<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Dear Brian, Mark,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I shall try to pick up and follow a few threads...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><brian>For me, ontology remains a question to ask about one's destinations in time, not a series of labels to be applied toward the technical utopia of transparent communication. Ontology: I mean, I'm not against tags, but it would be a pity to arrive at a situation where you can "find" everything, without ever knowing what you're actually looking for...</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Perhaps this arises because, as you say, ontologies and tags are essentially ways of classifying and ordering. But "<I>A classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual world</I>." (Dewey, 1989: 49 <FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">Originally published in 1925</SPAN></FONT>). </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">We seem to be immersed in some sort of basic need to categorise things, people and places. A counterpoint might be Susan Leigh Star's work (she's described as a communication theorist) on classification and the role of infrastructure systems: She talks about '<I>rich and interesting mess that occurs backstage in the doing of science. Some of the elements of this mess include serendipity; unforeseen aspects of timing and coordination; the physical constraints of things and materials, including animals and tools; and the informal, backstage processes of communication and argumentation that inform all organizational life'</I>. Her approach is emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. Problems arise because categories are made and kept invisible, and one way of disrupting this is to show how people can change this invisibility through integrating and adapting it into an everyday practice.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Suchman has taken this further in trying to understand the man/machine interaction. She wrote a paper way back in 1999 about the apparently uninteresting, but frustrating, fact that people in an office couldn't use a newly developed 'large, feature-rich photocopier'. The people who'd created the machine at Xerox couldn't understand why such an intelligent machine was essentially useless, so she did a technographic study over two years gave some insights. Her approach was to 'locate artifacts within the sites and relations of their everyday use'. She found that there was no such thing as an 'easy-to-use' machine, there was always some degree of learning required, so that new forms of practice are culturally produced. And in conclusion she recognises that systems development if not the creation of discrete , intrinsically meaningful objects, but should instead respond to the fact that:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> '<I>Ethnographies of the social world work across the grain of categories and distinctions- to recover just how the social/material specificities they describe are assembled together to comprise our everyday experience</I>'</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><mark>[Pask's] Conversation Theory. His Conversation Theory may be worth revisiting for a way of thinking through how the act of story-telling–as something that unfolds over time–produces a "shared" space "between" actors resulting in "outcomes" to which neither can lay claim to exclusive authorship.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">So one question does this theory really help to uncover what it is about conversation that produces share space or does it just help to develop descriptions of abstract qualities? Of course it is useful to be able to uncover some form of process of exchange, but IMHO fields such as sociology are better able to explain situated human to human interaction. In fact ethnographic and anthropological studies (such as those of Suchman, Eric Laurier and Barry Brown's work) seem to be able to reveal some of the features and structures of such exchanges in a much more useful and contextual way. Can cybernetics and its related approaches really offer ways of dealing and designing for everyday socio-spatial practices?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><brian>Feedback is the endless perfectioning of structure, the eternally corrective return. Whereas actual machines, in their material singularity, are always what breaks down, goes off track, falls catastrophically apart, with a little help from some impish non-conformist, some lazy maintenance-man, some treacherous spare-parts department. I'm not so much talking about hacking and sabotage as about ideas and attitudes that get under your skin and start fiddling with the dials on your inner android. Does the answer always have to be correct? What about the truth of scientific paradox? Is there a one-way ticket in life anymore? Is there a machinic irony of the overdeveloped civilizations?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><mark>The critique of encroachment of the domain of the "addressable" upon that of the "non-addressable" is long-standing.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">Asking how we might narrate the (last remaining?) spaces "in-between" (as Ian Sinclair does in Orbital London, or J.G. Ballard does in Concrete Island for that matter) would inevitably to lead to us down the line to yet another mobile application designed to direct the tourist to that hidden cafe located "off the beaten path." Perhaps "local knowledge" is best left local?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">i want a satnav that helps me get lost</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">If we think about how space it seems to me it is one of the worst victims of our need to structure and categorise experience. It is caught in a homogenous straightjacket of definitions and rigid infrastructures: Lat/Long, North/South/East/West, maps, addresses, post codes etc. This can be contrasted against Varela's concept of enaction, which Brian introduced, which allows for the co-creation of observer and observed through the construction of their relation. In our everyday life we experience space as enacted- it does not exist a priori in some form of contained and constrained structure. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In Edwin Hutchin's book 'Cognition in the Wild' he introduces the metaphor of navigation as computation, which I find very useful. He claims that navigation and computation can be correlated because they are both essentially about 'operating within an information processing system'. Because of this navigators often make mistakes because they imagine that the reality presented to them by the information matches the reality in the physical and social world. He gives an example where a ship navigator describes his faith in a nautical chart </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">' <I>This little dot right here where the lines cross is where we are! I don't care if the bosun says we just went aground, we are here and there is plenty of water under the ship here</I>' . </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Accuracy within a system doesn't necessarily deliver an account of reality that we would expect...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">So it's not as simple as a case of a satnav that gets me lost because there is an error in the systems translation of information, but a satnav that can cope with ambiguity, that could represent in-between spaces and offer 'wander' or 'spend an hour doing nothing in particular' as an option. I'm sure there are examples of situated technology projects out there which really respond to these issues... </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I mentioned Karen Martin's and colleagues workshops on in-betweeness and betwixt in my last mail (<A href="http://www.inbetweeness.org/workshops.html">http://www.inbetweeness.org/workshops.html</A>). They seem an example of a good way to start to investigate the non-categorisable spaces of the city, and how transitional spaces are enacted. Of course, there's still the point at which we translate this experience into a way of interacting with the world, and there we will always need to negotiate some form of common language if we have any chance of finding our way, or getting lost for that matter.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Katharine</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">+++++</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">L. Suchman, Blomberg, J. Orr, and R. Trigg. (1999 ) Reconstructing technologies as social practice. In Lehman, P. and N. Wakeford (eds.), Analyzing Virtual Societies: New Directions in Methodology. Special Issue of Applied Behavioral Sciences Journal: 43:3:.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995</DIV><BR><DIV><DIV>On 29 Oct 2007, at 22:52, <A href="mailto:brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr">brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr</A> wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Mark Shepard wrote:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Brian, Katharine,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Let's see how far we can spin this thread?</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Sure, for me it's quite interesting. But it will take a while just to make</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">our terms clear to each other, I suspect, because these are complicated</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">issues and I am sure everyone approaches them somewhat differently.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Clearly first-order cybernetics as exemplified by, say, the Homeostat,</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">follows this logic. But my understanding of how the field evolved (which is</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">limited, although I think Hayles (1999) provides a useful introduction) is</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">that second- and third-order theoreticians such as Gordon Pask sought ways</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">of thinking about interaction with (and through) computers that favored</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"open" over "closed" systems, with outcomes that were not knowable outside</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the system's performance.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Yes, these plateaus are fundamental. Most people date the second period</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">from Heinz von Foerster's focus on refleivity, on the observer inside the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">observed system (well, Von Foerster actually coined the term "second-order</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">cybernetics," so that's obvious enough). The third level gets various</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">definitions, all having to do with change in complex systems which are</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">often social ones. How does a system alter its own parameters? Guattari's</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">late work has aspects of third-order cybernetics, by way of Varela and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Prigogine. In Chaosmosis he raises the boundary-problem of Varela's</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">autopoetic machines or living systems, and suggests that the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">interdependency of machines, biological beings and institutions allows one</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">to locate assemblages. So you get third-order cybernetic sociology!</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[Pask's] Conversation Theory may be worth revisiting for a way of</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">thinking through how the act of story-telling–as something that unfolds</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">over time–produces a "shared" space "between" actors resulting in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"outcomes" to which neither can lay claim to exclusive authorship.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">This might be a good one for Katharine to look into! Seems pretty clear to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">me that exclusive authorship is not exactly common in the human way of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">doing things. I hope to get to Pask someday, but maybe not right away...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The critique of encroachment of the domain of the "addressable" upon that</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">of the "non-addressable" is long-standing. Deleuze (1992) discusses this in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the context of the dissolution of forms of societal enclosures (Foucault),</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Yes, and that critique is very timely today in the world of Web 2.0, when</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the word "ontology" is used by programmers defining categories of tags for</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">database files! Since I tend to think in the terms of continental</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">philosophy, and even a little poorly digested Heidegger, I find this</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">semantic-web talk of "ontologies" quite shocking, a really troubling</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">symptom of the oblivion of being. For me, ontology remains a question to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">ask about one's destinations in time, not a series of labels to be applied</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">toward the technical utopia of transparent communication. I mean, I'm not</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">against tags, but it would be a pity to arrive at a situation where you can</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"find" everything, without ever knowing what you're actually looking for...</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Law (2004) shows, the messy, non-addressable aspects of the "real world"</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">pervade the scientific laboratory as much as they do everyday life. So I'd</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">think it's less a question of looking away from science to art, but</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">recognizing the inter-weavings of the two (among others) in the larger</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">frame of this thing we call life.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">That seems to be what interests the cyberneticians from Von Foerster on. It</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">has lead to Varela's concept of enaction, or the co-creation of observer</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">and observed through the construction of their relation. I've just recently</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">heard of that idea, and it's very interesting! Maybe related to Pask on the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">conversation. But the introduction of the messier parts into cybernetics is</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">also the reason why the whole discourse was finally abandoned to a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">more-or-less hippie counter-culture (Bateson) or it broke down into its</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">constitutive specialties again (neurophysiology, control engineering,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">computer science, artificial intelligence). I guess the speculative and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">incalculable aspects of social theory were not digestible by the scientists</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">and technologists (but let's not forget Stafford Beer and Cybersyn in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Allende's Chile!). The thing is, before this breakdown in the 1980s, much</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">of the groundwork was laid for the kind of control society that we have in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the age of Total Surveillance today. To figure out where that came from, I</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">am quite interested in Karl Deutsch's book, The Nerves of Government</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">(1963), which is the strictest, yet most sophisticated and all-embracing</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">sociological use of first-order cybernetic models I've yet found.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Deutsch makes the point that feedback models merely formalize a long</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">tradition of organizational techniques, involving an increasingly careful</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">discipline of information flow through hierarchically structured chains of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">command. This is something you can see very clearly in James Beniger's much</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">later work on The Control Revolution (1986), covering problems of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">information flow in corporate and military organizations up to WWII.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Beniger's book is such a great genealogy of networked organizational forms</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">that he doesn't even have to talk about them explicitly! The relevance is</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">just obvious.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Another fascinating example of an early figure who put first-order ideas to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">very practical use in the management field is Jay Wright Forrester. After</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">working on the Whirlwind computer in the 1950s (which was part of the SAGE</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">ontinental air defense, and all those things that Edwards talks about in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">his Closed World book), JW Forrester went on to found system dynamics,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">which basically involves the modeling and computer simulation of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">interconnected feedback loops in large-scale organizations: industries,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">then cities, and finally the world, in the book on World Dynamics, which</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">led to the famous Club of Rome report on Limits to Growth in the early</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1970s.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">My basic idea is that the collapse of the initial cybernetic hypothesis,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">then its slow reconstruction into the very complex and ultra-specialized</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">discourses of present-day cognitive science, has acted to cover up and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">render opaque the really immense progress of the control society, some of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">which I have tried to describe in my recent text entitled "Future Map: Or</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance" (that's on</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">my blog at brianholmes.wordpress.com, along with the outline for the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Guattari piece that Mark referred to). And this story isn't exactly over:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Check out the concept of "socio-tech" in the US government report on</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Converging technologies for Improving Human Performance</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">(<A href="http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/1/NBIC_report.pdf">http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/1/NBIC_report.pdf</A>). There's a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">little chart on p. 159 which I find particularly impressive, a kind of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">bull's eye which brings a whole range of discourses to the point of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">identifying human subjects for instrumental action upon them.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What I am really interested in developing are ways of understanding the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">different moments of second- and third-order cybernetics as sites of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">cultural, philosophical and scientific struggles over the definitions, uses</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">and limits of technologically inspired models of human behavior. It seems</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">obvious to me that today, as cognitive science increasingly integrates</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">neurophysiological research and anthropology to informatics and artificial</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">intelligence, and as the simpler feedback systems of first-order</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">cybernetics are perfected and brought up to ever-higher speeds, with</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">ever-deeper memory banks and ever-wider surveillance nets to fill them with</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">information, there is a great cultural need to relaunch the kinds of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">heretical experimentation and also, explicit philosophical and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">organizational antagonism toward the applications of cognitive science, a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">kind of experimentation/antagonism which already marked the 60s and 70s,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">but which we seem to have forgotten about today. As you can guess I want to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">write something in exactly that direction, something that combines this</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">kind of dry and precise scientific talk that we're getting into here with</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">some more pointed political opposition and also some much wilder delirium!</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">But even more, I would like to get involved with some experimentation.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">If technology is to be the answer (and</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">it may not be in this case, but Katharine, you originally frame it as</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">such), how we frame the question is, in fact, *the* critical question.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Asking how we might narrate the (last remaining?) spaces "in-between" (as</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ian Sinclair does in Orbital London, or J.G. Ballard does in Concrete</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Island for that matter) would inevitably to lead to us down the line to yet</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">another mobile application designed to direct the tourist to that hidden</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">cafe located "off the beaten path." Perhaps "local knowledge" is best left</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">local?</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I want a SATNAV device that helps me get lost...</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Really, now you're talkin' sense, imho. Read Norman Klein on the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"Electronic Baroque" (in his Vatican to Vegas book) and you'll be even more</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">inspired!</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">So, maybe the question then (if the answer is to be technology): how do</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">we create technologies that work toward enhancing the serendipitous, the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">unexpected, the schizogeographic,<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>the always already _un_known, the stuff</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">which elides what Brian describes as "the imposed patternings of everyday</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">existence in technological societies", or in plain terms, that which simply</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">enhances the very _process_ of living?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Well, without being too sacrilegious here on the techno-loving iDC list,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">could I ask whether it might be interesting to break down or even destroy</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">some complex cybernetic machines? Like, for instance, the ones that</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">categorize us to the nth degree of ontological absurdity? The principle of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the feedback loop "is haunted by the idea of eternity," according to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Guattari in Chaosmosis. Feedback is the endless perfectioning of structure,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">the eternally corrective return. Whereas actual machines, in their material</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">singularity, are always what breaks down, goes off track, falls</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">catastrophically apart, with a little help from some impish non-conformist,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">some lazy maintenance-man, some treacherous spare-parts department. I'm not</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">so much talking about hacking and sabotage as about ideas and attitudes</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">that get under your skin and start fiddling with the dials on your inner</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">android. Does the answer always have to be correct? What about the truth of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">scientific paradox? Is there a one-way ticket in life anymore? Is there a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">machinic irony of the overdeveloped civilizations?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">all the best, Brian</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">mail2web.com – What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint">http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>