There were two extended symposia that may be of particular interest to
others on xmca. Each occupied three program sessions, one on Friday and one
on Saturday.
The first of these, "Materials, Practices, and Appropriate Politics:
Putting Theory to Work in Designing Technology", was organized by Marc Berg
and included papers by Phil Agre, Yrjo Engestrom, and Leigh Star among others.
The second, "Confounding the Boundaries: Learning(s) and Practice(s) in
Technoscience", was organized by Susan Newman. There were papers by Naoki
Ueno, Susan, and ten other authors (including me); and Jean Lave and I
provided formal commentary and discussion.
There were many interesting issues raised in the general discussions at
both sessions. Because there were so many papers in each symposium
individual presentations had to be rather brief, and so all were admittedly
less complete than their authors would have liked. In many cases there were
at least drafts of written papers also available.
I propose, if my energy and resolve hold out, to share my own perceptions
of these two sessions, with some comments on related papers in other
sessions. I hope that others who attended the meeting will also provide
their own reactions and commentary, and that some of these points will
stimulate more general discussion here on xmca.
Those unfamiliar with the 4S group should know that it includes historians
of science and technology as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and
some psychologists. My sense is that it is roughly divided between the
historical-philosophical approach, following Kuhn and other 'externalist'
studies (ie. science and technology evolving under social influences, not
autonomously) and a more contemporary sociological focus following Latour.
Of people well-known in the broader field of science and technology studies
who contributed to the two symposia I will comment on here were Michael
Lynch and Lucy Suchman. There was also a rather interesting plenary session
on globalization issues in science and technology studies (which
increasingly includes economics as an object of analysis). Karen
Knorr-Cetina, Steve Shapin, and Donna Haraway participated in that one.
Moving in and out of the audiences for the symposia, I also noticed and
heard contributions from Wolf-Michael Roth, Chuck Bazerman, Steiner Kvale,
and Suzanne deCastell. They each also presented separate papers in other
sessions.
The announced ambition of the Friday symposium was to connect studies of
activity networks in various fields and sites to wider political issues.
Although by the end of the day many of us were not sure how successful we
had been in this difficult task, there were certainly many fascinating
pieces of the puzzle on display and under discussion.
Yrjo Engestrom reported on his studies of ship-building and presented the
idea that modular pre-fabricated ship cabins offered a new paradigm for
'mass customization' with potential political implications in the
workplace. For me the most interesting point was that the model cabins are
created as full-scale prototypes, and often are actually used on shipboard
after the end of the manufacturing cycle. These model cabins function as
artefacts and tools for designers and workers' 'thinking about'
modifications, improvements, trouble-shooting, etc. They functionally
replace scale-models, blueprints, and other more common design tools. The
lived environment of the material cabin is both context for and tool for
design and planning.
I was not sure, however, just how the finished model cabin is 'translated'
into the production of its clones for the ship. Are working drawings and
blueprints made from the cabin prototype and then used in production? In
what sense is the model cabin both an 'object' of the design process in the
AT sense, and also a 'boundary object' in the sense of ANT? [apropos our
recent discussions on AT vs. ANT, Actor-Network Theory]
Yrjo also sketched some ideas about the political transformations of the
workplace that attend the move from traditional mass production paradigms
to this new prototype-as-finished-product paradigm of mass customization.
Unfortunately for lack of time his discussion on this point did not really
carry me all the way to an understanding of what he was trying to say.
Perhaps he could elaborate on the list?
Lucy Suchman, whose work has been in the field of Artificial Intelligence,
raised a number of troubling and exciting questions about the moral,
ethical, and political implications of various views of Agency. She seems
to developed a position that artefacts, including intelligent machines, do
not have agency except as part of activity networks that include agentive
humans, and that human agency is fundamental to the derived, or apparent
agency of nonhuman actors. She argued that it is morally and politically
unwise to try to define agency in such a way that humans and nonhumans
(machines, tools, artefacts) have the same kind of agency.
These issues were debated in the session. The Latourian view is that it is
a mistake methodologically to privilege human agency as totally different
from the agency of nonhumans, and this is sometimes misinterpreted as
saying that nonhumans have the same sort of agency ascribed to humans. It
can also be interpreted as meaning that we should reduce our notions about
human agency to the point where they coincide with what makes sense also
for nonhumans. I think it is this latter possibility that most worried
Suchman. My own view is that what Latour is really saying is that neither
humans nor nonhumans have autonomous agency; that all agency exists only
relationally, in and through networks of activities with both human and
nonhuman participants. This view also has some potentially radical
implications for issues of moral (not to mention legal) accountability. Any
thoughts on this would be most welcome.
Michael Lynch presented his work on the legal notion of a chain of evidence
(chain of custody of the material evidence) from crime scene to courtroom,
particularly for the case of DNA evidence. It happens that lawyers often
attack the validity of evidence by seeking out weak links in the long chain
of both actions and arguments that connect the crime scene to the
courtroom. Lynch sought to understand how the law construes the chain, and
introduced a rather useful metaphor that cropped up many times in later
discussion. He compared the custodial-evidentiary chain to a chain of paper
dolls, cut when the paper is folded, then unfolded into a long chain of
identical (attached) doll shapes. When refolded, the 'chain' appears short,
strong, and difficult to attack. When unfolded, just the opposite. (There
are degrees of foldedness in practical cases.) Those attacking the validity
of the chain seek to unpack or unfold, revealing links within links, some
of which may be weak; defenders seek to portray the chain with as few links
as possible. Other people, including myself, saw in this metaphor a
_fractal_ image of the connectivity of activity networks. Just as in AT we
may descend to the level of the Operations to trace how actions are united
in an activity, so in this fractal model of activity networks, there are
indefinitely many levels of potentially meaningful links and components of
activities, depending on what people consider sufficient or negotiate as an
adequate model for some purpose. We see here an ethnomethodological
contribution to our ways of understanding activities and their linkages,
one that adds real flexibility (which we observe, I think) to practice, and
makes real headaches for theory.
Leigh Star and Marc Berg probably made the most explicit efforts to address
political issues in the session. I will report and comment on their papers
in my next message. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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