tecznotes

Bruno Latour's investigation of the stillborn French transit system Aramis was recommended to me by Mike Frumin after another recent book post. Latour dissects the abandonment of Aramis in the form of an academic mystery novel, featuring a cranky sociology researcher/investigator and his young, upstart graduate intern ploughing through two collected decades of first-hand accounts from technologists and bureaucrats. The Aramis PRT occasionally speaks up for itself in the voice of a temporally transposed Frankenstein's Monster.

Latour builds on his translation model from Science In Action and shows how a successful technology project changes in response to its environment, taking on new features and satisfying new needs as it navigates the landscape of human and non-human actors from conception to delivery. No change, no project. Stasis.

Aramis in particular is an example of a late-1960's fad in public transportation that sought to marry the convenience and flexibility of the automobile to the high volumes and socialized costs of mass transit. PRT's never really panned out despite multiple attempts, though in some ways the current crop of car-sharing services is fulfilling this dream from the opposite direction. In this particular case, Latour shows how Aramis was never moved past the "technically sweet" stage: always an engineer's dream, worked on by idealists with little interest in taking its revolutionary technological concepts and adapting them to the physical, financial, and political realities of Paris in the 1970's and 80's.

I marked a lot of pages here, and this is a long post. Normally I'd try to summarize everything but Latour is a lucid, enjoyable writer and his prose is a joy, so this small bit of background should be enough.

Page 24, on state:

The observer of technologies has to be very careful not to differentiate too hastily between signs and things, between projects and objects, between fiction and reality, between a novel about feelings and what is inscribed in the nature of things. In fact, the engineers the observer is studying pass progressively from one of these sets to another. The R-312 was a text; now it's a thing. Once a carcass, it will eventually revert to the carcass state. Aramis was a text; it came close to becoming, nearly became, it might have become, an object, an institution, a means of transportation in Paris. In the archives, it turns back into a text, a technological fiction.

Page 45, on variability, solidity, and resilience:

Mr. Legardere may vary in size, the ministry will change hands ten times - it would be unwise to count on stability there; but the signatures and stamps remain, offering the alliances a relative durability. Scripta manent. That will never be enough, for signed documents can turn back into scraps of paper. Yet if, at the same time, the interlocking of interests is actively maintained, the law offers, as it were, a recall effect. After it is signed, a project becomes weightier, like a little sailboat whose hull has been ballasted with some heavy metal. It can still be overturned, but one would have to work a little harder to prevent it from righting itself, from returning to its former position. In the area of technologies, you cannot ask for more.

Page 59, on metaphor:

"It's a confusion of genres," I said, forgetting my place. "Chips don't talk any more than Chanticleer's hens do. People make them talk - we do, we're the real engineers. They're just puppets. Just ordinary things in our hands." "Then you've never talked to a puppeteers. Here, read this and you'll see that I'm not the one getting carried away with metaphors. Anyway, do you know what 'metaphor' means? Transportation. Moving. The word metaphoros, my friend, is written on all the moving vans in Greece."

Page 67, on the moveable frontier:

The frontier between "the bulk of the work" and "fine-tuning the details" remains in flux for a long time; its position is the object of intense negotiation. To simplify its task, every group tends to think that its own role is most important, and that the next group in the chain just needs to concern itself with the technical details, or to apply the principles that the first group has defined. Moreover, this way of looking at things is integrated into project management.

Page 72, defining "innovation":

Here is the difference between a project that is not very innovative and one that is highly innovative. A project is called innovative if the number of actors that have to be taken into account is not a given from the outset. If that number is known in advance, in contrast, the project can follow quite orderly, hierarchical phases; it can go from office to office, and every office will add the concerns of the actors for which it is responsible. As you proceed along the corridor, the size or degree of reality grows by regular increments. Research projects, on the other hand, do not have such an elegant order: the crowds that were thought to be behind the project disappear without a word; or, conversely, unexpected allies turn up and demand to be taken into account.

Page 88, time is what is counted:

The time frame for innovations depends on the geometry of the actors, not on the calendar. ... Is VAL's time the same as Aramis'? No, even though 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, and 1980 are critical years for both. It's no good taking out a chronometer or a diary so you can measure the passage of time and blame the first project for going too quickly and the second one for going too slowly. The time of the first depends on local sites, on Notebart's role as engine, on Ferbeck, and on Matra, just as the time of the second depends on the absence of sites, on hesitation over components, on the motor's fits and starts. All you have to do is reconstruct the chain of permissions and refusals, alliances and losses, to understand that a project may not budge for a hundred years or that it may transform itself completely in four minutes flat. The obsession with calendar time makes historians sprinkle technologies with agricultural metaphors referring to maturation, slowness, obsolescence or germination, or else mechanical metaphors having to do with acceleration or braking. In fact, time does not count. Time is what is counted. It is not an explanatory variable; it is a dependent variable that needs to be explained.

Pages 109-110, on tinkering and engineering:

"But wait a minute," I exclaimed, indignant at so much bad faith and because, by chance, I had read Levi-Strauss for my exams. "Levi-Strauss contrasts modern engineers with mythical tinkerers. We engineers don't tinker, he says. We rethink all programs in terms of projects. We don't think like savages." "Hah!" Norbert muttered ironically. "That's because Levi-Strauss did his field work in the Amazon rain forests, not in the jungle of the Paris metro. What he says about tinkerers fits engineers to a T, his ethnologist's bias notwithstanding. ...when everything is going along swimmingly; of course, then it's as if there were 'experts' quite unlike tinkerers and negotiators. But at the end, only at the end. And since Aramis wasn't lucky enough to have such an end ... No, believe me, you don't have those who tinker on one side, and those who calculate on the other."

Page 118, Matra's M. Freque on arguing:

"The arguments sometimes got pretty lively. You heard everything: 'Greedy industrialist!' 'Profiteers!' 'Assholes!' But in the long run we reached an agreement. The problem with Aramis is that not enough people yelled at each other. Below a certain level, that's not good. You see, sometimes my ideas got rejected, other times I came out the winner; sometimes things got simplified, other times they got complicated. That proves it was a real debate, a real negotiation."

Pages 126-127, on mobilization:

As a project takes shape, there is an increase in the number, quality, and stature - always relative and changing - of the actors to be mobilized. Petit was just one highly placed official. Now ministers and presidents are involved. By moving from conceptual phases to production phases, you move from saints to the God they serve. Since the project is becoming more and more costly, since it is agitating more and more people, since it is mobilizing more and more factories, since the nonhumans it has to line up are numbered in the thousands, since it is a matter no longer of plowing up a beet field but of tearing up parts of southern Paris, actors capable of providing resources adequate to the new scale must henceforth be reckoned with. Ten times as many actors are now needed for the project, and they cannot be recruited one by one - one pipe smoker after another, one iron bar at a time. We have to move from those who represent small numbers to those who represent large numbers.

Page 157, Aramis speaks for itself:

Why reject me? Have I not been good? Was I not born well-endowed with virtues, unlike my brother VAL? Have I not been the dream, the ideal? What pains were not taken for my conception! Why recoil in horror today? Did not all the fairies hover over my cradle? Oh, my progenitors, why did you turn your heads away, why do you confess today that you did not love me, that you did not want me, that you had no intention of creating me? ... Of all the sins, unconsummated love is the most inexpiable. Burdened with my prostheses, hated, abandoned, innocent, accused, a filthy beast, a thing full of men, men full of things, I lie before you. Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani.

Pages 159-160, on private doubt:

"To account for this survival, this delay, we have two elements: up above, in the higher spheres, everyone is now in favor of Aramis, unanimously. Although everybody has private doubts about the project, they give it their own backing, however half-heartedly, because they see all the others supporting it enthusiastically. Down below, with the technicians, everybody is skeptical..." "At least that's what they're saying now. At the time, no one noticed the skepticism..." "Exactly. Everybody was skeptical, but only in private. That's the whole problem: half-doubts are all scattered, isolated, buried in notes that we are often the first to see, in any case the first to bring together as a whole."

Page 174, on smoothness:

Let's calculate the sum of forces - using this expression to designate both the work all the actors do to sum up and the diversity of the ontological models they use. Let's add the thrusts of human labor, the fall of ballistic missiles, the responsibility of promises, amorous seduction, the shame of more killing, vanity, business - everything that makes Aramis impossible to suspend. Yes, it's definitely a strange monster, a strange physics. It's the Minotaur, plus the labyrinth, plus Ariadne and her thread, plus Daedalus, who is condemned to die in it and who dreams of escaping. They're really fun, those people who write books in which they think they're castigating technology with adjectives like smooth, cold, profitable, efficient, inhuman, irreversible, autonomous! These insults are qualities with which the engineers would be delighted indeed to endow their hybrid beings. They rarely succeed in doing so.

Page 180, on bureaucracy:

To make fun of the files of the bureaucrats, to make fun of the two-page notes of synthesis and the thousand-page appendixes, is to forget the work of stabilization necessary to the interdefinition of the actors. It is to forget that the actors, large or small, are as lost in the action as the investigator is. The human sciences do not show up as the curtain falls, in order to interpret the phenomenon. They constitute the phenomenon. And the most important human sciences, always overlooked, include accounting, management, economics, the "cameral sciences" (bureau-graphy), and statistics.

Page 199, on common sense:

"Everything happens in defiance of common sense, but there is no common sense for innovations, since they happen, they begin, they invent common sense, the right direction, the correct procedure."

Page 213, on figure-ground reversal:

Where is this thing, the microprocessor, to be situated? On the side of human beings? No, since humans have delegated, transcribed, inscribed their qualities into nonhumans. On the side of nonhumans, then? Not there either. If the object were lying among nonhumans alone, it would immediately become a bag of parts, a heap of pins, a pile of silicon, an old-fashioned object. Thus, the object, the real thing, the thing that acts, exists only provided that it holds humans and nonhumans together, continuously. ... On the one hand, it can be said to hold people together, but on the other hand it is people who hold it together.

Page 280, on stasis:

The report presented the 1987 Aramis, word for word, as identical to Petit and Bardet's 1970 Aramis. I found myself twenty-one interpretations, but the technological documents remained mute about this dispersion. Aramis had not incorporated any of the transformations of its environment. It had remained purely an object, a pure object. Remote from the social arena, remote from history; intact. This was surely it, the hidden staircase Norbert had been looking for. Its soul and its body, as he would say, never merged.

Page 292, on Aramis unloved:

"Yet in spite of its fragility, its sensitivity, how have we treated it? Like an uncomplicated development project that could unfold in successive phases from the drawing boards to a metro system that would run with 14,000 passengers an hour in the south Paris region every day; twenty-four hours a day. Here is our mistake, one we all made, the only one we made. You had a hypersensitive project, and you treated it as if you could get it through under its own steam. ... You believed in the autonomy of technology."

Page 295, Aramis speaks again:

Of what ends am I the means? Tell me! you hid from one another in order not to admit that you didn't want me. You built the CET the way human couples produce one child after another when they're about to divorce, trying to patch things up. What horrible hypocrisy, entrusting to the whimperings of the most fragile of beings the responsibility for keeping together creatures that are much stronger than itself.

Until his death in 1993, David Pye was a professor of furniture design at the Royal College of Art in London. The Nature And Art Of Workmanship is a guide to his theory of workmanship as distinct from design. The tone of the book is slightly musty, frequently dipping into old-mannish complaints that ring slightly of "the kids today", but on balance Pye is a clear writer with a coherent idea to communicate.

The book focuses on laying to rest the fallacy of "things done by hand" in favor of the terminology of risk and certainty. These two terms form the core of Pye's theory of workmanship, and boil down to "can it be fucked up?" For Pye, the meaningful distinction is whether a thing is a result of a risky process, or a certain one. The former requires dexterity and judgement while the latter requires an assembly line and planning. The division was a new one to me, but it has occasionally snapped into focus since I started this book over Christmas, as when reading Jeff Veen's latest blog post on Indi Young's new book:

In the end, using Indi's process, we were able to convince teams that we weren't researching all the creativity out of their projects. We were researching the risk out. And no matter how the industry is faring, that's a story people want to hear.

For what it's worth, Stamen is teetering on the cusp of this distinction (among other cusps we teeter on) as we investigate the sense of formalizing our process with an explicit producer role. Thus far, our work has been raw risk. I don't mean to say that we routinely snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but we consciously lack a "process" as someone like Jeff, Indi, or the company they helped found might understand it. It's personally interesting to me that computation and programming can still be seen to be risky in the same way that woodworking or pottery can, especially with the rapid growth of social websites whose success can not be measured by technical means alone.

(slide nabbed from Scaling Twitter)

As we take on larger slices of work, there's a natural inclination to manage risk by introducing certainty into the workflow. Namely, developing a process, knowing whether we're sticking to it, and starting think about hiring as filling holes rather than seeking out fellow travelers. I offer no opinions on this, except to say that it's an active debate.

It's also worth noting that Pye is no dogmatic fan of doing things the hard way. He devotes a number of pages (some excerpted below) to exploring why precise workmanship has been historically valued, notes that much work traditionally thought of as "hand labor" is really as jigged and regulated as machine work, observes that in many settings certainty and uniformity are desirable, and takes the Arts and Crafts movement itself to task for misunderstanding the potential joy inherent in competent work.

Page 17, on design, workmanship, and defining terms:

In the last twenty years there has been an enormous intensification of interest in Design. The word is everywhere. But there has been no corresponding interest in workmanship. ... This has not happened because the distinction between workmanship and design is a mere matter of terminology or pedantry. The distinction both in the mind of the designer and of the workman is clear. Design is what, for practical purposes, can be conveyed in words and by drawing: workmanship is what, for practical purposes, can not. In practice the designer hopes the workmanship will be good, but the workman decides whether it shall be good or not. On the workman's decision depends a great part of the quality of our environment.

Page 20, on risk, certainty, and defining more terms:

If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship, I shall say as a first approximation that it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises as he works. The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making; and so I shall this kind of workmanship, "The workmanship of risk": an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive. ... With the workmanship of risk we may contrast the workmanship of certainty, always to be found in quantity production, and found in its pure state in full automation. In workmanship of this sort the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single salable thing is made.

Page 25, on doing by hand:

Things are usually made by a succession of different operations, and there are often alternative ways of carrying any one of them out. We can saw, for instance, with a hand-saw, an electrically driven band-saw, a frame-saw, and in other ways. To distinguish between the different ways of carrying out an operation by classifying them as hand- or machine-work is, as we shall see, all but meaningless. ... The source of power is completely irrelevant to the risk. The power tool may need far more care, judgement and dexterity in its use than the hand-driven one.

Pages 32-33, on roughness:

In the workmanship of risk rough work is the necessary basis of perfect work, just as the sketch is of the picture. The first sketchy marks on the canvas may become the foundation of the picture and be buried, or they may be left standing. Similarly the first approximations of the workman may afterwards disappear as the work proceeds, or they may be left standing. For the painter and the workman it is sometimes difficult to know when to stop on the road towards perfect work, and sooner may be better than later. In the workmanship of certainty, on the other hand, there is no rough work. The perfect result is achieved without preliminary approximation.

Pages 49-50, on design intent:

The intended design of any particular thing is what the designer has seen in his mind's eye: the ideally perfect and therefore unattainable embodiment of his intention. The design which can be communicated - the design on paper, in other words - obviously falls far short of expressing the designer's full intention, just as in music the score is a necessarily imperfect indication of what the composer has imaginatively heard. The designer gives to the workman the design on paper, and the workman has to interpret it. If he is good he may well produce something very near the designer's intention. If the workman is himself the designer he almost certainly will (but that does not imply that the designs a workman intends are necessarily good ones).

Pages 58-59, on the origins of precision:

In nature we see varying degrees of disparity between the idea and the achievement wherever we look. To Plato it may perhaps have seemed that things would look better if there were no such disparities. We, having lived in an age where to all appearances such disparities really can be banished from our environment, may doubt it. ... Our traditional ideas of workmanship originated along with our ideas of law in a time when people were few and the things they made were few also. For age after age the evidence of man's work showed insignificantly on the huge background of unmodified nature. There was then no thought of distinguishing between works of art and other works, for works and art were synonymous. ... Then and for a long time afterwards - and even now in some remote places - all the things in common use for everyday purposes were of fairly free or rough workmanship and anything precise and regular must have been a marvel, amazing and worshipful.

This reverence for precision had, I think, two explanations. ... The second, and I believe deeper, reason lay in the opposition of art to nature. The natural world can seem beautiful and friendly only when you are stronger than it, and no longer compelled with incessant labor to wring your livelihood out of it. If you are, you will be in awe of it and will propitiate it; but you will find great consolation in things which speak only and specifically of man and exclude nature. When you turn to them you will have the feeling a sailor has when he goes below at the end of his watch, having seen all the nature he wants for quite a while. Precision and regularity, in those days signified that, to the extent of his intellect, man stood apart from nature, and had a power of his own.

Page 62, on spatial frequency and diversity:

It is a matter of the greatest moment in the arts of design and workmanship that every formal element has a maximum and minimum effective range. In can only be "read" - perceived for what it is - by an observer stationed within those limits. ... In nature, as in all good design, the diversity in scale of the formal elements is such that at any range, in any light, some elements are on of very near the threshold of visibility: or one should say, more exactly, of indistinguishability as elements. As the observer approaches the object, new elements, previously indistinguishable, successively appear and come into play aesthetically. Equally, and inevitably, the larger elements drop out and become ineffective as you approach. But new incidents appear at every step until finally your eye gets too close to be focused. The elements that at any given range, long or short, are just at the threshold, that we can just begin to read, though indistinctly, are of great important, aesthetically. They are perhaps analogous to the overtones of notes. They are a vitalizing element in the visible scene.

Page 118, David Pye doesn't like John Ruskin:

The deficiencies in the Arts and Crafts movement can only be understood if it is realized that it did not originate in ideas about workmanship at all. Indeed it never developed anything approaching a rational theory of workmanship, but merely a collection of prejudices which are still preventing useful thought to this day.

Much of what Ruskin writes is ambiguous because it is impossible to be sure what he is referring to. When he cites examples he always manages to leave room for doubt about his meaning. So far as one can judge, the essence of the ideas he wanted to express was that: 1) To make men do tedious repetitive tasks is unchristian. 2) High regulation always involves such tasks and must therefore be eliminated. 3) If the workman is allowed to design he will do rough work and so will eliminate it.

Above all, the workman's naive designs will be admirable. What Ruskin is inveighing against is not hard labor, but patient work. He did not realize, or so it seems, perhaps because he never had to work for a living, that a fair proportion of patient tedious work is necessary if one is to take any pleasure in any kind of livelihood, whether it be designing or making, for no one can continuously create and no one ever has. He did not realize there is great pleasure in doing highly regulated workmanship.

Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding Of Language was just returned to me after an extended loan, where it was apparently passed on to half a dozen more people or so.

Unfolding is a pop-linguistics book that describes the forces that shape language evolution, illustrates them with copious examples, and finishes up with a lengthy narrative showing how modern language (not necessarily English) might evolve from simple conceptual building blocks. Much of the content would be familiar to anyone in an introductory university linguistics class or one of George Lakoff's frumpy lectures on conceptual metaphor. The book is written in a chatty, at times grating tone, but it neatly presents a picture of linguistic evolution as a whole.

Deutscher shows how changes in language might be viewed from within as a form of decay or destruction, while the deeper currents of creative evolution and expansion remain hidden from view. He recounts familiar worries about degenerate forms like "gonna" or "hella", showing the phonetic drifts that erode longer forms into shorter, more economic ones. At the same time, he describes the expressive changes that get you a verb phrase like "going to go" in the first place, explaining how the mundane conversational furniture of linking verbs and tense markers all around us evolved from concrete analogies to physical space and time.

The examples are classic comparative linguistics. Words and phrases from early written history are compared to modern usage, and metaphors from across languages are showed to have a common conceptual origin. I've chosen a few of the more forceful paragraphs here, but the book is a goldmine of familiar examples and their counterintuitive origins.

Pages 61-62, on how language evolves:

The point is that no one in particular created this footpath, and no one in particular even intended to. The path did not emerge from some project of landscape design, but from the accumulated spontaneous actions of the short-cutters, who were each following their own selfish motives in taking the easiest and quickest route.

Changes in language come about in a rather similar fashion, thghout the accumulation of unintended actionse. These actions must stem from entirely selfish motives, bot from any conscious design to transform language. But what could these motives be? This is a rather more involved question, and doing justice to it will occupy us in the next few chapters. But in essence, the motives for changes can be encapsulated in the triad economy, expressiveness, and analogy.

Economy refers to the tendency to save effort, and is behind the shortcuts speakers often take in pronunciation. ... Expressiveness relates to speakers' attempts to achieve greater effect for their utterances and extend their range of meaning.

Page 62, on analogy which wants its own section:

The third motive for change, analogy, is shorthand for the mind's craving for order, the instinctive need of speakers to find regularity in language. The effects of analogy are most conspicuous in the errors of young children, such as "I goed" or "two foots", which are simply attempts to introduce regularity into areas of the language that happen to be quite disorganized. Many such "errors" are corrected as children grow up, but some innovations do catch on. In the past, for example, there were many more irregular plural nouns in English: on boc (book), many bec; one hand, two hend; one eye, two eyn; one cow, many kine. But gradually, "errors" like "hands" crept in by analogy on the regular -s plural pattern. So bec was replaced by the "incorrect" bokes (books) during the thirteenth century, eyn was replaces by eyes in the fourteenth century, kine by cows in the sixteenth.

Pages 76-77, on decay:

Taking it from the authorities, then, it seems a miracle that language did not degenerate into the grunts of apes long ago. ... There must be some very strong reasons why so many intelligent people should believe something that is so patently irrational: that language is always changing for the worse, and that it is even teetering on the brink of collapse. But what is it exactly that dazzles these scholars and makes them see only decay? Of course, one could write it all off as merely the consequence of some deep-rooted conservatism, a general harking back to bygone better days. "The longer, the worse", as Archbishop Wulfstan so pithily put it - just as people were more polite in one's youth, the weather was nicer, and the apples tasted better, so was language more refined and less abused.

But it would be rather unfair to blame it all on irrational nostalgia, since there is a much more serious reason why so many people think that language is constantly decaying. The reason is quite simply that decay is indeed a pervasive type of change in language, and what is more, it is the aspect of change that is by far the most easily observable to the naked eye. The forces of destruction almost seem to leap out of the pages of practically any language's history, but the contrary processes, the productive forces of renewal and creation, are much more difficult to spot - so difficult, in fact, that it is only in the last few decades that linguists have fully grasped their significance and have made real headway in understanding them.

Pages 112-113, on historical illusions:

The first of these two problems, the alleged perfection of prehistoric languages, was much easier to tackle, since on closer inspection the Golden Age of perfection turned out to be an optical illusion caused by one small but critical oversight. Recall that the idea of a past age of perfection stemmed from simple but apparently compelling logic: the attested languages are riddled with irregularities (such as flos-floris), but when such irregularities are pursued into the past, they can usually be traced or at least reconstructed to a more regular pattern from which they sprang (flos-flosis). The clear implication, then, is that the further back in time one goes, the more regular languages should become. Unassailable logic, surely? Well, there is one snag in this line of reasoning, and to identify it, let's consider another simple example, this time from English. Take a look at the final consonant in the following two forms of the verb "choose": I chose-they chose. But what is there to note here? Both forms have exactly the same consonant, and so there is no irregularity to be accounted for.

And that's precisely the point. One would never feel the need to justify the sound here, or look for any explanation for it, let alone dream up an irregularity behind this well-behaved pair. But as it happens, there are records from earlier stage of English which reveal that in the past "choose" was not quite the pillar of uprightness it is today. In fact, "choose" has quite a doubtful history, since the corresponding two forms in Old English were ceas ("I chose") but curon ("they chose"). It turns out the English "choose" was rather riotous in its youth, and only acquired a mantle of respectability in later stage of English, when the irregularity in ceas-curon was ironed out. But we only know about this juvenile delinquency because we happen to have records from the right period. If the written history of English happened to start at 1200, rather than around 800, there would never be any reason to suspect that "choose" had such a chequered history.

Page 127, on metaphor and its origins in the physical world:

At first, the ubiquity of metaphors even in the plainest of speech may seem perplexing, and their persistent one-way course even more so. Why is it that when one scratches a bit, most abstract words tend to have concrete origins? Why should the surge of metaphors always flow from concrete to abstract, and so rarely in the other direction? Why do we say about legislation that it is "tough", but not about a steak that it is "severe"?

The answer to these questions is quite straightforward. Imagine for a moment that the metaphor "tough" was not at our disposal, and that some alternatives for describing "tough legislation" had to be found. Except "severe", what options are there? We could say that the legislation was "inflexible", "strict", "repressive", "oppressive", "firm", "stern", "stringent", "unyielding", "unbending", "harsh", and so on. But there's the rub - none of these alternatives would help dodge a metaphor, since, just like "tough", all these tough-talking terms originally derive from the physical world. They all set out in life in the domain of materials. Some, like "unbending", "firm", "unyielding" or "inflexible", still betray traces of their old selves - thing of "flexing your muscles", for instance. But even the other options, those that are no longer recognizable, are skeletons of what once were full-blooded metaphors in the world of materials. "Oppressive", for instance, comes from "press against" (opprimere in Latin); "stringent" is derived from "bind tight" (stringere), while "harsh" (from Middle English harsk) originally meant "hard and rough to the touch".

Page 132, more on physical origins:

The images here are simple: what one holds or carries or seizes is used to convey what one "has". And in fact, English does the same thing with the verb "get" in sentences like "the man's got a car", which means the same as "the man has a car". So like Waata and Nama, English takes a verb of taking, and uses it as a metaphor for possession: "what one has got, one has". And if you are still unpersuaded, and are inclined to discount the expression "he's got" as just a sloppy substitute for the more respectable "have", then you might like to know that the origin of "have" itself is as grasping as the rest. "Have" ultimately derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *kap, which meant "seize". The original sense of *kap survives in the Latin root cap "seize", which found its way into English in the borrowed words "capture" (as well as in "captive", "caption", "capable", "recipe", "occupy", and even "catch"). The reason why the English homegrown "have" looks so different from its forebear *kap is simply Grimm's law, the series of sound changes in Germanic mentioned in the previous chapter, in which k was weakened to h, and p to f, thus turning *kap into *haf. So while "capture" and "have" look rather un-identical, they are in fact a pair of separated twins, deriving from the same source, *kap "seize".

Pages 154-155, on the forces of creation as rendered in a hypothetical conference dialogue and the word "gonna":

DE TROY: But seriously, there's nothing especially mysterious about this "particular combination" of metaphor and erosion. What happens to the "going" verbs in all these languages is the result of two common motives that are always behind the scenes: the desire to enhance our expressive range on the one hand, and laziness on the other. The flow towards abstraction is a consequence of this expressive urge: even if a language already has a future marker, speakers will always seek fresher ways of emphasizing that something is really going to happen. For example, they may want to stress that something will happen very soon indeed. Just think of the promise "I'm going to do it right away" - doesn't it sound much more promising than a mere "I'll do it"?

CHAIRMAN: But how does the erosion of language know when to start?

DE TROY: It doesn't. It carries on regardless, and keeps trying to hack away at everything all the time. But some constructions are more susceptible to it, while others are more resistant. So what happened to "going to" was really just a consequence of its hackneyed use in its new domain. As long as "going to" retained its independent meaning, it had a much stronger resistance and this is why no one says "I'm gonna bed". But once "going to" lost its independent content, it became much more exposed, because it was now used more often, in more predictable circumstances, and with far less stress. So naturally the temptation to take shortcuts in pronunciation grew, and the risk of misunderstanding decreased. In such conditions, the phrase was more prone to erosion than ever before, and so it's not surprising that the bleached future sense was shortened to "gonna".

Page 213, the introduction to an extended example showing how language can evolve from a defined starting point:

Now it is all very well to say that the starting point should already have some words to go on - but which? I suggest that just three groups are sufficient as the raw materials: words for physical things (such as body parts, animals, objects, kinship terms like "father"), words for simple actions (like "throw", "run", "eat", "fall"), and a third group small group consisting of the pointing words "this" and "that". We do not need to include at the starting point words for any abstract concepts, now do we require any grammatical words and elements (prepositions, conjunctions, articles, endings, prefixes, and the like). All these can subsequently develop from the raw materials in the three groups above.

Another point about this initial setup which one might want to take issue is the division of words into things and actions. Why should such a distinction be built into the system at the starting point? Shouldn't our evolutionary scenario actually account for it in some way? But it would be unreasonable to require our scenario to explain the emergence of the distinction between things and actions, since the conceptual basis for this distinction runs much deeper than language, and must have crystallized long before language was around.

Brian Marick's recent series on Actor-Network Theory (parts I, II, III, and IV) reminded me to dig up Science In Action for a fresh books post. I read this book a little over a year ago, after becoming interested in the philosophy of science through Karl Popper, and further diving has since led me to Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and Tracy Kidder's Soul Of A New Machine.

There are two big ideas I took away from this 20-year-old Bruno Latour book about the workings of science and technology. One is a figure-ground reversal akin to the NRA's famous slogan, "guns don't kill people, people kill people". The second is a description of the social conditions that make science possible. Latour frames his argument by introducing the concept of technoscience, his term for the kind of scientific inquiry that needs people, work, equipment, and funding - national laboratories, cancer research, particle physics, the sort of projects that Russell Davies recently described as thirteen smart guy problems in a post about Malcolm Gladwell.

The figure-ground reversal substitutes the common diffusion model with Latour's translation model. The former explains progress in terms of "ideas moving through society", while the latter places the people who act upon ideas in the foreground. People with desires and beliefs occupy the active role in Latour's world, moving ideas forward if they feel their own plans and agendas to be supported. Latour asserts that the diffusion model provides an inaccurate picture of technoscience, because it fails to account for the conscious agency of the technoscientists themselves. The book is well-stocked with examples of scientific and technological progress explained in terms of the people who linked their fates to a particular theory or invention: General Data's Tom West in Soul Of A New Machine, Rudolf Diesel's engine (and the MAN engineers and mechanics who eventually made it work), and the hypothetical "boss" of a biology laboratory.

Latour also shows how a social division between an inside (within the lab) and an outside (out in the world) make scientific and technical work possible. It is necessary to follow both to make any sense of "where" science happens: the outside supports the inside, allowing it to specialize, channeling funding, equipment, and personnel into the lab by enlisting and guiding the self-interest of universities, governments, and foundations towards to the interests of the lab itself. At the same time, the inside justifies the outside, producing results (process, technology) that fulfills the interests of those outside. On the boundary between the inside and outside sits the boss-figure, the scientist or engineer who motivates the lab and fights for its continued survival. "Firefighter up, cheerleader down" as my friend and first boss Darren used to say.

Science In Action has been quite a ride, and I've tried to apply its observations to my own company in a number of ways. For one, it has been instructive to think in terms of inside/outside with our activities, switching between "doing the work" and "talking about the work", having people specialize in one but not the other, and recognizing the importance of aligning the broader world's interests with our own. The time this becomes unusually rewarding are probably more frequent than we rightfully deserve: months of digging deep into nothing by maps, followed by a string of projects focused on images or time. It means we can juggle a lot of balls in the air without everyone fragmenting off into their own private corners. I've also recently sat in on the standards process behind OAuth, and have tried to judge it by Latour's translation model to see where good ideas were being moved about through conscious alignment of many groups' self-interests. I found this quite instructive.

Latour also has a way of describing the idea of a black box that resonates deeply. When I think back to my first visits to San Francisco (upper Haight when in High School, Bahia Cabana, the Mission, and downtown early in college), the city had not yet solidified in my mind, and I encountered each neighborhood on its own terms without a clear understand of how they fit together. The process by which novelty is transformed into familiarity and later background marks the passage of time. Sometimes it'd be nice to unlearn things at will.

Pages 91-92, on reification:

All biologists now take 'protein' for an object; they do not remember the time, in the 1920s, when protein was a whitish stuff that was separated by a new ultracentrifuge in Svedberg's laboratory. At the time protein was nothing but the action of differentiating cell contents by a centrifuge. Routine use however transforms the naming of an actant after what it does into a common name. This process is not mysterious or special to science. It is the same with the can opener we routinely use in our kitchen. We consider the opener and the skill to handle it as one black box which means that it is unproblematic and does not require planning and attention. We forget the many trials we had to go through (blood, scars, spilled beans and ravioli, shouting parent) before we handled it properly, anticipated the weight of the can, the reactions of the opener, the resistance of the tin.

Page 107, on phasing:

If the notion of discrete phases is useless, so, too, is that of trajectory. It does not describe anything since it is again one of the problems to be solved. Diesel indeed claimed that there was one trajectory which links his seminal patent to real engines. This is the only way for his patents to be 'seminal'. But this was disputed by hundreds of engineers claiming that the engine's ancestry was different. Anyway, if Diesel was so sure of his offspring, then why not call it a Carnot engine since it is from Carnot that he took the original idea? But since the original patent never worked, why not call it a MAN engine, or, a constant pressure air injection engine? We see that talking in phases in a trajectory is like taking slices from a pate made from hundreds of morsels of meat. Although it might be palatable, it has no relation whatsoever to the natural joints of the animal.

Page 137, on cameras and black boxes:

Let us remember Eastman's Kodak camera. It was simpler to operate than anything else before. 'Push the button, we'll do the rest,' they said. But they had to do the rest, and that was quite a lot. The simplification of the camera that made it possible to interest everyone in its dissemination in millions of copies had to be obtained by the extension and complication of Eastman's commercial network. When you push the button you do not see the salesmen and the machines that make long strips of celluloid films and the troubleshooters that make the coating stick properly at last; you do not see them, but they have to be there none the less. If they are not, you push the button and nothing happens. ... If we have understood this, then we may draw the conclusions from the two first parts of this chapter: the black box moves in space and becomes durable in time only through the actions of many people; if there is no one to take it up, it stops and falls apart however many people may have taken it up for however long before. But the type, number, and qualifications of the people in the chain will be modified: inventors like Diesel or Eastman, engineers, mechanics, salesmen, and maybe 'ignorant customers' in the end. To sum up, there are always people moving the objects along but they are not the same people all along.

Page 141, on diffusion vs. translation and why society is a fiction:

Among all the features that differ in the two models, one is especially important, that is society. In the diffusion model society is made up of groups which have interests; these groups resist, accept, or ignore both facts and machines, which have their own inertia. In consequence we have science and technics on the one hand, and a society on the other. In the translation model, however, no such distinction exists since there are only heterogeneous chains of associations that, from time to time, create obligatory passage points. Let us go further: belief in the existence of a society separated from technoscience is an outcome of the diffusion model. Once facts and machines have been endowed with their own inertia, and once the collective action of human and non-human actors tied together has been forgotten or pushed aside, then you have to make up a society to explain why facts and machines do not spread.

Page 152, on specialization and isolation:

...an isolated specialist is a contradiction in terms. Either you are isolated and very quickly stop being a specialist, or you remain a specialist but this means you are not isolated. Other, who are as specialized as you, are trying out your material so fiercely that they may push the proof race to a point where are of your resources are barely enough to win the encounter. A specialist is a counter-specialist in the same way as a technical article is a counter-articles (Chapter 1) or a laboratory is a counter-laboratory (Chapter 2).

Page 155, defining outside and inside:

This case shows how important it is to decide who are the people to study. Depending on which scientist is followed, completely different pictures of technoscience will emerge. Simply shadowing West or the boss will offer a businessman's view of science (mixture of politics, negotiation of contracts, public relations); shadowing the microkids or the collaborators will provide the classic view of hard-working white-coated scientists wrapped up in their experiments. In the first case we would be constantly moving outside the laboratory; in the second, we would stay deep inside the laboratory. Who is really doing research? Where is the research really done?

Page 156, more on inside and outside:

The first lesson to be drawn from these examples is rather innocuous: technoscience has an inside because it has an outside. There is a positive feedback loop in this innocuous definition: the bigger, the harder, the purer science is inside, the further outside other scientists have to go. It is because of this feedback that, if you get inside a laboratory, you see no public relations, no politics, no ethical problems, no class struggle, no lawyers; you see science isolated from society. But this isolation exists only in so far as other scientists are constantly busy recruiting investors, interesting and convincing people.

Pages 231-232, on modeling space and time:

Professor Bijker takes a metre-long plaster model of a new dam, fixes it into place and launches a first round of tides shortened to twelve minutes; then he takes it out, tries another one and continues. Sure enough, another 'Copernican revolution' has taken place. There are not that many ways to master a situation. Either you dominate it physically; or you draw on your side a great many allies; or else, you try to be there before anybody else. How can this be done? Simply by reversing the flow of time. Professor Bijker and his colleagues dominate the problem, master it more easily than the port officials who are out there in the rain and are much smaller than the landscape. Whatever may happen in the full-scall space-time, the engineers will have already seen it. They will also have become slowly acquainted with all the possibilities, rehearsing each scenario at leisure, capitalising on paper possible outcomes, which gives them years of experience more than others. The order of time and space has been completely reshuffled. Do they talk with more authority and more certainty than the workmen building the real dam there? Well, of course, since they have already made all possible blunders and mistakes, safely inside the wooden hall in Delft, consuming only plaster and a few salaries along the way, inadvertently flooding not millions of hard-working Dutch but dozens of metres of concrete floor.

Pages 248-249, where it all breaks down:

When the architects, urbanists and energeticians in charge of the Frangocastello solar village project in Crete had finished their calculations in early 1980 they had in their office, in Athens, a complete paper scale model of the village. They knew everything available about Crete: solar energy, weather patterns, local demography, water resources, economic trends, concrete structures and agriculture in greenhouses. They had rehearsed and discussed every possible configuration with the best engineers in the world and had triggered the enthusiasm of many European, American, and Greek development banks by settling on an optimal and original prototype. Like Cape Canaveral engineers the had simply to go 'out there' and apply their calculations, proving once again the quasi-supernatural power of scientists. When they sent their engineers from Athens to Frangocastello to start expropriating property and smoothing out the little details, they met with a totally unexpected 'outside'. Not only were the inhabitants not ready to abandon their lands in exchange for houses in the new village, but they were ready to fight with their rifles against what they took as a new American atomic military base camouflaged under a solar energy village. The application of the theory became harder every day as the mobilisation of opposition grew in strength, enrolling the pope and the Socialist Party. It soon became obvious that, since the army could not be sent to force Cretans to occupy willingly the future prototype, a negotiation had to start between the inside and the outside. But how could they strike a compromise between a brand new solar village and a few hundred shepherds who simply wanted three kilometres of asphalted road and a gas station? The compromise was to abandon the solar village altogether. All the planning of the energeticians was routed back inside the network and limited to a paper scale model, another one of the many projects engineers have in their drawers. The 'out-thereness' had given a fatal blow to this example of science.

Page 249, networks and a conclusion by way of prediction:

So how is it that in some cases science's predictions are fulfilled and in some other cases pitifully fail? The rule of method to apply here is rather straightforward: every time you hear about a successful application of science, look for the progressive extension of a network. Every time you hear about a failure of science, look for what part of which network has been punctured. I bet you will always find it.

(This is a regular series, see previous entries on Kuhn, Whyte, Buxton, Kidder, Whyte again, Levinson, Edgerton, and a recent name-check from Adam)

Where The Suckers Moon is Randall Rothenberg's account of Subaru's search for an advertising agency in the early 1990s and the campaign that resulted. It traces the strange roots of the car company, diverts into histories of the advertising industry, communications, semiotics, and psychology, and follows the creation of a campaign from its first creative development through the trenches of production and out to public release.

The first half of the book is largely historical, and doesn't provide a lot of quotable material for these excerpts. That's not to say it isn't good reading, just doesn't chunk well.

Reading this book reminded me of the blessing and curse that is YouTube. A blessing, because many of the early 1990s ads described in the narrative are readily available on Google's monster video sharing site, such as Tibor Kalman's work for Pepe Jeans. This ad has lurked in my subconscious for the past 17 years. A curse, because anything of recent interest is inevitably scrubbed from YouTube at a rapidly accelerating clip. Exhibit A is my post on the London 2012 identity I love so dearly, whose linked videos have been pulled for bullshit copyright reasons. I have a half a mind to write the minimal amount of Python and Actionscript it would take to mirror posted videos and keep them as presentable as they are now - the hive mind shared memory functions of sites like YouTube and OiNK are as deeply valuable as the communicative functions of the recorded media they store and share.

Anyway, on to the excerpts.

Page 211, on pomo:

Beyond placing emphasis in filmmaking technique, Wieden & Kennedy's Lou Reed ad helped foster the development of a postmodern sensibility in the advertising industry. In the minds of the youngsters who were entering the business, advertising no longer had to be advertising, or entertainment. It could be, in Larry Bridge's phrase, "metacommentary": art that explicated, through irony, camp, iconic references or self-reference, the commercial itself and the consumer culture of which it was a part. It was a living, evolutionary answer to Walter Benjamin's denial that art could exist in the modern era - "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."

Page 212-213, on pomo some more:

It may have looked like "metacommentary", but semioticians term it a "false metacommunication" because, through its production techniques, it pointed the viewer in a wrong direction - toward the preferred interpretation of freedom and license - in order to mask its covert purpose, selling mass-manufactured goods, which it did by the implicit linkage of the product with the message of independence. Robert Goldman and Steve Papson, sociologists who have studied this school of advertising, refer to it, with good reason, as "the postmodernism that failed."

Page 225, on conflicted creative direction:

And the truth was this: Jerry Cronin, the new creative director on Subaru of America's advertising account, despised cars. ... "I always hated cars," Jerry said one day in his office. "I didn't own a car until I was twenty-eight. We had no money when I was growing up. We always had these old Ramblers. I always heard the old man complaining about cars. Every time he left the house, he never knew whether the car would get him home." ... "People are far too attached to their cars. I want them to see that cars are a hunk of metal. Automotive advertising is the biggest lie of all time. You want to live better, look better - buy a grill, go to the gym!"

Page 230, on art direction influences:

Jerry was thinking. What he was looking for was inspiration. He had already decided that the look he wanted derived from the heroic Social Realism prevalent in public and commercial art during the 1930s - the "dawn-of-the-Machine-Age" style popularized in friezes by the Works Progress Administration and photographs in Life. That this look was also prevalent in the hortatory art of both Hilter's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union did not escape the agency men. Larry sent his assistant to a local video store to pick up a copy of Leni Riefenstahls's Olympiad, a celebration of Nazi power, to review it for cinematographic stimulation.

Page 301, on Chait/Day and fighting clients:

Watching the agency win, and build, Apple Computer and Yamaha motorcycles and other prestigious accounts taught Luhr the essential lessons of account management in the era of postmodern advertising. To do good work was the purpose of advertising, he learned. And good creative people didn't operate by the same rules by which, say, good bankers do. And clients don't always recognize the value of good creative work or good, quirky creative people, so an account exec had to be prepared to fight the client, anger the client, even risk dismissal or fire the client if the going got too debilitating.

Page 309, on slow hiring:

Everything Wieden & Kennedy was grew out of a creative philosophy that required immersion in the convolutions of American culture, everything the agency could be depended on the collegial spirit of the men and women who filled its offices. Although hundreds of creatives at other agencies across the land would have overturned their lives for a chance to work, however briefly, at Wieden & Kennedy, Dan was not an easy mark. You can't just... just... hire people overnight! You have to talk to them, again and again and again, test them, tease them, scrutinize their work and their philosophies. Since it was difficult to schedule time with Dan (his insistence on approving everything that went on in the agency made him difficult to pin down) Wieden & Kennedy generally took months to hire even relatively junior copywriters and art directors. On the Subaru account, the delays took their toll.

Page 328, on faith:

Faith, while hard won, is easily lost. It can be shaken by many things: misguided words, obstinacy, an inability to grow along with one's partner, suddenly seeing the partner through eyes unblinded by desire. Relationships, of course, are maintained by faith. No matter how fervently contemporary ad agencies insist that they are entertainers or artists, advertising is still founded on relationships. So in advertising, as in marriage, a loss of faith can be debilitating. It is the only quality, really, that binds a client to an agency.

Page 415, on reading between the lines:

"And so this campaign really does explain the key features of the car," Walter said, "in a very simpleminded way, not unlike the way Lexus is doing it." (Features: That meant Wieden & Kennedy had learned to talk about engineering. Simpleminded: That showed the agency was not striving to be creative. Lexus: That proved the agency had learned to sell by overselling.) "It hits on something we learned in the research: Impreza considerers need to be sold." (Research: That meant the work wasn't the invention of artsy types. Sold: That spoke again to the agency's new willingness to huckster.) "It also has a new tactical element, a videotape that we'll send consumers and ask them to respond to, via toll-free number." (Tactical: That showed Wieden & Kennedy was ready to deploy gimmicks. Toll-free number: The kind of gimmicks used by the big, boring agencies in New York.)

Page 427, in conclusion:

Subaru of America had learned the lesson of advertising. Advertising did not work by entertaining or assaulting the intellect of its audience, as the company's previous agencies had believed. Nor did it work through subliminal manipulation, as so many Americans, ever on the lookout for conspiracies, misguidedly thought. Instead, advertising, as the great ad man Bruce Barton had acknowledged decades before, was "something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it." To succeed, advertising cannot seek to invent a new soul. Instead, it must reinforce and redirect the existing image. It must serve as a form of mythology, providing the corporation's various and often competing constituencies - of which consumers are only one of many - heroes, villains, principles, rules of conduct and stories with which they can rally the faithful to remain true to the cause. Only then, with luck and effort, can they win new converts.