A basis for a performative image of science, in which science is regarded as a field of powers, capacities, and performances, situated in machinic captures of material agency (Pickering 1995:7)

The embedding of technology in science has been part of a larger program that has reconfigured the relationship between humans and all materiality, not just the specialized technology of scientific instruments. These are fairly well known with ANT thinkers (Callon 1997; Law 1999) discussing the 'end of the individual' and Latour (esp. later 'after-ANT' works, eg. 1999,2003) formulating a 'symmetrical' relationship between things-humans. Converging with Haraway's (1997,2003:60-63) intimacy of 'co-constitutive' relationships of humans-technology-animals, her 'kinship of technoscience', the push to de-center the classic philosophical figure of the 'subject as consciousness' as the center and foundation of all knowledge inquiry (whether classically empiricist or idealist) has itself been forcefully mobilized. Following from the consensus of technologically mediated scientific practice by Latour, Haraway, Pickering and Ihde (among others), these authors also subscribe to a move towards such a post-humanism. Pickering (1995:26):

the performative idiom that I seek to develop thus subverts the black-and-white distinctions of humanism/antihumanism and moves into a posthumanist space, a space in which the human actors are still there but now inextricably entangled with the nonhuman, no longer the center of the action and calling the shots.

Ihde (2003:129) also moves somewhat in this direction with his post-humanist:

if by that you mean we are using an implicit modernist description of humans as highly autonomous, subjective individuals, atomistically linked to society, then I am obviously a post-humanist.

This is part of Haraway's and Latour's explicit effort to break-down and 're-thread' classic binaries, including the primordial division of Nature/Culture which derivatively gives rise to subjects(culture) vs. objects(nature), the Cartesian mind (seat of culture) vs. body (locus of natural impulses and interface with nature and objects of nature), etc. For Latour and Haraway, to affirm the mediating effect of instrumentation upon practice is no leap as it forms a minor effort of re-engineering these larger inherited absolute distinctions.

In the vein of Haraway and Latour, such a symmetrical relationship of things-people is especially appealing to archaeology as the study of things within a context of no longer present actors. It enables the artefactual properties of things to be determined as the 'prime movers' of history without a necessary relating to the intentional actions of (past) people. This alleviates the burden of explanation for prehistoric development and historical practice from the subjects (in the past) and their agency. With the impasse posed by 'social constructivism' and its locking of explanatory ability into the vagaries (relative) of subjective intentionality and contextual situatedness. If the concept of 'matter' already presumes an ontological union of people-technology/artifacts, then ostensibly a study of the process of machinic-agency of material might get at the 'pragmatogony' (Latour 1994), or genealogical origin of both things-people. Such a research agenda for inscriptional practices by archaeologists-archaeological technics are very productive (see symmetrical archaeology); but I am wary of a reconstructive effort 'of the past' along such lines as it may resemble too closely the 'Culture-Historical' approach of archaeology in the 1930's-1950's (especially in North America) where material (artifacts and stylistic patterns) were conflated with actual past cultures of people.

Such an ontological leveling of things-people to focus on material agency is appealing as an escape from the spell of representation (Pickering 1995:13). However, in looking to the technoscience thinkers, a variety of positions pertaining to precisely this hesitation is clear. In such a mixing movement to de-center the human as simply one actant operating symmetrically with technology and materiality more generally the various positions of the thinkers, particularly that of Pickering and Ihde, begin to distill out. Ihde and Pickering are hesitant to ascribe absolute symmetry to things-people. For both there is a limiting of 'absolute ontological symmetry' in order to retain a semi-autonomous realm of actor intentionality. For Pickering, a retained realm of human intentionality common-sensically pertains to his 'mangle of practice' where the goals of researchers in relation to the materiality (technologically and in the objects of study as well as more multifarious considerations such as institutional constraints, financial capacities, etc.) are entangled within a process analogous to 'negotiation' (2003:97,100,1995:15-17,185). In Pickering's (2003:97,1995:17) temporal-focused terminology, what must be kept is the 'multiplicity' of different factors operating and effecting eachother in a rather Heraclitean flux of agency (or 'dance') which may be punctuated periodically by 'interactive stabilization' of all the various factors - a momentary settling-out into a Whiteheadian 'concrescence'. In Pickering's fashion, emphasizing chaos and chance (vestige of particle-physics background), such 'dances of agency' of people (scientists), objects, technology, etc. should not be reduced down to two encompassing categories of actors-actants - to a sole Homecoming King and Queen on the dance floor. In this 'Process Philosophy' (cf. Whitehead 1953) of research practice, Pickering highlights the goals and intentions of the scientists as an irreducible component - irreducible to things or machinic agency of technology.

I want to talk about intentionality - a term I use in an everyday sense to point to the fact that scientific practice is typically organized around specific plans and goals...One has to recognize that scientists usually work with some future destination in view, whereas it does not help at all to think about machines in the same way (Pickering 1995:17).

Aware of his divergent position from ANT, Latour and Haraway on the issue of intentionality and absolute symmetry, Pickering (ibid:13,15) continues,

semiotically, these things can be made equivalent; in practice they are not...the putative symmetry breaks down when one tries to imagine delegating machinic functions back to humans.

As agents of inscription producing meaning, actor and actant may be directly equated for their practical result. This is Latour and Haraway's pragmatic semiotics: as a (ephemeral) end-result, for example, a map is produced by both inscriptional practices of cartographers and things; one is impractical and there will be no emergent coordinated effect (the map-reading) without the other (C.S. Peirce has been criticized for this very equation of 'same action'='same (non-manifest) intentionality'; see Coppleston 1994:316-7;Peirce 1955:ch7; and see 'mapwork'). Yet to absolutely equate things-people for Pickering (1995:13) entails committing a 'hylozoism', or "an unjustified imputation of agency to the nonhuman realm." Or, more strongly, in Ihde's (2003:143-4) analysis, a re-commitment of anthropomorphism and even a 'fetishization' of things and technology (for rebuttal Latour 1993:40,2004:54). The prime examples receiving such criticism are Latour's (1993:38,1999:190) 'sleeping policeman'/speed-bumps and Callon's (cf Ihde 2002:79) scallops of St. Brieuc Bay. These 'reserved-symmetry' comments provoke, especially as Pickering (2003) and Ihde (2002,2003) come from on-going studies of blurring 'wet-ware/hard-ware' fields such as cybernetics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Yet aside from Pickering and Ihde, Latour (eg 1993:39,1999:ch4-5,185-190,2004) himself speaks most of 'goals' and 'programs of actions' of researchers within his idea of 'delegation', particularly when he turns attention to 'consultation' in his 'Parliament of Things' as a part of the 'politics of nature'. In this context, delegation refers to temporal process of negotiating goals of researchers with one another, institutional and political requirements and material agency akin to Pickering's formulation. An agent's goal (say, in one of Latour's examples, of desiring to slow automobile traffic on campus) must be modified in accordance with these certain context-specific constraints (too expensive, socially undesirable to have a large traffic enforcement force on campus, etc.). There ocurrs, then, an 'interruption' in the agent's program of action, and an act of delegation shifts the agent to an alternately negotiated act of translation, to an alternate program of action (1993:38-9). The result (in this example) may be the manufacture of 'sleeping police' to ensure speed regulation enforcement. Latour's 'non-copresence' explains how agents and actants (agent and her/his goal, engineers, designs, policemen, concrete, etc.) are contained within the speed bumps of the 'sleeping policemen', with a more general observation that "we live in the midst of technical delegates" (ibid:40). Here we can see, though, that 'goals' and 'desires' in Latour's usage are not equivalent to Pickering's notion of such 'intentionality'. Again, such 'intentionality' with Latour is appraised in terms of their inscriptional effects: "they produce meaning via a special type of articulation that crosses the commonsense boundary between signs and things" (ibid:38). This enables him to steer such a goal oriented happening as the placement of 'sleeping policemen' on campus between materialism and human agency (ibid:41). Again, a material or pragmatic semiotics afford intentionality of actors and of actants to be read as equivalent - an equivalency of inscriptional results.

Ihde enters the discussion with an even different understanding and usage of 'intentionality'; one that is derived from his 'pragmatic phenomenology', or 'post-phenomenology' (2003:136). This 'post-' or 'pragmatic' modifier is important for Ihde, as he modifies the original notion of phenomenological 'intentionality' derived from Husserl (and Brentano before him). As conceived in the phenomenological literature, 'intentionality' was utilized to counter-act a Cartesian manner (fundamental for the 'modernist settlement') of isolating consciousness from the encompassing real world - Descares's 1st-principle of philosophical method. Instead, intentionality foregrounded the ineluctable inter-relatedness of consciousness-things as part of the 'lifeworld': consciousness of anything is always of objects, of things. Such a use of intentionality does not set the subject/consciousness as the foundation for knowledge of the world (one of the criticisms of social constructivism), but does foreground bodily praxis, or bodily situatedness in the context of the lifeworld, as critical in understanding. With existential phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Satre), such a bodily situadeness emphasized the multi-perspectivalism and ambiguity of what is known of the world as actor-things is always relational and inter-engaged. It is this 'praxis-perception' model of phenomenology, which espouses less what is known, as how something is known, that Ihde extends to technology (Ihde 1991:17; and Hansen 2004 for specifically digital mediums). (Ihde (1991) also distinguishes between 'micro-perception' - concerned with the perceiving individual - and 'macroperception' which entails a more common, collective perception sedimented in habit and cultural tradition. This will be discussed in the next section Inclusion of Claimants, but it is notable that both Foucault and Kuhn's coeval development of 'non-linear' knowledge development comprised of incommensurable epistemes/paradigms may be traced to sweeping changes in 'macro-perception' - Foucault was Merleau-Ponty's student. Thus suggesting literal alternate manners of 'seeing' the world and hence constituting knowledge).

In his 'unorthodox' phenomenology (though anticipated by Heidegger as mentioned previously in Thinking Technoscience), Ihde extends the embodied and perspectival relations of agents with the world to include embodied relations with technology, "whereby the instrument is experientially taken into one's sense of body and through the instrument something is (mediatedly) perceived 'out there'" (2003:137). Latour (eg 1999:9-10,2003:16-17) most explicitly criticizes phenomenology for even more firmly entrenching the human consciousness at the center of world constitution, and the degree of 'symmetry' granted to humans-things is unequal. Yet Ihde, in contrast to earlier phenomenology, closes this gap as "an asymmetrical but post-phenomenological relativity gets its 'ontology' from the interrelationship of human and non-human" (2003:143). Humans(actors) are not equivalent to things (actants) in Ihde's phenomenological retaining of intentionality, but neither are humans separable or distinct from things. The embattlement really has more to do with scale of analysis due to informing philosophies (phenomenology versus material-semiotics). A pragmatic phenomenology, while attending more to the entwinement of people and things in specific regard to technological contexts, necessarily still holds the scale of analysis to the perceiving actor, while, as already stated, a material-semiotic lens (of Haraway and Latour) attends to consequential action, or negotiated end-products of people-things (as most famously with Latour's Pasteur-yeast historical imbroglio).

Ihde (2002:96) addresses this variance of theoretical focus:

Only by ascending to a much larger context, to too high an altitude, and then with too much generalization and abstraction, does symmetry emerge...in the middle-ground, interactive description of human-nonhuman relations, one can discern varieties of intention and degrees of symmetry or asymmetry.

Ihde alludes to a too-abstracted sphere removed from human actors in Latour's approach to absolute symmetry. This may seem intitially contrary as Latour in fact spends an immense amount of effort at 'following scientists around' in their intimate settings of research (1987); while, on the other hand, Ihde (eg 1991, 2002) invests little attention to empirical case studies (and see Ihde and Selinger 2003:ch1,7 for respective criticism). However, for my intention of developing a practical application of technoscience thinking in relation to the politicized context of archaeology engaging with indigenous claims to participate in knowledge constitution, I am going to utilize Ihde's and Pickering's notion of 'hybridized symmetry' or 'degrees of symmetry'. Such a focus on non-universal symmetry, attuned to a sensitivity of specific context (and not assumed Western, technoscience) wherein technical mediation or technological engagement may or may not be democratically shared, will allow me to suggest a politicized program of 'instrumental-facilitation'. The goal of this will become clear in the following section (Inclusion of Claimants), where a situated, embodied consideration of actors, rather than a leveling effect which occludes pre-conditions of participation in science by focusing on (material-semiotic) outcome-effects, will also integrate the usage of Pickering's 'conceptual models' (1995:185) and Ihde's bodily situatedness in relation to instrumental mediation in following Haraway (1991:194,1997:95-7) in a 'politicized epistemology'.

_____

Forward to Inclusion of Claimants

Return to Thinking Technoscience