Malidoma Patrice Some writes that in the African village where he grew up “houses do not have doors that can be locked. They have entrances. The absence of doors is not a sign of technological deprivation but an indication of the state of mind the community is in. The open door symbolizes the open mind and open heart. Thus a doorless home is home to anybody in the community. It translates the level at which the community operates.”

Call me selfish, but a doorless community isn’t one I want to be part of. But that got me to thinking about the history of doors. Doors are ancient (the oldest ones are on tombs, the oldest in Britain is an Anglo-Saxon door in Westminster Abbey, identified as such just two years ago). But not every culture has made use of the technology of doors.

Leave it to Bruno Latour to have written an essay on the subject, a portion of which says . . .

“Walls are a nice invention but if there were no holes in them there would be no way to get in or out –they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyyone can get in and out (cows, visitors, dusts, rats, noise –la Halle aux Cuirs is ten meters from the Paris ring road– and, worst of all, cold –la Halle aux Cuirs is so far to the north of Paris). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which, although common enough, has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledge hammer or a pick, you simply gently push the door (I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented –this would over complicate the already highly complex story of La Villette’s door); furthermore, and here is the real trick, once you have passed through the door you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed: you simply push the door gently back (I ignore for now the added complication of the ‘pull’ and ‘push’ signs).

“So, to size up the work done by hinges, you simply have to imagine that every time you want to get in or out of the building you have to do the same work as a prisoner trying to escape or as a gangster trying to rob a bank, plus the work of those who rebuild either the prison’s or the bank’s walls (I have never heard of prisoners or of gangsters having to rebuild the walls they pierced, although I have heard of gangsters being put in jail and, being well trained, piercing their jail’s wallÉ). If you do not want to imagine people destroying walls and rebuilding them every time they wish to leave or enter a building, then imagine the work that would have to be done in order to keep inside or to keep outside all the things and people that left to themselves would go the wrong way. As Maxwell never said, imagine his demon working without a door. Anything could escape from or penetrate into La Halle aux Cuirs and there would soon be complete equilibrium between the depressing and noisy surrounding area and the inside of the building. Some technologists, including the present writer in Material Resistance, A Textbook , (1984) have written that techniques are always involved when assymmetry or irreversibility are the goal; it might appear that doors are a striking counterexample since they maintain the hole-wall in a reversible state; the allusion to Maxwell’s demon clearly shows, however, that such is not the case; the reversible door is the only way to trap irreversibly inside La Halle aux Cuirs a differential accumulation of warm historians, knowledge, papers, and also, alas, paperwork; the hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order, or information. If you let the drafts get inside (these renowned ‘courants d’air’ so dangerous to French health), the drafts may never get outside to the publishers.

“Now, draw two columns (if I am not allowed to give orders to the reader then take it as a piece of strongly worded advice): in the right column, list the work people would have to do if they had no door; in the left column write down the gentle pushing (or pulling) they have to do in order to fulfill the same tasks. Compare the two columns: the enormous effort on the right is balanced by the little one on the left, and this is all thanks to hinges. I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one, by the words displacement or translation or delegation or shifting ; I will say that we have delegated (or translated or displaced or shifted out) to the hinge the work of reversibly solving the hole-wall dilemma. Calling on Robert Fox, I do not have to do this work nor even to think about it; it was delegated by the carpenter to a character, the hinge, which I will call a non-human (notice that I did not say ‘inhuman’ as so many bleeding hearts would do). I simply enter La Halle aux Cuirs. As a more general descriptive rule, everytime you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or fonction, of this little figure.

“Before going on, let me cash out one of the side benefits of this table: in effect, we have drawn a scale balance where tiny efforts balance out mighty weights; the scale we drew (at least the one that you drew if you have obeyed my orders –I mean, followed my advice) reproduces the very leverage allowed by hinges. That the small be made stronger than the large is a very moral story indeed (think of David and Goliath); by the same token, it is also, since at least Archimedes’ days, a very good definition of a lever and of power: what is the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely in order to produce the maximum effect. Am I alluding to machines or to Syracuse’s King? I don’t know, and it does not matter since the King and Archimedes fused the two ‘minimaxes’ into one single story told by Plutarch: the defence of Syracuse through levers and war machines (Plutarch: around 80). I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the ‘social construction’ of techniques, and not a hypothetical social context they are not equipped to grasp (this is the sort of sneering remark sociologists expect from technologists and I did not want to disappoint you).”

The rest of this delightful article is available at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html.