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Week 26 / 2008: Dependency on electricity and bacteria

Saying that our values are materialistic is no more than a value judgement. However, sociologist Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen thinks otherwise. He claims it is dangerous and irresponsible to take an indifferent attitude towards materialism.
"Human beings have always been defined through personality or soul, and lately through language – as a spirit. Materialism has been captured for quasi-critical use."
"Still, we are not Cartesian individuals separated from the world but thoroughly ecological and attached to our environment," says Lehtonen, who works in the researcher collegium of the University of Helsinki.

For example, bacteria are considered as an element external of human beings, but without them we would die very quickly. Also, our being together is realised through material matters.
"If we wish to care for each other, we must take care of the material things and processes that tie us together."

The human being uncovered in Lehtonen’s research is a creature who is thoroughly enmeshed in the multitude of matters and objects. Lehtonen is especially interested in the "transmitters" created in the interaction between humans and their environment, fundamentally affecting everyone's life.

"When speaking of a bacteria-dependent human, you can also talk about an electricity-dependent human," says Lehtonen.
"Banks, water supply, health care, mobile phones, refrigerators. What we are is fundamentally tied to electricity production, but still this connection is mostly unacknowledged.

Material things are not passive objects, but part of an active system consisting of things, technologies, ideas and operations," says Lehtonen. His new book Aineellinen yhteisö (Material community), published by the Finnish Researcher Association, is related to the research tradition started by social scientist Bruno Latour.

Text: Herman Raivio
Photo: Veikko Somerpuro
www.helsinki.fi/digitalcommunications
Translation: AAC Noodi

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