Um excerto de um capítulo de um livro que escrevi com uma colega:
As social agents engage in everyday actions, they use reference points to determine the most convenient access mode to action and subsequent course of action. The different access modes, though dependent on the agent’s ability for recognizing them, are hard-coded into most daily situations, in the sense that they present an overwhelmingly integrated code of unequivocal meaning for socially integrated agents. As such, a socially competent agent should have the ability to recognize the code, as well as the determinants central to any situation, in order to select the appropriate demeanor and mode of action with only a very slight conscious or deliberate effort. Such codes and determinants display, in most cases, a posture belonging to the regime of plan (Thévenot) and organization (even on the street), be it in terms of their degree of codification or of internal determination (such as injunctions or logic and moral rules). This is the case of the major metropolitan areas of our time, urban realities whose central property lies in the recurring human motion streams between more or less distant points, usually classified as “center” and “periphery.”
We suggest that, in this case, the regime of plan through which the agents engage in their daily motions is often shaped by normative industrial mechanisms, in the sense that they incorporate the determinations of past historical actions which have contributed to the development of a cité in an industrialized world (Boltanski & Thévenot). Thus, in certain urban contexts, the groundwork of everyday life is based on injunctions etched on objects and made recognizable to people, who in turn adjust to each situation as they are steered towards an idea of good associated with symbolic operators such as efficiency, productivity or optimization. A valued space is one that propitiates the attainment of these operators.
As expressed by Bruno Latour, though not exactly in this context, we’re faced with a kind of symmetry between the world of humankind and the world of objects and technique, as this latter element of symmetry embodies what Latour calls “the mass that is missing,” just like the mass astrophysicists lack to accomplish their dream of calculating the total mass of the universe. Latour tells us that the “moral that is missing” on the speeches of the great and not so great moralists of our time lies right in front of our eyes, in the technical world. We can find it, for example, on the seat belt and its automatic systems of alert, which configure an entire moral mechanism as they originate from notions of safety, brought to existence by the engineers who designed and built the system, in order to make it clear to the driver that if she doesn’t put it on she’d be ignoring a concept of personal safety that a general other expects of her.
Taking this problematic further, we verify that, in many cases, an agent is the more competent in her daily life as she avoids questioning the meaning of the plan action activated on a daily basis (routine), and becomes incapable of recognizing objects as the product of human activity and historical moral choices. In this sense, when the agent thinks (abandoning the normalized state of daily automatisms), she finds in herself only a mechanical or logical need, not a moral need, leading to a naturalization of the human.
We suggest that, in this case, the regime of plan through which the agents engage in their daily motions is often shaped by normative industrial mechanisms, in the sense that they incorporate the determinations of past historical actions which have contributed to the development of a cité in an industrialized world (Boltanski & Thévenot). Thus, in certain urban contexts, the groundwork of everyday life is based on injunctions etched on objects and made recognizable to people, who in turn adjust to each situation as they are steered towards an idea of good associated with symbolic operators such as efficiency, productivity or optimization. A valued space is one that propitiates the attainment of these operators.
As expressed by Bruno Latour, though not exactly in this context, we’re faced with a kind of symmetry between the world of humankind and the world of objects and technique, as this latter element of symmetry embodies what Latour calls “the mass that is missing,” just like the mass astrophysicists lack to accomplish their dream of calculating the total mass of the universe. Latour tells us that the “moral that is missing” on the speeches of the great and not so great moralists of our time lies right in front of our eyes, in the technical world. We can find it, for example, on the seat belt and its automatic systems of alert, which configure an entire moral mechanism as they originate from notions of safety, brought to existence by the engineers who designed and built the system, in order to make it clear to the driver that if she doesn’t put it on she’d be ignoring a concept of personal safety that a general other expects of her.
Taking this problematic further, we verify that, in many cases, an agent is the more competent in her daily life as she avoids questioning the meaning of the plan action activated on a daily basis (routine), and becomes incapable of recognizing objects as the product of human activity and historical moral choices. In this sense, when the agent thinks (abandoning the normalized state of daily automatisms), she finds in herself only a mechanical or logical need, not a moral need, leading to a naturalization of the human.
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