Moralidade e tecnologia

Pequeno fichamento do texto Morality and technology¹ de Bruno Latour.

Sobre a técnica preceder a humanidade, e a crítica à visão instrumentalista de Heidegger

Technologies belong to the human world in a modality other than that of instrumentality, efficiency or materiality. A being that was artificially torn away from such a dwelling, from this technical cradle, could in no way be a moral being, since it would have ceased to be human – and, besides, it would for a long time have ceased to exist. Technologies and moralities happen to be indissolubly mingled because, in both cases, the question of the relation of ends and means is profoundly problematized. (1, p. 248)

Tecnologia como modo de existência, em oposição a território ou classe de objetos

Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others. If we are unable to distinguish between a technical object and a non-technical one, we should nevertheless be able to locate the dimension pertaining to technology in some entity. The regime of technology, if you wish, is different from another standpoint (scientific, artistic or moral) not in the way that a region of reality would differ from another, but in the way prepositions differ amongst themselves, in much the same way as ‘in’ is clearly distinguishable from ‘by’, although there is no particular domain of ‘in’ that we can separate from the territory ‘by’. (1, p. 248)

Objetos técnicos são uma dobra de espaço, tempo, e actantes. Multiplicidade de temporalidades, terriotorios, atores.

There is nothing less local, less contemporary, less brutal than a hammer, as soon as one begins to unfold what it sets in motion; there is nothing more local, more brutal and more durable than this same hammer as soon as one folds everything implicated in it. (1, p. 249)

Tecnologia como ser-como-outro.

We never tame technologies, not because we lack sufficiently powerful masters, not because technologies, once they have become ‘autonomous’, function according to their own impulse, not because, as Heidegger claims, they are the forgetting of Being in the form of mastery, but because they are a true form of mediation. Far from ignoring being-as-being in favour of pure domination, of pure hailing, the mediation of technology experiments with what must be called beingas-another (1, p. 250)

O uso de uma tecnologia desvia nossas intenções: ao mudar os meios, nós mudamos o fim.

If we fail to recognize how much the use of a technique, however simple, has displaced, translated, modified, or inflected the initial intention, it is simply because we have changed the end in changing the means, and because, through a slipping of the will, we have begun to wish something quite else from what we at first desired. If you want to keep your intentions straight, your plans inflexible, your programmes of action rigid, then do not pass through any form of technological life. The detour will translate, will betray, your most imperious desires. (1, p. 252)

Tecnologia é mais do que existencia material passiva, é mediação ativa.

Yet the existence of a multiplicity of modes of exploration of being does not justify turning technical enunciation into a simple material domain on the surface of which always float symbols, values, judgements and tastes, since that habit would cause all mediations to gradually disappear. (1, p. 253)

Tecnologia é uma complexidade de traduções e desvios, onde não faria sentido falar nem em função (de forma fixa), nem em neutralidade.

The paradox of technology is that it is always praised for its functional utility, or always held in contempt because of its irritating neutrality, although it has never ceased to introduce a history of enfoldings, detours, drifts, openings and translations that abolish the idea of function as much as that of neutrality (1, p. 255)

Moralidade está inscrita nas coisas, assim, antes de uma regra moral ser concretizada em leis e exigencias, ela já está presente nos objetos tecnológicos.

Morality comes to rework precisely the same materials as does technology, but by extracting from each of them another form of alterity because its primary concern is the impossibility of their fitting into the mould of intermediaries. Well before we are able to translate the moral exigencies of tradition into obligations, they already lie inside that massive objectivity of mediations that forbid them being taken for ends for whoever and whatever else. In this sense, morality is from the beginning inscribed in the things which, thanks to it, oblige us to oblige them (1, p. 257-258)

Each of these modes of existence upsets in its own distinctive way the relations between means and ends: technology by dislocating the relations between entities in such a way that they open towards a series of new linkages that force the constant displacement of goals and multiply intermediary agents whose collective sliding forbids any mastery; morality, by constantly interrogating aggregates to make them express their own aims and prevent a too hasty agreement about the definitive distribution of those that will serve as means and those that will serve as ends. If one adds morality to technology, one is bound to notice, to make a pun, the end of the means. This gathering, this progressive composition of a common world, obliges us to return to another form of enunciation, this time a political one, which similarly aspires to recover its ontological dignity in order to escape from the state of abasement in which it had been cast by a scorn that has lasted even longer than that which technology has had to endure for so long. (1, p. 258-259)