tecznotes

Arthur F. Bentley's 1908 The Process Of Government (A Study Of Social Pressures) found me through a a review in the New Yorker a few months ago. This summary got me interested:

The Process of Government is a hedgehog of a book. Its point - relentlessly hammered home - can be stated quite simply: All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure. It was, in his day as in ours, a wildly contrarian position. Bentley was writing The Process of Government at the height of the Progressive Era, when educated, prosperous, high-minded people believed overwhelmingly in "reform" and "good government," and took interest groups to be the enemy of these goals.

Normally I summarize the books I read, but in this case Nicholas Lemann's review is a much better and more interesting writeup than I can offer. Instead I'll just mention that it's a delivery mechanism for the kind of worldview that burrows its way into your subconscious and won't let go. I have a weakness for reductive explanations, and Bentley offers a big one: "ideas", "the public", "zeitgeist", and other hive-mind explanations of political activity are meaningless in the face of often-temporarily organized interests arrayed in groups of people, playing a species-wide game of king of the hill. Law and morality exist because they are useful and helpful to someone, somewhere, more than they are harmful. When these things fall out of kilter, organizations form to rebalance them.

Read the review, check out the passages below, and then try to celebrate Tuesday's inauguration, read a political blog, watch Milk, follow Tim O'Reilly's losing battle to define "web 2.0", bemoan the passage of Prop. 8, or digg (something) for (some reason) without seeing groups, groups, groups, and groups all vying for your attention and support.

Page 13, on reform, opportunity, the absence of personal change:

What was to be seen, in actual human life, was a mass of men making of their opportunities. The insurance presidents and trustees saw opportunities and used them. Their enemies in the fit time saw opportunities and used them. The "public" by and by awoke to what it had suffered, saw its opportunities for revenge and for future safeguard and used them. All these things happened, all of them had causes, but those causes cannot be found in a waxing and waning and change or transformation of the psychic qualities of the actors.

Page 58, Rudolf von Jhering on the usefulness of law:

He set himself in opposition on the one hand to theories which made laws take their origin in any kind of absolute will power, and on the other hand to theories which placed the origin in mere might. It was the usefulness of the law, he said, that counted.

Stripped of terminology and disputation, this came to saying that you cannot get law out of simple head work, and you cannot get it out of mere preponderance of force; law must always be good for something to the society which has it, and that quality of being good for something is the very essence of it.

The formal element of the law he placed, at this time, in the legal protection by right of action ("Klage", "Rechtsschutz"); the substantial element in "Nutzen", "Vortheil", "Gewinn", "Sicherheit des Genusses". He defined laws as legally protected interests, and said that they served "den Interessen, Bedürfnissen, Zwecken des Verlkhes". The "subject" of the law, using the term habitual among the jurists, is the person or organization to whom its benefits pass. The protection of the law exists to assure this benefit reaching the right place.

Page 113, on beef, alternatives, and inevitability:

To take an illustration of a kind most unfavorable for my contention: Does anyone believe that a states'-rights Bryan in the president's chair could have taken any other course in dealing with the nation-wide beef industry when the time for its control had arrived than was taken by a republican? ... But given the national scope of the industry and its customers, given also its foreign trade, given the emergency for its control which was bound to come through its own growth and methods, if not in one year then in another, given presidential representation of the mass of the people on approximately the same level, could a states'-right president have found a different solution from any other president? The answer is most decidedly, No.

Page 169, on the social rootedness of emotion:

No matter how generalized or how specific the ideas and feeling are which we are considering, they never lose their reference to a "social something". The angry man is never angry save in certain situations; the highest ideal of liberty has to do with man among men. The words anger and liberty can easily be set over as subjects against groups of words in the predicate which define them. But neither anger, nor liberty, nor any feeling or idea in between can be got hold of anywhere except in phases of social situations. They stand out as phases, moreover, only with reference to certain position in the social situation or complex of situations in the widest sense, within which they themselves exist.

Page 181, on what material to study if not ideas:

When our popular leader - to revert to the Standard Oil illustration - gets upon the platform and tells us we must all rally with him to exterminate the trusts, we have so much raw material for investigation which we must take as so much activity for just what it is. If we start out with a theory about ideas and their place in politics, we are deserting our raw material even before we take a good peep at it. We are substituting something else which may or may no be useful, but which will certainly color our entire further progress, if progress we can make at all on scientific lines.

Page 197, on social activity as the raw material:

We shall find as go on that even in the most deliberative acts of heads of governments, what is done can be fully stated in terms of the social activity that passes through, or is reflected, or represented, or mediated in those high officials, much more fully than by their alleged mental states as such. Mark Twain tells of a question he put to General Grant: "With whom originated the idea of the march to the sea? Was it Grant's or was it Sherman's idea?" and of Grant's reply: "Neither of us originated the idea of Sherman's march to the sea. The enemy did it;" an answer which points solidly to the social context, always in individuals, but never to be stated adequately in terms of individuals.

Page 206, on acting groups:

There is ample reason, then, for examining these great groups of acting men directly and accepting them as the fundamental facts of our investigation. They are just as real as they would be if they were territorially separated so that one man could never belong to two groups at the same time. ... Indeed the only reality of the ideas is their reflection of the group, only that and nothing more. The ideas can be stated in terms of the groups; the groups never in terms of the ideas.

Page 211, on groups, activity, and interests:

The term "group" will be used throughout this work in a technical sense. It means a certain portion of the men of a society, taken, however, not as a physical mass cut off from other masses of men, but as a mass activity, which does not preclude the men who participate in it from participating likewise in many other group activities. It is always so many men with their human quality. It is always so many men, acting, or tending toward action - that is, in various stages of action. ... It is now necessary to take another step in the analysis of the group. There is no group without its interest. An interest, as the term will be used in this work, is the equivalent of a group.

Page 227, on the source of group strength:

There is no essential difference between the leadership of a group by a group and the leadership of a group by a person or persons. The strength of the cause rests inevitably in the underlying group, and nowhere else. The group cannot be called into life by clamor. The clamor, instead, gets its significance only from the group. The leader gets his strength from the group. The group merely expresses itself through its leadership.

Page 347, on the deception of appearances:

Taking all the conditions, it would have been natural to expect that the tariff movement would have found a leader in Roosevelt, and have made a strong struggle through his aid, which, of course, is just what has not happened up to date. And the reason for this is exceedingly simple. It is not that Roosevelt "betrayed" the cause nor that he sacrificed it to the "trusts", but that under present conditions, despite all superficial appearances, there is not an intense enough and extensive enough set of interest groups back of the movement to make a good fight for thoroughgoing reform with reasonable prospects of success.

Page 348, on subsurface movements:

The essential point in an interpretation of government concerns the great pressures at work and the main lines of the outcome. It is relatively incidental whether a particular battle is fought bitterly through two or more presidencies, or whether it is adjusted peacefully in a single presidency, so long as we can show a similar outcome. This is true because the vast mass of the matter of government is not what appears on the surface in discussions, theories, congresses, or even in wars, but what is persistently present in the background. It is somewhat as it is when twenty heirs want to contest a will, but have only a single heir apparent in the proceedings, while the other nineteen hang back in the shadow. The story will concern the fight of the one; but the reality concerns the silent nineteen as well.

Page 418, on the inadequacy of policy to explain political parties:

Like all "theory", policy has its place in the process as bringing out group factors into clearer relation, and as holding together the parties, once they are formed, by catchwords and slogans. So far as it gives good expression to the groups on its particular plane, all is clear. But to attempt to judge the parties by their theories or formal policies is an eternal absurdity, not because the parties are weak or corrupt and desert their theories, but because the theories are essentially imperfect expressions of the parties.

The vicissitudes of states' rights as a doctrine are well known enough. Another passing illustration concerns the government regulation of commerce. If we may identify the commercial interests of a century ago with those of today for the purposes of illustration, we find that the very elements which then under Hamilton's leadership were most eager to extend the power of government over commerce are now the most bitterly opposed to any such extension. Then and now the arguments made great pretenses to logic and theoretical cocksureness, and then, as now, the theories were valuable in the outcome only as rallying the group forces on one side or the other for the contest.

Page 432, on writing legislation yourself:

Still more striking if the organization which at times can be found which produces what may almost be described as substitute legislatures. When there is some neglected interest to be represented, when the legislature as organized does not deal on its own initiative with such matters, when a point of support in party organization can be found - a point let us say of indifference, at which nevertheless the ear of some powerful boss can be obtained - a purely voluntary organization may be formed, may work out legislation, and may hand it over completed to the legislature for mere ratification.

Page 440, on leadership and personality cults:

A leader once placed will gather a following around him which will stick to him either on the discussion level or on the organization level within certain limits set by the adequacy of his representation of their interests in the past. That is, as a labor-saving device, the line of action in question will be tested by the indorsement of the trusted leader. The leader may carry his following into defeat in this way, but that very fact helps to define the limits of the sweep of groupings of this type.

Page 441, on the primacy of groups over forms of government:

The citizen of a monarchy who sees his kind ride by may feel himself in the presence of a great power, outside of him, entirely independent of him, above him. The man busy in one of the discussion activities of the time may look upon ideas as masterly realities self-existing. But neither ideas nor monarchs have any power or reality apart from their representation of reflection of the social life; and social life is always the activity of men in masses.

Page 442, on leadership and esprit de corps:

Not only are discussion groups and organization groups both technique for the underlying interests, but within them we find many forms of technique which shade into each other throughout both kinds of groups. In the older fighting, soldiers might sing as they went into battle, or an officer might go ahead waving the colors. The singing and the officer illustrate the technical work of the representative groups. They serve to crystallize interests, and to form them solidly for the struggle, by providing rallying points and arousing enthusiasm. For all that, it is the men organized behind the singing, the cheering, and the colors that do the fighting and get the results.

The full title of this 1973 U.C. Berkeley public planning book (recommended by A Better Oakland) is formidable: Implementation: How Great Expectations In Washington Are Dashed In Oakland; Or, Why It's Amazing That Federal Programs Work At All, Economic Development Administration As Told By Two Sympathetic Observers Who Seek To Build Morals On a Foundation Of Ruined Hopes. It seems significant that all the illustrations are excerpts of Rube Goldberg machines.

I bought this book because of the Oakland connection, but there's a lot in here that's relevant to any form of project planning and completion, especially for software developers and designers (like me) trying to figure out why it's so easy to start, and so hard to finish, a project. Other writers in the development world have touched on this before, and there's an entire discipline called Agile that seeks to cut through impediments to completion like a Gordian Knot.

There's an undercurrent of misery and pathos to the book - nothing ruins dinner like 200+ pages on fucked-out-of-the-gate early 1970's social welfare programs in a city you love. The historical framing is an EDA jobs program for the hardcore unemployed that sought to deliver funding to projects and businesses which would in turn employ economically disadvantaged Oakland residents. The late-1960's urgency behind the project stemmed from a desire to nip in the bud further urban race riots like those that had taken place in Watts and elsewhere. Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, was viewed as a potential trouble spot. Rapid flows of federal money aimed at helping the unemployed was identified as the solution. As you might expect from the title, things didn't turn out as planned: money and time were generally wasted, and few people received the promised help. The program fit the general pattern of the past 50 years: splashy introduction, front page news, energy and excitement at the outset, slow leakage of enthusiasm, and an eventual page 10 notice of cancellation several years later.

This is going to get wildly relevant in the coming years, especially in light of Obama's recently-alluded-to New New Deal: "We'll be working out the details in the weeks ahead, but it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy." Part of me is saying "uh oh", but a bigger, louder part of me is saying "hellz yeah, where do I sign up to help?"

The core question that authors Aaron Wildavsky and Aaron Pressman hope to answer is: why is the road to hell paved with good intentions? Is there a difference between policy and implementation that can be somehow bridged, or at least described more precisely? "Implementation" refers to that often-overlooked part of the project that happens after the ideas, funding, and excitement, but before any tangible results.

Page 87, on the complexity of joint action:

When we say that programs have failed, this suggests we are surprised. If we thought from the beginning that they were unlikely to be successful, their failure to achieve stated goals or to work at all would not cry out for any special explanation. If we believed that intense conflicts of interests were involved, if people who had to cooperate were expected to be at loggerheads, if necessary resources were far beyond those available, we might wonder rather more why the programs were attempted instead of expressing amazement at their shortcomings. The problem would dissolve, so to speak, in the statement of it.

I love this idea, and it slots in neatly with the commercial world's wisdom that successful companies create room for mistakes, if those mistakes can be used to gain experience and learn. From a project point of view, no one wants to be on the job that fails. From a societal point of view, failed experiments that are adequately described point the way toward eventual success.

Page 98, on mismatched means and ends:

When programs are not being implemented, it is tempting to conclude that the participants disagreed about the special ends they sought rather than the ordinary means for attaining them. Thinking about means and ends in isolation, however, imposes an artificial distinction, especially when more than one program is involved. One participant's ends, such as a training facility, may be another actor's means. Once innumerable programs are in operation, the stream of transactions among people who are simultaneously involved in them may evidence neither clear beginning nor end but only an ebb and flow. As the managers of each program try to impose their preferred sequence of events on the others, their priorities for the next step, which differs for each one and cannot be equally important to all, may conflict. The means loom larger all the time because they are what the action is about. Actually, it is easier to disagree about means because they are there to provoke quarrels, while ends are always around the corner.

The difference between success and failure seems to be the difference between turbulent and laminar flow. Each participant has the same end in mind, but one is relaxed while another is in a hurry, one wants to start here and another there. Even with all actors ostensibly moving in the same direction, turbulence and chaotic flow result from these seemingly-small differences in chosen velocity.

Page 113, on delay:

What had looked like a relatively simple, urgent, and direct program - involving one federal agency, one city, and a substantial and immediate funding commitment - eventually involved numerous diverse participants and a much longer series of decisions that was planned. None of the participants actually disagreed with the goal of providing jobs for minority unemployed, but their differing perspectives and senses of urgency made it difficult to translate broad substantive agreement into effective policy implementation. It was not merely the direction of their decisions - favorable or unfavorable - but the time orientation of the participants - fast or slow, urgent or indolent - that determined the prospects of completion. When so many future decisions depend on past actions, delay in time may be equivalent to defeat in substance.

Much of the process methodology behind Agile seems to recognize that priority-setting is the critical point for most friction: people must agree on what the next most important task is, and this is where most negotiation is designed to take place.

Page 133, on the need for bureaucracy:

If one wishes to assure a reasonable prospect of program implementation, he had better begin with a high probability that each every actor will cooperate. The purpose of bureaucracy is precisely to secure this degree of predictability. Many of its most criticized features, such as the requirement for multiple and advance clearances and standard operating procedures, serve to increase the ability of each participant to predict what the others will do and to smooth over differences. The costs of bureaucracy - a preference for procedure over purpose or seeking the lowest common denominator - may emerge in a different light when they are viewed as part of the price paid for predictability of agreement over time among diverse participants. The price may be too high, but the cost of accomplishing little or nothing otherwise must be placed against it.

Big, dumb bureaucracy has a lubricating effect here. Things take a long time because processes are designed to insulate actors from each others' instabilities. The computation metaphor that seems appropriate here is boundedness: CPU or I/O? What exactly are you waiting for at any given time, and how can project management help participants understand that some given task or responsibility is simply going to take a while, and maybe you should find something else to do?

Page 134, on coordination:

When one bureaucrat tells another to coordinate a policy, he means that it should be cleared with other official participants who have some stake in the matter. This is a way of sharing the blame in case things go wrong (each initial on the documents being another hostage against retribution) and of increasing the predictability of securing each agreement needed for further action. Since other actors cannot be coerced, their consent must be obtained. Bargaining must take place to reconcile the differences, with the result that the policy may be modified, even to the point of compromising its original purpose. Coordination in this sense is another word for consent.

Telling another person to coordinate, therefore, does not tell him what to do. He does not know whether to coerce or bargain, to exert power or secure consent. Here we have one aspect of an apparently desirable trait of antibureaucratic administration that covers up the very problems - conflict versus cooperation, coercion versus consent - its invocation is supposed to resolve.

Everyone wants coordination on his own terms.

This is the part where I criticize unilateral approaches like 37 Signals' Getting Real. The core tenets of Getting Real seem to essentially boil down to a pathological aversion to commitment: commitment to people ("small teams"), to goals ("flexible scope"), and to details ("ignore details", "it doesn't matter"). Generally speaking, people who believe this will have already put themselves in a position to live it: it's no accident that Stamen is seven people. The act of externalizing Getting Real makes it a process, one that's spectacularly bad at addressing coordination. Fine for small projects where everyone starts on roughly the same page, but disastrous for any situation where other actors need to give consent: managers, clients, investors, customers. The universe of Getting Real is a cramped, airless one populated by to-do list managers and communication software for tiny teams.

Where someone needs to be convinced, coerced, or seduced into cooperating with you, process gives way to sub-rational animal instinct.

Pages 165-166, on implementation-as-control:

In this view, for instance, implementers must know what they are supposed to do in order to be effective. Yet, "street level" bureaucrats are notorious for being too busy coping with their day-to-day problems to recite to themselves the policies they are supposed to apply. ... Writing about the administrative process in the regulatory commissions of the New Deal era, James Landis recalls how "one of the ablest administrators that it was my good fortune to know, I believe, never read, at least more than casually, the statutes that he translated into reality. He assumed that they gave him power to deal with the broad problems of an industry and, upon that understanding, he sought his own solutions."

The planning model recognizes that implementation may fail because the original plan was infeasible. But it does not recognize the important point that many, perhaps most, constraints remain hidden in the planning stage, and are only discovered in the implementation process.

This is what I think Agile seeks to address: the idea that requirements change because they flex and respond to previous requirements already met.

Pages 167-168, on implementation as interaction:

This view is strangely reminiscent of old syndicalist doctrines summarized in once-popular slogans like "The Railroads to the Railroadmen" and "The Mines to the Miners." The syndicalists' demand for "industrial democracy" actually concealed a view of production as an end in itself rather than a means of satisfying consumers' wants. We feel the emphasis on consensus, bargaining, and political maneuvering can easily lead (and has, in fact, led) to the conception that implementation is its own reward.

The interaction model of implementation carries interesting evolutionary overtones. The results are not predictable, an element of surprise is maintained, and the outcomes are likely to be different from those sought by any single participant.

This is where I think Agile falls apart: the manifesto promises to do away with process, but introduces process of its own. In particular, the process it introduces is fundamentally introspective, a kind of "Programming for the Programmers" frame of mind that seems to focus on the needs of the development team over the needs of the broader project. The outcomes are likely to have been bent or twisted somewhat along the way.

Page 215, on implementation as adaptation:

In a world of flux, it is only through continuous negotiation between administrators, implementers, and decision makers that any "congruence between program design and program implementation" (mentioned as essential in the literature) can ever be achieved.

"Adaptation" is Pressman and Wildavsky's final watchword for a useful view of implementation. It encodes ideas of flexibility, negotiation, while still leaving room for a deeper goal. This is not willy-nilly natural selection, but a process of constant self-evaluation. There's a lot more on this topic in a future post on Arthur Bentley's The Process Of Government.

Page 228, on learning from error:

In reaction to what is widely perceived as a dismal record, students of implementation, like the evaluators before them, have sought to guard themselves against failure. Instead of learning from error as it is occurring, they hope to prevent future failure before it takes place. Since there can be little learning without mistakes to learn from, however, the field of implementation is caught in a double bind: too much error suggests incompetence and too little inhibits learning.

It's been a while since I've done one of these, I'm a bit rusty. I started Cognition In The Wild over a full year ago, put it down for a while, and only recently came back to finish the book. The topic is cognitive activity, and how it plays out in social situations. Sort of a behaviorist tract in a way, which is interesting because the idea that everyone loved to hate (everyone in UC Berkeley CogSci department ten years ago that is) is starting to pop back up in some odd places in my life: this book, another one about politics from 1908, Obama's economic policies, etc.

Edwin Hutchins frames his story in the context of an observational trip aboard a U.S. Navy vessel, the Palau, and its crew of sailors and navigators. Hutchins particularly concerns himself with the way in which practice and instrumentation constitutes a meta-cognitive process above the level of the individual: the observations and computations that enable the crew of the ship to steer it are carried out by a collection of participants, some of them quite inexperienced, all of them performing small pieces of a bigger task. Together, they form a complete computational process, a sort of full adder made of half adders. He's particularly interested in the instrumentation that lets these guys do their jobs: slide rules, sighting scopes, variations on the protractor, and conventions surrounding verbal communication on the bridge and over the ship's intercom.

Hutchins's theory seems to be that these devices and practices act as a form of cognitive jig, embodying complex trigonometric and geometric processes in tangible form the way a slide rule converts multiplication into a simple linear movement. I've been interested in this idea before, via David Pye's Nature and Art of Workmanship. Pye argued that a lot of what we consider to be "hand work" is actually jigged and regulated through external forces. Pye calls unregulated workmanship "the workmanship of risk", and it's an interesting contrast to the kind of cognitive risk minimization that Hutchins is describing here. There's joy in navigation by dead reckoning as in risky, dextrous workmanship, but the U.S. Navy is having none of it and prefers its interpersonal procedures immaculately specified to the finest detail.

The place where I think this touches some of my recent interests in tiling and flows is that the purpose of a jig is to turn the latter into the former, to transform fluid into constrained motion. In particular I'm thinking about by most recent favorite general-purpose example, the use of "remaining days" as a transposed operations metric by Flickr's capacity planning guru John Allspaw.

Flickr takes one kind of motion, the consumption of storage space or saturation of network bandwidth, and transposes it into another kind of motion, the number of days they're free to sit on their hands until everything falls to pieces.

There's an extended example in Hutchins' book that's similar in spirit to this, and it forms the only coherent set of pages I bothered to dog-ear. As a counterpoint to Western-style navigation that places a moving boat in the context of a static ocean, he offers an in-depth analysis of Micronesian navigation practices that proceed along utterly different lines and yet still allow canoe navigators to travel between tiny islands out of sight of land without losing their bearings. The background to this alternate navigation frame is rote memorization of angular relationships among islands, but the surprising bit is the way it recontextualizes the navigator as a static center with respect to the sidereal compass, surrounding islands moving past him on parallel tracks to the left and the right.

These excerpts constitute my first donation to the Analogy Library. That Flickr capacity thing above is my second. Also worth a read is UPenn's Traditional Navigation in the Western Pacific: A Search for Pattern, written by 1989-2003 This Old House host Steve Thomas.

Page 66, a bit of context:

Without recourse to mechanical, electrical, or even magentic devices, the navigators of the Central Caroline Islands of Micronesia routinely embark on ocean voyages that take them several days out of the sight of land. Their technique seems at first glance to be inadequate for the job demanded of it, yet it consistently passes what Lewis has called "the stern test of landfall." ... Western researchers traveling with these people have found that at any time during the voyage the navigators can accurately indicate the bearings of the port of departure, the destination, and other islands off to the side of the course being steered, even though all of these may be over the horizon and out of sight. These navigators are also able tack upwind to an unseen island while keeping mental track of its changing bearing - a feat that is simply impossible for a Western navigator without instruments.

Page 67, on clues from what lies beneath:

The world of the navigator, however, contains more than a ser of tiny islands on an undifferentiated expanse of ocean. Deep below, the presence of submerged reefs changes the apparent color of the water. The surface of the sea undulates with swells born in distant weather systems, and the interaction of the swells with islands produces distinctive swell patterns in the vicinity of land. Above the sea surface are the winds and weather patterns which govern the fate of sailors. Seabirds abound, especially in the vicinity of land. Finally, at night, there are the stars. Here in the Central Pacific, away from pollution and artificial light, the stars shine brightly and in incredible numbers. All these elements in the navigator's world are sources of information.

Page 68, on the sidereal compass:

Seeing the night sky in terms of linear constellations is a simple representational artifice that converts the moving field of stars into a fixed frame of reference.

This seeing is not a passive perceptual process. Rather, it is the projection of external structure (the arrangement of stars in the heaves) and internal structure (the ability to identify the linear constellations) onto a single spatial image. In this superimposition of internal and external, elements of of the external structure are given culturally meaningful relationships to one another. The process is actively constructive.

Page 71, on picturing a frame of reference:

The fundamental conception in Caroline Island navigation is that a canoe on the course between islands is stationary and the islands move by the canoe. This is, of course, unlike our notion of the vessel moving between stationary islands. A passage from Gladwin (1970: 182) amplifies this:

Picture yourself on a Pulawat canoe at night. The weather is clear, the stars are out, but no land is in sight. The canoe is a familiar little world. Men sit about, talk, perhaps move around a little within their microcosm. On either side of the canoe, water streams past, a line of turbulence and bubbles merging into a wake and disappearing into the darkness. Overhead there are star, immovable, immutable. They swing in their paths across and out of the sky but invariably come up again in the same places. ... Everything passes by the little canoe - everything except the stars by night and the sun in the day.

Page 81, intersecting lines:

It is tempting to criticize the Caroline Island navigators for maintaining an egocentric perspective on the voyage when the global perspective of the chart seems so much more powerful. Before concluding that the Western view is superior, consider the following thought experiment: Go at dawn to a high place and point directly at the center of the rising sun. Return to the same high place at noon and point again to the center of the sun. That defines another line in space. I assert that the sun is located in space where those two lines cross. Does that seem wrong? Do you feel that the two lines cross where you stand and nowhere else?

...

Our everyday models of the sun's movement are exactly analogous to the Caroline Island navigator's conception of the location of the reference island. The choice of representations limits the sorts of inferences that make sense.

Page 92, on relative difficulty in frames of reference:

All navigation computations make use of frames of reference. The most prominent aspect of the Micronesian conception is the apparent motion of the etak island against the fixed backdrop of the star points defined by the sidereal compass. Here there are three elements to be related to one another: the vessel, the islands, and the directional frame. In order to preserve the the observed relationship of motion parallax, one can have the vessel and the directional frame move while the islands stay stationary (the Western solution) or one can have the vessel and the directional frame stationary while the islands move (the Micronesian solution). ... Each of these schemes makes some things easy to compute and other difficult.

Marshall McLuhan entered my world in 1994 or so, when I first subscribed to Wired magazine while still in high school. I still had a year before I got online, so the bits of the articles that began with "http:.." didn't yet make sense to me. I've been bathing in "medium is the message" talk since I was 16 years old, without quite knowing what it means.

I approached Understanding Media as a sort of founding work, trying to get some sense of what Web 1.0's 1960's patron saint was on about. The book is equal parts frustrating and fascinating, especially at the beginning. Right away I had difficulty with two things: McLuhan's definition of "media" (electric light is given as an example, along with the usual radio, TV, film), and his use of terms like "hot" and "cold" without explanation. Radio is a hot medium, television a cool, one. There's not a lot here to grab hold of, and I still can't quote get my head around what the temperature idea refers to.

The book is essentially a 300 page long series of metaphorical assertions. McLuhan prefaces a large number of them with "it is well-known...", "anyone could tell you...." I quickly had to acclimate to this style.

There are just a few big ideas I've walked away with.

One is the frequently-repeated image of a human nervous system extended out past the skin and body through the use of electronic communications media. The book was written well before the Internet, but the founding rhetoric of the 1990's is all there. McLuhan starts with the idea that telecommunications is a factual expansion of the human nervous system out into the world, and derives a number of metaphors on the calmness of nerves and the farming of perception to corporate interests.

Another is the following of all threads, from a technology to all its implications and outcomes. Bruno Latour used a similar "full hardware stack" approach in Artemis when pointing out that the soft, fleshy, and therefore squeezable-during-rush-hour human body is as much a design feature of public transit systems as the rails and vehicles that carry it. McLuhan focuses on perception and all the senses, showing how all the broadcast and point-to-point media imply different sensual responses, from the tactile clothing of the TV generation to the receptiveness to Hitler's rhetoric via the radio medium. In his mention of abrasiveness, I immediately thought of the "shred" / "grind" terminology in popular culture of the past 15-odd years: is there something about the skate video medium that calls up a sandpaper touch? Do the psychological effects of cocaine, ecstacy, etc. make necessary the highly-pitched fuzz of dance music? Simon Reynolds says much of techno was a functional musical form adapted to serve its physical and pharmacological environment. I don't even know how to begin applying these ideas to our emerging world of little square friends - the thought scares me.

I marked many pages than are excerpted here; McLuhan is a very quotable writer even though much of what's quoted is significant more in the reading than the writing.

Pages 65-66, on the sensitivity of the artist to technological change:

The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new technology has number conscious procedures. He can correct them before numbness and subliminal groping and reaction begin. If this is true, how is it possible to present the matter to those who are in a position to do something about it? If there were even a remote likelihood of this analysis being true, it would warrant a global armistice and period of stock-taking. If it is true that the artist possesses the means of anticipating and avoiding the consequences of technological trauma, then what are we to think of the world and bureaucracy of "art appreciation"? Would it not seem suddenly to be a conspiracy to make the artist a frill, a fribble, or a Milltown? If men were able to be convinced that art is precise knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

Page 68:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. Something like this has already happened with outer space, for the same reasons that we have leased our central nervous systems to various corporations. As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.

Page 158, on maps:

Prince Modupe tells in his autobiography, I Was A Savage, how he had learned to read maps at school, and how he had taken back home to his village a map of a river his father had traveled for years as a trader:

"...my father thought the whole idea was absurd. He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him.... Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. ... With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted tracks."

Page 183, on clowns, bicycles, and eggs:

The clown is the integral man who mimes the acrobat in an elaborate drama of incompetence. Beckett sees the bicycle as the sign and symbol of specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interact and react, using all out faculties at once.

Humpty-Dumpty is the familiar example of the clown unsuccessfully imitating the acrobat. Just because all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, it doesn't follow that electromagnetic automation couldn't have put Humpty-Dumpty back together. The integral and unified egg had no business sitting on a wall, anyway. Walls are made of uniformly fragmented bricks that arise with specialisms and bureaucracies. They are the deadly enemies of integral beings like eggs. Humpty-Dumpty met the challenge of the wall with a spectacular collapse.

Pages 209-210, on advertising:

The book-oriented man has the illusion that the press would be better without ads and without the pressure from the advertiser. Reader surveys have astonished even publishers with the revelation that the roving eyes of newspaper readers take equal satisfaction in ads and news copy. During the Second War, the U.S.O. sent special issues of the principal American magazines to the Armed Forces, with the ads omitted. The men insisted on having the ads back again. Naturally. The ads are by far the best part of any magazine or newspaper. More pains and thought, more with and art go into the making of an ad that into any prose feature of press or magazine. Ads are news. What is wrong with them is that they are always good news.

Page 252, on sensitivity:

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), wealthy and refined member of the powerful new English group engendered by industrial power, began to pick up human-distress signals, as a young lady. They were quite undecipherable at first. They upset her entire way of life, and couldn't be adjusted to her image of parents or friends or suitors. It was sheer genius that enabled her to translate the new diffused anxiety and dread of life into the idea of deep human involvement and hospital reform. She began to think, as well as to live, her time, and she discovered the new formula for the electronic age: Medicare. Care of the body became balm for the nerves in the age that had extended its nervous system outside itself for the first time in human history.

Page 255, on electricity:

Many analysts have been misled by electric media because of the seeming ability of these media to extend man's spatial powers of organization. Electric media, however, abolish the spatial dimension, rather than enlarge it. By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, without delegation of functions or powers. The organic everywhere supplants the mechanical. Dialogue supersedes the lecture. The greatest dignitaries hobnob with youth.

Page 277, on Edison and indirectness:

Edison became aware of the limits of lineality and the sterility of specialism as soon as he entered the electric field. "Look," he said, "it's like this. I start here with the intention of reaching here in an experiment, say, to increase the speed of the Atlantic cable; but when I've arrived part way in my straight line, I meet with a phenomenon, and it leads me off in another direction and develops into a phonograph."

Page 294, on expectations:

Since the best way to get to the core of a form is to study its effect in some unfamiliar setting, let us note what President Sukarno of Indonesia announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives. He said that he regarded them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man's birthright.

That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by daydreaming. But the Oriental is right, and we are wrong about this.

Page 298, a poem by Bertold Brecht:

You little box, held to me when escaping / So that your valves should not break, / Carried from house to ship from ship to train, / So that my enemies might go on talking to me / Near my bed, to my pain / The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning, / Of their victories and my cares, / Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

Pages 315-316, on tribal magic:

German Romantic poets and philosophers had been chanting in tribal chorus for a return to the dark unconscious for over a century before radio and Hitler made such a return difficult to avoid. What is to be thought of people who wish such a return to preliterate ways, when they have no inkling of how the civilized visual way was ever substituted for tribal auditory magic?

Page 327, on tactile television:

So avid is the TV viewer for rich tactile effects that he could be counted on to revert to skis. The wheel, so far as he is concerned, lacks the requisite abrasiveness.

Clothes in this first TV decade repeat the same story as vehicles. The revolution was heralded by bobby-soxers who dumped the whole cargo of visual effects for a set of tactile ones so extreme as to create a dead level of flat-footed dead-panism. Part of the cool dimension of TV is the cool, deadpan mug that came in with the teenager.

Page 339, possible origin for the brand name "Nerf"?

The French phrase "guerre des nerfs" of twenty-five years ago has since come to be referred to as "the cold war". It is really an electric battle of information and of images that goes far deeper and is more obsessional than the old hot wars of industrial hardware. The "hot" wars of the past used weapons that knocked off the enemy, one by one. ... Electric persuasion by photo and movie and TV works, instead, by dunking entire populations in new imagery.

Page 356, on automation, feedback, and customization:

On this machine, starting with lengths of ordinary pipe, it is possible to make eighty different kinds of tailpipe in succession, as rapidly, as easily, and as cheaply as it is to make eighty of the same kind. And the characteristic of electric automation is all in this direction of return to the general-purpose handicraft flexibility that our own hands possess. The programming can now include endless changes of program. It is the electric feedback, or dialogue pattern, of the automatic and computer-programmed "machine" that marks it off from the older mechanical principle of one-way movement.

Almost three months have passed since my last book post, and I've been having terrible luck with non-fiction lately. A chance encounter with bkkeepr reminded me that E.H. Gombrich's Art And Illusion had been sitting on my recently-cleaned desk since April or so.

Gombrich is one of those towering academic figures whose Story Of Art dominates first year art history courses. This book is more specific, tracing the evolution of art and visual perception, arguing for a definition of style and representation that moves from primitive schemata to modern responses to light and geometry.

Page 78, on correctness and style:

To say of a drawing that it is a correct view of Tivoli does not mean, of course, that Tivoli is bounded by wiry lines. It means that those who understand the notation will derive no false information from the drawing - whether it gives the contour ina few lines or picks out "every blade of grass" as Richter's friends wanted to do. ... Styles, like languages, differ in the sequence of articulation and in the number of questions they allow the artist to ask; and so complex is the information that reaches us from the visible world that no picture will ever embody it all. That is not due to the subjectivity of vision but to its richness.

Page 106, on Egyptian art and eternity:

...what does seem likely is that picture cycles and hieroglyphs, representations and inscriptions, were more interchangeable in Egyptian eyes than they are for us. ... Mrs. Frankfort concludes that "the rendering of a typical timeless event means both a timeless presence and a source of joy for the dead." But if they are right who see the origin of these typical scenes in pictograph renderings of the round of the seasons, Mrs. Frankfort's analysis might carry even greater weight. For where would it be more meaningful to re-present the cycle of the year in typical symbolic images than on the walls of a tomb that is meant to impart eternity to its inmate? If he could thus "watch" the year come round and round again, the passage of time, the all-consumer, would be annihilated for him. The sculptor's skill would have anticipated and perpetuated the recurrent cycle of time, and the dead could thus watch it forever in that timeless cycle of which Mrs. Frankfort speaks. In this conception of representation, "making" and "recording" would merge. The images would represent what was and what will always be and would represent them together, so that time would come to a stop in the simultaneity of a changeless now.

Page 120, on the Greek invention of art:

There is a painting on one of the walls of a Pompeian house that reflects this motif. It is not a great work of art, and the same criticism applies to many other copies of Greek works found in Italy and elsewhere. But such criticism has tended to obscure the most astounding consequence of the Greek miracle: the fact that copies were ever made at all to be displayed in the houses and gardens of the educated. For this industry of making reproductions for sale implies a function of the image of which the pre-Greek world knew nothing. The image has been pried loose from the practical context for which it was conceived and is admired and enjoyed for its beauty and fame, that is, quite simply within the context of art. ... It may sound paradoxical to say that the Greeks invented art, but from this point of view, it is a mere sober statement of fact.

Page 132, on the Renaissance and schemata:

Leonardo was obviously dissatisfied with the current method of drawing trees. He knew a better way. "Remember," he taught, "that whenever a branch divides, the stem grows correspondingly thinner, so that, if you draw a circle round the crown of the tree, the sections of every twig must add up to the thickness of the trunk." I do not know if this law holds. I do not think it quite does. But as a hint on "how to draw trees," Leonardo's observation is invaluable. By teaching the assumed laws of growth he has given the artist a formula for constructing a tree - and so he can feel like the creator, "Lord and Master of all things," who knows the secrets of nature and can "make" trees as he hoped to "make" a bird that would fly. I believe what we call the Renaissance artists' preoccupation with structure has a very practical basis in their needs to know the schema of things. For in a way our very concept of "structure," the idea of some basic scaffolding or armature that determines the "essence" of things, reflects out need for a scheme with which to grasp the infinite variety of this world of change.

Pages 147-148, on active perception:

We hear a lot about training the eye or learning to see, but this phraseology can be misleading if it hides the fact that what we can learn is not to see but to discriminate. If seeing were a passive process, a registration of sense data by the retina as a photographic plate, it would indeed be absurd for us to need a wrong schema to arrive at a correct portrait. But every day brings new and startling confirmation form the psychology laboratories that this idea, or ideal, of passivity is quite unreal. "Perception," it has recently been said, "may be regarded as primary the modification of an anticipation." It is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations. Instead of talking of seeing and knowing, we might do a little better to talk of seeing and noticing. We notice only when we look for something, and we look when our attention is aroused by some disequilibrium, a difference between our expectation and the incoming message.

Page 162, on seeing things from a distance:

"The Athenians intending to consecrate an excellent image of Minerva upon a high pillar, set Phidias and Alcamenes to work, meaning to chuse the better of the two. Alcamenes being nothing at all skilled in Geometry and in the Optickes made the goddesse wonderfull faire to the eye of them that saw her hard by. Phidias on the contrary ... did consider that the whole shape of his image should change according to the height of the appointed place, and therefore made her lips wide open, her nose somewhat out of order, and all the rest accordingly ... when these two images were afterwards brought to light and compared, Phidias was in great danger to have been stoned by the whole multitude, untill the statues were at length set on high. For Alcamenes his sweet and diligent strokes beeing drowned, and Phidias his disfigured and distorted hardnesse being vanished by the height of the place, made Alcamenes to be laughed at, and Phidias to bee much more esteemed."

Pages 174-175, on economy:

But no tradition of art had a deeper understanding of what I have called the "screen" than the art of the Far East. Chinese art theory discusses the power of expressing through absence of brush and ink. "Figures, even though painted without eyes, must seem to look; without ears, must seem to listen. ... There are things which ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression to the invisible." The maxim into which these observations were condensed might serve as a motto of this chapter: "i tao pi pu tao - idea present, brush may be spared performance."

Pages 247-248, on primitivism:

Because of this gravitation toward the schematic or "conceptual," we have a right to speak of "primitive" modes of representation, modes, that is, which assert themselves unless they are deliberately counteracted.

It is easy to show that these modes have their permanent and roughly predictable features which distinguish them from Constable's approach. I have asked a child of eleven to copy a reproduction of Constable's Wivenhoe Park. As expected, the child translated the picture into a simpler language of pictorial symbols. The copy is really a tidy enumeration of the principal items of the picture, particularly those which would interest a child - the cows, the trees, the swans on the lake, the fence, the house behind the lake. What has been missed, or much underrated, are the modifications which these classes of things undergo when seen from different angles or in different light. The house, therefore, is much larger than in Constable's picture, and the swans are gigantic. The boats and bridges are seen from above in that "conceptual" maplike mode which brings out the characteristic features.

Page 268, towards a reductive definition of art history:

...it is not hard to show that the vocabulary which Constable used for the portrayal of these East Anglian scenes comes from Gainsborough. ... But if this is true, are we not led into what philosophers call an infinite regress, the explanation of one thing in terms of an earlier which again needs the same type of explanation? If Constable saw the English landscape in terms of Gainsborough's paintings, what about Gainsborough himself? We can answer this. Gainsborough saw the lowland scenery of East Anglia in terms of Dutch paintings which he arduously studied and copied. We have his drawing after Ruisdael, and we know that it was this vocabulary which he applied to the rendering of his own idyllic woodland scenes. And where did the Dutch get their vocabulary? The answer to this type of question is precisely what is known as the "history or art." All paintings, as Wolfflin said, owe more to other paintings than they owe to direct observation.

Page 279, on learning:

In all these cases there is the same need to proceed by experiment, and for the same reason: the filing system of our minds works so differently from the measurements of science. Things objectively unlike can strike us as very similar, and things objectively rather similar can strike us as hopelessly unlike. There is no way of finding out except by trial and error, in other words, through painting. I believe that the student of these inventions will generally find a double rhythm which is familiar from the history of technical progress but which has never yet been described in detail in the history of art - I mean the rhythm of lumbering advance and subsequent simplification. Most technical inventions carry with them a number of superstitions, unnecessary detours which are gradually eliminated through short cuts and a refinement of means.