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Home |Changes [Jul 19, 2007]
ScheduleSummary:
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Discussion notes: Friday, October 27 discussion with Geoff Bowker
*organizing concepts: presence, agency, representation *excavating infrastructurs: what is visible vs. invisible
*how do invisible or unclassified others have/gain/practice political agency? **they can buy into caetgories but the risk is reifying them (south african example of crossing racial categories) **you can try to fight the categories
*as objects gain agentic properties, how do we rethink classifications/infrastructures? **we are increasingly delegating work to computers, though people are still responsible for articulating this delegation, however this work of articulation is still largely invisible **actants vs. actors, who has intentional being in these infrastructures?
*who is empowered by classification? **class infrastructures & categories are reinforced, epidemiologists, doctors, bureaucrats (particularly these since it is often their domain to work with statistics & categories, comparable across context) **who are you when you become classified? what type of categories, specification are involved. there are clearly benefits & returns to this process -- (a balance sheet of classification) **does the process of naming constrict or empower individuals?
*who is not empowered by classfication? **often individuals, the between cases (others)
*naming **new media does not foster the flexible, rapid name changes that you might guess, example as botanical names which still have a life span of 100 - 150 years despite new media's inclusion in this system **naming can be part of agents/agency. it is often power over something to be able to name it **levels in a dendritic structure + flows of agency **naming can also be seen as gathering, it can be accomplished by collaborative filtering, intelligent algorithms etc. increasingly there are 2 trends: the transferrence of naming to actants (technologies) and additionally relations that **we should be careful to distinguish a freedom from categorization, brough about by dynamic categorization, and some other ideas about taste. are these dynamic categorization systems (e.g. the way amazon recommends books based on previous purchases) really directing attention? are they really people slowly building models of their identity in a data universe, leaving a trail of their past uses of attention?
*the question of authorship **one of the things it complicates to erase singular categorizations (e.g. single authored papers) is the ensuing qeustions of authorship. how could you tenure? how would you judge the relative contributions of each worker? this is a use of standard well-supported within the academic institution. kept alive by those who do it and those who tenure based on these critera. would there be any other models? movie credits? **whence comes the category of authorship: role of the designer, division of labor, what about those that manage the work? **how can we author or create fairly?
*how can we change a category? **actor network theory (Latour) would tend to overstate the capacities of the individual actor to mobilize others in a network and thus affect change. intsead it largely requires collective rather than individual action. also there are often sizable social structures that the actor is nested in (categories are created that structure us before we are even old enough to know they exist) that prevent agency. **how can the invisible worker do this? **creation of discourse as means of change **is the simple creative act enough? consider as an example the contemporary fine arts community. they sucessfully deploy concepts as part of the art object and then sell people on the concept. buying this concept as art piece, as a strategic collector, deploys, further, the social importance of the concept/artist/art. **changes are both top down & bottom up
*how do classifications get re-classified? **cultural revolutions, conjunctions of localities that start to change each others' ideas, scale (the speed and reach of the media through which these things are deployed influences this process), time **the modern hard question is how you get organizations taht work at different rhythms in conjunction with each other? (this question of rhythms is quite large....there is often cultural lag behind changes/innovations which varies greately across historical examinations)
*heterochronia: the fit & intersection of temporalities, conjunctures annalistes/braudel **emerges as an idea in biology concerning differential rates of growth in varied parts of an embryo **new media can change the visibility of institutionalization. e.g. digital media has revealed remixing & plagiarism (by current system definitions) as common work practices, particularly in creativity. **plagiarism emerges as a new & powerful institiutional category **the power of use **the importace of procedures (these can be exceedingly difficult to change) **role of long term use and institutionalization **importance of archives as institutionalized memory, authorized history
*classification as work/process **classifying is work that is often done but largely invisible **where are the acts of categorization **where systems are applied **by using instruments **by findign work arounds (visibility, fuzziness, managing of multiplicity) **black boxing
*work and work-arounds: what is the difference between work and a work around? what can we learn from these work arounds? **work arounds are those solutions that are not formally articulated as work in the system **many people are constantly work-arounding at the local level **today's production patterns (e.g. coding) create a situation where no one has the whole view of the standards & structure of a body of code. instead peopel are interacting with a constantly shifting view of the body of code, and they, in their local spot are always working around as part of their daily "work" **instead we see assemblage these days, the making of systems with people, artifacts, communities, institutions, embedded decisions rather than a single coherent designer (myth of this) **managing, understanding & viewing, capturing the process
*about the author: Geoff describes his journey into this work as initially inspired by reading Levi-Strauss on mythologies. He became interested in reading the mythologies in science, especially those around the concept of time. He has been researching classification, a thing which seems to hold knowledge down and render it inflexible. The challenge, in this book, was how to read the very formal systems,the ICD, databases, etc, that are the key symbolic forms of our times, the key to governmentality. We have no tools to read these things.
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Related References Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think -- describes institutions as sites of collective memory.
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Sorting things out and archaeology.
One of the things that I have found more interesting in the book is the idea that we are dealing all the time with boundary objects without paying due attention to them. "Boundary objects are the canonical forms of all objects in our built and natural environments. Forgetting this, as people routinely do, means empowering the self-proclaimed objective voices of purity that creates the suffering of monsters in borderlands" (p.307). Archaeologists construct typologies which do not allow boundary objects to exist as such, in all their multiple, complex nature. Typologies are about precise order, purity, cleanliness, well defined classes. We rarely reflect on the far-reaching implications of our classifications. We take them for granted, even while we build them. Our archaeological artefacts are readily transformed into naturalized objects, lacking anthropological strangeness (p. 299). This practice certainly does not produce human suffering as Apartheid or medical classifications do, but it may have negative implications for our discipline. And I am sure that it has political implications. Among other things, we are continuously applying very modernist categories that do violence to the relationship between artefacts and people. I think we need typologies that admit multiple membership and that are guided by an ethics of ambiguity. We can not take a pot for granted.
AGR
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Bowker - Introduction.pdf
