Année 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 -1985 Year 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 -1985		Articles 1992 - Index 050: Where are the missing masses... 049: Don't throw the baby out with the Bath school! 047: A Note on Socio-Technical Graphs Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door Bruno Latour In hommage to Robert Fox ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- According to some physicists there is not enough mass in the universe to balance the accounts that cosmologists make of it. They are looking everywhere for the "missing mass" that could add up to the nice expected total. It is the same with sociologists. They are constantly looking, somewhat desperately, for social links sturdy enough to tie all of us together or for moral laws that would be inflexible enough to make us behave properly. When adding up social ties it does not balance. Soft human and weak moralities are all sociologists can get. The society they try to recompose with bodies and norms constantly crumble. Something is missing. Something that should be strongly social and highly moral. Where can they find it? Everywhere, but they too often refuse to see it in spite of much new work in the sociology of artefacts . I expect sociologists to be much more fortunate than cosmologists since they soon will discover their missing mass. To balance our accounts of society we simply have to turn our attention away from humans and look at non-humans. Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the humans masses did in the 19th century. 1. Description of a door I will start my enquiry by following a little script written by anonymous hands. On a freezing day this February, posted on the door of La Halle aux Cuirs at La Villette, in Paris, where Robert Fox's group is trying to convince the French to take up social history of science, could be seen, a small hand-written notice: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed" (groom is Frenglish for an automated door-closer or butler). This fusion of labor relations, religion, advertisement, and technique in one single insignificant fact, is exactly the sort of thing I want to describe in order to discover the missing masses of our society. As a technologist teaching in an engineering school, I want to challenge some of the assumptions sociologists often hold about the 'social context' of machines. Walls are a nice invention but if there were no holes in them there would be no way to get in or out –they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyyone can get in and out (cows, visitors, dusts, rats, noise –la Halle aux Cuirs is ten meters from the Paris ring road– and, worst of all, cold –la Halle aux Cuirs is so far to the north of Paris). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which, although common enough, has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledge hammer or a pick, you simply gently push the door (I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented –this would over complicate the already highly complex story of La Villette's door); furthermore, and here is the real trick, once you have passed through the door you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed: you simply push the door gently back (I ignore for now the added complication of the 'pull' and 'push' signs). So, to size up the work done by hinges, you simply have to imagine that every time you want to get in or out of the building you have to do the same work as a prisoner trying to escape or as a gangster trying to rob a bank, plus the work of those who rebuild either the prison's or the bank's walls (I have never heard of prisoners or of gangsters having to rebuild the walls they pierced, although I have heard of gangsters being put in jail and, being well trained, piercing their jail's wallÉ). If you do not want to imagine people destroying walls and rebuilding them every time they wish to leave or enter a building, then imagine the work that would have to be done in order to keep inside or to keep outside all the things and people that left to themselves would go the wrong way. As Maxwell never said, imagine his demon working without a door. Anything could escape from or penetrate into La Halle aux Cuirs and there would soon be complete equilibrium between the depressing and noisy surrounding area and the inside of the building. Some technologists, including the present writer in Material Resistance, A Textbook, (1984) have written that techniques are always involved when assymmetry or irreversibility are the goal; it might appear that doors are a striking counterexample since they maintain the hole-wall in a reversible state; the allusion to Maxwell's demon clearly shows, however, that such is not the case; the reversible door is the only way to trap irreversibly inside La Halle aux Cuirs a differential accumulation of warm historians, knowledge, papers, and also, alas, paperwork; the hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order, or information. If you let the drafts get inside (these renowned "courants d'air" so dangerous to French health), the drafts may never get outside to the publishers. Now, draw two columns (if I am not allowed to give orders to the reader then take it as a piece of strongly worded advice): in the right column, list the work people would have to do if they had no door; in the left column write down the gentle pushing (or pulling) they have to do in order to fulfill the same tasks. Compare the two columns: the enormous effort on the right is balanced by the little one on the left, and this is all thanks to hinges. I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one, by the words displacement or translation or delegation or shifting ; I will say that we have delegated (or translated or displaced or shifted out) to the hinge the work of reversibly solving the hole-wall dilemma. Calling on Robert Fox, I do not have to do this work nor even to think about it; it was delegated by the carpenter to a character, the hinge, which I will call a non-human (notice that I did not say 'inhuman' as so many bleeding hearts would do). I simply enter La Halle aux Cuirs. As a more general descriptive rule, everytime you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or fonction, of this little figure. Before going on, let me cash out one of the side benefits of this table: in effect, we have drawn a scale balance where tiny efforts balance out mighty weights; the scale we drew (at least the one that you drew if you have obeyed my orders –I mean, followed my advice) reproduces the very leverage allowed by hinges. That the small be made stronger than the large is a very moral story indeed (think of David and Goliath); by the same token, it is also, since at least Archimedes' days, a very good definition of a lever and of power: what is the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely in order to produce the maximum effect. Am I alluding to machines or to Syracuse's King? I don't know, and it does not matter since the King and Archimedes fused the two "minimaxes" into one single story told by Plutarch: the defence of Syracuse through levers and war machines (Plutarch: around 80). I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the "social construction" of techniques, and not a hypothetical social context they are not equipped to grasp (this is the sort of sneering remark sociologists expect from technologists and I did not want to disappoint you). This little point having been made, let me go on with the story (we will understand later why I do not really need your permission to go on and why, nevertheless, you are free not to go on, although only relatively so –see p.xx). 2. Delegation to humans There is a problem with doors. Visitors push them to get in or pull on them to get out (or vice versa) but then the door remains open. That is, instead of the door you have a gaping hole in the wall through which for instance cold rushes in and heat rushes out. Of course, you could imagine that people living in the building or visiting le Centre d'Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques would be a well disciplined lot (after all historians are meticulous people). They will learn to close the door behind them and retransform the momentary hole into a well-sealed wall. The problem is that discipline is not the main characteristic of La Villette's people; also you might have mere sociologists visiting the building, or even pedagogues from the nearby Centre de Formation. Are they all going to be so well-trained? Closing door would appear to be a simple enough piece of know-how once hinges have been invented, but, considering the amount of work, innovations, sign-posts, recriminations, that go on endlessly everywhere to keep them closed (at least in Northern regions), it seems to be rather poorly disseminated. This is where the age-old Mumfordian choice is offered to you: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a groom or a porter (from the French word for door) or a gate-keeper, or a janitor, or a concierge, or a turnkey, or a gaoler. The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behaviour. No matter who they are and where they come from, the groom will always take care of the door. A non-human (the hinges) plus a human (the groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma. Solved? Not quite. First of all if La Halle aux Cuirs pays for a porter they will have no money left to buy coffee or books, or to invite eminent foreigners to give lectures. If they give the poor little boy other duties besides that of porter (yes, this reflects my sexist chauvinist discriminatory bias against hiring girls), then he will not be present most of the time and the damned door will stay open. Even if they had money to keep him there, we are now faced with a problem that two hundred years of capitalism has not completely solved: how to discipline a youngster reliably to fulfil a boring and underpaid duty? Although there is now only one human to be disciplined instead of hundreds (in practice only dozens because La Halle aux Cuirs is very very difficult to locate), the weak point of the tactic can be seen: if this one lad is unreliable then the whole chain breaks down; if he falls asleep on the job or goes walkabout there will be no appeal: the damned door will stay open (remember that locking it is no solution since this would turn it into a wall, and then providing everyone with the right key is a difficult task that would not insure that key holders will lock it back). Of course, the little rat may be punished or even flogged (do not hesitate, go on, yes indeed, this reflects my bourgeois late monopoly capitalist bias against workers). But imagine the headlines: "Social historians of science flog a porter from a poor working class background"; and what if he is coloured which might very well be the case, given the low pay? No, disciplining a groom –Foucault notwithstanding– is an enormous and costly task that only Hilton hotels can tackle, and that for other reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the door properly closed. If we compare the work of disciplining the groom with the work he substitutes for, according to the list defined above, we see that this delegated character has the opposite effect to that of the hinge: a simple task –forcing people to close the door– is now performed at an incredible cost; the minimum effect is obtained with maximum spending and spanking. We also notice, when drawing the two lists, an interesting difference: in the first relationship (hinges vis à vis work of many people) you not only had a reversal of forces (the lever allows gentle manipulations to displace heavy weights) but also a modification of time schedule: once the hinges are in place, nothing more has to be done apart from maintenance (oiling them from time to time). In the second set of relations (groom's work versus many people's work) not only do you fail to reverse the forces but you also fail to modify the time schedule: nothing can be done to prevent the groom who has been reliable for two months from failing on the 62nd day; at this point it is not maintenance work that has to be done but the same work as on the first day –apart from the few habits that you might have been able to incorporate into his body. Although they appear to be two similar delegations, the first one is concentrated at the time of installation whereas the other is continuous; more exactly, the first one creates clear-cut distinctions between production, installation and maintenance, whereas in the other the distinction between training and keeping in operation is either fuzzy or nil. The first one evokes the past perfect ("once hinges had been installedÉ"); the second the present tense ("when the groom is at his postÉ"). There is a built-in inertia in the first that is largely lacking in the second. The first one is Newtonian, the second Aristotelian (which is simply a way of repeating that the second is non-human the other human). A profond temporal shift takes place when non-humans are appealed to; time is folded (this is to show you that although a mere technologist I can do my bit of philosophising). 3. Delegation to non-humans It is at this point that you have a relatively new choice: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a delegated non-human character whose only fonction is to open and close the door. This is called a door-closer or a groom ('Groom' is a French trademark which is now part of the language). The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one non-human and may safely leave the others (bell-boys included) to their erratic behaviour. No matter who they are and where they come from –polite or rude, quick or slow, friends or foes–: the non-human groom will always take care of the door in any weather and at any time of the day. A non-human ( hinges) plus another non-human ( groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma. Solved? Well, not quite. Here comes the deskilling question so dear to social historians of technology: thousands of human grooms have been put on the dole by their non-human brethren. Have they been replaced? This depends on the kind of action that has been translated or delegated to them. In other words, when humans are displaced and deskilled non-humans have to be upgraded and reskilled. This is not an easy task as we shall now see. We have all experienced having a door with a powerful spring mechanism slam in our face. For sure, springs do the job of replacing grooms, but they play the rôle of a very rude, uneducated and dumb porter who obviously prefers the wall version of the door to its hole version. They simply slam the door shut. The interesting thing with such impolite doors is this: if they slam shut so violently, it means that you, the visitor have to be very quick in passing through and that you should not be at someone else's heels, otherwise your nose will get shorter and bloody. An unskilled non-human groom thus presupposes a skilled human user. It is always a trade-off. I will call, after Madeleine Akrich's paper (this volume), the behaviour imposed back onto the human by non-human delegates prescription . Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. In spite of the constant weeping of moralists, no human is as relentlessly moral as a machine, especially if it is (she is, he is, they are) as "user friendly" as my Macintosh computer. We have been able to delegate to non-humans not only force but also values, duties and ethics. It is because of this morality that we, humans, behave so ethically, no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are. How can these prescriptions be brought out? By replacing them by strings of sentences (usually in the imperative) that are uttered (silently and continuously) by the mechanisms for the benefit of those who are mechanized: do this, do that, behave this way, don't go that way. Such sentences look very much like a programming language. This substitution of words for silence can be made in the analyst's thought experiments, but also by instruction booklets, or explicitly, in any training session, through the voice of a demonstrator or instructor or teacher. The military are especially good at shouting them out through the mouthpiece of human instructors who delegate back to themselves the task of explaining, in the rifle's name, the characteristics of the rifle's ideal user. Whatever the many ways invented by the analyst to retrieve in words and texts the explicit prescription, its main characteristic however is to remain silent –hence the impression given to those who are obsessed by human behavior that there is a missing mass of morality . The results of such distribution of competences between humans and non-humans is that competent members of la Halle aux Cuirs will safely pass through the slamming door at a good distance from one another while visitors, unaware of the local cultural condition, will crowd through the door and will get bloody noses. This story is similar to the famous one about the buses loaded with poor blacks that could not pass under driveways leading to Manhattan parks (Winner: 1980). The non-humans take over the selective attitudes of those who engineered them. So, to avoid this discrimination, inventors get back to their drawing board and try to imagine a non-human character that will not prescribe the same rare local cultural skills to its human users. A weak spring might appear to be a good solution. Such is not the case, because it would substitute for another type of very unskilled and undecided groom who is never sure about the door's (or his own) status: is it a hole or a wall? Am I a closer or an opener? If it is both at once, you can forget about the heat –and after all, even Britishers need heat to write good history of science. "Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée". In computer parlance, a door is a OR, not an AND gate. I am a great fan of hinges, but I must confess that I admire hydraulic door-closers much more, especially the old copper plated heavy one that slowly closed the main door of our house in Aloxe-Corton. I am enchanted by the addition to the spring of an hydraulic piston which easily draws up the energy of those who open the door, and retains it, and then gives it back slowly with a subtle variety of implaccable firmness that one could expect from a well trained butler. Especially clever is its way of extracting energy from each and every unwilling, unwitting passer by. My sociologist friends at the School of Mines call such a clever extraction an "obligatory passage point", which is a very fitting name for a door; no matter what you feel, think or do, you have to leave a bit of your energy, literally, at the door. This is as clever as a toll booth. This does not quite solve all the problems, though. To be sure the hydraulic door-closer does not bang the noses of those who are not aware of local conditions, so its prescriptions may be said to be less restrictive, but it still leaves aside segments of human populations: neither my little nephews nor my grand-mother could get in unaided because our groom needed the force of an able-bodied person to accumulate enough energy to close the door later. To use Langdon Winner's classic mutto (1980): because of their prescriptions these doors discriminate against very little and very old persons. Also, if there is no way to keep them open for good, they discriminate against furniture removers and in general everyone with packages, which usually means, in our late capitalist society, working or lower-middle class employees (who, even coming from higher strata, has not been cornered by an automated butler when they had the hands full of packages?). There are solutions though: the groom's delegation may be written off (usually by blocking its arm) or, more prosaically, its delegated action may be opposed by a foot (salesman are said to be expert at this). The foot may in turn be delegated to a carpet or anything that keeps the butler in check (although I am always amazed by the number of objects that fail this trial of force and I have very often seen the door I just wedged open politely closing when I turned back to it). 4. Anthropomorphism As a technologist, I could claim that provided you put aside the work of installing the groom and maintaining it, and accept to ignore the few sectors of the population that are discriminated against, the hydraulic groom does its job well, closing the door behind you constantly, firmly and slowly. It shows in its humble way how three rows of delegated non-human actants (hinges, springs and hydraulic pistons) replace, 90% of the time, either an undisciplined bell-boy who is never there when needed or, for the general public, the programme instructions that have to do with remembering-to-close-the-door-when-it-is-cold. The hinge plus the groom is the technologist's dream of efficient action, at least it was until the sad day when I saw the note posted on La Villette's door with which I started this meditation : "the groom is on strike". So not only have we been able to delegate the act of closing the door from the human to the non-human, we have also been able to delegate the little rat's undiscipline (and maybe the union that goes with it). On strike... Fancy that! Non-humans stopping work and claiming what? Pension payments? Time off? Landscaped offices? Yet it is no use being indignant, because it is very true that non-humans are not so reliable that the irreversibility we would like to grant them is never complete. We did not want ever to have to think about this door again –apart from regularly scheduled routine maintenance (which is another way of saying that we did not have to bother about it)– and here we are, worrying again about how to keep the door closed and drafts outside. What is interesting in this note is the humour of attributing a human character to a failure that is usually considered as "purely technical". This humour, however, is more profound than the synonymous notice they could have posted "the groom is not working". I constantly talk with my computer, who answers back; I am sure you swear at your old car; we are constantly granting mysterious faculties to gremlins inside every conceivable home appliance, not to mention cracks in the concrete belt of our nuclear plants. Yet, this behaviour is considered by moralists, I mean sociologists, as a scandalous breach of natural barriers. When you write that a groom is "on strike" this is only seen as a "projection", as they say, of a human behaviour onto a non-human cold technical object, one by nature impervious to any feeling. This is anthropomorphism, which for them is a sin akin to zoophily but much worse. It is this sort of moralising which is so irritating for technologists, because the automatic groom is already anthropomorphic through and through. It is well known that French like etymology; well, here is another one: anqropoß and morpfoß together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans. Well the groom is indeed anthropomorphic, and in three senses: first, it has been made by men, it is a construction; second it substitutes for the actions of people, and is a delegate that permanently occupies the position of a human; and third, it shapes human action by prescribing back what sort of people should pass through the door. And yet some would forbid us to ascribe feelings to this thoroughly anthropomorphic creature? To delegate labor relations, to "project"– that is to say, to translate– other human properties to the groom? What of those many other innovations that have endowed much more sophisticated doors with the ability to see you arrive in advance (electronic eyes), or to ask for your identity (electronic passes), or to slam shut in case of danger? But anyway, who are you, you the sociologists, to decide for ever the real and final shape (morpfoß) of humans (anqropoß)? To trace with confidence the boundary between what is a "real" delegation and what is a "mere" projection? To sort out for ever and without due enquiry the three different kinds of anthropomorphism I listed above? Are we not shaped by non-human grooms, although I admit only a very little bit? Are they not our brethren? Do they not deserve consideration? With your self-serving and self-righteous social studies of technology, you always plead against machines and for deskilled workers –are you aware of your discriminatory biases? You discriminate between the human and the inhuman. I do not hold this bias (this one at least) and see only actors –some human, some non-human, some skilled, some unskilled– that exchange their properties. (But I am getting carried away, this is what happens when we, technologists, discuss at School with our friends and nevertheless colleagues from Sociology). So the note posted on the door is an accurate one, it gives with humour an exact rendering of the groom's behaviour: it is not working, it is on strike (notice, that the word 'strike' is also an anthropomorphism carried from the non-human repertoire to the human one, which proves again that the divide is untenable). 5. Built-in authors and users The debates around anthropomorphism arise because we believe that really there exist 'humans' and 'non-humans' without realising that this attribution of roles and action is also a choice. The best way to understand this choice is to compare machines with texts since the inscription of builders and users in a mechanism is very much the same as that of authors and readers in a story. In order to exemplify this point I have now to confess, to my shame and to your disappointment, that I am not a technologist. I built in my article a made-up author and also I invented possible readers whose reactions and belief I anticipated. Since the beginning I have many times used the "you" and even "you sociologists". If you remember well, I even ordered you to draw up a table (or advised you to do so) (p. xx) . I also asked your permission to go on with the story (p. xx). In doing so, I built up an inscribed reader to whom I prescribed qualities and behaviour, as surely as a traffic light or a painting prepare a position for those looking at them. Did you underwrite this definition of yourself? Or worse, is there any one at all to read this text and occupy the position prepared for the reader? This question is a source of constant difficulties for those who are unaware of the basics of semiotics. Nothing in a given scene can prevent the inscribed user or reader from behaving differently from what was expected (nothing, that is, until the next paragraph). The reader in the flesh may totally ignore my definition of him or her. The user of the traffic light may well cross on the red. Even visitors to La Halle aux Cuirs may never show up because it is too complicated to find the place, in spite of the fact that their behaviour and trajectory have been perfectly anticipated by the groom. As for the computer user input, the cursor might flash for ever without the user being there or knowing what to do. There might be an enormous gap between the prescribed user and the user in-the-flesh, a difference as big as the one between the "I" of a novel and the novelist. It is exactly this difference that so much upset the authors of the anonymous appeal I commented. On other occasions, however, the gap between the two may be nil: the prescribed user is so well anticipated, so carefully nested inside the scenes, so exactly dovetailed, that it does what is expected. The problem with scenes is that they are usually well prepared for anticipating users or readers who are at close quarter. For instance the groom is quite good in its anticipation that people will push the door open and give it the energy to reclose it. It is very bad at doing anything to help people arrive there. After fifty centimeters, it is helpless and cannot act, for example, on the maps spread around La Villette to explain where La Halle aux Cuirs is. Still, no scene is prepared without a preconceived idea of what sort of actors will come to occupy the prescribed positions. This is why I said on page xx that, although you were free not to go on with this paper, you were only "relatively" so. Why? Because I know that, since you bought this book, you are hard working serious English speaking technologists or readers commited to understand new development in social studies of machines. So, I can safely bet that I have a good chance of having you read the paper thoroughly! So my injunction "read the paper, you sociologist" is not very risky (but I would have taken no chance with a French audience). This way of counting on earlier distribution of skills in order to help narrowing the gap between built-in users or readers and users- or readers-in-the-flesh is like a pre-inscription. Drawing a side-conclusion in passing, we can call sociologism the claim that, given the competence and preinscription of human users and authors, you can read out the scripts non-human actors have to play; and technologism the symmetric claim that, given the competence and pre-inscription of the non-human actors you can easily read out and deduce the behavior prescribed to authors and users. From now on, these two absurdities will, I hope, disappear from the scene, since the actors at any point may be human or non-human and since the displacement (or translation, or transcription) makes the easy reading out of one repertoire into the next impossible. The bizarre idea that society might be made up of human relations is a mirror image of the other no less bizarre idea that techniques might be made up of non-human relations. We deal with characters, delegates, representatives, lieutenants (from the French "lieu" "tenant", i.e. holding the place of, for, someone else), some figurative others non figurative, some human other non-human, some competent others incompetent. You want to cut through this rich diversity of delegates and artificially create two heaps of refuse "society" on one side and "technology" on the other? That's your privilege, but I have a less deadly task in mind. A scene, a text, an automatism can do a lot of things to their prescribed users at close range, but most of the effect finally ascribed to them depends on a range of other set-ups being aligned. For instance, the groom closes the door only if there are people reaching the Centre d'Histoire des Sciences; these people arrive in front of the door, only if they have found maps (another delegate, with the built-in prescription I like most: "you are here" circled in red on the map) and only if there are roads leading under the Paris ring road to the Halle (which is a condition not always fullfilled); and of course people will start bothering about reading the maps, getting their feet muddy and pushing the door open only if they are convinced that the group is worth visiting (this is about the only condition in La Villette that is fulfilled). This gradient of aligned set-ups that endow actors with the preinscribed competences to find its users is very much like Waddington's "chreod" : people effortlessly flow through the door of La Halle aux Cuirs and the groom, hundreds of times a day, recloses the door –when it is not stuck. The result of such an alignment of set-ups is to decrease the number of occasions in which words are used; most of the actions are silent, familiar, incorporated (in human or in non-human bodies) –making the analyst's job so much harder. Even the classic debates about freedom, determination, predetermination, brute force or efficient will –debates which are the 20th century version of 17th century discussions on grace– will be slowly eroded away. (Since you have reached this point, it means I was right in saying on page xx that you were not at all free to stop reading the paper: positioning myself cleverly along a chreod, and adding a few other tricks of my own, I led you here... or did I? May be you skipped most of it, may be you did not understand a word of it, o you, undisciplined readers.) 6. Figurative and non-figurative characters Most sociologists are violently upset by this crossing of the sacred barrier that separate human from non-humans, because that they confuse this divide with another one between figurative and non-figurative actors. If I say that Hamlet is the figuration of "depression among aristocratic class", I move from a personal figure to a less personal one –class. If I say that Hamlet stands for Doom and Gloom, I use less figurative entities, and if I claim that he represents Western Civilization, I use non-figurative abstractions. Still, they all are equally actants, that is to say entities that do things, either in Shakespeare's artful plays or in the commentators' more tedious tomes. The choice of granting actants figurativity or not is left entirely to the authors. It is exactly the same for techniques. Engineers, are the authors of these subtle plots and scenarios of dozens of delegated and interlocking characters so few people know how to appreciate. The label "inhuman" applied to techniques simply overlooks translation mechanisms and the many choices there exist for figuring or de-figuring, personifying or abstracting, embodying or disembodying actors. For instance, in the picture opposite of a meat-roaster in the Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, the little groom, called "le petit Bertrand", is the delegated author of the movement. This little man is as famous in Beaune as the Mannekenpis in Bruxelles. Of course, he is not the one who does the turning –a hidden heavy stone collects the force applied when the human demonstrator or the cook turn a heavy handle that winds up a cord around a drum equipped with a ratchet. Obviously "le petit Bertrand" believes he is the one doing the job because he not only smiles but also moves his head from side to side with obvious pride while turning his little handle. When we were kids, even though we had seen our father wind up the machine first and put the big handle away, we liked to believe that the little guy was moving the spit and not moved by the thing. The irony of the "Petit Bertrand" is that, although the delegation to mechanisms aim at rendering any human turnspit useless, the mechanism is ornemented by a constantly exploited character 'working' all day long. Although this turnspit story offers the opposite case from that of the door-closer as far as figuration goes (the groom on the door does not look like a groom but really does the same job, whereas "le petit Bertrand" does look like a groom but is entirely passive) they are two similar cases as far as delegation goes (you no longer need to close the door and the cook no longer has to turn the skewer). The "enunciator" (a general word for the author of a text or for the mechanics who devised the spit) is free to place or not a representation of him or herself in the script (texts or machines). "Le petit Bertrand" is a delegated version of who is responsible for the mechanism. This is exactly the same operation as the one I did in pretending that the author of this article was a hardcore technologist (when I really am a mere sociologist –which is a second localisation of the text, which is as wrong as the first since really I am a mere philosopher...). If I say "we the technologists", I propose a picture of the author of the text as surely as if we place "le petit Bertrand" as the originator of the scene. But it would have been perfectly possible for me and for the mechanics, to position no figurated character at all, as the author in the scripts of our scripts (in semiotic parlance there would be no narrator). I would just have had to say things like "recent developments in sociology of science have shown that..." instead of "I", and the mechanics would simply have had to take out "le petit Bertrand" leaving the beautiful cranks, teeths, ratchets and wheels to work alone. The distinctions betwen humans or non-humans, embodied or disembodied skills, impersonation or "machination", are less interesting that the complete chain along which competences and actions are distributed. For instance, on the freeway, the other day, I slowed down because there was a guy in yellow suit and red helmet waving a red flag. Well, the guy's moves were so regular and he was located so dangerously and had such a pale although smiling face, that, when I passed by, I recognized it to be a machine (it failed the Turing test, a cognitivist would say). Not only was the red flag delegated; not only was the arm waving the flag also delegated; but the body appearance was also added to the machine. We, road engineers (see? I can do it again and carve out another author) could move much further in the direction of figuration, although at a cost: we could have given him/her (careful here, no sexual discrimination of robots) electronics eyes to wave only when there is a car approaching, or have regulated the movement so that it is faster when cars do not obey –and also we could have added, why not?, a furious stare or a recognizable face like a mask of Mrs Thatcher or of President Mitterand –which would have certainly slowed drivers down very efficiently... But we could also have moved the other way, to a less figurative delegation: the flag by itself could have done the job. And why a flag? Why not simply a sign "work in progress"? And why a sign at all? Drivers, if they are circumspect, disciplined and watchful will see for themselves that there is work in progress and will slow down. Depending on where we stand along this chain of delegation we get classic moral human beings endowed with self-respect and able to speak and obey laws or we get stubborn and efficient machines and mechanisms; half way through we get the usual power of signs and symbols. It is the complete chain that makes up the missing masses not one of its extremity. 5. From non-humans to super-humans Here comes the most interesting and saddest lesson of the note posted on the door at La Villette: people are not circumspect, disciplined and watchful, especially not French drivers doing 180 kilometres an hour on a freeway a rainy Sunday morning when the speed limit is 130km/h (I inscribe the legal limit in this article because this is about the only place where you could see it printed in black and white; no one else seems to bother, except the mourning families). Well, that's exactly the point that the note made: "The groom is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed". In our societies, there are two systems of appeal: non-human and super-human, that is machines and gods. This note indicates how desperate its frozen and anonymous authors were (I have never been able to trace them back and to honor them as they deserved). They first relied on the inner morality and common sense of humans; this failed, the door was always left open. Then they appealed to what we technologists consider the supreme court of appeal, that is, to a non-human who regularly and conveniently do the job in place of unfaithful humans; to our shame, we must confess that it also failed after a while, the door was again always left open. How poignant their line of thought is! They moved up and backward to the oldest and firmest court of appeal there is, there was, and ever will be. If human, and non-human have failed, certainly God will not deceive them. I am ashamed to say that, when I crossed the hallway, this fatal day February day, the door was open... Do not accuse God, though, because the note did not appeal directly to Him (I know I should have added "Her" for affirmative action reasons but I wonder how theologians would react); God is not accessible without mediators, the anonymous authors knew their catechisms well, so instead of asking for a direct miracle (God Him/Herself holding the door firmly closed or doing so through the mediation of an Angel, as has happened in several occasions, for instance when Paul was delivered from his prison) they appeal to the respect for God in human hearts. This was their mistake. In our secular times, this is no longer enough. Nothing seems to do the job nowadays of disciplining men and women and force them simply to close doors in cold weather. It is a similar despair that pushed the road engineer to add a Golem to the red flag to force drivers to beware –although the only way to slow French drivers is still a good traffic-jam. You seem to always need more and more of these figurated delegates aligned in rows. It is the same with delegates as with drugs; you start with soft ones and end up shooting up. There is an inflation for delegated characters too. After a while they weaken. In the old days it might have been enough just to have a door for people to know how to close it. But then, the embodied skills somehow disappeared; people had to be reminded of their training. Still, the simple inscription "keep the door closed" might have been sufficient in the good old days. But you know people, they no longer pay attention to the notice and need to be reminded by stronger devices. It is then that you install automatic grooms, since electric shocks are not as acceptable for men as for cows –a regrettable constraint that might soon be waived, especially in La Halle aux Cuirs which, before housing historians of science, was meant to treat cow hides. In the old times, when quality was still good, it might have been enough just to oil it from time to time, but nowadays even automatisms go on strike. It is not, however, that the movement is always from softer to harder devices, that is from an autonomous body of knowledge to force through the intermediary situation of worded injunctions, as the La Villette door would suggest. It goes also the other way. It is true that in Paris no driver will respect a sign (for instance a white or yellow line forbidding parking), nor even a sidewalk (that is a yellow line plus a fifteen centimetre kerb); so instead of embodying in the Parisian consciouness an intra-somatic skill, authorities prefer to align yet a third delegate (heavy blocks shaped like truncated pyramids and spaced in such a way that cars cannot sneak through); given the results, only a complete two metre high continuous Great Wall could do the job, and even this might not made the sidewalk safe, given the very poor sealing efficiency of China's Great Wall (I am sorry to speak of cars so much but I am happy to offer you this fresh case of social determinism; I live in Paris and swear a hundred times a day at cars parked on the sidewalks ). So the deskilling thesis appears to be the general case, always go from intra-somatic to extra-somatic skills; never rely on undisciplined men, but always on safe delegated non-humans. This is far from being the case, even for Parisian drivers. For instance, red lights are usually respected, at least when they are sophisticated enough to integrate traffic flows through sensors; the delegated policemen standing there day and night is respected even though it has no whistles, gloved hands and body to enforce this respect. Imagined collisions with the other cars or with the absent policemen are enough to keep them in check. The thought experiment "what would happen if the delegated character was not there" is the same as the one I recommended above to size up its function. The same incorporation from written injunction to body skills is at work with car user manuals. No one, I guess, will nowadays cast more than a cursory glance at the manual before igniting the engine of an unfamiliar car. There is a large body of skills that we have now so well embodied or incorporated that the mediations of the written instructions are useless. From extra-somatic they have become intra-somatic. Incorporation in human or "excorporation" in non-human bodies is also one of the choice left to the designers. 6. Texts and machines Even if it is now obvious that the missing masses of our society are to be found among the non-human mechanisms, it is not clear how they get there and why they are lost from most accounts. This is where the comparison between texts and artefacts that I used so far becomes misleading. There is a crucial distinction between stories and machines that explain why machines are so hard to retrieve in our common language. In story-telling, one calls shifting out any displacement of a character either to another space, or to another time, or to another character. If I tell you "Pasteur entered the Sorbonne aula", I translate the present setting –you and me– and shift it to another space (middle of Paris), another time (mid 19th century) and to other characters (Pasteur and his audience). "I", the enunciator may decide to appear or to disappear or to be represented by a narrator who tells the story ("that day, I was sit on the upper row of the aula"); "I" may also decide to position you and any reader inside the story ("had you been there, you would have been convinced by Pasteur's experiments"). There is no limit to the number of shiftings out a story may be built with. For instance, "I" may well stage a dialog inside the aula between two characters who are telling a story about what happened at the Académie des Sciences between, say, Pouchet and Milnes-Edwards. In that case, the aula is the place from which narrators shift out to tell a story about the Academy, and they may or not shift back in the aula to resume the first story about Pasteur. "I" may also shift in the entire series of nested stories to close mine and come back to the situation I started from –you and me (Latour: 1988). All these displacements are well known in literature departments and make up the craft of talented writers. No matter how clever and crafted are our novelists, they are no match for engineers. Engineers constantly shift out characters in other spaces and other times, devise positions for human and non-human users, break down competences that they then redistribute to many different actants, build complicate narrative programs and sub-programs that are evaluated and judged. Unfortunately, there are many more literary critiques than there are techno-logists and the subtle beauties of techno-social imbroglios escape the attention of the literate public. One of the reasons for this lack of concern may be the peculiar nature of the shifting-out that generates machines and devices. Instead of sending the listener of a story into another world, the technical shifting-out inscribe the words into another matter. Instead of allowing the reader of the story to be at the same time away (in the story's frame of reference) and here (in his armchair), the technical shifting-out force him to chose between frames of reference. Instead of allowing enunciators and enuciatees a sort of simultaneous presence and communion to other actors, techniques allow both of them to ignore the delegated actors and to walk away without even feeling their presence. To understand this difference in the two directions of shifting out, let us venture out once more onto a French freeway; for the umpteenth time I have screamed to Robinson "don't sit on the middle of the rear seat; if I brake too hard you're dead". In an auto-shop further along the freeway I come across a device made for tired-and-angry-parents-driving- cars-with-kids-between-two-and-five (that is too old for a baby seat and not old enough for a seat belt) and-from-small-families (that is without other persons to hold them safely) and-having-cars-with-two-separated-front-seats-and-head-rests. It is a small market but nicely analysed by these German fellows and, given the price, it surely pays off handsomely. This description of myself and the small category into which I am happy to subscribe, is transcribed in the device – a steel bar with strong attachments to the head rests– and in the advertisement on the outside of the box; it is also preinscribed in about the only place where I could have realised that I needed it, the freeway. (To be honest and give credit where credit is due, I must say that Antoine Hennion has a similar device in his car and that I had seen it the day before, so that I really looked for it in the store instead of "coming accross" it as I wrongly said; which means a) that there is some truth in studies of dissemination by imitation; b) that if I describe this episode in as much detail as the door I will never been able to talk about the work done by the historians of technology at La Villette.) Making a short story already too long, I no longer scream at Robinson and I no longer try to foolishly stop him with my extended right arm: he firmly holds the bar that protects him against my braking. I have delegated the continuous injunction of my voice and extension of my right arm (with diminishing results as we know from Feschner's law) to a reinforced, padded, steel bar; of course, I had to make two detours: one to my wallet, the second to my tool box; 200 francs and five minutes later I had fixed the device (after making sense of the instructions encoded with Japanese ideograms). The detour, plus the translation of words and extended arm to steel, is a shifting out to be sure, but not of the same type as that of a story. The steel bar has now taken over my competence as far as keeping my son at arms lenght is concerned. If in our societies, there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we have delegated competences, it means that what define our social relations is, for the most part, silently prescribed back to us by non-humans. Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability, is not a property of humans but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters. Since each of those delegates ties together part of our social world, it means that studying social relations without the non-humans is impossible (Latour: 1988a). One of the task of sociology is to do for the masses of non-humans that make up our modern societies what it did so well for the masses of ordinary and despised humans that make up our society. In order to find the missing masses, the lively, fascinating and honorable ordinary mechanism should now be added to the people and ordinary folks. There are many other things to say about the work of Robert Fox and on the missionary work of his group, but so many non-humans are demanding a room in our account of society that I got carried away just describing the door of the hallway leading to their office and have no place left to describe their work... --------------------------------------------- Bibliography Akrich, Madeleine (this volume) Baxandall, Michael (1985) Patterns of Invention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New-Haven: Yale University Press. Bijker, Wiebe, Hugues, Thomas and Pinch, Trevor (editors) (1986) NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES OF TECHNOLOGY, Cambrige Mass, MIT Press. Fujimura, Joan (1987) "Constructing 'Do-able' Problems in Cancer Research: Articulating Alignement" Social Studies of Science 17:257-293. Latour, Bruno (1988 a) "How to Write the Prince for Machines as Well as for Machinations" in Brian Elliot (editor) Technology and Social Change Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Latour, Bruno (1988 b) "A Relativist Account of Einstein's Relativity" Social Studies of Science Vol. 18, pp. 3-45. Leroi-Gourhan, André (1964) Le Geste et la Parole. Paris: Albin-Michel. MacKenzie, Donald and Wacjman, Judy (editors) (1985) THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF TECHNOLOGY- A READER, Milton Keynes, Open University Press. Mumford, Lewis Noble, David (1984) Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New-York: Alfred Knopf. Winner, Langdon (1986) THE WHALE AND THE REACTOR: A SEARCH FOR THE LIMITS IN AN AGE OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY, Chicago, Chicago University Press. Winner, Langdon (1980) "Do Artefacts have Politics?" Daedalus, 109:121-136.