Showing papers by "John Law published in 1997"

After the individual in society : Lessons on collectivity from science, technology and society

Abstract: . Les sciences sociales ont invente toute une serie de concepts pour surmonter l'opposition entre action individuelle et collective. Un des apports de l'anthropologie des sciences et des techniques (AST) est de montrer que cette opposition ne constitue qu'une des configurations construites par l'action et sa distribution. Pour restituer la diversite de ces configurations l'AST a elabore quatre principes. Le premier affirme le caractere heterogene du social. Le deuxieme conduit a considerer que toute entite est une realite assimilable au reseau des elements heterogenes. Le troisieme affirme que les entites sont a geometrie variable et qu'elles reorientent l'action dans des directions imprevisibles. Le quatrieme propose que tout arrangement social stabilise est a la fois un point (un individu) et un reseau (un collectif). L'analyse sociologique, si elle veut surmonter l'opposition entre individualisme et holisme, doit donc se donner pour objet l'etude de ces differentes configurations hybrides. Resume. The social sciences have devised a series of strategies in order to overcome the division between individual and collective action. However, science, technology and society (STS) has shown that this distinction is only one possible configuration for action and its distribution. In order to investigate other possible configurations, STS proposes four principles: that the social is heterogeneous in character; that all entities are networks of heterogeneous elements; that these networks are both variable in geometry and in principle unpredictable; and that every stable social arrangement is simultaneously a point (an individual) and a network (a collective). If sociological analysis is to overcome the individualism/holism division it should attend to the range of hybrid configurations. "For at the intersection of all these fields we sense that the same basic message is being conveyed -- a message that seems indeed over the course of the centuries to have almost attained the status of an accepted truth. This is the assertion that reality -- all reality -- can be conceived of as a construction that one should be able to lean on, and as something that must be manipulated. Arts and wisdom, as the Chinese conceived of them, should be devoted to the strategic exploitation of the propensity inherent in reality; they should be designed so as to cause a maximal effect." (Francois Jullien, La Propension des Choses, Paris: Seuil, 1992, page 15) Introduction Many cultures manage perfectly well without it. For instance, those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Strathern 1991) -- or, perhaps less exotically, that of the Japanese. Indeed, the very translation of Euro-American social thought into Japanese is extraordinarily difficult. For the whole idea of the "individual" and "society" is foreign to Japanese culture. There is a fascinating story to be retold about the conversion of these terms into Japanese neologisms -- the ugly neologisms needed to import Euro-American social science and its problems into Japan. And another equally interesting story to be told of teaching about the distinction between the individual and society to eighteen-year olds in Japanese universities -- students who tend to come from places which perform continuities between the collective and the personal, rather than divisions or dualisms. (2) Are the Japanese disadvantaged? Perhaps. But perhaps not. For maybe what appears to be a Japanese problem is really one of Euro-American making. And one that should be treated as a burden, indeed an unnecessary burden. Such, at any rate, is the thesis that we explore in this paper. That the Euro-American distinction between the individual and the collective--current since at least the Enlightenment, though no doubt preceding this by many centuries -- is unsatisfactory. And that the space created by the division and the intellectual games it generates are unnecessary, perhaps even sterile. …