designing themselves in a state of full intentionality. I saw it many times working with psychotic patients who are, by law, rendered far more accountable than the things that unravel around them. Except that I genuinely believe that plenty of psychotics live in a reality where things REALLY design themselves autopoietically, reason why I had to stop working with them and contributing to make them accountable in the eyes of the law.  
 
Psychotics aside, this is my question. As humans we can write things such as a theory of deutero-learning. We learn about things. Our things can learn. We are able to learn about the processes by which we 'deutero-learn' with things and humans. Our current things, nonetheless, are still far less able to deutero-learn. Better as our things may become in deutero-learning, my question is: will things ever be able to write a theory on the difference between learning and deutero-learning? I find this hardly to believe. In that sense, I think I am closer to Ken.   
 
I cannot start to imagine a thing that would write down a theory of deutero-learning. If I saw a thing like that, I would probably run for my life. But maybe, exactly like a psychotic, I wouldn't need to run for my life anymore. In that world, things would just carry on emerging, designing themselves autopoietically and divesting in me whatever parts of themselves they wanted, guilt or something else.  
 
Just a thought. Cheers.