Objects, Artifacts and Materiality: Related Literature

(1)

Systems Thinking and Sociotechnical Systems:

sets of elements standing in interaction - interactive technological and sociological patterns. Anthropotechnology and human centered interventions.

(8)

Fluidity – Multiplicity of Reality:

a study of the relations, repulsions and attractions which form a flow, reality is multiple, ontology is not given, ontologies are brought into being in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices

(2)

ANT:

objects as matters of concern, ostensive vs performative objects, object subject dichotomy, ”associology” – study of interactions, transients

(3)

Activity Theory

: objects motivate and direct activities, instrumentality, appropriation of the material world, mediating artifacts

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Material Semiotic Analysis:

Discursive Constitutive processes of materiality. Situated knowledges . “Objects" do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. Objectivity is not about disengagement . Figurations.

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Performativity – Discursive Materialization

: Performativity - gender is an "act, process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter

(4)

Situated Action:

situatedness of action, embodied and enacted practice, sociomaterial assemblages, performative nature of both persons and things,

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Philosophy of Pragmatism:

things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of enquiries. experience is of as well as in nature. Things interacting are experience; they are what is experienced.

(5)

Mangles of Practice:

constitutive intertwining and reciprocal interdefinition of human and material agency, material-human-disciplinary agency, performative science

(12)

Review Paper A (Pels et al.):

After poststructuralism and constructivism attention to the sensuous immediacy of objects. New mediations (technical and ethical).

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SocioMateriality:

constitutive entanglements, actors and objects are not self contained, performativity: boundaries between humans and technologies are enacted in practice

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Review Paper B (Law):

merging worlds of facts and values, things in process, move to enactment. Making facts is making values. 6 modes of mattering: critique, puzzlesolving, balance, interference, avant garde, inspiration

(7)

Agential Realism:

matter is differentially engaged and articulated, apparatuses produce phenomena via agential intra-action, intra-actions constraining not determining, inseparability of observed objects and agencies of observation.

(14)

Materiality as a threshold:

in accounting, materiality judgments are concerned with screens or thresholds, materiality is the threshold at which something becomes sufficiently important, materiality pervasive and entity-specific.

6.

2.

1.

Bertalanffy, L.v.(1968) General Systems Theory: foundations, development, applications, Braziller, NY, NY.

Hall A.D. & Fagen R.E. (1968) Definition of system. In: W. Buckley, Modern Systems Research for the Behavioural Scientist, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago 4.

3.

Boulding, K. (1956), General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, Management Science Trist, E. & Bamforth, K., (1951) Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal getting, in: Human Relations, 4, 3-38 5.

Cherns, A., (1976), The principles of sociotechnical design, Human Relations, Vol. 29 (8), 783-792.

Wisner, A. (1976), Ergonomics in the engineering ofa factory for exportation. Vith lEA Congress, Maryland on Ergonomics, Mental Load, Anthropotechnology. Laboratoire d'Ergonomie du CNAM, Paris. 7.

Emery, F.E. & Thorsrud, E., (1969). Form and Content in Industrial Democracy: Some Experiences from Norway and Other European Countries. London: Tavistock Publications.

8.

Sandberg, A., 1995. Enriching production: perspectives on Volvo’s Uddevalla plant as an alternative to lean production. Aldershot: Avebury.

9.

Hendrick H,. W. and Brown 0,,( eds) 1(984),H uman Factors in Organizational Design and Management /I (North Holland, Amsterdam).

(all text in brackets extracted from books-papers) – General Systems Theory (GST): definition brief, elegant and very careful not to distinguish between human/inhuman, animate/inanimate, material/immaterial. More commonly used is the definition “a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes

Systems

” by Hall & Fagen. This is to my opinion a more shoddy definition; it is probably preferred because it gives a sense of more detail and accurateness but it brings are “

Sets of elements standing in interaction

”, this is the original Bertalanffy in the notions of “objects” (a word loaded with meaning) and also the duality of relationships between the attributes of the objects and between the objects themselves (pointing to a way to analyze systems by modularizations of attributes instead of “object wholes”). Interrelations and interdependences are key notions in GST. When Boulding sketched the need for a new theory to help put together fragmented approaches, he made the point that this new theory would not be a theory of everything but rather a framework, a structure for viewing the various specific theories without losing sight of the holistic character of situations “The spread of specialized deafness means that someone who ought to know something that someone else knows isn't able to find it out for lack of generalized ears ”. “Systems Theory” soon drifted to causal-predictive modelling of systems (mainly via OR) – The “

sociotechnical systems”

approach carried over key notions related to the “system” artifact (mainly “open systems” properties that can give an account of the adaptive nature of work settings that cope with complexity, dynamic environments, new technology etc.). In the widely cited paper on “longwalls” Trist and Emery speak about “

interactive technological and sociological patterns

”. Still, this is more an ethics position calling for “Joint optimization” (sic) of the technical and social aspects (Cherns) to counterbalance the prevailing technical focus. It soon drifted towards human centered design. Sociotechnical approaches were infiltered in Wisner’s anthropotechnology (developed specifically for technology transfer to developing countries), the Norwegian “industrial democracy“ ideal, the Scandinavian participatory approaches (e.g. the flagship Volvo case from Sandberg) , the Organizational Design and Management (ODAM) movement within Ergonomics in the US … – Applications of Sociotechnical thinking are always

grounded

to detailed empirical situations and are strongly influenced by

ethnomethodological

approaches. They resist the full prescription ideal and the notion of frozen (unmoving) problem situations (essentially this is an implication of bringing-in living objects which co-exist with the technical artifacts that prevailing views had them to be “static” from the moment they are introduced to the world). They propose design approaches that allow for the convolution of the technological and the social as the one can not subsist without the other. “

Situated cognition

” approaches are pointing to the same convoluted character of humans artifacts and the humans’ physical embeddedness in the environment approaches (see more on situated action related page that follows). Sociotechnical thinking, ethnomethodological approaches and situated cognition formed the basis for a significant part of

ergonomics research

. The convolution of agency and materiality in work settings has always been the central theme for ergonomists analyzing body aspects of work (work design based on physical e.g. musculo-skeletal, social e.g. sleep deprivation due to shift work, cognitive etc. characteristics of tasks). – I think that only General Systems Theory is truly holistic while sociotechnical systems thinking and approaches based on it are

more human centered rather than symmetrical

. The key distinction in sociotechnical is not between ideal and material (as maybe the term sociomaterial is pointing to) but rather between human living organisms and fabricated rather stable artifacts (technical). Studying “work” is sociomaterial in the sense that this is a true set of interacting elements (human/inhuman, material/ideal) and there is no a priori ethical stance – i.e.

in GST

no element is privileged and

cuts/distinctions are waiting to happen

as to serve better the study aims of the study.

5.

1.

Latour,B. (2005), Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University 2.

4.

Latour, B. (2004), Politics of nature : how to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 3.

Latour, B. (1994). On technical mediation. Philosophy, sociology, Geanlogy. Common Knowledge, 3(2), pp 29-64 Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope. Essays On the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Bijker & Law (eds.) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press • Actor Networks: (all text in brackets extracted from books-papers) – “…

objects are nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt.

They exist, naturally, but they are never given a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants, they live on the margins of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to be represented as such. There seems to be no way, no conduit, no entry point for them to be knitted together with the same wool as the rest of the social ties.” ( 1 pg 73). ANT studies collectives that might exhibit “social inertia and physical gravity”. “Even the simple effect of duration, of long-lasting social force, cannot be obtained without the durability of nonhumans to which human local interactions have been shifted…Nonhumans are at once pliable and durable; they can be shaped very quickly but, once shaped, last far longer than the interactions that fabricated them.” ( 3 ). ANT calls for ” a social science that takes seriously the beings that make people act” ( 1 pg 236) and discusses on the hybrid character of socio-technical collectives. Brings-in the ontological symmetry between human and nonhuman actants (symmetry does not mean sameness) – Ostensive vs

performative

: “the object of a performative definition vanishes when it is no longer performed” ( problem with any ostensive definition of he social is that no extra effort seems necessary to maintain the groups in existence, while the influence of the analyst seems to count for nothing – or simply as a perturbing factor that should be minimized as much as possible. The great benefit of a performative definition…it draws attention to the means necessary to ceaselessly upkeep the groups and to key contributions made by the analyst’s own resources” ( 1 1 pg 35), “the pg 37). ANT is about studying transient associations (“associology”),

they have to perform in order to exist

. And materiality is there to offer durability-inertia-friction. – “When we list the qualities of an ANT account, we will make sure that when agencies are introduced they are never presented simply as matters of fact but always as

matters of concern

, with their mode of

fabrication

and their

stabilizing

mechanisms clearly visible.” ( 1 pg 120). And, “…when faced with an

object

,

attend first to the associations out of which it’s made

”. ( 1 pg 233) (distinction among matters of fact and matters of concern) – “In addition to ‘determining’ and serving as a ‘backdrop for human action’,

things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid

Gibson has been found so useful. ( 1 and so, on. This is why the notion of affordance, introduced by pg 72). Objects, are “actors, or more precisely participants in the course of action waiting to be given a figuration,” as when a speed bump “causes” a driver to slow down or a kettle boils water ( 1 pg 71) – notice the use of the word figuration adapted from Haraway. – “A clan is essentially a reunion of individuals who bear the same name and rally around the same sign. Take away the

name

and the sign which

materializes

it and the clan is no longer representable” ( 1 pg 38) – Subject-object dichotomy: “What is a

subject

, actually?

That which resists naturalization

. What is an object, actually? That which resists subjectivization” ( 2 pg 74). “The object that sits before the subject and the subject that faces the object are polemical entities, not innocent metaphysical inhabitants of the world. The object is there to protect the subject from drifting into inhumanity; the subject is there to protect the object from drifting into inhumanity” ( 4 pg 294). ( νομίζω υπάρχει θέμα με τα inhumanity) –

Tools also shape the goals

of the people who use the tools ( 3 «στοχοτρόπος» απάντηση στο activity theory. ) Latour entangles the distinction between means and ends –

Delegation

describes the reciprocal relationship between the social and the technical. Technology is used to delegate, or to convert a a major effort into a minor effort. We delegate to technologies the work of many humans. In turn, technologies delegate behaviour back onto the social. Our actions are regulated by technologies that frame we can do what and how. ( 5 )

3.

1.

Engeström, Y. (1999), Learning by Expanding, original title Lernen durch Expansion, Marburg: BdWi-Verlag; translated by Falk Seeger 2.

Engeström, Y. (2000), Activity theory as a framework for analysing and redesigning work. Ergonomics, 43(7): 960–974.

Engeström, Y.(2005), Knotworking to create collaborative intentionality capital in fluid organizational fields. Collaborative Capital: Creating Intangible Value. Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, 11: 307–336 4.

Engeström, Y. and Blackler, F. (2005), On the Life of the Object. Organization, 12 12(3): 307–330 • Objects as Transients in Organizational Analysis (4) : –

Life

of an Object: “Object in

Production

defining the object as identifiable entity”), “Object in

Circulation

(all text in brackets extracted from the papers) ” (naming-stabilization: “separating the object from its background, giving shape to and ” (“anticipatory definition of the exchange value of the object” commoditization – valuation – “exchange with a value tag”), “”Object in

Consumption

” (using the object) – Unusual

revitalization actions

during all three stages: “playful conversion” (a production action, converting valueless objects to new identifiable entities), “caring revitalization” (a circulation action, converting valueless objects to “newly conceptualized transients”), “engrossed appropriation” (a consumption action, converting valueless objects to “enjoyable objects in use”) – “The notion of the object is of particular

significance for organization studies

. It focuses attention on the organization’s work, uncovers practices rather than beliefs, and draws attention to transitions and possibilities”, “…inseparable relationships between the material and the social pointing to the trails of symbolic attachment, identity and investment that objects generate as they travel across time and space”, “theories of practice do not privilege the role of cognitions, interactions, language, institutions or systems; rather they feature … embodied capacities and collective practices” • “Five principles of

cultural –historical activity theory

relationship between decision (3) … (1) the principle of object-orientation, (2) the principle of mediation by tools and signs, (3) the principle of mutual constitution of actions and activity, (4) the principle of contradictions and deviations as source of change, and (5) the principle of historicity. “…the principle of object-orientation guides us to ask: What is actually the object here? What are they talking about and trying to accomplish? …The second principle, mediation by tools and signs, asks us to look into the potentials of artifacts as means of eliciting or triggering voluntary action… The third principle of mutual constitution of actions and activity calls attention to the making and envisioning… The fourth principle directs our analysis to contradictions and deviations as source of change... The fifth principle, historicity, prompts us to ask what historical type of work and collaboration is actually being performed …all the five principles, most obviously the principle of mutual constitution of actions and activity, the principle of contradictions as source of change, and the principle of historicity call for a serious examination of the social constitution and institutional embeddedness of agency.”. “object-oriented interagency”. Subjects tend to focus (what? the object) and to appropriate (how? mediating artifacts). All practices emerge around an object that motivates and directs activities. • (2) “The approach distinguishes between short-lived goal-directed actions and durable, object-oriented activity systems”. His work has a focus to

motivation

issues. “The motive is embedded in the object of the activity.” distributed and partially improvized orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems. A movement of tying, untying and retying together seemingly separate threads of activity characterizes knotworking.” The whole framework is based on activity theory introduced by Vygotsky and Leont ’ev. Clear distinction between humans and non humans. Marxist roots obvious: discussion on value and work activity. The concept of activity is linked to an agent who acts (an individual or collective "subject"). Then, any activity is directed at something, so there should be things the agent is interacting with. Activity mediates interaction between subjects (agents) and objects (things). (2) “The notion of

knot

refers to rapidly pulsating, • An activity is “

a form of doing directed to an object

”. Central to activity theory is the concept that all purposeful human activity can be characterised by a triadic interaction between a subject (actor) and the object (or purpose) mediated by artifacts. The subject is carrying out an activity directed towards the object (purpose, product or output) employing tools or representations. I thing it is an optimistic, “humanistic” approach putting forward the idea of

augmenting human capacity

both by cultivation and tool building.

Material artifacts are

considered

means

for consolidating and conveying knowledge, affording alternative modes of operation, filtering social interaction etc.

• (1) “

Instrumentality

implies that the instruments form a system that includes multiple cognitive artifacts and semiotic means used for analysis and design, but also straightforward primary tools used in the daily practice and made visible for examination, reshaping and experimentation -...a dense mediational setting. The very complexity of the setup means that the instrumentality is constantly evolving; old tools are modified and new tools are created.” basic principles of Activity Theory include object-orientedness, the dual concepts of internalization/externalization, tool mediation, hierarchical structure of activity, and continuous development.

1.

3.

Suchman L (2007) Human –machine reconfigurations. Plans and situated actions, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2.

Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Ciborra, C (2006) The mind or the heart? it depends on the (definition of) situation, Journal of Information Technology 21, 129 –139 • Situated action: – (all text in brackets extracted from the books and the paper) Lucy Suchman (initially 1987, 2nd edition in 2007 ) introduced the notion of

situatedness, embeddedness of action

happens under real emerging circumstances as opposed to planned action (crafted in preparation for circumstances that never occur exactly as anticipated). She advocates “embodied and enacted” practice, “the heterogeneous sociomateriality and real time contingency of performance” , the “new agencies and accountabilities effected through reconfigured relations of human and machine” and the “

performative nature of both persons and things

”. She tries to bring to our attention “possibilities generated… through specific sociomaterial assemblages”. “It is not just knowledge about the world, it is the world as an inexhaustibly rich resource for action”. Suchman’s argues that “humans and artifacts are

mutually constituted

”.

which – Her work is influenced by Latour (on the question of agency of humans and nonhumans), Butler (performativity), Haraway (figuration) and by “situated cognition” approaches previously developed aiming mainly to enhance our understanding of human learning. Need to have a special mention to

Hutchins

influential work on involves multiple collaborating human beings interacting with artefacts:

situated cognition

. . .

(1995). He argues that “to understand cognition ‘in the wild’ one must go beyond the analysis of the individual ‘bounded by the skin’ as cognition frequently local functional systems composed of a person in interaction with a tool have cognitive properties that are radically different from the cognitive properties of the person alone and a group performing cognitive task may have cognitive properties that differ from the cognitive properties of any individual” –

Ciborra

commented on the

lack of attention

of the situated action literature to the “

disposition, mood, affectedness and emotion

to the “ ” of actors pointing to the need to bring also in the “inner life of the actor, mind and heart, through the scope of a renewed, authentic, phenomenological tradition.”. In the introduction to the 2

temporality

nd edition of her book Suchman identifies a need for “displacement of reason from a position of supremacy to one among many ways of knowing in acting” but it is true that issues of affection have not been explored (for example I would have thought that the exploration of why she was not successful in interacting with Kismet (a robot that is part of an MIT project) in spite the success of Kismet’s developer would have taken into account such emotion issues going deeper than the mutual constitution of the human-machine relationship. Ciborra also points ” of situations that he advocates that can not be viewed as static, nor as processual but rather as events. Ciborra digs into Heidegger and his notion Befindlichkeit. “In this respect, Befindlichkeit captures the multiplicity of meanings of being in a (inner and outer simultaneously) situation. In comparison, the current renditions of situatedness are much narrower, and deprived of the inner dimension.” and “ It is the pathos that characterizes the whole person in his or her situatedness in the world”. Ciborra’s comments are to my view compatible with Latour’s objects as matters of interest. Also this “inner part” of actors (e.g. attitudes, values) was present in sociotechnical approaches. I almost tend to think that Suchman tries to avoid this kind of human perplexities in order to keep persons’s and things’ performativity as much as possible symmetrical. But since she also explicitly acknowledges that they are not same but merely symmetrical I think that pointing also different attributes would not weaken her argument on heterogeneous sociomateriality and mutual constitution of humans and artifacts but rather strengthen it. I guess that key differences are artifacts’ inertia (anchoring power according to Orlikowski or durability according to Latour) and human’s pathos.

Pickering, A. (1995)

The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science

. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. • • • • • • Practice is a

dialectic of resistance and accommodation

: the metaphor of a mangle. Material agency “comes at us from outside the human realm and… cannot be reduced to anything within that realm”. Human and material agencies are reciprocally and temporally constituted: “the

constitutive intertwining

and reciprocal interdefinition of

human and material agency

” Pickering criticizes ANT – the human agency is not given sufficient emphasis and the agency of material entities is overlooked. So he proposes a typology for agency : the

material agency

of natural world, which acts via natural laws;

human agency

, characterized by individual intent, reflexive monitoring of action, and meaningful construction of the social world; and

disciplinary agency

, in which the agency of a discipline disciplines that provide a scaffolding for their actions.

– elementary algebra or a systems design methodology, – leads people through a series of actions and also naturalizes these actions for them. Pickering argues that these different types of agency, are linked in what he terms ‘the mangle of practice.’ “Material agency is captured by machines as material objects, separate from us as creatures of flesh and blood. Machines display regular, predictable, and nonvolitional powers that we can set in motion and direct, but that are not reducible to human powers’. Following Foucault, he defines disciplinary agency as the shaping and channeling of human action by conceptual and cultural systems. Disciplines are bodies of knowledge that preserve concepts, practices, and values that can be employed in action. E.g. mathematicians work within Pickering uses Foucault’s phrase ‘

surface of emergence

’ to refer to temporally emergent quality of machines and disciplines instantiated in a particular historical context. Human agents act through courses of action and revise their intentions and engagement with the situation.

appropriating

structural features of existing machines and disciplines, which in turn introduce material, disciplinary, and embedded human agency into the process. These other types of agency lend their own direction to the process, which may lead human agents to alter their Human, material, and disciplinary agencies must achieve mutual accommodation in scientific practice to stabilize scientific ‘facts’. The

stabilizations

that he describes are always temporary and contingent on a specific confluence of agencies in practice

Performative dimension

of science: . “the representational idiom casts science as, above all, an activity that maps, mirrors, or corresponds to how the world really is” “there is quite another way of thinking about science;” one, which starts from the idea that the world is doing things, and is therefore, first of all, full of agency. This idea is the starting point for a performative analysis of scientific practice, “in which science is regarded a field of powers, capacities, and performances”. “My basic image of science is a performative one, in which the performances – the doings – of human and material agency come to the fore. Scientists are human agents in a a field of material agency which they struggle to capture in machines. Further, human and material agency are reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle. Their contours emerge in the temporality of practice and are definitional or and sustain one another. Existing culture constitutes the surface of emergence for the intentional structure of scientific practice, and such practice consists in the reciprocal tuning of human and material agency tuning that can itself reconfigure human intentions. The upshot of this process is the construction and interactive stabilization of new machines and the disciplined performances and relations that accompany them”

1.

2.

Mol, A. and Law, J. (1994) ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids. Anaemia and Social Topology’, Social Studies of Science, 24: 641-671. Mol, A. (2002), The body multiple: ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press • • • • • Focus on the agentiality of material entities, attention on situated performances to demonstrate how reality is made under different circumstances. She studies how realities relate and interfere with each other.

(1) “For if we are dealing with 'anaemia' over and over again, something that

keeps on differing but also stays the same

, then this is because it transforms itself from one arrangement into another without discontinuity”.

She talks about

fluidity

, using the word fluid she points to the dynamic character of boundaries, relativity in spatiality and the constitutive force of the interplay among repulsions and attractions. (1) “Fluids aren't solid. Or stable. Or the only spatial types around. It's all contingent” . “The study of fluids, then, will be a study of the relations, repulsions and attractions which form a flow.” “In fluid spaces there are often, perhaps usually, no clear boundaries. Typically, the objects generated inside them - the objects that generate them aren't well defined.” She concludes that (1) “

the social

does not exist as a single spatial type, but rather

performs itself

and topologically heterogeneous manner.” in a recursive I do not like very much the fluidity metaphor because it is not very intuitive – we normally experience fluidity as a series of instances and never notice all the properties of fluidity in everyday life. On the other hand it might be interesting to link it to system dynamics where it has been extensively used to structure and model problems (e.g. in Forrester’s stocks and flows modeling of complex situations focusing to interactions and behavior) In her ethnographic study of hypoglycemia Mol describes the multiplicity of bodies. The enactment of body parts, symptoms, and disease differs between clinical, laboratory, and specialist settings within the same hospital, treating the same patient. She describes how bodies are produced in different ways in different medical practices. She puts forward the position that that the differences are not perspectives on the same body, but multiplicity of the body: (2) “no object, no body, no disease, is singular. If it is not removed from the practices that sustain it,

reality is multiple

… attending to the multiplicity of reality is also an act. It is something that may be done – or left undone. It is an intervention. … This is the plot of my philosophical tale: that ontology is not given in the order of things, but instead,

ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither await in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices

”.

1.

Haraway, D.J. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives", in

Feminist Studies

, 575 –599.

2.

Haraway, D.J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. – – – – – – –

Apparatus of bodily production

: (1) “Like "poems," which are sites of literary production where language too is an actor independent of intentions and authors,

bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes

. Their

boundaries

materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices;

"objects" do not preexist as such

. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies.” The concept of apparatuses of bodily production designates the constitutive intersections – techno-scientific, biological, social economic etc – through which a given phenomenon is constructed and must be investigated. Haraway described science and technology as situated practices and lived experiences of embodied actors (technoscience practices inform processes of subjectivation). Assignment of agency to all ‘objects: (1) “

Situated knowledges

require that the

object

of knowledge be pictured

as an actor

and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of "objective" knowledge.”

Constitutive processes of materiality

.

(1) “Accounts of a "real“ world do not, then, depend on a logic of "discovery' but on a power-charged social relation of "conversation." The world neither speaks itself nor disappears in favor of a master decoder. The codes of the world are not still, waiting only to be read.” (1) “

Objectivity is not about disengagement

but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where perhaps the world resists being reduced to mere resource because it is-not mother /matter /mutter - but coyote, a figure of the always problematic, always potentially between meaning and bodies.” (2) "We are all chimeras, theorized and

fabricated hybrids of machine and organism

; in short, we are cybors. The cyborg is our ontology " Her propositions are communicated with the support of narrative figures that she creates (

figurations

) e.g. the coyote, the cyborg, the OncoMouse, the dog, etc.

• • • 1.

Butler, J. (1999/1990).

Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

London: Routledge.

2.

Butler, J. (1993).

Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”.

London:Routledge.

Judith Butler emphasizes discursive practices and the constitutive effects of discourse, she claims that identities are produced performatively. Performativity creates gender differences (1) “

As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an "act,“”.

“ …gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” “… operation of repulsion can consolidate "identities" founded on the instituting of the "Other" or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the "inner" and "outer" worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner and outer constitute a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. When that subject is challenged, the meaning and necessity of the terms are subject to displacement. If the "inner world" no longer designates a topos, then the internal fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale of gender identity, become similarly suspect. The critical question is not

how

did that identity become

internalized?

as if internalization were a process or a mechanism that might be descriptively reconstructed. Rather, the question is: From what strategic position in public discourse and for what reasons has the trope of interiority and the disjunctive binary of innertouter taken hold? In what language is "inner space" figured? What kind of figuration is it, and through what figure of the body is it signified? How does a body figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth?

In the preface of the 1999 edition of her “Gender Trouble” book she gives an account of how she came up with the performativity notion: “ I originally took my clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s “Before the Law”. There the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributes and installed: the anticipation conjures its object” (I think though that this is closer to a description self fulfilling prophecies …) In her second book (Bodies that Matter) the focus was shifted to materlialization: (2) “But how does the notion of gender performativity relate to this conception of materialization? In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”, but rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names. What will, I hope, become clear in what follows is that the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative” “what I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the

of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface we call matter

”

notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process

• Barad, K. (2003), Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28 (3) 801-831 Agential Realism: – the world is made up of

phenomena

, the word is chosen to notate (all text in brackets extracted from the paper) the inseparability of “observed objects” and “agencies of observation.” She says… “On my agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.” –

Intra-action

, a word introduced to signify her notion that things do not precede their interaction, but rather, they emerge through particular intra-actions. She says …” The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful …Intra-actions always entail particular exclusions and exclusions foreclose any possibility of determinism, providing the condition of an open future. Therefore, intra actions are constraining but not determining.” – “The

apparatuses

that produce phenomena can not be understood as observational devices or mere laboratory instruments… are not inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action happens, or machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation... apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted .“ – “The causal relationship between the

apparatuses

of bodily production and the

phenomena

agential

intra-action

.” (apparatuses of bodily production adapted from Haraway) produced is one of – – “A specific intraaction (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an

agential cut

(in contrast to the Cartesian cut —an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object.” That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata within phenomena emerge through specific intra actions.” “Phenomena –the smallest material units-come to matter through this process of ongoing intra-activity.

Matter

refers to the materiality/materialization of phenomena, not an inherent fixed property of abstract independently existing objects…Material discursive practices are specific iterative enactments – agential intra-actions through which matter is differentially engaged and articulated (in the emergence of boundaries and meanings). Agential separability is a matter of exteriority within (material – discursive) phenomena. Hence, no priority is given to either materiality or discursivity.” – – Epistemology vs ontology is a false distinction to her, “Practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually implicated. We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because “we” are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming.” She introduces the term “

Onto-epistemology

”

Ethics issues

: “Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering.” and… “knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part.” Proposes “a materialist and posthumanist reworking of the notion of performativity” Explaining in pg 826: a posthumanist formulation of performativity makes evident the importance of taking into account the human , nonhuman and cyborgian forms of agency… holding the category human fixed excludes an entire range of possibilities in advance eliding important dimensions of the workings of the power λέει με εξυπνακλιστικο τρόπο τα ΑΝΤ και βάζει το cyborg για να θολώσει νερά.

Pg 827: challenges the positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency… The belief that nature is mute and immutable and that all prospects for significance and change reside in culture is a reinscription of the nature/culture dualism. Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nr the end product of cultural performances. Nor similarly can a human/nonhuman distinction be hardwired into any theory that claims to take into account of matter in the fullness of its historicity.

• – – – – 4.

2.

1.

Orlikowski, W. (2010). The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 125-141 Orlikowski, W. & Scott, S.(2008) Sociomateriality: Challenging the Separation of Technology, Work and Organization', The Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 433 — 474 3.

Orlikowski, W. (2007) Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work, Organization Studies, 28(09): 1435 –1448 Orlikowski, W. (2005) Material Works: Exploring the Situated Entanglement of Technological Performativity and Human Agency, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 17(1):183 –186 (all text in brackets extracted from the papers) (2) “Research framed according to the tenets of a sociomaterial approach challenges the deeply taken-for-granted assumption that technology, work, and organizations should be conceptualized separately, and advances the view that there is an inherent inseparability between the technical and the social.” She proposes “a distinctive

move away from seeing actors and objects as primarily self-contained entities that influence each other either through impacts or interactions

. Instead, the focus is on

agencies that have so thoroughly saturated each other

that previously taken-for granted boundaries are dissolved.” From this perspective, people and things only exist in relation to each other … in other words, entities (whether humans or technologies) have no inherent properties, but acquire form, attributes, and capabilities through their interpenetration. This is a relational ontology that presumes the social and the material are inherently inseparable”. I guess that actually sociomateriality is mainly a boundary problem (because attributes can also be handled by emergent process perspective). Related to boundaries she says “For scholars of sociomateriality, the notion of performativity draws attention to how relations and boundaries between humans and technologies are not pre given or fixed, but enacted in practice”. She proposes “grounding in relationality, performativity, and sociomaterial assemblages (rather than either discrete entities or mutually dependent ensembles) may afford some empirical and conceptual innovations that will increase our understandings of the practices of contemporary organizational life”. (3) “The notion of

constitutive entanglement

Notions of mutuality or reciprocity presume the influence of distinct interacting entities on each other, but presuppose some of these entities from each other. Thus, for example, we have tended to speak of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other, recognizing that each is changed by its interaction with the other, but maintaining, nevertheless, their ontological separation. In contrast, the notion of constitutive entanglement presumes that departs from that of mutual or reciprocal interaction common in a number of dynamic social theories.

there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics

”

a priori

independence (4)

“ ‘human agency’ and ‘material performativity

’ … recognize the power of both without equating them. In this view, material performances and human agencies are both implicated in the other (human agency is always materially performed, just as material performances are always enacted by human agency), and neither are given a priori but are temporally emergent in practice. This view further allows us to recognize the unanticipated conditions and unintended consequences of human agency and material performativity)

temporal intertwining

, thus reclaiming the bases from which to make some observations about institutional outcomes, social purposes, and human reflexivity” (I am wondering if she could still hold on the separation of (1) (her

critique on the emergent process perspective

) “ A common explanation for this absence of materiality in the management literature is that technology is either invisible or irrelevant to researchers trained in social, political, economic and institutional analyses of organisations. For these researchers, ontological priority is given to human actors and social structures and, as a result, technological artifacts (and materiality more generally) tend to disappear into the background and become taken for granted. With such a perspective it is not surprising that scholars do not work on questions about artifacts, and research done on this view thus underestimates the role and significance of technological artifacts.” I agree: in ISD literature everything is about the artifact and silver bullet thinking prevails (technology is supposed to have the power to form behaviour etc etc), in organisational studies exactly the opposite. There is a need to bridge the two views and reestablish the totality for work activity phenomena. Orlikowski comments on this artifact centered understanding: ”technology is understood as an exogenous and relatively autonomous driver of organisational change and, as such, that it has significant and predictable impacts on various human and organisational outcomes, such as governance structures, work routines, information flows, decision making, individual productivity and firm performance”. She acknowledges that there is already a midway approach (the one that we also use): “an emergent process perspective focuses primarily on the embedded and dynamic meanings, interests and activities that are seen to produce an ensemble of technological relations … While this perspective situates the production and use of technology in particular sociocultural and historical contexts, it has been criticised for minimising the role of technology, and specifically sidelining the physical characteristics and capabilities entailed in particular technological objects” she also asserts that this emergent process view is too human centric (I agree) and that it would be more useful to follow a fourth path: “privileging either the technologies or the humans reduces human agency on the one hand, and technological performances on the other, to relatively passive and reactive rol perspective that renounces the categorical presumption of separateness is likely to offer a more useful conceptual lens with which to think about the temporally emergent sociomaterial realities that form and perform contemporary organisations.”. This is ok, but still, what are we trying to do? Human centric does not have to mean discarding sociomateriality and although it is easy to drift to banal views of the world phenomena, human centerness at least gives us some sound ground to stand on and prevent us from slipping to absurdity or unscrupulous worldviews.

es…. a

1.

2.

3.

Dewey, J. (1938/1991) Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in J. A. Boydston (ed.) John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925 –1953, Vol. 12. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press.

Dewey, J. (1925/2000), Experience and Nature, Dover Publications Dewey, J. (1910/2010), How We Think, ReadaClassic • • • (1) “The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using “objects” for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For

things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of enquiries

.” (2) “

experience is of as well as in nature

. … Things interacting in certain ways of the world the one is reciprocally constituting.

are

experience; they are what is experienced” , the world does not just influence but it also constitutes the one that is being in it, and by being part Acting upon things is what makes things what they are, so (3) “a chair is a different object to a being to whom it suggests an opportunity for sitting down, repose, or sociable converse, from what it is to one to whom it presents itself merely as a thing to be smelled, or gnawed, or jumped over” … Dewey was particularly interested in the signs and the cumulative effect of education, social cultivation, the loading of things with meaning that goes beyond the physical attributes that can be grasped automatically.

• • • • Pels, D., Hetherington, K, & Vandenberghe, F. (2002), The Status of the Object : Performances, Mediations, and Techniques. Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (1) 1 –21 “Objects are back in strength in contemporary social theory. …

After poststructuralism and constructivism

had melted everything that was solid into air, it was perhaps time that we

noticed once again the sensuous immediacy of the objects

and hate, which bind us as much as we bind them. High time perhaps also, after this panegyric of textuality and discursivity” we live, work and converse with, in which we routinely place our trust, which we love “Perhaps the most intriguing feature of this new constellation is our (re)discovery of the multiple new ways in which

social and material relations are entangled together

. …Talking to intelligent machines, reconstructing our bodies with the help of prosthetic and genomic technologies, being glued to mobile phones, roving around in cyberspace, indulging in humanoid robotic phantasies, is to mingle our humanity with not-so-mute, active, performative objects in a way which we find equally fascinating as disconcerting.” “In this way, the present issue highlights

new mediations

and entanglements of sociality and materiality which also suggest new forms of ontological politics and a new ethics of alterity. If, as Latour insists,

technical

mediation is the mode of the detour, of the unexpected sideways move, rather than that of mere instrumentality; and if

ethical

mediation too is a way of slowing down, preventing ends from turning too readily into means, both morality and technology are explorations of alterity which are out to proliferate mediations rather than to close them down.” “Human bodies and the artefacts they are attached to form an intricate tangle of performances, mediations and techniques which no longer support traditional critical distinctions between the social and the material world. But this does not reduce the critical (political) task of

keeping fluid the many fixtures and reifications which these performances, mediations, and techniques necessarily engender

.”

• • • John Law, ‘Matter ‐ ing: Or How Might STS Contribute?’, version of 28th June 2004, available at http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/L aw2004Matter-ing.pdf (downloaded on 4th February 2010). “First,

the merging of two worlds

indexes the

move from stability

: the kingdom of facts, and the kingdom of values. This it the move from what Bruno Latour calls ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’; and to what Annemarie Mol calls ‘ontological politics’. Second, it , things in themselves,

to things in process

. From object to Ding, to gathering. And then, as a part of this, third it indexes a

move to enactment

. Barad, Latour, Mol, all of these writers (and many more) insist that worlds are being done, enacted into being.… And what goes on goes on in a lot of different locations. So

we also have to attend to questions of space and transportation

and why.” inquire into what matters and doesn’t matter where, “

Making facts is making values

is making arrangements that are in one way or another political (the point is most forcefully pressed by Donna Haraway). …Making material in a manner that is of concern. … It isn’t very clear what matters and what doesn’t.” Law bulding upon matters of fact and matters of concern introduces facts and values that will be later used for his 6 ways of mattering. I think that making valuations- evaluations is a key issue, inquiring minds are always making trade-offs, reflective being is an on-going negotiation of what is important part of the situation and what is not, problem structuring, awareness, self awareness, all are in a sense processes of valuation actually I think that mattering and valuation is quite a tautology. ( a reminder of Checkland: “If you are seeking to engage with real-life problem situations and social development, you must have some thought-out image of the nature of what you are intervening in: day-to-day real life. SSM sees it as a complex ongoing flux of interacting events and ideas which unfolds through time. Intervening in that flux, to bring about improvement or social development, calls for an organized process of learning which can absorb and deal with the multiple worldviews which will always be present. … finding out about the situation, defining relevant activity models, using the models to structure debate and testing out ideas for change. … in a brief 2010 paper which is an account of SSM (and not Action Research): Researching Real-Life: Reflections on 30 Years of Action Research, Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 27, 129 -132). All types of systems thinking hard, soft, critical are the same agony, how to sort out what matters. We economise, we think of problems that can be solved, we dream of the impossible, we take pragmatic and less pragmatic paths. The only prerequisite is an authentic interest of the situation at hand (which is again a paradox because we obviously never share the same situation. Going back to Law: “a whole lot of different things matter, but they don’t add up. A whole lot of contributions are made, but they don’t sum up either. There is no overall reality.” “six modes of concern or modes of mattering .. The list is arbitrary. In real world enactments they overlap – and no doubt there are others too”. 1.

“

critique

: a question of re ‐ valuing or re ‐ moralising. …Critique enacts a world that poses itself as a contrast, another possibility, an escape” 2.

“

puzzle

‐

solving:

the concern is to find or make the missing piece in the puzzle … Puzzle ‐ solving deals with missing facts or technicalities, not values; with possible realities, not ethics.” 3.

4.

5.

6.

“the making of a

balance

between things that won’t add up in a nice convergent way. The concern, then, is to find a way of patching these non-convergences together and enacting a whole. So we find ourselves in a weary world of imperfect tradeoffs, or, to put it more positively, in the smooth world of policy ‐ making and compromise.” “Mattering in

interference

is something that is re ‐ done, re ‐ enacted, instance by instance” “

avant garde

which works by undoing taken for granted assumptions”, “

inspiration

. .... under certain circumstances artworks may contribute by transporting and enacting features of enacted embodiments an experiences (I stress that they are enacted) that otherwise tend to stay in particular circuits of embodiment and experience, and do not move around. … artworks are moving what are taken to be features of the private into the public domain by re ‐ enacting these in other media: which, if it is right, is a very particular mode of mattering or contributing.”

• • • • In the

accounting context materiality is the threshold at which something becomes sufficiently important

that it should be reported. It is a key notion but also very difficult to define. Practically it directs what gets to be included in the universe that is accounted for and what can be left out. The extracts that follow give some sense of the (almost futile) efforts that have been made to produce concrete guidance on materiality.

“Materiality relates not only to relevance, but also to faithful representation. Materiality should be included in the converged framework as a screen or filter to determine whether information is sufficiently significant to influence the decisions of users in the context of the entity, rather than as a qualitative characteristic of decision useful financial information”: June 2005 IASB Meeting “… In fact, the

pervasive nature of materiality

makes it difficult to consider the concept except as it relates to the other qualitative characteristics, especially relevance and reliability. …

Materiality judgments are concerned with screens or thresholds

. Is an item, an error, or an omission large enough, considering its nature and the attendant circumstances, to pass over the threshold that separates material from immaterial items? … Another factor in materiality judgments is the degree of precision that is attainable in estimating the judgment item. The amount of deviation that is considered immaterial may increase as the attainable degree of precision decreases” 1980 FASB Statement of Financial Accounting Concepts No. 2 “

materiality is an entity-specific aspect

of relevance based on the nature or magnitude or both of the items to which the information relates in the context” FASB 2010 Acronyms stand for: International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in US