A very human tale

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Notes

1. The title is given half in French and half in English in the bibliography. I refer henceforth to the English translation, Serres, Rome.

2. Ibid., unpaginated preface.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. Hutchins, Cognition.

5. See e.g. Derrida, The Animal; Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?.

6. Law, ‘Technology.’ The textual center of the debate surrounding whether agency is an exclusively human (social) attribute or whether it should be extended to non-humans as well can be found in the exchange between Collins and Yearly, ‘Epistemological Chicken’ and Callon and Latour, ‘Don’t Throw.’

7. Mukerji is not always consistent in ascribing power to social networks and force to unrecruited nature, but this seems nonetheless to be her general scheme.

8. Hutchins, Cognition (note 4 above) actually only uses the term ‘embodied’ in the first sense mentioned here. In Hollan, Hutchins, and Kirsh, ‘Distributed Cognition,’ however, he and his co-authors write that a ‘second tenet of the distributed cognition approach is that cognition is embodied’ (p. 177). For an interesting introduction to embodied cognition, see Clark, Being There. For an introductory survey of how sociologists have recently dealt with the study of cognition, see Ignatow, ‘Theories.’ For efforts to historicize the study of embodied and distributed cognition, see Sutton, ‘Porous Memory’; Sutton, ‘Spongy Brains’; Tribble, ‘Distributing Cognition.

9. Compare this with Hutchin’s discussion of the distance between abstract mathematical computation as developed by Turing and the cognitive work of mathematicians. ‘What Turing modeled was the computational properties of a sociocultural system.’ Hutchins, Cognition, 362. Bruno Latour highlights this characteristic of detachability from the complex local processes of production in a more positive light in his discussion of ‘immutable mobiles.’ Latour, Science.

10. Indeed, Mukerji writes that ‘the canal became more substantial as the situation became more unstable.’ Mukerji, Impossible, 93. See also 221.

11. The literature on this point is legion. For recent critical reviews, see for example Macnaghten and Urry, ‘Toward a Sociology’; Inglis and Bone, ‘Boundary Maintenance’; Scarce, ‘Review.

12. Hutchins, Cognition, xiii, xvi.

13. Intriguingly, the word ‘nature’ does not appear in the index of Impossible Engineering.

14. See Mukerji, Impossible, p. 24. For an extended analysis of this tradition, see Hunt, Greater Perfections, 32–75. Mukerji cites Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis as her source for this distinction. Cronon writes: ‘Despite the subtly different logic that lay behind each, the geography of second nature was in its own way as compelling as the geography of first nature, so boosters and others often forgot the distinction between them. Both seemed quite “natural”’ (p. 56).

15. Hunt, Greater Perfections, 57.

16. Roberts, Schaffer, and Dear, Mindful Hand explains this seeming paradox as the result of a double history in which socially distributed, practical collaboration was often effaced by a socially polarized rhetoric and institutionalization of attribution. Gentlemanly scholars, members of elite institutions and managers of various stripes, that is to say, were interested to interpret projects which yielded material and knowledgeable advances as the result of rational inquiry and applied manual labor. That Mukerji’s work can be interpreted in this light is attested to by the fact that an essay of hers is included in the volume. Mukerji, ‘Demonstration.’ For the unresolved character of her own position, however, see also her essay and my introduction in a subsequent special issue of the journal History of Technology in which I critique her use of the term ‘tacit knowledge’ to express the skilful capabilities of peasant workers. Roberts, ‘Introduction: Transcending Boundaries,’ 109; Mukerji, ‘Mindful Hands.