Reading:: Chasing Technoscience

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

Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RC: Yes, that's what he says.

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

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

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Reading:: The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

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

The Art of War

by Sun Tzu

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

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

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Reading:: Fast Food Nation

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

Fast Food Nation

by Eric Schlosser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Prince

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

The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli, David Wootton (Editor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Languages of Edison's Light

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

The Languages of Edison's Light

by Charles Bazerman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

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

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

by M.M. Bakhtin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Complexities

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

Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading :: Activity-Centered Design

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

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

by Geri Gay, Helene Hembrooke

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

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

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

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

(Upcoming Features)

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

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

Any other suggestions? Let me know.

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Reading:: Politics of Nature

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

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

by Bruno Latour

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

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

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

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

He pulls it off.

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

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

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

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Game :: Eternal Darkness

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

Eternal Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Substance of Style

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

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

by Virginia Postrel

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

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

Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

by Mikhail Bakhtin

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

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

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

by P. N. Medvedev

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

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

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

by P. N. Medvedev

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

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

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reading:: Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

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

Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

by V. N. Volosinov

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

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

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

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

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

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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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