The notion of the sociotechnical.

Societies are conventionally understood as populated by humans-in-themselves while technology is understood as composed of the things-in-themselves. But the notion that the human being ends at the skin and that things exist as tools to be lorded over and be utilized to whatever end the human intends is arbitrary and false. It is a product of modernist thought and the Enlightenment.

The notion of sociotechnical is meant to hold on to the entanglements and mixtures that make up both society and technology. In other words society is not defined in opposition to technology, but by its seamless relationship with it. In this way, humans are material beings and personhood rests on complex mixtures of the social and the technical. How we think, perceive and act in the world is inextricable from the most mundane of techonologies - the earliest hominid tools from Olduvai for example - to the sophisticated soldiery of contemporary global conflict. This is about cyborg ontology.

Such instrumental mixtures, collectives or hybrids of humans and nonhumans rest behind the articulation of knowledge in archaeology. Here the human, society, has been shifted from the extreme side of a binary of objects and subjects to the middle to be entangled within an imbroglio of things and ideas.

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