ch11, practice and posthumanism, social theory and a history of agency, Andrew Pickering

Reading this chapter reminded me of an email that Spinuzzi sent to me: 

I'm not a huge Black Sabbath fan, but I love the fact that when Iommi lost the tips of his fingers in an industrial accident, it started a chain of events that led to a new subgenre of music. Similarly, I recently read that some standard rock guitar sounds are disappearing because they require the guitar to be slung down low, but newer artists are slinging the guitar high so it can be in the camera frame when they post to YouTube/Instagram/TikTok. There's an interesting paper in there on materiality and genre, but I have not been able to plot it out yet.

And then there was this tweet, too. I'll get to the synthesis in a minute. 

The best designers do both. https://t.co/J6xns8tq7U

— Joe Gebbia (@jgebbia) July 3, 2021

With the tweet, I was thinking about that with regard to Pickering's idea that

the phrase ‘sociotechnical system’—a well-known term of art in the actor-network approach to science studies—was first coined at the Tavistock (Miller and Rose 1995). And one does not need a Ph.D. in the field to know that in his discussions of technological artifacts like ‘sleeping policemen’ Bruno Latour (e.g., 1988) is simply doing ergonomics. What should we make of such observations? 

The connection makes sense. The tweet is saying how good UX makes it so that you don't have to think about the object, so that you can forget about the object and concentrate only on the function so to speak. Like for example, there's that quote in B & L, with the guy who says, you don't go to the store to buy a drill because you want a drill; you only want a 1/4 inch hole. Or the milkshake example (Clayton Christensen). People like the object because they can forget about it and ... Or maybe that's a bad way to put it. They don't like the object. The object simply isn't there, it can disappear. Don't make me think (Krug). 

I guess this is as good of place as any to connect to Virilio. 

This is the world too of Virilio’s ‘terminal citizen’ (Virilio 1997, 21). We pass, Virilio says, from a society of speed to a society of immobility and inertia (1997, 20), moving with the ‘transmission revolution’ to the final human vehicle, the ‘static’ audio-visual vehicle: ‘the body terminal of that interactive being who is both transmitter and receiver’ (1997, 21; 11) For Virilio, this immobilized, ‘generalized interactivity’ (1997, 21) is a threat to our experience:

Paul Klee hit the nail on the head: ‘To define the present in isolation is to kill it’. This is what the teletechnologies of real-time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discreet telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery.

(1997, 10–11)

It is hard to read this without thinking of our lockdown in an isolated, hyperextended present, disconnected from the real experience of time and space and engaging through real-time interfaces. For Virilio, this loss of the terrestrial body has another, theological meaning: as the loss of motion (‘anima’—the root of ‘animation’) is also the loss of our soul (Latin: ‘anima’) (1997, 25). Hence, the body terminal, in only being ‘mobile on the spot’ (1997, 20), is fundamentally a terminal body.

How was this embedded into Pickering though? Let's just do the quote:

§5.04 One can develop Schivelbusch’s ideas about material ideology a bit further here. Computer interfaces certainly obscure the inner workings of the machine, but still, in scientific applications, for example, they serve to connect the human user to something beyond the screen. A visual simulation of a thunderstorm, say, presents the products of massive computation in graspable form. It makes the inner states of the machine accessible to its human exterior. On the other hand, however, other uses of visualization are intended as pure surface. In entertainment—from video games to virtual reality—the interface achieves its apotheosis as pure thing-in-itself: all that matters is destroying the space invaders as they appear on the screen. This surface/depth contrast is an invitation to talk about postmodernity (Jameson 1991) which I will not take up—except to note that a functioning virtual reality would make possible a fully alienated subject position. Of course, we do not talk about ‘alienation’ any more, either, but Paul Virilio’s (1993) notion of the ‘terminal

citizen’ is still worth thinking about.

Had to think about it for a minute, but the first part is transitive, so to speak. "Computer interfaces certainly obscure the inner workings of the machine, but still, in scientific applications, for example, they serve to connect the human user to something beyond the screen. A visual simulation of a thunderstorm, say, presents the products of massive computation in graspable form. It makes the inner states of the machine accessible to its human exterior. " This is the enargeia, in the same way as how, in a data storytelling class, you might use monopoly pieces to bring politics before the eyes. 

I can't believe you found the one you wanted, the one from MIT and on Beijing. It reads:

The goal of this visualization is to quantify air pollution measured in PM 2.5 and to educate people about what PM2.5 really is. Many people are aware that air pollution is bad, but they are not familiar with the concept of PM 2.5. The particles in the air do not make it harder to breathe, but instead, breathing in a lot of these particles into the body can result in serious health effects.

Btw, this also resonates with the Barton and Barton you were reading the other day and how in it they were saying you've got to make explicit what you exclude, or to make recognizable ideology so that it can lose its power. Whether this is a realistic goal is another thing. But the point is, the data sculptures fit into this category. 

Also just don't forget about the D Dobrin and the Slack, Doak and Miller. All of these people are trying for a more reflexive paradigm in which the invisible is now acknowledged, which is to say, production is now front and center. The technical writer is now an author (Slack, Doak, and Miller), technical writing can be creative (Dobrin), create visualizations that don't naturalize the unnatural (Barton and Barton). So in each and every case, these people are saying that tech writing would be better, more effective, if we were to do something seemingly contrarian--to be more subjective, so to speak. The Barton and Barton really go well with the Dobrin in this way. You need to be creative in order to make the point, to communicate the point effectively. And to do that, you need to denaturalize the natural. In the NYT piece, this occurs through the use of the monopoly pieces. Also note the connection to Sarah Handren here too. 

All of this is a long way from Pickering. 

Picking's leit motif from Marx, "‘production not only creates an object for the subject but also a subject for the object’ (Grundrisse, quoted in Schivelbusch 1986: 164)." is a good way into the Spinuzzi quote actually. Can we think about production as loss? as in the loss of a finger? and how would that create an object for the subject? I guess it gave Toni a new way to play the guitar. OK. But how did it create a subject for the object? maybe the subgenre part? like then people have to conform to the conventions of the new genre? like they're accountable now? like they're constrained by the contours of the emergent form? That's the best I can do, I think.

I think you were right. Look at this:

§1.1 Marx’s aphorism: ‘production not only creates an object for the subject but also a subject for the object’ (Grundrisse, quoted in Schivelbusch 1986: 164). Microstudies of scientific practice help us grasp this thought. Think of Ludwik Fleck’s account of the establishment of the Wassermann reaction as a test for syphilis. Fleck describes this as a process of the reciprocal tuning of people and things. The serologists tuned the Wassermann reaction as a material procedure, ‘adding now “a little more,” now “a little less” of a reagent,’ letting the reaction proceed a little longer or a little shorter, and so on, until the success rate of the test increased from 15–20 per cent to 70–90 per cent (1979:72–3). At the same time a specific social community was formed: the community of disciplined practitioners competent to carry out the Wassermann reaction, having the ‘serological touch,’ and internally differentiated in the ‘quasi-orchestral’ (97) performance of the reaction. The Wassermann reaction as material procedure was the object for the community of practitioners, and the practitioners were the subject for the object: each developed and took on a particular shape in relation to the other. 

I wonder if tuning is the equivalent of a round or priority item from ethnomethodology. 

§1.5 Again, while traditional behind-the-scenes explanations in social theory attempt to find explanatory constants underlying the flux of appearances, Fleck’s study suggests that there is only flux. In the establishment of the Wassermann reaction, everything from material setups and their performance to the contours of human agency was at stake and subject to redefinition. The only generally reliable and enduring feature of practice that I can discern is the pattern that I have so far called tuning, and elsewhere analyzed in detail as a dialectic of resistance and accommodation: ‘the mangle’ for short (Pickering 1993, 1995a). And mangling is a temporally emergent process: its upshots are not given at all in advance. This means that an adequate social theory can amount, at most, to a set of sensitivities in our encounter with empirical phenomena: we should especially look out for posthumanist intertwinings of the human and the nonhuman—the construction of subjects for objects, as well as vice versa—and we should recognize that in general nothing substantive endures in the encounter of material and human agency. A theory of practice, then, would focus our attention on specificity, on particular interdefinitions of machinic and social fields. This is not, of course, how traditional theory functions. Traditionally, as I have said, the invitation is to extract an invariant skeleton from the flux of appearances. Perhaps we should say that a theory that recognizes temporal emergence is an antitheory in the traditional sense. The havoc interpretation wreaks in the domain of appearances is incalculable, and its privileged quest for hidden meanings may be profoundly mistaken,’ as Jean Baudrillard once put it (1988a: 149). 

So basically iteration. I think. Also thinking back to Thevenot and how he talks about the responsivity to the environment. Dreyfus was talking about that too apparently, how the world is a participant in our endeavors. Via Tuning, you could even go back to Nicotra in the objects book. You tune to the environment? and the environment tunes to you? I don't recall how that latter part works in Nicotra, but still...I'm sure it's right. Or maybe you could use the Cooper example. A student doesn't know what he's talking about. Intuitively, you should just speak over him and give the class the answer. Counterintuitively, you should give him MORE time to figure it out in the off chance that you yourself learn something. That works. Tuning. I attune to you, you attune to me. Reciprocity. And again, this gets us back to the Marx quote, "‘production not only creates an object for the subject but also a subject for the object’ (Grundrisse, quoted in Schivelbusch 1986: 164)."

Something to note too is how close Pickering seems to be to ethnomethodology in this quote. "§0 This essay moves from theory to history and back again, exploring some directions in which analyses of scientific practice at the microlevel can be suggestively extended to macrosocial concerns."

I wonder if there's anything to me made of the fact that Picking is doing a history of agency versus doing say a history of autonomy (Cornelius Castoriadis). I just wonder what the different objects say about the different fields.

"It is clear that as we approach the present destructive and productive agencies have become increasingly strongly coupled to one another." This tracks. But how is this just now Schumpeter? Even Gil on Twitter though compares Deleuze to Schumpeter....

§3.1 In a fascinating essay, Henk van den Belt and Arie Rip (1987) date the emergence of the synthetic dye industry back to William Henry Perkin’s discovery of aniline purple in 1856. There followed a period of material

(and even the home in its historic transit from production to consumption).

skeleton of class struggle, for example.

§2.4 The periodization of a history of agency would register discontinuities in

tinkering which resulted in the production of a continuing series of new synthetic dyes.

§3.2 This material tinkering was guided by developments in chemical theory,

including Kekulé’s structure theory of 1859 and his benzene theory of 1865 (van

den Belt and Rip 1987:144), the latter forming the basis of modern organic

chemistry. The reciprocal intertwining of material practices and scientific theory

needs to be emphasized here. Organic chemistry did not first evolve according to

its own autonomous dynamics and then find application in the dye industry.

Instead its history is better understood as a reflection upon the existing

accomplishments of the industry—material processes and products of synthesis—

that aimed at further performative achievements. Here, then, science should be

seen as within the plane of practice: continually emerging from and returning to

enduring sites of encounter of material and human agency such as the factory

(though occasionally departing on loops through such places as the university).

This, in fact, is in general how we should expect to find that science appears in a

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contemporary chemical theory, the so-called coupling reaction promised to

generate an indefinite series of new dyes in ‘an endless combination game’ (van

den Belt and Rip 1987:151) of different ingredients. And the response to this

recognition was the establishment of a new social institution, the industrial

research laboratory, within the German synthetic dye industry. From this point

on, chemists appeared in the history of synthetic dyes in two roles: (1) an already

established role, as academic researchers in the universities; and (2) their new

role as ‘scientific mass-labor’ located within industry itself, running through the

endless combination game of dye syntheses as quickly as they could. The industrial

research laboratory thus represented a device through which the dye industry

could, as it were, wrap itself around scientists and enfold them, as a tactic in the

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together in the history of the synthetic dye industry. The establishment of new material procedures and products (the coupling reaction and azo dyes), new bodies of knowledge (modern organic chemistry) and topological transformations of social institutions (the enfolding of science by industry in the industrial research laboratory) hung together, reinforced one another and reciprocally structured each other’s development. To return to Marx, we see how ‘production not only creates an object [synthetic dyes] for the subject [industry, science, the consumer] but also a subject [an industry with science now enfolded within it] for the object.’6 

Who was the tinkering from?

§5.11 I have already drawn upon one concept which is central to some branches of cybernetic thought: that of an emergent phenomenon. When Manuel De Landa (1991:30), drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1987), says that ‘tracking the [machinic] phylum...involves discovering the “emergent properties” of different combinations of materials: that is, any physical property that arises from an assemblage of parts, but that is not present in the parts taken separately,’ he is moving along the same lines as Schivelbusch’s remarks on shock and metal fatigue. There is a notion of discontinuity and nonlinearity here in the notion of emergent phenomena that is a useful antidote to the gradualist images that attach themselves to notions like Karin Knorr Cetina’s old idea of ‘tinkering’ (1981), or my metaphor of ‘tuning.’ Perhaps this is why I prefer the

more violent word, ‘mangling.’ (See also Pickering forthcoming b.)

OK, Knorr Cetina. 

This bears repeating. "To return to Marx, we see how ‘production not only creates an object [synthetic dyes] for the subject [industry, science, the consumer] but also a subject [an industry with science now enfolded within it] for the object.’6 " Wonder if the folding has to do with topology. Like maybe in higher ed the prison is enfolded in our assessment practices?

How is the concept of the stimulus shield bad?

§4.1 Schivelbusch (1986:168):

[T]he stimulus shield model is so abstract that it can be applied to all possible kinds of stimuli: to technically caused ones (i.e., velocity) as well as cultural ones (laws, customs, etc.). Thus the ‘civilizing process’ described by Norbert Elias can be understood as the formation of a stimulus shield, just as we have understood the process of rail travel to be one. The ‘stimuli’ that the individual...absorbs during the civilizing process are the social rules that are interiorized by the courtly upper strata... A violation or breaking of these rules was commonly described as ‘shocking’: it was the shattering of a stimulus shield of convention—an analogous event to ‘shock’ in military clash or railroad accident.

Leaving aside the unappetizing concept of ‘stimulus shield’ and his endorsement of the dubious notion that social life can be understood in terms of rules, Schivelbusch’s project is an intriguing one. He wants to move from the humanist sociology exemplified in Elias’s work to a posthumanist sociology of people and things. Further, he wants to explore the inner human experience of technology, specifically the contours of what he calls ‘industrialized consciousness’—a terrain little explored in mainstream Anglo-American (or even French) science studies. We can follow him a little way to see what is at stake. 

Especially when it resonates with the whole cushion thing?

§5.02 At the unreflective end of the spectrum we find the work of engineers. Schivelbusch, for example, argues that heavily upholstered furniture appeared on the railways as a solution to the problem of matching flesh to metal— specifically, as a response to the discomforts of vibrations induced in the human body by railway travel (122–3). And he suggests that upholstery thus concealed the truly industrial nature of railway travel, functioning, in effect, as an equivalent in the material world to ideology in the world of thought. One could perhaps take this suggestion too seriously, but at the same time it illustrates the heuristic power of posthumanist metaphors in social theory. We may no longer be able quite to credit the notion of false consciousness, but it still points to a topic worthy of analysis, and perhaps thinking about comfy chairs might be a good way to get started (cf. Benjamin 1968; Baudrillard 1988b). 

Doesn't the cushion shield us from the Real?

You noticed this when looking for that quote:

§4.3 Schivelbusch thus offers us a rather different take on the reciprocal production of subjects and objects from that discussed in §3. Now inner experience is part of the construction of the subject (the panoramic voyeur) for the object

(the railway/the landscape). And it is worth emphasizing that panoramic seeing

was not envisaged in the construction and use of the railways—nor was it

something actively at stake (subject to tinkering) in the evolution of railway

travel. In this sense panoramic seeing was an emergent phenomenon—a new way

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to perceive that just happened to manifest itself in a new material situation.

I wonder if this distinction between that which is and is not subject to tinkering parallels the stuff in the early chapters about a metalanguage. Flirting for example doesn't have a well established metalanguage, whereas house painting does (Turner, I think?). 

§4.2 Schivelbusch takes the nineteenth-century railway to be a key site for the development of industrialized consciousness, and explores it from several angles. One straightforward example of his way of proceeding concerns the development of what he calls panoramic seeing (1986: Chapter 4). His suggestion is that the railway journey makes possible a new way of perceiving the landscape quite different from earlier modes of apprehension, associated, for example, with horse-drawn carriages or walking. Where the latter foster a detailed (and multisensual) engagement with the specifics of the local environment, rail supports a panoramic (and purely visual) grasp of the terrain, in which the immediate foreground vanishes (due to the relative speed of the observer) while the background is seen synthetically, and translations between towns, countryside, and villages are grasped as a whole. It is as though the landscape appears as a movie projected onto the screen of the window. 

Thevenot also talks about roads and the morality or roads. I wonder if I could study Boerne using the roads and infrastructure as a .. way to do something??? Like if I could fold in the angel network stuff and startups AND B & T AND Boerne and tie it altogether in one bow. Plus community advocacy. Like I could help Boerne communicate better. Provide a real solution for them. Well maybe not solution but recommendations. Like a Spinuzzi report type thing. You could do chapters on the roads, the A network, housing, ... 

Going back to this: " Now inner experience is part of the construction of the subject (the panoramic voyeur) for the object

(the railway/the landscape)" I wonder if this parallels the Katz from the Digital Literacy and Tech Comm volume. With Heidegger. Like how we mould tools then tools mould us. 

Yes. Thinking of psychoanalysis here. 

§4.4 A certain frustration can arise here as elsewhere in Schivelbusch’s discussions of industrial consciousness. On the one hand, he certainly does seem to illuminate the specificity of what it is like to be in an industrial society; on the other hand, no special language of inner states is involved. Somehow, Schivelbusch gets at the inner by describing the outer: the landscape rushes past, so of course the foreground becomes an unreadable blur, while the landscape unfolds like a map in the distance. One suspects some sleight of hand. But I think this feeling is mistaken. The point to note is that while there are many ways of describing the motion and relation of bodies and objects in railway travel, Schivelbusch describes outward circumstances from a certain perspective or subject position—the embodied position of the fast-moving traveler. The railway journey, then, made available the new subject position at which panoramic

seeing emerged.

Well, read more closely. "Somehow..." "One suspects some sleight of hand." "I think this feeling is mistaken. " "A certain frustration can arise here as elsewhere in Schivelbusch’s discussions of industrial consciousness" Or is Pickering defending Schivelbusch? It kind of seems like he is. Look at the title of this ch too. Oh I thought embodiment was in the title. 

You'll have to go back for the tech comm, overlay thing. 

§5.08 My own first reaction is one of distaste. I feel very uncomfortable when I discover that people I want to write about actually articulated my own interpretive scheme before I did. A consoling temptation is to say that the coincidence proves we are both right; but my fondness for the symmetry principle of the sociology of scientific knowledge gets in the way of that. Instead this seems like a nasty instance, too close to home, of that collapse of theory into its object which Fredric Jameson (1991) has described as characteristic of postmodernity—that loss of analytical distance, critical and otherwise. 

I feel like there's def a collapse of theory into its object. Good call Fred. 

But there was this too. 

§5.05 Upholstery and computer interfaces are material solutions to practical

problems encountered in the matching of people to things. Their historical

evolution has not hinged upon much general reflection on posthuman couplings,

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at least until recently.

But there is a strand of such reflection that dates back at

least to the industrial revolution (Pickering 1997b). The early political

economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx via Charles Babbage, were intensely

and explicitly interested in the coupling of people and machines in the factory,

which was remaking society as they wrote. Somehow, however, that line of

posthumanist thought has been repeatedly subject to humanist and antihumanist

purification as it looped through the academy in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. The proto-posthumanism of early scientific management, for

example, seems to have disintegrated in the 1920s and 1930s. As Peter Miller

and Nikolas Rose put it: The plant [then became] understood as pervaded by an

attitudinal and communicative atmosphere, a socio-psychological overlay to the

actual organization of the productive process itself (Miller and Rose 1995:435,

emphasis added), and the humanist overlay was claimed by the social scientists, 

while the ‘productive process itself’ was retained by the engineers. 

Sounds a little like the history of tech comm. Like we were proto-post-h and now we're fully that way.

Also Lyotard with quoting. "The plant [then became] understood as pervaded by an

attitudinal and communicative atmosphere, a socio-psychological overlay to the

actual organization of the productive process itself (Miller and Rose 1995:435,

emphasis added)"

You'll have to read Parsons, the bad cyberneticist? 

different thought: "One way to appreciate the significance of panoramic seeing is to reflect upon satellite imagery of the earth as a recent instance of the trend that began with the railways. Elichirigoity (1999) argues that satellite images of the earth as an isolated body floating in space were crucial to the emergence of a distinctive discourse of globality (or planet management) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "