User:Tisa/research log

The structure of this research log is yet to be figured out. Rather than a taxonomization by date, tax. by reference is more suitable. Interconnections between texts have to be somehow established. This is the backend. The front end, I imagine, will be a web interface and the final written thesis (as a summary and a static articulation of the research process).

Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology

5 lectures from 1989 available here

Lecture #1

listened on: 24-9-20

• "Technology has built a house where we all live" - knowing about its secret passages and doors.
• "Technology changes social and individual relationships between us and forces us to look and redefine our notions of power an responsibility."
• "Technology is a system. ... It involves organization, procedure, symbols, equations, and most importantly mindset!"
• Technology > ways of doing something, as formalized practice. Dennis Balding says: There is tech for prayer, as well as for plowing, for controlling fear, as well as controlling flood.
• (example of the magnifying glass) development that leads to the right of the practitioners to exclusive practice practice of technology > professions are born. exclusifying the right to the tools, technology.
• practice defines content. technology of prayer. "laying down the practice precisely", otherwise the practice cannot be considered as prayer (even if felt).

• 2 ways of distinguishing:
  • work-related technology. making work easier.
  • control-related technology. more control over an operation. (prevalent)

• 2 forms of technological development (technology as practice) > they have very different specializations and divisions of labor, consequently: social and political implications. Interested not in what is being done, but HOW it is being done.
• "Understanding the real meaning - the social and political meaning of the division of labor and prescriptive tech is the most important step to understanding the real world of technology."

• • holistic technologies (craft, artisan controlling own process of work, real-time decisions while working, experience applied to unique situations, one-of-a-kind products. pottery for everyday use, pottery for religious rites = specialization by product = holistic tech, the doer is in the total control of the process)

• • prescriptive technologies = specialization by process. the making/doing is broken down in identifiable steps done by separate workers. division of labor (industrial revolution, large scale ... also ancient Romans and Chinese - casting bronze(example)).
    • The protocol. Discipline. Rules. Planning. Organization. Institution. Control. Command. You need the boss and people who obey the boss. = prescriptive tech = social innovation. Designs for compliance and discipline. Order and obedience.

People become aculturated to them. External control and internal compliance is considered as normal and necessary. It is the seed bed for orthodoxy. Formative influence on philosophy, political thought and government (China). Aculturation of population through prescriptive technologies. Beyond production of material things.

• Filling in an income tax form is an example of normalization of prescriptive tech. > Designs for compliance. on them rests the real world of tech that we live.
• We live in a culture of compliance, we are conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, there is only one way of doing it. Holistic tech supplemented by prescriptive.
• Think about the degree to which we are living under prescription. Smart building Adam & Eve - never see an apple. Prescriptive tech eliminate choice and eliminate the principle of choice. Social design for compliance. Eliminates any situation in which we can make principle decision.

non-stated, underlying models:

• growth model (giants are stupid, small humans are smart. one can promote growth, not control it. study, observe, cherish, try to provide conditions for growth. something is left to chance. context is essential.

• production model (dimensions are manipulated, production can be arranged in a way growth cannot. all essential parameters are externally controlled. input and output. producing the desired outcome. independent from context, variables are controlled. externalities, others people problem. context as irrelevant.

• We look at education as if it was production model, whereas learning is growing.
• We have no demography of machines! Increasing car population. The numbers could be generated, but there is no political will. No public discussion about birth control for cars. Why no discussion about that?

• Technology has to fit the values, not the values to technology. If we want to have a different technology, we need to have different values, concepts of justice. First come the values, and then the practice on how to impose them. (question about Chinas open door policy for incoming technology).

///

• Intuitive technology? Holistic technology examples in the 21st century?
• Rituals?
• power, bioplotics, discipline, punishment, ... (Link to Foucault?)

Lecture #2

Listened on 25-9-20

• human consequences in communications technology. misnomen: "noncommunication technology".
• "When human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general technical arrangements reduce or eliminate RECIPROCITY = some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication between parties." ... *physical distance between the parties - distorts the reciprocity. "Reciprocity was ruled out by design. The loss is a continuing of technologically executed inequality. It has very profound political and psychological consequences. Reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is designed to improved specific processes. The purpose of it is to make things work. Feedback exists to improve the performance, but cannot alter the design."
• "Reciprocity is situationally based, a response to a situation - it is not designed into the system, it is not predictable. Reciprocal responses can alter the initial - can lead negotiation, response ..."
• Violence not objected to when depicted on tv (situation without reciprocity). People not feeling the need to intervene and not feeling bad for not intervening. Violence becomes enjoyable. What that does to people! Muscles that are not in use.
• Technologies that eliminate reciprocity diminish the sense of our common normality/commonality (?). No reciprocity > no need to listen, no need to understand or to accommodate.
• "Prescriptive technologies are social innovations, a feed bed for a culture of compliance. They require control, management, planning. An acculturation of society to external control, planning and fragmentation of work - as given and normal."
• Impact of tech on governance, power, control. Foucault, 18th century, before the machine age, a foundation for the industrial age/revolution. The origin of current patterns is in the history.
• "Physical and administrative infrastructures in the industrial revolution. Decisions are made in a technological mode, hard to influence through democratic/egalitarian decision-making (vs technical/technological decision-making)."
• Technologies are developed and used in a particular social and economic and political situations/contexts. //&Situatedness
• The nature of systems. "Technological systems" ... rather: thinking in a notion of a web of interactions. Seeing strings of the web, visualizing patterns and designs. Weaving: One can change patterns only at certain places and manners, if one does not want to risk the continuity of the whole fabric. "Re-weaving the web of life." There are other patterns, the patterns of technology are not fixed. Pattern changes > being clear about the structures, rules of the patterns that are there. Notion of planning! Prescriptive technologies require planning. "The structuring authority gains an enhanced power. No ruling class plans for their own demise. Structures that are put in the place enhance the existing powers."
• Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish: notion of discipline enters the secular scene.
• Le Mettrie - Man a Machine: detailed analysis of the human body, looked upon as an intricate machine that could be understood, controlled and used. Foucault: The discovery of the human body as a machine and as an instrument of power ... Efficient operation of these machines. ... Disciplines of exercise, training, work = general prescriptions of dominance. "Political anatomy was born."
• timing of movement in schools, prisons, of soldiers (drill choreographies - a military unit is a machine at the command of the superior). Detailed labor discipline in workshops (prior to industrial revolution, a well-prepared soil).
• Factory system augments and extends these patterns of control. The machinery didn't create them, it enforced them. The outcome of this development is the breakdown of processes into small prescriptive steps. Extended into non-mechanical applications. Changed banking, schooling, prison. Are exercises of control. Required planning.
• "The industrial revolutions strongest dream: to plan with and for technology. A totally automated factory, a workplace without workers. Discussed already in the early 19th century."
• "Until the end of the 18th century the control and dominance was exercised by regarding human bodies as machines. In the 19th century the machines alone could be visualized as instruments of control. Machines appear more predictable and controllable than workers. [...] Planning against undesirable and unpredictable interventions. The resistance of the workers must be seen as a clearly understood threat to workers control and autonomy. Not resistance to technology, but the opposition to the division of labor and the loss of control."
• The LUDDITES. Its a question of WHO controls the innovation. They understood the distinction of work-related and control-related technologies.
• ///&Link to "easier life" by machines, What are the human costs?
• Robert Owen: Separating industrialization from capital accumulation (later: capitalism). Addressing control and government. He develops profit sharing, sharing of controls among workers.
• The exaggerated hopes and ideas of the beneficial effect of technologies. (then&then&now). What machines are going to do to moral and human development ...

• Physical and administrative infrastructures. Relationship between the state and industry/technology. Changes catalyzed by the need for large public infrastructures in order to develop and sustain the industrial enterprises.
• Support relationships between tech, public institutions, the government = a novelty. Transportation and distribution. Energy, information (from the point of its generation to the points of its use). Linking the public with the private spheres.
• "Political decisions in the garment of technological decisions." (The standards of electricity different in the US and elsewhere)
• Divisible benefits and costs vs indivisible benefits and costs.
• From common safety to individual criminality = fear of being caught and fined would be a way to enforce regulations. Driving, speeding. Technology.

Donna Haraway

Cyborg manifesto

21-9-20

"relation between Organism and machine has been a border war" pg. 2

Breaking down binaries/boundaries, intersections:

• animal "vs" human
  • "The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange" pg. 4
• organism "vs" machine
  • "The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be hanuted, there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. [...] Machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, they could only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert." pg.4

// & Link to Dolar, thinking machines

• physical "vs" non-physical
  • A matter of size. Sleek and unnoticeable contemporary tech.

// & Link to Franklin, smart humans and dumb giants.

• fractured identities, breaking down labels

25-9-20

• joined kinship, multiplied perspectives pg. 5
• labor pg.8 (link to prescriptive technology, Ursula Franklin)
• The informatics of domination pg .10
• "technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social Interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meaning. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relation and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other."
• ... All submitted to a disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. pg. 12
• Theory of language and control - Communications science, cybernetic (feedback-control led) systems. Determining the rates, direction and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. Threat: interruption of Communications. "any system break down is a function of stress." pg. 14

From Cyborgs to Companion Species

lecture here

listened on: 24-9-20

• kin and kind
• kinship
• companion species - dogs and cyborgs
• species / companion - linguistic breakdown

Alternative to the various versions of post-humanism ... Coming to terms with multiple decenterings/wounds to narcissism that the ontological human had to suffer:

• Copernican wound = decentering earth (the narcissist) from the centre of the universe
• Darwinian wound = decentering of humanity from all organic life
• Freudian wound = decentering of consciousness - active agencies, active beings
• the synthetic wound = decentering the natural from the artificial

companion specisism - accomodates the four wounds to the ontological of the human. (machinic+organic+humanic)

run fast, bite hard

shut up and train

"there must be some molecular record of our touch in our codes of living that will leave traces in the world"

25:00

Marcel Mauss: The techniques of the body

• A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris ; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The positions of the arms and hands while walking form a social idiosyncracy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms." pg.3

Mazuir Rafal: The dao of improvisation

22-9-20

• (mentions Henri Bergson "bergsonian intuition/intuitive cognition" & Stockhausen "intuitive music" and Cardew "free improvisation")

• "You cannot see improvised music through 'what' to play, but rather through 'how' to play."

//& Link to Franklin, she says the same about technology and its implications!

• "... free and intuitive improvisation is a kind of action strategy and as many artists presumed over the centuries, is in fact an exceptionally effective strategy, allowing extraordinary creative actions, results of which can exceed our expectations (or even go far beyond our ability to understand)."

• "... it should be considered a way of action, and a way of action that is not related to any specific stylistic (this particular feature was called 'non-idiomatic' by Derek Bailey)."

• "... The changes, related to the processual thinking of the world and to the belief in non – existence of static objects together with the belief in constant movement in the subatomic world. Acceptance (or, at least, not radical rejection) of Bergson’s thesis on the change being the basis of reality and exploring the experiences of culture, for which Yiqing -The Book of changes- is an essential writing, seems just natural in the attempt to formulate a philosophical strategy of free improvisation."

• state of the "transparent mind"

• weiwuwei action without action

• ..."When one's wisdom does not think of the right or the wrong (of a question under discussion), that shows the suitability of the mind (for the question)."