Samuel notes that “Bogost proposes that in our current age, two system operations are dominant: ‘scientific naturalism’ and ‘social relativism’”. Scientific naturalism is the idea that there are small things that join together to make bigger things. Sort of like Matryoshka dolls. Social relativism, which is what most of us have been educated into, is the idea that what things mean is what matters, and what they mean is cultural determined.

The problem with the scientific view is that it risks getting too caught up on containers and the edges of things. So it has to classify and have taxonomies, for instance, about where one thing (species, object) begins and another ends. Yet we know, as do most scientists, that things don’t work this way. It might be sometimes convenient, but it isn’t how things are. Sex, for example, is not a simple binary in humans (or other species). It also makes it hard to recognise how interconnected or entangled and active things are. That as we saw in the simple discussion about a pet dog it really is not that the dog is in the house and is in the family and that one simply contains the other.

The main issue with the social relativist view is that everything that apparently matters is an outpost of the social. We have to bring everything into our domain, including language, before it is deemed to matter, to have any qualities that ought to be cared about or noticed. This is a very narrow view of what the world is, and even narrower view of what we can know. If you know how to ski that is a material, embodied, and sometimes corporeal knowing. It is not linguistic. We can say the same thing about any other skill. There are ways of knowing, for people, that are emotional, affective, and spatial. None of these are linguistic, and often not ‘social’. (Unless we want an odd very stretched definition of social that describes what is happening between my body, skis, snow, temperature, the physics of cold water, and gravity.) And, as I have said each class, social relativism finds it hard to move past what something means, and just (unlike the sciences) seems little concerned with what things do.

Why does this matter? There will be more about this, but as media makers our equipment, what is known as technical media (and I would expand this to be ‘technical media machines’), are first of all things that do. And now, all the ways what we make gets used, are through things (systems, which are networks with actors with agency) that do. If we do not learn how to understand the way things do, including our instruments (recorders, cameras), do, and the terms of this doing, we are poor users of these tools. But the rub, the push is in the next bit. Think about jazz. In jazz there is improvisation but also a rethinking of what an instrument can do. That is part of what jazz is. This is letting the instrument make sounds it wants to make, not what musical notation or traditional music thinks a note or music is. You can’t get jazz if you don’t let your instruments have their own agency. What is it, what would it be, to begin to let our instruments have their agency?