Re: <nettime> parliament of things

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

> In other words, the division between the social and
> the natural (or technological) is not the beginning
> of the scientific enterprise, but its end result.

C.S. Lewis, not exactly your average social constructivist/ postmodernist
hero, said the same thing in "The Abolition of Man" back in 1947:

    "From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light.
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them.  We are
always conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to
some extent, conquered." [1]

> What we need now, is a way to bring the other half into the game.

Translation:  because science is simply politics by other means, it needs
to be brought under the rule of law.  That was also C.S. Lewis's agenda.  
Of course, by law he meant "natural law" and by "natural law" he meant
"religion".  Latour's concept of law may be different in form, but not in
substance.  When he talks about a "politics of nature", he doesn't really
mean that bacteria and rocks should be elected to parliament.  What he's
really saying is that science should be brought under political control.

Of course, that's a very old idea.  One could go on to argue that Latour
wants to revive Lysenko and Lewis the Inquisition, but that would only
start a flame war.  I think it would be uncontroversial, however, simply
to point out that left and right seem to be working rather brilliantly
together, as they are on so many things lately, to make sure that nobody
in the academy today speaks for Mendel and Galileo.  Instead we get
clumsy, all-thumbs revivals of Lamarckian theory, brought to you by
Motorola and their obviously hard-working team of publicists.  It's clear
that cellular phones are getting ready to stand for a seat in the
"parliament of things" as well, isn't it?

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's first return to the original
argument over whether society is constituted by physical objects.  In my
opinion, that formulation represents a monstrously mutated version of the
rather unremarkable insight (associated with Bateson) that all form
requires a physical substrate.  Information, as a kind of form, is no
different.  Add to this the idea (a cybernetic one, also associated with
Bateson) that all systems, whether animate or inanimate, persist as units
of identity through processes of communication and exchange.  What results
is the idea that the character of systems will be heavily influenced by
the physical media through which these constituent processes are effected.

Apply this deduction to those two great modes of human life, the
individual and society, and you get back to where we started: gifts and
money.  Yes, the constitution of society depends a great deal on the
physical tokens we use to interact with each other.  Societies that use
shells or lumps of gold to communicate will differ in important ways from
ones that use proprietary machines made of glass fiber, satellites,
silicon and secret source code. Should those machines ever become
open-source, society will change again in important ways.

But it is a fallacy to say that because we communicate through physical
objects, it is the those objects that create our societies and, as
Motorola pays people to discover, even our bodies.  It's very important to
be clear on what creates what.  Mistakes can be fatal.  And perhaps the
most fatal of such mistakes is to assume that the real world is simply
another kind of windy political rhetoric that belongs in a parliament.  
Because the real goal of this kind of sophistry probably isn't, in fact,
to revive Lysenko or the Inquisition.  Instead, redefining truth to be
something we create is simply another step toward redefining science as
one big intellectual property factory.  And if that is to happen, those
rocks, trees, bacteria and other career politicians had better get to work
fast.  They've got a lot of new laws to write for us.

Kermit Snelson

Notes:
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition3.htm


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