p.28-29 The facts are produced and represented in the laboratory, in scientific writings; they are recognized and vouched for by the nascent community of witnesses. Scientists are scrupulous representatives of the facts. Who is speaking when they speak? ...In themselves, facts are mute... the scientists declare that they themselves are not speaking; rather, facts speak for themselves. These mute entities are thus capable of speaking, writing, signifying within the artificial chamber of the laboratory... Little groups of gentlemen take testimony from natural forces, and they testify to each other that they are not betraying but translating the silent behavior of objects. With Boyle and his successors, we begin to conceive of what a natural force is, an object that is mute but endowed or entrusted with meaning.

p.46-47 we have never been modern... No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world... we have never begun to enter the modern era. [JLJ - what a radically modern thought]

p.55 Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the 'hard' parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society - for unknown reasons - needed to be 'projected'. [JLJ - there you have it - the quasi-object. I knew that there was a universal answer to everything. I quasi-like the concept and I quasi-think that I will quasi-use it in my quasi-paper. I kind of feel quasi-queasy, though.]

p.57 But quasi-objects continue to proliferate... those socialized facts and these humans turned into elements of the natural world.

p.62 There is only one positive thing to be said about the postmoderns: after them, there is nothing. [JLJ - wrong. Philosophy continually invents things in order to have discourse about what is and what is not. What will be real in the future is simply not known now. The post-postmoderns - whoever they are and whatever they write about and believe, will someday laugh at our pre-post-postmodern ignorance of things. Someone may actually write a book about the post-postmoderns, what we in fact can put together about them and their belief system. We might see trends today that indicate the rise of post-postmodernism. Their leaders, their schools of thought, their most fierce advocates - are we approaching the turn of post-postmodernism?]

p.63 The text becomes primary... as for the author, he is no longer anything but the artifact of his own writings (Eco, 1979). The objects being spoken of become reality effects gliding over the surface of the writing. Everything becomes sign and sign system... even the unconscious itself (Barthes, [1985] 1988).

p.64 When we are dealing with science and technology it is hard to imagine for long that we are a text that is writing itself, a discourse that is speaking all by itself, a play of signifiers without signifieds. It is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand narrative

p.65 Martin Heidegger designates the central point where everything holds together, remote from subjects and objects alike. 'What is strange in the thinking of Being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it' (Heidegger, 1977a) '...Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of Being, as the clouds are the clouds of the sky' (p.242)

p.83 In all the languages of Europe, north and south alike, the word 'thing', whatever its form, has as its root or origin the word 'cause', taken from the realm of law, politics, or criticism generally speaking. As if objects themselves existed only according to the debates of an assembly or after a decision issued by a jury. Language wants the world to stem from language alone. At least this is what it says... (Serres, 1987, p.111)

Thus in Latin the word for 'thing' is res, from which we get reality, the object of judicial procedure or the cause itself, so that, for the Ancients, the accused bore the name reus because the magistrates were suing him. As if the only human reality came from tribunals alone. (p.307)

Here we shall see the miracle and find the solution to the ultimate enigma. The word 'cause' designates the root or origin of the word 'thing': cause, cosa, chose, or Ding.... The tribunal stages the very identity of cause and thing, of word and object, or the passage of one to the other by substitution. A thing emerges there. (p.294) [JLJ - ok, a thing becomes a "thing" only in the course of a trial or ordeal. For example, during a 10K road race, the 5K marker (or perhaps the finish line) becomes a thing only during the running of a race. After the race is over and the place is cleaned up, it is not really a "thing" any more, until the next road race. A chess piece such as a knight becomes a "thing" of a certain type - and with certain properties - only during the playing of a game. After the game is over and the pieces returned to the bag, it reverts to a simple carved-wood object of a certain shape that can be used as a game-piece.