Symmetry as a methodological move, part IV

Is there a difference between hitting a nail with and without a hammer?

This is one of the provocative questions that Latour asks in Reassembling the Social (p.71). The question, of course, is rhetorical: of course there's a difference. Using the hammer remakes—perhaps I should say makes—the activity in a very fundamental way. Perhaps holding a hammer makes every problem look like a nail, but similarly, a nail poses a very different problem when one doesn't have a hammer.

Yet, Latour charges, classical sociology has tended to ignore the hammer and other material objects when it examines human activities. These material objects are often seen as incidental, he says, to what classical sociologists see as their real focus: social constructs, social structures, social contracts, social forces, etc. As Latour argues in his book Aramis, classical sociology sees through actors to the social structure, scrutinized through fixed frames such as norms, reason, logic, and common sense (pp.199-200). It assumes "a stabilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other phenomenon" (Reassembling the Social, p.1). It posits "the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon, variously called 'society,' 'social order,' 'social practice,' social dimension,' or 'social structure'" (p.3). This social "context" "can be used as a specific type of causality" (pp.3-4), i.e., it causes people to act in various ways. So, Latour claims, classical sociology begins with society or social aggregates; sociologists then study the effects of these causes (p.8).

Latour does not necessarily think this is a problem.

In fact, Latour says, classical sociology is like Newtonian physics. In most ordinary cases, when change happens slowly, it's fine to use a fixed frame of reference. When you're trying to determine with what force an object will hit the ground, knowing only the object's mass and rate of acceleration, it's fine to use Newtonian physics (f=ma). And if you're studying fixed social situations, such as traditional craftwork, a fixed-frame approach such as classical sociology is A-OK in Latour's book (literally his book: Reassembling the Social p.12).

But in other cases, we need a relativist frame. If you want to understand why atomic clocks run slower on commercial jetliners than they do at the US Naval Observatory, Newtonian physics will not get you very far; you need a relativist physics. And if you want to study situations in which "things accelerate, innovations proliferate, and entities are multiplied," Latour says, you need a relativist sociology (Reassembling the Social p.12)—one with no fixed frames or metalanguage (Aramis p.200).

In this alternate, relativist view, "'social' is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glue cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors" (Reassembling the Social, p.5). It's not the cause but the consequence of the assemblage (Reassembling the Social, p.8); the social is what you get when you associate various things. Thus, in this relativist sociology, you can't understand the social until you trace the associations among things (p.5). The things themselves aren't social; what's social is how they are shuffled together (p.64).

Let's try this out with some examples.

Situation 1. Suppose you're visiting a carpenter and his apprentice in their workspace. They're familiar and comfortable with their tools (hammers, saws, miter boards, etc.) and with each other, and they're doing work with which they are very familiar. Their hands are sure and their movements are smooth,  as you might expect from experienced people performing familiar tasks. In activity theory's terms, they their work is largely operationalized, habituated to a degree that they hardly have to think about it, leaving them free to talk baseball and politics. In fact, the details and tools of their craftwork may not be nearly as interesting as other things you might be able to investigate in this fixed frame: how they bond through talk, how they represent themselves in topics, how the carpenter retains or fails to retain social dominance over the apprentice.

Situation 2. But now let's suppose we visit a middle-aged college professor. He's at home, working at his kitchen table, surrounded by books and papers. The window is open, letting in a breeze that repeatedly moves the papers. Suddenly he gets up, fetches a hammer from the kitchen counter, and puts it on top of a page.

Now, that's not a completely novel use for a hammer, but it is certainly not what the hammer was designed to do. And this use snaps our attention to what we might stuffily call "the materiality of writing"—a broad set of different things (materials, artifacts, practices, people) that become associated in order for the professor to do his work. Without some of these associations, the work doesn't turn out the same way, or perhaps at all. These different things all contribute somehow. Sometimes it's through direct problem-solving, as in the maps and hoeys that Hutchins describes. Sometimes it's through mediations that make the problem space more tractable, like using a hammer as a paperweight. Any thing might be an actor—"any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference," Latour says (Reassembling the Social p.71). So the operative question is: "does it make a difference in the course of some other agent's action or not?" (p.71).

Or as I asked at the beginning: Is there a difference between hitting a nail with or without a hammer?

When Latour uses symmetry, it's as a methodological move: a move that focuses us on the associations among various humans and nonhumans. And since the associations themselves are the focus, the things they associate fade into the background. It's not that nonhumans become humans or vice versa, it's that these differences in qualities are no longer what we're investigating. Hipsters and horses are different, but those differences don't matter to an elevator or gravity. Professors and papers are different, but that difference isn't the focus of Latour's methodology.

Now let's connect this discussion to something closer to home. Earlier I mentioned the materiality of writing, something I've been studying for the last 15 years. One of my first moves—conducted after reading Hutchins, but before reading Latour—was to begin describing and examining genre ecologies, which are (loosely speaking) associations of text types used in people's work. This move was, like Latour's, a methodological move, meant to help me focus on a specific issue: How people were solving problems by using available texts in their environments. This issue became very important to me during my first set of observations, when I discovered something that (when you think about it) should be blindingly obvious: people don't just read one text at a time. In fact, they string together lots of texts, sometimes surprisingly large gobs of wildly heterogeneous texts, related in very different ways. Some of these are things that we would not normally consider texts at all.

My focus, that is, shifted toward the associations among the genres I saw being used in these observations, which I mapped using basic network diagrams, characterized based on qualitative data (observations, interviews, artifact collection), and compared between participants and observations. Rather than asking "How does this person read and write?" I began asking, "What combinations of texts do people need in order to get work done?" "When and why do people innovate new texts to include in these combinations?" "How do they associate these texts?" "When is one association substituted for another?" "Around which associations do people encounter the most disruptions?"

The construct of the genre ecology helped me get at questions such as these, methodologically, by helping me to focus away from individual expertise, interpretation, cognition, and social forces, and instead focusing on the associations that held these together. At the same time, this methodological move forced me to demand specific evidence for each association.

That's not to say that genre ecologies are symmetrical in the way that Latour's actor-networks are. Genre ecologies model associations among texts, not all kinds of entities, and those associated texts collectively mediate human activity rather than enfolding human beings into the collective activity of a system. That is, genre ecologies are still conceived within a WAGR framework. But methodologically, they constitute a similar move, one that has paid dividends for me (and, I hope, for others in my line of work).

And that's where I want to leave this series. When Latour proposes that we study humans and nonhumans symmetrically, when I propose that we study genres in ecologies, when Newton proposes that force can be considered mass times acceleration for any mass in a fixed frame, these are not all-encompassing propositions. They are deployed only when they make methodological sense. Physicists, I'm assured, don't look at their loved ones and see kilograms (unless, perhaps, when they're worried about the elevator breaking down). Similarly, Latour doesn't talk to doorknobs—unless he needs to apply that methodology to solve a particular kind of problem.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part III

I've been discussing the principle of symmetry in actor-network theory on the blog. In previous posts, I've tried to use commonplace examples to demonstrate how, rather than being a form of pantheism or an antihumanist sociology, symmetry is simply a way of getting at certain relationships that are often overlooked or even buried in other approaches. When we examine these relationships in fairly restricted ways—weight requirements in elevators or falling bodies—symmetry makes a great deal of sense. But when we move to more complex phenomena, symmetry seems like a dicier proposition. 

For instance, let's consider cognition.

Latour famously proposed in Science in Action that we institute a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology. (Hakkarainen criticized this moratorium in a 2003 Science and Education issue, complaining that Latour mentions this moratorium every so often, always extending it for ten years.) This moratorium came out of Latour's observations of scientific work, in which he noticed that scientists would assemble a large array of nonhumans and humans—instruments, procedures, lab techs, etc.—to perform science, then attribute the results to cognition. Without all of these nonhuman and human intermediaries, Latour argued, cognition could not have provided an adequate explanation.

Let's use an analogy. Suppose that as you walk home, you spot your neighbor on the roof. Do you think to yourself, "I am amazed that my neighbor can jump so high!" Or do you look for a ladder? Analogically speaking, Latour always looks for the ladder. He sees the alternate explanation—based entirely on human ability—as rather implausible. Yes, it's always a possibility, but (Latour might say) let's look for the ladder first.


This does not mean that actor-network theory is anti-cognition, as Hakkarainen and others have interpreted it to be. ANT is no more anti-cognition than a fork is anti-soup. 


No better demonstration of this point exists than Latour's positive review of Edwin Hutchins' 1995 book Cognition in the Wild. Latour declares: 

The results of Hutchins' inquiry are as devastating for psychology as the results of sociology were for epistemology or those of Shirley Strum for primatology. Everything that was crammed inside the mind of individuals is deployed outside and shared collectively with the culture, through the social connections and with the many cognitive artifacts the group has been able to devise. (p.55)

To put it another way: Hutchins, like Latour, looks for the ladder. 


But more than that, Hutchins refuses to separate cognition from mediating artifacts. In Hutchins' account, "cognition" is not confined to what happens inside the skull, but is instead distributed across a given environment. Latour summarizes the central claim of the book this way: 

cognition has nothing to do with the minds nor with individuals but with the propagation of representations through various media, which are coordinated by a very lightly equipped human subject working in a group, inside a culture, with many artifacts and who might have internalized some parts of the process. (p.56, Latour's italics).

To understand what's happening here, let's dive into Hutchins' book itself. Here's what he says about cognition in Chapter 2:

Having taken ship navigation as it is performed by a team on the bridge of a ship as the unit of cognitive analysis, I will attempt to apply the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation—to the operation of this system. In so doing I do not make any special commitment to the nature of the computations that are going on inside individuals except to say that whatever happens there is part of a larger computational system. But I do believe that the computation observed in the activity of the larger system can be described in the way cognition has been traditionally described—that is, as computation realized through the creation, transformation, and propagation of representational states. (Hutchins, 1995, p. 49)

So Hutchins approaches the notion of cognition by defining it narrowly, as computation. In committing to this computational account, Hutchins takes a radically symmetrical perspective. Rather than drawing lines between what transpires inside and outside one's head, Hutchins examines computation—and thus propagation of representational states—wherever it happens. He brilliantly demonstrates that much of what we might have assumed was expertise or intelligence is instead attributable to how these representational states propagate. For instance, he argues that by all rights the sailors he studied should not have had the depth of experience needed to perform the navigational feats they performed; but these feats were attributable to the entire system of sailors plus other computational media. 


(As a side note, this book had a deep impact on me as I was planning the study for my doctoral dissertation. For instance, as I was developing the notion of the genre ecology in my own work, I ran across Freedman and Smart's 1997 article "Navigating the current of economic policy," in which they coined the term "genre ecology" and modeled it after Hutchins' concept of "tool ecology" in this book. After reading their article, I picked up Hutchins' book, and its influence was key to my understanding of genres as co-mediating each other.) 


To get at what Hutchins is trying to say, let's leave the ship for a moment and look at what he says late in the book about Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine, he says, a room in which John Searle sits. Outside the room, people bring slips of paper on which they have written questions in Chinese. One by one, each person passes her or his slip of paper through a slot in the door; a few moments later, the person receives a reply, also written in Chinese. 


Does Searle know Chinese? Perhaps. Let's suppose that in one scenario, Searle knows how to read and write Chinese and is composing answers on the fly. In a second scenario, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but has several baskets of Chinese characters plus a rulebook that tells him how to combine them to respond to certain strings of characters. (The second scenario is very similar to that of Fred Saberhagen's first Berserker story, "Without a Thought.") In the second scenario, Hutchins argues, Searle doesn't know Chinese, but (for our purposes) the room does. Or to put it another way, the "cognitive properties of the sociocultural system" are different from "the cognitive properties of a person who is manipulating the elements of that system" (p.362). Cognition—in the narrowly defined sense that Hutchins uses the term—is stretched across the human agent and the environment, resulting in accomplishments that could not have resulted from the human agent alone. Searle has a ladder.


And with that, we can see why Latour does something that critics such as Hakkarainen haven't caught. He lifts the moratorium on cognitive explanations:

When I published Science in Action in 1987, I proposed a "moratorium" on cognitive explanations, which had been so freely and cheaply entertained by epistemologists. ... I did not know that I would be able to safely lift the ban, less than 10 years later, since in the meantime, cognitive explanations would have been dissolved past recognition [by Hutchins]." (p.62)

Symmetry as a methodological move, Part II

We've been discussing the oft-misunderstood principle of symmetry in actor-network theory. Last time I emphasized that symmetry is a methodological stance meant to get at certain things and not others–not wholesale anthropomorphization. Let's pursue that line further by performing a thought experiment. I emphasize that this is just a thought experiment for reasons that will become clear below.

Aristotle believed and taught that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo disagreed, and described a classic experiment in which he stood at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with two balls, dropped them, and they hit the ground at about the same time. (It's unclear whether Galileo actually performed the experiment.)

Suppose you want to perform a similar experiment. Since I'm at the University of Texas campus, let's imagine that you ascend UT's Tower to the observation deck. You bring a one-pound weight and a ten-pound weight.

Photo © 1980 Larry D. Moore (CC-BY-SA), available  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uttower1.jpg

(NOTE: You can only do this as a thought experiment. The observation deck is inaccessible except during guided tours due to a tragic incident. Also, dropping weights from the observation deck is a misdemeanor. Obviously, I do not endorse actually performing this experiment.)

Leaning over the railing, you drop the two weights at the same time. Not surprisingly, you discover that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong. The ten-pound weight does not fall ten times faster than the one-pound weight; they hit the ground at roughly the same time.

Interesting, you think. And then you decide to try a second variation of the experiment. You ascend the tower again, this time with a one-pound weight, a ten-pound weight, and a 150-pound hipster.

(NOTE: Again, you can only do this as a thought experiment for obvious legal, moral, and ethical reasons.)

When you reach the observation deck, you repeat the experiment, this time dropping all three objects at the same time. It turns out that no matter how ironically the hipster falls, in terms of gravity, he behaves exactly as the other weights do. For the purposes of the experiment, the hipster is exactly the same as the other two weights; you treat them symmetrically, and so does gravity.

But when you descend the elevator to the bottom of the tower, you discover that what is treated as symmetrical in one network of meaning is not treated as symmetrical in other networks. Dropping the weights is a misdemeanor. Dropping the hipster is a felony. The law of gravity treats them as symmetrical, but state and federal law do not.

When Latour describes humans and nonhumans as symmetrical, he means that differences among actants (both human and nonhuman) are generated within a given actor-network rather than preexisting them; we can't presuppose those differences. Consider Galileo's experiment as well as the previous illustration of elevator capacity: in these narrowly defined situations, humans and nonhumans act in exactly the same way. (If the tower experiment were a physics problem, you wouldn't even specify the materials, you'd just plug in the weight values.) But of course these networks of meaning are always entangled with other networks, as they should be. There are many good reasons why you would never actually perform this experiment, and they go beyond trouble with the law to basic questions of empathy and morality, questions that apply to all people,  few if any artifacts, and to some extent to nonhuman animals. 

But Latour talks about situations in which people are actually interacting: scientists, technologists, the public. Aren't these social rather than technical? And in social situations, don't we have to treat humans and nonhumans differently? 

The answer is: it depends on your methodological aims. Even in terms that we consider very human–cognition and persuasion–it sometimes makes sense to take a symmetrical viewpoint in one's methods. We'll see an example in the next post in this series.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part I

"This circulating gene entangles patients and researchers as it goes along. ... we see that the gene is domesticated, tamed, and integrated into a collective that holds it and is held by it. It is a civilized and civilizing gene, performing the collective and performed by it. And this integration into the society of the gene, or insertion into the genetics of society, would have been impossible without a starting point: the parity, the symmetry, between the complementary forms of knowledge that constitutes the foundations of this collective." (Callon & Rabeharisoa 2003, p.201)

This quote from a recent class echoes through your head as you walk down Austin's 6th Street on a beautiful spring day. Callon & Rabeharisoa are talking about a collaboration between research scientists and the French Muscular Dystrophy Association, which was clear enough, but in the latter half of the paper they make this assertion, consistent with the principle of symmetry that actor-network theory embraces.

Symmetry seems ridiculous to you. What's the point of pretending that genes, stars, and rat kidneys are actors in the sense that people are? Why apply the same language to both? Maybe this is one of those "critical theory" moves you've heard people talking about. To you, it seems more like attention-seeking. Latour likes to say that symmetrical language is not metaphorical but that he isn't engaging in anthropomorphism either. Obviously he's trying to have it both ways.

Enough. It's spring break. South by Southwest Interactive is winding down, but South by Southwest Music is just ramping up. You walk past the back of a club, where roadies are struggling to move a ton of sound equipment. It's going to be an exclusive show, evidently, because fourteen undernourished hipsters have already lined up at the front of the club; they're thumbing their iPhones and checking out each others' ironic t-shirts. A little farther on, seven well-nourished tourists on Segways ride along the sidewalk in a neat line, like ducks. And as you pass Jim-Jim's Water Ice, you see a mounted policeman on one horse, holding another horse's reins. The other policeman is in line getting a snow cone. Ah, Austin.

But you don't have time to enjoy the scenes. You hurry on toward the Driskill Hotel, where a temporary job awaits you. When you get there, you find out that the job is pretty easy.

"See this elevator?" your supervisor asks. "It's old. It has a maximum capacity of 2000 pounds. Max. But people try to overload it all the time. Your job is to make sure they don't." He turns on his heel and walks away.

Easy, you think. But then you wonder: about how much is 2000 pounds?

Let's see, you reason to yourself. Two thousand pounds is a ton. Like a ton of stereo equipment, you think whimsically, remembering your walk.

But how many people? Maybe thirteen or fourteen people - like those fourteen undernourished hipsters in front of the club. Or seven well-fed tourists on Segways, you think, imagining the line riding into the elevator. Or two horses and a police officer. Any of these combinations would come out to about 2000 pounds. You resolve that whatever combination of humans and nonhumans might come through the door, if they are above 2000 pounds, they can't ride together.

Humans and nonhumans? You laugh a little, thinking back to the notion of symmetry. What if the hipsters argued: "But we're not horses! Hello? Do horses have an encyclopedic knowledge of craft brews? Did horses listen to Mumford and Sons long before they were cool? Do horses have iPhones? Of course not! Horses don't even have thumbs!"And you imagine yourself retorting: "Maybe that matters if you're trying to get backstage. But not here. All that matters is how much you weigh."

You don't believe for a minute that hipsters are the "same" as horses, that stereo equipment is the same as overfed tourists, or that policemen are the same as Segways. But for the purposes of your job, they are judged by exactly the same criteria. Four hours later, it occurs to you that you are indeed performing a kind of symmetric analysis.

More than that: If you don't, the elevator will.