back to ‘96 quoting Latour

Yann Bona — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:26:22 +0000

I have found this quote of Bruno Latour reading a paper from Social Studies of Science by Adrian Mackenzie dated on 2003 entitled “These Things Called Systems: Collective Imaginings and Infrastructural Software”. (I must confess I had some difficulties reading that paper though…) Nevertheless, here’s a quote for the quote of the day section from Latour’s Aramis, ou l’amour des techniques:

“The engineer substitutes for the signs he writes the things that he has mobilized; he attaches them to each so they’ll hold up; then he withdraws a little, delegating to another self, in the form of a chip, a sensor, or an automatic device, the task of watching over the connection. And this delegating allows him to withdraw even further – as if there were an object.” (Latour, 1996: 81) -as seen in MacKenzie, A.(2003) SSS, 2003, 33.

schematic from free hardware project ronja.twibright.com

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back to ‘96 quoting Latour