Reading :: Rapid Contextual Design

Originally posted: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:36:57

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood

Somehow it's appropriate to read this book after Aristotle. Like Aristotle's Rhetoric, Rapid Contextual Design has a few striking ideas and a lot of exhaustive advice about the details. It is indeed "a how-to guide to key techniques." And they're generally quite useful.

In fact, what I've always liked about contextual design is that it's sort of ethnography light: easy to grasp, rapidly deployable. It's not as rigorous as good ethnographic research, but it doesn't require a PhD either. I've found it to be a good way to introduce students to the concepts of fieldwork, although I'm careful to stress that one CD course does not make them qualified anthropologists. What I inevitably find, though, is that students have trouble with the details: how to conduct an unstructured interview, how to run an affinity session, how to walk the wall and do visioning. That's where this book really shines: it's full of advice about things as diverse as inductive coding, arranging for site visits, tactfully getting interviewees back on track, and constructing paper prototypes. Much of the advice is just as applicable to other types of field research, and I'm certainly going to be passing it along to my students this fall.

Contextual design itself continues to evolve in its techniques and rationale. Look carefully and you'll find some subtle adjustments to how the authors portray the methodology and how they justify its parts. They've also added some common HCI techniques: profiling and scenarios, for instance.

I don't see this book making it into heavy rotation on my shelf, but I imagine I will look at it whenever I teach this class or use CD on my own. >

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Capital, Volume 1

Originally posted: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 09:36:26

Capital, Volume 1

by Karl Marx

Yrjo Engestrom has said more than once that to understand activity theory, you have to read Marx. And unfortunately my formal education didn't include Marx. So with some trepidation, I undertook the book on my own.

My feelings are mixed. Libraries have been written about the book, countries have reworked their economies around it, and entire fields have sprung up around it. So what can I say about it? Let's delineate the scope of this review a bit. I'm not a political theorist, economist, or sociologist, so I'll tend to skip over these aspects. Instead, I'll focus on Capital's impact on the sorts of things I've been studying: activity theory, dialectic, work organization, and work structure.

In those terms, I found Capital somewhat underwhelming -- simply because I've heard most of it before, from people who have drawn heavily from Marx's work. Braverman, Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, Leont'ev, Ehn, Bodker, Kyng, Engestrom, and even Zuboff and Maxmin have addressed Marx's masterwork so thoroughly, and fields such as sociology and cultural studies have drawn so freely from it, that reading the book gave me a sense of deja vu. (Engestrom was wrong, then, in a sense.) At the same time, Marx's painstaking description of the labor conditions of industrial capitalism gave me great insight into why Marx was so motivated to change things. When Marx drifts too far toward polemic, engaging in hasty generalizations and straw man attacks, it's worthwhile to keep in mind the conditions that he opposed.

Marx starts with the familiar-in-retrospect contradiction between use-value and exchange-value (p.126 -- actually the second page of Marx's text, which follows a lengthy set of prefaces and introductions). According to Marx, use-value comes from the abstracted human labor materialized in it, and the value of an article is determined by the amount of labor necessary for its production (p.129).

Commodity production necessitates a division of labor because it calls for heterogeneous forms of labor (p.132). Later, Marx argues that the division of labor is "an organization of production which has grown up naturally, a web which has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of the producers of commodities" (p.201). Marx describes this web as a chain of producers who in turn consume the products of other producers (p.201), and he later argues that "there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents" (p.207). Marx gets into some really interesting discussion along these lines later, when arguing that manufacture takes two forms: heterogeneous and organic. Heterogeneous manufacturing is like watchmaking, in which different streams of supplies eventually come together (p.461); organic manufacturing involves the same material being progressively transformed, allowing the different stages to be isolated and to yield a chained division of labor (p.463) in which work that had been accomplished in one place, by one person, is distributed in space and time (p.464).

The division of labor is further discussed on p.456, where Marx really begins to analyze how industrialism had changed labor; he argues that each option becomes crystallized into an exclusive function of a particular worker (also see p.457). I can see how the notion of chained activity systems comes from this early industrialist understanding of human activity, and I can see why Zuboff and Maxmin argue that these conceptions have reached the end of their shelf life -- something that particularly leapt out at me in Marx's Ch.13.

One oft-quoted passage of Capital is Marx's comparison between bees and human architects; he argues that the architect conceives in advance, then constructs, whereas the bee works by instinct (p.284). The object of labor, he says, is anything that labor separates from its connection with the environment (p.284) -- a great summary of what others such as Ilyenkov would later develop theoretically and what activity theorists would eventually turn into the focus of activity theory. In this understanding, instruments of labor -- which can include even the earth itself (p.285) -- indicate the social relations among laborers (p.286). Notice that here we see the three points of the minimal activity theory triangle: subject, object, and mediational means! It's a short, sophisticated discussion of labor that neatly prefigures so much in the activity theory tradition. Indeed, Marx even makes the point that a product can shift from tool to object and back again (p.288, 289), that the object is "soaked" in labor (p.296), and that the product of the labor represents definite masses of crystallized labor time (p.297).

Underlying the above work, of course, is dialectic. Marx didn't discuss dialectic much -- more's the pity, since Engels took up the slack, and not well in my opinion -- but he has some interesting examples of how irregularities and conflicts led to more accurate investigations of friction (Arkwright) and steam (Watt) (pp.498-499).

As I said, Capital is a rich and fascinating book, and even though it sounds familiar from cover to cover, that's only because it prefigures so very much of what came later. In reading it, I found myself understanding activity theory, dialectic, participatory design, new economy literature, and so forth in new ways. It's a struggle -- nearly a thousand pages -- but the prose is surprisingly easy to follow and the examples are generally quite clear. Now I wish this book had been part of my formal education; it's a pity I waited until now to read it.

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Reading :: The Art of Rhetoric

Originally posted: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 10:10:23

The Art of Rhetoric

by Aristotle

It's been a while since I read excerpts from this book, the first to attempt to systematize my discipline. Aristotle was the student of Plato the student of Socrates, the smug absolutist on whom we generally blame rhetoric's bad reputation. (See Latour's evisceration of Plato's Gorgias in Pandora's Hope). Fortunately Aristotle was much more broad-minded than Plato, and his sympathetic, systematic treatment of the subject serves as the basis for innumerable first-year composition textbooks as well as scholarship.

Oh, you know what I'm talking about. Aristotle is the source for our argument that rhetoric is the probabilistic counterpart to logic and that its enthymeme is the counterpart to the syllogism (pp.66-70); that rhetoric's genres are deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (pp.80-81); and that rhetoric's proofs are the appeals to emotion, character, and reason (Ch.6-8). Having just taught first-year composition using an excellent textbook along these lines, I've found it pleasant to go back to this source material.

Of course, most of the material involves seemingly endless lists of examples -- much more boring than that comp textbook. But some of it is really fascinating. Take Aristotle's discussion of how rhetoric fits in: like dialectic, it treats subjects that everyone can grasp (p.66). But in rhetoric, proof is central, and enthymemes are the "flesh and blood of proof" (p.67). An enthymeme is a type of syllogism (p.68). And Aristotle is careful here to say that rhetoric is not persuasion, it's "the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter" (pp.69-70); it's analysis. Notice how this discussion serves as an implicit rebuke to the Gorgias.

As Latour argues, Socrates has no interest in politics and consequently no respect for rhetoric. Aristotle characterizes rhetoric as a political offshoot of dialectic and logic. Whereas logic is inductive and relies on the syllogism, Aristotle says, rhetoric is deductive and relies on the enthymeme (p.75). But rhetoric also has induction in the form of examples (p.77). Unlike logic, rhetoric considers groups, not individuals, and its premises are matters for deliberation rather than settled (p.76).

I haven't read Aristotle to any extent since grad school, so it was refreshing to come back to this text and see what I could get out of it this time. Although many of the particulars are tedious, the overall discussion of rhetoric's place still seems fresh to me. Certainly Aristotle made a place for the despised art in his taxonomy, and although that place seems a little cramped to me, it's a good start.

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Reading :: Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Originally posted: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 19:23:23

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

by Stuart A. Selber

I just finished writing a review of Stuart's book Multiliteracies for a Digital Age for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, so out of fairness I won't post a full review here. What I will say, though, is that the book is impressive. Stuart has managed to systematically analyze the concept of computer literacy, articulate a strategy for addressing it within writing classrooms, and create a solid framework for scaling computer literacy efforts from individual classrooms all the way up to the university level. If you're involved in computers and writing, particularly at the curricular level, you really ought to read it.

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Reading :: The Culture of Fear

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:48:49

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

by Barry Glassner

Every year, every student in first-year composition reads what we call the "First Year Forum" book: a book that has been selected in order to anchor discussions across all first-year comp courses at UT. The idea is to have students across campus reading the same text, discussing it in their dorm rooms as well as their classrooms, and ideally having the author visit campus. We won't be able to have the author come to campus in 05-06 -- the author, John Stuart Mill, is apparently in no shape to visit.

But we did manage to have Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, come to discuss the 2004-2005 First Year Forum book. I missed out on the talk, but not the book, which I just finished using in my summer II course.

Glassner's strength is that he documents nearly everything. When talking about fears of -- and I'm reading off the front cover -- "crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutant microbes, plane crashes, road rage & so much more," he does a terrific job of dissecting the perception of various dangers and contrasting them with the available statistics. He also provides overlooked but more severe dangers in comparison. That's great.

Unfortunately, the book has some real flaws as well. Glassner holds some definite views that he does not treat with the same scrutiny as the views he challenges. Sometimes the results are, frankly, embarassing.

To understand why our first example is embarassing, let me give you a sense of what it's like to read Culture of Fear. Glassner's introduction has 49 footnotes; Chapter 1 has 43; Chapter 2 has 70. Each footnote has an average of two citations (my estimate; I didn't make a comprehensive survey). When bringing these citations to bear on dubious fears, Glassner ruthlessly pounds us with statistics, mostly having to do with body counts. That's admirable.

But then we get to p.66, where Glassner describes how Advo, Inc.

mails out an estimated 57 million postcards each week to American households. Each card features on one side the smiling face, birth date, eye color, hair color, and other vital information for a missing child, and on the reverse side an advertisement for a local business. The question "Have you seen me?" printed above the child's picture has multiple meanings: it asks if we've seen the child and, at the same time, if we've seen the advertisement and the product or service it advertises. As Marilyn Ivy, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, notes in an essay about this marketing device, "That a child is missing -- not at home -- also brings up fears that perhaps we as residents at home are missing something too." (p.66)

Whatever one thinks of Advo's postcards -- and I routinely throw them away without a glance, I confess -- it's quite a charge to level that they are meant to manipulate readers into buying things rather than to perform what their producers and advertisers believe to be a valuable service. And that's what Glassner appears to be saying here. What monsters these people must be to prey on the worries and fears of their customers! So what mountain of evidence does Glassner quote to demonstrate that this is so? Interviews from advertisers? Surveys of the ads' readers? No, nothing. It's simply stated as obvious, not needing proof. Glassner would never let his opponents get away with something like that. But here he is, without a shred of evidence, accusing Advo and its advertisers of profiting from human misery.

Glassner, as I implied earlier, uses the body count as his measure of danger. On this point he scolds us for being afraid to fly. "In the entire history of commercial aviation, dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year" (p.183). Sure, I think most people know that driving is more dangerous than flying. But Glassner doesn't seem to account for the fact that most of us think one death is more terrifying and horrible than the other. Would you rather die swiftly in a two-person accident over which you have some control? Or in a two-minute free fall with 60 people screaming around you? Glassner doesn't seem to consider that people can make rational choices using criteria other than body count.

Usually. But, strangely, Glassner does feel free to use additional criteria when he gets to a couple of his hobby-horse issues. For instance, automobiles cause many more deaths per year than guns, yet guns are "a danger that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans' lists of fears" (p.xix). Because gun deaths are more senseless? More preventable? More immoral? More benighted and backward? There are arguments to be made -- good ones -- but Glassner doesn't make them, treating the question as obvious. Perhaps the answer is simple as the fact that Glassner owns a car but no guns. But that would mean that he's using statistics to affirm his own beliefs rather than to dispassionately get to the bottom of the issue -- wouldn't it?

>

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Reading :: The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital

Originally posted: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 08:28:47

The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital

by E.V. Ilyenkov

As an activity theorist, I've become convinced that AT needs to continue developing along the lines of the "third generation" work that Yrjo Engestrom has been advocating. I'm familiar with many of the sources on which Engestrom draws, especially M.M. Bakhtin, but I had not read any Ilyenkov until recently. And the more that I read of Engestrom, the more I became convinced that I had to absorb Ilyenkov in order to better understand contradictions and dialectics.

Dialectics, I hasten to add, is a weak spot of mine. In my graduate education we discussed dialectics only in passing and never read any of the source material in class. And technical communication literature typically doesn't draw much on dialectics except in passing. In fact, most of what I knew about dialectics came from Bakhtin's implicit, under-the-table comparison of it with dialogics. So, incredible as it sounds, my understanding of dialectics -- the core of activity theory -- has been learned inductively by reading endless AT studies. Maybe that's okay, since as far as I can tell, many North American activity theorists haven't studied dialectics either. But it's become apparent that I can't really progress in understanding AT theoretically or methodologically until I understand dialectics as it was understood in the Soviet milieu, the milieu in which activity theory developed. So I began reading up on dialectics in earnest last year, working up to the source materials.

The most important of these source materials, of course, is Marx's Capital. I've begun this work, but have paused to read Ilyenkov's work in hopes that it would summarize and illuminate Marx's discussion. At this point I'm not sure how well it succeeds on that count, but it does seem to summarize and illuminate the Soviet understanding of dialectics in the late 1970s -- which, for my present project, is actually more valuable. Furthermore, Ilyenkov either summarizes or extends (I'm not sure which yet) the implications of Marx's work for understanding development, objects, and contradictions.

In my recent review of Ilyenkov's Dialectical Logic, I mentioned that it seemed to be very much like the other Soviet work I'd read from that era: triumphalist, scornful of non-Marxist and non-dialectic work, and unstinting for its praise of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. There are actually some real differences among these thinkers, but those differences tended to be suppressed rather than explored in the Soviet milieu, and Dialectics is no exception. As I've noted elsewhere, this tendency to consecrate Marxist writers tended to cover up the fact that Engels radically expanded the scope of dialectics, making it a theory of everything: when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, when two animals produce a hybrid, when potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, and when a culture adjusts to new tools, these are all examples of dialectic. Dialectic becomes a -- I should say the -- natural law. As Haraway and Serres both note in their idiosyncratic ways, the practical effect is that the logic of dialectic becomes naturalized and imposed on nature.

The results are quite limiting. As Ilyenkov describes it, dialectics is unrelentingly oriented toward development: from the abstract to the concrete, from the simple to the complex, from folk knowledge to scientific knowledge, from feudalism to socialism. That is, it's teleological -- so much so that if intelligent life were to be wiped from the Earth, we can be certain that it would arise again (in Dialectical Logic p.55)! For Ilyenkov, time's arrow points one way, and that way leads not just from the past to the future but also from the less evolved to the more evolved. Given that fervent belief, it's not really that surprising that the Soviets wrote so triumphantly: they believed that the iron law of nature dictated that "imperialism" would globally give way to communism (p.134).

(A set of inerrant texts that have to be reconciled by hook or by crook; a teleological narrative of progress; a natural law dictating the rise of intelligent life. Hmm, what does that sound like?)

As a totalizing theory of everything, dialectics seems severely compromised and is vulnerable to the many criticisms leveled by Haraway, Serres, Deleuze & Guattari, and others. But as a theory of development, it's on firmer ground (despite its teleological tendencies). And this is where Ilyenkov really starts to pull his weight. Ilyenkov contributes several things: an account of the "ascent from the abstract to the concrete"; a discussion of the "spiral-like theory of development" on which Engestrom has based his Developmental Work Research approach; and a thorough discussion of contradictions as engines of change.

The "ascent from the abstract to the concrete" refers to the movement from the abstract -- "any one-sided, incomplete, lopsided reflection of the object in consciousness" (p.36), a "particular definition" (p.58) or characteristic -- to the concrete, "a logical combination (synthesis) of particular definitions into an aggregate overall theoretical picture of reality, as movement of thought from the particular to the general" (p.58). Out of many examples -- Ilyenkov tends to go over the same ground many times, perhaps having something to do with the spiral theory of development -- one sticks out. Like Engestrom, Ilyenkov draws on the example of Carnot from Engels' Dialectics of Nature. He introduces Engels' quote in this way:

In actual fact, mankind has always obtained universal, 'infinite' generalisations and conclusions, not only in philosophy but in any area of knowledge as well, through analysis of at least one typical case rather than through abstraction of those identical features that all possible cases have in common. (p.170)

So Carnot's discovery of this law of thermodynamics, which is the abstraction developed through his analysis of a steam engine, led to the concrete applications in 10,000 steam engines. Simple, abstract, common characteristics inevitably lead to complex, concrete, unique, particular syntheses of these characteristics. The abstract and the concrete have a dialectical unity (p.105) in that they are different aspects of the same reality.

Let's get to the "spiral character of development," which is used so expertly in Engestrom's Developmental Work Research approach and his discussions of learning by expanding. Ilyenkov argues that

This dialectics of all real development, in which the universal necessary condition of the emergence of an object becomes its own universal and necessary consequence, this dialectical inversion in which the condition becomes the conditioned, the cause becomes the effect, the universal becomes the particular, is a characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle, or, to be more precise, of a spiral which extends the scope of its motion all the time, with each new turn.

At the same time there is a kind of 'locking in itself' here which transforms an aggregate of individual phenomena into a relatively closed system, a concrete integral organism historically developing according to its immanent laws. (pp.115-116)

This spiral is not circular, with an effect becoming its own cause, because dialectics regards cause and effects as manifestations of "a system of mutually conditioning aspects, as a historically emerging and developing concreteness" (p.117).

Now let's get to the final and most important contribution: the discussion of internal contradictions in objects. Ilyenkov argues that in the dialectical-matrialist conception, a single object (in the AT sense) must be traced through "different stages and phases of its maturity" (p.205) in order to highlight "the abstract outlines of its inner structure" that "remain the same throughout its historical development" (p.206). If phenomena or categories disappear during the development of the object, "they are not attributive, internally necessary forms of being of the object" (p.206). If we interpret this as a methodological principle for identifying objects rather than a law of development, it makes quite a bit of sense -- and helps to address Steve Witte's criticism that it's impossible in principle to identify an activity.

Unlike metaphysics, which interprets contradictions as imperfections in reasoning, dialectics sees contradictions "as the necessary logical form of the development of thought, of the transition from ignorance to knowledge, from an abstract reflection of the object in thought to the ever more concrete reflection of it" (p.234). And "Dialectics regards contradiction as a necessary form of development of knowledge, as a universal logical form. That is the only way to consider contradiction from the point of view of cognition and thought as a natural historical process controlled by laws independent from man's desires" (pp.234-235). Internal contradictions -- those that cause tensions within an object, such as the primary contradiction between exchange-value and use-value -- are the ones that drive changes in the object as participants work to resolve the contradiction (p.238; cf. p.266). And now we can see why Ilyenkov asserts that

objective reality is a living system unfolding through emergence and resolutions of its internal contradictions. The dialectical method, dialectical logic demand that, far from fearing contradictions in the theoretical definition of the object, one must search for these contradictions in a goal-directed manner and record them precisely -- to find their rational resolution, of course, not to pile up mountains of antimonies and paradoxes in theoretical definitions of a thing. (p.244)

And "Dialectical contradiction is not in this case an insurmountable barrier in the way of the movement of the investigating thought but, on the contrary, a springboard for a decisive leap forward in a concrete investigation, in further processing of empirical data into concepts" (p.251). A contradiction is "a necessary expression of a real fact in its origin" (p.253). And at this point in the book, we can see clearly how crucial it is -- despite its modernist, teleological leanings -- to the "third generation" reconceptualization of activity theory. Without Ilyenkov's discussion of the object and the elaboration of contradictions in its development, activity theory would have a much less articulated discussion of development on its hands. In particular, Ilyenkov's discussion of internal and external contradictions suggests that we can't understand networks of activity by simply looking for ways in which discrete activity systems link up; we have to understand these linkages as interpenetrating activity systems that foster internal contradictions.

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(Tracing Genres through Organizations and Activity-Centered Design)

Originally posted: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 08:57:25

Discussions are heating up over a recent post of Don Norman's in which he urges us to move away from "human-centered design" and toward "activity-centered design." The latter term is based on "my own brand of 'Activity Theory,' heavily motivated by early Russian and Scandinavian research." (But not on the book by the same title, which happens to be in the same book series as mine.) Norman once again issues his call for designers to be dictators and to design around "activities." In his understanding, "activity is a coordinated, integrated set of tasks."

Dan Brown and Peter Merholtz have both been kind enough to mention my book as a counterexample to Norman's heavy-handed design dictatorship, and Dan in particular nails one of the problems with Norman's conception: it's static. As I wrote in a comment on Dan's blog, Norman doesn't seem to have taken into account the central way in which activity theory handles change, through contradictions. That's not terribly surprising, since design-as-dictator strategies tend to attempt to find the one best way to perform an activity (without reflecting much on the criteria for making that judgment), and then maximize stability by forcing users to learn and use the system as designed. This, I think, is why it's so vital to look at so-called "third generation" activity theory, which pushes contradictions to the forefront and -- more importantly -- attempts to describe networks of interpenetrating, developing activities and how they interact with each other.

Elsewhere, Andrew Otwell reacts to Norman's piece by asking, "I wonder to what extent UCD?s and Activity Theory?s expectations of design inputs (deep examination of the formations of user goals, dissection of community and social network relationships) are really artifacts from an era in computing that?s passed." The question is valid: much activity theory work on IT, until recently, drew deeply on the Scandinavian participatory design tradition from the early to mid 1980s. (I have a piece on the subject coming out in Technical Communication Quarterly this fall.) But the more recent "third generation" work has taken the knowledge economy/distributed capitalism more seriously and attempted to work out theoretical and methodological tools for addressing more rapid, less stable work formations. Search for "knotworking" on my site and you'll see what I mean.

As I say in my book, I think the key challenge will be to provide sustainable structures on which workers can build and formalize their own innovations. Since the book was published, we've seen an explosion of such tools. So when Dan praises 37 Signals, I agree -- and I see opportunities in applying "third-generation" AT to disparate activity networks using similar tools. >

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Reading :: Dialectical Logic

Originally posted: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 21:00:45

Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory

by E.V. Ilyenkov

I've provided a link to the electronic version of this book at marxists.org since Amazon doesn't list the version I read and doesn't have much on the book at all. Ilyenkov is credited by Yrjo Engestrom as the thinker that brought the issue of contradictions back to the forefront of dialectical thought; Engestrom and others applied the work to activity theory, making possible the development of the third generation of AT. For those of us who came late to activity theory, it's hard to imagine AT without contradictions as the central explanation for developmental change.

In this book, Ilyenkov does develop the idea of contradictions as the driving force of change and development in human activity. But the book mainly deals with the history of dialectical logic. Ilyenkov traces the prehistory and history of Marxist dialectic, touching briefly on Aristotle before jumping to Descartes, Locke, Bacon, Liebniz, and a series of other philosophers. Ilyenkov reserves extended discussion for Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lenin. Those who are familiar with Soviet publications from this era will not be surprised that Marx and Lenin are treated as infallible while the others are treated as men who couldn't quite escape their preconceptions. In vintage Soviet form, Ilyenkov casts Hegel's contributions in this way:

Marx, Engels, and Lenin showed both the historical contribution of Hegel and the historically conditioned limitations of his scientific advances, the clearly drawn boundary across which the Hegelian dialectic could not step, and the illusions, whose power it was incapable of overcoming despite all the strength of its creator?s mind. Hegel?s greatness, like his limitations, was due on the whole to his having exhausted the possibilities of developing dialectics on the basis of idealism, within the limits of the premises that idealism imposed on scientific thinking. (p.227).

Although Ilyenkov is a careful thinker, he sounds downright Engelsian in his claims for dialectic. "Dialectical Logic is therefore not only a universal scheme of subjective activity creatively transforming nature," he declares, "but is also at the same time a universal scheme of the changing of any natural or socio-historical material in which this activity is fulfilled and with the objective requirements of which it is always connected" (p.8). So is dialectic a logic -- a sociohistorical phenomenon -- or is it a universal law that applies equally to all types of change, as Engels would have it? My reading suggests the latter: Ilyenkov later approvingly quotes Engels' assertion that natural dialectic inevitably will produce thinking minds (p.55) and Lenin's assertion that thought is the highest form of development of the universal property of sensation (p.56). Later, Ilyenkov hails Schelling's contribution of the "truly universal" law of bifurcation, derived from various examples (magnetic polarity; acids and alkalis; positive and negative electricity). Again, this sounds much like Engels, and supports Deleuze and Guattari's charge that dialectic is arborescent. Finally, Ilyenkov insists that dialectical schemas revealed by Hegel were universal forms and laws of the natural world reflected in man's collective consciousness (p.251; cf. 290; 312). Haraway's critique of dialectics seems more and more relevant here.

Let's return to the question of contradictions, because this is where Ilyenkov makes his real contribution. Ilyenkov boldly asserts that "Contradiction as the concrete unity of mutually exclusive opposites is the real nucleus of dialectics, its central category. On that score the cannot be two views among Marxists" (p.320). Contradictions, he says, are the principle of self-movement in a "concrete, developing system" (let's say an "activity system" here) and are "the form in which the development is cast" (p.330). They provide the impetus for development; dialectics "is the means of resolving these contradictions" (p.322). In fact, studying contradictions is all about studying human activity geneticallly (i.e., historically-developmentally). How did this system develop? What contradictions have arisen and how will they be resolved?

We can see how the third generation of activity theory has taken on Ilyenkov's specific approach to studying development, while moderating or suppressing what appears to be a strongly teleological, universalist understanding of the principle. I'm becoming more and more convinced that activity theory is treading a difficult path at this point, attempting to hold onto the modernist understanding of dialectics and contradictions while simultaneously trying to integrate postmodernist, amodernist, and poststructuralist ideas (multiplicity, dialogism).

Is it worth reading this book? If you're interested in a history of dialectics, or if you're interested in how activity theory's notion of contradiction was developed, you should. I'm interested in both. But be prepared for -- how should I put this? -- some remarkably Soviet prose. >

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(Reading Roundup)

Originally posted: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:24:28

I've been buried with work, but I'm also busy reading several texts.

Currently I'm making my way through E.V. Ilyenkov's 1977 book Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory, an overview of dialectic as it developed from Spinoza to Lenin. Yrjo Engestrom has been citing Ilyenkov quite a bit in relation to how activity theory understands contradictions and the object of activity. I should be done with that soon and will probably post a review by the end of the week.

Next up is Ilyenkov's Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital and, of course, Capital itself. I haven't read Capital yet, but I've started it and will pick it up again once I've finished with Ilyenkov.

Engestrom once said that you can't truly understand activity theory until you've read Marx. And now Ilyenkov tells me I can't really understand dialectic until I've read Hegel. See how the game is played?

Somewhere in here I will also read Stuart Selber's

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, which I've agreed to review for a journal.

Finally, I'll need to wedge in Holtzblatt et al.s' Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design. I don't plan to use that book in my contextual design class this fall, but it should help me as I put together assignments and readings. >

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Reading :: The Natural Contract

Originally posted: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:21:51

The Natural Contract

by Michel Serres

The Natural Contract, published in French in 1992, appears to have significantly influenced Latour's later Politics of Nature. Like that later book, this one argues that the pro-ecology movement should abandon the modernist divide between culture and nature, humans and their environment, in favor of an understanding in which the two are inextricable. "So forget the word environment, commonly used in this context. It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature" (p.33). Rather, Serres strives for a symmetrical view in which there are no a priori or positional differences between humans and others.

But surprisingly -- and not so surprisingly, if you think about it -- this line of argument leads to familiar terrain that seems to have less and less to do with ecology. For instance, Serres continues his campaign of sideswipes against contradictions and dialectic (p.11, 50, 64, 81), which is now linked to and blamed for the problem at hand.

... this long war is still called history, and its law is dialectics, or the law of tribunals, which has nothing to do with the world, only with the exquisite disputes indulged in by refined men among themselves. So law prevails over the sciences, even globally, and that means that the laws of the world of men prevail over the laws of the world of things. In the end that means that people will look down on the world of things. (p.81)

This discussion of dialectics comes in the context of a "virtual contract" between humans, one that Serres contrasts with the "natural contract" that he says must be struck among all groups in the ecology. Along those lines, he provides some meditative passages on the "virtual contract" and its origins. I was more interested by a line of argument that Serres makes on the question of privacy. Serres claims that

when everyone knows everything right now about everybody and lives by this knowledge, you have antiquity's notion of freedom and the ideal city, and also the ideal of modern philosophers since Rousseau, the ideal of the media and social science, of the police and bureaucracy: poll, clarify, inform, make known, expose, report. A terrifying nightmare, one that if you've lived in small villages or large tribes, you'll want to avoid all your life, for it is the height of enslavement. Freedom begins with the ignorance I have and wish to preserve of the activities and thoughs of my neighbor, and with the relative indifference that I hope they harbor for mine, for want of information. (p.68)

The freedom of Athens was a freedom that came from busybodies, neighbors who spied on neighbors and told everyone else what they found out! "Everybody played the part of spy and inquisitor for everyone else" (p.69). Freedom is slavery in this context -- the freedom of equal participation in government comes at the price of continual, distributed monitoring. So Serres sees the development of specialties such as law enforcement and prosecution to be an enormous plus: "Better to have the policeman and the prison, these highly visible, specialized organs, recognizable by the uniform and the bars, than the omnipresent eyes and ears of one's associates and of those all-seeing strangers who represent the virtual contract and act on its behalf" (p.69). Specializations can be black boxed, and we gladly do so rather than wading through all the arguments involved with understanding them. But of course this sort of specialization carries its own dangers; we've seen a recent blogospheric upsurge in fact-checking the media, for instance.

The Natural Contract, like Serres' other books, contains no cites, just allusions. It's not as heavily metaphorical as The Parasite but it's not a walk in the park either. Check it out if you're interested in ecological philosophy, symmetry, or influences on Latour's later work.

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Reading :: The Parasite

Originally posted: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 22:46:46

The Parasite

by Michel Serres

What makes these Parisian philosophers write in such heavily metaphorical language? Maybe it's in the Perrier. Whatever it is, Latour seems to have sipped a bit, while Callon is almost wholly a tetotaler. Deleuze imbibed deeply. And Serres, he swims in it.

Serres is known as a master stylist in French and his works are sometimes described as almost untranslatable because of it. And I see glimmers of that, especially when the translator includes the original wording in parentheses so that we can understand and admire particularly clever wordplay. Some of this I found quite worthwhile. But throughout, I longed for the clarity that comes from Latour's and Callon's empirical cases. In those works, we are treated to laboratories and the hospitality industry. In Serres' work, we get Aesop's fables.

These fables can be nicely illustrative, of course, but it's hard to figure out how they apply to other cases. Nevertheless, we get some idea of why Latour and Callon turned to Serres' work.

What is a parasite? The translator helpfully explains that the French term has three meanings: a biological parasite, a social parasite, and static (p.vii). Serres uses all three meanings, switching from one to the other and trying to pull in all three at once, in his illustrations. The parasite, in brief, is a figure meant to illustrate intermediaries in a network. In a chain, the parasite intercepts material meant for the host and transforms it; the parasite turns material into information, like a guest who pays for his supper with stories (p.11 and many other places). But the parasite, like a rat, may find its meal interrupted by a noise -- the rat is parasited by the noise, which comes between it and its meal (p.19). A parasite always comes between. and we are all parasites: "We parasite each other and live among parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute our environment. We live in that black box called the collective; we live by it, on it, and in it" (p.10).

Notice the language of symmetry here. In his metaphorical fashion, Serres seems to be saying what actor-network theorists have later said, citing him for support: The world is full of mediators, or intermediaries, each of which comes between other things, each of which plays a transformative role. These things include people and animals, but also "the telephone, the telegraph, television, the highway system, maritime pathways and shipping lanes, the orbits of satellites, the circulation of messages and of raw materials, of language and foodstuffs, money and philosophical theory" (p.11). This list closely parallels Callon's lists of intermediaries. And Serres does not see these things atomistically; rather, he defines them relationally, in a way that recalls Bateson's definition of information as a difference that makes a difference: "The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical origin of things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned it to hell" (p.13). Serres finds it necessary to begin with a theory of relations (p.130).

In such a theory of relations, doubles and oppositions become unsuitable: " the doubles and oppositions would disappear in favor of the plural and transformations" (p.21). The implications for dialectic (Hegelian dialectic, at least) are obvious. "A text in three parts -- a dialectic -- has a forked tongue and the head of a viper. The twin thesis and antithesis divinely produce the athletic synthesis: the synthesis waits for its adversary or its double in the wrestling match" (p.29). And elsewhere: "dialectic is the logic of phenomenology, that is to say, appearance" (p.76; cf. p.222). But that appearance does us no good. "What is the good of opposing word to word, article to article and antithesis to thesis, sound to sound or idea to meaning, if by slipping into the channel, one can perturb the sound, meaning, thesis, and system at will? ... The old kind of combat and the two fighters disappear in this fog" (p.195).

Let's leave the two fighters there, then, and get back to the parasite. Serres recalls the story of the passer-by who finds a snake frozen stiff in the snow. The passer-by takes the snake into his home, places it by the fire to warm up -- then kills it when it tries to attack him (p.22). The snake has turned traitor, refusing its new and unasked-for role of a guest in debt. The host tried to speak for it; the snake refused to accept the host's attempted role. Plug this story back into the definition of the parasite as intermediary and you get the notion of translation-betrayal of which Callon and Latour write so frequently. Who is the host and who is the guest? Who decides? According to Serres, the question can be asked "not of the whole network, but at a local division, a single point of the system" (p.27).

Speaking of betrayal, the longer you fend it off and the more elements you can add without betrayal, the stronger the network is: "The stronger the voice the longer the relation" (p.84).

Serres' discussions eventually lead to the notion of a quasi-object, which Latour later picks up in We Have Never Been Modern. He argues that a parasite is an intermediary in the network, in fact, the "elementary relation" of the network (p.224). In the network, a quasi-object helps to define those relations by marking the one who holds it (p.225). Think of a ball game: "A ball is not an ordinary object, for it is what it is only if a subject holds it" (p.225). If the object of the game is to possess the ball, the game's knot (or focus) is the ball's possessor. The subjects serve the object rather than making it their slave. And when the ball is passed, the knot is undone and the focus shifts. "What was supposed to be decided isn't; the knot comes undone. History and attention bifurcate" (p.226). The game is a graph of substitutions. "The quasi-object that is the marker of the subject is an astonishing constructor of intersubjectivity" (p.227).

What's a quasi-object? Money, for one (p.229). And again we see the connection to Callon's intermediaries.

The Parasite might be a joy to read in French or for someone of a different temperament, but I found it to be frustrating. I got a lot out of it, as I hope the review demonstrates, but without the frame of actor-network theory I would have had a much harder time. Read Latour and Callon first before tackling this one.

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Reading :: Rationalizing Medical Work

Originally posted: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 19:32:13

Rationalizing Medical Work: Decision Support Techniques and Medical Practices

by Marc Berg

Marc Berg's dissertation work was supervised in part by Annemarie Mol, and her influence is quite evident in this book based on the dissertation. Berg uses actor-network theory to examine medical work, particularly the trend of rationalization that is exemplified by decision support systems -- information systems that are meant to help doctors make consistent, accurate decisions about medical care. Such systems look good on paper, but begin to provide wildly inaccurate diagnoses when applied to problems outside their specialty area. Berg wants to know: Why is this so? How do medical personnel deal with the problem? What does all of this tell us about knowledge work?

As I've discussed elsewhere on this blog, Berg has done some very smart work in relating ANT to computerized information systems, and in doing so he has brought it onto "turf" that has been occupied by information processing cognitive psychology and (more recently) situated cognition, distributed cognition, and activity theory. ANT has some methodological and theoretical relations with the latter three, but it is ultimately a rather different enterprise because it represents a relationist sociology hooked up to a particular type of ontology. So although it deals with some of the same problems that an AT or DC study might, it sometimes diverges in interesting ways, especially as it treats history, multiplicity, and development.

Berg discusses how medicine has been framed over the last couple of centuries, noting that it has involved a struggle between two concepts of medicine: as a situated practice grounded in tacit knowledge and as a set of general principles grounded in formal research. The latter view has gained the upper hand lately, resulting in attempts to flatten and univeralize concepts and vocabularies (e.g., p.24). This view has led to developing automated decision systems that can compile general knowledge about various conditions, based on the research paradigm. Such systems not only draw from normative concepts and vocabularies, it enforces them: the practice of its users is "disciplined to this formalism" (p.92, his emphasis).

Unfortunately, this approach simply doesn't work well. Like Mol, Berg identifies the problem as multiplicity: different disciplines simply don't and can't agree on the "same" object (p.96). As one informant complains: "But nobody agrees on what they are talking about. What should the result of the test be. A figure? The angle the leg makes with the table?" The informant goes on to describe ever more specific variations of decisions physicians must make in order to reach the degree of specificity necessary for agreement. Berg's point is that such negotiations could go on in remarkable detail for each case, with more negotiations necessary whenever a new medical specialty is brought in, and no guarantee of agreement -- because the different specialties are looking at different objects and mobilizing them in different ways. The approach necessitated by a decision support system involves building these negotiations into the tool itself, flattening them into a single discipline with a single body of knowledge and object. The task is problematic to say the least:

... formal medical tools cannot be conceived ass inert carriers of some "good medical practice." Delegating tasks to a formal tool transforms the nature of those tasks. The introduction of a decision-support tool generates a propensity to refocus medical criteria on the elements that behave in predictable and easily traceable ways. Formal tools contain a predisposition to build simple, robust worlds, without too many interdependencies or weak spots where contingencies can leak back in. In doing so, in selecting the measurements and indications that best fit its prerequisites, the breast cancer protocol redefines what eligibility for bone-marrow transplantation treatment denotes -- and, thus, what "potentially curable disseminated breast cancer" is. (p.99)

Hard data, Berg says, is data whose production has been disciplined (p.101).

So on the one hand a decision-support system redefines that which it describes, but on the other hand the system cannot contain too many negotiations with too many disciplines. That quickly becomes too complex a task -- unless the system is sharply bounded. "Constructing a feasible, working decision-support tool, then, always implies building specific contexts into the technique" (p.108). The decision-support system appears to embody some sort of universal medical knowledge, but it can only do so in a sharply limited space, and even then, "idiosyncratic, unique features of the specific sites involved become embedded in a tool's script" and thus "a tool's radius of action is reduced" (p.108). "The contingent nature of the protracted process of negotiations, I argue, is incorporated into the core of the tool. Trying to get a protocol to work is a process of making ad hoc compromises, going back to the tool, and tinkering to get the medical practice's elements in line" (p.115). The traces of these struggles and compromises are left in the tool (p.116).

Ultimately, "Instead of the transparent, optimal, unified Clinical Rationality hoped for, we end up with opaque, impure, additional rationalities" (p.116).

In the latter part of the book, Berg brings the principle of symmetry to bear on the issue. He points out how chains of events are consistently rewritten to attribute decisions to individual physicians rather than to the tools and practices on which they draw, and in doing so, he calls into question the notion of uniquely human agency (p.136; cf. Hutchins, Suchman). Berg also follows ANT by arguing that history and future are continually reconstructed in medical records (p.137).

Ultimately, Berg argues, "the only way the network can persist is through its looseness, its openness, and its unresolved tensions" (p.168). I agree, of course, having made a similar argument in my own book.

Overall, Berg makes a strong case for applying ANT insights to information systems. Those of us coming from an activity theory standpoint can extrapolate a critique of our own work as well as ways in which the two approaches complement each other.

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Reading :: Hermes

Originally posted: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:43:15

Hermes : Literature, Science, Philosophy

by Michel Serres

Michel Serres' work is often praised (or condemned) as "poetic," beautiful in the French, and almost impossible to translate because of the high quality of the prose. That's probably true. Although the stories and metaphors that Serres uses seem to translate fairly well, the prose in this translated version tends to be dense and not terribly enjoyable. And unfortunately the high density of metaphor and allegory tends to obscure rather than productively illustrate Serres' points.

Nevertheless, the book is interesting and, with patience, rewarding.

I came to Serres because he was so influential to Bruno Latour (whose prose, unlike Serres', tends to be translated in ways that retain his style) and Michel Callon. Callon is said to have borrowed the notion of translation from Serres' Hermes volume 2, which sadly does not appear to be translated into English in its entirety. Nevertheless, this collection gives us an idea of what we are missing. Most interesting is Serres' discussion in Chapter 2 of Aesop's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb". Serres detects an arborescence: a genealogical tree or ordered structure. The wolf is upstream from the lamb and more powerful than it; but he pretends to be downstream, wronged by it (p.19). The structure organizes the game-space: "Without a set provided with an ordering relation, there would be no game" (p.20). And this game is called dialectic: "Stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable" (p.21). Dialectic assumes and provides the structure. It imposes order under the guise of explaining it. So should we stick with the dialectic or attack the ordered structure? (p.22).

(Alert readers will detect some of the same thought here that guided Deleuze & Guattari -- absolute limits, flows, and arborescence.)

In the next chapter, Serres discusses Jules Michelet's La Mer (1861), in which Michelet proposes a chain of beings, an ontogeny, a phylogeny (p.29). It sounds half-baked the way Serres describes it. But it interests Serres because of these accounts. For instance, Michelet describes the Carnot cycles, the cycles in the northern and southern hemispheres flowing from warm to cold spots. The Carnot cycles are named, of course, after Sadi Carnot, who labored to develop a theorem that became the second law of thermodynamics -- a theorem that, as Engels says, summarizes the work of a steam engine and on which subsequent steam engines were based. The world, then, is a steam engine by this reckoning. But it is also many other sorts of machines. "The world is a static machine, a compression engine, an electrical engine, a chemical machine, a steam engine; the world is an organism -- all without contradiction" (p.35). Serres uses this text to make his own argument, not about the world, but about method:

It is not necessary to introduce methods to read this text: the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application. This is not a special case; it is one that is perfectly generalizable. Why should there be a dichotomy between texts, between the ones that operate and the ones that are operated upon? There are texts, and that is all. (p.38)

This does sound quite structuralist (and in the book I borrowed from the library, someone penciled in the word "structuralist" next to this passage).

Well, let's skip a bit, because much of what Serres discusses is not relevant to my projects (and this blog, ultimately, is all about me). I mentioned that Serres was one of Latour's biggest influences and that he provided the origin for what actor-network theorists call translation. Translation is touched upon late in the book (p.132), but not really explicated. Black boxes are discussed but not explicated (p.80). The reversibility of time is discussed but not explicated (p.71). On the whole, alas, I see a lot of seeds but not much fruit for my project here. Nevertheless, as I said at the beginning of this review, the book can be rewarding with patience. Not everything has to be fruit.

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Reading :: Thoughts of a Statesman

Originally posted: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:08:03

Thoughts of a Statesman

by Niccolo Machiavelli

The link above is to a great online library in which older works have been scanned and turned into PDFs along with the embedded machine-readable text. So, for instance, you can read the scanned page from this 1882 book, then highlight lines and copy them. Or you can use the find-as-you-type feature in MacOS X's Preview to find relevant passages. What a time saver.

The book itself is "a compilation of some of Machiavelli?s most famous thoughts arranged by the editor of the 1882 edition of his works," originally appearing in vol. 2 of The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. Let's call it a book anyway. It's a 32-page "collection of maxims, extracted from the works of Machiavelli ... to show the injustice of the charges against the writings of Machiavelli, resulting from an unfair prejudice and imperfect understanding of his sentiments" (from the prefatory note, p.435). It even comes with a fake-but-accurate letter purportedly written to Machiavelli to his son, sounding for all the world like the last chapter of Latour's Pandora's Hope:

I know that some one has poured out his venom against my writings because he has formed his judgment upon each one separately, instead of all together, and has looked more to the words than the spirit; as if one could judge correctly of a work or a science or art from a single part, and not the whole together, or could judge of the colors without regard to the drawing. (p.435)

Poor Machiavelli!

The maxims which follow are decontextualized, but they do point to the fact that Machiavelli was not simply a schemer. When reading The Prince, sometimes it's easy to forget that Machiavelli believed "That government alone is durable which rests upon the free will of the governed" (p.439). Other bon mots:

Whoever is harsh and cruel in commanding is badly obeyed by his subjects; but whoever is kind and humane meets with ready obedience. (p.440)

To command a multitude it is better to be humane than proud, and merciful rather than cruel. (p.440)

We ought to attach little value to living in a city where the laws are less powerful than men. That country only is desirable where you can enjoy your substance and your friends in security, and not that where your property can be easily taken away from you, and where your friends, for fear of their own property, abandon you in your greatest need. (p.444)

It is the laws that make men good. (p.444)

A good prince must preserve perfect justice in his states, and in giving audiences he must be affable and gracious. (p.446)

Those provinces where there is money and order are the nerve and sinews of the state. (p.450)

Those only deserve to be free who apply themselves to good works, and not to evil ones; for liberty badly employed injures itself and others. (p.452)

And so forth. The great thing about lists of maxims is that they have already done the hard work of pulling out great quotes. The problem is that these quotes become detached from the overall argument. In this case, the editor has selected many, many quotes in which Machiavelli agrees with common wisdom and morality. But that means that Machiavelli's most interesting moments -- and his method -- become lost, and his observations become banal. When they are reintegrated into the overall arguments that Machiavelli advances, they again become vital and original.

Take the statement that "It is the laws that make men good" (p.444). In itself, it seems a fairly banal observation, in consonance with the church of Machiavelli's day (though contrasted to the book of Hebrews, which states that the Law was given in order to expose and multiply sin). But integrated into Machiavelli's overall political philosophy, it becomes a pragmatic statement: one must establish a law to which men can relationally calibrate themselves. It is the difference that makes a difference, to paraphrase Bateson.

In all, it's an interesting document. I've not flinched from recommending Machiavelli, but I'll recommend this one with a caveat: read it after reading Machiavelli's major works.

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(Reading Roundup: Engestrom's umpires and Latour's cosmos)

Originally posted: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 18:55:55

We have two very different articles today, with no theme binding them together save that they are both responses to articles I have not yet read.

Engeström, Y. (2000). Activity theory and the social construction of knowledge: A story of four umpires. Organization, 7:301?310.

In this response to an article by Blackler et al. on activity systems, Engestrom uses the illustration of four baseball umpires to illustrate epistemological and methodological issues of activity theory. Engestrom's trying to clear the way for moving AT from a psychological theory to "an original and potentially powerful approach to the social construction of knowledge" that "may prove useful for practice-based attempts to reconceptualize knowledge in organizations" (p.301).

The four umpires represent the epistemological stances of traditional realism, constructivism, constructionism, and activity theory. From Karl Weick:

The story goes that three umpires disagreed about the task of calling balls and strikes. The first one said, 'I calls them as they is.' The second one said, 'I calls them as I sees them.' The third and cleverest umpire said, 'They ain't nothin' till I calls them.' (quoted on p.301)

Engestrom methodically goes through these three stances, arguing that the shared problem is individualism: "the assumption that he or she as an individual is the center of construction of knowledge and reality" (p.302). But in the fourth, activity-theoretical perspective, the umpire can be "the center of activity" at moments, but not throughout. "In the next action, someone else takes the position of the subject" (p.304). In this activity system, the activity can be disturbed and dealt with by various actors occupying the subject position. Engestrom gives the example of an umpire who, observing the reactions of the crowds during foul balls and reviewing the stats afterwards, works with her colleagues to uncover a betting scandal. Engestrom's point is that the activity is collective and works through contradictions; "the fourth umpire crosses the boundaries of her given role and becomes involved in the initiation of a historical reorganization of the entire game of baseball in Finland" (p.305).

The contradiction is identified as the primary contradiction of capitalism, use-value vs. exchange-value, here featured as the conflicting outcomes of winning vs. profit. Organized betting has tipped the scales here, leading to a secondary contradiction between the game's rules and its object.

So far so familiar. But here we get to the methodological issues.

The first issue: "Blackler et al. (this issue) state that, rather than analyzing an organization as a single activity system, they deem it more satisfactory to analyze the organization as a network of nested and overlapping activity systems" (p.307). "But I favor carefully grounded analyses and worry about shortcuts. From Blackler et al.'s article we learn little about the 'internal systemic connections' of the three Strategy Development Groups, and even less about their concrete actions" (p.308).

The second issue: Engestrom applauds the concept of multiple perspectives, but these perspectives can be discussed under multivoicedness (Bakhtin) and is "inherent in the speech, thought, and action of every individual" (p.308). That is, perspectives should be empirically demonstrable through speech rather than inferred, second-order constructs.

The third issue: Learning. "Activity theory is at its best in analyzing such poorly understood processes of developmental transformations over time. Expansive learning is energized by historically accumulated developmental contradictions within and between activity systems, and it is triggered by disturbances and concrete innovative actions" (pp.308-309).

Latour, B. (2004). Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics? Comments on the peace terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge, 10(3):450?462.

In this response, Latour goes over the argument he developed in War of the Worlds, that the separation of nature and culture serves as a way to underpin ethnocentrism/multiculturalism (two sides of the same coin). He starts out with a great illustration:

famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools. Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls?that much seemed obvious?but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. (p.451)

Were the Europeans spiritual entities, or human beings?

The Amerindians? experiment was as scientific as the Europeans?. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. (p.452)

So the Europeans looked for social proof while the Amerindians used a naturalistic methodology. The point?

The relevance of this anecdote should be apparent: at no point in the Valladolid controversy did the protagonists consider, even in passing, that the confrontation of European Christians and Amerindian animists might be framed differently from the way in which Christian clerics understood it in the sixteenth century. At no point were the Amerindians asked what issue they took to be in dispute, nor is Beck asking now. (p.452).

The Europeans and Amerindians both assumed that there is a univeral baseline for the negotiation of a dispute (p.453) -- a limiting factor to the disputes, a universal stasis that all parties can reach. Latour says no, and draws on Isabelle Stengers' work for backing. And that's the basis of his critique of Beck:

For Beck, as for most sociologists and all political scientists, wars rage because human cultures have (and defend) differing views of the same world. If those views could be reconciled or shown to differ only superficially, peace would follow automatically. This way of understanding cosmos and cosmopolitics is limited in that it puts a limit to the number of entities on the negotiating table. But if cosmosis to mean anything, it must embrace, literally, everything?including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act. (p.454)

This view is not satisfactory: "If this be peace, I must say I prefer war. By war I mean a conflict for which there is no agreed-upon arbiter, a conflict in which what is at stake is precisely what is common in the common world to be built" (p.455). Open war is preferable to cold war, in which one side indulgently allows "multicultural" interpretations of the one nature, i.e., separates nature and culture with the implicit understanding that one culture really does understand nature better than the others. Nature becomes an absolute arbiter, the voice of God. We might as well have open war leading to open negotiations than this cold war in which resentments fester! And they do, not just in the "other cultures": "anyone who holds that fabricated means untrue, and made means fake, tends toward fundamentalism" (p.460). "And when one fundamentalism butts heads with another, no peace talks are possible because there is nothing to discuss: pedagogical wars are waged to the bitter end" (p.461). And here's the knockout: "My main objection, then, to the peace terms of Ulrich Beck is that he has not put the West?s own native fundamentalism up for discussion. Our naturalism has failed: it was a war plan disguised as a peace plan, and those against whom we directed it are no longer fooled. Naturalism, like any fundamentalist ideology, amounts to a prejudice against fabrication" (p.461, my emphasis).

Reading :: Organizing Modernity

Originally posted: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:37:02

Organizing Modernity

by John Law

Q: What did the informant say to the postmodern ethnographer?

A: "But enough about you, let's talk about me for a while."

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Reading :: Dialogues

Originally posted: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:49:16

Dialogues

by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet

This book belongs to a series of conventional interviews with philosophers, but since Deleuze refused to perform a traditional interview, it turned into a coauthored book between Deleuze and his interviewer, Claire Parnet. This move keeps Deleuze from being interrogated, something he and Parnet both agree is not desirable. But it also means that Deleuze is not asked to communicate in a different mode; we don't get the different perspective that we typically get in interviews (which is why we read them in the first place). Instead, Parnet starts to write like Deleuze, so much so that I had a hard time figuring out who was who. This was a stated goal, presented as a struggle against the interview genre, but it seemed like flat-out colonization to me. And as a result, I saw nothing here that was not covered in greater length in A Thousand Plateaus. Go read that book instead -- or better yet, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.

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iCal hack to print events

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:13:47

NOTE: This hack is no longer available due to subsequent changes in how iCal stores files -- I never got around to recoding the script, and now the original files are lost in the mists of time.

One reason I've been trying out different pieces of software for time management is that iCal doesn't have a way to print a list of events. You can print out calendars by day, week, and month, but you can't print out the tabular list that you get from doing an incremental search. That's too bad -- it's not a hard piece of functionality to implement, and it's tremendously useful.

When I ran across an article on how to use Ruby to print iCal events, then, I was interested. Especially since the hack allows a lot of latitude in formatting. The original hack prints out today's and tomorrow's events from all calendars to text columns on the terminal. I'm more interested in multiday projects in a nicer format. So I spent a few hours teaching myself Ruby and came up with this:

The HTML file gets generated through a modified Ruby script (attached: projects.rb) whose output is piped into an HTML file (attached: printprojects.sh). The HTML file (attached: projects.html) is formatted with some basic CSS (attached: projects.css).

To try this out:

1. Download Ruby and install it.

2. Download all the files below. Save them to the Desktop or whatever folder you like, as long as they're in the same folder.

3. Open the Terminal and navigate to the folder.

4. Type: "chmod +x printprojects.sh"

5. Open iCal, create a calendar called "projects", and enter some events. Close iCal.

6. From the Terminal, type "./printprojects.sh".

7. In your web browser, navigate to the directory and open "projects.html". Your events should be in there.

The Ruby code is ugly as can be, and large chunks don't do anything. And it's hard-coded to produce exactly the output I want. If anyone wants to undertake some cleanup and revision, please be my guest!

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Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:38:03

I just finished re-skimming John Law's Aircraft Stories, which connects actor-network theory (or at least this postvariant) pretty firmly to Deleuze and Guattari's work. Based on that reading, I picked up Deleuze and Parnet's Dialogues, which weighs in at only about a hundred pages. Maybe I can finish it this weekend. First, though, I have to finish Law's Organizing Modernity; this one has some bright spots, though Law spends an awful lot of time talking about himself rather than his research site. (This is legitimized by invoking "reflexivity.") I've also picked up Marc Berg's Rationalizing Medical Work, which should be interesting given Berg's involvement in the CHAT community. >

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(Reading Roundup: The Lightning Round)

Originally posted: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:10:47

I've read so many articles in the last few days that I don't have time to review them as thoroughly as usual. So here's a list of the articles and a couple of points on each.

Sheller, M. (2004). Mobile publics: beyond the network perspective. Environment and Planning, 22:39?52.

Embraces ANT's relationist materialism, but suggests that its metaphor of network is too limiting: "this metaphor of social networks is now being outmoded by the very processes of mobilisation of people, objects, and information enabled by the new communication technologies" (p.46). Instead, nominates the term "gel": "whereas a network implies clean nodes and ties, then, a gel is suggestive of the softer, more blurred boundaries of social interaction" (p.47). As in mainstream ANT, actors are network effects: "new 'persons' and 'places' are constantly emerging out of the social gel itself" (p.50). Has a terrific example of how phone networks enable new connections (p.49), which leads to a linking between ANT and new economy thought.

Callon, M. and Rabeharisoa (2003). Research "in the wild" and the shaping of social identities. Technology in Society, 25:193?204.

More linking on ANT and new economy:

Briefly, even if there are multiple markets and they are organized in different ways, all now share a common feature: users or consumers who take an ever greater role in defining demand, that is, in the conception of the products being offered to them" (p.194)

And a rare discussion of expertise in ANT:

As Harry Collins put it in a recent review, it is a mistake to jump from a critique of Western science to arguing for the abolition of the notion of expertise [20]. We would add that it is also a mistake to deny the existence of lay knowledge.

The AFM experience takes us even further in the adoption of a symmetrical point of view. It shows, first, that these types of knowledge are not contradictory but complementary, for ?when science is applied without taking local knowledge into account, it is often the poorer for it,>

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