Bowker - The Ontological Priority of Mediation - Presses Des Mines

3/17/2015 Débordements - The ontological priority of mediation - Presses des Mines

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Pressesdes MinesDébordements | Madeleine Akrich, Yannick Barthe, FabianMuniesa, et al.

The ontologicalpriority ofmediationGeoffrey C. Bowkerp. 61-68

Full text“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next

wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations ofall the deathless ones who hold the peaks of

snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth ofthe wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among

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the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs andovercomes the mind and wise counsels of all godsand all men within them. From Chaos came forth

Erebus and black Night; but of Night were bornAether and Day, whom she conceived and bare

from union in love with Erebus.” (Hesiod,Theogony, 116)

I walked into the Center for the Sociology of Innovationat the Paris School of Mines in 1984 as a fully working,self-contained, human subject. I walked out six yearslater as a mediated entity, constituted by andconstitutive of networks of things of all kinds – humanor non-human each being awarded equal status in theemergent semiotics of the Center. And the best thing inthis, as Antoine Hennion said as I despaired of evenwanting the change, is that it doesn’t even hurt. A keyactor in helping me work through this transition wasMichel Callon – his work especially on the St Brieuc Bayscallops but more generally. Through Michel, I came tounderstand the centrality of ontological issues. Thisessay marks the place where I (or rather this particularlyconstituted me) am with my ontological thinking.There was a cartoon in the New Yorker a while back thatshowed a chicken and an egg in bed together. Thechicken is lying back smoking a cigarette looking wellpleased, and the egg says grumpily: “ Well, I guess thatanswers that question ”. Which came first, order orchaos? In the Judeo-Christian tradition order takesprecedence – as day follows night in Genesis, the God oforder creates and classifies the world through a series ofacts of binary division. Our secular cosmogony agrees –the universe rapidly wends its way from maximal orderto entropic end. Order out of chaos or chaos out oforder?Binary divides define us. Nature/society tells us thatthere is a realm of the social which is in some wayoutside of nature, and a nature which can be fully



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described without taking humans into account.Mind/matter tells us that there is a realm of thought (aparticularly efficient Turing machine) which existsoutside of the realm of matter – or more precisely whichis indifferent to its material seat. I/Thou tells us thatthere is a me here and a you there, as if I and thou wereself-contained. Posing these divides as ontologicallyprior tells us that the act of ordering itself is natural: itcame first. Only once we posit these can we begin tothink.The realm in which chaos came first is more fluidhistorically. In this realm there is a primordial soupmade up of humans and non-humans, I’s and thou’s,nature and society. It is only through the particulars ofan historically contingent act of mediation that societyand nature – me and my shadow – fall out as entities inthe world. As the particular set of mediations change, sodo the resultant categories which drop out of them. AsLatour argues, nature and society drop out as categoriesfrom the act of mediating between the two.The central arguments of this essay are that theEnlightenment is indeed an epoch and that the epoch isto be defined in terms of mediation. Although mytrajectory has been the inverse of the many other authors(I look to the past in order to understand the present),we collectively have met along a tunnel beingconstructed between the eighteenth century and thetwenty-first.There have traditionally been two ways of conceivingepochs – as advances in human thought (think Hegel,John Stuart Mill) which have material effect, or aschanges in the political economy broadly conceived andmediated by tools (the relationship between us andnature) which in turn influence culture. For the latter, asSiskin adumbrates, think Bacon’s gunpowder, printingand compass or Marx’s technological determinism.Michel Foucault spans the two. His wonderful discussion



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of the difficulty with transhistorical categories such as‘the state’ or ‘the individual’ reaches a similar conclusionto Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:categories are incommensurable between epochs (cf.Veyne, 1971). They are different because the constitutionof selves and states varies with the tools through whichwe experience them – in our terms they fall out of theacts of mediation which subtend them.Let us trip for the nonce over the notion of epoch. It is anespecially difficult notion, since the historicizingEnlightenment itself gave a new twist to the concept –superceding eternal returns (Eliade, 1969) andprogressive degeneration – ages of gold, silver, bronze(Kurke, 1999). There are two difficulties with an epochdefining itself, both of which can be illustrated out of thehistory of media. First is that the people who get to tellthe story are the true believers. Clanchy argues brilliantlythat the humanists who laud the spread of the printedword as a necessary specific against ignorance andintolerance were themselves teachers and spreaders ofthe word: there is just as good an argument that thespread of writing – and as I will argue the growth of thedatabase – were key to the development of totalitarianstates (Clanchy, 1993). Secondly, they are often truebelievers with axes to grind. As Geary argues inPhantoms of Remembrance, the people who gave us theshift to writing in eleventh century France were pushingthe agenda of favoring certain property claims overothers. In the act of doing so, they artificially operated abreak between before and after the written record whichhas since been reified by historians as an historical,ratherthenamediational,transformation(Geary,1994)–thepastwasdifferentrather than that those who weremediating the past had changed. In similar fashion,when Lavoisier wrote his textbook on chemistry, hedeliberately obscured live traditions which had informedhim (the alchemists of previous centuries) by creating a



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new language which rendered past writing unintelligible(Bensaude-Vincent, 1989). In true baroque fashion,every act of clarity is simultaneously an act of obscurity.Guillory (2010) gives us a good picture of the claims ofthe epoch-makers to the nature of the change they bothexperienced and caused: Condorcet’s claim that withprint: “Men found themselves possessed of the means ofcommunicating with people all over the world. A newsort of tribunal had come into existence”. Babbage, whogave us the difference and analytical engines, extendsthis vision in his fragmentary, outrageous Bridgewatertreatise. He proclaimed that until the invention ofprinting: “the mass of mankind were in many respectsalmost the creatures of instinct” (Babbage, 1837: 59).Now, the great were encouraged to write, knowing that:“they may accelerate the approaching dawn of that daywhich shall pour a flood of light over the darkenedintellects of their thankless countrymen”, seeking: “thathigher homage, alike independent of space and time,which their memory shall for ever receive from the goodand the gifted of all countries and all ages” (Babbage,1837: 54). As in Landor’s Imaginary Conversations (orE.M. Forster’s imaginary reading room at the BritishMuseum), the enlightened would be in constantproductive dialogue: mediated by print. (Unfortunately,none of the above saw that the field of the enlightenedwould soon beget an impenetrable thicket – there are fartoo many of them for anyone to read, as the breakneckpublication rate of the modern academy attests).What I like about Babbage is that he puts time as well asspace on the table. He was writing in the full flower of aperiod which wrote about space and time beingdestroyed, annihilated by the steamship and the railroadas well as print. What stands between here and there,now and then had changed. Moral qualities drop outdifferently in this new equation. Trust is different if it ismediated through word of mouth, text or database entry.



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Clanchy describes the moves that were needed to givethe first precedence over the second – a series oftechnical inventions such as the chirograph made itpossible to say that the words of a contract were lesslikely to be forged then the words of a trusted witness tobe suborned. Laplace, creating probability theory,laboured hard on the question of how many – and whatkind of – witnesses it takes to make a miracle believable.Where for Laplace it was the technique of probabilitiesthat could stand between a person and the world in therealm of effective belief, for Boyle (Shapin & Schaffer,1989) it was the protected laboratory (outside of spaceand time) with its implements; and for governments thetechnology of statistics.Building on Manovich – as variously do Eliassen andJacobsen explicitly and Blair and Stallybrass implicitly –we can say that this was the epoch of the database.Scientists (‘les voyageurs naturalistes’, Napoleon’s tripto Egypt) were collecting and collating information on anunprecedented, scale. The natural resources of theempire should be managed. As Serres argues in LeContrat Naturel this was an epoch where we began as aWestern civilisation to begin to think about themanagement of our planet – in the face of ever-increasing population and limited resources. At the sametime, states were beginning to create qualitatively newquantitative measure of their citizenry. A chief tool wasthe science of statistics – data about the state. InFoucault’s turn of phrase, this was the epoch ofgovernmentality.So how to define the epoch, and how to ground it in aform which enfolds both the material and the cultural?We need to play with temporality in order to do it.Though it’s highly convenient to name a moment ofinstauration of the Archive (Derrida, 1995), it isparticularly misleading. Any new informationinfrastructure – for an interest in such is central to this



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volume – is a slow process. Braudel and the Annalistsoffer useful language here. For them, the rhythms ofhistory can be grouped into the punctual (the vagaries ofpolitical change, the memoirs of St Simon), the material(variations in modes of production), and theenvironmental (climate change for example). Precisedates only really go with the first of these. Modes ofproduction change over long periods – so that the ‘first’member of the bourgeoisie can be traced with someassurance anywhere from the twelfth to the nineteenthcentury. Or again, how do we know when we have anenvironmental disaster in, say, Los Angeles? Is it whenwe first overpopulated the land, when asthma reaches agiven mark, or when water begins to dry leading tofuture wars between the states? So to offer a beginningfor the Enlightenment is precisely the wrong thing to do– to do so is to shift it out of its native temporality.Rather, as Siskin so eloquently sustains, infrastructurespersist in long nows. The latter being a reference to theclock of the long now being built by Stuart Brand interalia – that glorious clock which will chime everythousand years and complete a cycle every ten thousandyears to the gentle susurration of Brian Eno’s airportmusic (Brand, 1999). It is a long now precisely because ofthe act of mediation which gives rise to categories andclasses, words and things. The easiest way into thisargument is an essay by Paul David (1990). The essay is aconsideration of the so-called productivity paradox: youbring computers into the workplace and productivitygoes down for about twenty years. I witnessed thispersonally in the 1970s when a company I worked forwhich had been an early adopter of computers decided todecomputerize – the gains were not worth it. Hecompares this to the development of electrical dynamosin factory production at the turn of the twentiethcentury, which displayed the same paradox. You bring insomething new and better and you do the old things



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worse. And that is precisely the point for David –dynamos are second-rate steam generators, andcomputers are second-rate typewriters. Only when youcan truly think the new technology can you begin to dothings which were otherwise inconceivable. In so doingyou often need to change the concept of ‘productivity’ –as we have done as the service economy has overtakenthe manufacturing in the first world.When written record was preferred over memory – at theprecise date for Clanchy (1979: 23) of 3 September 1189– a lot already had to be in place. Not only the collectionof manuscript material, but also its archiving. Not onlythe signed statement, but also the chirograph. Similarly,with the spread of the book it took a few hundred yearsto develop the armature of footnotes which facilitativeconversation over time and space – earlier referenceswere more akin to the orphan page numbers of EzraPound’s cantos. Today, we did not suddenly becomedifferent with the invention of email. We are differentnow – in significant ways. My memory is enhanced bythis prosthesis. I can access any email I sent over thepast 20 years; my fleeting thoughts are now part –should I ever choose to access them – of myconsciousness in ways unimaginable in the past. I oncewrote two papers with a colleague whom I had nevermet. I am distributed in space and time in ways I nevercould have been in the past. However, my early emailwas like letters – in the dawn of the era of SMS I fearmine will never fully make the transition. SoEnlightenment doesn’t have a date. What kinds of thingsare these momentous, undatable events? They areprecisely those which result from the generation of newmediations. It is a historiographical error to say that thecategories (humanity, nature and so forth) come firstand then the mediations come after.The more complex question is what occasions a new setof mediations. To consider this, I juxtapose three



entities: Thomas Arnold, the post office and the tickertape. Thomas Arnold – father of Mathew – washeadmaster at Rugby – an elite school which trained theleaders of the British Empire. The children’s classic TomBrown’s Schooldays describes the life of a boy growingup under a transforming institution. When Tom Brownwent to school, there was a given social order in place(fags serving their sybaritic superiors, inordinate capitalpunishment) which dissolved over the period that Arnoldserved. In Thomas Hughes’ classic, Arnold engineersroot and branch change at Rugby without anyonerealising it was happening. The social engineer parexcellence worked his magic through the accumulation ofsmall changes all pointed in his chosen direction. Let usabandon at once this picture of heroic change – foresightthrough mediational change is awarded retrospectively,not earned contemporaneously. There is no visible handwhich creates an epoch, nor is there intelligent designwhich molds our future. Next is the more interesting caseof the post office. Richard John argues persuasively thatit was through the infrastructure of the post office, andmore particularly the cheap postal rate for newspapers,which permitted the creation of the American state –suddenly folks from California or Oregon could join inwith events in Washington or New York in a singlenational dialogue (John, 1995). The case for Australia isas strong – when sailboats took six months to venture toAustralia, the Governor had a lot of leeway in hisdecisions, with the steamboat this went significantlydown and with telegraphy the center could hold the reinsof power (Blainey, 1966). This pushes us closer to the actof mediation whereby the state itself is constituted by thefabric of its information and communicationsinfrastructure – new infrastructure means a new state,new people, new relations. John, though, rests at theinstitutional level. Finally consider the ticker tape. In abrilliant paper, Alex Preda argues that the invention of



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the stock ticker – which permitted the rapid distributionof stock market figures from Wall Street to investor viainvestment houses – forged a new temporality andspatiality for the profession of broker (Preda, 2006). ForPreda, the technology itself provides affordances for anew kind of sociality subtended by a new temporalityand spatiality: the remorseless ticking of the tickerengaged with previous practices and transformed them.Much as Arnold did, but blindly.How blind, then, is the change that comes from theprimordial soup before which there is no mediation?This is of course the wrong question – mediations begetmediations, and if the act of mediation is indeedontologically prior then the real question is that of thenature of the transformations that occur. This leads tothe heart of the historiographical problem.The way into this for me is through a consideration ofhistorical voice. The two great historiographicaltraditions can be cast as Herodotus opposed toThucydides. The former gave us a great and for manymodern readers a confusing history in which multiplestories were told from various voices, without thehistorian choosing a single description of the truth.Thucydides on the other hand gave us the single-voicedauthoritative account. If we turn to the Baroquephilosophers who preceded the Enlightenment –Montaigne or La Mothe Le Vayer – we get a multiplicityof voices. For Montaigne it is a string of juxtaposed,contradictory anecdotes which nonetheless tell a story. Ifthere is one thing about Enlightenment historiography,whose baleful influence we still experience, it is thatthere is a one true right and only history – of the humanmind or of the forces of production. It produced a newlandscape of mediation in which the categories which fellout as outside of space and time were the universaltruths of science and history. Latour and Woolgar wroteabout the ‘deletion of modalities’ in scientific texts – as



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facts become more and more true, they are assignedfewer and fewer dates and times and conditions ofexperiments – they become established truths for alltime (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). By parallel,Enlightenment historiography can be described as acontinuous process of the deletion of mediation. Thecategories which fall out from the act of mediation havenever been mediated. This is not a necessary feature ofthe work of mediation: it is an historical fact about aparticular epoch in that history. The act of creating anarchive is, within our current configuration,automatically an act of exclusion from the archive(Derrida, 1995) in the process of creating unmediatedtruth.The key figure which provides the nature of therelationship is that of the trader – as Hénaff (2002)discusses so beautifully. The trader is the stranger withinthe state – the person who by their very otherness withindefines what is inside and outside of polis. In The GreatWall of China, from History to Myth, Arthur Waldronexplores the myth of the wall as a barrier which keeps thebarbarian hoards ravaging an unprotected countryside(Waldron, 1989). First, he notes, the barrier itself actedalso as an entranceway. Several times central powers lostwars to the nomads beyond, who then became thecentral powers, who then… etc. At any given temporalscale, movements of lesser or greater magnitude can beseen. Secondly, the wall was never a continuous stretchof patrollable boundary – it was shored up wherever thecurrent threat was and elsewhere fell into desuetude. Theapprehension of a single wall stretched across thelandscape has always been a political statement in thepresent rather than an historical representation. Thirdly,the site of exclusion – the wall itself – was a rich andstable trading zone between the nomad barbariansbeyond and the civilized within. It was a site ofinterpenetration of people, artifacts, food, disease. So the



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barrier between, and the concomitant set of tradingrelationships, defined a stable historical relationshipbetween nomads and the civilised which continued toreproduce itself whatever the historical vagaries of thecollection of folks each side of the wall. With newinformation and communications infrastructures, we getnew forms of mediation between people, new forms ofinsides and outsides. What is great about theseinfrastructures is that they are precisely that out of whichtruth emerges (encyclopedic knowledge of the world,statistics about our citizenry) and that which bestexpresses our current set of mediations.The Enlightenment is alive for us today precisely becauseit gave us a set of tools for mediating between people andbetween humans and nature. As empires expanded,more and more voices were brought into play – and thenew tools gave ways of understanding and describingthose voices, transforming them in the process. Oneexample of this is classification. The era of binaryclassification which Linnaeus ushered in (as he showedthe door to heteronomous cabinets of curiosity) spreadalong with information technologies throughout thenineteenth century: so that we came to see species andknowledge organization in tree form. The tree of life andthe tree of knowledge. Patrick Tort writes wonderfullyabout the proliferation of genetic, binary classificationacross multiple sectors of science and bureaucracy (Tort,1989). He writes traces the filiation of the systems – howgenetic classification moved from biology to linguistics tomineralogy. He does not unfortunately ask the questionof what made that filiation possible: the common newmode of organizing knowledge out of which newtranshistorical entities were created. If we turn ourattention to the deleted mediations, we can see theinevitability of the unity of the myriad faces of theEnlightenment without having recourse to anepistemology of Truth. What we see is a historically



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Bibliography

References

contingent new way of ordering the world.The era of the past two hundred and fifty years in theWest is very much the era of the database. What isinteresting about the new forms which are emergingtoday – still in the very infancy of their long now – is thepossibility of creating new forms of ordering, perhapseven forms which permit polyphony. With our newinformation infrastructure we should reach back to theBaroque before we are blinded by the light.

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Bensaude-Vincent, B., (1989), “Une révolutionscientifique: Lavoisier”, in M. Serres (ed.), Élémentsd’histoire des sciences, Paris: Bordas, p. 363-387.

Blainey, G. (1966), The Tyranny of Distance: HowDistance Shaped Australia’s History, Melbourne: SunBooks.

Brand, S. (1999), The Clock of the Long Now: Time andResponsibility, New York, NY: Basic Books.

Clanchy, M. T. (1993), From Memory to WrittenRecord: England 10661307, Oxford: Blackwell.

David, P. A. (1990), “The Dynamo and the Computer”,The American Economic Review, 80 (2), p. 355-361.

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Geary, P. J. (1994), Phantoms of Remembrance:Memory and Oblivion at the End of the FirstMillennium, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Guillory, J. (2010), “Genesis of the Media Concept”,Critical Inquiry, 36 (2), p. 321-362.

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John, R. R. (1995), Spreading the News: The AmericanPostal System from Franklin to Morse, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Kurke, L. (1999), Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: ThePolitics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Latour, B. & S. Woolgar (1979), Laboratory Life: TheSocial Construction of Scientific Facts, Thousand Oaks,CA: SAGE.

Preda, A. (2006), “Socio-Technical Agency in FinancialMarkets: The Case of the Stock Ticker”, Social Studies ofScience, 36 (5): p. 753-782.

Shapin, S. & S. Schaffer (1989), Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life,Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tort, P. (1989), La Raison classificatoire: les complexesdiscursifs. Paris: Aubier.

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Geoffrey C. Bowker

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Electronic reference of the chapterBOWKER, Geoffrey C. The ontological priority of mediation In:Débordements: Mélanges offerts à Michel Callon [online]. Paris:Presses des Mines, 2010 (generated 17 March 2015). Available onthe Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/pressesmines/724>.ISBN: a:1:{i:0;s:13:"9782356711878";}.

Electronic reference of the bookAKRICH, Madeleine (ed.) ; et al. Débordements: Mélanges offerts àMichel Callon. New edition [online]. Paris: Presses des Mines, 2010(generated 17 March 2015). Available on the Internet:<http://books.openedition.org/pressesmines/703>. ISBN: a:1:{i:0;s:13:"9782356711878";}.Zotero compliant

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Bowker - The Ontological Priority of Mediation - Presses Des Mines

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