Reading:: Aramis or the Love of Technology

Originally posted: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 08:32:55

Aramis or the Love of Technology
by Bruno Latour

When I first read this book, about three years ago, I agreed with many of the reviewers that it was not one of his best works. Unlike Latour's previous work, Aramis is an experimental novel based on a real research study the author conducted -- a study of a massive R&D project meant to develop a revolutionary new public transportation system. The study is recast as a sort of mystery novel told from many different viewpoints: a fictional researcher named Norbert who resembles Latour; a research assistant trained as an engineer; administrators involved in various parts of the project (through interview transcripts); and even Aramis itself, cast as a sort of Frankenstein's monster who only wants to be made real. On my first reading I was quite skeptical of the premise and the execution. Now I think it's an outstanding book.

What happened? Well, in relation to the rest of Latour's writings, the book provides an extended and enlightening illustration. Latour's major themes up to this point (symmetry and asymmetry, diffusion and translation, syntagms and paradigms, black boxes, networks, traitors, etc.) all make appearances and all are discussed clearly and simply. If you have some familiarity with them, that is. If you don't -- and I really didn't three years ago -- things get muddled very quickly.

So the book is a partial success. I assume that Latour's aims are the same that Norbert describes at the end of the book, when he talks about writing his own experimental novel based on the project:

"And I'd actually like to do a book in which there's no metalanguage, no master discourse, where you wouldn't know which is strongest, the sociological theory or the documents or the interviews or the literature or the fiction, where all the genres and regimes would be at the same level, each one interpreting the others without anybody being able to say which is judging what." (p.298)

That doesn't quite happen, of course. Readers -- or at least this reader -- believe that Norbert the sociologist has a handle on things the whole time, just like Hercule Poirot, to whom he refers frequently. We believe that at some point the researchers will discover the "hidden staircase," the surprise that makes sense of the investigation. But, as in a standard murder mystery, the fun is in trying to figure out the mystery before the protagonists do. I wasn't able to, but that's partially because I couldn't get a good grasp on what I should be looking for. Three years ago, the "hidden staircase," when it was revealed, was a disappointment. This time it was a revelation.

Aramis is also an attempt to write a book that is accessible and interesting to general readers. I don't think it succeeded in that respect. But as an illustration of actor-network theory in progress -- and as an illustration of qualitative research in general -- it is interesting and valuable.

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Reading:: Make It Bigger

Originally posted: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 11:21:24

Make It Bigger
by Paula Scher

"A friend at CBS Records in the seventies," writes graphic designer Paula Scher in this career retrospective, "predicted that when I die, my epitaph will read, 'Art director of the original Boston album.' The thought has always horrified me."

Scher indeed art-directed the iconic cover, which shows several domed cities blasting off into space just in time to escape the explosion of the planet Earth. It takes a second glance to realize that the domes are really at the butt end of very large guitars. Any science fiction aficionado can pin the reference to James Blish's Cities in Flight, but Scher claims that she and the artists made it up themselves. Possible, I guess.

In any case, the anecdote is one example of the real value of the book. At every stage of her professional career, Scher meditates on what it means to be a graphic designer and how designers navigate various minefields to get their work done. She writes pages worth of advice about how to navigate various client relationships in order to preserve the designer's vision while making the necessary compromises. She talks about building negotiation points into comps so that she can appear to compromise with the client while protecting the most important points of her design. She describes how to identify strong actors in an organization and find ways to make them their allies, noting that once you have convinced a strong ally, the weaker people in the organization will fall into line. And she recounts her mistakes, noting that you learn much from your mistakes and nothing from your successes. Fascinating, rather Machiavellian in spots (and I mean that in a good way), and a great read if you're a designer or someone who might want to hire a designer.

As it happens, my wife is a designer and she insisted that I read this book. I'm glad she did, since design fascinates me. It would be very interesting to have a class read this book in conjunction with Karen Schriver's Dynamics in Document Design, a rather rationalist take on document design that leaves out politics, alliances, and negotiations altogether and pigeonholes designers like Scher as unresponsive to the client. Schriver is a very smart person, and my interactions with her have always been positive, but she tends to portray design as simply a matter of empirically determining the best, most functional way to design an item. In Schriver's world, varying goals and conflicting cultures are just noise. In Scher's, they are genuine interlocutors that must be brought into alignment with the designer's own goals.

Scher's book is not only interesting and well designed, it's reasonably short. Unlike most of the books I read, this one can be read in one sitting. I wasn't quite able to do so, primarily because my daughter kept urging me to read other texts to her.

A final poseur note. I actually met Paula Scher (I keep wanting to type "Pauly Shore") in 2001 at Design Ranch, an annual event put on by the Austin AIGA. My wife Gail was participating in the sessions and I was mostly hanging out and reading articles. Scher seemed to be a very approachable, down-to-earth person, in contrast to some of the more extreme personalities that seem to populate the field of graphic design. That intelligent, down-to-earth tone permeates the book and makes it a real page-turner. Pick it up and take a look.

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Reading:: Ecologies of Knowledge

Originally posted: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 21:06:53

Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology
by Susan Leigh Star (Editor)

Well, what a difference being well read makes. It turns out that two of the better essays in this collection -- by Latour and by Callon & Law -- are versions of essays in the Bijker and Law collection reviewed below. Nevertheless, this collection had some nice stimulative work in it. Susan Leigh Star's introduction, for instance, does some nice work on explaining the ecological metaphor as opposed to the network metaphor, although the explanation is unconvincing to me. (She sees the network metaphor as lacking because it implies that empty or blank spaces exist -- which is what I thought was the whole point of that metaphor.) Star also links ANT with pragmatism, discusses activity theory within this framework, deals with the question of how to interpret the notion of symmetry (i.e., it's not pantheism), and does quite a bit more. A great essay until the end, where she treats us to some of her own poetry. Brr.

Star also has a second essay on the politics of formal representations. I drew on this essay and Star's similar work when writing my book, so I'm already a big fan. Interestingly, I didn't get nearly as much out of it this time around. Perhaps that's because I know the territory so well now. Still, a strong essay.

Steve Woolgar's essay on integrating psychology and sociology is similarly interesting. I realized recently that psychology, sociology, and many of the other humanistic disciplines have taken up pieces of the programme originally taken up by rhetoric, so I feel less guilty about spending so much time reading their texts. Inevitably, these pieces of the programme have drifted away from each other, and Woolgar asks if they can be put back together again. He's pessimistic. I'm more optimistic; I suppose that's because activity theory is attempting to do exactly that. My favorite quote: "We need to recognize, instead, that 'cognitive' is an essentially odd notion" (p.174). Explanations of human activity in terms of cognition are, Woolgar maintains, premature at best.

Finally, Joan Fujimura's essay on cancer and biology was interesting in that she attempts an ANT-type analysis but attempts to replace the typically aggressive, warlike, competitive vocabulary with a more cooperative one, a vocabulary that she maintains does a better job of exploring distributed centers of authority. A worthwhile aim, although I found myself skimming the essay itself.

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(Reading Roundup: Latour Reviews Hutchins)

Originally posted: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 10:43:47

Reading Roundup. Still working on Star's Ecologies of Knowledge, but I got sidetracked when I discovered that UT has an online subscription to Social Studies of Science and some similar journals. I printed almost a ream of articles by Latour, Bowker, and similar folks and have almost finished reading them. In the mix: Latour's review of Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild from Mind, Culture, and Activity (a great journal that I didn't know UT even had a subscription to).

The latter was highly interesting because it begins to help me piece together something I began thinking about early in the blog: the relationship between actor-network theory and distributed cognition. Both take radically symmetrical (or I should say, symmetrical and therefore radical) views of the relationships between humans and nonhumans. Both attempt to eschew a micro-macro distinction. Both are pragmatic, broadly speaking (in passing, I note that Star draws the same connection between ANT and American pragmatism that I speculatively drew earlier in this blog.) But ANT comes out of sociology while DC comes from cognitive anthropology (if such a thing still exists). ANT avoids cognitive explanations while DC incorporates them by narrowly defining cognition and moving it primarily outside the head.

Other little differences begin to add up. Latour declares the macro-micro distinction dead, but I can think of few examples of his work that examine the fine details of human activity -- and even these fine details are described in general terms, along the lines of "then the lab tech cuts off one of the rat's toes." Hutchins similarly avoids a macro-micro distinction, but he uses cameras and coding schemes to dissect minute practices in ways that I can only describe as microanalytical. Latour focuses on chains of translation and displacement, while Hutchins describes chains of transformation through computations. Latour wants to make nonhumans actants, so he describes them in terms we normally reserve for humans (allies, traitors, compliant, recalcitrant, etc.) -- one envisions Latour living in a Disney cartoon where teapots sing and doors grumble, although Star cautions us against reading Latour through the lens of pantheism. Hutchins wants to stretch cognition across artifacts, so he describes it computationally and calls people a special kind of media, which on its face appears to be the opposite of Latour's tactic, creating a symmetric vocabulary by describing humans in terms reserved for nonhumans. (Of course, there's a long tradition of this in cognitive science and in Taylorism for that matter.)

I think the underlying difference between ANT and DC is that they're working on different problems. ANT isn't trying to unify the social and the cognitive -- Latour and Woolgar, in fact, decared a "moratorium" on the cognitive, believing it to be empty. On the other hand, I think that in some important way DC *is* trying to unify the two, just as activity theory is. So I'll have to investigate.

I'll also have to reread Geoff Bowker's book Science on the Run pretty soon. I just reread another one of his Schlumberger pieces and can see some resonances with my current project. More on that later.

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Reading:: Shaping Technology / Building Society

Originally posted: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 02:26:44

Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change
by Wiebe Bijker (Editor), John Law (Editor)

I keep intending to read something by Wiebe Bijker, who gets mentioned a lot whenever people talk about the sociology of technology, the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), the rhetoric of science and technology, etc. So when I noticed that he edited this frequently cited volume with John Law, I decided I had to pick it up.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this collection. Some of the essays are very good, and I'll doubtless end up photocopying them and citing them. In particular, standouts include the essay on the TRS-2 aircraft by Callon and Law (better than the later book project, reviewed below); Geoff Bowker's study of Schlumberger, a company with which I interned in 1997 and 1998 (Bowker's study also turned into a book project); and a couple of really strong linked essays by Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour. The latter essays come with a coauthored glossary with an inordinate number of words based on "script." Akrich and Latour's separate essays have a lot to say about user-centered design and the relationship between designers and users, and in fact I wish I had read them as I was revising my book manuscript -- but no matter, I can use them later.

(I think that Latour's essay is either a previous or a later draft of the one that shows up in Ecologies of Knowledge, ed. Susan Leigh Star. Since I'm reading that book now, I'll check and report back.)

So lots of these essays are good. Why should I feel ambivalent about the collection as a whole? Mostly, I think, because I feel like I'm reading the same story over and over. We approach an established technology (fluorescent light, steel, a patent) and as we investigate the historical record, behold! It turns out that politics, society, alliances, etc. were even more important than technological superiority when it came to establishing the dominant technology. Some of the essays go a bit farther than that, of course, such as Akrich, but the basic plot seemed to hold with nearly every one of the essays. It's like reading the collected works of Piers Anthony, only without the retarded sexuality.

As a historical document, though, the collection is very interesting in that it illustrates some of the later critiques of the sociology of science and technology that are made by Latour, Law, etc. The editors and many of the authors explicitly argue that we must balance the work of technology AND sociology; the book's motto might as well be "don't forget the social dimension." And in that sense it's a breath of fresh air to read the Akrich and Latour pieces, which take the "radical" (according to the editors) position of symmetry. Latour does this most explicitly, but Akrich demonstrates it more systematically from empirical data. Forget this business about society and technology, they argue, and recognize that there is no separating the two -- each is implicated in the other, not in the crude sense of Marx's "dead labor," but in a more complex, interactive, and dynamic way.

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(Reading roundup)

Originally posted: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 02:23:54

Reading roundup. So I've slowed down lately, which I imagine has displeased my legion of readers. I've been reading miscellaneous articles and proceedings papers rather than books. I won't summarize them here, but yes, most of them have to do with actor-network theory and related items. And most have been readings that I've skimmed through before, not completely gotten, and am suddenly starting to really appreciate now that I've done the requisite background reading. In particular, Reijo Miettinen's "The riddle of things: Activity theory and actor-network theory as approaches to studying innovations" (Mind, Culture, and Activity, 6(3)) is an insightful critique and comparison of the two approaches -- really nice work. In another vein, I've been reading Jenny From the Blog, where I recently got a shout out. I've also been spending evenings with my wife playing Perfect Dark on the N64. That's right, going old skool.

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Reading:: Aircraft Stories

Originally posted: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:02:23

Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience
by John Law

"Absence/presence, the absence of materiality that is also a presence -- no doubt that is what those who write actor-network studies intend when they talk of 'translation' and 'chains of translation'" (p.98). What a great sentence to encapsulate so many things that are wrong with this book. "No doubt" indeed. Actor-network theory is most strongly associated with a very few names, including Michel Callon, Bruno Latour ... and John Law. So why the artful hesitance and distancing between the author and ANT?

I suppose the author could say that he has begun to distance himself from ANT, at least as it has emerged lately as a strong program (see my review of After Actor Network Theory, ed. John Law). Certainly this book reflects a shift away from ANT, and particularly the things that attract me to it: the focus on materiality, the pragmatism. But in other places the author is quite happy to draw from ANT and particularly his previous work in it. This feigned (that's how I read it) distancing is characteristic of the book, which has attempted to take on a postmodern aesthetic -- stops and starts, hesitations, the performance of reflexivity. It's tiresome because the author clearly has strong ideas about his subject. The performance, in other words, is poor. Let's not kid ourselves, academic writing is performed, and what I admire so much about Latour's style is that he can perform an outburst so admirably while clearly making a well thought out argument. Law's writing style, in comparison, is overprocessed and overproduced in the same way that an N*Sync album is. It's tiresome.

Not that there isn't some worthwhile stuff in here. Law starts with a reflection on the role of personal writing and performance that is quite interesting. His use of Deleuze and Guattari (who I'll have to read soon) begins to make sense through the case. And the approach of examining an empirical study through slices -- although flubbed here in my opinion, making the book incoherent rather than "fractionally coherent" -- has some promise.

But then on the other hand, Law's project is doomed from the start. His project "is about modernism and its child, postmodernism -- and about how we might think past the limits that these set to our ways of thinking" (p.1). Great, sounds like what Latour was doing in his last two books. But rather than abandon the distinction as an artifact of Cartesianism, Law proposes that we oscillate between modernism and postmodernism. So we enter a bipolar world in which we are supposed to enjoy and explore tensions between mo and pomo, presence and absence, ideal and material, grand narratives and little narratives, and other dichotomies.

Speaking of grand and little narratives, it pained me that Law rejects grand narratives as explanations, then turns around and imputes a grand narrative in his review of a brochure. Law indulges himself in a vaguely Lacanian analysis of the figures in the brochure, arguing for instance that a sketch of an aircraft in a meadow is meant to invoke a range of tropes:

So it is that we see a surround of soft meadows, trees, and bushes. For by drawing a gentle landscape it becomes a place of rest and nurture, with all the tropes that this carries. For instance, there is husbandry. What is it, one might ask, that grows in this particular garden? What fruits does it bear? Is it dragons' teeth? For what grows is a weapon, a weapon of war or, more abstractly, a potential, a potential for action. Thus the aircraft is something that grows, grows quietly in potential and (it is understood) its quiescence is merely a stage, a moment -- as will be revealed when it leaves the garden and that potential is unleashed. (p.139)

Law abandons the pragmatic approach of ANT (remember earlier essays in which, for instance, Latour argued that power could only be seen as a consequence rather than a motivator?) for this sort of semiotic exploration without any sort of coordinating evidence such as readers' reactions or artists' interviews. This trick of reading a text and stating authoritatively what it means -- didn't we leave this when we left grand narratives? No, because it's a good trick, one that we can use to render living human beings into fixed objects of study. This is what they really meant. And the thing about this trick is that you can use it even if your objects of study resist and protest. They didn't realize this is what they meant, because it's all subconscious. The people who produced the text are through this trick rendered incapable of interpreting or evaluating it. They're no longer competent readers; the meaning of the text is now fixed by the academic rather than determined by the chain of interactions among actants. How disrespectful and pointless this trick is! And how dishonest for Law to resort to this trick -- which amounts to a grand narrative, an arborescence -- while questioning such narratives and promoting little narratives or rhizomes.

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Reading:: A Sociology of monsters

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 00:36:00

A Sociology of monsters : essays on power, technology, and domination
John Law (Editor)

Too bad this book is out of print. Even though I'm a little tired of discussions of "power," this collection is really interesting and full of useful essays. In particular, I was taken with Steve Woolgar's investigation of usability trials -- an excellent essay to have your usability class read, as it calls into question some of the notions that underpin the realism of usability labs. Woolgar is amused by how large a role coffee seems to play in the usability trials he studied. Beyond that, he asks what the boundaries of an object are, and gives an answer that is a little more complex and satisfying than "they're just social."

Latour's classic "Technology is Society Made Durable" uses examples such as hotel keys to argue that we have to see technology and society in terms of the associative chains built among actants -- chains that are often (always?) forged through rhetoric. What is an actant? An actant, he says, is a list of answers to trials. Here's another answer to the question Woolgar poses: through successive trials, the actant becomes known and distinguished from other actants.

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Reading:: Power, Action, and Belief

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 00:27:51

Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?
by John Law (Editor)

It might be cheating to count this as a book since I only read three of the essays: Michel Callon's classic study of scallops and fishermen, John Law's (again) classic study of Portuguese navigation, and Bruno Latour's good-but-probably-not-a-classic essay on the nature of power. All three were well worth it in terms of understanding actor-network theory, but all three implicitly pointed out some of the problems as well.

Take Callon's study. It's a great way to illustrate the notion of translation, the notion of treason, and the principle of symmetry. I was particularly interested in how he uses symmetry to show how the fishermen were enlisted and translated just as the scallops were, and how both groups of entities had to be kept in line. Fishermen and scallops both vote; they both become unruly and betray the researchers. Great. On the other hand, I thought Callon went too far (or not far enough) to make his points. How is it that the fishermen and scallops are construed as being kept in line and as betraying the researchers, and not the other way around? Despite the principle of asymmetry, it seemed to me that Callon had made the researchers into tragic heroes, Machiavellian (and not in the positive sense).

Law's study was very nice, and it's no wonder that it was cited approvingly by Edwin Hutchins in his 1995 book on distributed cognition and ship navigation. Law convincingly argues that the Portuguese achieved naval dominance in part by "the creation of an environment within which vessels might operate with integrity" through new practices and artifacts, resulting in the projection of long-distance control. Although Law doesn't invoke Taylorism here, some of the practices he describes can be seen as its precursors. Fascinating stuff, and a nice point to move from ANT to distributed cognition if you're interested in doing so.

Latour's essay argues that power is not a possession, but a consequence, and that we should begin to see the enactment of power as translation rather than diffusion. One person does not possess more power than another, at least not in any empirical sense, but one person might be able to find ways to align her interest with others, to translate their interests so that they must take a detour and fulfill her goals. This notion of power is democratic (no surprise there) and materialist. Latour goes on to say that society itself is also the result of material tasks. We can see here where Latour wants to part company with folks like activity theorists, who want to use diagrams to construct overall pictures of cultures and activities. Rather, Latour believes that those pictures don't exist, since culture and activity are abstractions or stories that are made up after the fact. In his later work, Latour picks up the notion of rhizomes, as does John Law (whose book I'm working on right now).

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Reading:: The Myth of the Paperless Office

Originally posted: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 10:24:15

The Myth of the Paperless Office
by Abigail J. Sellen (Author), Richard H. R. Harper (Author)

The Myth of the Paperless Office should be an interesting, exciting book, especially for folks like myself who are interested in workplace communication, writing, unofficial texts, and technology. It discusses how paper has been thoroughly integrated into modern workplaces; takes steps toward designing round paper; and offers lots of case studies.

But I found myself skimming through the book. I read through it very quickly, over two evenings, not because I found it to be terribly interesting but because I skimmed so much. Although important work is done in the book, and I'm positive I'll be citing it, there are not many surprises. Does anyone who has studied workplace writing find it to be surprising that workers juxtapose documents, annotate while they're reading, and use paper documents spatially? Similarly, Sellen and Harper's endless taxonomies are useful but wear quickly on me.

(Maybe it was a mistake to read this book right after Latour.)

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Reading:: Actor Network Theory and After

Originally posted: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 09:37:35

Actor Network Theory and After
by John Law (Editor), John Hassard (Editor)

In his contribution to the collection, Bruno Latour tells us that there are only four things wrong with the name "actor-network theory": the words "actor," "network," "theory," and the hyphen. He argues that it really should be called something like "actant-rhizome ontology."

Well, that should give you an idea of how the book is. Many of the essays, including Law's contributions, argue that actor-network theory is in the process of being reified as a Theory (with a capital T, like Truth) and a Method, when it was meant precisely as a challenge to Theories and Methods. Law in particular wants ANT to resist this tendency to be turned into Theory.

I don't have the book with me right now, so I won't try to trace through Law's and the others' arguments. I will say, though, that the book gives a lot of insight into what ANT is, how it's been applied, and how some of its earliest developers would like to see us proceed. And if memory serves, it has a nifty glossary.

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Reading:: Science in Action

Originally posted: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 09:02:53

Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
by Bruno Latour

Well, of course this book is a classic. I had forgotten how good it was. A few things that struck me on this reading:

First, Latour's unique and remarkable writing style has begun to emerge here. It was present in the earlier Latour and Woolgar, but very subdued. It gets stronger here and is in full flower in Pandora's Hope and We Have Never Been Modern. Yes, I think this is very important. As Latour points out in this book, most academic articles go unread or at most glanced at; it is as if they never existed. His style helps his work to be noticed and read, although of course there's much more to his work than his style (see below). Compare it to another book I'm currently reading, Sellen and Harper's The Myth of the Paperless Office (review coming soon) and you'll see what I mean -- it's not that Sellen and Harper's insights are shallower or less useful, it's just that their mild academic style, endless taxonomies, and run-of-the-mill examples make their text a bit hard to get through. I'm not racing through that book or feeling inspired as I do with Latour's works. So I'm very interested in Latour's style and particularly in learning how to make my own style more interesting.

Second, Latour has some interesting thoughts about rhetoric and its importance. Rhetoric is not simply assembling a large number of allies, but allies in the most advantageous way and in transformative ways. Even here in his earlier work he's connecting rhetoric and democracy in smart ways. Pandora's Hope develops this thought further. (Another thought: In PH, I think Callon stands in for the figure of Machiavelli and turns out to be a nice way for Latour to defend himself against the charges of Machiavellism that are sometimes leveled against him. Some of those charges came from hasty readings of Science in Action. Reading the two books in reverse chronological order makes it easier to evaluate those charges.)

Third, and probably the most interesting to me at this point, Latour proposes a "moratorium on cognitive explanations of science and technology" -- a rejection of the idea that special cognitive abilities are a necessary explanation for how technoscience works. Well, there it is. Distributed cognition takes a similar tack, of course. But I wonder if perhaps this point has something to do with why Latour is so blithe about the macro-micro distinction. If he abandons the cognitive as a useful and meaningful explanation, it's much more interesting to watch texts and artifacts change hands than to scrutinize micro-level interactions! Compare that with Hutchins (1995), where he agrees that special cognitive abilities aren't needed but still thinks the cognitive is vitally important. Hutchins examines macro and micro levels with appropriate methods and tries to integrate them; Latour really doesn't, I think.

Anyway, a great book.

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Reading:: Laboratory Life

Originally posted: Sun, 08 Jun 2003 09:26:19

Laboratory Life

by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar

I read most of this book when standing in line for tickets to The Matrix: Reloaded on opening night. My wife is ultra-line competitive and sent me to stand in line two hours early. Well, it worked -- I was first in line for the 9:30 showing. Plenty of people were there for the 9:00 showing, pretty much the folks you would expect. One young woman was wearing an authentic Trinity outfit that she probably bought from a bondage shop. So you can see why I bore down and read the book rather than make chitchat with the other people in line.

I keep talking about style in Latour's work, and in that sense this book is highly interesting because its style is almost conventional. That undoubtedly has to do something with the fact that it's Latour's first book and the fact that it was coauthored with Woolgar. Still, it's compelling partially because it is so audacious.

It also uses the term "social constructionism," a term that Latour rejects later because it has become associated with postmodernism. Latour is not postmodernist but amodernist -- that is, he sees us as continually interacting with each other and the world, collaboratively constructing selves, societies, facts, sciences, etc. in a web of interpretation. Yes, that sounds postmodernist. But he also brings in the principle of symmetry, that is, the point that nonhumans are actors just as much as humans are. In other words, we are not autonomous minds simply constructing reality -- or even society -- out of the yarns we spin. Our stories recruit other actors, including nonhuman actors, and those actors sometimes resist, disrupt, or commandeer our stories. For instance, it's not enough for Pasteur to tell a story about microbes to make them a reality -- the microbes must be compelled to take part in the story by, for instance, causing unsterilized material to forment while leaving sterilized material untouched. If they are unruly, if they are unconvinced by Pasteur's story, then Pasteur's story doesn't convince anyone else either.

Speaking of microbes as being "convinced" or "compelled" seems to lend them human qualities that they do not have. But Latour's aim is to use the same vocabulary for humans and nonhumans in order to call into question the deep assumptions we have about the divide between mind and reality, politics and science, etc. In other words, Latour is a monist. And he sounds very much like other monists here and especially in Science in Action, where his account of children learning language sounds a lot like externalists such as Thomas Kent or Donald Davidson. Similarly, his account of networks of humans and nonhumans, and his symmetrical treatment of them, sounds a lot like distributed cognitionists such as Edwin Hutchins and (to an extent) Donald Norman. When you read Latour, keep in mind the notion of monism and he sounds much less outrageous. It makes sense that he affirms his belief in reality, as he does in Pandora's Hope.

In any case, this book is a strong account of how a lab works, and I especially like the account of inscriptions making successive transformations as they circulate through the lab.

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Reading:: Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology

Originally posted: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 19:27:09

Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World
by Michel Callon, John Law, Arie Rip (Editor)

This collection, published in 1986, is a relatively early set of studies using actor-network theory (ANT), including a nice little glossary of terms. ANT has often been accused of being Machiavellian, and this book's introduction appears to confirm that accusation in its praise for Machiavelli's method and its suggestion that sociologists should imitate him. But what should be imitated, the authors argue, is Machiavelli's willingness to make even-handed observations, to follow the actors wherever they lead without favor or condemnation. (See Latour's argument in the latter chapters of Pandora's Hope for a convincing argument against the sort of amoral power-wielding that we often think of when we think of Machiavelli.)

So, in imitation of Machiavelli, the authors set out to make even-handed observations -- to follow the actors, which means following the texts (p.4), the many inscriptions that are made and circulated. These texts are seen as making possible the construction of linkages among other texts, work, and institutions (p.10). Obviously, this view is attractive to me as a person who studies texts and who has advocated following the texts (i.e., tracing the genres) in organizations.

One result of this methodological stance is that the authors are willing to set aside the macro-micro divide that has typically been assumed in sociology. That's a theme that appears elsewhere in the ANT literature. And I'm willing to go partway on it -- obviously macro, meso, and micro levels of activity are related, and I have gone so far as to claim that they co-constitute each other. But they're also useful analytical lenses, particularly when you want to examine activity in sociocognitive terms. ANT doesn't appear to do that. I tend to think that ANT is what distributed cognition would be if it were about politics and society rather than cognition. (And not coincidentally, some in the ANT are clearly very interested in Edwin Hutchins' work.)

The first half of the book concentrates on theory and involves the sorts of qualitative studies you might expect. The second half, though, involves a lot of quantitative analysis of scientific texts and their references. I found it to be interesting in theory and boring in practice. But I'm sure I should return to this book at some point and review the methods.

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Reading:: War of the Worlds:

Originally posted: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 01:48:00

War of the Worlds: What About Peace?
by Bruno Latour

War of the Worlds is a little pamphlet Latour published in the wake of 9/11, although much of it is based on essays written before the tragedy. It's hopeful. He wants to see this tragedy as a wake-up call, as a way for us to recognize that we are at war -- a war that, he contends, has been waged for a while but that the West has not acknowledged. Once we recognize this war, he says, we can possibly negotiate a peace.

The real value of the book is Latour's examination of ethnocentrism and multiculturalism (two sides of the same coin -- a familiar pattern in Latour's writing). He critiques them strongly, arguing that they rely on the notion that there is one nature but many cultures. That's a notion that the West has embraced, he says, and ultimately both Western ethnocentrism and Western multiculturalism assume that the one Nature is best apprehended by Western ways of knowing. We might appreciate that another culture believes differently about its gods, creation myths, you name it -- but deep down we believe that our methods have allowed us to see Nature more clearly than they. That, Latour says, is not only corrosive but from an ontological viewpoint, inaccurate.

Then we get into the problem of the book. Latour is very attached to democracy and democratic dialogue, as am I, and he wants to use democratic dialogue to negotiate a truce in this once-hidden, now revealed war of cultures. Great. Here's a passage discussing the shape these negotiations might take:

Take the case of religion, which, even more than Science, has to do with earlier, premature modernist projects to unify the planet. Can a positive constructionism be applied in this instance? Might not the nearly fanatical attachment to the non-constructed character of the unity of God be largely a response to the unifying role of nature, which the negotiations have agreed to limit? If the latter becomes negotiable, why not the former too? Do we mandate the diplomats to dare to say, for instance, of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he is well or badly constructed? .... Why not use [the discourse of fabrication] positively, and reformulate, in the company of the others, the question of the right ways of constructing good divinities? Would we not have here, instead of a hypothetical 'inter-religious dialogue,' a more fruitful and even technical exchange of procedures? The all powerful already existing absolute God sends his devout to holy war, but what about the relative God which might be unified in the slowly constructed future? (pp.45-46)

The quote is shocking, as I'm sure Latour meant it to be, but it also strikes me as naive. Whether there is a war of the worlds or not, those who created the event that frames this booklet were in important ways quite modernist -- well educated, literate (more so than most US citizens), schooled in the sciences and technologies. And their ideology -- this is the important part -- was also quite Western, owing as much to fascist ideologies of the last century as they do to Islam. They bought into modernism as much as the Western world did. (To borrow a mandate from Latour's earlier work: Follow the actors! Follow the texts!) And the notion of renegotiating God with hostile parties would not set well with them or even with non-modern non-Westerners. You'll find quite a few Western diplomats willing to negotiate in Latour's terms, but who will they negotiate with?

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Reading:: Pandora's Hope

Originally posted: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 01:17:14

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies
by Bruno Latour

This is one of Latour's most enjoyable books. Latour was one of the first popularizers of actor-network theory (which he now claims should be called "actant-rhizome ontology" to be accurate) and continues to be a really interesting thinker. And writer. His style is really remarkable -- provocative, pugnacious, confrontational.

Latour's family also is known for wine, and in an interview a while back, he said that he only hoped that people enjoyed reading a Latour as much as they enjoyed drinking a Latour. For me, reading a Latour is very enjoyable and tends to be like drinking. His texts make me feel a little euphoric, a little gregarious, particularly since he sees humans sharing a world with nonhumans who are every bit as much socialized actors as we are. I enjoy that perspective. But the day after reading a Latour, I tend to have sort of an ontological hangover. As a colleague of mine said recently, Latour's extraordinary writing style comes at a price. Clear away the remarkable writing style (at its best here) and you see the same sort of academic argument you often see: position A, position B, and then Latour's position C.

In this book, position A is modernism and position B is postmodernism. According to Latour, they're two sides of the same coin, two ways of handling the Cartesian split and the related modernist settlement. What interests me is that he connects these to democracy, in which he seems to believe quite fervently. Well, me too. So his two chapters on the Gorgias -- the famous Socratic dialogue in which Callicles and Socrates create the false dichotomy of Might vs. Right, ignoring the teeming masses and their way of governance, democracy -- is really fascinating and thought-provoking. I see a lot of parallels with other movements that are concerned with democracy and modernist threats to it, particularly participatory design.

Latour's work is particularly interesting to me right now because I've been dealing with activity theory and genre theory to tackle problems of information design and knowledge circulation. See my upcoming book. But activity theory and Bakhtinian genre theory both developed in the Soviet Union, where it wasn't particularly safe to question the political structure, so politics are relatively undeveloped in both approaches. (Some may disagree with me here.) So I'm looking for ways to extend my genre tracing approach to involve the political dimension (and, inevitably, the rhetorical dimension that goes along with it). Of course, the schools of thought may be hard to reconcile, since activity theory was founded on Marxist thought and Latour has contempt for Marxism. I'm working on squaring that circle right now.

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