Berry and DeCock, Computational Porosity

David M. Berry, and Christian DeCock (2026) “Computational Porosity: Benjamin, Lācis and Algorithmic Life.” Controversies of AI Society. https://doi.org/10.54337/aau.add.scai-11425

This interesting conference paper which will hopefully be further developed. The authors start off with a sophisticated discussion of Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity, noting it as a product of the encounter between Naples and an exoticizing European gaze which then uses the concept to problematize the assumed arrangement of space in the North and elsewhere. Drawing on Jameson and Adorno, they also note the role the concept played in the development of Benjamin’s thought, particularly his concept of denkbild or “figure of thought.” B and DeC also point out the temporal, not just spatial, interpenetration of porosity. They tie the concept further to the Brechtian concepts (which Benjamin was influenced by) of estrangement (Verfremdung) and refunctioning (Unfunktionierung). [These specific aspects of Benjamin’s thought on porosity are not specifically returned to in the later discussion of computational porosity.]

"We argue that Benjamin and Lācis’s concept of porosity can be used to help understand how computational architectures structure contemporary social relations." (32)

The crucial difference is that computational porosity operates not through stone and concrete but through the material substrate of processors, networks and algorithms that increasingly mediate social existence. This includes the proliferation of enterprise software, algorithmic management systems, and platform-mediated labour that restructure how work is coordinated, controlled, and experienced in organisations.

They deploy the concept of computational porosity two ways:

1. “as a descriptive concept which helps understand how discretisation as a practice within computation is giving way to diffusion techniques”

2. “as a critical concept in the sense given by Benjamin and Lācis who saw it as an alternative to bourgeois ways of organising the lifeworld.”

Just as Naples resisted the rationalised planning of modern cities, computational porosity challenges organizational boundaries and hierarchies. In platform organizations, the distinction between employee and contractor, workplace and home, working time and leisure time becomes increasingly porous. Uber drivers, for instance, exist in a deliberately porous space where they are neither fully independent nor fully employed, where the car becomes simultaneously private property and workplace, where algorithms interpenetrate with human decision-making about when and where to work. (33)

The office diffuses into domestic home spaces and synchronous and asynchronous communication blur together making corporate surveillance and individual autonomy clash through activity monitoring software and flexible scheduling.

... computational systems create fluid boundaries between local and cloud processing, between human and machine cognition, and between private data and public circulation. The physical permeability [Benjamin and Lacis] identified in Naples’ buildings finds its contemporary parallel in the technical permeability of computational systems that allow data and processing to flow across previously distinct spheres and across planetary networks.

When we issue a voice command to ChatGPT or another LLM, the computation flows seamlessly between device, data centre and cloud, creating what appears as a unified interaction but which actually traverses across multiple computational domains. This technical arrangement mirrors the interpenetration of spaces that Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples, though now operating through digital rather than architectural forms. Similarly, the diffusion processes that many AI systems now implement, make all cultural works diffuse and hybrid within the latent spaces of their neural networks, a process Berry (2025) calls diffusionisation. (33-4)

In a footnote:

The idea that porosity is now also an instrumental process, actuated through computational techniques for the diffusionisation of the lifeworld, raises interesting questions about how a practice of resistance can be integrated into the system. However, we want to suggest that porosity, as Benjamin and Lācis deploy it, points to the excess that cannot be captured fully, even when turned into a computational function. Thereby, computational porosity creates unforeseen lines of flight and potentials for resistance in social and political practice.

While computational porosity describes the broader phenomenon of interpenetrating boundaries between human and machine agencies, diffusionisation represents a specific technical manifestation of this porosity within AI systems. Through diffusion models, cultural artefacts are not simply stored or processed but become porous themselves as their features, styles, and meanings blur and intermingle within the latent spaces of neural networks. This technical process of diffusionisation thus intensifies the porosity Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples’ architecture, as it operates not just on the level of infrastructure but on the very substance of cultural production itself. (34)

They describe using Google's “Smart Compose:”

As we compose, our thought processes become intertwined with algorithmic suggestions in ways that go beyond simple automation. The system learns from aggregate patterns of communication across millions of users, creating a kind of collective linguistic porosity where individual expression becomes mediated through statistically derived patterns.

This example thus layers all, or at least many of, the kinds of porosity they talk about (spatial, boundary-blurring, temporal, social, "diffusionist"). They also discuss agential porosity, “where human and machine decision-making become so entangled that attributing responsibility becomes difficult” (35). Through computational porosity, agency is distributed through [the assemblage] of human and non-human, with no clear [figure] in which it can be located. “This computational porosity obscures accountability whilst intensifying control and will create a number of difficulties unless reflexively understood.” They further discuss variations such as playful coding, and “workaround cultures” in which workers try to game the algorithms they are being controlled by.

Just as Neapolitans used architectural porosity to evade official functions and create alternative uses, workers develop tactics to game algorithmic management systems, exploit platform vulnerabilities, or repurpose enterprise software for unintended purposes. For example, call centre workers might share strategies for maximising metrics whilst minimising actual work, Deliveroo riders might use geographic quirks in the algorithm to secure better-paying orders, and remote workers might use mouse or keyboard automation to simulate work activity to evade surveillance software. These practices reveal the porous character of seemingly rigid computational management systems.

However, “The same flexibility that enables worker resistance also enables platforms to externalise costs, avoid employment obligations, and intensify exploitation through the blurring of work and non-work time” (35-6).

However, computational porosity is not merely analogous to architectural porosity. Rather, it represents an intensification and acceleration of the interpenetration of spaces and practices that Benjamin and Lācis observed. Contemporary computational systems do not simply enable movement between defined spheres but actively blur the boundaries between them. When we interact with AI systems or social media platforms, increasingly human and algorithmic agencies are diffused in complex ways. The “theatrical” dimension they identified in Naples’ architecture becomes literalised in computational systems that transform every interaction into a performance that can be captured. (36)

The concept of “explainability,” which Berry advocates in other writings, would create “epistemic porosity, where technical knowledge and democratic oversight must somehow coexist and interpenetrate” [it would be interesting to explore the connections between this concept and "legibility" per Enfield, et al.] Algorithmic management is another example of “temporal porosity” between past hiring decisions (e.g. encoded in training data), present applications, and future workforce composition.” There does not appear to be a set number of ways in which they want to discuss kinds of “porosity,” as they keep adding more, then circling back and revisiting ones discussed previously [perhaps one could argue there is a “porosity” to this mode of discussion.] It would be nice to have a set, clear list or overview paragraph of the forms or relations which computational porosity takes [not, of course, that Benjamin and Lacis bothered with anything of the sort], and how these tie back to their initial discussion of B&L’s porosity.

 [Whereas in my 2019 article I had looked at porosity primarily in terms of the relative openness or closedness of different spaces to interaction with each other, B&DeC seem more interested in how it creates mingled productions, blurred categories, “dissolved boundaries,” and recondite traces of (unevenly) distributed/delegated agency; this concern is likely linked to the project of “explainability” (which they do state in their conclusion); they are more interested in the politics of discursive articulation than in the politics of spatial articulation].

There are also possibilities for resistance: “For example, in adversarial machine learning, researchers and activists can deliberately exploit the porous boundaries of AI systems to reveal their limitations and biases. This recalls Benjamin’s (1930) attention to how Naples’ street urchins used the city’s new underground to subvert the purpose of this technology with playful chaos” (37). Apps like Signal “create deliberate impermeability within otherwise porous systems;” they give other examples workers’ collectives, unions, using apps.

“The European Union’s AI Act and similar regulatory frameworks create new porous spaces between technical systems and collective governance, opening possibilities for workers to contest how algorithms organise their labour” (38). The authors find parallels between use of silicon computing, and the tuff stone of Naples.

Whilst computational systems create new forms of algorithmic governmentality and platform capitalism, their porous character potentially generates possibilities for alternative social arrangements; a “chance to correct the incapacity of peoples to order their relationships to one another in accord with the relationship they possess to nature through their technology” (39, quoting Benjamin)

The key question then becomes how to mobilise computational porosity towards democratic ends. Just as Naples’ citizens used the city’s porous spaces to create autonomous zones and informal economies, we might identify how computational porosity enables new forms of collective organisation and resistance. For instance, the porous boundaries between local and cloud computing could support decentralised infrastructure projects that prioritise community control over corporate profit. The diffusional character of contemporary AI systems might be redirected towards collective knowledge production rather than data extractivism.

The conclusion turns more specifically to the subject of AI:

we can see generative AI’s outputs as a form of involuntary surrealism as they often contain unexpected juxtapositions, distortions, and a Verfremdung-­effect that can either enlighten or mislead, depending on context. Just as the Surrealists collaged disparate elements to jolt consciousness, AI often unwittingly collages fact and fiction.

Large language models, trawling through billions of data points and recombining them, might surface hidden cultural obsessions or biases in strange new forms. Indeed, image generators trained on internet data often produce biased or stereotyped images, spuriously classifying people by race, gender, sexuality, and personality .... When these biases appear blatantly in AI outputs, they can become an estranging mirror held up to society’s prejudices. It makes visible what is often obscured in polished human-made media, the deep-set biases in our collective imaginary. Thus, AI’s remix aesthetic can become a tool for critique, a way to see the “dream wishes” of society laid out unsparingly, much as Benjamin read the arcades of Paris as the dream wishes of the 19th century. (40)

Benjamin had seen that contemporary media and technology could be used for both fascism and freedom. B&DeC note that much current discourse on AI focuses on fears related to “boundary violations” between the human and the simulated. Such anxieties over borders have long been weaponized by fascism, and a better ground for progressive politics is needed. 

The question becomes not just how to maintain boundaries, but how to cultivate forms of porosity that enable flourishing rather than domination. Indeed, porosity functions dialectically in workplace struggles as it simultaneously enables new forms of worker coordination and new modes of managerial control. Workers will need to increasingly engage in collective reverse-engineering of opaque systems, sharing knowledge about how algorithms calculate work, predict demand, or evaluate performance. A critical concept of porosity must therefore resist managerial appropriation by foregrounding questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.

They turn to the question of “explainable forms of life” in the algorithmic age as a political, not just technical, issue. "This requires new institutional arrangements and technical practices that enable collective deliberation about how computational systems shape social life" (41).

Enfield: Legibility and Agency

N.J. Enfield (2026) “Legibility and Agency.” American Anthropologist 128(1):39-51

In this very interesting article Enfield argues that “legibility is foundational to human agency” (39). He casts this as a rebuttal to Scott (1998) which is perhaps not really necessary. His larger point is that legibility is “both agency-increasing and agency-decreasing” (48) depending on social and institutional context.

He begins with an interesting example of Mrkaa boatmen in Laos reading the surfaces of rivers to avoid hazards, and ties this into literature on other culturally and practically situated practices of “reading” water. Such learned skills can be seen as “tuning:”

Whether one is navigating the streams of Mrkaa or the swells of Micronesia, whether one’s readings are direct from nature or mediated by instruments, whether one cites qualitative descriptions of numeric measures, people become tuned to reading the cues around them. This tuning is an adaptation that opens channels for flow, whether it be the flow of attention, reasoning, or response and action. This flow defines the agent’s relation with their environment. The relation is called legibility. (40-1).

Enfield’s beef with Scott is not really about the kind of “High Modern” state [and capitalist] legibility that Scott was critiquing, but more with the way that the term “legibility” is broadly used today in ways derived from Scott’s critique, without including the “high modern” or “state” or “topdown” kind of modifier that would distinguish it from the more general phenomenon which Enfield wants to use the term for: “Beyond this narrow idea of a tool of state control, the mechanism of legibility has far deeper significance for human action and interpretation in social systems” (41), at all scales of human agency and interaction. [And Enfield does, I think, recognize that this contradicts rather the spirit and the polemical intent of Scott’s book, than the explicit content, because Scott in turn includes various caveats regarding local kinds of knowledge and also the nuanced position of local elites (relevant to Enfield’s argument later in this paper).]

Enfield posits two related aspects of agency: 1) flexibility, control over action, planning, anticipation, etc.; and 2) accountability, “comprising others’ evaluations of their actions, and the rights and duties that their actions presuppose, create, and invoke;” in other words, the social and ethical significance made by the social group of the agent’s ability to act.

People use categorization to simplify their environment and their range of responses to it; E makes three points about the relation between agency and categorization (each of which are clearly related to both flexibility and accountability):

1. Categories are “sieves for decision-making and action.”

2. Categorization “sets public coordinates for social agency.”

3. Categorization coordinates “behavior, action, and understanding in groups,” so the interpretations and actions of the group’s members will converge [thus making their actions in turn more legible for the purpose of accountability].

Enfield turns first to first-order legibility, in the relation between an agent and their environment, drawing on Ingold, Gibson, Kockelman, Bourdieu, etc. Legibility is not merely a “property” of the environment: “it cannot be defined without also referring to an agent who reads it” (42) [and a context and purpose for which they are doing so]. “When this relationship achieves an enduring equilibrium for a group of agents, this gives rise to a legibility regime.”

In addition to learned legibility (attuning your attention to found signs in the environment) there is also constructed legibility (attuned to constructed signs produced by tools, instruments, etc.). Enfield also distinguishes first-order legibility regimes as to different “sources:” ancestral, goal derived, expertise derived.

He turns next to second-order legibility, “manipulating the environment to guide others’ action,” and more generally, anticipating the actions and interpretations of said others. As the perceptions and actions of other people are among the things we are most attuned to in any environment, second-order legibility is “foundational to the logic of communication.” Enfield discusses several ways that humans, honeybees, etc. do this; legibility is thus “an organizer of activity” in Lynch’s words (quoted on page 43).

In second-order legibility, we construct signs that organize others’ activities in a mechanism that is fundamental to the agency of social interaction. It builds on first-order legibility (the capacity to read an environment) by reading others’ capacity to read and then heeding that reading in the design of other-oriented action. (43)

[This is thus made possible by the three points E emphasized about categorization, and is also linked to the accountability of the others whose actions we are anticipating.] Enfield summarizes his argument:

Our goal here is to understand legibility as a resource for agency in the broadest sense, and thus to recontextualize a widely held framing of legibility as a modern imposition of large-scale states and technologies. I argue that legibility is inherent to all frameworks for situated action, from mētis to census, and that the legibility-agency relationship is foundational to social coordination and, in turn, to sociocultural institutions.

Enfield now sets about this recontextualization by discussing legibility in a series of social contexts; first off, the reading of signs to establish deviance.

Following the logic of second-order legibility, being socialized in a community means becoming tuned to how others will read your behavior and then being able to adjust as needed. … we create signs of ourselves that heed others’ patterns of assessment and nudge them as needed, but in large part, our self-presentation is a way to avoid attracting attention or response at all.

Thus, beat cops patrolled neighborhoods looking for “suspicious” characters; the trick was to anticipate this legibility regime and not arouse suspicion. Other examples include visitors to Mrkaa houses failing to understand the rules of seating location and thus standing out as outsiders.

Enfield then turns to the “high modernist” legibility famously critiqued by Scott in Seeing Like A State. He notes that

Critiques of high-modernist legibility are not critiques of legibility per se, but of the methods of states as agents of large-scale social order. … The problem is the supplanting of old, functionally evolved legibility regimes with hastily arranged, cartoonishly simple, and inflexibly quantitative new ones. (45)

[Though it is not in fact the hastiness, cartoonishness, or inflexible quantitativeness of such imposed legibility regimes that are central to Scott’s critique, it is rather that legibility regimes with these qualities can nevertheless better serve the State’s interests than locally developed and situated regimes, and so will often be adopted.] E argues further:

High-modernist legibility is not fundamentally different from any dynamic coordination device that sets terms for members of a social group who would wish to understand, influence, and align with each other. Whether it is enabling or constraining depends on who uses it and how.

He follows this with an interesting discussion of semiotic interception, in which signs are “intercepted” or [rearticulated/reterritorialized] to have means other than intended; an example is a king who is tricked into lowering his head on entrance through a low doorway, and thus “bowing” to the owner of the house.

The ever-present possibility of semiotic interception means that, to be agentive, people must anticipate and imagine potential secondary readings of their actions, some with significant consequences. Semiotic interception occurs when we are read in ways we did not foresee or intend. This ignorance of one’s own legibility is a de-agentivising force. It creates conditions for flow piracy in the domain of social action, a key factor in the exertion of political power. (46)

["Flow piracy" is a great term, apparently borrowed from hydraulics? which is unfortunately not returned to or fleshed out, though "pirates" are mentioned again later.]

Two phenomena linked to semiotic interception are preference capture, “when legibility thematizes and exploits an established preference,” and preference installation, “when legibility creates and imposes a new preference.”

The concept of semiotic interception is then expanded on with an account of how witchcraft accusations are used by the relatively powerful to take advantage of the relatively powerless, e.g., by local landowners to seize the property of a widow, by [articulating] an accident or sickness as a sign of witchcraft. Enfield primarily emphasizes how semiotic interception is made use of by the powerful; the question of course arises, isn’t it also used by those with less power, to resist, challenge, or redirect the powerful? It would be interesting to see this explored in greater depth. Enfield’s own examples include the trickster fooling the king, and people under surveillance fooling the police, specifically through semiotic interception.

Turning back to Scott, he takes issue with a passage in which Scott had argued that cadastral maps served the purposes of outsiders, not locals, because locals already “know” whose land is whose:

But if it were true that “everyone knows” whose land is whose, there would be no land disputes at the village level. Of course there are such disputes and they are all too often resolved in favor of the powerful. (48)

We would like to think that no idyllic “meadow by the river” would be sullied by such disputes. But without the publicly warrantable accountability that certain forms of legibility can offer, we are at the mercy of the locally powerful: landowners, resource-holders, lords, big men, et cetera. In these contexts, the words “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river” are the words of a pirate, gangster, or corrupt village chief. Societal structurelessness may seem ideal when juxtaposed against the excesses of an overbearing, malevolent state with its half-empty glass of tyrannical legibility. But structurelessness is also “a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.” [quoting Freeman, 1972]

This is a great and valid point, and even opens up some great further potential avenues for exploration (e.g. written constitutions and laws as legibility regimes, in order to make state power and process more transparent/contestable, a la Hammurabi, etc.). But first there seem to be some conceptual mashings-together which need to be cleaned up. First off, it is not clear that for Scott the opposite of State-imposed legibility is some complete lack of legibility; iirc there is a point where he describes complex urban street systems as “legible” to their inhabitants, though not to outsiders. Showing that achieved or learned legibility is not just State-imposed but an aspect of communication in all societies is a great point and a contribution, but it is needlessly limited by being posed as a rebuttal to Scott, who seems likely to have agreed. Second, “structurelessness” here is Freeman’s word, not Scott’s, and she is criticizing informality, not horizontality, per se (cf. Cohen, 2021, 12-13). Scott is not arguing for informality, against formality; he is arguing against centralizing systems of power-through-legibility which in turn leads him to posit the frequent inferiority of such systems in serving the needs of local people, compared to local and traditional systems. Those local systems can be formal or informal, and Scott frequently makes note of the fact that they are not necessarily lacking in exploitation and inequality—they simply will tend to be less exploitative and unequal than State-imposed systems. (For example, Scott’s “everybody knows who holds the meadow by the river,” evokes some locally legible agreement or understanding, a “publicly warrantable accountability,” which would not necessarily exclude formal mechanisms for maintaining and enforcing this understanding (I am thinking of the Andean villagers in Rappaport 1990); the fact that someone “holds” the meadow means that someone else is excluded from using it, so we are not talking about an idealized “structureless” commune of some sort). The general lesson that the “weapons of the weak” can often be the weapons of the strong is an important one, and it would be good to see it explored through Enfield’s concepts at greater length, but a polemical stance unhelpfully simplifies what is necessarily a nuanced subject.

Cohen, Yves (2021): “Horizontality in the 2010s: Social Movements, Collective Activities, Social Fabric, and Conviviality”, Mecila Working Paper Series, No. 40, São Paulo: The Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, http://dx.doi.org/10.46877/ cohen.2021.40

Freeman, Jo (1972) “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” Berkeley Journal of Sociology. 17: 154-64.

Rappaport, Joanna (1990) The Politics of Memory: Native historical interpretation in the Columbian Andes. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Scott, James C. (1998) Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Personal Knowledge, Preface and Chapter 1

 

Michael Polanyi (2005 [1958/1962]) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, London.

Summary of Preface

Michael Polanyi [aka “the other Polanyi”] states that his book is “primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge” (iv). He rejects the “ideal of scientific detachment” which has had a “destructive influence,” particularly in certain sciences, and seeks to “establish an alternative ideal of knowledge, quite generally.” “Personal knowledge,” the title of the book, might seem contradictory, as aiming at both the particular and subjective, and the objective and universal; but this will be resolved by “modifying the conception of knowing.”

He will build off Gestalt psychology, despite the fact that scientists “have run away from the philosophic implications of gestalt.”

Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change of our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the re-shaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested.

The “personal knowledge” gained through such participation with the world is not merely “subjective,” it is both personal and objective:

Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications.

In addition to cut-off subjectivity, P also wants to challenge the idea of abstract, detached objectivity:

into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge. (v)

Part One: The Art of Knowing

Summary of Chapter 1: Objectivity

Polanyi starts off by asking, what is the lesson of the Copernican revolution? The standard answer is that the lesson is basically that we (humans) are not the center of the universe, and need to understand our actual, puny place in it.

What precisely does this mean? In a full ‘main feature’ film, recapitulating faithfully the complete history of the universe, the rise of human beings from the first beginnings of man to the achievements of the twentieth century would flash by in a single second. Alternatively, if we decided to examine the universe objectively in the sense of paying equal attention to portions of equal mass, this would result in a lifelong preoccupation with interstellar dust, relieved only at brief intervals by a survey of incandescent masses of hydrogen—not in a thousand million lifetimes would the turn come to give man even a second’s notice.

However, P replies, it is impossible for us to actually think this way, and nobody, even scientists and philosophers, actually does so.

For, as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.

The actual lesson of the Copernican revolution was that Copernicus sought “intellectual satisfaction” over the self-importance of the previous model; he “gave preference to man’s delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses.” His system is every bit as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic one, “the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.”

If we call Copernicus’s conclusions more “objective” this means we think objectivity means privileging theory over sensory experience; “So that, the theory being placed like a screen between our senses and the things of which our senses otherwise would have gained a more immediate impression, we would rely increasingly on theoretical guidance for the interpretation of our experience, and would correspondingly reduce the status of our raw impressions to that of dubious and possibly misleading appearances” (3).

P lists three “sound reasons for thus considering theoretical knowledge as more objective than immediate experience”:

1. “A theory is something other than myself.” P gives the example of a map. “A theory on which I rely is therefore objective knowledge in so far as it is not I, but the theory, which is proved right or wrong when I use such knowledge.” [And thus, can be corrected and built on over time, fine-tuned through collective effort, unlike (or at least moreso than) immediate individual perception.]

2. A theory has its own structure and so “cannot be led astray by my personal illusions.”

3. “Since the formal affirmations of a theory are unaffected by the state of the person accepting it, theories may be constructed without regard to one’s normal approach to experience.” Unlike the Ptolemaic, the Copernican model holds true from any perspective in the universe.

Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses—but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason. In doing so, we claim the capacity to formulate ideas which command respect in their own right, by their very rationality, and which have in this sense an objective standing.

Copernicus’s theory then led on to many further discoveries which were made possible by it.

The intellectual satisfaction which the heliocentric system originally provided, and which gained acceptance for it, proved to be the token of a deeper significance unknown to its originator. Unknown but not entirely unsuspected; for those who whole-heartedly embraced the Copernican system at an early stage committed themselves thereby to the expectation of an indefinite range of possible future confirmations of the theory, and this expectation was essential to their belief in the superior rationality and objective validity of the system. (4)

A “theory which we acclaim as rational in itself is thereby accredited with prophetic powers” in that we expect it to lead to further discoveries and confirmations. This, and not the smallness of humanity, is the real lesson of the Copernican revolution:

It inspires us, on the contrary, with the hope of overcoming the appalling disabilities of our bodily existence, even to the point of conceiving a rational idea of the universe which can authoritatively speak for itself. It is not a counsel of self-effacement, but the very reverse—a call to the Pygmalion in the mind of man.

Polanyi now traces two lineages of scientific and philosophical thought beginning with the ancient Greeks. Copernicus is in the first, Pythagorean lineage, which finds the truth of reality in numbers, and thus stands for the fundamentality of theory over observation. After Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo are also in this lineage, which tends towards the mystical and rapturous. The Pythagoreans and their Renaissance successors are mistaken, but they are definitely on to something, in Polanyi’s estimation, in the way they express and value an emotional attachment to knowledge.

The other, less mystical and more materialist line, is the older Ionian one, the atomist Democritus being the avatar. The dominance of this line in European science led to the emergence of the mechanistic worldview, which separated pure mathematics, as an abstract realm, from empirical, and thus more “real,” reality. This leads ultimately to 19^th Century positivism, embodied in the perspective of Ernst Mach:

Scientific theory, according to Mach, is merely a convenient summary of experience. Its purpose is to save time and trouble in recording observations. It is the most economical adaptation of thought to facts, and just as external to the facts as a map, a timetable, or a telephone directory; indeed, this conception of scientific theory would include a timetable or a telephone directory among scientific theories. (8)

The mechanistic worldview, in turn, was replaced by relativity; P makes a big deal about Einstein not responding to the Michelson-Morley experiment, the point of which is that he was inspired not by empirical problems (as in the standard account which Polanyi is challenging), but by his own reflections and reason. After the acceptance of relativism as the dominant worldview, later experiments by Miller which supported the theory of aether were ignored, not on empirical but theoretical grounds. (Polanyi’s point here is not that Miller was correct and should therefore have been listened to; he is instead pointing out that he was ignored because his findings conflicted with what had become established theory, scientists being more interested in verification of laws than discovery.)

[At this point his argument is very reminiscent of Kuhn (not to mention Foucault), and there is a complicated relationship between Polanyi and Kuhn. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out in the same year as the revised version of this book. Kuhn cites Polanyi, and Polanyi expressed support for Kuhn’s position, but there is a more recent literature teasing out the similarities and differences between Polanyi’s and Kuhn’s (more “relativistic”) arguments.]

By virtue of the triumph of relativity over the previous mechanistic worldview,

modern physics has demonstrated the power of the human mind to discover and exhibit a rationality which governs nature, before ever approaching the field of experience in which previously discovered mathematical harmonies were to be revealed as empirical facts.

Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naïvely taken for granted. (15)

Polanyi seems to have two main points to make in this chapter: 1) fight against the separation of theory and observation into separate realms, with observation seen as more real and primary, and theory/reason as existing only in the mind, not also in nature; and 2) emphasize the value of a sense of wonder and beauty in science (particularly its theoretical side), which had been dismissed by the empiricists as “mystical.”

We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us. Yet the prevailing conception of science, based on the disjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks—and must seek at all costs—to eliminate from science such passionate, personal, human appraisals of theories, or at least to minimize their function to that of a negligible by-play. (16)

This is the myth of “objectivity" as mere empiricism: “This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture, would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory.”

P castigates the use of “simplicity,” “symmetry,” and “economy” as euphemisms for “rationality.” He promises to elucidate his theory of personal knowledge as a corrective to all this nonsense.

We shall find Personal Knowledge manifested in the appreciation of probability and of order in the exact sciences, and see it at work even more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards. (17)

 

Learning The City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Assembling the Everyday: Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning

As advertise, M uses this chapter to discuss the related concepts of incremental urbanism and tactical learning. Incremental learning is illustrated with an account of a bricolage-built home in a São Paola favela; and more generally, any kind of building and dwelling in a home is a sort of “learning through assemblage” which takes place over time: a “house is a set of contingent sociomaterial orderings, the constitutive geographies of which extend far beyond the house” (36). He brings in the concepts of extensive and intensive multiplicities from D&G, then discusses skateboard as a form of urban learning, drawing on Borden 2001. Reciprocity is discussed (40ff).

Another example of urban learning is provided through the experience of street children in Mumbai (43ff). M turns to the subject of rhythm, listing three functions of urban assemblages (48) and describing dwelling as an “education of attention,” a term to which he will return throughout the chapter (49). He reviews some of the literature on walking (50ff), then notes some critiques of Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” though these do not require a rejection of the concept or term per se.

The section on “tactical learning” combines De Certeau’s distinction between “strategy” and “tactics” with James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak,” through the lens of Hansen and Verkaaik’s “urban infrapower (54ff). The notion of infrapower helps highlight the fact that the tactics and weapons of the weak described by De Certeau and Scott have to be learnt. M discusses a tenants’ association campaign as another example of urban learning.

Learning The City, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter 1: Learning Assemblages

In this highly theoretical chapter, McFarlane lays out his concept of learning assemblages, and discusses his view on assemblage theory more broadly. He begins with a general definition of learning and, following Ingold, considers learning as a process rather than as the incorporation or familiarization with some body or corpus of information; “learning emerges through practical engagement with the world” (16). [It seems worthwhile to note in this context, that machine learning does the opposite: it imbibes a corpus, and has no engagement with the world.] “As a process and outcome, learning is actively involved in changing or bringing into being particular assemblages of people-sources-knowledges” (16). He emphasizes three aspects of learning, which he discusses through the chapter: translation (17-9), coordination (19-20), and dwelling (21-3). (The terms are conveniently defined on page 23, and then again with some slight difference on page 31). He considers learning as an assemblage in order to “highlight how learning is constituted more through sociospatial interactions than through the properties and knowledges of pre-given actors themselves” (16). Assemblages are 1) situated in terms of “history and potential;” 2) [(re)produced] through “doing, performance, and events” (17) [what is the difference between “doing?” and “performance?” Perhaps this will be addressed later]; and 3) “socially structured, hierarchized and narrativized” through unequal relations of [power/knowledge].

Translation is “the relational distributions through which learning is produced as a sociomaterial epistemology of displacement and change” (23). The choice of a term naturally owes a good deal to Latour, who contrasts “translation” (good) on the one hand (as phenomenon) to “purification” (bad) (Latour 1993), and on the other (as theoretical concept) to “transportation” (bad) (Latour 2005: 106ff). [I have elsewhere criticized Latour’s simplistic use of “transportation” as a sort of straw man in this regard.] McFarlane deploys the concept of translation to highlight four “perspectives” on learning. First, he wants to counteract the “diffusionist” model according to which knowledge flows, discrete and immutable, e.g., from centers to peripheries [what Latour had been calling “transportation,” above]. Translation, in contrast, “emphasizes the materialities and spatialities through which knowledge moves and seeks to unpack how they make a difference to learning, whether through hindering, facilitating, amplifying, distorting, contesting or radically repackaging knowledge” (17). Secondly, translation emphasizes the role of intermediaries [as opposed to “mediators;” see the same passage of Latour, cited above.]

Third, learning-as-translation emphasizes the role of practice. “The attention to practice collapses traditional dichotomies that separate, for example, knowing from acting, mental from manual, and abstract from concrete” (18). [This separation of messy reality into neat, reifying categories was what Latour had referred to as purification, above]. Fourth, McFarlane states that a focus on translation brings out the fact that learning, or much of learning, is comparative, which he will presumably return to and elucidate at more length later in the book.

Coordination is “the construction of functional systems that enable learning as a means of coping with complexity, facilitating adaptation, and organizing different domains of knowledge” (23). Drawing on Edwin Hutchins’ classic text Cognition in the Wild, McFarlane here refers to “mediating structures” which “can be as varied as language, models, procedures, rules, documents, instruments, traffic lights, market layouts, ideas, discourses, and so on” (19). “Coordination is a process of sociomaterial adaptation.” The role of coordination in linking together different domains of knowledge will be elucidated in later chapters.

Dwelling is “the education of attention through which learning operates as a way of seeing and inhabiting urban worlds” (23). Quite naturally, McFarlane is here drawing on Heidegger above all, along with such other usual suspects as Tim Ingold and James J. Gibson; the relation to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is also noted in passing.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to laying out McFarlane’s use of “assemblage” in relation to the literature more broadly. He notes that “assemblage” is sometimes used to refer to a way of thinking about the world, and sometimes as an object in or characteristic of the world; he will do both, because they are not mutually exclusive. He discusses various nuances of the ways the concept is used, by such interlocutors as De Landa, Ong, Deleuze and Guattari, and so on, and notes how it relates to the ANT concept of “network.” He concludes by emphasizing the political possibilities opened up by this perspective.

The critical purchase of of the concept of urban learning assemblage is not simply a call to know more of cities, but to unpack and debate the politics of learning cities by placing learning explicitly at the heart of the urban agenda. (30)

Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

 

Learning the City, Introduction

McFarlane, Colin (2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Summary of Introduction

McFarlane states that he writes to address five questions:

How might learning be conceptualized? How does learning take place on an everyday basis? How does learning occur translocally? How do different environments facilitate or inhibit learning? And how might we develop a critical geography of learning? (1)

He casts this in terms of assemblage in order to “emphasize the labour through which knowledge, resources, materials, and histories become aligned and contested;” he posits different “urban learning assemblages” in different contexts, which will be explored in the book. Drawing on writers like Heidegger, Sennett, and Ingold, he plans to explore urban learning through the concepts of dwelling, struggle, and practice (2). From Lefebvre, he draws the importance of interpretation and participation to a democratic understanding of urban learning:

if we are interested in urban justice, then we cannot simply ask what specialist and expertise knowledge is and what it does, nor simply how learning takes place—we need alongside this to ask constantly who we learn from and with; that is, we need to attend to where critical urban knowledge comes from and how it is learnt.

M takes care to distinguish learning from knowledge. “Knowledge is the sense that people make of information, which is anchored in practices, beliefs, and discourses” (3). He does not by this want to make of it a [reified] “possession,” but rather to say that

knowledge is located in space and time and situated in particular contexts; it is mediated through language, technology, collaboration and control; and it is constructed, provisional, and constantly developing.... Most importantly, if knowledge is the sense that people make of information, that sense is a practice that is distributed through relations between people, objects, and environment, and is not simply the property of individuals or groups alone.

[This last point is likely key to M’s project of democratization.] He notes the traditional distinction between tacit and codified or explicit forms of knowledge, which distinction can be useful, but which runs the risk of obscuring how these are both distributed in assemblages.

Learning, for its part, is “the specific processes, practices, and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested, and transformed.... a dstributed assemblage of people, materials, and space that is often neither formal nor simply individual.”

M will explore the issue of urban learning in a wide variety of senses and contexts, with a focus on varying “urban learning assemblages.”

urban learning is not exhausted by the specificity of particular encounters with urban form or process, but is instead embedded in the current of people’s lifeworlds, and is shaped relationally. (7)

The city “demands” learning, which is not a set or fixed thing but an unending process over time. McFarlane will focus not only on individual or group bodies moving through and experiencing the city, but also on the city as learned by activists, urban planners, etc. His goal is not to privilege certain kinds of learning as more “real” or “authentic”, but to argue for “a democratization of urban learning” (13). He ends with Le Corbusier’s quote that “a house is a machine for living in,” concluding, essentially, that a city is an assemblage for learning in.

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Conclusion

Summary of Conclusion

Whereas D&G’s Conclusion was essentially a rehearsal of several key concepts from throughout their text, Simondon’s is more of a brand new agenda building off the book so far, like a passionate instructor who excitedly introduces a slew of new concepts into the last day of class.

Simondon declares:

To this day, the reality of the technical object has been relegated to the background behind the reality of human work. The technical object has been apprehended through human work, thought and judged as instrument, adjuvant, or product of work. However, one ought to be capable, in favor of man himself, to carry out a reversal that would enable what is human in the technical object to appear directly, without passing through the relation of work. It is work that must be known as a phase of technicity, not technicity as a phase of work, for it is technicity that is the whole of which work forms a part, and not the reverse. (247, emphasis added)

The old “naturalistic definition” of work [travail], as human shaping of nature, is no longer sufficient, as it does not capture work as a part or phase of technicity.

There is work only when man must offer his organism as tool bearer, that is, when man must, along with his organism and his psychosomatic unity, follow the step-by-step unfolding of the human-nature relation. Work is the activity through which man actualizes the mediation between the human species and nature within himself; in this case we say that man operates as tool bearer because he acts on nature in this activity and follows this action, step by step, gesture by gesture. There is work when man cannot entrust the technical object with the function of mediation between the species and nature, and must fulfill this function of relation himself, through his body, his thought, his action.

Work is the shaping of natural matter into human-designed form:

The activity of work is what forms the link between natural matter and form, which comes from man; work is an activity that succeeds in making two realities as heterogeneous as matter and form coincide and renders them synergetic. And the activity of work makes man aware of the two terms he synthetically relates, because the worker must have his eyes fixed on these two terms which he must bring closer together (this is the norm of work), not on the interiority itself of the complex operation through which this bringing together is obtained. Work masks the relation in favor of the terms. (248)

S states that it is in part the “servile condition of the worker” that makes “the operation by which matter and form are made to coincide more obscure,” insofar as

the man who orders [commande] work to be done is concerned with what must appear in the given order [ordre], in terms of content and of the raw material that is the condition of execution, rather than with the operation that enables the process of taking form to occur: the attention is given to form and matter, not to the process of taking form as operation. The hylomorphic schema is thus a couple in which the two terms are clear and the relation obscure.

So interestingly S does not see work itself as the “process” of giving form to matter, but rather as, just another input? along with matter and the organization achieved by the “man who orders work to be done.” A focus on labor per se is, acc S, obscurantist because it hides the real “process” of which labor is just a part or phase. Cf. this quote from way back in Part Two, Chapter Two:

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

Pace Hegel, it is neither the Master, nor the Servant, for whom there is a path toward transcendence. S illustrates his point with a passage about clay which is worth quoting at length:

Indeed, it is not enough to enter the workshop with the worker or slave, or even to take the mold into ones own hands and to operate the potter’s wheel. The point of view of the working man is still too external to the process of taking form, which is the only thing that is technical in itself. It would be necessary to be able to enter the mold with the clay, to be both mold and clay at once, to live and feel their common operation in order to be able to think the process of taking form in itself. For the worker elaborates two technical half-chains that prepare the technical operation: he prepares the clay, makes it malleable, without lumps, without air bubbles, and correlatively prepares the mold; he materializes the form by making it into a wooden mold, and makes matter pliable, capable of receiving information; then, he puts the clay into the mold and presses it; but it is the system constituted by the mold and the pressed clay that is the condition of the process of taking form; it is the clay that takes form according to the mold, not the worker who gives it its form. The working man prepares the mediation, but he doesn’t fulfill [accomplit] it; it is the mediation that fulfills itself on its own once the conditions have been created; even though man is very close to this operation, he does not know it; his body pushes the mediation to fulfill itself, enables it to fulfill itself, but the representation of the technical operation does not appear in work. It is the essential part that is missing, the active center of the technical operation that remains veiled. (248-9, emphasis added)

[Simondon apparently has a similar discussion of clay at the beginning of his other book, on individuation (cf. Lambert 2012)]. In any event, the worker’s labor is external in S’s account, because it is just setting up the “condition of the process” by preparing the clay and the mold; it is the clay that takes form, which action is the “active center of the technical operation.”

For as long as man practiced work without using technical objects, technical knowledge could only be transmitted in an implicit and practical form, through professional habits and gestures: this motivating [moteur] knowledge is effectively what enables the elaboration of two technical half chains, the one starting from form and the one starting from matter. But it does not and cannot go further, it stops before the operation itself: it does not penetrate inside the mold. In its essence, it is pre-technical and not technical. (249)

I was recently reading about the transformation of beer-brewing in the 19^th century, from old, more-art-than-science practices formed through observation and tradition, toward those informed by scientific investigations into how yeast, malt, hygiene, etc. actually worked (Sigsworth 1965); the old, artisanal brewers were essentially setting up the Simondonian “technical half chains,” with no full understanding of how fermentation (or other related processes such as malting, etc.) actually worked. Nevertheless for S the key step is not just growing scientific understanding, but the switch from “tool-bearing” to “using technical objects.”

Technical knowledge, on the contrary, consists in starting from what happens inside the mold in order to find the different elaborations that can prepare it by starting from this center. Man cannot leave the center of operation in the dark, when he no longer intervenes as tool bearer; it is the center that must effectively be produced by the technical object, which does not think or feel, and which does not acquire habits. In order to construct the technical object that will function, man needs to represent to himself the way of functioning that coincides with technical operation, which accomplishes it.

[He makes distinctions in use between “function” and “operation” which I find it a bit hard to puzzle out (contrast the quotes above and below); clearer is the difference between “function” and “work:”]

One cannot speak of the work of a machine, but only of its functioning, which is an ordered ensemble of operations. Form and matter, if they still exist, are at the same level and belong to the same system; there is continuity between the technical and the natural.

Making the technical object is no longer accompanied by this obscure zone between form and matter. Pre-technical knowledge is also pre-logical, in the sense that it constitutes a couple of terms without discovering the interiority of the rela­tion (like in the hylomorphic schema). Technical knowledge on the contrary is logical, in the sense that it seeks the interiority of the relation. (250)

Different “paradigmatisms” arise from considering the “relation of work,” as opposed to considering technical operation and “technical knowledge.” This leads into a discussion of the hylomorphic scheme as essentially a misunderstanding preserved from ancient, pre-technical thought (apparently linked to the experience of the two half-chains, instead of understanding what happens in the middle, the zone left obscure before the development of true technicity? S also insists that technical objects are “detachable” mediations between nature and humanity [akin to Latour’s immutable mobiles, although part of their power derives from the fact that they are not exactly “immutable” in L’s sense, but rather adaptable? to new contexts; in any event their detachability from context of production [an aspect of alienation, in Marx’s view] gives them a power and importance which is part of what the new mechanological or whatever understanding needs to capture and bring to the fore. [Even though it’s sometimes a pain in the ass, I like having a detachable mediation.]

For all Simondon’s conscious differences with Marx he shares some of the early Marx’s arguably mystical ways of talking about work as the mediation between humanity and nature. “Work adheres to the worker, and reciprocally, through the intermediary of work, the worker adheres to the nature on which he operates.” Because of their detachability, technical objects are not, er, sticky in this way... and for this reason they somehow enable a better mediation:

The relation of man to nature, rather than being only lived and practiced obscurely, takes on a status of stability, of consistency, making it a reality that has laws and an ordered permanence. In edifying the world of technical objects and by generalizing the objective mediation between man and nature, technical activity re-attaches man to nature through a far richer and better defined link than that of the specific reaction of collective work. A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human establishes itself through the technical schematism. (251)

[It is not clear from the context, to me at any rate, when this is happening. Is it happening throughout history, during the course of technical development? Or is it happening in the future, after this book has transformed cultural understanding of technicity?]

S makes a distinction between function [fonctionnement] and work [travail] (in French it makes more sense to say that machines “function” and people “work”). S writes, “The technical object thus carries with it a broader category than that of work: operational functioning [fonctionnement opératoire]” (252). [I’m still not clear on the difference or relation between “operation” and “function”]. Operational functioning is more than work because it includes also a previous act of invention.

Now, invention is not work; it does not presuppose the mediation between nature and the human species to be played out by somato-psychic man. Invention is not only an adaptive and defensive reaction; it is a mental operation, a mental functioning that is of the same order as scientific knowledge.

“Work” for S is limited to this physical mediation between nature and the human species; invention, by including mental operation, is not work, and can be communicated, transmitted through the technical object, unlike work, which as we saw above, somehow “adheres” to the worker. (The terms “mental operation, mental functioning” further distinguish invention from “work” in S’s usage.) The communicative, informational aspect of invention leads to the development of a “universe of technicity:”

Henceforth, above the social community of work and beyond the inter-individual relationship not supported by an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity establishes itself, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up ... by a human subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would like to name transindividual.

The potential of this mental universe can only be grasped or developed by people who can appreciate it “according to its essence” (cf. the previous chapter):

The technical object can be read as carrier of a definite information; if it is only used, employed, and consequently enslaved, then it cannot bring any information, any more than a book that would be used as a wedge or pedestal. The technical object that is appreciated and known according to its essence, i.e., according to the human act that has founded it, penetrated it with functional intelligibility, valorized it according to its internal norms, carries with it pure information. (252-3)

The “human act that has founded it,” per S, is not labor as some might claim, but rather invention. “what is known in the technical object is the form, the material crystallization of an operational schema and of a thought that has resolved a problem” (253).

S makes a crucial distinction between the individual and the subject:

Work, conceived as productive, insofar as it comes from the localized individual hic et nunc, cannot account for the invented technical being; it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject, vaster than the individual, richer than it, and having, in addition to the individuality of the individuated being, a certain weight of nature, of non-individuated being. (253)

Per Barthélémy (2012: passim) the “subject” is more than the mere “individual” because it carries also the “pre-individual charge;” collectively subjects form the transindividual, which for this reason is also more than a mere collection of individuals. S uses the terms “community” and “inter-individual” to refer to this lesser sort of collective, which he associates with the thought of Marxists, sociologists, etc. In relation to this S opines that, contra Marx, it is not the social relations of work in capitalism, but work itself that is inherently alienating.

If this hypothesis is right, then the true path toward the reduction of alienation would not be situated within the domain of the social (with the community of work and class), nor in the domain of inter-individual relationships that social psychology habitually envisages, but at the level of the transindividual collective. (254)

S’s is here taking on both Marx’s critique of labor and alienation within the conditions of production, but also what he calls a “counter-Marxism” of social psychology (the organizational sociologists of the human relations school, whom Braverman criticizes, come to mind). “Work,” being a concept left over from the era of mere utensils, is not the right way to understand technical objects:

the relation of the worker to the machine is inadequate, because the worker operates on the machine without his gesture continuing the activity of invention in this gesture. The obscure central zone characteristic of work has transferred itself to the utilization of the machine: it is now the functioning of the machine, the provenance of the machine, the signification of what the machine does and the way in which it is made that is the obscure zone.

A worker, according to Simondon, confronts a machine as something they use without understanding; the action which “continues the activity of invention” is the adjustment, maintenance, or repair of the machine, which requires understanding of the technical schema. (S adds the “breaking in” of machines a page later (256)).

The worker’s alienation is translated by the break between technical knowledge and the exercise of the conditions of use. This break is so noticeable that the function of adjusting the machine is strictly distinct from that of the machine’s user in a large number of factories, in other words, distinct from the worker, and it is prohibited for workers to adjust [régler] their own machines by themselves. The activity of adjustment, however, is the one that most naturally continues the function of invention and construction: adjustment is a perpetual, if limited, invention. (255)

Braverman, of course, would strongly object that it is precisely within the “domain of the social” that we can find the cause of this separation. Simondon would apparently rather situate it on a cultural or even civilizational level, as the effect of continued hylomorphic thinking, than situated socially and historically as an aspect of the class struggle over the control of knowledge in the productive process. S talks about the knowledgeable user/adjuster who has “forms within himself” which allow for an understanding of the “forms carried by the machine;” through this communication “the work done on a technical object becomes a technical activity and not simply work” (emphasis added). [In Heideggerian terms, for the worker the machine is ready-to-hand; for the adjuster/controller it is present-at-hand:]

The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction. (emphasis added)

S then goes into an interesting (and today very relevant) discussion of alienated consumers: “The technical objects that produce the greatest alienation are those meant for ignorant users.” [Cf. Stiegler on technology making people “stupid.”]

Such objects progressively deteriorate: they are new for a short time, and quickly begin to devalue when losing this aspect of being new because they can only distance themselves from the conditions of initial perfection. The sealing of delicate organs is indicative of this divide between the manufacturer, who is identified with the inventor, and the user who only acquires usage of the technical object through an economic process … (255-6)

“The machine remains one of the obscure zones of our civilization, at all social levels. This alienation exists as much at the management level … as it does at the level of workers.” Thus, contra Marx, this alienation is not solvable by the mere ownership of the means of production:

... it wouldn’t be enough for workers simply to be the owners of their machines in order for alienation to be abruptly reduced; to possess a machine is not to know it. Non-possession, however, increases the distance between the worker and the machine on which his work is accomplished; it makes the relation even more fragile, more external, more precarious. It would have to be possible to discover a social and economic mode whereby the user of the technical object would not only be the owner of this machine, but also the man who chooses it and who maintains it. (256-7)

[Finally Simondon and Braverman agree about something!] Nevertheless Simondon says nothing more about this promising “social and economic mode.”]

Per S, both labor and capital are “inessential with respect to technical activity;” as we have seen earlier in the book, he considers economic and political context “extrinsic” to the essence of technics. The sort of [transcendence] he is aiming for is somehow thus distinct from that achieved through class struggle:

This level of technical organization where man encounters man not as the member of a class but as a being who expresses himself within the technical object which is homogeneous with respect to his activity, is the level of the collective, going beyond the inter-individual and the given social. (257)

“The relation with the technical object cannot become adequate individual by individual” because the desired condition of the transindividual requires “a coupling between the inventive and organizational capacities of several subjects.” Yet interestingly he does not seem to see this as coming about through a reorganization of society at large, but as happening through companies, which unify labor and thought through the organization of “technical committees at the level of their employee councils:”

in order to be efficient and creative, an employee committee should be essentially technical. The organization of channels of information in a company must follow the lines of technical operation and not that of social hierarchy or of purely inter-individual relations, which are inessential with respect to technical operation. The company, being the ensemble of technical objects and men, must be organized on the basis of its essential function, that is its technical functioning; it is at the level of the technical operation that the whole [ensemble] of the organization can be thought, not as a confrontation of classes, i.e., as a pure social ensemble, or as a grouping of individuals each having their psyche, which brings the ensemble down to an inter-psychological schema, but as a unit [une unité] of technical functioning. (258)

It is a bit jarring to see such innovative and thought-provoking philosophical reconceptialization lead up to such tepid reformism. Simondon’s idealism leads him yet again to imagine that existing hierarchies are “extrinsic” to the alienation of labor and thought, which can be overcome simply by introducing a new way of thinking. [And how surprising that sixty years after this book’s publication, our society remains so alienated!]

He goes on to criticize Bergson, Poincaré, Le Roy, and pragmatists in general for “conflating” work and technical operation; they attempt to overturn the Classical hierarchy (e.g., in Plato, etc.), in which mental activity (σχολή) was seen as superior to manual labor, by insisting on the primacy and validity of the latter. This, however, only preserves the false opposition of utility to truth:

Pragmatism, by appearing to reverse the hierarchy of values, defines the true by the useful; but it preserves the schema of opposition between the norm of utility and the norm of truth, to such an extent that it results in a relativism in the order of knowledge, or at nominalism if this attitude is pushed to its most rigorous and extreme consequences; science is not more true, but more useful for action than common perception. (260)

Technics is an “intermediary reality” between work and σχολή, and thus not understandable through either concept.

It seems that this opposition between action and contemplation, between the immutable and the moving, must cease in the face of the introduction of the technical operation within philosophical thought as area of reflection and even as paradigm.

Barthélémy, Jean-Huges (2012) “Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon” in de Boever, et al., eds. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Lambert, Léopold (2012, Dec. 8). “Form and Matter: Gilbert Simondon’s Critique of the Hylomorphic Scheme Part 1” The Funambulist (blog). https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-form-matter-gilbert-simondons-critique-of-the-hylomorphic-scheme-part-1

Sigsworth, E.M. (1965) “Science and the Brewing Industry, 1850-1900.” Economic History Review, 17(3): 536-550.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 20

 

Summary of Chapter 20: A Final Note on Skill

Braverman notes that his argument in this book goes against the “popular view” of his time, that increased mechanization leads to an increase in skilled work, because there is a need for training to use the machinery.

The concepts of “skill,” “training,” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of “upgrading"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration. (294)

He criticizes discussion of “average skill” in this regard, when it is really an issue of polarization.

The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.

“For most of those who hold it, the ‘upgrading’ thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education” (295). This is “a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.”

B not surprisingly demolishes the argument for the first trend (that workers have been “upgraded” into higher skill levels) by showing that the supporting statistics have been created retroactively “based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word” (297). To illustrate this he gives a great example of the difference between horse-driving and automobile-driving occupations:

Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxidrivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled” laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled.” When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill.” Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses. (297-8)

It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. (298)

The “semi-skilled” category and descriptions barely differs from the “unskilled”. The issue of some required training is raised, but B points out that even “unskilled” job typically require some training. The operative/assembly line jobs, which the statisticians take as “semi-skilled” and thus an upgrade for formerly “unskilled” workers, are typically easier to learn [and thus in actuality less skilled, per Braverman] than the jobs that are being left behind. B denounces this as the “imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises” (300). He goes on to emphasize the range of skills represented in the category of “farm laborer,” contradicting contemporary sociologists who imagine that any movement of workers out of this category is an upgrade. Likewise, statisticians consider “service worker,” as well as clerical work, as higher categories than industrial operative or laborer, but Braverman has already pointed out in previous chapters how these categories obscure an actual deskilling and decrease in pay.

The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition of long standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. … The weight of the prejudice which rates all “white-collar” above all “blue-collar” work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom (301-2)

Another argument the sociologists Braverman is arguing against put forward as evidence of increased skill is increased education. B points out this has to do with far more than work:

In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education. (302)

B recounts the history of how high school diplomas became widely seen as requirements for many jobs in the US, for reasons unrelated to the actual skill required in work, such as policies to control unemployment.

The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee – not always valid – of getting workers who can read. (304)

He goes into a lengthy and quite savage critique of the education system:

We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons – which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training – it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational” structure.... The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factor – the purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational system – we have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart. (304-5)

Braverman turns to the central thesis of the book:

For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. (307)

[And this is not because of any inherent aspect of technological development, but because of the particular shape this development takes in a capitalist system.]

B moves on to the next key point, which is what lessons this study of labor in monopoly capitalism can have for a post-capitalist society: “The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process.” This can to an extent build off the current educational system:

But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it. (308)

In this light, B criticizes certain schemes for workplace democracy which he thinks do not go far enough in actually challenging control over the means of production:

The demands for “workers 'participation” and “workers’ control,” from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism­ – election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc. – upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor – without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production – balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts,” and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers’ control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers’ control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers’ democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.

In this context he remarks that the Soviet Union, which seized ownership from the bourgeoisie but did not institute true worker’s control in the workplace, was stuck in the “abortive first stage of revolution” from a truly Marxist perspective.

In contrast to B’s more hopeful vision, the current capitalist system separates knowledge and skill from labor, robbing humanity of “its birthright of conscious and masterful labor” (309). He ends by casting back to the previously noted, almost refreshingly naive directness of the Taylorians, who had explained that under Scientific Management there is in fact no “unskilled” labor, because all workers will have been trained to carry out their specific tasks:

It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading” in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. “Training a worker,” wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.” Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?