Bruno Latour is a sociologist of science. His aim to “share sociality with things” has attracted the interest of design theorists, new media critics, and scholars interested in “thing studies.” Not only are things important to human interaction, but objects are themselves actors, suggests Latour. (He prefers the term actant, which subsists in the middle region between the active and the passive voice.)
Latour would like to imagine a world in which things serve “as comrades, colleagues, partners, accomplices or associates in the weaving of social life.” Reading Latour makes me feel like I’ve wandered into a grown-up version of Beauty and the Beast or The Friendly Toaster, where appliances have personalities and toys are people too. Latour wants to turn that clock with the happy-face on it back a few centuries, to a time before animism and fetishism were nasty habits to be avoided along with bounced checks and emails with blank subject lines.
Latour invites us to imagine relationships between people and things along vectors other than ownership (of things by people) and instrumentalization (of people by things). Such alternative scenarios include “attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care” (“Cautious Prometheus,” 2). If I can only get my tea cup to talk to me, just imagine the stories that she’d tell!
Bruno Latour, A Cautious Prometheus: A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design
Illustration: Cord Swarm by Ellen Lupton.
— Julia Lupton · 2009-02-01
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THE BOOK