Reading:: Complexities

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

Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading :: Activity-Centered Design

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

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

by Geri Gay, Helene Hembrooke

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

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

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

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

(Upcoming Features)

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

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

Any other suggestions? Let me know.

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Reading:: Politics of Nature

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

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

by Bruno Latour

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

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

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

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

He pulls it off.

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

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

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

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Game :: Eternal Darkness

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

Eternal Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Substance of Style

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

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

by Virginia Postrel

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

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

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

by Mikhail Bakhtin

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

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

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

by P. N. Medvedev

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

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

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

by P. N. Medvedev

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

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

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

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

Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

by V. N. Volosinov

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

Originally posted: Fri, 05 Mar 2004 23:51:07

Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

by Michel Serres, Bruno Latour

Michel Serres, the "maverick" French philosopher who became one of Bruno Latour's chief inspirations, is the focus of this book-length series of interviews conducted by Latour himself. Since I'm reading quite a bit on Latour right now, I had to pick up the book. And I'm glad I did, although based on these interviews, I don't admire Serres nearly as much as Latour appears to.

In these interviews, Serres is quite clearly managing his image as a maverick -- declaring boldly that he has "neither masters nor disciples" (though later he urges a pedagogy in which his insights should be passed to students); that intellectual work is best done individually and in seclusion rather than through discussion (though he edges toward a dialogic understanding throughout and warms to discussion under Latour's prodding); that philosophers and scientists have manufactured a split and he is the bridge between them (though he eventually acknowledges others' work, including Latour's, that covers the same ground); that he doesn't bother reading other philosophers (though he eventually demonstrates that he has). At times thoughtful, bombastic, and rash, Serres also has some very interesting ideas that have clearly influenced Latour's. And obviously his style has as well. More on that in a minute.

As much as Serres has influenced Latour, Latour seems to want to confirm his own reading of Serres' work. So when they talk about modernism, for instance, Serres is clearly uncomfortable making statements -- he professes to understand little about modernism as philosophy defines it, and even less about postmodernism -- and Latour tends to lead Serres by defining the two, sketching his notion of amodernism, and pushing Serres into agreeing with it! But at other times, Latour seems too unwilling to press this elder philosopher on his sometimes rash statements, such as the one about discussion. Latour is more interested in Serres' understanding of time and his style of writing.

Style, in fact, is one of the more interesting topics under discussion. Serres' style is often described as "poetic," both by his critics and his admirers. He and Latour agree that coming from either side, the description is insulting. Rather, Serres says, style functions as a substitute for the rigorous mathematics he studied in his youth, mathematics that are not flexible enough to constitute the philosophical method he needed. Style, as Latour remarks, reveals methodology. (One suspects that Latour is talking about himself as well.) In particular, Serres' works repeatedly use figures such as Hermes, the Troubador of Knowledge (sounds like a Rush album, doesn't it?), and Jupiter to embody and explicate the tensions across cultures and histories. As he explains, religion forms one of the most basic connections among people and their objects, so drawing on figures from religion helps to surface these connections. Similarly, Serres likes to bring together similarities from different eras: fluid dynamics in contemporary studies and in ancient texts, the Challenger accident and sacrifices to Baal. He sees time as a handkerchief that one can crumple in such a way as to connect any point to any other -- events as parts of fluctuating networks -- and thus calls into question the themes of cultural-historical development that make such as big part of Marxist approaches. "Time develops more like the flight of Verlaine's wasp {speeding, unpredictable, erratic] than along a line, continuous or regularly broken by dialectic war" (p.65). (Not coincidentally, he also has harsh things to say about the Stalinists that dominated French universities during his graduate days.)

As the quote above implies, development is not his only angle of attack against Marxism. He also deplores dialectic, which he calls "the logic of the masters" (p.38), the imposed conditions that constrain too many discussions. And of this logic, he says:

Dialectics recites a logic so impoverished that anything and everything can be drawn from it. In it you have only to set up a contradiction, and you will always be right. Ex falso sequitur quodlibet -- From the false comes anything. Ever since the invention of classical formal logic we have known that it's possible to deduce anything, true or false, from contradiction, from the pairing of true and false, and that this deduction is valid. This is the source of the dialectical ensemble of constructions, of deductions -- each more valid than the last, but totally without interest. Even in their logical trappings war or polemics remain sterile. (p.155)

Apart from the impoverishment of dialectics, he implies that this method seeks to settle the past -- but the past is never really settled; dialogues, artifacts, and indeed all aspects of our world are not homogeneous and synthesized but rather heterogeneous and lumpy. Artifacts are themselves aggregates of scientific and technical solutions, contemporary only in their assemblage (p.45), polychronic (p.60). For this reason he says that the past, like the future, is unpredictable (p.87). One can see strong affinities to Bakhtin's work here -- though Serres has appeared to rashly condemn all dialogue.

All in all, this book was very interesting, partially because it served as a primer to Serres' works (which I shall have to pick up sometime) and partially because it gave me insight into Latour's thoughts -- both his influences and, through his questions, his current stands.

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(Coming features)

Originally posted: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:33:33

Well, I've been too buried in classes to make much progress. But I recently ordered several books from Amazon (mostly used -- the online used book market is phenomenal) and the first couple came in Friday. I've already reviewed Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life, but I haven't yet read or reviewed Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Latour's book-length interview with French philosopher Michel Serres. Serres was one of Latour's strongest influences, so I'm looking forward to reading this book next and perhaps using it as a point of departure for Serres' other works. I also ordered Latour's latest book, which will be out in April, as well as Mol and Law's recent edited collection. Hopefully I'll be able to read, evaluate, and blog these soon.

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Reading:: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Originally posted: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:31:34

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

by Donna J. Haraway

In a previous review, I suggested that Haraway's Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse had an undercurrent of hesitancy or insecurity. No such undercurrent is to be found here, in her earlier book, and I think perhaps that's because the later book was stylistically more unconventional. Haraway was trying something new, perhaps trying too hard. But in this, perhaps her best known and most widely read book, Haraway is at the top of her form. In this collection of essays from 1978 to 1989, Haraway explores a variety of topics that center around questions regarding biology and genetics. How are these constructed, how do they represent us, how do they interact politically, socially, and culturally?

Such questions lead to investigations of sex and gender, and have particular currency as the United States debates how to handle taboo subjects such as homosexual unions. In one chapter, for instance, Haraway examines research accounts on simians from the early 1900s to the 1980s. She points out that over and over again, researchers would attribute heterosexual relations to the natural state of the animal, and homosexual relations to the effects of captivity. According to her, there's no strong rationale for this separation; it's essentially a circular argument. Other types of gender and sex relations are similarly rationalized, such as "prostitution" (simians performing sexual favors in exchange for items), aggressiveness, and infanticide. She concludes that for many of these studies, and certainly the most influential ones, simians are being read through the template of the nuclear family -- that is, when apes behave like us, they are seen as behaving "naturally," and that "natural" behavior boomerangs to support arguments that the nuclear family is itself "natural."

This suspicion leads her to other studies and other arguments. Perhaps her best known work is "A Cyborg Manifesto," in which she lays out a post-Marxist vision for socialist-feminism. Here, the controlling mode is irony, which she says is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically. We should embrace this ironic mode, she says, taking both pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and responsibility for their construction. That is, we should become cyborgs: decentralized, interconnected, having given up on organic unity. The premier cyborg technology is writing; the politics of cyborgs is a struggle against the one perfect code, the "god trick."

This god trick is taken up in Chapter 9. Science, she says, lays claim to a God's-eye view of the world, the view from nowhere. But, she says, "the form in science is the artefactual-social rhetoric of crafting the world into effective objects" (p.185). (Notice the strong affinity to Latour's work.) In opposition, she argues for a feminist account in which "situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge" (p.198). Again, sounds a lot like Latour here, though Latour wouldn't use the term "dialectic."

This book is important, as so many people have discovered. As I've mentioned, it has many connections with Latour and similar work. But it also gives a window into the shortcomings of Marxism and a template for dealing with those shortcomings. And it provides important theoretical work to ground methodologies for investigating within the feminist/situated account.

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Reading:: Datacloud

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 00:12:40

Datacloud

by Johndan Johnson-Eilola

I just finished reading the manuscript for this book. It hasn't been published yet, but it's slated for the Computers & Composition series. Because it's not yet published, I'm not going to give the book a full review at this point. But what I will say is that I think this is going to be an important book for computers and writing.

That's not because the book breaks a lot of new theoretical ground. It employs Reich's notion of symbolic-analytic work and Hall's articulation theory in much the way that Johndan's earlier articles have done. But Johndan turns this framework to the question of how we encounter texts. We used to encounter them one at a time, he says: we would read a book, interact with an interface, etc. But now we don't just read texts, we inhabit a fully textualized space, a "datacloud" in which many texts physically surround us and compete for our attention. Our computer screens display browsers, email, IM all at the same time, and next to them, sticky notes, whiteboards, and printed texts, signs, litter ... If we are now immersed in texts, inhabiting textual landscapes, then how does that change reading and writing? Johndan's answer is that we spend more time on the surfaces of texts and less time engaged "deeply" in them. And that's okay, he says.

I like this text. I like its informality: Johndan manages to keep the text light even when investigating texts with articulation theory, which means that this book could be used for undergraduate seminars. I like that it attempts to provide a general theory of textual interaction rather than fixating on MOOs or IM or other specific technologies that may evolve into something unrecognizable by the time the book hits print. I like that it still engages with specific examples such as MOOs, IM, and whiteboards. I like that it is self-indulgent enough to discuss turntablism in detail.

There are certain limitations to the text, but I'll wait until print to discuss them. For now, look for this book to be printed and take a look for yourself.

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Reading:: The Dialogic Imagination

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:38:05

The Dialogic Imagination

by Mikhail Bakhtin

I rarely read fiction anymore; I find studies and theoretical texts more interesting and usually more vital than fiction. But whenever I read Bakhtin, I begin to think that literary criticism could be a fascinating business. Bakhtin approaches his texts the way I approach mine: as documents that shed light on their cultural-historical moment and tell us about the activities in which they were born and matured. Bakhtin is part literary critic, part language theorist, part covert political theorist.

So although Bakhtin's analysis here is focused on the novel and other literary genres, some of his work can be applied to other texts.

In particular, Bakhtin has a lot to say about social languages and how they have their own logics, lines of development, values, and implementations. Generic languages and professional languages, he says, are "permeated with concrete value judgments; they knit together with specific objects and with the belief system of certain genres of expression and points of view of certain professions" (p.289). These social languages are particular points of view and cannot be neutral; language is a concrete heteroglot conception; the word is half someone else's (p.293).

The dialogues among these languages (and their social worlds) preoccupies Bakhtin. The key concept here is dialogism. Social languages, he says, recapitulate their contradictory history; they were formed through dialogue between different points of view and never entirely resolved. And he implies -- though saying so explicitly would be rather dangerous in Bakhtin's time and place -- that dialogism is not dialectical: the voices do not yield a unified whole or a resolution, but an amalgam (see pp.330-31). Bakhtin says it much more clearly in Speech Genres and Other Essays, in which he mocks dialectic as an impoverished, monologized version of dialogue. I see an argument here not unlike Latour's, but I also understand that dialectic is perhaps more subtle and nuanced than either Bakhtin or Latour portray it. I'll be looking at this question more carefully soon.

Bakhtin has a lot to say about genre here as well, and his discussion has a lot of congruence with Vygotsky's notion of mediation and with distributed cognition. I've reviewed this work elsewhere (Spinuzzi 2003). He also talks about the chronotope, a really interesting concept that I am having trouble relating to my own work. Suffice it to say that this book is a classic. Although it drags in spots, it really does nail down and illustrate key concepts that, as a whole, demonstrate the well fleshed out framework that Bakhtin developed -- one whose potential, I think, is far from being exhausted.

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Reading:: Mind in Society

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:31:25
Mind in Society
by Lev Vygotsky
The first time I read this seminal work was in graduate school. I was coming to it fresh from reading later activity theory work (AT is genetically related to, but conceptually separate in some ways from Vygotsky's work) and Bakhtin. So I spent a lot of time looking at the basic concepts of mediation and internalization/externalization that debuted in Vygotsky's work. I mostly related these concepts to adult workers, though the book deals with developmental psychology in young children.
Well, now I have a two-year-old who is busily acquiring language. So rereading these smart and innovative studies was illuminating in a different way. Vygotsky treats his young participants with respect and admiration, using Marx's work as a basis for understanding how they absorb culture and how they contribute to it in turn. Reading Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" before this book helped to put it in context: like Marx in that brief piece, Vygotsky wants to acknowledge the social-cultural-historical shaping of individuals without giving up the individuals' agency. So he rejects the botanical model in vogue at the turn of the 18th century (think kindergarten) as well as the notion of instinctual or inborn "stages" that children march through (think Piaget). Rather, he explores how children's development involves the interplay of biological capacities and cultural, mediated ones.
The notion of mediation is terribly important here, and Vygotsky illustrates it well with accounts of his many studies. He argues that we rarely do what animals do -- act directly on the environment -- but instead work through mediators. For example, we tie a knot in a handkerchief (or to use an analogous illustration from the US, we might tie a string around our finger) to remember something. Or to use another illustration: an infant might reach vainly for an object which is then handed to her by a parent. Eventually the grasping (an attempt to control the environment directly) becomes pointing (a sign that helps to "control" the parent). The mediator not only helps to carry out an activity that would be difficult otherwise, it changes the character of the activity; it qualitatively transforms it. And in learning and taking up a culture's mediators, we become acculturated.
Look at what this does to rhetorical theory. We tend to think of genres as communications -- ways to offer or transmit information. But for Vygotsky, I think these genres would function just as pointing does: they control or regulate or mediate both our activities and those of others. Although Vygotsky agrees that interpersonal and intrapersonal mediation are different and that tool and sign mediation are different, he provides a framework for talking about them both and relating them in terms of development. Genres are seen not as vehicles for transmitting information but as ways of exercising some influence and, in doing so, qualitatively changing the activity.
The concept of internalization/externalization is a direct result of applying mediation to learning. Something that mediates our behavior from the outside -- let's take the example of a checklist -- can over time be operationalized, even to the extent that the checklist is superfluous. And at points -- such as when a worker needs to teach a trainee how to do her tasks -- that checklist can be externalized. But internalization and externalization are qualitative changes, not simply storing and ejecting. Vygotsky was monist, and mediation was one way he got around the Cartesian divide, so it's unfortunate that he used such Cartesian-sounding terms.
Anyway, this is a landmark book and a surprisingly quick and easy read. I expect to come back to it frequently as I sort out my ideas on mediation in particular.

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(Back online)

Originally posted: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 00:08:03

Well, the entire CWRL site was down for a couple of days because someone hacked a few of the older accounts. I never realized how much I rely on this blog to go back over my thoughts, copy and paste discussions, and examine shifts in my thinking. Fascinating, and I wish I had started doing this stuff earlier.

I've returned to Bakhtin's classic The Dialogic Imagination and am slowly working my way through it while simultaneously rereading articles on genre and activity for the chapters I'm currently drafting. Classes start Tuesday and it's possible that my grad course will make, so my reading list will possibly be dominated by those texts for a while.

In other news, I see that Jenny Formerly from the Blog is continuing my discussion of video games. I talked yesterday with Jason Craft about similar topics -- MMORPGs, mostly. There's an interesting field to research here that has mostly been elided in computers and writing discussions, don't you think?

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Game :: Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Originally posted: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 10:06:50

Okay, this isn't an academic book, it's a game. But I just finished it and I think console games have become fairly mature narrative genres, so I want to talk about it.

First, let's put the game in perspective. The Legend of Zelda series is one of the older ones around, going way back to the mid 1980s. But the landmark game, and the gold standard of gaming, is The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. This is the one I first discovered, and it took up a considerable amount of my time in Lubbock during my second year at Texas Tech. How I managed to do research and teaching I don't know. With an epic storyline, innovative 3D gameplay and targeting system, clever puzzles, specialized tools, and a wide, fleshed-out world to explore, Ocarina was and is remarkable. It's been called the Citizen Kane of console games. Personally, once I finished the game, I actually felt emotional attachments to the characters I had met along the way. Hope that doesn't sound too fanboy.

Ocarina was followed up with Majora's Mask. Superficially, it had the same elements as Ocarina, including the same graphics, targeting system, types of puzzles, etc. But it fell flat. A big part of the problem, for me, was the time factor. You had three "days" to keep the moon from crushing the Earth. Sure, you could reset the clock with your ocarina of time, but then you have to relive everything -- like Groundhog Day, but with enough persistent elements that you could win the game eventually. You even had to keep an appointment book, for crying out loud. That's the last thing I wanted to do after an overscheduled day of teaching, research, and web development. So I quit in disgust.

One can imagine that I felt some trepidation at picking up the new Zelda game, The Wind Waker. After all, it couldn't match Ocarina.

It didn't, but it was a strong effort. The game's authors returned to the epic story arc that had been used so expertly in Ocarina, setting the gameplay on a vast unexplored ocean that turns out to be the flooded remains of Hyrule, the setting of Ocarina. The flood, we are told, was the gods' attempt to defeat the enemy Ganondorf, who had been defeated in Ocarina and mystically imprisoned, only to escape somewhere between the end of Ocarina and the beginning of Waker. (You'll recognize the borrowing of the flood story from the Bible and Gilgamesh; Waker borrows freely from world myths.) For someone who has battled their way through Ocarina to save Hyrule, this realization -- and the walk through the remains of Hyrule Castle, weirdly preserved in a vast bubble under the sea -- is breathtaking.

Breathtaking is also the word to describe the graphics. Although initial demo footage in 2000 suggested thatWind Waker would feature photorealistic rendering, the finished product opted for a cel-shaded animated look. This choice has been controversial among fans, but I appreciated how it lightened the mood of what was really a very dark story. (If you want a photorealistic Link -- the hero of Ocarina of Time -- you can buy Soul Caliber 2 instead.) But it also made the game seem more childlike and child-oriented. The puzzles are easier too.

You don't quite get the same wide open feeling of world exploration in Wind Waker that you did in Ocarina, but it's close. You also don't develop the same attachment to the characters you meet. And, honestly, the ending was not satisfactory. I have to place blame squarely on the game's designers here: the story arc, which was very strong up to that point, petered out in the final movies. Waker shoots for the same bittersweet mood that Ocarina's ending provided -- but we aren't invested enough in the characters, the land, or the gameworld to have that depth of reaction. And -- how do I say this? -- compared to the final battles of Ocarina, this one was anticlimactic.

Nevertheless, a strong game, and one that I would recommend to others -- after they play Ocarina, which is now available for the GameCube. Next I'll be working on Eternal Darkness, a game that has obviously drawn from Ocarina's third-person perspective, puzzles, targeting system, and complex tool use. It strikes me that gaming has replaced fiction reading in my life.

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(Reading roundup: Russell, Bazerman, Freedman and Smart, Spinuzzi on Genre Assemblages)

Originally posted: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 09:22:09

Well, someone always has to be a troublemaker. In my last post, I put together a nice neat taxonomy of frameworks for studying genre assemblages. But something was bothering me, so I went back and looked at some more papers. And lo and behold, there seems to be considerable slippage in the genre systems framework. Some papers describe genre systems pretty much as I have. But some, most notably David Russell's 1997 piece "Rethinking Genre in School and Society," drive much closer to the notion of genre ecologies that I have forwarded: it looks at dialectical relationships among genres (although I try not to use the term dialectical -- I'm still trying to sort out the whole dialectics vs. dialogics distinction that Bakhtin draws); it recognizes informal as well as formal genres; and it doesn't attempt to put genres in a sequential order. Truth be told, I think Bazerman tacks closer to this conception in his later work as well, and perhaps the more limiting description of genre systems in his 1994 piece comes from not fully recognizing and drawing the distinctions that later became more obvious in contrast with the important groundlaying work he has done. (Does that make sense?)

I note other points of slippage as well. For instance, at about the time I was coining the term genre ecology in my own unpublished work, Freedman and Smart published the article ?Navigating the Currents of Economic Policy? (1997) in which they used the same term in print. Despite their different origins, the two conceptions draw on the same body of work and are similar enough that they can be discussed under the same heading.

In Freedman and Smart's article, they base the notion of genre ecology on Edwin Hutchins' notion of a tool ecology (1995). And like Hutchins, they use the term to refer to a symmetrical understanding of artifacts informed by distruibted cognition. The important point to note here is that when Freedman and Smart describe genre ecologies, they refer to them as "systems of genre." Again, the distinction between the two frameworks hadn't been made yet, leading me to believe that they didn't see a particularly strong distinction. Again, I think that distinction has become more important over time.

But let's push further into this article and into some of my own to explore the notion of genre ecology a bit further. "Genres interrelate with each other in intricate, interweaving webs. These webs delicately trace routes and networks already in place," Freedman and Smart explain (p.240). In these webs or overlapping layers, genres do not necessarily have a sequential relationship, not do they necessarily overlap in the sense that Orlikowski and Yates (1994) describe. Rather, they can be connected and used in rather different ways; the emphasis is on dynamism and adaptability to exigencies. In this framework, genres are not simply performed or communicated, they represent the "thinking out" of a community as it cyclically performs an activity. They represent distributed cognition in the sense that cognitive work is spread among the genres and the artifacts that belong to them, and opportunistic connections among those genres are historically made, cemented through practice, yet dynamic enough that new genres can be imported or can evolve to meet new contingencies.

These themes continue in later work on genre ecologies. In Spinuzzi and Zachry's article "Genre ecologies: An open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation" (2000), the authors stress contingency, or the opportunistic coordinations that people and activities make among genres (p.173); decentralization, or the "distribution of usability, design, and intention across the ecology of genres" ? a notion directly influenced by work in distributed cognition (p.174); and stability, or "the tendency of users to make the interconnections between the genres they use conventional and official" (p.175) ? a sort of "dynamic equilibrium" reached within the genre ecology. Since genres are contingent on each other, the success of any given genre depends on its interconnections with other genres and how those genres jointly mediate a given activity.

That last point is important: rather than focusing on communication, as the other three frameworks have done, the genre ecology framework focuses on mediation. In Tracing Genres through Organizations (2003), I describe this emphasis on mediation: "Mediated actions are not just a detour from unmediated actions, a different set of goal-directed steps leading to the same outcome. Rather, mediating artifacts qualitatively change the entire activity in which workers engage" (p.38). A given genre mediates an activity, but it does not do so alone; it works in conjunction with the entire ecology of genres available. I call this compound mediation (p.47). As I demonstrate in the book and elsewhere, genre ecologies are constantly importing, hybridizing, and evolving genres (and occasionally discarding them), and these dynamic changes in a genre ecology tend to change the entire activity. Yet that dynamism is counterbalanced by a relative stability, particularly in more mature activities: genres in an ecology "have developed relatively stable connections or coordinations with other genres" (p.48).

(Careful readers will note the strong similarities between what I'm talking about and how Russell describes genre systems in his 1997 piece. He was my dissertation chair, after all. But I think there are differences too. I think there's a stronger emphasis on contingency and decentralization in my work.)

It's not an accident that in many of the quotes above, the agent is "genre" or "genre ecologies" rather than human beings. Genre ecologies are grounded in theories of distributed cognition, particularly activity theory, and consequently emphasize genres as collective achievements that act just as much as they are acted upon. Whereas the other frameworks are firmly asymmetrical, emphasizing a human being's control over, performance of, and communication through genres, the genre ecology framework is more symmetrical, replacing the notions of performance and communication with the notion of mediation. Mediating artifacts, as I state in the quote above, change the entire activity ? whether they communicate between people (as in memos, email, and presentations) or whether they are privately used to mediate one's own actions (as in checklists, handwritten notes, and even highly arranged stacks of paper). This symmetrical, mediated, interconnected approach brings into question the sequential, communication-focused understanding of genre assemblages that we see in the other frameworks, and it also tends to highlight idiosyncratic, unofficial, often invisible genres. In that sense, genre ecologies are somewhat similar to the notion of "datacloud" that Johndan Johnson-Eilola has advanced (2001).

Anyway, I'm going to continue working on this. The problem with writing a framework essay (which is what I'm doing) is that the edges are blurry. Framework essays impose boundaries and black-box theoretical tools, which is important work, but let's not pretend that it's simply descriptive. Right?

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(Reading roundup: Devitt, Bazerman, Yates & Orlikowski on Genre Assemblages)

Originally posted: Thu, 01 Jan 2004 11:35:45

So I've been reading a variety of genre-related articles and chapters lately, gearing up for the big genre discussion in the book I'm working on. If you know my previous work, you know that I'm really very interested in how genres are brought to bear on activities and how they jointly mediate them; I've been using the term "genre ecologies" to discuss these complexes or clouds of genres. Well, others have used terms to describe assemblages of genres as well. Until now I've sort of vaguely nodded to this other literature, but I think that genre ecologies do work that they don't. So finally I'm going to draw some distinctions.

To do that, I've been reading about genre sets, genre systems, genre repertoires, and (of course) genre ecologies. On first glance, they all seem to be interchangeable. But poking around in some of the canonical texts of each, I see some fairly important differences.

Amy Devitt's 1991 essay "Intertextuality in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional" is the canonical text on genre sets (at least as far as I know -- it sure is referenced often). In her examination of how accountants get things done, she posits that texts form networks of interaction for the accountants. Each text connects to the previous text in a chain of actions. "In examining the genre set of the community, we are examining the community's situations, its recurring activities and relationships." And she adds, "This genre set not only reflects the profession's situations; it may also help to define and stabilize those situations" (p.340). Her focus, in fact, tends to be on that sequential and stabilizing work (p.341), and that leads her to examine the official (disciplinarily developed, stabilized, and regulated) texts that do the most to perform this work. Although she counsels us to "examine the role of all texts and their interactions in a community" (p.354, my emphasis), she only examines the "products" of the work -- memos, correspondence, tax provision reviews -- not unofficial genres such as transitory annotations, notes, aides memoire, etc. These official genres bound and enable professions, in Devitt's account, but they appear to serve serial and strictly communicative functions, not self-mediational ones. Remember when you were doing math in high school and the teacher told you not just to write your answer, but to "show your work"? Genre sets don't show the work; they don't expose the unofficial genres that play such a large part in distributing cognition. They're scriptures, not scribbles. Objects, not tools. They are asymmetrical in Latour's sense.

They are also, as Charles Bazerman points out, focused on individual perspectives. In "Systems of genre and the enactment of social intentions," he seeks to extend the notion of genre sets by talking about genre systems. "These are interrelated genres that interact with each other in specific settings. Only a limited range of genres may appropriately follow upon one another in particular settings, because the success conditions of the actions of each require various states of affairs to exist" (pp.97-98). Like genre sets, then, genre systems are made up of sequences of genres that hand the baton of communication onward. Each genre is required in order for the next one to be produced and used. That, of course, once again implies official genres and focuses away from the informal, unofficial assemblages of genres that we often bring to bear on our work. Unlike genre sets, genre systems involve "the full set of genres that instantiate the participation of all the parties" (p.99) -- but that "full set" appears not to be so full when we consider that unofficial genres are squeezed out.

JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski develop this notion of genre systems in "Genre systems: Structuring interaction through communicative norms" (2002). They still share Bazerman's view of genre systems as sequences of interrelated communicative actions that structure collaborative work (structure is particularly important to them), and they see these genres as being "linked or networked together" to constitute "a more coordinated communicative process" (p.14). Indeed, genre systems do not just support a social activity, they comprise it.

But this sequential understanding is not enough, for clearly people bring assemblages of genres to bear simultaneously on a problem. In their 1994 article "Genre repertoire: Structuring the communicative practices in organizations" (yes, there's that word "structure" again), Orlikowski and Yates mention that genres do not just sequence, they overlap. Through these two sorts of coordination, genres work together to produce a more communicative practice. Members of a community "tend to use multiple, different, and interacting genres over time. Thus to understand a community's communicative practices, we must examine the set of genres that are routinely enacted by members of the community" (p.542), and this set of genres is what Orlikowski and Yates term a genre repertoire. The authors recognize that this repertoire changes over time as new genres are improvised or otherwise introduced, and they suggest that explicating these changes over time can help us to understand changes in the community's communicative practices and organizing processes.

Orlikowski and Yates edge away from the rigidly sequential understandings of genre sets and genre systems here (although you notice that they return to that conception in 2002). The notion of genre repertoire is developmental and accounts for overlapping as well as sequential communicative actions. But at the same time, genre repertoires emphasize individual and group communicative performances: you perform a genre, but it doesn't perform you. That is, they still reflect an asymmetrical understanding of genre that exclusively deals with communication rather than mediation or (more broadly) distributed cognition. And because of the firm emphasis in communication, particularly communication in repeated enactments across a group, genre repertoires still emphasize the official rather than unofficial genres.

Looking at these frameworks has helped me to clarify some of the things I've been trying to do with genre ecologies. I find Orlikowski and Yates' distinction between overlapping and sequencing to be useful, though oversimplified. My genre ecology work has tended to emphasize the overlapping aspect. It has also emphasized mediation rather than communication -- and in doing so, has explored unofficial and idiosyncratic genre use more thoroughly than has been typically done in these other frameworks. At this point I won't go into the articles on genre ecologies that Mark Zachry and I have written, nor the related concept under the same name that Freedman and Smart wrote about in 1997. But in their emphasis on compound mediation, genre ecologies deal with a quite different phenomenon than do genre sets, systems, and repertoires: they deal with activity, whether individual or group. Any person or group can make connections and build assemblages (or ecologies) of heterogeneous genres to mediate their own or others' activities. Notice how communication drops out here, at least as a separate category, because mediation includes influence over one's community as well as oneself. This is an interesting but terribly underdeveloped point, and one that I'll have to think about for a while.

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Reading:: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Originally posted: Sun, 28 Dec 2003 05:16:43

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

(Note: A later review of this book is available.)

A Thousand Plateaus is a deeply influential book which, though first published in French in 1980, is being increasingly cited in rhetoric, technical communication, science studies, educational psychology, and the like. In in, Deleuze and Guattari introduce themes such as rhizomes, deterritorialization, bodies without organs (BwO), and the like. Through their highly metaphorical language, imaginatively written explanations, and their attempt to write the book as a rhizome -- even inviting readers to begin reading at any point rather than at the beginning -- Deleuze and Guattari perform as well as describe an approach to language that relies on heterogeneous, multiply linked assemblages.

I found the book to be excruciating and abandoned it on p.178.

Is it worthwhile to review a book of which I have read less than half? Perhaps so, especially because I strongly suspect that most people who cite this thing haven't read it all the way through either. When I see references to Deleuze & Guattari, they almost always focus on the notion of rhizome discussed in the first (and most readable) chapter. In any case, I'll take the authors at their word when they say in Chapter 1 that the book is written as a rhizome, an organic structure (or rather anti-structure) that is so interlinked that any part is as the whole.

This notion of rhizome, as I hint above, is the best traveled and most used concept from the book, at least in the literature I've read. "Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be," the authors tell us (p.5). Rhizomes may rupture in spots, temporarily, but everything is connected so these disruptions do not destroy the rhizome. The rhizome is an anti-genealogy: it does not rely on historical development, it links through and across states of being and ontologies. One can see how writers such as Bruno Latour and John Law, who have been applying the notion of heterogeneous networks to science and technology studies, would be intrigued by the concept. Frankly, I think they attempt to apply the concept much more concretely than Deleuze and Guattari do -- to actual empirical cases, not just to endlessly circulating semiotic systems -- and in doing so they expose some of the problems with the concept.

What problems? Here's Latour, from his chapter "Social theory and the study of computerized work sites":

Rhyzomes and heterogeneous networks are thus powerful ways of avoiding essences, arbitrary dichotomies, and to fight structures. But ... their limit is to define entities only through association. ... they become empty when asked to provide policy, pass judgement or explain stable features. ... Their dissolving power is so great that after having dissolved the illusions of critical postures, there is not much that is left and they even may turn into a somewhat perverse enjoyment of the diversity, perversity, heterogeneity and multiplicity of the unexpected associations they deploy so well. (1995, p.304).

The genius of rhizomes -- the point that we can put Cartesian distinctions behind us and examine the multiple and multiplying interconnections among people, practices, artifacts, ontologies, etc. -- is also its Achilles' heel. What do you do with them after you cry for the umpteenth time, "aha, there's no Cartesian divide!" You descend into the joyless, wearily self-indulgent spiral of deconstruction that Latour so rightly condemns as "perverse" here and in stronger terms in Pandora's Hope. Stability is lost -- or, rather, completely rejected -- as is any interest in or explanation of sociocultural development. The latter point is particularly corrosive to empirical examinations of work, and I think has fought against some of the more interesting work in science and technology studies.

Of course, Deleuze and Guattari didn't come up with the notion of rhizome with those studies in mind, and it's actually not very clear to me exactly what they want to apply rhizomes to. The examples in subsequent chapters, though, tend to be semiotic systems, endless regimes of signs forming infinite, infinitely circular networks (see especially Chapter 5). It seems to me that what the authors have given with one hand -- the notion of a rhizome composed of heterogeneous nodes across categories -- they take away with the other by immediately collapsing these heterogeneous nodes unto dreary, labyrinthine regimes of signs. We're back to the prison-house of language from which Latour, Law, Callon, and others worked so hard to release us. Behind our backs, Deleuze and Guattari restored the asymmetrical relationship between humans and nonhumans by insisting that the whole is interpreted. So we spiral back into an endless post-Freudian discussion of how pores resemble vaginas, a colorless set of instructions that a masochist might leave his dominatrix, and so forth.

That seemingly endless discussion involves a lot of neologisms and a lot of highly metaphoric language. Even some of the words seem endless, especially when you say them out loud. "Deterritorialization." "Bodies-without-organs." Frustratingly, it's very difficult to figure out these metaphors in spots, making the book read like a mystical text rather than an imaginatively constructed one. When Deleuze and Guattari say that language is not a map but a tracing, do they mean the same by trace that I do -- a sociocultural line of development? Who knows? As with any mystical, metaphoric text, A Thousand Plateaus requires the acolyte to read without immediate comprehension, to soak in the wisdom through multiple readings, to work out an endless regime of signs in his or her own life. Tons of words, teaspoons of insight.

I'm just not up for that, so I just stopped reading. Yes, I'll likely cite the first chapter as apparently everyone else does. But I can't imagine reading the rest of this excruciating book of my own free will.

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(So very tired)

Originally posted: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 09:50:14

No, I still haven't made it through Deleuze & Guattari yet. (I refuse to call them "D&G" as Jenny suggests.) And today the book was recalled. Fortunately my friendly colleague Mark Longaker has offered to loan me his copy, so I'll get after this during Christmas break. If I can tear myself away from playing the new Zelda on the GameCube.

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