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Bruno
Latour, Domus June 04
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Photo Bojidar Yanev
Do artifacts have politics? “Of course not”. Such has
been for many years the common sense answer: technical objects are
as neutral as Aesop's tongue. They simply take the shape given to
them. But when the philosopher Langdon Winner raised the question,
several decades ago, his answer was a resounding 'yes': far from
being neutral, technologies could 'embody' oppression in such a
devious way that it was made irreversible.
One of his favourite examples will be familiar to all urbanists.
When Robert Moses began to redesign New York parkways, he made sure
that the bridges giving access to his beloved beaches and recreational
parks would be so low that buses could not pass under them. Since,
at the time, blacks were not rich enough to own private cars, this
meant that Moses, without any apartheid laws, without even the appearance
of impropriety, could maintain his beaches as free of any miscegenation
as if he had created a racist police to enforce his edict: "For
whites only". Hence Winner's conclusion: not only artifacts
have politics, but it's the most perverse of all since they hide
their biases under the appearance of objectivity, efficiency or
mere expediency.
This is indeed a nice story. And there is no doubt when you drive
along New York parkways that, to this day, parkways bridges are
indeed low, so low in fact that trucks and buses still ram into
them regularly. But what does it mean to say that bridges ‘embody’,
‘reify’ or ‘materialise’ some political
intent?
That designers use detours through material objects to enforce types
of behaviour, everyone who has been made to slow down near a school
because of the silent presence of a speed trap (also called a 'sleeping
policeman') would readily agree. Yes, we are made to do things we
would not have done otherwise every time we enter into contact with
an artifact: when we want to boil water for our morning coffee,
lock a door behind us, fasten our seat belt before our car engine
starts, and so on about two hundred times a day. This doesn't mean
however that only oppression and discrimination are expressed through
those humble and devious techniques. We are also, thanks to them,
'allowed', 'permitted', 'enabled', 'authorised' to do things. Thus,
to say that our ordinary course of action is intermingled with artifacts
does not mean that they have politics —at least, not yet.
Does politics begin when the irreversible built in techniques are
taken into account? Architects are well aware of the heavy weight
bequeathed to them by their predecessors. My own Haussmanian building
in Paris, has the perverse tendency to force the students inhabiting
its coveted 'chambre de bonnes' to climb six stories through a steep
and narrow staircase, while the happy owners of the flats are allowed
to glide through a comfortable lift inserted inside a wide staircase.
Are the students ‘discriminated’ against? Undoubtedly,
but the reason is that during the Belle Epoque it was unthinkable
to have the servants and valets take the same stairs as the Zolaesque
bourgeois for whom those buildings had been designed. In the meantime,
though, servants have disappeared, students have come in and the
discriminating power of two incompatible stairs has remained: it
is now, literally, cast in concrete. To undo Hausmann's political
bigotry would mean destroying my house, stone by stone... Does it
mean, however, that buildings in the Latin Quarter ‘have’
politics?
To detect politics in artifacts is always tricky because of the
exact opposite of what is implied by Winner’s argument: the
lack of mastery exerted over them by engineers. Hausmannian architects
had found a way to keep servants and bourgeois apart, but they never
anticipated relegating students to the back stairs. Technology,
in other words, has its own intent and import which makes the best
(or the worst of intent) drift away. This is why it's always difficult
to do reverse engineering and to read the intention of a designer
out of a design.
Fifty years later, New York City Departments of Transportation,
Parks and Traffic Enforcement are still disputing how to keep trucks
on or off parkways. Has Robert Moses discriminated against trucks?
Surely, this was explicit in all the plans and this is why he made
the bridges so low retaining the normal height for the other expressways:
trucks had no truck going to the beaches. But has he discriminated
against buses ‘full of blacks’? This is pure ideology,
that of the social critique: to separate parkways from expressways
is not the same as to keep whites and blacks apart. To jump too
fast from one to the other is indulging into some sort of conspiracy
theory.
When you begin to read artifacts not as neutral objects indifferent
to goals and values, but as the central node of a power struggle,
it's true that you enter into politics, but the question then becomes
which sort of politics? To read discrimination against blacks into
a bridge is not doing politics. It's simply doing architectural
critique and the most innocuous at that, namely the one that sees
artifacts as simply ‘embodying’ some type of oppression.
“Give me the social structure, I will give you the shape technology
should take.” But this means that buildings do nothing of
their own: they simply carry forth the pure effect of domination.
Which is going back precisely to the neutral idea of technology
that was criticized earlier.
But if artifacts do more than ‘objectifying’ some earlier
political scheme, if their design is full of unexpected consequences,
if their durability means that all the original ideas their designers
entertained about them will have drifted in a few decades, if, in
addition, they do much more than carrying out power and domination
and are also offering permissions, possibilities, affordances, it
means that they are doing politics in a way not anticipated by Langdon
Winner's seminal article. In other words they have to be represented.
They are a material assemblage in dire need of an assembly.
The problem is that if we sort of know how to describe a bridge
or a building in its material composition, we are yet unable to
draw together all the stake holders which have to be assembled for
this bridge or this building to have a political representation.
We know how to describe the shuttle Columbia as an engineering project,
or how to describe NASA as an organisation, but we don’t know
how to describe NASA and the shuttle as one single type of assembly.
And yet all artifacts reside inside a corporate body which affirms
their existence —or, alas, fail to do so.
Footnotes:
Winner, Langsdon. "Do Artefacts
Have Politics?" Daedalus 109 (1980): 121-36.
I thank Bojidar Yanev, inspector of New York City bridges, for a
fascinating visit.
Joerges, Bernward. "Do Politics Have Artifacts?" Social
Studies of Science 29 (3) (1999): 411-31 and the interesting dispute
with Steve Woolgar that ensues.
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