If we think back (often discussed on xmca at length) to Bateson's
man-axe-tree-axe-man loop of differences that make a difference in the
'chopping' activity, we could I suppose substitute man-computer-man as a
minimal loop, but part of the richness of Bateson's analysis is that there
is artifact mediation via the axe (cf. Heidegger's hammer), and that (again
like Heidegger) there is a sort of 'fusion' in which man-hammer, or
man-axe, or man-mouse, or man-computer behaves as a single system; there is
an emergent level of organization in which what hammers do, how they
participate in interaction, and what people do, that is not predictable
from any amount of study of hammers in a world without people, or people in
a world without hammers. Woman-with-a-hammer, or hammer-with-a-hand
wielding it, are not the same functional unit, not the same _actant_ as the
hammer on the bench, etc. Ditto human-computer. This much is not news, of
course.
Cybernetic models look at the flow of information, or more elegantly as in
Bateson, of differences that make a difference. We can also take a
phenomenological view, or an emergentist view, or some combination of
these. But if the artifact _mediates_, what is on the 'other end'? For
Bateson it's the tree, for Heidegger the nail and board. I don't really
think we can take the computer to be a mirror, and there are some
interesting paradoxes in the notion of the computer, or the text, mediating
our interaction with ourselves. In a developmental
internalization-externalization model, we get the odd view that we
bootstrap our own development by externalizing the now-me, which is viewed
by the new-now different-for-having-externalized me, and the interaction
produces the stiller newer me of having internalized my own just past
externalization.
Of course we all know that this does really happen. But we regard it as a
special and somewhat 'degenerate' (in the mathematical, not the moral
sense) case of interpersonal interaction, where there is another human on
the other side of the seesaw. But that view is itself excessively
individual-privileging in terms of levels and units of analysis. As Bill
notes, it's really a larger scale social system or network in which
participating fosters internalizations via externalizations and their
dialectic.
If we put the Heideggerian view in the paradox get even worse, for now me
and the computer are fused into a single unit of analysis, a single
emergent level of organization: so how can there even be a mirroring or
feedback? it takes two to tango, and in this view, which represents an
experientially realistic account in many cases, there is no longer two but
one. The resolution here again is that there must be a 'third'. I may fuse
with the hammer, but the nail remains 'as if' external. I may even fuse
with the hammer-and-nail, but the board ... or the house, or something,
remains external. There must be an 'externalization' in this sense, a
not-me, for the mirroring-feedback-autopoietic-change model to function
logically (and experientially).
Pulling back to the core model of the internal, we can pose this also in
the classic terms of solipsism: at what point is it useful (if never
actually necessary) to suppose that there is a not-me 'out there'?
Precisely at the point that the comparison of efferent and afferent signals
(brain theory is still at the cybernetic stage) produces a difference not
predictable from the efferent signal and prior afferent information about
the environment. That is, when life surprises us, when there seems to be
some other agency at work besides ourselves (people, machines, demons,
gravity, the unconscious?). But our default model of this other agency is
that it is an agent like ourselves -- which is why a lot of people find
Latour's notions of nonhuman agency a bit weird (not realizing that he
means to change the model for our own agency as well).
Emergentism seems to me to offer a rather elegant solution to all these
problems at once. We participate in networks of social practices/processes
in which artifacts, inscriptions (tools, signs) also participate as do
other humans and all of the units of analysis on comparables scales of the
ecosocial systems. Participating we are changed, we are functionally
different as we take on roles in various networks. Subnetworks, even very
small local ones (but they don't have to be space/time-local), function as
new units of organization at a higher scale (cf. fusions, cyborgs), without
ceasing to function as individual units at the lower scale. There is always
a not-me, a not-us: the further extensions and participants (actants) of
the network at the next higher scale, without which the scale-in-focus
would not continue to operate (no nails, no hammering-of-nails). The
internal-external divide is relative and re-scalable; it is arbitrary in
general, but not in each specific case where there are definable units at
different scales and levels of analysis. There is always internalization in
the sense that we cannot not participate in the ecosocial system, cannot
not be changed by doing so. There is always externalization in the sense
that whatever we do _matters_ (makes a difference) to the higher-levels in
which we participate, some part of which is always for some purpose
'external' or not-me, not-us at the moment.
But ... we are still free up to a point to increase or decrease our
coupling to various subnetworks, to be more open or more closed, to not
fully participate, to participate here and not there, to refuse to
externalize in those particular ways that couple us into a particular
subnetwork more sensitively. We cannot be there and not have an effect, but
we need not produce the particular effects that the subnetwork is counting
on and needs in order to further entrain us into an activity. We
externalize, but not 'co-operatively' with the specificity of the activity
type. And so we are still affected by our resistance or our demurral, we
still internalize something (maybe that sense of wrongness), but we are not
as selectively sensitive, not as specifically coupled into that activity as
we might be, or as is needed if we are to internalize what is usually
internalized through full, appropriate forms of externalization. Our
behavior, of course, produces a somewhat anomalous local subnetwork, as
seen at the next higher level of analysis. What do other, normally coupled
subnetworks, make of this anomalous one? Do anomalies spread and ramify, or
are they damped out toward an average preservation of meta-stability?
And, finally, the joker. Cross-scale effects in which distant events in
time and space, large-scale systems and long-term trends, break into the
local moment, or simply pervade it: the computer has a design history that
is suddenly very relevant to what we are doing now; the not-me, the not-us,
become 'them' designers of the machine, the authors of software, and less
individualistically the cultural biases built into the affordances of the
artifact, and through our fusion with it, into us (at least into
us-and-it-now). Other cultures, other hammers. So, no, 'me and the
computer' is not a viable minimal unit, especially when use is seamless
(fusion), at least not for the analysis of internalizationa and
externalization and their role in enculturative development. Perhaps when
the computer is not working properly, when it is no longer an extension of
a differently-abled me (the egocentric view, of course), but is
recalcitrant, an adversary, a thing that does back what is not predictable
from my efferents, when I act _on it_ rather than _through it_, when it
ceases to be truly mediational and becomes itself the 'other' of
interaction, rather than, as normally, a part of me+ that is transacting
with some further other.
Once we see that all activity is always already interdependent with and a
part of larger networks of further activities (and their participants),
organized on multiple scales, with shifting degrees of coupling in each
local instance, in-/ex-ternalization becomes relative and multiple, always
a relevant perspective, but redefined at each scale, with multiple relevant
scales in each case. There are no minimal units, only the levels of
organization that happen to be in focus at the moment -- and these cannot
be defined outside of the networks, neither absolutely nor universally nor
in context-independent ways. And so neither can they be defined at single
instantaneous moments of time; they can be defined as
actants-in-an-activity only in the over-time dynamics of the activity, only
as trajectory-entities with finite (greater than zero) scale-extension in
time (which is of course what _makes_ 'time').
Non-externalization is really 'displaced' or 'reduced' externalization
relative to a particular subnetwork and activity. Non-internalization is
the same phenomenon relative to the next larger (developmental) time-scale,
a scale appropriate to the web of activities that bridge between an
activity in which we could have internalized aspects of some practice but
didn't, over to another (many others) in which it makes a difference that
we did not do so. On that scale there will be links to still other
activities in which we are more engaged, more productively externalize, and
do internalize (or at least maintain if not change practices). And at that
or perhaps the next scale up, we will find the connections between the
practices-not-internalized and those that are, and perhaps also the
consequences of non-externalization.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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