Movie Break

I've been very much enjoying the sections in Reassembling the Social (harking back to "Where are the Missing Masses?" and its seat belts and door closers) where Latour calls attention to the literal "framing" of the social world by material things by describing what it would be like if those things didn't exist. E.g., on page 194-195 where he talks about how lecturing would be impossible without an architect having designed a lecture hall for that purpose: "Fathom for one minute all that allows you to interact with your students without being interfered with too much by the noise of the street or the crowds outside in the corridor waiting to be let in for another class. If you doubt the transporting power of all those humble mediators in making this a local place, open the doors and the windows and see if you can still teach anything … [I]f you are not thoroughly 'framed' by other agencies brought silently on the scene, neither you nor your students can even concentrate for a minute on what is being 'locally' achieved. In other words, what would happen if inter-subjectivity was obtained for good by removing, one after another, all traces of inter-objectivity?"

It's a funny fantasy Latour entertains from time to time: what if all of the objects we take for granted suddenly disappeared, or stopped working, and we were back at the baboon stage of having only social tools — i.e. our bodies, and what we can manage to incorporate within them — at our disposal? What would happen to the (supposedly purely human) social world then? It's sort of his version of a dystopic vision, I guess (which makes it an interesting counterbalance to our recent discussion of utopia). Anyway, just want to mark it, and say that it reminds me of this scene from, of all things, Kentucky Fried Movie:



And one more, demonstrating even more vividly the fragility of the technological frameworks we tend to take for granted:

rotating kitchen from Zeger Reyers on Vimeo.