Control needs to be read here as a kind of blocking activity. In the first
case, the notion of regimentation as control fits well with the intuitively
straightforward metaphor of entrapment--fresh action is directly blocked.
Social ambage, the winding ways of the entrapping system, is high so skill at
"working" the system must be developed if fresh action is to be undertaken.
These skills could include a significant degree of mimesis, a masking of
intent behind an otherwise apparently "normal" activity. Rapidly changing and
(apparently) uncoordinated contexts create the opposite form of control
because they "freeze" participants who become increasingly unable to predict
consequences. Administrators might, for example, adopt a management style
that would control subordinates by frequent restructuring and contradictory
directives. Since the administrators are at least one step removed from
production, they can afford to do this but the subordinates are overwhelmed
by the need to adapt (and survive). High levels of ambiguity (the
administrators' style in this case) here fit within the less intuitively
obvious metaphor of overwhelmedness. Both extremes however describe basic
kinds of blocking action-control projects.
Identity formation is tougher and I'm not sure I could answer it
satisfactorily even if I were to abuse the normal email protocol of message
length (which I'll try not to do). White's structural approach to network
theory, as opposed to Latour's more anthropological approach could, I hope
not unfairly, be characterized as neo-Mertonian sociology. While White takes
care to avoid individual-as-person atomism this suggests considerable care
should to be taken in comparison, particularly when they seem to be talking
about the same thing. Never the less, both approaches do result in a model
that is rather "flat" -- confined to a social plane in which
actors/actants/identities are the elements (nodes) and
stories/interactions/valuations the ties (edges) of a social network "graph."
Actants/identities are frequently non-human and, in structural terms at
least, result from various kinds of "friction" -- they are literally the
traces, as are social practices generally, of control efforts by others and
of the self as well. Control may be read here as an adaptation to contingency
-- to a phenomenologically stochastic universe -- and agency may be read as
an exclusively social facet of identity formation. The kinds of contingency
tradeoffs that foster identity and fresh action, such as ambage-ambiguity
balancing, are major sources of "friction." Without such "frictions," it
would be possible for a human _not_ to be an identity since identities,
according to White, continually rediscover and reshape themselves in action
-- the more contingency there is, the more action is required to counter and
anticipate disruption.
I hope that doesn't muddy the waters too much.
Rolfe
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Rolfe Windward (UCLA GSE&IS, Curriculum & Teaching)
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"I respect belief, but doubt is what gets you an education." W. Mizener