The De-Scription of Technical Objects Madeleine Abrich Describing the Interaction between Technics and Humans Although science and technology are often thought to go together, they are concerned with very different subject matters. Science is, taken to go beyond the social world to a reality unfettered by uman contingency. Perhaps as a result, the sociology of science has studied the ways in which the local and the heterogeneous are combined to create knowledge with the status of universal and timeless truth. By contrast, sociologists have found it difficult to come to terms with technical objects. Machines and devices are obviously composite, hewrogencous, and physically localized. Although they point to an end, a use for which they have been conceived, they also form part of a long chain of people, products, tools, machines, money, and so forth, Even study ofthe technical content of devices does not produce a focused picture because there is always a hazy context or back- ground with fuzzy boundaries. Thus even the most mundane objects appear to be the product of a set of diverse forces. The strength of the materials used to build cars is a function of predictions about the stresses they will have to bear. These are in turn linked to the speed of the car, which is itself the product of a complex compromise ‘between engine performance, legislation, law enforcement, and the values ascribed to different kinds of behavior. As a consequence, insurance experts, police, and passers-by can use the condition of the bodywork of a car to judge the extent to which it has been used in ways that conform (o the norms it represents, ‘echnical objects thus simultaneously embody and measure a set of relations between heterogeneous elements. However, the pro- cess of describing everything about a car in such terms would be a mammoth task.! Furthermore, the end product might well be banal. The automobile is so much a part of the world in which we live that its sociography (a description of all the links making it up) would no“Goubi look like a collection of commonplaces, It would, in other words, look like a set of places where elements of the technic the social, the economic, and so on were to be fo juni together, and it woul leave observers free to switch between one element or register and another as this suited them.? Tam arguing, therefore, that technical objects participate in build- g heterogencous networks that bring together actanis of all types and sizes, wheiher human or nonhuman. But how ean we deseribe the specific role they play within these networks? Because the answer has to do with the way in which they build, maintain, and stabilize a structure of Tinks between diverse actants, we can adopt neither simple technological determinism nor social constructivism, ‘Thus techoological determinism pays no attention to what is brought together, and ultimately replaced, by the structural effects of a net- work, By contrast social eontructivism denies the obduracy of objects and assumes that only people can have the status of actors. ‘The Problem is not one of deciding whether a technology should be seen as an instrument of progress or a new method for subjugat- ing people. It is rather ta find a way of studying the conditions and mechanisms under whicl the relations that define both our society and our knowledge of that society are susceptible to partial reconstruction, ‘To do this we have to move constantly between the technical and the social, We also have (@ move between the inside and the outside of technical objects, Wwe do this, two vital questions start to come nto focus, ‘The first has to do with the extent to which the compo: tion of a technical object constrains actants in the way they relate both to the object and to one another. ‘he second concerns the character of these actants and their finks, the extent to which they are able to reshape the object, and the various ways in which the object may be used. Once considered in this way, the boundary between the inside and the outside of an object comes to be seen ax 4 consequence of such interaction rather than something that deter- mines it. The boundary is turned into a line of demareation traced, within a geography of delegation,* between what is assumed by the technical object and the competences of other actants. However, the description of these elementary mechanisms of ad- Justment poses two problems, one of method and the other of vocab- ulary. The difficulty with vocabulary is the need (0 avoid terms that assume a distinction between the technical and the social. Because the Hinks that concern us are necessarily both technical and social, 1 develop and use a vocabulary drawn from semiotics that is intended to avoid this difficulty.s The methodological problem is that if we ‘want to deserihe the elementary mechanisms of adjustment, we have to find circumstances in which the inside and the outside of objects are not well matched. We need to find disagreement, negotiation, the potential for breakdown, ; Phere are several areas— for instance, in technological innovation and technology tansfer—where objects and their supposed fune- aions, oF the celationship between supply and demand, are poorly matched. In what follows I describe a number of cases of “technol- ogy transfer” to less-developed countries (LDCs) that are drawn from my own Geldwork. These range from the simple transplantation ofa piece of technical apparatus widely uscd in industrial societies to the development of objects specifically intended for use in LDC3$ In each case 4 describe the elementary mechanisms of teciprocal adjust- ment between the technical object and its environment, I start by considering the way in which technical objects define actants and the relationships hetween actants, I show that the ease swith which the actants assumed in the design of the object are related to those that exist in practice is partly a function of decisions made by designers. The obduvacy or plasticity of objects, something that is established in the confrontation with users, is a function of the distei- bution of competences assumed when an object is conceived and designed In the second part of the chapter I consider the way in which technical objects distribute causes. If most of the choices mace by designers take the form of decisions about what should be delegated to whom or what, this means that technical abjects contain and produce a specific geography of responsibilities, ar more generally, of causes. To be sure this geography is open w question and may he resisted. Nevertheless, it suggests that new technologies may not only lead to new arrangements of people and things. They may, in addition, generate and “naturalize™ new forms and orders of causal- ity and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world. 1 will consider this process and illustrate the way in which technologies may generate both forms of knowledge and moral judgments, Subjects and Objects in the Making From Seript to De-Scription For same time sociologists of technology have argued that when technologists define the characteristics of their objects, they necessar- ily make hypotheses about the entities that make up the world intoBOF Madeleine Akrich which the object isto be inserted.” Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political preju- dices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, techwology, science, ond econonry will evolve in particular ways, A targe part of the work of innovators is that of “insertbing” this vision of (or pre- diction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. 1 will call the end product of this work a “script” or a “scenario.” The technical realization of the innovator’s belief& about the rela tionships between an object and its surrounding actors is thus an. attempt to predetermine the settings that users are asked to imagine for a particular piece of technology and the pre-scriptions (notices, contracts, advice, etc.) that accompany it. To be sure, it may be that no actors will come forward 0 play the roles envisaged by the designer, Or users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens, the objects remain a chimera, for itis in the confronta- tion between technical objects and their users tat the latter are rendered real or unreal ‘Thus, like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act, Sigaut (1984) gives examples of tools whose form suggests a precise description (a la Sherlock Holmes) of their users. ‘The two-handled Angolan hoe is made for women cartying children on their backs. The laborer’s stake, with its single point, can only be driven in by two people, and thus presupposes a collective user. However, onee one moves away from such simple examples, it be- comes more difficult to uncover the links between technical choices, users’ representations, and the actual uses of technologies. Thus the method af content analysis, as applied to texts, adopts an individual and psychological approach that has little or no relevance to our problem, Indeed, because it ignores the wide range of uses to which objects may be put, it comes close to technological determinism. 1 is obvious that it cannot possibly explain the wide variety of faves experienced by technological projects —fates that range from com- plete success to total failure, ‘One way of approaching the problem is to follow the negotiations between the junovator and potential users and to study the way in which the results ofsuch negotiations are translated into technologi- cal form. Indeed, this method has been widely used in sociological and historical studies of technology. Thus, if we are interested in technical objects and not in chimerae, we cannot be satisfied meth- odologically with the designer's or user’s point of view alone. Instead we have to go back and forth continually between the designer and the user, between the designer’s projected user and the real user, etween the world inscribed in the object ancl the world described by its displacement. For itis in this incessant variation that we obtain access to the crucial relationships: the uscr’s reactions that give body to the designer's project, and the way in which the user's real environment is in part specified by the introduction of a new piece of equipment. “The notion of de-scription proposed here has to be developed within this framework, 11 is the inventory and analysis of the mechanisms thatallow the relation between a form and a meaning constituted by and constitutive of the technical object 10 come into being. These mechanisms of adjustment (oF failure to adjust) between the wer, as imagined by the designer, and the real user become particularly clear when they work by exclusion, whether or not this exclusion is deliberate.’ ‘The case of the photoelectric lighting kit is an example in which exclusion was explicitly sought by no one, The Photoelectric Lighting Kit: Or How to Produce a Non-User “Lhe photweleetire lighting kit was born from the wish of a govern ment agency to promote new energy sources. As part of its coopera: ternational activities, the agency wanted to work on and and meet the need for lighting ~ something that well-intentioned infor- jal for all LDCs. At the same tine it wanted to help the French photoelectric cell industry to create a market ti miants said was esse Caught up, as they were, in 2 specific network involving state support with industry, those involved in its design conceived of the kit as a function of the specific needs and constraints imposed on them by this network. At no point, for instance, did commercial considerations come into play. Accordingly, the shape of the lighting kit can be treated as a description of the way in which this network ‘operated—a network characterized by the circulation of certain types of resources and the exclusion of other actors. The “narrative” patterns and scripts dreamed up by those who conceived the kits were quite specific, a function of their position, Study of the lighting kit (or any other technical object) makes it possible for us to create the “sociology” of the network defined by its circulation. When J first heard the industrialists and designers talking about the lighting kit, it appeared to be a very simple array with three functional elements. There was a panel for producing electricity, a storage battery, and a lamp that consumed the electricity. However, ‘once [ arrived in Africa and started to study the ways in which such kits were actually used, the picture rapidly became more compli-