Reading:: Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

Originally posted: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:25:00

Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

by David S. Kaufer, Brian S. Butler

I first read Rhetoric and the Arts of Design in fall 1999, and was inspired to do so again after talking with Dave Kaufer at this spring's RSA conference. Particularly after Dave pointed out parallels between it and my own book.

What has always interested me about this book is that it puts together such a careful, ordered model of rhetoric. The book takes the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an extended example, dissecting them in terms of the different components in each speaker's arguments. These arguments, Kaufer and Butler assert, are actually designed, and that's important:

The public would like, collectively and as individuals, to live with sturdier bridges, safer buildings, more reliable computer programs, and easier to read manuals.

Rhetorical design should be no exception.

You can see why I'd be intrigued. Kaufer and Butler likens rhetoric's relationship with literature to graphic design's relationship with the fine arts: in both cases, the former is practical and oriented to action. And in this book, they argue at length for seeing rhetoric as a design art that, once understood in that way, can be examined and taught more systematically. Their system is rooted in blackboard architectures, "a well-known cognitive science paradigm" that is

especially robust for modeling systems, like design, that where a task requires the opportunistic application of many heterogeneous "experts" all looking at the same problem (represented ina common workplace called a "blackboard") but with each expert looking at the problem from a specialized set of competencies and goal priorities. (p.267)

In Kaufer and Butler's scheme, these "experts" are "modules," particular rhetorical strategies mobilized in service of the emerging argument design. The most relevant modules are plans, tactics, and events. Kaufer and Butler tend to anthropomorphize these modules as experts in some places. For instance, this (initially) disconcerting passage appears on p.151:

Douglas' dilemma was skillfully crafted to make Lincoln say something that would force an inconsistency in his Plans. The Plans module, knowing nothing about the rhetorical situation, would have no awareness of the tactical threat against it. Indeed, if the Plans module were able to understand Douglas' questions, it would have no idea how to respond, for it knows only how to tell what is predictably true and false about the social world. It is left to Lincoln's Tactics to deal with the dilemma, and the Tactics module understood there is pressure to answer a question even if the answer causes further problems down the road. Lincoln's answer, because it shares the same structure as plans, throws a wrench into the Plans module. When Lincoln's Plans module next sampled the design structure, it finds a structure like "I do not pledge to the Republican platform at Springfield" in the midst of its public module, seeming to disenable Lincoln's organizational authority. Plans had no idea where this type of structure comes from but it does understand that the structures create personal inconsistencies in the public model, and that the inconsistencies need to be reconciled if the rhetor is to continue to tell predictable truths and falsehoods about the social world. (pp.151-152)

Kaufer and Butler admit to "partial anthropomorphizing" (p.263) like this, but they do it in service to the blackboard architectures approach they're pursuing. And although this sort of anthropomorphizing sounds suspect -- reminding me of Hutchins' critique of cognitive psychology in Cognition in the Wild -- it begins to make a lot of sense if understood analogically. In short, Kaufer and Butler aren't proposing homunculi, they're proposing a heuristic model, and that distinction is vital to understand if the book is going to make sense. Once I got that distinction, Kaufer and Butler's modules turned into powerful categories for examining public debate; I found myself applying them with great success to the current political debates in this current, superheated primary season.

What Kaufer and Butler are after, essentially, is a model of public rhetoric as conscious design. At times I found myself thinking of similarities with Latour's sociotechnical graphs, which also attempt to model statements -- and Freed, Freed, and Romano's Writing Winning Business Proposals, which continues to be one of my favorite heuristic approaches to argumentation. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design takes its place next to these as an enormously useful resource for understanding and modeling public rhetoric. But what struck me as I read this book was that it doesn't address the sorts of things I've tried to address: the materiality of rhetoric, its ad hoc and convergent nature in private and semipublic practice, and particularly its use outside of argumentation and debate. Which is to say that Kaufer and Butler have set themselves a task that is separate from mine. But they've provided tools and an example of modeling that will be enormously useful to me as I proceed.

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(Moving to Drupal)

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:28:46

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I have been disappointed by MovableType in many ways: the fact that SixApart has begun charging for it, the slowness, the limitations that come with using a stripped-down content management system (which is what a blog is). What's been holding me back until now has been the difficulty in migrating. Moving a year's worth of book reviews is not something one does through cutting and pasting.

Drupal provides several ways to migrate, but they all involve hacks, and they present multiple other problems. Finally, I did this:

1. I set my old blog's RSS feed to show all my archives in their entirety.
2. I pulled the feed into Drupal's aggregator.
3. I fired up mysql, figured out what table held the aggregator data and the blog data, and dumped the aggregator table into a SQL file.
4. I then hand-edited the SQL file to move the data into the blog table.
5. Finally, I edited the blog module (written in PHP, I think, with added SQL statements) so the blog would display in reverse chronological order rather than in order of nodes (don't ask).

Drupal people: It shouldn't be that hard to write a decent converter. Come on.

Anyway, this is the third blogger package I've used. (The original blog was on BlogSpot). Hopefully I won't have to migrate again.

Finally, an update. I have ordered a horrendous number of books from Amazon, so expect a flood of reviews soon. Currently I'm working through Kaufer and Butler's Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, to be followed by Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Machiavelli's Discourses.

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Reading :: The Variables of Composition

Originally posted: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 02:45:20

The Variables of Composition: Process and Product in a Business Setting

by Glenn J. Broadhead, Richard C. Freed

When I began my studies at Iowa State, one of the first classes I took was a proposal writing class with Rich Freed. (I got a B.) Freed's book Writing Winning Business Proposals, which I've raised often enough, was in draft form at that point. That book was (and is) full of insights and heuristics, and remains one of the more valuable practical aproaches to argumentation I know. Later, I found out that the book had been preceded by a scholarly monograph Freed had written with his then-office mate Glenn Broadhead. That monograph, of course, was The Variables of Composition.

Reading this monograph nearly twenty years later, I find myself taking a trip down Memory Lane. The Variables of Composition is a product of the mid-1980s interest in process and in close textual analysis. So we get to read a lot about T-units and incremental changes to drafts, all in the context of the "seven variables of composition." Broadhead and Freed allow that their method of exhaustively coding every word in multiple drafts of long documents is somewhat time consuming. No kidding.

What really interested me here wasn't the intricate coding scheme, nor the seven variables, but the discussion of the organization and contexts in which the authors wrote. This is the part that seems the most consequential for me and the most far-reaching in its implications -- and coincidentally the part that later became the foundation of Freed's Writing Winning Business Proposals.

But I was also interested in the computer analysis of texts. Their technique -- transcribe the text into a text file, assign a long code to each line, and run the whole mess through a series of scripts -- is actually still viable, even though a variety of qualitative research packages have been developed to make things easier. We've come a long way, but perhaps not as far as we could have.

>

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Reading:: The Support Economy

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:55:29

The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin

Shoshana Zuboff's last book was In the Age of the Smart Machine, a really remarkable text that drew on several studies of workplaces to discuss essential shifts in work introduced by the computer. The point, despite the title, was not that "the computer changes everything" -- an overreaching claim that is sometimes made by more wild-eyed technology theorists -- but that automation has wrought some key changes in management and labor. Smart Machine is practically required reading for anyone interested in computers in the workplace.

Then there was a long, long hiatus. Zuboff, by her own account, held off on writing a second book until she could coherently discuss some phenomena that weren't adequately addressed by her first one. Now, she says, she can. Hence The Support Economy, written with her husband James Maxmin.

Zuboff is a professor of business administration at Harvard and Maxmin is a CEO, so it's not surprising that the book is very business-oriented and very concerned with the shape of business in the near future. It's also not surprising that this book is part of a larger effort that involves speaking engagements and consulting. What is surprising is the sheer scope and vision of the book, which attempts to predict and define a fundamentally new stage in capitalism.

Really. Zuboff and Maxmin claim that we are on the cusp of a genuine paradigm shift, a true realignment of thought that takes place at most once a century. The last time this happened was the birth of managerial capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, when Henry Ford realized that you could satisfy consumers by making lots and lots of the same thing, as long as you made it very very cheap. The essential enterprise logic led to the split between ownership and control: ownership was distributed across many shareholders, while control was concentrated tightly in the hands of CEOs. This led to what Zuboff and Maxmin describe as a "solar system" in which the company is at the center of everything; suppliers are in orbits farther out; and at the outermost reaches of the solar system are the customers. Customers might be given lip service, but ultimately they are forced to "contort themselves" and conform to the company's demands because, under this enterprise logic, the only way for the company to get ahead is to give everyone the same experience and to continue reducing the costs associated with that experience.

Zuboff and Maxmin, however, see the beginnings of a "Copernican revolution" that will reorient this solar system, placing the customers at the center. They envision a distributed capitalism in which control will be just as distributed as ownership -- distributed across the customers, that is. Digital technologies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for this Copernican revolution; other conditions include the individuation of consumption (i.e., the desire for unique identities and unique experiences), the consequent rise in relationship value, and the desire for deep support (i.e., stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences). In this support economy, the existing enterprise logic is inoperative; supply chains are dismantled; professional relationship workers called "advocates" assemble temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction; and nobody gets paid until the customer pays. The last point is especially important because it is what ensures that control is distributed across the system and the customer remains the center of the new "solar system."

That summary doesn't do justice to this complex and well developed vision, and I encourage anyone to read through this book and see what you think. Especially the last three chapters, where the vision is clearly laid out. Bottom line, I had very mixed feelings when reading The Support Economy. On one hand, it does a remarkable job of pulling together and coherently discussing things that others have been discussing piecemeal: the individuation of consumption (Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, some of David Sless' work in Australia); Internet technologies meant to foster civic engagement (Spinuzzi, Bowie, Rodgers, and Li; Zappen); open systems meant to allow people to expand information systems (Spinuzzi and Zachry; Spinuzzi, Tracing Genre through Organizations); complex problem solving (Barbara Mirel's work, including her book); the question of how workers from different organizations form relationships and alliances (Nardi et al.; Engestrom et al.). Or just look at the rise of content management systems and other ways of customizing experiences and distributing control; the proliferation of ATMs; the tendency for large churches to place recordings of sermons online. Something is happening here, something big, and Zuboff and Maxmin give us an explanation of what it might be.

But on the other hand, their description of the support economy sounded like science fiction. In fact, it sounds a lot like a Bruce Sterling novel I read a while back. The underpinnings, the moorings of this new economy, seemed curiously two-dimensional. Maybe that's because, although Zuboff and Maxmin may be describing their ideal new economy, it doesn't sound very attractive to me. Consider the following:

1. The death of privacy. Our privacy, in tatters as it is, would disintegrate completely in this new economy. The thing about being at the outer reaches of the "universe" is that you can hide; in the support economy, everyone wants, needs, and shares your information.
2. The death of small business. Remember the cardinal rule that nobody in the federation of service providers gets paid until the customer releases the payment. Larger companies can get away with this because they have large budgets. Small businesses, which often ask for money up front and mark up the services of others in the supply chain, will get squeezed out. In fact, although the book provides numerous examples of small businesses finding niches that presage the support economy, they are absent from the description of the realized support economy and the illustrative examples of it. That's sort of a big deal in the U.S.
3. Smothering customers with kindness. A key member of the support economy is the "advocate," the person who forms and maintains long-lasting relationships with customers and who coordinates these ad hoc "federations" of suppliers. In one of the unintentionally disturbing passages of the book, Zuboff and Maxmin point to a real-life advocate, a woman who worked for an airline company and who was well known for going above and beyond the call of duty -- and was repeatedly disciplined for it. She would stand in the rain with tickets for customers who were running late; she would page customers with information about changes in their flights; she even visited a customer in the hospital during his cancer treatments. She, Zuboff and Maxmin tell us, is a forerunner of the advocates they envision being a key to the new economy. Am I the only one who finds this to be creepy? To me, this person came off as a bit unhinged and more than a little needy, and I shudder to think of an economy filled with them. Zuboff and Maxmin, by the way, tell us that people often prefer to deal with ATMs and e-commerce rather than human beings because they have been treated poorly by the managerial economy. That seems too pat. My pharmacist is a great guy who always remembers my name and my wife's, makes sure to have our prescriptions ready for us, and even tells me when he'll need to renew the prescription with the doctor. The service is really remarkable, and he's not needy at all. But I would replace him with a vending machine in a second if I could; I'd rather my transactions be quick, impersonal, and entirely controlled by me.
4. The centralization of functions. The federation model means that companies essentially split into modular units that concentrate on what they do best. Such a thing would be unthinkable in the managerial economy because it would require each group to have its own apparatus for accounting, payroll, and other managerial functions. But in the envisioned support economy, companies would outsource those services to other companies. In other words, functions that are now integrated within each enterprise would be consolidated and offered as services to each enterprise. That would squeeze a lot of redundancy and waste out of the system -- but paradoxically, it would mean more centralization rather than decentralization for those sectors. In the wake of Arthur Anderson's recent troubles with Enron, I worry.

I'm sure that Zuboff and Maxmin have answers to all of these objections, but in too many spots the future vision seems like handwaving. And in too many spots, the case against the old economy seems overmade. For instance, at one point, Zuboff and Maxmin make the point that women have been disadvantaged in the managerial economy. That seems pretty obvious. So why follow it up with page after page of statistics? Slimming these down might have shaved 30% off of this behemoth.

Enough. I've spent a lot of time on this review and discussed many objections simply because I think that this book is too important to ignore. You really ought to read it and see what you think. Whether you totally agree with it or not, you'll find a lot that sounds familiar, and you'll get used to that "a-ha" moment happening over and over again.

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(Yes, more comments)

Originally posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:10:37

Since moving to Drupal, I've reactivated comments. The new system requires you to register and log in to post comments -- which is a pain, I realize, but it should stop the shadowbloggers.

Please feel free to create an account, and certainly feel free to make it anonymous if you like.

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Reading:: Toilet Training in Less than a Day

Originally posted: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 10:00:55

Toilet Training in Less than a Day

by Nathan H. Azrin

You can tell what we're about to start doing. This is not a book that I picked up with enthusiasm, but shortly after I began reading it, I became engrossed. After all, it outlines a methodology, and I'm fascinated by methodologies of all shapes.

Like most methodologies, this one is at its core quite simple. Based on learning theory and validated by empirical studies, the approach works by modeling, repetition, and validation. I can't speak yet to its effectiveness -- we implement it in a few weeks -- but I fervently hope it lives up to its claims.

Now for a little cultural commentary. The book was published in 1974 and uses a style that would be quite comfortable in 1954 -- heavily dependent on housewives' testimonies in the first chapter and heavily didactic in later chapters. The text and illustrations inevitably show the training as being implemented by the wife, with the father being regulated to the role of exemplar and validator. The illustrations were a bit startling to me: thirty years ago I suppose that couples bore children earlier, but the mothers depicted seemed to be at most 19 years old. Children having children, I thought. And it seemed to me that the reader is sometimes treated as not more advanced than a child. In the narrative at the end, for instance, the mother gains the respect of her neighbor and the book describes in great detail the immense pleasure she gained from this. Something tells me the child isn't the only one being trained and validated.

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(What I'm NOT Reading)

Originally posted: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:40:22

For every book that appears on this list, there are two or three that I pick up, skim, read a chapter or two, and abandon. So here's a sample of the books I'm not reading -- ones that have interested me in the past year, but that I haven't finished:

Wireless nation : the frenzied launch of the cellular revolution in America. / Murray, James B. / Cambridge, Mass. / 2001

Art of war. / Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469-1527 / Chicago / 2003

TnT : texts and technology. / Walker, Janice R. / Cresskill, N.J. / 2003

Toward a philosophy of the act. / Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975 / 1st ed. / Austin / 1993

Picturing texts / Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, Cynthia Selfe / 2004

The one best way : Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. / Kanigel, Robert. / New York / 1997

Capital. / Marx, Karl, 1818-1883 / London. / 1957

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(One-Year Anniversary)

Originally posted: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 17:57:07

One year ago today, I began reviewing my readings on this blog. It doesn't seem like it's been that long!

Events My first review, of Latour's Pandora's Hope, was posted to the BlogSpot blog I had set up on the evening of June 4, 2003. A few months later, I moved the whole thing to the CWRL server and migrated it to MovableType. Since then, I've been busy blogging almost everything of consequence that I read, searching the archives whenever I need to review a reading, using posts as first drafts for chapters and articles, and of course deleting innumerable spambot comments.

Side effects One of the unanticipated side effects is that I read more books and fewer journal articles now. I think I trend toward books because they now seem like bigger accomplishments and more significant to blog. But I have also blogged some clusters of articles in mini-framework essays. I should do more of that. Perhaps that will be my resolution for this upcoming year.

Another side effect is that it allows me to "keep score." I tried to keep a tally of books at TTU for a while, but it wasn't very successful. But the blog has allowed me to track what I read. (Disturbingly, however, it doesn't seem to count them for me. How many books have I read this year? A lot.)

Circulation. I've been really surprised at how many people have mentioned the blog to me at conferences (like RSA, last week) or over email. I don't currently have access to server stats, so I really have no idea how many people are reading it, but I'm starting to get used to people casually remarking, "as you say in your blog..."

The blog now appears on a number of blogrolls. Rudely, I have not reciprocated. It's not that I don't read or respect other blogs, but I want the Reading List to be insular -- pure scholarship, not remarks on current events, wry quotidian observations, political screeds, or speculations on technology. I always liked the idea of the Reading List as a semi-private set of notes on the books I read, as my first post stated. So my apologies to those who have linked to my site.

What's next? Since MovableType has gone to a pricing structure that the CWRL can't pay, I'll likely have migrated this blog over to other software by this time next year. (Any suggestions? Obviously I'd like something that makes it easy to migrate from MT.) Either way, I'll keep the current entries in the blog so I (any anyone else) can review them.

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Reading:: Chasing Technoscience

Originally posted: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:57:16

Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality

by Evan Selinger (Editor), Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering

A while back, I noticed that Amazon.com kept recommending this book to me. Then a good friend asked me if I had read the interview with Latour that appears in it. Later, someone at UT's School of Information asked whether I had read the work of Andrew Pickering, who figures prominently in this book. So when I came across this book in the library while searching for an entirely different book, I had to pick it up.

I'm glad I did, although it's not going to change my life. Chasing Technoscience grew out of a technoscience research seminar at Stony Brook University, Don Ihde's home university, and about half of the chapters appear to be written by Ihde's graduate students in philosophy. The other half, of course, are Ihde, Haraway, Latour, and Pickering, all of whom are well known in technoscience studies. Here, they all publish original essays on their own work next to interviews with them conducted mostly by the seminar's participants.

(I should add "apparently" to that last sentence. This is the first I've heard of Don Ihde.)

Of the 14 chapters, the ones that interested me the most were the four interviews. They gave some interesting insights, and the interviewers didn't pull any punches. Since three of the interviewees are not trained philosophers and most of the interviewers are, we get an interesting interdisciplinary dialogue in which these famous technoscience theorists are held to philosophical standards with which they are not always familiar. That's not entirely fair, but it is fascinating. Pickering fares the worst in these terms, I think, but all acquit themselves fairly well.

We also get gems like this one. Latour is asked about Clifford Geertz's opposition to the critical studies mode of fieldwork and advocacy of a more hermeneutically sensitive mode. The interviewer describes the latter to Latour.

BL: Yes, that is a minimum definition of fieldwork! Does he mean that cultural studies people don't do that?

RC: Yes, that's what he says.

BL. This is very mean. (p.21)

Mean indeed. A lot of criticism leveled against the four principals is revealed in the interviews to be based on disciplinary differences and differences in programs. That is, Latour, Haraway, Ihde, and Pickering have managed to spread so widely and influence so many people outside their home disciplines that they are now having to keep their work coherent by shoring up their programs across disciplinary and national boundaries, making their warrants explicit, surfacing their assumptions, and rearticulating the principles of their frameworks within the different disciplines. It's the sort of problem most ambitious scholars would love to have. And in the end, I think that's the most interesting aspect of the book: it allows us to reflect on the practical consequences of interdisciplinarity in technoscience studies, and it thus allows us to reap lessons for similar interdisciplinary fields such as technical communication, computers & writing, and computer-supported cooperative work.

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Reading:: The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

Originally posted: Wed, 26 May 2004 09:22:51

The Art of War

by Sun Tzu

A brief review for a brief book. Sun Tzu's book is a mere 60 pages, but it's a terse set of maxims that have been justly passed on through the centuries. My brother read it in ROTC, I think. It's very applicable to military strategists. And it's an interesting contrast to Machiavelli.

Machiavelli's why I picked up this book: I was searching for his book of the same title when I came across this one. Both are interested in strategy, both are ruthless. But Machiavelli's book seems more broadly focused on political power and governance. Tzu is a general, period.

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Reading:: Fast Food Nation

Originally posted: Tue, 25 May 2004 19:09:23

Fast Food Nation

by Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation is an interesting book and a quick read. It provides some really relevant examples of the deskilling and efficiency focus discussed by Harry Braverman and feared by Ehn, Kyng, et al. But for all that, I found the book to be a bit forgettable.

Why? Maybe because although there were interesting anecdotes and sometimes horrifying facts, there really weren't many surprises here. Yes, fast food is terribly unhealthy and makes people fat. Yes, McDonald's exploits its workers. Yes, slaughterhouses are unsanitary and unsafe. Yes, family farmers are finding that their trade is about as economically viable as cobbling. And yes, fast food restaurants are trying to market directly to my two-year-old. I knew all that, although I didn't know some of the particulars.

But fast food and the mass production system that coexists with it have lowered the price of food enormously: Poor people in the US are more likely to be overweight than emaciated. But the outbreaks of disease documented at fast food restaurants are pretty tame compared to the public health challenges faced by the WWI generation or indeed the current highway system. But marketing to children, although it sounds insidious, seems clumsy compared to the sorts of ideological indoctrination that socially conscious parents often worry about, and doesn't seem to work all that well anyway.

What really struck me about the book, though, was that the author seems so preoccupied with authenticity. He talks in great detail about how artificial scents and smells are formulated, about how kids in Colorado Springs no longer wear cowboy hats as the "real" Coloradans did, about how chains actually got started compared to what is said in their literature. Maybe it's because I'm GenX, but I really don't have the preoccupation with authenticity that Schlosser does. Of course these restaurants are selling a brand, a mood, an experience. So do universities and churches, often with the same level of conscious cultivation.

I'm using FFN as the reader in my first year composition course this summer. The simple stories have clearly defined heroes and villains, which I think will please the class very much. I was a bit disappointed with that simple underlying story, though, particularly in how it (in my view) misread politics. In the Afterword, the author concedes that the villains are usually Republicans, not Democrats, and admits that he could have made much more of President Clinton's ties to Tyson Chicken. But, he adds, Republicans have far more often deregulated the food industry and supported meatpackers in their efforts to evade legislation on fair working conditions and on sanitation and health. When it comes time to explain why, Schlosser sort of shrugs his shoulders and says that if the Democrats were to do the same things, he would condemn them as well. I suspect the split has more to do with geography and region than party: Clinton's Arkansas is largely rural, like most of the "red" states, and rural areas are more likely to house meatpacking plants, more likely to have Republican constituencies, and more likely to subscribe to the do-it-yourself ideology that drives deregulation. No wonder Arkansas Democrats "act like Republicans" when it comes to food issues (those are my scare quotes, not Schlosser's) -- all politics is local, as someone famously said.

Schlosser attempts to inoculate himself from charges of political bias by pointing out that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, led the fight to pass key meatpacking regulations and wishes that contemporary Republicans would take up the charge. Roosevelt's Republican party was largely Northern and urban, of course, again suggesting that party labels have less to do with the issue than region. So I wish Schlosser had gone ahead and checked that thesis rather than subscribing to the all-too-common bifurcated view of political parties.

In any case, the book is a good read. But I had the urge to buy fries everytime I picked it up.

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Reading:: The Prince

Originally posted: Mon, 17 May 2004 19:00:07

The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli, David Wootton (Editor)

Whenever anyone wants to criticize actor-network theory in general or Latour in particular, the most popular line of attack is to call the theory and the theorist Machiavellian. After all, the foundational work on ANT in the late 1970s and early 1980s drew explicitly from Machiavelli to provide a political-rhetorical account of science, an endeavor that had typically been seen as neither political nor rhetorical. Callon, Law, and Rip, for instance, praise Machiavelli in their 1983 collection Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology as a sensible ethnographer who recorded what was rather than what should be.

The charge has stuck, partially because early ANT work has tended to foreground the political-rhetorical expertise of individuals (such as Louis Pasteur in The Pasteurization of France) and partially because, as Latour notes in Science in Action, rhetoric is a despised discipline. Activity theorists have been quick to pick up on the accusation. For instance, Reijo Miettinen claims that the early focus on Machiavellian princes works against the principle of symmetry, while Engestrom et al., Engestrom & Escalante, and Nardi et al. all point to Machiavellian princes and their manipulations in their critiques.

But if you actually read Machiavelli's The Prince, his most famous work and the one to which critics most frequently allude, you'll find that the picture is more mixed. Despite what his critics have said, Machiavelli is not amoral, nor does he focus exclusively on retaining power through manipulation. Rather, Machiavelli recognizes that leaders, citizens, and countries continually form alliances and find ways to advance their own interests -- princes or not -- and the book aims to provide insights and instruction useful for surviving in such a variable and treacherous environment. The point is not to manipulate and betray, it is to find settlements that will satisfy the greatest number of stakeholders and provide the most durable networks.

In that sense, later ANT work -- particularly Latour's -- is if anything more Machiavellian than the earlier work! The original references to Machiavelli may have been dropped -- a politic decision -- but the concern with settlements, stakeholders, and durability continue, as does the impulse to portray things the way they are rather than the way they should be (p.48).

Interestingly, Machiavelli points to a methodological problem faced by actor-network studies and descriptive studies in general. As David Wootton points out in the introduction, Machiavelli attempts to write a how-to, a set of guidelines that distill his experience and insights into prescriptions. But time and again Machiavelli admits that decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis. The calculations are too complicated, the knowledge is too tacit. Machiavelli rarely succeeds in moving easily and unambiguously from description to prescription. The same can be said of ethnography.

The Prince deals primarily with lands accustomed to dictatorial or monarchal rule. I understand that his Discourses deal with his preferred governmental system, the republic. Perhaps I'll read them next.

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Reading:: The Languages of Edison's Light

Originally posted: Wed, 12 May 2004 18:55:19

The Languages of Edison's Light

by Charles Bazerman

At the recent Bakhtin-Vygotsky SIG, I chatted with Chuck Bazerman about my current project and its use of activity theory and actor-network theory. "I do that a bit with my latest book," he told me.

I had skimmed that book -- The Languages of Edison's Light -- about a year earlier, before my current ANT binge began, and had missed the undertones of ANT and AT. So I just finished rereading the book. It's not surprising that I had missed those undertones before, since the story is foregrounded and the theoretical framework is not explicated until the conclusion. Nevertheless, now that I knew what I was looking for, I could find the connections quite easily.

The Languages of Edison's Light is in many ways quite similar to Bazerman's superlative Shaping Written Knowledge: a meticulously researched historical account of changing communication. Languages, however, is more focused on a shorter time frame, a more bounded organization, and particularly a single charismatic leader. That leader, Edison (who sometimes sounds like a cult leader, frankly), is portrayed as creating "a bramble of overlapping claims" (p.90), material claims that took the form of technologies as often as they did paper or speech. In fact, one of the real advantages of the book is its thoughtful examination of nontextual artifacts as arguments, and the ways they become rearticulated (in both senses of the word: respoken and relinked) as they move into different nodes/activities. As Bazerman concludes in Chapter 5: "When the light got beyond the laboratory, it became other things, to be talked about in other ways. It no longer needed people hovering over its flickering beginnings figuring out how to make it robust and steady" (p.84). Once the electric light became a tool rather than an object (to use activity theory's terms) -- or once it became a boundary object (to use actor-network theory's term) -- it could move into different activities and begin to make different meanings. Bazerman explores some of these meanings in the last chapter, which describes how consumers received the light.

Of course, the "bramble" of claims served Edison's work to develop a practical, mass-marketable light system -- the emphasis being on system, the real object being centralized power systems that would continue to provide revenue for Edison's companies. The electric light was merely the "killer app." And the claims included "languages" as diverse as patent applications, lawsuits, experimental notebooks, public and private demonstrations, and economic transactions (for, as Bazerman reminds us, all economic transactions are rhetorical [p.141]). These many claims -- and Bazerman focuses mainly on the textual ones, you'll note -- create value by not only constituting the technology but by defining a place for it (p.142) and creating the values associated with it (p.143). As technology becomes a unitary social fact, Bazerman asserts, it aggregates its own core of meanings, drawing discursive systems into a new formation (p.144).

The story Bazerman tells is generally intriguing, although it sometimes gets bogged down in the details with long quotes from various correspondence -- often block quotes are typeset opposite a reproduction of the source correspondence, which seems rather redundant. One of the things that makes the story so intriguing, of course, is that Edison seems so Machiavellian: he sets up conditions, creates a "bramble" of claims, confounds his enemies, manipulates his shareholders, coopts his critics, lies blatantly to gain market advantage, sets up a lab that runs primarily on his own personal charisma. It's not surprising that when you turn to the Works Cited, the only books from actor-network theory -- Latour's Science in Action and The Pasteurization of France -- are from Latour's early period, in which he drew explicitly from Machiavelli to provide accounts of scientists who were master rhetoricians and master political manipulators. In his later work, Latour moves toward a more symmetrical account, although he continues to acknowledge that the political-rhetorical work is often attributed to central figures.

In general, as I've indicated, the theoretical and analytical framework of the book is not foregrounded. We get to glimpse it in the conclusion, in which Bazerman talks a bit about activity systems, but I wanted to see more. For instance, Bazerman talks about the extensive networks in which discourse circulates (p.336) and the material accountability that discourse must provide (p.340), but we don't get a firmer understanding of how those networks are composed and linked. He points out, sensibly, that it's not enough to amass allies as Latour describes, the kinds of connections are important too (p.343); but the point could have been more explicitly developed. He notes that "programs, concepts, or technologies become transformed as they move from forum to forum" while the representations and the project remain coherent (p.343), and the book provides several strong examples of that point, but I wanted more discussion of how this occurs. Basically, I wanted Bazerman to discuss activity networks, and I shouldn't fault him because that really wasn't his project.

A few more notes. Bazerman mentions genres in an offhand way but doesn't theorize them. He uses the term "dialectic" several times, which (as I've noted elsewhere) drives a significant wedge between AT and ANT; I plan to work out the issue of dialectic in my own project. He does a great job of explaining material nondiscursive rhetoric, although his focus is mostly on texts. And he points me to Hughes' Networks of Power, which I shall have to read soon.

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Reading:: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Originally posted: Wed, 05 May 2004 19:19:42

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

by M.M. Bakhtin

Bakhtin's often hard to read, and this book is harder than most. A mix of published essays, previously unpublished work, and notes found in schoolboy notebooks rotting in rat-infested storage rooms, the collection is rather uneven. At the same time, even at its most uneven, it's brilliant. We get to see Bakhtin debating with himself, going over themes that he's discussed many times only to rethink them once again in different ways. Whereas works such as The Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics provide us with a more or less finished (stabilized-for-now?) view of Bakhtin's work, this collection sometimes provides a sense of the working-out that was involved.

One of the arguments that Bakhtin has with himself, of course, is the nature of the novel. In "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin argues that "secondary (complex) speech genres -- novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth -- arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is artistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on" (p.62). Such secondary genres absorb or "digest" primary (oral) speech genres, bringing them into a heterogeneous mix. So heterogeneous, in fact, that Bakhtin is moved to remark in "From Notes Made in 1970-71" that "the novel, deprived of style and setting [i.e., removed from the predetermined settings that define primary genres], is essentially not a genre; it must imitate (rehearse) some extralinguistic genre: the everyday story, letters, diaries, and so forth" (p.132). Is it or isn't it a genre? This is the question with which Bakhtin wrestles, and the answer is so elusive precisely because the novel is relatively new, it is removed from recurrent settings, oriented toward writing rather than speaking, meant to travel widely and to furnish its own world to readers.

Personally I don't give a flip whether the novel is a genre or not. I'm much more interested in some of the other secondary genres Bakhtin lists: scientific research, commentary, etc., the results of highly organized written communication. The same question obtains. Are these genres? They incorporate rather heterogeneous primary genres, genres that have emerged in very different settings, activities, or spheres, using different styles, representing different world views. Primary genres have histories and logics of their own; do secondary genres, or do they become anachronistic as they bring these heterogeneous elements into dialogue?

Those of you who have been following my blog probably know where I'm going next. When we begin thinking of scientific research as a secondary genre, we are reminded of the very similar discussions going on in science and technology studies about actor-networks. Indeed, the early ANT work often involved examining scientific reports as networks in which references linked to other actants (both textual and other). Later ANT work drew on Deleuze and Guattari's work with rhizomes to explain how these actor-networks were able to splice together disparate, heterogeneous elements. A rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, is an anti-genealogy. And genres are nothing if not genealogical! So a secondary genre is restless, seething, trying to keep a lid on a boiling pot; it attempts to bring stability to a sometimes volatile mix of genres. (Stability is not D&G's forte, nor is it ANT's.) Secondary genres, I speculate, do have a line of development, but that line emerges from the dialogue of primary genres within them; the assembly work of the novel/report has a past and can be used again in the future. This notion of "digestion," as unpalatable as the metaphor is, provides the stability and developmental perspective that rhizomes lack.

"Digestion" involves dialogue. Dialogue, which is the major theme of this book, results from the juxtaposition of two (heterogeneous) speech works (p.118). But juxtaposition does not mean resolution or finalization -- quite the opposite, since resolution or finalization results in a monologue. It's instructive to look at Bakhtin's elusive pronouncements on dialectics.

"Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness--and that's how you get dialectics" (p.147). This somewhat enigmatic pronouncement is probably Bakhtin's most direct attack on dialectics. Elsewhere he's more moderate. In "Methodology for the Human Sciences," he says that "dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)." And a few paragraphs later, he constrasts dialogue with "a mechanical contact of 'oppositions'" on a merely formal level. "If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel's monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning disappears (we hit the bottom, reach a standstill)" (p.162). Finally, in "The Problem of the Text," semantic relations among texts are parenthetically termed "dialectical" (p.106), while extralinguistic aspects are parenthetically termed "dialogic" (p.109). Even near the end of his life, after Stalin was dead, in his own notes, Bakhtin could not be any more direct about critiquing dialectics. But we can get a sense of what he disliked: dialectics insists on abstraction (or: returning to dialogue "at a higher level"), finalizability, the settling of a conversation. Dialogue does none of these; it insists that diverse voices be allowed to sound, being heard but not necessarily resolved. It's a more heterogeneous vision.

There are dozens of other insights in this book, but I won't be able to get to them all today. So let's cut this, er, monologue short.

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Reading:: Complexities

Originally posted: Sun, 02 May 2004 02:52:24

Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices

by John Law (Editor), Annemarie Mol (Editor)

Here's another useful book full of studies of knowledge. Mol and Law, you will remember, are currently in a "post-actor-network-theory" stage. Suitably, most of the essays in this book draw only glancingly from ANT in a direct sense, but underneath, almost all are heavily in debt to it. Here you'll find elephants, roads, aircraft, atherosclerosis, and other phenomena talked about in really interesting ways that highlight the construction of knowledge among multiple heterogeneous stakeholders. Some of these are really interesting and inventive. For instance, Andrew Barry examines how the EU works hard to maintain and extend its networks despite its status of relative powerlessness; Laurent Thevenot examines how roads are not only constructed through arguments but become parts of those arguments; Charis Thompson discusses how elephants and their relation to the environment are variously constructed by different stakeholders.

Sadly, my copy has a printer's error, which means that the essays by Thompson and by Mol are present only as fragments, and Michel Callon's essay is entirely omitted. A shame. All of these looked interesting, but I don't have enough to evaluate Mol's or Callon's work. Hopefully Duke University will send me a replacement copy soon.

Nevertheless, the collection is worthwhile, though not life-changing or substantially revelatory.

Update: The good people at Duke University Press replaced my copy of Complexities with a new one. No printer's errors in this one. Which means that I was able to read Michel Callon's essay "Writing and (Re)writing Devices as Tools for Managing Complexity." This essay was easily the most relevant for me and perhaps the best one in the collection -- not just because it focuses on writing (my main concern) but also because it considers the question of how texts mediate activity in a different way. In this formulation, texts aren't merely scripts, narratives, or documentary reality (although all of these functions are performed at various points). Rather, the texts Callon studied -- the manuals, questionnaires, and collateral materials employed by a cruise line -- serve to weave relationships between individual actors and collectives. (It hardly needs to be said here that Callon means both human and nonhuman actors here.) They translate the actors in such a way as to define them and to facilitate smooth, predictable relations.For instance, the detailed questionnaires given to customers define those customers through series of trials, just as Latour alleges scientists define phenomena through series of trials. What is iron? It's an element with this tensile strength, that melting point, that many protons, etc. What is a customer of this cruise line? It's a person who belongs to this demographic, who likes to travel to these areas, who wants cleaner toilets but who thinks the buffet is quite nice as is. Callon further alleges that writing helps to manage complexity in increasingly complex markets through such definitions: the bewildering range of customers can be reduced to customer types served by niche cruises, the bewildering array of detailed procedures can be reduced to principles. Narratives make actions and their unity compatible; they manage the multiplicity that comes from splicing together actors in an assemblage. This splicing work, Callon says, always involves negotiations. There are, of course, direct implications for my current project.

Since I'm discussing Complexities again, I should mention another essay in this collection. Laurent Thevenot's "Which road to follow?" examines how artifacts can be said to participate in the moral world. In the case that Thevenot studies, the road doesn't just provide a setting, it embodies an argument -- that is, it results from protracted moral and political negotiations and it continues to participate in them. From a symmetrical perspective, it becomes an actor itself, an artifact that is just as much a moral artifact as the wills and expressions of the humans involved in the activity. I find this notion of artifacts as arguments intriguing, of course, extending as it does the role of rhetoric to design.

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Reading :: Activity-Centered Design

Originally posted: Sun, 02 May 2004 02:47:55

Activity-Centered Design : An Ecological Approach to Designing Smart Tools and Usable Systems

by Geri Gay, Helene Hembrooke

Full disclosure: Activity-Centered Design is the second book in the Acting with Technology series at MIT Press. Mine was the first. The series examines how human activity is mediated through tools and technologies, drawing on frameworks such as activity theory. Like Tracing Genres through Organizations, Activity-Centered Design combines activity theory with other perspectives in order to investigate and design information technologies.

The text is exactly 100 pages, making it short enough to read in one sitting. And Gay and Hembrooke's writing style makes it quite easy to read. Illustrated by a series of studies by the authors at Cornell's HCI Group, the book draws on CMC analysis and configural analysis, as well as insights from the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), to develop and apply a theoretical framework. Through their studies of information technologies in museums and at Cornell, the authors demonstrate the framework. In so doing, they critique much user-centered design work as too focused on individuals and their tasks, not enough on organizational development. Particularly impressive here is their use of Engestrom's cycle of development.

I'll limit my critique to the issue that has been vexing me these many months. Gay and Hembrooke discuss activity systems as decomposable into a network of activity systems: "the original setting and increasingly broader contexts." They provide a cite that I'll have to look at. But I find this formulation to be suspicious. When they say "decomposable," I envision sort of a pinata that, once struck, yields its contents. But in practice, activities aren't contained but overlapping. Take the university classroom, in which the activity is mediated by many artifacts and practices -- books, chalkboards, chairs, lectures -- each of which is connected with other activities. Sometimes wildly different ones, as Gay and Hembrooke's studies demonstrate: students in computer classrooms found themselves using instant messaging and checking their websites in class, for instance. The activities are interlinked, the artifacts are polysemous, but not in ways that are decomposable or containable.

Along these lines, I should note that Gay and Hembrooke attempt to provide activity theory with something that it's long missed: a thoroughgoing account of stakeholders. AT grew up in the Soviet Union, where questioning the Soviet orthodoxy could land you in the gulag, so it understandably tended to focus on harmonious craft activities with little conflict or on overarching confrontations (contradictions) between Marxism and capitalism (see Leont'ev's books for examples of both). Gay and Hembrooke do a nice job of bringing in tools that help to conceptualize, explore, and develop stakeholder perspectives. But so much more needs to be done.

(Upcoming Features)

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 09:59:53

We're near the end of the semester, which means that I'm busy reading dissertation drafts, undergrad and grad projects, and administrative documents rather than scholarship. But several books are on the docket. I'm partially through Bakhtin's Speech Genres and Other Essays and plan to reread Toward a Philosophy of the Act soon after that, to get a sense of the pre-Stalinist Bakhtin. The second book in MIT Press' Acting With Technology series, Activity-Centered Design, will be arriving in my box soon. So will the corrected copy of Complexities, so I'll be able to finish my review of that book. The participatory design classic Design at Work arrived recently, so I may review it soon. (I just found out that it's going to be reprinted, which is great -- this classic has been out of print for years.) And during the Q&A at my recent presentation at the School of Information, someone suggested Pickering's The Mangle of Practice. I guess that's enough reading for a while.

Any other suggestions? Let me know.

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Reading:: Politics of Nature

Originally posted: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:04:39

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

by Bruno Latour

"To keep this book to a reasonable length," Latour says of his latest book in its introduction, "I have said little about the field studies on which it has been based." I was disappointed to see this. Like other commentators, I miss Latour's field studies from his earlier books (Science in Action, Laboratory Life, The Pasteurization of France, Aramis) and have been less interested in the more generally philosophical bent of his later work (We Have Never Been Modern, Pandora's Hope, War of the Worlds). Although I have found much to admire in these later works, I really like having solid book-length studies to nail down the points. So it was with mixed feelings that I took this book out of the Amazon.com box and began reading.

The book did grow on me. It very much continues the work of the later Latour books, especially Pandora's Hope, with its talk of Parliaments of Things and the modernist Constitution. Like Pandora's Hope, Politics of Nature takes the principle of symmetry to the level of politics. It attempts to answer the question: What do we do about modernism?

Modernism, according to Latour, is based on the fable of the Cave. You remember the one, the story that Plato spun about how human beings are metaphorically chained in a cave our whole lives, forced to face the back wall, where all we can see is the shadows of the real things held up at the mouth of the cave. Not knowing any better, we take these shadows to be the real thing. This fable isn't just the basis for a lot of speculative fiction (from Nine Princes in Amber to The Matrix) but also, Latour asserts, for the current separation between Society and Nature. We are all trapped in Society, the modern version of this fable asserts, and here we engage in politics, speculate, and wallow in our own subjectivity. A few of us, the fable asserts, can apprehend objective Nature through Science, and those people can bring insights back from it into Society. These insights are called facts.

The separation rests on several assumptions, and I'll go over just a few. One is that we can and should separate people on one side and things on the other. Another is that there may be several cultures (multiculturalism), but they all live in and interact with the same reality (mononaturalism). A third is that nature does not speak -- it is silent -- and so scientists must speak for it. Ingeniously, Latour makes an enormously difficult argument: all of these separations are not just demonstrably false, they are ludicrous on their very face!

He pulls it off.

By the end of the book, Latour has argued passionately and convincingly that the Nature-Society division -- in political terms, a bicameral political body in which one side (Nature) is silenced so that Science can speak for it, and the other side (Society) is allowed to speak freely but is always trumped by these pronouncements made on behalf of nature -- is essentially faulty. In fact, Latour says, the arrangement only works because the Moderns do the opposite of what they say: science (with a small "s" this time) has always functioned as a sort of speech prosthesis, a way of setting up a series of trials that allow nonhumans to speak for themselves. With a slight twist, Latour says, we can come up with a workable bicameral separation in which one house takes into account ("How many are we? What goes into our collective?") and the other house arranges in rank order ("Can we live together? Can the collective hold?").

Yes, this sounds loopy. Read the book. This is Latour's most ambitious and detailed attempt yet to grapple with the question of how Nature and Society interact -- the question that (judging by the examples he provides) has often been phrased as invitations for him to jump out the window and see how socially constructed gravity is. Clearly scientific facts are "constructed," constructivists say: look at the historical record, look at how we used to believe X where now we believe Y. But clearly scientific facts exist apart from us, empiricists reply: we live in a common world and gravity is in force whether you "construct" it or not. Latour's ingenious solution is to make gravity an interlocutor, to give it the opportunity to speak for itself in this collective of humans and nonhumans, and to continually be ready to negotiate what constitutes this collective, who or what we should let in and take into account, what should be related.

Latour says in the Introduction that the book's argument proceeds like the tortoise rather than the hare, and now I can see why. It's almost impossible to summarize coherently. But it's also almost impossible to put down.

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Game :: Eternal Darkness

Originally posted: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 09:23:31

Eternal Darkness

I mentioned a while back that I've given up fiction in favor of video games. Basically, I read enough already, and I find ethnographic studies more interesting than literature. But I'm intrigued by the mix of puzzle solving, action, and complex narrative in video games. For me, this trend started with the venerable The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, the Nintendo-64 game that changed the face of console gaming.

Eternal Darkness is a bit different. Inspired by gothic horror such as H.P. Lovecraft's work, Eternal Darkness takes itself very seriously -- too seriously for my tastes, actually, especially given the over-the-top story and characters. Any game that prominently features zombies should crack a smile every once in a while.

In terms of story, ED comes up with an interesting, fairly complex treatment that spans 2000 years. In a nutshell, three Ancients -- nightmarish beings with godlike powers -- are continuously trying to enter our world, dominate it, and destroy the others (bringing on the "eternal darkness" of the title). We learn of this ongoing, secret conflict through the eyes of Alex Roivas, a young woman in 2000 AD who inherits her grandfather's mansion after his untimely and gruesome death and discovers the Tome of Eternal Darkness. ("Roivas" backward is "savior" -- get it?) Each chapter she reads tells of the adventure of another person who has worked to save the world from eternal darkness. The clever thing is, you play the character in each chapter. You end up playing 12 different characters, each with their own attributes. The characters visit the same places, but in very different states: for instance, a Persian underground temple visited by a Roman soldier in the first century AD is later visited by a firefighter trying to put out Iraqi oil fires in 1991.

Each character learns things, including spells, that can later be taken up by other characters. The spell system is the most intriguing part of the game, at least for me, because it involves a very basic grammar. Each character picks up runes. You create spells by assembling runes in a basic grammar (noun + verb + alignment). You can pick up spell scrolls that describe handy spells or you can assemble your own. Later, you can power up spells by adding power runes. The spells become very important in combat, but also in puzzle-solving.

Combat bites. The targeting system is clunky; you can't target and move at the same time. The joystick seems less responsive. Also, some of the characters have poor stamina. I'm used to Link in the Ocarina of Time -- that guy will run and run without breaking a sweat. In ED, though, many of your characters are in poor shape and can't do much jogging before they start wheezing. I guess this is more realistic, although realism in a game that features zombies seems a bit much. As you accumulate spells, fortunately, hand-to-hand combat becomes far less important.

Puzzle solving is uneven: sometimes it seems far too easy and sometimes it's unreasonably hard. The first puzzle you have to solve, for instance, involves setting the hands of a clock to a specific time. Not much setup for that, especially because you have an entire abandoned mansion to wander before finding it. At other points, you'll find a spell scroll immediately before encountering a puzzle that can only be solved by that spell.

Even with these limiations and the inherent corniness of the game, though, I found it to be fun and interesting. Many of the scenes and environments are arresting, including beautiful carpets, imaginative room designs, and everywhere the breathtaking illusion of depth. The monsters are suitably horrible, as is the gore and the fate of your characters should you lose. I sort of got tired of being told "I spit at thee!" in the final scene, though.

The game is designed so that you can play it three times through, defeating a different Ancient each time, and I actually did exactly that. Each time through was a chance to use different strategies. Now that I've finished off all three, I have the option of playing in "eternal" mode -- invincible, that is -- but what's the fun in that?

If you're interested in gothic horror, this game is for you. If you're more interested in thoughtfully constructed puzzles, one of the Zelda games might be a better bet.

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Reading:: The Substance of Style

Originally posted: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 08:45:37

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness

by Virginia Postrel

Early in The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel tells a story about a panel of designers at a conference being confronted by a man who objected to their profession. Why did they spend so much time trying to differentiate between nearly identical products such as Coke and Pepsi? Wasn't their profession a sort of lying, trying to manufacture differences where there are none?

That's the key question Postrel tries to answer in the book. It's a good question, one that parallels accusations leveled against rhetoric for the last couple of millenia. Unfortunately, Postrel's attempt to answer this question doesn't take the form of a coherent argument. Instead, she deploys a seemingly endless series of anecdotes about how design has changed our lives and perceptions. The anecdotes are often entertaining, but they lack precision and often Postrel doesn't seem to get anywhere.

Maybe in part that's because I am a rhetorician and am familiar with this basic argument. Maybe as an introduction to the value of design, this book is valuable to a general audience. But then again, compare it to marketing books such as Jack Trout's Differentiate or Die, which provides a surprisingly sophisticated rhetorical explanation of product branding in language that the lay person can easily understand.

Postrel's book is a quick read -- one afternoon for me, even with the TV on -- so it's not a huge time investment. If you want access to lots of anecdotes about product design or a primer on the style/substance question, by all means take a look. But don't expect sophisticated argumentation here.

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Reading:: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

Originally posted: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:04:03

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

by Mikhail Bakhtin

I really can't do justice to this book in a short review. It seems deeper, better thought through, and more organic than the other books in the Bakhtin Circle. At the same time, those benefits come frequently at the price of clarity -- compared to Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, this book is quite indirect. But it does give valuable insights into the question of dialogics vs. dialectics that currently interests me.

A little background first. The book is largely the same as the 1929 book of (nearly) the same title, published by Bakhtin not long before he was arrested for membership in an underground church. A positive review by a high-placed official apparently saved him from the gulag, but he went into exile for a while. Much later, in the 1960s, a group of young scholars rediscovered Bakhtin's work and persuaded him to rework the book and republish it, which he did. This review is of the second version, which probably couldn't have been published under Stalin.

One of the reasons it couldn't have been published is that it makes an indirect but unmistakable attack on dialectics. Caryl Emerson's preface brings this out nicely, linking it to the famous fragment from Speech Genres and Other Late Essays in which Bakhtin compares the two. In Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky -- and, it appears, in his analysis of language as a whole -- there is a permanent, necessary gap between speakers resulting in a permanent dialogue, a permanent array of differences that are discussed and negotiated but never finalized, synthesized, or eliminated. Oppositions are never cancelled out; they are not seen as contradictions to be overcome; every utterance expects an answer; differences are taken seriously. The truth, he says, is born between people searching for truth --it is not ready-made and waiting to be discovered. Two voices is the minimum for life.

Looking back at the paragraph above, I've culled some of the more memorable points and expressions from the Dostoevsky book. This is easy and boring. But the book is more interesting and harder to get than that. I think that it provides perhaps the sharpest critique of dialectics and the most direct discussion of dialogics and their implications -- even if couched in an abstract criticism of literature.

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 11:31:51

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

by P. N. Medvedev

Honestly, I have very little interest in poetics. But I do have a strong interest in language philosophy, and like the other works of the Bakhtin Circle, this 1928 book roots its exploration of its subject matter in a sociological understanding of language. A Marxist understanding? I'm not really an expert on Marxism, so I can't speak to the debate over whether Medvedev's book was genuinely Marxist or whether it used "protective coloration" to hide non-Marxist ideas. But at any rate, it thoroughly criticizes the Formalist school for ignoring society, culture, history, and dialogue -- just as Voloshinov criticized Freudianism in 1927 and linguistics in 1929 for the same sins. Put these books together with Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and you get a central set of working assumptions about language philosophy with wide-ranging implications across the spectrum of language use.

So what are some of these working assumptions? One is that language is inherently ideological -- that is, inherently oriented to a particular sociocultural sphere of activity. I don't think that Medvedev uses the term dialogue, but clearly he's talking about the same phenomenon Voloshinov so brilliantly discusses in 1929. For Medvedev as for the other members of the circle, the ideological aspect of language is what makes it meaningful and alive; the utterance is material, social, historical, and every concrete utterance is a social act. Medvedev further postulates that utterances involve "social evaluations," evaluations that are multileveled (occurring at the level of the broad historical sweep but also on the order of days, minutes, and seconds). These social evaluations interpenetrate each other "dialectically" (and here I think we could use the term "dialogically," since Medvedev seems to be driving at that concept).

Another is that the social nature of language implies the social nature of human cognition. Anticipating Voloshinov's later argument, Medvedev says that social evaluation organizes the work of cognition itself; we think in "inner speech," he says, but that speech is not made up of the formal elements of words and sentences but rather in socio-ideological utterances couched in "inner genres." The ideological nature of genres -- seen themselves as ideologies or views on the world -- distinguishes them from the later notion of schema that was the rage in cognitive psychology for a time.

A little personal story: I bought this book at Half Price Books here in Austin in 1997, when I was interning at Schlumberger. The receipt, and my original notes, were still in the book. Back then I was very excited to read it; now, after reading Voloshinov's two books, I am indifferent. Medvedev does indeed take the insights from the Bakhtin Circle and apply them to poetics, but he doesn't seem to develop them further. If you're interested in looking at the Bakhtin Circle's works, honestly, I think you should start with Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky (which I'll be reading next), then work through Voloshinov's two books before coming to Medvedev. Unless you're interested in Formalism, I suppose.

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 11:31:51

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

by P. N. Medvedev

Honestly, I have very little interest in poetics. But I do have a strong interest in language philosophy, and like the other works of the Bakhtin Circle, this 1928 book roots its exploration of its subject matter in a sociological understanding of language. A Marxist understanding? I'm not really an expert on Marxism, so I can't speak to the debate over whether Medvedev's book was genuinely Marxist or whether it used "protective coloration" to hide non-Marxist ideas. But at any rate, it thoroughly criticizes the Formalist school for ignoring society, culture, history, and dialogue -- just as Voloshinov criticized Freudianism in 1927 and linguistics in 1929 for the same sins. Put these books together with Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and you get a central set of working assumptions about language philosophy with wide-ranging implications across the spectrum of language use.

So what are some of these working assumptions? One is that language is inherently ideological -- that is, inherently oriented to a particular sociocultural sphere of activity. I don't think that Medvedev uses the term dialogue, but clearly he's talking about the same phenomenon Voloshinov so brilliantly discusses in 1929. For Medvedev as for the other members of the circle, the ideological aspect of language is what makes it meaningful and alive; the utterance is material, social, historical, and every concrete utterance is a social act. Medvedev further postulates that utterances involve "social evaluations," evaluations that are multileveled (occurring at the level of the broad historical sweep but also on the order of days, minutes, and seconds). These social evaluations interpenetrate each other "dialectically" (and here I think we could use the term "dialogically," since Medvedev seems to be driving at that concept).

Another is that the social nature of language implies the social nature of human cognition. Anticipating Voloshinov's later argument, Medvedev says that social evaluation organizes the work of cognition itself; we think in "inner speech," he says, but that speech is not made up of the formal elements of words and sentences but rather in socio-ideological utterances couched in "inner genres." The ideological nature of genres -- seen themselves as ideologies or views on the world -- distinguishes them from the later notion of schema that was the rage in cognitive psychology for a time.

A little personal story: I bought this book at Half Price Books here in Austin in 1997, when I was interning at Schlumberger. The receipt, and my original notes, were still in the book. Back then I was very excited to read it; now, after reading Voloshinov's two books, I am indifferent. Medvedev does indeed take the insights from the Bakhtin Circle and apply them to poetics, but he doesn't seem to develop them further. If you're interested in looking at the Bakhtin Circle's works, honestly, I think you should start with Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky (which I'll be reading next), then work through Voloshinov's two books before coming to Medvedev. Unless you're interested in Formalism, I suppose.

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Reading:: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Originally posted: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:45:06

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

What a difference two years makes. Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927) had some interesting things to say about a Marxist-dialogic understanding of psychology, but it was not terribly sophisticated. But Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) is. I can scarcely believe it's written by the same person. (Some would say it wasn't, but let's leave that alone for now.) Marxism develops the dialogic approach in far more detail and sophistication than the first book or Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), and in clearer detail than Bakhtin's own Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. And wheras the other books deal with the realms of psychoanalysis, poetics, and literary criticism, Marxism deals with sociolinguistics, a more general topic that touches directly on quotidian lived experiences.

Some readers have commented that Marxism isn't really Marxist and that the references to dialectical materialism, etc. were intended more to placate the censors than to develop Marxism. Certainly they're the thickest just at the beginning and the end of each chapter. I'm sure that these references do indeed serve to show allegiance to Soviet Marxism (just as contemporary academics, myself included, use gender-neutral language to demonstrate allegiance to feminist principles). But in either case, the conscious inclusion doesn't necessarily mean subterfuge! My (unschooled) take is that the Bakhtin circle did indeed want to develop Marxism and did indeed see value in the materialist monism that it described. But they wanted to develop it further, faster, and in different ways than would be permissible under Stalinism. (Vygotsky had the same problem: after his death, his works were banned for a time.) I wouldn't call the Bakhtin Circle's works Marxist, especially not Bakhtin's, but at the least it was the result of an earnest dialogue with Marxism.

Speaking of dialogue, Marxism is full of the term and its explications. I've gone over some of this in the review of Freudianism, so let me restrict myself to the high points. (My copy of the book has sticky notes on nearly every page, that's how rich the book is.)

First, consciousness is discussed in detail as a dialogue, one that takes shape in material signs. Dialogism is material monism. Those familiar with Vygotsky will see essentially the same argument here. Along with this point, Voloshinov notes that

consciousness has become the asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs. It has been made the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues have been stored away. Instead of trying to find an objective definition of consciousness, thinkers have begun using it as a means for rendering all hard and fast objective definitions subjective and fluid (p.13).

This passage could have been written by Latour, who complained in one of his books that we assign too much importance to cognition and calls for a ten-year ban on cognitive explanations! Latour is a monist too, and he is impatient with the dualism that so often shows up in cognitive research and theory. But he later "repealed" his ban in his review of Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, which presented a monist, symmetrical understanding of cognition as distributed across the material environment. Latour and Hutchins, I'm sure, would nod approvingly when reading Voloshinov's take on distributed cognition: "Cognition with respect to books and to other people's words and cognition inside one's head belong to the same sphere of reality, and such differences as do exist between the head and the book do not affect the content of cognition" (p.34). But Hutchins might disagree with what Voloshinov says two pages later: that psychology must be grounded in ideological science (p.36).

Ideology, again, is a major theme in the book. And Voloshinov's discussion of it, though it sometimes goes under the name of "dialectic," is definitely dialogical. He even anticipates Bakhtin's discussion of the utterance, of words as two-sided acts shared by speaker and addressee, and of genre -- and he talks about "behavioral genres" (p.96), stabilized forms of behavioral interchange.

I could go on and on about this book, which I remembered fondly from my studies at Iowa State and which I find to be even richer now. In many ways I think it's the clearest expression of the Bakhtin Circle's work on dialogism. We usually think of The Dialogic Imagination as the authoritive text on this, but Marxism is the better bet for my money. Check it out.

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Reading:: &lt;em&gt;Marxism and the Philosophy of Language</em>

Originally posted: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:45:06

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

What a difference two years makes. Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927) had some interesting things to say about a Marxist-dialogic understanding of psychology, but it was not terribly sophisticated. But Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) is. I can scarcely believe it's written by the same person. (Some would say it wasn't, but let's leave that alone for now.) Marxism develops the dialogic approach in far more detail and sophistication than the first book or Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), and in clearer detail than Bakhtin's own Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. And wheras the other books deal with the realms of psychoanalysis, poetics, and literary criticism, Marxism deals with sociolinguistics, a more general topic that touches directly on quotidian lived experiences.

Some readers have commented that Marxism isn't really Marxist and that the references to dialectical materialism, etc. were intended more to placate the censors than to develop Marxism. Certainly they're the thickest just at the beginning and the end of each chapter. I'm sure that these references do indeed serve to show allegiance to Soviet Marxism (just as contemporary academics, myself included, use gender-neutral language to demonstrate allegiance to feminist principles). But in either case, the conscious inclusion doesn't necessarily mean subterfuge! My (unschooled) take is that the Bakhtin circle did indeed want to develop Marxism and did indeed see value in the materialist monism that it described. But they wanted to develop it further, faster, and in different ways than would be permissible under Stalinism. (Vygotsky had the same problem: after his death, his works were banned for a time.) I wouldn't call the Bakhtin Circle's works Marxist, especially not Bakhtin's, but at the least it was the result of an earnest dialogue with Marxism.

Speaking of dialogue, Marxism is full of the term and its explications. I've gone over some of this in the review of Freudianism, so let me restrict myself to the high points. (My copy of the book has sticky notes on nearly every page, that's how rich the book is.)

First, consciousness is discussed in detail as a dialogue, one that takes shape in material signs. Dialogism is material monism. Those familiar with Vygotsky will see essentially the same argument here. Along with this point, Voloshinov notes that

consciousness has become the asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs. It has been made the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues have been stored away. Instead of trying to find an objective definition of consciousness, thinkers have begun using it as a means for rendering all hard and fast objective definitions subjective and fluid (p.13).

This passage could have been written by Latour, who complained in one of his books that we assign too much importance to cognition and calls for a ten-year ban on cognitive explanations! Latour is a monist too, and he is impatient with the dualism that so often shows up in cognitive research and theory. But he later "repealed" his ban in his review of Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, which presented a monist, symmetrical understanding of cognition as distributed across the material environment. Latour and Hutchins, I'm sure, would nod approvingly when reading Voloshinov's take on distributed cognition: "Cognition with respect to books and to other people's words and cognition inside one's head belong to the same sphere of reality, and such differences as do exist between the head and the book do not affect the content of cognition" (p.34). But Hutchins might disagree with what Voloshinov says two pages later: that psychology must be grounded in ideological science (p.36).

Ideology, again, is a major theme in the book. And Voloshinov's discussion of it, though it sometimes goes under the name of "dialectic," is definitely dialogical. He even anticipates Bakhtin's discussion of the utterance, of words as two-sided acts shared by speaker and addressee, and of genre -- and he talks about "behavioral genres" (p.96), stabilized forms of behavioral interchange.

I could go on and on about this book, which I remembered fondly from my studies at Iowa State and which I find to be even richer now. In many ways I think it's the clearest expression of the Bakhtin Circle's work on dialogism. We usually think of The Dialogic Imagination as the authoritive text on this, but Marxism is the better bet for my money. Check it out.

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Reading:: Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

Originally posted: Tue, 09 Mar 2004 08:28:13

Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

by V. N. Volosinov

Freudianism is the first of four books produced by the Bakhtin Circle in the extraordinarily productive years of 1927-1929. It was followed by P.N. Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), M.M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (1929), and Voloshinov's own Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). All deal with one of Bakhtin's favorite subjects -- dialogue -- and begin lines of exploration that Bakhtin explores in his later work. For that reason, some have alleged that Bakhtin actually ghostwrote the other authors' books. I'm going to avoid rehashing the argument here except to say that if Bakhtin wrote all four books, he was one busy son of a gun.

The Bakhtin Circle was cut short, just as so many other projects were violently cut short during the Stalinist period. Nevertheless, reading this book -- which I think is the weakest of the four -- helps us to see where this productive group of scholars was going and how they attempted to apply dialogue to various aspects of social and humanistic pursuits. I say dialogue here, though Voloshinov tends to use dialogue and dialectic interchangeably. (Bakhtin most certainly did not.) It's hard to tell how committed Voloshinov was to Marxism, since the book is quite light on references to Marxist authors: Marx and Engels make an obligatory appearance, for instance, but they are not quoted in depth. The concept of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, is used extensively. Voloshinov uses it as an instrument -- usually a blunt instrument -- to dismantle the assumptions of Freudianism.

Let's get to the heart of the critique. Voloshinov argues that Freudianism fails to place the individual psychology in its sociohistorical milieu, thus ignoring the effects of class struggle, economics, and other material conditions and therefore confusing individual traumas with sociocultural movements. Sounding like Vygotsky, he argues that individual consciousness is best understood as a dialogue, one that may be internalized to an extreme degree but nevertheless exists, an ideological dialogue/dialectic that has been turned inward. Voloshinov goes on to ridicule Freudian notions such as the "unconscious" and the "censor"; these are fictions, he says, that mask the essentially social nature of the psyche. The "unconscious" is merely a verbal-ideological dialogue (p.86); consciousness equals ideology (p.77); things and thoughts are of the same material (p.82), which is to say, Voloshinov advocates a sort of materialist monism (p.21). As James Wertsch notes in his foreword to the book, Voloshinov's macrosociological account complements Vygotsky's microsociological one. (Ironically, in an appendix, Voloshinov attacks A.R. Luria -- a member of the Vygotsky Circle -- for his interest in Freudianism.)

Those who are familiar with Bakhtin will note passages that sound quite familiar. (Wertsch helpfully points them out for us on p.xii.) For instance, Voloshinov states that "every utterance is the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges" (p.79).

I wouldn't read Freudianism for its critique of Freudianism. But it is illuminating in terms of how the Bakhtin Circle had begun to conceptualize dialogue and utterance. The thing that I was most interested in studying, though -- the differences between dialogue and dialectic -- remain blurred, probably out of concern for the censor's pen. Hopefully Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which I'll read next, will have more answers.

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