[iDC] how long is a piece of string?

Thu Nov 1 15:15:05 UTC 2007

Dear Brian, Mark,
I shall try to pick up and follow a few threads...

<brian>For me, ontology remains a question to ask about one's  
destinations in time, not a series of labels to be applied toward the  
technical utopia of transparent communication. Ontology: I mean, I'm  
not against tags, but it would be a pity to arrive at a situation  
where you can "find" everything, without ever knowing what you're  
actually looking for...

Perhaps this arises because, as you say, ontologies and tags are  
essentially ways of classifying and ordering. But  "A classified and  
hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of  
the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our  
actual world." (Dewey, 1989: 49 Originally published in 1925).
We seem to be immersed in some sort of basic need to categorise  
things, people and places. A counterpoint might be Susan Leigh Star's  
work (she's described as a communication theorist) on classification  
and the role of infrastructure systems: She talks about 'rich and  
interesting mess that occurs backstage in the doing of science. Some  
of the elements of this mess include serendipity; unforeseen aspects  
of timing and coordination; the physical constraints of things and  
materials, including animals and tools; and the informal, backstage  
processes of communication and argumentation that inform all  
organizational life'.  Her approach is emphasize the role of  
invisibility in the process by which classification orders human  
interaction. Problems arise because categories are made and kept  
invisible, and one way of disrupting this is to show how people can  
change this invisibility through integrating and adapting it into an  
everyday practice.

Suchman has taken this further in trying to understand the man/ 
machine interaction. She wrote a paper way back in 1999 about the  
apparently uninteresting, but frustrating, fact that people in an  
office couldn't use a newly developed 'large, feature-rich  
photocopier'. The people who'd created the machine at Xerox couldn't  
understand why such an intelligent machine was essentially useless,  
so she did a technographic study over two years gave some insights.  
Her approach was to 'locate artifacts within the sites and relations  
of their everyday use'. She found that there was no such thing as an  
'easy-to-use' machine, there was always some degree of learning  
required, so that new forms of practice are culturally produced. And  
in conclusion she recognises that systems development if not the  
creation of discrete , intrinsically meaningful objects, but should  
instead respond to the fact that:
  'Ethnographies of the social world work across the grain of  
categories and distinctions- to recover just how the social/material  
specificities they describe are assembled together to comprise our  
everyday experience'

<mark>[Pask's] Conversation Theory. His Conversation Theory may be  
worth revisiting for a way of thinking through how the act of story- 
telling–as something that unfolds over time–produces a "shared" space  
"between" actors resulting in "outcomes" to which neither can lay  
claim to exclusive authorship.
So one question does this theory really help to uncover what it is  
about conversation that produces share space or does it just help to  
develop descriptions of abstract qualities? Of course it is useful to  
be able to uncover some form of process of exchange, but IMHO fields  
such as sociology are better able to explain situated human to human  
interaction. In fact ethnographic and anthropological studies (such  
as those of Suchman, Eric Laurier and Barry Brown's work) seem to be  
able to reveal some of the features and structures of such exchanges  
in a much more useful and contextual way. Can cybernetics and its  
related approaches really offer ways of dealing and designing for  
everyday socio-spatial practices?

<brian>Feedback is the endless perfectioning of structure, the  
eternally corrective return. Whereas actual machines, in their  
material singularity, are always what breaks down, goes off track,  
falls catastrophically apart, with a little help from some impish non- 
conformist, some lazy maintenance-man, some treacherous spare-parts  
department. I'm not so much talking about hacking and sabotage as  
about ideas and attitudes that get under your skin and start fiddling  
with the dials on your inner android. Does the answer always have to  
be correct? What about the truth of scientific paradox? Is there a  
one-way ticket in life anymore? Is there a machinic irony of the  
overdeveloped civilizations?

<mark>The critique of encroachment of the domain of the "addressable"  
upon that of the "non-addressable" is long-standing.
Asking how we might narrate the (last remaining?) spaces "in- 
between" (as Ian Sinclair does in Orbital London, or J.G. Ballard  
does in Concrete Island for that matter) would inevitably to lead to  
us down the line to yet another mobile application designed to direct  
the tourist to that hidden cafe located "off the beaten path."  
Perhaps "local knowledge" is best left local?

i want a satnav that helps me get lost

If we think about how space it seems to me it is one of the worst  
victims of our need to structure and categorise experience. It is  
caught in a homogenous straightjacket of definitions and rigid  
infrastructures: Lat/Long, North/South/East/West, maps, addresses,  
post codes etc. This can be contrasted against Varela's concept of  
enaction, which Brian introduced, which allows for the co-creation of  
observer and observed through the construction of their relation. In  
our everyday life we experience space as enacted- it does not exist a  
priori in some form of contained and constrained structure.
In Edwin Hutchin's book 'Cognition in the Wild' he introduces the  
metaphor of  navigation as computation, which I find very useful. He  
claims that  navigation and computation can be correlated because  
they are both essentially about 'operating within an information  
processing system'.  Because of this navigators often make mistakes  
because they imagine that the reality presented to them by the  
information matches the reality in the physical and social world. He  
gives an example where a ship navigator describes his faith in a  
nautical chart
' This little dot right here where the lines cross is where we are! I  
don't care if the bosun says we just went aground, we are here and  
there is plenty of water under the ship here' .
Accuracy within a system doesn't necessarily deliver an account of  
reality that we would expect...

So it's not as simple as a case of a satnav that gets me lost because  
there is an error in the systems translation of information, but a  
satnav that can cope with ambiguity, that could represent in-between  
spaces and offer 'wander' or 'spend an hour doing nothing in  
particular' as an option. I'm sure there are examples of situated  
technology projects out there which really respond to these issues...

I mentioned Karen Martin's and colleagues workshops on in-betweeness  
and betwixt in my last mail (http://www.inbetweeness.org/ 
workshops.html). They seem an example of a good way to start to  
investigate the non-categorisable spaces of the city, and how  
transitional spaces are enacted. Of course, there's still the point  
at which we translate this experience into a way of interacting with  
the world, and there we will always need to negotiate some form of  
common language if we have any chance of finding our way, or getting  
lost for that matter.

Katharine

+++++
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. (1999) Sorting Things Out:  
Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press

L. Suchman, Blomberg, J. Orr, and R. Trigg. (1999 ) Reconstructing  
technologies as social practice. In Lehman, P. and N. Wakeford  
(eds.), Analyzing Virtual Societies: New Directions in Methodology.  
Special Issue of Applied Behavioral Sciences Journal: 43:3:.

Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995

On 29 Oct 2007, at 22:52, brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr wrote:

> Mark Shepard wrote:
>
>> Brian, Katharine,
>>
>> Let's see how far we can spin this thread?
>
> Sure, for me it's quite interesting. But it will take a while just  
> to make
> our terms clear to each other, I suspect, because these are  
> complicated
> issues and I am sure everyone approaches them somewhat differently.
>
>> Clearly first-order cybernetics as exemplified by, say, the  
>> Homeostat,
> follows this logic. But my understanding of how the field evolved  
> (which is
> limited, although I think Hayles (1999) provides a useful  
> introduction) is
> that second- and third-order theoreticians such as Gordon Pask  
> sought ways
> of thinking about interaction with (and through) computers that  
> favored
> "open" over "closed" systems, with outcomes that were not knowable  
> outside
> the system's performance.
>
> Yes, these plateaus are fundamental. Most people date the second  
> period
> from Heinz von Foerster's focus on refleivity, on the observer  
> inside the
> observed system (well, Von Foerster actually coined the term  
> "second-order
> cybernetics," so that's obvious enough). The third level gets various
> definitions, all having to do with change in complex systems which are
> often social ones. How does a system alter its own parameters?  
> Guattari's
> late work has aspects of third-order cybernetics, by way of Varela and
> Prigogine. In Chaosmosis he raises the boundary-problem of Varela's
> autopoetic machines or living systems, and suggests that the
> interdependency of machines, biological beings and institutions  
> allows one
> to locate assemblages. So you get third-order cybernetic sociology!
>
>> [Pask's] Conversation Theory may be worth revisiting for a way of
> thinking through how the act of story-telling–as something that  
> unfolds
> over time–produces a "shared" space "between" actors resulting in
> "outcomes" to which neither can lay claim to exclusive authorship.
>
> This might be a good one for Katharine to look into! Seems pretty  
> clear to
> me that exclusive authorship is not exactly common in the human way of
> doing things. I hope to get to Pask someday, but maybe not right  
> away...
>
>> The critique of encroachment of the domain of the "addressable"  
>> upon that
> of the "non-addressable" is long-standing. Deleuze (1992) discusses  
> this in
> the context of the dissolution of forms of societal enclosures  
> (Foucault),
>
> Yes, and that critique is very timely today in the world of Web  
> 2.0, when
> the word "ontology" is used by programmers defining categories of  
> tags for
> database files! Since I tend to think in the terms of continental
> philosophy, and even a little poorly digested Heidegger, I find this
> semantic-web talk of "ontologies" quite shocking, a really troubling
> symptom of the oblivion of being. For me, ontology remains a  
> question to
> ask about one's destinations in time, not a series of labels to be  
> applied
> toward the technical utopia of transparent communication. I mean,  
> I'm not
> against tags, but it would be a pity to arrive at a situation where  
> you can
> "find" everything, without ever knowing what you're actually  
> looking for...
>
>> Law (2004) shows, the messy, non-addressable aspects of the "real  
>> world"
> pervade the scientific laboratory as much as they do everyday life.  
> So I'd
> think it's less a question of looking away from science to art, but
> recognizing the inter-weavings of the two (among others) in the larger
> frame of this thing we call life.
>
> That seems to be what interests the cyberneticians from Von  
> Foerster on. It
> has lead to Varela's concept of enaction, or the co-creation of  
> observer
> and observed through the construction of their relation. I've just  
> recently
> heard of that idea, and it's very interesting! Maybe related to  
> Pask on the
> conversation. But the introduction of the messier parts into  
> cybernetics is
> also the reason why the whole discourse was finally abandoned to a
> more-or-less hippie counter-culture (Bateson) or it broke down into  
> its
> constitutive specialties again (neurophysiology, control engineering,
> computer science, artificial intelligence). I guess the speculative  
> and
> incalculable aspects of social theory were not digestible by the  
> scientists
> and technologists (but let's not forget Stafford Beer and Cybersyn in
> Allende's Chile!). The thing is, before this breakdown in the  
> 1980s, much
> of the groundwork was laid for the kind of control society that we  
> have in
> the age of Total Surveillance today. To figure out where that came  
> from, I
> am quite interested in Karl Deutsch's book, The Nerves of Government
> (1963), which is the strictest, yet most sophisticated and all- 
> embracing
> sociological use of first-order cybernetic models I've yet found.
>
> Deutsch makes the point that feedback models merely formalize a long
> tradition of organizational techniques, involving an increasingly  
> careful
> discipline of information flow through hierarchically structured  
> chains of
> command. This is something you can see very clearly in James  
> Beniger's much
> later work on The Control Revolution (1986), covering problems of
> information flow in corporate and military organizations up to WWII.
> Beniger's book is such a great genealogy of networked  
> organizational forms
> that he doesn't even have to talk about them explicitly! The  
> relevance is
> just obvious.
>
> Another fascinating example of an early figure who put first-order  
> ideas to
> very practical use in the management field is Jay Wright Forrester.  
> After
> working on the Whirlwind computer in the 1950s (which was part of  
> the SAGE
> ontinental air defense, and all those things that Edwards talks  
> about in
> his Closed World book), JW Forrester went on to found system dynamics,
> which basically involves the modeling and computer simulation of
> interconnected feedback loops in large-scale organizations:  
> industries,
> then cities, and finally the world, in the book on World Dynamics,  
> which
> led to the famous Club of Rome report on Limits to Growth in the early
> 1970s.
>
> My basic idea is that the collapse of the initial cybernetic  
> hypothesis,
> then its slow reconstruction into the very complex and ultra- 
> specialized
> discourses of present-day cognitive science, has acted to cover up and
> render opaque the really immense progress of the control society,  
> some of
> which I have tried to describe in my recent text entitled "Future  
> Map: Or
> How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love  
> Surveillance" (that's on
> my blog at brianholmes.wordpress.com, along with the outline for the
> Guattari piece that Mark referred to). And this story isn't exactly  
> over:
> Check out the concept of "socio-tech" in the US government report on
> Converging technologies for Improving Human Performance
> (http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/1/NBIC_report.pdf).  
> There's a
> little chart on p. 159 which I find particularly impressive, a kind of
> bull's eye which brings a whole range of discourses to the point of
> identifying human subjects for instrumental action upon them.
>
> What I am really interested in developing are ways of understanding  
> the
> different moments of second- and third-order cybernetics as sites of
> cultural, philosophical and scientific struggles over the  
> definitions, uses
> and limits of technologically inspired models of human behavior. It  
> seems
> obvious to me that today, as cognitive science increasingly integrates
> neurophysiological research and anthropology to informatics and  
> artificial
> intelligence, and as the simpler feedback systems of first-order
> cybernetics are perfected and brought up to ever-higher speeds, with
> ever-deeper memory banks and ever-wider surveillance nets to fill  
> them with
> information, there is a great cultural need to relaunch the kinds of
> heretical experimentation and also, explicit philosophical and
> organizational antagonism toward the applications of cognitive  
> science, a
> kind of experimentation/antagonism which already marked the 60s and  
> 70s,
> but which we seem to have forgotten about today. As you can guess I  
> want to
> write something in exactly that direction, something that combines  
> this
> kind of dry and precise scientific talk that we're getting into  
> here with
> some more pointed political opposition and also some much wilder  
> delirium!
> But even more, I would like to get involved with some experimentation.
>
>> If technology is to be the answer (and
>> it may not be in this case, but Katharine, you originally frame it as
> such), how we frame the question is, in fact, *the* critical question.
> Asking how we might narrate the (last remaining?) spaces "in- 
> between" (as
> Ian Sinclair does in Orbital London, or J.G. Ballard does in Concrete
> Island for that matter) would inevitably to lead to us down the  
> line to yet
> another mobile application designed to direct the tourist to that  
> hidden
> cafe located "off the beaten path." Perhaps "local knowledge" is  
> best left
> local?
>>
>> I want a SATNAV device that helps me get lost...
>
> Really, now you're talkin' sense, imho. Read Norman Klein on the
> "Electronic Baroque" (in his Vatican to Vegas book) and you'll be  
> even more
> inspired!
>
>> So, maybe the question then (if the answer is to be technology):  
>> how do
> we create technologies that work toward enhancing the  
> serendipitous, the
> unexpected, the schizogeographic,  the always already _un_known,  
> the stuff
> which elides what Brian describes as "the imposed patternings of  
> everyday
> existence in technological societies", or in plain terms, that  
> which simply
> enhances the very _process_ of living?
>
> Well, without being too sacrilegious here on the techno-loving iDC  
> list,
> could I ask whether it might be interesting to break down or even  
> destroy
> some complex cybernetic machines? Like, for instance, the ones that
> categorize us to the nth degree of ontological absurdity? The  
> principle of
> the feedback loop "is haunted by the idea of eternity," according to
> Guattari in Chaosmosis. Feedback is the endless perfectioning of  
> structure,
> the eternally corrective return. Whereas actual machines, in their  
> material
> singularity, are always what breaks down, goes off track, falls
> catastrophically apart, with a little help from some impish non- 
> conformist,
> some lazy maintenance-man, some treacherous spare-parts department.  
> I'm not
> so much talking about hacking and sabotage as about ideas and  
> attitudes
> that get under your skin and start fiddling with the dials on your  
> inner
> android. Does the answer always have to be correct? What about the  
> truth of
> scientific paradox? Is there a one-way ticket in life anymore? Is  
> there a
> machinic irony of the overdeveloped civilizations?
>
> all the best, Brian
>
>
>
>
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