The reason we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have a finer imagination, but because we have better instruments. In science, the most important thing that has happened in the last forty years is the advance in instrumental design...The gain is more than a mere addition; it is a transformation (Whitehead 1953(1925):114).

The primary authors who I will be considering (Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Donna Haraway, and Don Ihde) explicitly position themselves against 'traditional' Philosophy of Science in arguing for a non-reductive stance to materiality (Ihde 2002:1-3,1991:6-8;Latour 1988:part2). The movement to incorporate 'materiality' in the most inclusive formulations of Actor Network Theory's 'relational materiality' (Law 1999:4), Latour's (eg. 1999) subsequent 'collective', Haraway's 'cyborgs' (2003:62-3), Pickering's (1995) 'mangle of practice', and Ihde's (1991;2002) extension of a phenomenological 'lifeworld' are all inter-related to their respective stances to technology (as a co-constitutive material). Their depictions of this 'embededness' of material relations differ, however, as to their informing theoretical positions - such as the analytical leveling of Haraway, ANT and Latour of people-things made possible by a material-semiotics. I will discuss these in the subsequent section Instrumental Mediation for the critical divergences of things-people relatedness pertaining to a consideration of alternate conceptual models rooted in subjective factors and the possibility of incorporating 'alternate' (non-Western sciences) frameworks for archaeological practice. Here, however, the affirmation of technological-material relations among the various thinkers will be sketched (briefly, see Ihde 1991 for a more in depth historical overview) in order to underscore the integral role of technological mediation in the sciences. Such a generally shared vision of technology must be adumbrated in order to re-frame technology (such as social software) as less an 'application' of representational modeling, and more of an integral mode of engaging the world.

A shared criticism of historical Philosophy of Science and its contemporary inheritor, Analytic Philosophy, was the lack of an acknowledgment of the inseparable inter-relatedness of technology and its practical usage in goal-oriented scientific pursuits (its 'Platonic bias' towards abstraction and logical principles and representational capacity; Ihde 1991:73;Selinger 2003:148). This traditional bias contributed to the generally perceived failure of philosophy to account for practical and material considerations. Like the much derided Cartesian 'brain in vat' syndrome, or Kant's 'restricted intelligibility', both unable (or conceding inability) to know 'things in themselves', technology remained a facilitator of correspondence theories. The early development of technology within a 'natural philosophy' which grafted technological apparatuses onto human perception as visual extension for mimetic evidence in the sciences (Gumbrecht 1998; and see Non-representational epistemology: visual evidence in archaeology).

This was the 'technology for science.' Largely contained within an Anglo-American context, provocation to re-address this equation came unsurprisingly from outside as 'continental' sources. Most influentially with Heidegger's later writings on technology wherein the material, ontological qualities of technologies are inverted to prominence (Heidegger 1977:295-305; Latour 1993:30). "Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing" (ibid). Technology was recast as a 'world revealer', and its former conception as 'applied science' gave way under subsequent developments whereby technology was increasingly imbedded as part of the praxis - institutional, political, social - of doing science (Ihde 1991,2002). And with Latour, this Heideggerian practical enmeshment with technology came to be visualized itself in his 'Technical Mediations' (1993,1999), whereby "no unmediated action is possible" (1993:29) - though Heidegger's dystopian prognosis for humans-technology has been downplayed by these thinkers.

Furthermore, while the sciences, particularly particle physics and biochemistry, have acknowledged that 'technical mediation' was indispensable as both micro-and macro-levels of phenomena unavailable to human perception were increasingly being investigated, technology was beginning to be recast as explicitly devices of inscriptional (Latour 1988) and bodily (Ihde 1991) mediation mobilized in transforming the world for argument (Latour 1999:'circulating reference'). Hacking (1983:206-9) links up with this idea early on in his discussion of Francis Bacon's rudimentary microscope, drawing the distinction between 'seeing with' and 'seeing through'. And Ihde discusses the work of Heelan and Ackerman, and their avowal of scientific phenomena "encountered only through the mediation of instruments or technology" in a unique manner of 'scientific seeing' learned through the optic prostheses of instruments (Heelan, quoted in Ihde 1991:105). As scientific theory receded to the infinitesimal of particle physics, or the galactic of relativity theory, instrumentation was consequently the only manner of 'seeing through' to these phenomena. And Ackermann (1985:87) insightfully noted that the 'history of science' could be written "in terms of the instruments that have been available for scientific use." At this point, instrumentation begins to supercede Kuhn's paradigmatic revolutions as the 'epistemology engine' behind scientific progress (Ackerman 1985). However, attention by these authors to scientific instrumentation remained largely committed to a representational realism. Instrumentation was certainly an intermediary, or interface, with difficult to perceive objects of the world, but since 'one can throw positrons at it, it's real' (cf. Hacking 1983). More recently, Latour has re-threaded the conception of 'instrumental realism' with his notion of circulating reference.

Latour details a (re)conception of mediation (esp. 1993, 1999:ch.2), critically limiting Hegel's (eg. 1977:58) totalizing connotation of no immediacy of sense-certainty un-colored by individual-universal co-constitution. Instead, Latour restricts consideration of mediation to technical processes of rendering the world 'mobilizable' for argument. Importantly, Latour's mediation suspends consideration of mimetic veracity of mediating steps to the real world, and instead focuses on a 'veracity in effect'; that is, the ability of such mobilized media to convince by nature of their coherent tracebility between such inscriptions (media) and the stuff of the world (such as between his Brazilian soil samples and the French scholars' published report; 1999:ch.2). There is transformation through technical mediation, as such "techniques modify the matter of our expression, not only its form" (1993:38). Yet so long as such chains of referencing mediations may be traced back and forth across the spectrum of world-media, traditional issues of mimetic certainty are pragmatically irrelevant. Instrumental interface is still an integral part of practice, but it is less a matter of affirming that technologically mediated phenomena are really there, as a pragmatic concern with how much of really there can you bring forward/through instrumentation to convince. (Such an identification of truth through verification or his 'trials of strength', with the process of an idea's verification, aligns Latour with C.S. Peirce and William James's pragmatic correspondence theory whereby "...such mediating events make the idea true" (eg James 1925:202)).

Such an understanding of technology as mediating by transforming the world into mobilized inscriptions for argumentation comprises one specialized area (inscriptional practice) of technological interface. Such a practice is enlarged in ANT and Latour's ontological extrapolation of such inscriptional, meaning mobilizing practices to include the material-semiotic entanglement of not just specific mediating activities utilizing technology (eg. sciences), but to humans-things generally (though see Lenoir 1999 for a criticism of these Greimas inspired approaches). This trajectory to interface technology and humans in the context of practical activity may be culminated in Haraway's 'cyborgs' (1997,2003:63) - and most inclusively, her 'companion species'. But it is here where the relevant divergences amongst the thinkers I'm considering begin to diverge on more precise details. And I will need to explicate these alternate formulations of human-things convergence and the resultant ramifications for their appreciation of technical mediation. It will be along this internal spectrum of positions that I intend to tease out a notion of 'instrumentation' for archaeological practice and a political strategy for multi-'vocal' inclusion.

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