Leigh Star studies the complex networks of activities that implement our
human classification schemes, our meaning-splitters, which in a sense are
responsible (my view) for the greater complexity of ecosystems with vs.
without humans. Any physically irrelevant difference can become culturally
meaningful and so become the grandmother of generations of further
differences ... which now become physically relevant through our material
human mediation of other ecological processes. Classification is pretty
important, indeed perhaps too important to be left to semioticians, at
least if they insist that all meaning is based on contrasting categories,
whereas students of natural, including human, phenomena see that we make
meaning from quantitative differences as well, and perhaps more
fundamentally (in a material sense). Leigh and the discussion raised all
these issues, but what stands out in my mind, and from later comments also
for others who heard the talk was the political, and very human dimension
of Leigh's central example: racial classifications in apartheid South
Africa and their human effects.
It takes a rather complex network of institutionalized activities to
sustain a system of social classification, especially an explicit one, over
a large society with all its inherent quantititative and circumstantial
variability and diversity. Dominating political institutions tend to
substitute the 'normal' or 'average' case, always either a fiction or a
very rare instance, for the real range of almost always somehow
non-canonical cases. (The basis for my odd conclusion that some-way 'queer'
is the majority, and all-ways 'normal' a very small minority.) Apartheid
South Africa had to deal with all sorts of real cases that contradicted its
White/Black (or White/Black /Colored/Asian) ideology of positive races. (A
wonderful example of just why the positivist philosophical program
typically fails.)
Leigh recounted and traced the elaborate legal, social, cultural, and
institutional apparatus needed to discipline an unruly biological
(cultural, linguistic, individual) diversity to make it appear to conform
to an impossibly simplistic classification scheme. These classifications
affected where you could live, what school a child could attend, whom you
could marry, where you could work, which library was open to you (a
horrifying photograph was projected of the entrance to a Europeans-only
library, officially sign-posted, built and constituted as such ... if you
think this a fearsome contradiction, think about present practice of
Adults-only sites of knowledge).
Among my many reactions to Leigh's insightful accounts was a sort of dread
that there is something inhuman at the heart of all meaning systems --
perhaps the reason why wise semioticians are also intensely aware of the
need for phenomenological acccounts of lived experience and the ways it
escapes semiotic description.
Leigh provided at least one concept, as usual a metaphoric term, that lives
quintessentially between semiotics and lived experience: torque. She used
this term to name the fact and degree of mismatch between what the
classificatory meaning system of the culture says you are or must be, and
what the lived experience of your life affirms. I have sometimes in the
past used the term 'slippage' for such a notion, but 'torque' much better
connotes both the skew dimensions at stake and the felt wringing of our
hearts.
Marc Berg's paper took up a theme heard in several others at the
conference, though in more general terms: how is the logic of design
distorted by the logic of power? or in its inverse terms: how is the logic
of power inscribed by design in the logic of artefacts? His focus was on
the sleight of hand by which the hierarchical rationality of systems of
managerial and bureaucratic domination project themselves onto the logic of
design for the workplace. He distinguished the logic of the workplace as a
site of cooperative and collaborative community of practice from that of
managerial hierarchies which favor a Taylorian rationalization not just of
production, but human action and interaction in the workplace. His examples
were drawn from the design of information systems, whose rationality seems
purely formal and abstract, but is really a decontextualizing logic that
serves to mediate hierarchical managerial control, and he contrasted this
with contextualizing logics of the specificity of workplaces and worker
collaborations. [I was hearing Marc in part through the mediation of
Valerie Walkerdine's critique of formal logicality as a medium of
patriarchal domination.] It is too bad that Naoki Ueno's and Yasuko
Kawatoko's related papers on just this sort of logic of collaboration in
Japanese machine tool factories was in Saturday's symposium. It would have
made a perfect reference case for Marc's points.
The ensuing discussion seemed to focus on the question of what social
studies of science and technology really had to offer to anyone,
politically or in terms of improvement of practice. Among the suggestions
was that it helps us understand the linkages across domains of human
activity (a methodological canon of the Latourian approach at least), and
that it potentially offers a basis for constructing a political theory and
praxis that takes into account the important role of science and especially
of technology in modern societies (though the audience seemed to find this
more a promise than something yet demonstrated).
In the discussion I proposed another contribution, one more from the
theoretical side (I do believe in the practical uses of theorization!):
that by distinguishing what local ideology conflates we can open up larger
spaces and dimensions of imaginably possible actions and lives. We can
spawn political visions and help people imagine acts that do not fit
hegemonic social patterns. There would not have been time in the discussion
period (I was not an official discussant for this session, but only for the
next day's), but I had worked out one such example on my notepad, beginning
from Marc's analysis.
As many of you know, I have been thinking a lot about scale lately,
especially temporal scale. So Marc's distinction between the logic of power
relations and that of the workplace seemed to me fit within a larger model
that distinguished analyses of power relations on various scales, workplace
practices on these same scales, and practices of technological design --
distinguished them the better to relate them to one another (which I think
one can only do by looking across the time scales). The three
(oversimplified) time scales would represent those of synoptic/abstracting
formal-logical practices, of the dynamics of complex self-organizing
systems, and of developmental trajectories and their evolution on the
generational-historical scale. This gives us a 3-by-3 matrix whose entries,
if we can fill them in, expands Marc's basic analysis into a much larger
space of possibilities. [I can supply the whole matrix and my guesses about
the nine entries if anyone is interested.]
There were many other interesting papers in this symposium (including one
by Ina Wagner on the interaction of architectural design and human social
practices in the designed spaces, for those following the xmca thread on
that issue). I was already not feeling my best that day, and so did not
make it to the first (8:30 am) paper by Phil Agre -- perhaps he or someone
else can fill in that gap in my report.
I'll move on next to the Plenary that evening and to the Saturday symposium.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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