The world comes crashing down

I have done a lot of work thinking about the ‘agent’ of social action. I suppose it was just a matter of time before an article addressing social cognition landed on my table. This turning point came after I started looking into cognitive enhancement (one core focus of transhumanism) and began wondering about the social meaning of brain manipulating. Thus I began reading about cognitive science and cognitive psychology. The latter I have some experience about a decade back when I was studying for a brief while in the University of Joensuu (now called the Eastern University after the unification between universities in Kuopio and Joensuu). So, the article I am now reading starts with a main stream sociology shattering abstract form How is Social Realism Possible: Sociology after Cognitive Science by Patrick Pharo in European Journal of Social Theory (10/30: 2007)

This article explores the limits of social constructionism and criticizes the
‘demiurgic conception of society’ associated with it. It contemplates the
possibility of sociological realism by investigating the intrinsic and objective
properties of action, cognition and morality. The incorporation of intrinsic
meanings and intentions in social actions, the objective information supporting cognitive processes and human sensitivity to pleasure and pain as well as
the normative rejection of undue suffering, delineate the objective core of
social facts, which can be interpreted or influenced, but not arbitrarily or
capriciously constructed or manipulated. This general argument is supported
by various illustrations drawn from the semantics of social actions and
classical puzzles of interpretative sociology such as the meaning of suicide
or the morality of social sanctions.

Now, for many sociologists the constructivist stand is a ‘given’. The human actor is considered more or less a ‘blank slate’ that processes meaning and somehow learns the cultural habits and ways of thinking. In this article we find no over determination of the cognitive theory so there is no reduction of action to workings of neurons. However, the question is being raised about the human actor making decisions in a socially constructed reality. Very interesting. This could have a deeper effect on my attempt to construct an actor with a concrete human-technology connection.

 

Article notes: We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the anthropos

Pyyhtinen, Olli & Tamminen, Sakari (2011) “We have never been only human: Foucault and Latour on the question of the anthropos” in Anthropological Theory 11(2) (pp. 135-152).

What a surprise to find two fellow countrymen behind a truly gem of an article. A great read and surely this will save me a lot of trouble with my inevitable journey into these two giants of theory. Here I summarized some notes and ideas this pushed in my mind.

The article is ultimately about rebunking the idea of human ‘exceptionalism’. The two authors are arguing that by cleverly combining the theories of Latour and Foucault they would spring up a concept of ahumanism. They point out that in anhtropology and in STS literature there is a lot of flirting with the theorie of both Foucault and Latour but no-one has yet tried to match the theories together. The authors claim that together Foucault and Latour will provide a very powerful framework for STS and anthropology.

Neither Foucault or Latour are interested in the “examining the boundary-making practices by which the human is distinquished from the ‘others'”(p. 136). The authors make it very clear, that they are aware of the differences in scope and scale of Latour and Foucault. Yet, they claim that the two theoreticians are complementary to one another and therefore the close examination of their theoretical work can help to make a sensible framework for ‘posthuman’ anthropology.

The analysis starts with a claim that makes the aims of the article very clear:

We claim that, for both Foucault and Latour, human subjects are defined not by some autonomous essence but by the specific networks in which they participate.” (p. 137.)

In the last part of the article the authors are going to criticize the “human centered” view of intentionalism. At this point, they have my attention since intentionalism is a a component in my analysis of technology (well, so far it’s the best I have come up with so I’ll keep an open mind).

From the Foucaultian side a crucial aspect in the article is

[…] in his work Foucault shows us again and again how the form of ‘man’ is produced at the intersection of the historical conditions of knowledge and the relations of power.” (p. 138).

The radical way Foucault sees ‘man’ as a contingent product and producer of knowledge does not allow any essential dimensions for the ‘actor’. Foucault reads the world as ‘discourses’ and… thats it.

It is here, the authors claim, that the writings of Latour come handy. Latour brings the analysis from

the archaeological and genealogical past to the anthropological present. (p, 139).

Latour does not claim an essence of ‘human’ but stresses the fact that many non-human ‘things’ affect how we are in everyday life. It is these ‘objects’ Latours anthropology is mainly focused on. Technology, clearly, is one of these non-human ‘things’ that makes us human

Humanity and non-humanity are inextricably enmeshed. (p. 139).

So, there are the two sides. On the other side, Foucault who focuses on the ‘genealogy’ of knowledge and focuses his research on the discourses. On the other side we have Latour, who focuses on the similarities of humans and non-humans. By similarities I mean, or interpret, that since Latour defines action as influence or effect, he makes no real distinction between humans and non-humans as actors. Therefore, we have two scopes for research and neither need an essential human actor.

The authors then procede to note that this would lead to criticism due to the fact that human ‘intentionality’ will be eradicated from the analysis. The authors then claim two objections to the counter argument that states that

[…] no matter what, the supposed actions of these non- humans [ie. machines] are possible only because of humans, for it is humans who have designed and built them for a specific purpose. (p. 141).

They claim that the argument has two fundamental flaws: 1. there are many non-human events, that happen without humans. Earthquakes or bacteria function as ‘stand alone’ phenomena. 2. That in everything even humans build has an element of ‘surprise’ in them and therefore even they are not totally human controlled.

Foucault and Latour challenge the idea of autonomous intentionality. They dis- tribute intentionality over the relational field of networks. For them, intentionality is carried and supported by various extra-somatic materials instead of being an activity confined within the human mind alone. (p. 141).

The authors will now attempt to ‘loosen’ the definition of human intentionality even more by claiming that even intentionality is built in to the system with the interplay of several non-human elements. With Foucault the authors argue that

Instead of the knowing, intentional subject, it explores the knowledge (savoir) that occurs in discursive practices and that makes it possible for something to appear to the consciousness of a subject. […] By focusing on discourses, Foucault dethrones the sovereign subject: knowledge becomes something that nobody knows and think- ing is something that nobody has thought; it does not presuppose the knowing and thinking subject. (p. 141).

As for Latour the argument goes

Latour’s point is that thought should be seen not as an activity attributed to the mind only but as a coming together of heterogeneous human and non-human elements coming together of heterogeneous human and non-human elements. […] According to Latour, neither do humans have intentionality: ‘Purposeful action and intentionality may not be properties of objects, but they are not properties of humans either. They are properties of insti- tutions, of apparatuses, of what Foucault called dispositifs’. (p. 141.)

In the next section the authors invoke the concept of dispositif from the Foucaultian analysis of power. Dispositif states that all power is at once intentional and asubjective. With this they claim that Latours main idea, actor-network, can be translated as a form of dispositif. I quote here a longer passage that stresses both the interconnection of Latours and Foucaults thought and the line of argument the authors follow:

As does the dispositif, an actor-network embodies various elements from science and technology to equipment, buildings, infrastruc- tures, legal frameworks, ethical codes and black-boxed truths. And, similarly to the actor-network, a dispositif, as Foucault puts it, is a ‘system of relations’, which can be set up between elements of different types. In addition, dispositifs and actor-networks are neither coherent nor stable structures – they change and move: in both cases, the relations that make up the network are in a state of ceaseless association and differentiation. (p. 144.)

This gives rise to a well addressed question in the article, the question of the ‘outside’. For Foucault life (in bio-politics) becomes the center stage of the struggle for the ‘subject’. Life is something that exists not outside but more like as the ‘basic element’ of the technics of ‘power’. Latour has a similar concept know as ‘plasma’. Plasma is something that is outside the ‘social relations’ and in a way outside of all meaning – a bit like the early Witgensteinian concept of the inability to talk about things outside the language system.

It seems the authors then attempt to make sense of this ‘non social’ element with Latour and Foucault. They refer to Deleuzes idea of the ‘virtual’ and Serres’s concept of ‘noise’. Bot these concepts bear similarity in the sense that they try to give ‘outside’ elements an ability to ‘act’ and therefore they would add tho the Foucaltian and Latourian concept if ‘the subject’ by adding an ‘outisde’ effect system to the forming of the subject. Here the authors seem to make a good case for such a strong non-human element in creating action and in many ways this does seem to lead to the extermination of human exceptionalism and intentionalism.

Serres’s philosophy of noise has two considerable strengths when attempting to come to terms with the outside. First, Serres’s work illustrates well how noise, while representing the other or the absolute outside of a system, is still an integral part of the functioning of any system. Second, whereas for Foucault and Latour the way in which life or plasma participates in agentic assemblages ultimately remains relatively unclear and vague, Serres provides an accurate account of what it is that noise actually does. (p. 147.)

In the end the authors conclude that in the Foucaultian thinking there is no room for human ‘essentialism’. Both Latour and Foucault seem to be

Denouncing any grounding in Man, Foucault and Latour propose a post- humanism or, rather, an ahumanism and call into question the grounds for any claim about the inherently determinate properties or capabilities of the human. (p. 148.)

As a concluding remark, an in a more humbled tone, as the authors note, they stress the view point for the contemporary anthropology as being a mission to

 reinstate the old question of ‘what logos is appropriate for anthropos’ (p. 148.)

The entire article does pose some important questions and I must confess that I am not familiar enough with all the theoretical work mentioned. I still do feel bit uneasy with the idea of casting intentionality out from the system of my own work. This is due, I suppose, to the strong actor needed in Touraines line of thinking about action and especially social relations. However, this article makes it very clear that if I am to argue about such a strong concept of the actor, I need to be wary of a major problem.

If I constitute an actor, there is a danger of just addressing it as an analytical concept. By this I mean, that the concept is just structured in order to classify my own research materials and concepts. In an example, intentionality is a crafty way to make a causal argument about the motives and interrelations of any action relations I may come up with. In a sense, this would lead to some form of ‘brutal rationalism’ where the concepts bend the empirical findings to match my concepts.

I agree that in order for anyone to argue about such matters, a careful examination of the ‘logos of the anthropos’ must take place. Right now I am not prepared to answer the problem posed here but I am delighted to find a field of research I can now start reading about more closely.

Article notes: “Cognitive Enhancement in Education”

Buchanan, Allen (2011) “Cognitive Enhancement in Education” in Theory and Research in Education 2011 9: 145.

A short but well structured article about how and why Biomedical Cognitive Enhancements (BCE’s) are going to be used to enhance education. The author, Allen Buchanan, is by no means a new name in the transhuman related pantheon of writers. He has authored two books I look forward to reading: Beyond Humanity and Better than Human.

In this article Buchanan focuses on cognitive enhancement. He argues, that this is already done with coffine and nicotine and there is no real obstacle that in the future there would be a selection of ever more powerful cognition enhancing drugs. Buchanan gives four aims for education: 1) promote individual flourishing, 2) equip a person to fulfill the role of citizen, 3) help people to become economically independent and a contributor to society and 4) to promote general social well-being by enabling skills and knowledge that make more complex cooperation possible.

With these four points Buchanan continues on to make the case for the use of BCE’s. He argues, that there is a clear continuity from the four aims of education to the use of cognitive enhancement. According to Buchanan there neither exist any relevant issues, that would speak against the use of BCE:s.

He argues, that the biggest obstacles in using BCE’s have to do with not knowing enough about them. Buchanan argues, that our concept of “natural” has a lot to do with a “pre-Darwin” concept, where all that is natural is good and pure. Also, what he calls biotechnological exceptionalism, we attribute too much contingency on the “new” biotechnology.

Probably the most controversial point in the authors vision has to do with the idea of using cognitive enhancement technologies as part of a mandatory policy. He argues that:

In a society in which the better off will predictably utilize BCE, harnessing BCE to the public educational enterprise would have two significant advantages. First, it would avoid the risks […] where thousands of people are taking prescription drugs in order to enhance their cognitive performance without medical supervision […] Second, it would ensure that access to CBE is not limited to the well-off and create the opportunity for using CBE to reduce rather than to exacerbate unfair inequalities in natural endowments. (Buchanan 2011, 161.)

This was a short introduction to the article and I’m not sure if it makes a fair point about the whole. Still, it raises some difficult questions I need to answer. Here Buchanan talks about ‘enhancement’. I found this article by doing a search with the term ‘enhancement’ in the Sage Journals. Part of my problem in looking at the “concept” (notice the quotations I have started to use) of transhuman technology is that the very central concept of “enhancement” is as broad as it is high.

Very often in STS literature medical technology and technology are separated. With nanotechnology we see a change towards a more hybrid view of technology but generally medical and non-medical technology are different. I suppose this has to do with the history of these particular technologies but I also believe there are different social worlds at play too. The medical technology is part of the medical institution that is run by doctors and the technology sector belongs to the institutions of technology, run by engineers and research scientists. This is just a thought, but it can be that the way these institutions construct ‘technology’ (or the “artifact”) are different.

But, now for the next article…

Preparing the argument: The technology-actor problem

I decided to start establishing some ground by trying to define some initial model for the ‘actor’. Some major assumptions have to be taken if one wishes to connect technology and to subject to a larger ‘macro theory’. This is a problem in any such research because it is very difficult to compel readers to accept the leap from the particular technology and it’s user to a larger scheme of ‘technology-as-culture’. However, this is something I hope to do and Alain Touraines theory actually implies it.

Here is a crude first version of my hypothesis.

An actor is an actor because it constitutes an active individual. In order for an individual to be active, it has to be able to perform intentiotal action. What exactly I mean with intention here is not relevant. We can just assume that intention means that an individual is able to make assessments, make choices based on those assessments and act upon the made choice. Clearly, this is what humans – or any intelligent beings – are able to do and it defines us as actors in our lives. So, an actor is flesh and blood. How can we then make a ‘leap’ from an individual actor or act to a larger scheme, like Touraines ‘action system’?

Well, I’m not yet prepared to make that argument but I hope I’ll get that far some day.

With my crude outline of an actor I’ll define technology as follows. An actor can either accept or decline what she considers ‘technology’. This means, that I assume technology as something given. Obviously a more precise definition of technology should start with the question of what is technology, but, since I’m just trying to get a handle on the whole, this will do.

Okay, so, technology is something given, so what our actors call technology could be pretty much what we in our mundane speak also call technology. Computers, railways, tooth pics, etc. The point I am making here is that technology is something that has intrinsic relevance to the actor. If not, then it would be irrelevant so the actor could not really accept or decline it. It would be invisible or to use an analogue, it would be like the tapestries of your home: they are there, but you don’t really notice them until you start focusing on them.

So, technology is relevant in a way that an actor can accept or decline it. An actor therefore has an opinion about technology so we can say (in a crude way) that the actor can have intentions that have something to do with ‘technology’.

Technology is not a ‘discourse’. In other words, it is not something that is just built out of meanings. People who are used to the foucaultian way of thinking would do well with just assuming that technology posits a kind of a discourse, a cultural text, and that would be all. The analysis would concentrate on the discourse and the actor would pop up equally constructed within (or with) that discourse. I’m sure you are aware, that this is also a very crude way to talk about Foucault.

Now, here is where I make my epistemic hand in hand with Touraine. At the center of my analysis there is a ‘flesh and blood’ actor that has a certain relation with the thing she calls technology. That’s great, but how does this play out when I try to connect this particular actor situation with some wider context, like an institution or – the biggest of them all – culture?

Let’s call a particular piece of technology an artifact. Now we have actors who can identify artifacts to be part of something they refer to as technology. Artifacts are, in a way, ‘owned’ by the actor. Different actors share the concept of an artifact and they all agree that it is a technological ‘thing’. If one feels like it, one can envision technology as being an attribute of the artifact.

Now, we have a flesh and blood actor that can touch, use and talk about real objects as pieces of technology.

At least for me, it gets tricky here. Since technology is something actors have to be able to identify and what they can also use, are there some competences or resources the actors must possess to identify an artifact as ‘technology’? If not, then how can anyone argue that a particular artifact has the attribute ‘technology’? It seems, there has to be some cultural (or cognitive, if we assume we are talking about people as actors) competence to ‘see’ technology.

I believe that actors must have some knowledge that helps them to classify things as technology. I am making an argument that technology is defined within a cultural system all though it does exist as an object and it can have causal or functional properties even if it is not identified by actors. This is probably something Ulrich Beck’s theory on ‘risk’ has in the theories epistemic assumptions.

This is one reason I’d like to have a real actor in my vision. If we treat technology as discourse, it would look much the same as above but there would be a very big problem in trying to relate the technology as discourse to a particular person or even a particular event in space and time.

Now, I have an actor with intentions and with an ability to identify technology and technology that is an objective part of ‘reality’ but what can also be ‘classified’ as artifacts.

I now assume that actors can relate to each other. To put it simply, they can talk and understand one another. This means they can communicate by using technological artifacts and they can also communicate about ‘what is technology’. Here I assume that the ‘culture’ of technology starts building on top of the world of artifacts. In fact, the reason these actors can even have technological artifacts is that they were together able to grasp the concept of ‘technology’ and then identify some objects as ‘technological’.

In the empirical world (?) there is a concept called ‘the technology divide’. It is often used in reference to the modern communication technology and it roughly means, that some people (children, poor, elderly) do not have the same access to technology as some technology savy individuals. In other words, some people have access to technology and they know how to use it. In our modern world this is an increasingly growing source of inequality.

I am assuming, this is how technology can be viewed as creating social relations among different groups. By using a simple dual model we can say that there is a divide between techno elites and techno populus. I’m not yet claiming that these are class differences, but I’m going in to that very direction with this argument on some other post.

At this point, I am defining the transhumanist concept of technology as follows.

Technology constitutes a cultural system where some people are more able to own and use technology. All technological artifacts draw their meaning from this shared cultural bed of knowledge. Transhumanists operate on a unique knowledge base withing a larger culture of technology. This means, that they can give extra meanings or new meanings to artifacts other people use for other purposes (like genetic engineering) or what other people don’t even consider ‘relevant technology’ (like perhaps creating a super artificial intelligence).

And, since technology is defined with a culture of ‘transhuman technology’, this culture gives the base for the cultural orientations, that Touraine speaks of when he conceptualizes the conflicts with actors: the elites and the popular classes have different cultural orientations to the same objective environment. We can talk about a ‘transhuman way of life’ as such a cultural orientation to the world.

With this definition I can start working on how actors relate to each other socially and how these relations can be seen as a creation of different and conflicting ‘classes’. The interesting part here is that the conflict is (at least partly) created by the use of technology. To do this, I’ll have to figure out how the ‘relation’ is built up from groups to institutions and organizations and ultimately to the tourainean concept of historicity. This is especially interesting in connection with transhumanism, since their ‘utopian’ technology does have a possibility to create really big cultural differences among social groups.

A mission impossible disguised as a To-Do list

I have done a lot of reading lately and I’ll add the books and articles to the bibliographical links some day next week. So far I have arrived at ever deepening questions and journeyed further in to European cultural history from the 18th century onwards. I think this could be called ‘combing the field’. Now, I’ll start of with a refined research question.

“In my first article I will analyze the transhuman concept of human enhancement. I will argue that enhancement creates new social relations much in the way Alain Touraine uses the concept in his framework of ‘sociology of action’. I also will argue for a technology-subject that breaches the nature-technology divide. This technology-subject is meaningful analytically but also empirically”.

Ok. That is really just for me as a reminder or a pointer. The question will start to make sense (even to me) as I go along with this project.

This post is where I try to make sense out of it for my self. Out of  a large collection of strips of paper that I use to sketch my ideas I am now trying to write something like a very short To-Do list. Oh, by no means this is much more ‘to do’s’ than I’d need for the article but I am having some vague ideas I want to test out first.

1. Different concepts of technology. 

Technology in the 19th and 20th century. I’ll try to see the Big Picture but also to get some hint about the ‘weight’ of history in the concept of technology, science etc. I have been reading a lot about the human-nature-relationship, the Enlightenment, Romanticism (Percy Bysshe Shelley mostly… and that could be going ‘too deep’ in to the matter).and others. The main focus here is to create a background understanding on the concept of technology and it’s different cultural meanings.

2. Construct a suitable ‘subject’ 

The subject is not just a concept but actually an actor where technology, nature and culture meet. It is alive. This subject should be concrete enough to connect to careful empirical analysis of different technologies. However, it should also be flexible enough to allow for theory building.

3. Subject-social relation-macro theory

Here is a real puzzle and I’m not even going to try to understand it myself. It involves a careful reading of Touraines work and others. I’ll need to start thinking about how I argue the actor is connected to a larger societal context and how this context could be viewed in light of some macro level theory.

4. The research data

I have to decide what materials am I going to use for my research data. This is really hanging in the air right now but I’ll figure it out later.

5. Read… read….read.

I have collected about 40 articles from various scientific journals and I need to get them read quite fast. Already I know there are some true gems in them and some articles I can discard right away. However, as my research at the moment is very theoretical, there are dozens of books and things I should either read or at least be aware of.

The Black Box of Technology

I’m working on a piece of theory I need for my first article. Last night I was laying in bed and going through some new articles on my iPhone. There were several and it will take weeks before I have read them all. And even then, I am not sure if the line of inquiry is a good one. Anyway, the problem is this: sometimes in STS literature technology is called “the black box”. This is to denote that technology is something we put things in and get other things out while we don’t exactly know how the ‘box’ works.

That sounds simple but in fact, the ‘black box’ offers a truly challenging problem in many forms. Obviously technology as a black box is extremely problematic for transhumanism that claims a certain essential knowledge about humans and technology. For me, this is very problematic because in order for me to link the subject and technology, there should not be a blind spot like this in the mix.

One approach I have been thinking about is inspired by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg in their excellent book Modernity and Technology. Here they simply pose the question why so little is written about technology in the large corpus of modernity theory in the social sciences. I paused as I read about it and then realized that, yes, there is very little written about actual technology and the ‘modernity’ in much of these works.

Now, my mission is to link some form of a tourainean theory of the subject and action (a macro level analysis) to the concrete technological corporeal subject (micro level). Therefore the link between theory of the modern and actual technology is seminal in my work.

Back to the box. The first question to pop in my mind was not ‘how’ can I do this if technology is something I cant ‘see’ with my theoretical gaze. The first question was ‘why’ technology is not mentioned in the theory of modern.

In the coming days I’ll post my initial argument with which I hope to show that the ‘technology as a black box’ problem is in fact a problem of a meta narrative. Theories of modernity only grasp technology when they have a meta narrative about concrete phenomenon like technology. If one does not exist, technology is viewed like any other ‘system’ and therefore it gets hard to analyse it’s meaning and functioning. This is why, I argue vaguely, that is why you don’t often see technology in a ‘grand theory of the modern’. I can think of at least Bourdieu and Touraine as exceptions but I suppose there are others. But, the argument is coming later. And yes, there are big problems in it’s wake.

With meta narrative I mean a system of meaning that ‘reflects’ reality (weather or not such a thing exists). There fore a meta narrative can encapsulate a phenomenon like the black box of technology, give it a meaning and have it function inside the system of the meta narrative. But, there is no epistemic view on what this black box is an there is only an ontology of ‘meaning’ around the black box. I will argue, that the omission of meaning in the meta narrative is in fact the black box of technology it self.

If the box is opened, it becomes something that interacts with the theoretical construction of ‘reality’ around it. In the case of technological imperative -model of understanding technology, the black box marches an en deux macina from it bowls. In the constructivist view, the black box contains a process of knowledge genesis and in the ANT-model the black box becomes a piece of the world.

So, let’s have a theory of the ‘modern’ that actually holds some concrete ideas about what there is inside the black box. This is what I am working on right now and it shows a lot of promise and even more peril. (Dramatic. Someone should open the ‘theater of scientific writing’ and see what fools we make ourselves into.)

Now, it was this link between meta narratives, technology as a black box and the theory of modernity that got me excited about Steve Fullers 1995 Review Essay Is there life for sociological theory after the sociology of scientific knowledge? in sociology journal.

In the essay Fuller questions the status of scientific knowledge in social science research. The whole technology as a black box problem has a lot to do with the theory of knowledge in general. For instance, we know that a certain object is made of whatever materials, that it has some cultural meanings and that it can be used to affect how the (social) world operates. It has effects and we have knowledge ‘based’ on it. Now, to have knowledge about it, we need a theory that can explain why it exists.

And here we are, back in square one. However, I think I have something you could call a solution. Well, nothing that dramatic but at least I think I have an approach that can take me where all sociologists eventually end up: inside the blue box…. no, sorry, a fan u see… I meant the black box.