Capital Vol 1: Preface to the first edition

These first notes are quite selective and leaves the most of what’s in the preface out. Just two shorter reflections:

At first I was surprised to see as many references to “laws”, “iron necessity” and so forth, as well as references to “natural history”. I have read these pages before but it was a long time ago. But when I went back to them once more, I ‘saw’ (at least) two things.

1) They all seem to refer to immanent laws of capitalist society (or as Marx would put it “capitalist mode of production” or “modern society”, which are not the same but still obviously related), not laws of human society as such. Thus, they don’t seem to refer to, say feudalist mode of production or whatever else. We must therefore be careful before we jump to something as Marx’ theory of production or of society as such.

This have implications on how ‘far’ we let Marx’ investigations travel beyond the specific case of capitalist mode of production and its society.

2) When talking about laws, Marx rather than referring to, say, the law of gravity, he refers to “natural history”, which is something else. For one thing, you cannot predict the results of evolution, even in the abstract; evolution is not a law of determination (or what I should call it … and btw, it is not a law at all). Also, evolution is dependent on or the result of subjects’ actions, even if not on their awareness of or thoughts about those actions. The fourth footnote of the chapter on machinery and large scale industry takes up Darwin explicitly, but this to jump too far ahead.

This have implications on how we treat the terms “law”, “necessity” etc.

This all is not to say that we know what Marx thought on these subjects as much as to say what we until now cannot say that he thought (if that makes sense). But that is also how I think we should treat the pre- and postfaces: as something we really can say anything about after we have read the whole stuff.

Notes on Marx’ Capital

I have recently started to read Capital vol 1 … again. This time I am doing it in a study group over a cloudy social media forum (CSMF), rather than in face-to-face groups (as I have done twice before). However, since CSMF’s seldom are the best choices when it comes to get an overview or save older reflections, I decided to post some notes on Capital also here. The blog has been dead for a while now, and what is better than waking the dead?

I still don’t know how this project will develop. My thought is that I will make a comment on each week’s reading on the CSMF, take my comrades questions, reflections and critique, and then post an improved version of it here. We’ll see how it goes.

A fuzzy critique of the ANT-framework

I have spent some time during the last year to dig into the part of the STS-field known as Actor-Network Theory. Some of the former posts on this blog are results of trying to understand what it is all about. Surely, the framework in question has got its pros. For instance, there is no doubt that it has done a lot to dissolve the problem of determinism that has haunted the studies of technology since … forever (see for instance Heilbroner as the technological determinist and Pinch and Bijker as the social determinists). Through attending to what Latour, Callon, Woolgar et al. call associations and translations (i.e. how different actors connect and relate to each other in networks and how successful translations from, say a group of humans of a certain age, to some graphs on a sheet, to a spokesperson in the media for the group, etc. occur) they have shown how all these entities, these actors and actants (the latter actors that are represented by other actors, i.e. the group of humans of a certain age represented by the spokesperson in the media) relate in a kind of jumble that makes determinist accounts impossible to sustain. What this means is that Society, this huge and abstract phenomenon that is not Technology, nor Nature, is rather the result of this networking, these associations and translations, this work conducted by actors, human and non-human alike.

This is one of the most efficient blows struck at determinist views on the relation of technology, society and nature. It, so to speak, pulls the rug out from under the determinist’s feet. What the determinist takes for granted, that there is a Society or a Technology (or a Geist or whatever) that can determine, is the result of the networking and thus the determinist have missed the party, only looking at what is left when everything is quite and calm.

But if I like this view so much, what is my critique then? Well, there is something missing. After having read Latour’s Science in Action, I was left with a feeling that something was not attended to. How come these individuals, these researchers, these actors that stand at the center of a certain successful network, are being able to constitute a fact that everyone takes as a fact? Why him (because it is with almost only men in the examples)? I get the feeling that the explanation becomes something like “he is there because he can associate and extend the network successfully”. But then we have a non-answer of sort. It is like answering “because she is good at math” when being asked “why did she get so good grades”. There seems to be a quite traditional and liberal understanding of the subject behind the actor in the network. How is this actor himself/herself (re)produced and how does s/he get into the position of successfully constructing networks?

One of the rules in classical ANT is not to begin with such entities as gender, capitalism, racism etc., since they are the result of the process studied, not its cause. But this seems too simplified. The subject itself, being a central actor in a given network, ought to be a result as well. And what really deprived say gender of its possibility to be a part of a network? The network, despite the arguments saying the opposite, seems to be all too abstract. If gender is the result of one network, it might very well become a part of another one. And probably it could be argued that just positioning gender as the result is obscuring the fact that gender also plays a part in the very same network, even when it is coming in as a fact, i.e. as Gender.

There is something missing in the ANT-network.

Latour, critique and gatherings

When writing on a text that probably will be published … elsewhere, I have re-read Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” (2008) and here is my understanding of it. Not much of an analysis, but rather just a summary. Latour is as always a fun read, but not without problems, and one of them is that he is just asking the reader to take his word on it, that criticism has turned out as he is describing it, etc. Also, I would really urge Latour to read Marx on technology for an analysis in parts strikingly close to what he is asking for … both in the Grundrisse and in Capital. I think he would be surprised.

Soooo … in the light of the denial of global warming (or at least that human activity is causing it) and different contemporary conspiracy theories, Bruno Latour wonders if he and his likes within the sociology of science and technology/science and technology studies unknowingly have been lending their critical support to such revisionist accounts. Identifying a critical position that shifts so that the critic always is right, he calls for a another kind of criticism, one that neither takes the fairy-position (the power of the fetish is only your ingenuity), nor the fact-position (your free will is only the result of structures, drives, etc.). In being able to take both these positions, the critic will always be right, and Latour sees a troubling similarity in the structure of explanation where both the critic and the conspiracy theorist starts in disbelief (‘That is a fetish!’) and then end up in causal explanations from ‘behind our backs’ (‘This is the fact!’). But there are never any crossovers between the facts and the fetishes. Instead, he advocates the “fair position”, one that attends to all participants in a thing, i.e. in a gathering.

Drawing on military metaphors, Latour argues that critics have to renew their strategies in the face of new enemies in new terrains. And not only are critics using old tools for new battles, they have also gone down the wrong path mistakenly confusing getting closer to facts with getting away from them, thus accepting what matters of fact were said to be.[1] What is needed, he argues, is a stubborn realist attitude dealing with matters of concern, not matters of fact.

To be realist is to direct attention towards matters of concern, of which matters of facts are just partial, political renderings. When in a realist manner studying objects, we are studying gatherings, i.e. assemblies or assemblages of things that makes an object.[2] Things (e.g. institutions, technologies, people, physical artifacts) are gathered and turned into objects; matters of concern are turned into matters of fact. Or in other words, matters of fact are emerging out of matters of concern.

The modern era, Latour argues, was a parenthesis in history in which objects were “out there, unconcerned by any sort of parliament” (236) (i.e. another word for gathering, or in Scandinavian languages, “ting” (Swedish) or “althing” (Icelandic)). Today, things “are gathered again”, such as the cases of global warming or for that matter sustainable technology. Of course, Latour argues, this has always been the case (we have never been modern), but now it is out in the open again.

However, and maybe ironically, when trying to add reality to scientific objects in this way, reality always seems to be subtracted from them. It seems like attending to the actual situatedness, history, connections etc. of an object, is subtracting reality, while not attending to it is adding reality. Latour argues that one of the reasons for this being so is the social sciences’ positioning of objects as disconnected from most of what is going into its “thinginess”. This has been done in the general critical landscape of social sciences, as described above.

In critical perspectives, the object has been positioned either in the fact or in the fairy position. The former position is when the critic is debunking ordinary people’s believes in that they are free, instead of “acted on by forces”, i.e. objects, they are unconscious of. The latter position is when the critic is debunking the fetishism of the “naïve believers” that projects their own “wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself”.

When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see.

(Latour, 2008: 239)

 Attending to the matters of concern, Latour argues, is confused with this trap of the critics; that scrutinizing matters of fact as gatherings of matters of concern is misunderstood as being the critique of objects portrayed above. But the critics never put the objects they use for debunking the fact position (economic structures, genes, evolution) in the fairy position (as fetishes), or vice versa. However, when studying technologies and sciences, that is when conducting STS, this is not possible, because what is studied is neither a plausible fetish, nor an undisputable fact; what is studied is both there, real and with effects, and constructed, “emerging as matters of concern” (242). The objects of STS are taking both positions (or none) at the same time.

(This by the way is not really only reserved to scholars in STS, I might add. Analogous examples are also crucial (maybe even more so) for feminist studies since scholars in this field always had to keep in mind, say the social construction and the facticity of sexual violence at the same time (cf. Hekman, 2009). Latour is telling the story a bit too simple.)

To the fact and the fairy position, Latour wants to add the fair position. One that is positioning neither as fetishes nor as facts, one that is not asking the epistemological question of matters of fact (How do we know it?), but the ontological question of matters of concern (What is there?). Latour suggests a turn towards gatherings (Heidegger), what others has called societies (Whitehead, Gabriel Tarde) or associations (Latour), and to “detect how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence” (246). Thus, the critic, i.e. the ‘new’ one, should not be “the one who debunks, but the one who assembles” (246).

---

[1] This is a theme in various post-postmodernist accounts, from Hardt and Negri’s altermodernism (in Commonwealth, 2009), to Susan Hekman’s Latour-inspired new settlement (in The Material of Knowledge, 2010). All of these authors have in some way been post-modernist constructivists in the past. In another place, Latour now calls for compositionism instead of constructivism (in “An Attempt at a ‘Composionist Manifesto'”, 2010).

[2] Thing-Gathering is an etymological affinity of great concern to Martin Heidegger, who however discriminated heavily against the thingness of objects of science and technology, the Gegenstand. Latour calls for treating objects as carefully and detailed as Heidegger treated the thing.

Sequential Value and Class Struggle

Let’s talk about value. Value is probably the most difficult phenomenon there is to understand. At least it is for me. Ok, I know the Marxian labor theory of value quite well by now. Value is produced through labor that the capitalist buys in the form of labor power (the capacity to work within a given time frame) in relation to the socially necessary labor time that is needed to produce a certain commodity. A shoe on the market has the value equal to the value of the labor power and the machinery and alike consumed when producing an average shoe. The labor power has the value (i.e. the commodities) that goes into its reproduction under the given social and historical conditions, the machinery etc. has the value of its commodity value for the capitalist buying it (this can change after that the capitalist bought it since its value as any other commodity stands in relation to other equal or better commodities on the market). Surplus value is possible because the values of the commodities reproducing labor power for say eight hours is lower than the value of the commodities that the worker can produce during the equal time.

Ok, this got a bit messy anyway, but the basics are clear: Value in this theory is commodity value or exchange value. All things in the story are commodified: the shoe, the machine, the labor power, what the worker consumes in her reproduction. In Marx there is also use-value, which is what the product of labor does. This is more important to workers than to capital, shown in the formulas C-M-C and M-C-M’ in which C stands for commodity and M for money. The worker starts with a commodity (labor power) and ends up with another (food, etc.). The capitalist starts with money and ends up with more money (the ’ stands for M + ∆M where ∆M is the extra money, the surplus, that is the result of the production process).

But are there other values that are essentially non-capitalist? And what is the use-value beyond its place in the production process? Are there values that are neither exchange- nor use-values? What about moral value? Esthetic value? Are these only values as parts within a capitalist production system? Can use-values be “outside” capitalist value measure?

So what is value? According to Massimo De Angelis (following David Graeber) value is how we represent importance of our actions to ourselves (“Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets” in The Commoner, No. 10, 2005). This representation guides our actions. But for the representation to be done, a social whole to compare with, to gain measurement from, is needed. So, in a dialectical process relating part and whole to each other, subjects both gain norms of measurement from the social whole and reproduce it at the same time. Thus, according to De Angelis, the “politics of alternatives is ultimately a politics of value, that is a politics to establish what value connecting individuals and wholes, is” (p. 66).

In Marx’ Capital it is not easy-peasy to point out the subject, but it’s easier to point out who is not: the individual subject within the whole. In the beginning of Capital, there are abstract individuals (the capitalist and the worker) but they are only “stand-ins” for classes not yet presented in the line of argument. Marx’ Capital is not an anthropology. In an anthropology where the viewpoint is a group of individuals, a part of several wholes, value could exceed value for capital in that other values can compete with capitalist value (i.e. what can be exchanged on a capitalist market). Some would probably say that these are not values at all, taking the viewpoint on value from capital (I guess this would be the standpoint of the theory of Wert-Abspaltung, of which I know just a little). But the point is similar whether you call it value or not: it is not value for capital, neither as part, nor as whole.

Now comes what I am trying to wrap my head around at the moment. What constitutes other values then? What is the ontology of values? If I understand De Angelis correct, value is construed through a process of measuring in relation to a norm. The measuring is the articulation of the relations between individual actions and norm. The norm of capital value production is the socially necessary labor time (SNLT) and in relation to this, individual actions (work) are measured. Instead of seeing a linear process of past SNLT constituting present commodity-values, De Angelis argues for a “sequential” view where SNLT “articulates the past as the perception of the future that guides the present action” (p. 71). That is, SNLT is not distinct from the process of constituting commodity-values. (This by the way strikes me as quite similar to the view of the ethnomethodological perspective Doing Gender of Fenstermaker, West and Zimmerman.)

If we focus on the production process where the actual relations between actions and norm are being played out we see how there is a turbulent flow of emotions, affects and energies. This turbulence reflects a struggle between conflicting values and value practices (pp. 74f). In the M-C-M’ formula we find this turbulence between C and M’, that is where the labor process occurs. And I would argue that we could extend this to see it between the M and the C as well, where class struggle takes the form of struggle over the value of labor power.

So, what is the point of this? Well, I believe that this opens up for two things. First, as De Angelis argues in line with Harry Cleaver, that value is the result of class struggle. Second, that we can find alternative value practices, both progressive and not, that are not possible to formulate as capitalist value (which of course might be “used” by capital anyway, say in the form of solidarity within lower strata of the working class that while not possible to measure as exchange value still has value for ones acting it out and is reproducing the working class at least partly on behalf of capital accumulation).

We will see where all this is heading. I guess.

Networks and Boundary Objects

My last post was about Michel Callon’s development of network-analysis. In a network certain actors interact, and some of them try to set up an obligatory passage point through interessement (i.e. to actively through translation enlisting different actors so that they will pass through the obligatory passage point which the central actors, for Callon the researchers, control as gatekeepers). In this text I will present a modification of this model, made by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer in their “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translation’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39” (Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3, Aug., 1989, pp. 387-420). I do not intend to go through all of the arguments made by Star and Griesemer, only some of them that are interesting in relation to the actor network model of Callon.

The problem with this bottleneck-model of a network is that several actors in a network simultaneously are trying to conduct translations. Instead of describing an alliance being set up through a passage through one obligatory passage point, Star and Griesemer suggest that different actors through different translations can pass through different passage points (i.e. not one obligatory) and through this construct a common boundary object (this instead of an alliance). Multiple worlds coexists and “entrepreneurs” (what Star and Griesemer calls actors that conduct translations) from these worlds can simultaneously set up their own work as passage point and still end up at a boundary object common with entrepreneurs from other social worlds. In Star and Griesemer’s study this is exampled by researchers, amateur collectors, university administrators, trappers, etc. who collectively set up e.g. different species and their habitats as boundary objects.

What does this mean? Well, from what I understand, it has implications on how we define networks and how we analyze them. From seeing on central actor setting up a bottleneck passage point for all actors to pass through a translation/displacement-process controlled by the central actor, to a more dynamic network with multiple passage points where different actors act like gatekeepers and together with other actors constitute a boundary object. It might make us look for different things.

In Star and Griesemer, the important thing is the boundary object. Or at least I find it the most important (probably the standardization of methods is equally important). A boundary object is formulated to create coherence in a phenomenon that several social worlds/actors (in creating the museum there are researchers, amateur collectors, financiers, etc.) have interests in. It is always both plastic to fit local needs and robust to have a “common identity across sites” (393), and weakly structured when used in common and strongly structured for the individual. Through the boundary object, translations can occur, and coherence between different social worlds/actors can be developed and maintained.

Another difference that is obvious when reading Callon and Star and Griesemer together is that the latter seems to drop the acknowledging of agency in non-humans. And maybe this is where the boundary object comes in? Because for S&G, the anchoring scallops of Callon would have been the boundary object for the researchers, fishermen and the science community, instead of being an actor. Maybe are S&G not at all symmetrical in their analysis of the network of the setting up of the museum? The specimens being collected are passively constructed as boundary objects for others, and the Social is given priority over Nature.

Can one combine the two models, “giving” agency to boundary objects?

The translation of scallops, fishermen and scientists

Michel Callon’s “Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” (in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? from 1986) is kind of a classic in the STS-field in general, and in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in particular. Some really central concepts, such as asymmetry, translation and obligatory passage point (OPP), are developed here. Perhaps STS-cases can be divided into three groups, depending on if they study failures, successes or something else (or in between). Callon’s scallop-study is then to be filed under the first category. This is a study of a failed research project.

But first things first. Callon in the beginning states that the aim (“object”) of his paper is to “present an outline of […] sociology of translation” and to show that this kind of sociology is “particularly well adapted to the study of the role played by science and technology in structuring power relations” (first paragraph under “Introduction” … I do only have a text document without numbered pages). Later on (in the third paragraph under “Scallops and fishermen”) he states another object, then for the study (which perhaps could be viewed as something else than the object of the paper), and that is to “examine the progressive development of new social relationships through the constitution of a ‘scientific knowledge’”. I don’t know, but the object seems to be twofold which of course is OK, but it is not that obvious that this is Callon’s intention and not just some sloppy writing.

Callon proposes three methodological principles that he intends to follow (and urges us to adapt): 1) Extend agnosticism of the observer, that is the sociologist, to the social sciences as well as to the natural sciences that she is studying. This for instance implies that the scientists studied are not to be censored when they talk about something not deemed to be about Nature (e.g. if they talk about how colleagues from this or that university lack social skills); 2) Generalize the asymmetry so that no change of register is to occur when moving from technical, natural or social. There surely is no consensus about Nature in the natural sciences, but that is the case of Society in the social as well. Thus, the sociologist is not supposed to let Society to play any other role than Nature, or giving social explanations priority over natural; 3) Associate freely and do not define an a priori distinction between nature and society, between natural and social events.

So what is Callon’s study about? Three French scientists have been to Japan and found a method for breeding scallops that they want to bring to France and the scallop-industry there (a different kind of scallops). In doing so, they have to convince the science community, the fishermen, and the scallops to adopt their views and methods. To do so, they have to define themselves as an obligatory passage point in the network of scientists, scallops and fishermen: All actors have an interest in admitting their proposed program for securing the stock of scallops. If scallops are brought up behind a net through which predators cannot pass, there will be sustainability in scallop breeding that is not the case in France (but in Japan) at the time. To do this, there needs to be scientific studies conducted, and the three scientists are to conduct them. Thus, by convincing all parts that there needs to be studies conducted and knowledge produced (e.g. how does scallops anchor?), that is by formulating and setting up a specific problem, the scientists have (if everybody are convinced) made themselves into an obligatory passage point.

But of course, not all scallops, not all fishermen, and not all scientists, can or are supposed to pass through the passage point. Only some representatives are to. So there is some translation to occur. The scallops are translated into larvae (that is, the ones who does the anchoring), which are translated into numbers of larvae actually anchored behind the nets, which are translated into lines on graphs. The fishermen are translated into elected delegates. The scientists (or scallop specialists) are translated into the colleagues that read and discuss the papers of the three researchers. So through the OPP of the three researchers, lines on graphs, fishermen delegates and active colleagues pass, all representing a “quiet” majority. Thus, the network in case works through several translations. In a way, the network can be viewed as a bottleneck: There is one passage point where several forces are to pass to reach what they want (scallops wants life, fishermen wants livelihood, research community wants knowledge).

But, to the regret of the three researchers, the OPP brakes down, because the involved groups were not down with it. The translations did not really work in the long term. The larvae did not really anchor in the research trials and some fishermen from the community fished where they were not supposed to, and the OPP was bypassed.

So what is Callon’s point except that his three methodological principles worked really well (surprise!)? Well, translation is an important aspect of how networks work, and translation is displacement (scallops become larvae, fishermen becomes delegates). Translations are continually being done and they are the establishment of spokespersons (which obviously can be disputed by the ones allegedly being spoken for): “The three researchers talk in the name of the scallops, the fishermen, and the scientific community” (3^rd paragraph from end). By such translations, Callon argues, social and natural worlds progressively take form, interlinked in networks of actors, thus blurring the boundary between Nature and Society.

White and Manly: Nerds as Gatekeepers

In her “’White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype” (Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2011) Lori Kendall returns to the phenomenon of nerds, a topic which she has studied and published on at least since the 90’s. She has studied various sources such as films (e.g. Revenge of the Nerds) and Internet forums and discussion groups. Basically, her argument has been that nerd identity is standing in a somewhat contradictory relationship to hegemonic masculinity; partly positively through technological competence and a culture of extreme disembodiment, partly negatively through images of physical weakness and social incompetence (especially towards women). In “White and Nerdy”, Kendal analyze three “nerd-phenomena” in popular culture: Geek Squad (a computer service company), Weird Al’s song and video “White and Nerdy”, and the hip-hop sub-genre called Nerdcore.

In all of the examples, nerd identity is shown as generated through images of difference based on gender and race. Nerd identity is strongly white and masculine, and is to a large degree gaining this through distance to women and non-whites (except for at least some Asian Americans). In Geek Squad advertisement for instance, nerds are imaged as stereotypically male (GS is also somewhat trying to change this) and when for example jokes about dating are made, it is stereotypically heterosexual male nerds in need of help with dating women. Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy” is shown to construct nerd identity as white identity in contrast to black identity that is synonymous with being gangsta. Sometimes Al is even dropping nerd all together, only imaging difference between black and white. There are also almost no women in the video; the nerds are young white men. Also Nerdcore generates its interest through difference, and also here it is done through race and gender, taking “the ‘gangsta’ pose of mainstream hip-hop at face value” (516). Nerdcore-rappers are white men, not black (gangsta) men.

The nerd stereotype conjoins five statements: (1) Computers are an important but problematic type of technology. (2) Nerds understand and enjoy computers. (3) Those who understand and enjoy computers are nerds. (4) Nerds are socially inept and undesirable. (5) Nerds are white men. (519)

Kendal argues that the nerd stereotype acts as a kind of gatekeeper to science and technology expertise, for example through making people look for nerdiness when hiring expertise (something Geek Squad obviously knows), thus making it harder for women and non-whites to gain access to these fields of expertise. This could favorably be read in relation to my last post.

Computing Culture Evolved?

A new article came to me through the footnotes of Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. I might write about that book some other time (I haven’t finished it yet). The article in question is called “The Evolving Culture of Computing: Similarity is the Difference” and is written by Lenore Blum and Carol Frieze (published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2005). This will be a rather short post, only focusing on some interesting aspects of the article.

The researchers conducted semistructured deep-interviews with 48 students, 24 women and 24 men, in computer science (CS) at Carnegie Mellon University. A previous longitudinal study had shown that the few female students at the university were excluded from practices of sharing experiences, from the ‘geek’ stereotype, that men focused on programming and women on the application of computers, and that female students often changed major after a year or two. To the researcher’s surprise, their interviews showed no signs of gender differences in interest, that female students “flourish[ed] as an integral part of the community” (112) and that a new identity was open to women in which they could combine ‘geekiness’ and femininity (whatever that was/is). Furthermore, Blum and Frieze argues that the both the female and the male students “were reevaluating and redefining what it means to be a computer scientist” (113).

These changes were due to changes in the educational guidelines and changes in which students that were applying and got enrolled at the CS program; changes that for instance downplayed the need for prior programming experience, thus leading to a fivefold increase of female students (from 7 out of 96 in 1995 to, on average, 45 out of 132 since 1999). No affirmative action was from what I understand undertaken (even though many students believed so and were unease about it).

So, here comes the most interesting part: The changes witnessed among the students were not because they were a group enrolled under the new guidelines. On the contrary, they were the last class enrolled under the previous, programming-emphasizing and ‘geek’-favoring ones. The organizational changes thus helped alter the student’s self-perception, identity-formation and the understanding of their own discipline, not the other way around.

Based on this, the authors formulate the hypothesis that gender differences tend to disappear in more balanced environments (balanced in numbers or what?) and thus argues that “recommendations for curricular changes based on presumed gender differences can be misguided and may help reinforce, even perpetuate, sterotyopes”.

A Critique of a Critique of a Critique … (Woolgar and Cooper on Joerges)

In the last post I summarized Bernward Joerges’ critique of Langdon Winner’s understanding of Robert Moses’ bridges. Hence, it seems suitable to summarize Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper’s critique of that critique … and of Winner’s understanding as well (in Social Studies of Science, vol. 29, No. 3, 1999). If it is not an Aufhebung (it is not) it is at least a fundamental shift of focus.

The aim of Woolgar and Cooper is to build on Joerges analysis and go beyond his sticking to the ‘historical facts’ and to show why this needs to be done. It is also to “clarify significant misapprehensions which Joerges attributes to ‘Woolgar’, and to ‘the discourse position’” (434). There is much more to be learned than just that Winner was wrong.

Woolgar and Cooper summarize Winner’s story of Moses’ bridges as one constituting a disjunction between what in a certain technology that seems to be (bridges that let vehicles pass over water) and the actual case of it (the bridges only letting certain groups of people over due to racist design). This disjunction follows from what led up to the technological artifact, i.e. the racist politics implemented into the design process. And, the effects of the technology are in line with the motives of the designer, i.e. the effects are (only) racist politics in action. This is what gives Moses’ bridges political qualities (artifacts thus have politics), whether or not the racist design was conscious or not (here Woolgar and Cooper seem to miss the point Winner made of this being conscious racist design).

Instead of jumping directly to Joerges critique, Woolgar and Cooper now retell some other stories of debunking the claims made by Winner. A student, named Jane Douglas, at a lecture debunks the Winner-story by claiming that she’s been riding buses over Moses’ bridges everyday when living in New York. This will become important later on.

Back to Joerges, he makes a distinction between words and things that is misleading when it comes to textual practice, claims Woolgar and Cooper. Ironically, he is here following Winner’s position. This position gives “ontological priority to things over words” (435). But, W&C argues, texts “encompass both words and things” (ibid.). If I understand them correctly, this is because words are part of the constituting of things, bringing them into the text. There are both words and things in a text, with the (once again ironically) example of Joerges’ text itself, so full of ‘words’ and (following Joerges) absent of things.

What Woolgar and Cooper does is basically to leave the question of true and false representation of things behind and ask “what does the text do?” and “how does it gain the status of truth?”. They argue that both Winner’s and Joerges’ bridges are construed through eliding the “possible auxiliary theories” that undermine the “emerging consensus” (437). This is nothing separating them from correct representations of artifacts; this is an essential ambivalence at the core of every representation. Joerges ignores this the “essential ambivalent quality of artifacts” (438), i.e. that aspects of it are always out of reach.

So, the iconic status given to Winner’s story is not to be found in the text (it is not because of an error committed or not), it is to be found in the outcomes of the story’s usage. As such, stories are like artifacts (or rather, they are artifacts), since “the properties of the artifact are the outcome, not the cause, of their reception” (439) and what is to be analyzed is its movement in and through relational contexts. This is fancy talk for: Who cares about the truth of the story? What’s interesting is how and by whom it is used!

The conclusion is that Moses’ (or Winner’s) bridges are Urban Legends for academics. If “Winner’s bridges didn’t exist you would have to invent them” (441). It tells moral stories about boundaries and boundary transgression. For some bridges seems only to be bridges. (Arguably, Joerges’ bridges could be argued to be an Urban Legend as well, telling the moral tale of those transgressing the truth-lie-boundary.) This is the usage of Moses’ bridges.

The other conclusions Woolgar and Cooper draws are that Joerges is as much on the level of intention as Winner (Moses did not intend racist bridges!), thus underplaying “the significance of the constant availability of competing versions of Moses’ ‘actual’ intentions” (442), and that Joerges by taking the middle road between Control and Contingency (such a third-way-social-democrat-fuck-strategy) draws a erroneous “conceptual geography” (why this is the case is not fully developed).

So, this is the critique of the critique of the critique. I’ve seen that there is a critique of this critique. We’ll see if I manage to take that one on as well. And then maybe with a less vulgar usage of the term ‘critique’.