I can’t say I’ve internalized (routinized? inscribed?) Latour’s Laboratory Life yet, but in the mean time I present you with three quotes on routinization, inscription, and facts:
To counter these catastrophic possibilities, efforts are made to routinise component actions either through technicians’ training or by automation. Once a string of operations has been routinised, one can look at the figures obtained and quietly forget that immunology, atomic physics, statistics, and electronics actually made this figure possible. Once the data sheet has been taken to the office for discussion, one can forget the several weeks of work by technicians and the hundreds of dollars which have gone into its production. After the paper which incorporates these figures has been written, and the main result of the paper has been embodied in some new inscription device, it is easy to forget that the construction of the paper depended on material factors. The bench space will be forgotten, and the existence of laboratories will fade from consideration. Instead, “ideas,” “theories,” and “reasons” will take their place. Inscription devices thus appear to be valued on the basis of the extent to which they facilitate a swift transition from craft work to ideas. The material setting both makes possible the phenomena and is required to be easily forgotten. Without the material environment of the laboratory none of the objects could be said to exist, and yet the material environment very rarely receives mention. It is this paradox, which is an essential feature of science, that we shall now consider in more detail. (p. 69)
The production of a paper depends critically on various processes of writing and reading which can be summarised as literary inscription. The function of literary inscription is the successful persuasion of readers, but the readers are only fully convinced when all sources of persuasion seem to have disappeared. In other words, the various operations of writing and reading which sustain an argument are seen by participants to be largely irrelevant to “facts,” which emerge solely by virtue of these same operations. There is, then, an essential congruence between a “fact” and the successful operation of various processes of literary inscription. A text or statement can thus be read as “containing” or “being about a fact” when readers are sufficiently convinced that there is no debate about it and the processes of literary inscription are forgotten. Conversely, one way of undercutting the “facticity” of a statement is by drawing attention to the (mere) processes of literary inscription which make the fact possible. (p. 76)
A fact only becomes such when it loses all temporal qualifications and becomes incorporated into a large body of knowledge drawn by others. Consequently, there is an essential difficulty associated with writing the history of a fact: it has, by definition, lost all historical reference. (p. 106)
Can we profit from focusing on objects/processes that “facilitate a swift transition from craft work to ideas”? I spent a few pleasant hours this afternoon doing some Rails programming; that framework shines because of the small amount of craft work necessarily to see a manifestation of your ideas. Does a software framework count as an “inscription device”? Does a programming language? Does a compiler, an interpreter? If not, is there some generalization of that concept that we can use here?
Agile processes value a swift transition between the programmer’s craft work and the Customer’s ideas. (A transition in both directions, I should add.) What are the inscription devices here? Ironically, one of the key mechanisms that agile uses to speed this transition is to remove certain inscription devices, or at least inscriptions, in favor of people talking directly to each other.
Can we relate tests to inscriptions and inscription devices? Test runs can certainly lead to thousands, millions of inscriptions over the course of a day; most of those inscriptions are internal, in that the software is noting that an assertion passed, but I label them as inscriptions nonetheless. They’re a very good form of persuasion; if you’re on a project where test runs act as a reliable safety net, then your worry level decreases, you can treat the software’s behavior as a “fact”, and spend time in idea land. Until, of course, a test failure (or, much worse, a failure that your tests didn’t catch) undercuts your software’s facticity.
I’ve been pretty obsessed with A3 reports for the last few months, which are certainly a form of inscription. And one of the strengths of the process is the extent to which the A3 report doesn’t serve as a source of persuasion, the extent to which the “sources of persuasion seem to have disappeared”: if the process is doing well, it’s a summary of facts to which all participants agree. Or have the sources of persuasion disappeared? Perhaps better to say they’ve been distilled down to a trace, as with a scientific paper; I don’t want to underestimate the importance of that trace.
I don’t suppose I can relate this to video games somehow? One issue that I struggle with, especially in games with a large variety of techniques to reach a goal, is how to internalize the various gameplay options that are available to me. Most of the time, I end up leaning on a few standard ways of progressing through a game’s levels; I suspect my experience would be richer if I had a broader tapestry of “facts” to choose from in the form of live tactical (or, better yet, strategic) options. What can games do to help me reach this state? What inscriptions can they present me with to ease this journey? How can I modify my own play styles to reach this state?
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A fact only becomes such when it loses all temporal qualifications and becomes incorporated into a large body of knowledge drawn by others. Consequently, there is an essential difficulty associated with writing the history of a fact: it has, by definition, lost all historical reference. (p. 106)
I think this point is probably the most central and repeated thing Latour talks about (albeit he does this through a variety of modes and approaches). For the most part, it seems to me that he (Latour) wants us all to slow down and be mindful of the data we are producing and take great pains to record all associations that the data we produce creates. The history of facts is often so difficult to ascertain that it could be called feudal. And, looking back, it is difficult to see the ideas that stood contrary to that fact as it was being created (take the examples of the bakelite, bicycle, and whatever else the ANT/SCOT folks love to talk about). It is here that I wish most discussion of ANT would start.
Speaking of creation of facts and relating them to video games, I was talking about with a friend of mine who researchers consumer needs with computers that they don’t know how to ask for was the difference between the video games when they first came out and video games now that try and emulate a video game / board game hybrid or try to be interactive movies. The consumer of video games doesn’t know what they want any more than the creators seem to be able to figure out what they want.
It’s such an odd thing to see when you think about some of the first games. They were The Video Game. Market deluge created a negative stereotype that hasn’t ever really been washed away despite any success gaming might have had. From here, it almost seems like gamers and game makers went off and created their own business while ignoring the rest of the world. Only recently has this begun to change.
At some point, it seems like makers decided that their consumers wanted better graphics yet resolution seems more of a combination of television resolution quality than that of games themselves). Was it a logical step that video games took when they decided to become more graphic intensive while not really changing input or design that often? I think an ANT discussion should start there when thinking about craft work to ideas.
5/26/2009 @ 8:28 am
In regards to your first paragraph: yeah, and I think that’s why Brian is so into ANT: it’s obviously interested in the social, but it doesn’t shy away from the details of the technical, which is a good fit for agile methods. (See Brian’s site http://arxta.net/ for more explanation of his current thoughts on these matters.)
Maybe that’s a good lens for my recent A3 obsession, too: A3 reports can represent relatively stable facts, but the A3 book is all about the process of creating the A3 report, not the outcome, and in particular is about the many relationships (between people and people, between people and things, between things and things) that are involved in that process. And the A3 report itself serves as a reminder of the work that gets into it, but by its stripped down nature you can’t pretend that it’s anything more than a reminder and a summary.
Hmm, now I go up and reread what you actually wrote. I think I’m riffing on “be mindful of the data we are producing”, but I have a harder time with “take great pains to record all associations that the data we produce creates”. There are so many associations that I don’t see how we can avoid taking an editorial role here. Maybe that’s the word “network”? It’s not “Actor-Undifferentiated Smear Theory. :-)
5/26/2009 @ 8:26 pm
Hmm, now I go up and reread what you actually wrote. I think I’m riffing on “be mindful of the data we are producing”, but I have a harder time with “take great pains to record all associations that the data we produce creates”. There are so many associations that I don’t see how we can avoid taking an editorial role here. Maybe that’s the word “network”? It’s not “Actor-Undifferentiated Smear Theory.
This was the entire goal of Reassembling the Social, to remind us that Sociology is supposed to take time and that we have a huge hand in creating and labeling the social world. Not taking our time, not being mindful, relying on shorthands for knowledge leads to dangerous behavior. As for editing, I don’t know that being an editor is as important as knowing how to write what you’re seeing (also a goal of Reassembling the Social). Being a great writer takes almost as much patience as being a great observer.
Editing out certain associations is probably inevitable but those associations should at least appear somewhere. But how do we determine which associations are worth mentioning? Here is where bias carefully comes in to this sort of thing. Each and every game produced probably has some effect (however small) on the games that come after it (from the same company or not) and not selecting some associations might end up being important when those associations create a controversy later that can be studied.
Of course, i’m talking Sociology whereas you’re talking about the bizarre interdisciplinary world of Latour so I would imagine some of these fine points are mingling for me whereas they’ve been long resolved for you.
5/27/2009 @ 4:20 am
Okay, that’s a good point: in particular, this certainly isn’t going to do us any good if we take our pre-existing explanations for what’s going on and pretend that we’re doing something useful by labeling certain entities Actors and talking about Networks between them. And plain old observation is a huge component in avoiding that pitfall.
Once you’ve done the observation, you have to distill it further – c.f. the inscription stages mentioned in the first quote. If you don’t do that distillation, you’re unlikely to have “a swift transition from craft work to ideas”; but if you don’t do a good enough job of observing, then people will “undercut[] the ‘facticity’ of [your] statement … by drawing attention to the (mere) processes of literary inscription which make the fact possible”. Or, worse yet, if you don’t do a good job but do fail in a way that goes along with others’ biases, people won’t undercut the facticity of your statement even though they should!
That’s useful to keep in mind when running the workshop – I think that, when doing the sorts of blog posts that riff on an author in the context of, say, agile software development, I spend a lot of time making links between what the author says and theories that I already have about software development. Which probably serves a useful role in terms of getting my feet wet, but I shouldn’t stop there, I need to go further and see if I can come up with ideas about how my theories might be wrong. And we should make sure to focus enough on observations in the workshop to have a chance of generating new theories there, too. (Which, I suppose, is why we’re labeling the workshop as an Idea Factory!)
5/27/2009 @ 8:25 am
The production of a paper depends critically on various processes of writing and reading which can be summarised as literary inscription. The function of literary inscription is the successful persuasion of readers, but the readers are only fully convinced when all sources of persuasion seem to have disappeared. In other words, the various operations of writing and reading which sustain an argument are seen by participants to be largely irrelevant to “facts,” which emerge solely by virtue of these same operations. There is, then, an essential congruence between a “fact” and the successful operation of various processes of literary inscription. A text or statement can thus be read as “containing” or “being about a fact” when readers are sufficiently convinced that there is no debate about it and the processes of literary inscription are forgotten. Conversely, one way of undercutting the “facticity” of a statement is by drawing attention to the (mere) processes of literary inscription which make the fact possible. (p. 76)
I was thinking about this and it made me think of another Latour quote from my Latour book of choice (you know the name).
The problem is that social scientists too often alternate between hubris – each of them dream to be the Newton of social science as well as teh Lenin of social change – or desperation-they despise themselves for merely piling on more reports, stories, and statistics that no one will read. But the choice between complete mastery and total irrelevance is a very superficial one. To despiar of one’s own written text doesn’t make any more sense than the head of a chemistry laboratory to want to be relevant to the NIH. Relevance, like everything else, is an achievement. A report is interesting or not depending on the amount of work done to interest, that is, to place it between other things.
The quote goes on to talk about why the social sciences are important but this part of the quote is relevant to what I wanted to say. There’s another amazing quote on research needing to be revolutionary but it basically says the same thing that the above does. We, and by we I mean most people producing something, seem to struggle constantly with improvement, betterment, relevance, and the all-important “making money”. It isn’t just improvement, most times, but “revolutionary” improvement. I have to wonder if, and I keep coming at this from such a tremendous amount of angles, the point Latour constantly tries to make is that we shouldn’t worry about relevance or improvement in the “revolutionary” sense.
For an “idea factory” I wonder if it wouldn’t be entertaining to create an assignment where one doesn’t attempt this, but tries to figure out how to make something without trying to improve it in the “revolutionary” way. Perhaps the distinction is too fine to really get across quickly. I feel like I need to head back to Simon Ferrari’s journal and post this comment there as well.
5/27/2009 @ 6:23 pm