![]() ![]() Posing these divides as ontologically prior tells us that the act of ordering itself is natural: it came first. I/Thou tells us that there is a me here and a you there, as if I and thou were self-contained. Mind/matter tells us that there is a realm of thought (a particularly efficient Turing machine) which exists outside of the realm of matter – or more precisely which is indifferent to its material seat. Nature/society tells us that there is a realm of the social which is in some way outside of nature, and a nature which can be fully described without taking humans into account. Order out of chaos or chaos out of order?ģBinary divides define us. Our secular cosmogony agrees – the universe rapidly wends its way from maximal order to entropic end. Which came first, order or chaos? In the Judeo-Christian tradition order takes precedence – as day follows night in Genesis, the God of order creates and classifies the world through a series of acts of binary division. The chicken is lying back smoking a cigarette looking well pleased, and the egg says grumpily: “ Well, I guess that answers that question ”. This essay marks the place where I (or rather this particularly constituted me) am with my ontological thinking.ĢThere was a cartoon in the New Yorker a while back that showed a chicken and an egg in bed together. Through Michel, I came to understand the centrality of ontological issues. A key actor in helping me work through this transition was Michel Callon – his work especially on the St Brieuc Bay scallops but more generally. And the best thing in this, as Antoine Hennion said as I despaired of even wanting the change, is that it doesn’t even hurt. I walked out six years later as a mediated entity, constituted by and constitutive of networks of things of all kinds – human or non-human each being awarded equal status in the emergent semiotics of the Center. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus.” (Hesiod, Theogony, 116)ġI walked into the Center for the Sociology of Innovation at the Paris School of Mines in 1984 as a fully working, self-contained, human subject. ![]() ![]() “Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. ![]()
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