Key Pages
- |Changes [May 05, 2008]
Ten Things 2006: Pr...The case of the palaeolithic "hand axe". The first of ten things.
Flaked flint, made 250k - 1.2m years ago by a member of the species homo erectus. Found in a gravel pit in the Thames Valley in England.
Basic point - things do social and cultural work - we have intimate relations with things (!).
(NB the social refers to the structure and organization of social groups - class, status, horizontal and vertical divisions in society -
the cultural refers to particular meanings, significances, values attached to social structures and artifacts)
We begin with some of the stories attached to a tool like this. Stories that deal with technology, evolution and what it is to be (uniquely?) human.
Stories with characters such as "homo habilis" - "handy human" - that stress the importance of tools in human evolution.
Stories of technological progress - from primitive lithic to high tech contemporary. Involving mastery over raw materials and nature, achieved through reason, intelligence, science and technology.
Stories of "homo faber" - "man the maker" (and they are gendered) - with a distinctive human trait being that we make artifacts from "raw material" to answer need and desire.
We can ask questions of cognitive capacity - what intelligence (human?) was needed to make this artifact?
We can ask questions of the function of the lithic, and what its symmetrical design signified in the way of an aesthetic sensibility.
These stories and characters and questions are a way of thinking of some common definitions of technology.
TECHNOLOGY: common definitions:
INDUSTRY: a related concept: common definitions:
How we normally understand technology:
Problems with this way of thinking - it breaks up the world into impossibly opposed qualities
Technology thus treated is
THE DICHOTOMIES:
SOCIETY TECHNOLOGY SPIRITUALITY TECHNOLOGY FEELING DOING COMMUNICATION PRAGMATICS STYLE FUNCTION PERSON TOOL
Such schemes are open to suspicion when applied cross-culturally.
They are also inappropriately gendered.
THE PROBLEM is that in these conventional definitions
technology is identified with instrumental objects/tools and their inventory
identified with the 'purely technical': separate and autonomous.
THE TECHNICAL AND THE MECHANICAL ARE CONFLATED
in the following way:
any technical process involves:
MATERIAL - (TOOL) - ACTION - KNOWLEDGE.
But in conventional approaches that radically separate technology and society and assume you can treat each quite separately, the person using a tool becomes an OPERATOR, indifferent to their social context, subjectivity and sensibility.
Productive work is thus divorced from AGENCY (as in a factory assembly line)
and is assigned to the functioning of an apparatus or machine. It means people are seen as naturally alienated from the real world.
As people, we cannot live without things::society is as much composed of things as people.
Another way of thinking of this is to understand how things and tools are socially and culturally active. They perform work (of course!).
So I presented Bruno Latour's case of the door and door closer.
Begin with a simple question of any artifact.
What work would have to be done in its absence?
This will reveal the ways that things are implicated in our very human being.
This is an argument for putting to one side the opppositions listed above and instead understanding the symmetry of
PEOPLE THINGS CULTURE NATURE COMMUNICATION PRAGMATICS HISTORY SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE ACTION
New definitions of tool and technology
Begin simply by asking the question "what would I have to do if I didn't have this thing?"
and you will realize that technology is all about work and action.
And that any technical act is part of a system and systematically related to other actions in a particular social context.
Think of CORRELATIONS and CONNECTIONS as well as CAUSALITY.
Any tool stores actions committed earlier/elsewhere/by others.
Another way of saying this is that we can DELEGATE actions, values, arguments, thoughts to things that come to stand in for them.
Tools thereby are the presence of the past in actions now.
In this delegation
there is exchange of properties with non-humans
transactions
translations
correlations
socialization of non-humans
mediations
... and crucially
Piaget Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Intelligence.pdf
One thing to be careful of when considering evolutionary psychology is how heavily it draws upon developmental psychology. While looking at how children grow and come to understand the world and what bits of knowledge seem to be separate is useful, the fact that our ancestors knew something that a 6-year-old knows does not mean that all of their abilities were at a 6-year-old's level. Intellectual capacities may not have all developed at the same rate - certainly some build upon others (have prerequisites), but it is possible to develop fairly far along one path without paying much attention to another. We need to be careful about what else we assume our ancestors knew at Time X based on one piece of evidence.
