Seven Red

I guess I’ve been motivated to say all this for a while, but the real spur was an article I read the other day that tries to navigate a course for the future of usability studies, “User-Centered Technology in Participatory Culture: Two Decades ‘Beyond a Narrow Conception of Usability Studies,’” by Robert R. Johnson, Michael Salvo, and Meredith Zoetewey. The real exigence for the article seems to be the sort of thing that almost always gets ink these days: positioning professional technical communicators as a necessary part of technology design processes. This is an old story by now. You can’t read the technical writing literature for a day without coming across the deep anxiety about the the effects of disintermediation on the technical communicator role. Because this role has been so classically tied to a position of intermediary (between scientific experts and a lay public), its collapse in post-Fordist economies has sent everybody even faintly associated with the discipline into frantic redefinition mode. The problem, to state it quickly, is that in disciplinary societies (that is, Fordist-Taylorist economies) that maintained strict differentiation of functions (which is to say, a division of and within manual and mental labor, combined with a division of production and consumption), the technical communicator actually played a significant role, because the functional divisions produced distinctions in knowledge and capacities, and thus required the labor of an intermediary. As the partitions and divisions of the old disciplinary apparatuses start to fall apart, along with the temporal rhythms of the production process, these distinctions no longer hold. Not only is technical knowledge dispersed over a wide swath of the lay public (as every meth lab in Montana will readily attest to), but the experts and laypeople are often better at writing for and interacting with each other than the supposed intermediaries.

(Perhaps the last bastion of Fordist disciplinarity, then, now lurks in the concept of the “discourse community,” which purports a materialist origin in its claim that people develop linguistic differences through their different specified activities: the rare Hong Kong stamp collector speaks an esoteric rare Hong Kong stamp collection language, and so forth. This is, no doubt, as true as it is untrue: it’s indisputable that language clusters and mutates around material activities, but the problem for professional discourse communities is that such activities are less and less connected to specified institutional roles. The notion of the professional discourse community, in any case, has become such an article of faith in the discipline that one scarcely recognizes it for what it is: a linguistic ontology of the international division of labor, even as that division undergoes massive structural transformation.)

So the technical communicator – as the frantic repositioning has it – becomes all manner of expert on rhetoric and language and symbolic analysis and user advocacy and finessing consumer participation and anything else that will maintain some coherence for an evaporating conceptual and subjective space. That is to say, at precisely the moment when capital subsumes living labor in its full linguistic capacity, the “task” of the technical communicator becomes at once irrelevant and paramount. It becomes irrelevant because the specified role of the intermediary collapses alongside strictly defined functions of the Fordist production model. The problem is that of any professional whose esoteric knowledge suddenly seems all too exoteric: “technical communication” is not rare, yet the professional technical communicators bank on a scarcity of competence for their own professional (labor) interest. In post-Fordism, it’s not that we don’t have enough technical communicators, but too many of them.  The role becomes paramount because capital has reversed its processes in at least one way: it now sucks value precisely from the labor of consumption, a communicative-relational labor that relies on language processes outside designated sites of production. In the world of cross-functional teams, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing – that is, in a world in which constant capital is made variable, embodied not in technical machines, but in social machines, the technical communicator becomes something like an expert on general social processes, which is really the definition that underlies all the theoretical niceties in the journal articles: we’re the people who help you with people!

And if they’re the people who help you (where “you” generally means some corporation or other, let’s be clear) with people (that is to say, workers and/as consumers, or as we call them all now, “users”), the point of maximum contact becomes the use of the technical artifact, whether it be a potato masher or a patient medical health form. So “usability” becomes the supreme fetish process in the story, and really a remarkable one, as we return to use-value in order to reclaim something like an exchange value for the professional, a reversal Marx would have to just shake his head at (but Baudrillard would at least appreciate). Should there be any doubt about that, we learn from Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey where the real question of value begins and ends: “Usability’s value, after all, is measured by its effects in the agora—the marketplace” (325). The authors are, strictly speaking, correct on this score, however much big “r” Rhetoric wants to big “r” Romanticize the agora as some place of pure communicative action. It is communicative action, with the proviso that communicative action, under the conditions of real subsumption, is already communicative labor. Exchange value thus rediscovers use-value, and with it, usability – a mildly interesting phenomenon because it is a second order abstraction of use-value (the knowledge of use) which can then be reintegrated into the technical commodity as exchange value. It’s why Macs cost more. And why Linux costs nothing. But such contact cannot be left to the chance encounters of the worker-consumers without incurring a significant risk to the economic measurement of these “effects in the agora,” so the point of contact becomes the object for a tightly woven discourse of usability, which, incidentally, manages to reinvent the scarcity of rhetorical operations, or at least of the experts who can interpret them for us (i.e., those who can cycle use back into production). And so we reach the dogmas of usability and user-centeredness.

1) It’s About Users – The problem of usability testing, as Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey articulate it, (and here’s where the agora sneaks back in, though now fully clothed in its marketplace finery) is that it’s both never quite communicative enough and far too communicative for its own good. Never communicative enough: the whole question of usability is in danger of being grabbed up by the empirical social and physical scientists, who come armed with their eye-motion trackers and various well-articulated positivist methodologies. That’s on the one hand, so to speak. On the other is something like a “participatory culture,” which is itself laudable within this discourse for reasons I will discuss later (it’s DOGMA #2), but can also – and here’s your Aristotle – go too far, particularly when its “radical calls to open doors to users” fail to maintain requisite “boundaries between production and consumption” (327). I should note immediately that this thing labeled “participatory culture,” as celebrated as it is by its various ideologists (Lessig, Shirky, etc.), is almost always a euphemism for the reconstruction of labor relations in post-Fordism, a point that is becoming more and more obvious as the eventual settlement with the various “content industries” appears on the horizon. Lessig’s latest book, for example, doesn’t even bother to mask its cheerful unanimity with the extraction of surplus value through this remixing charade, supposing his previous books ever did. If the dialectical two step seeks a synthesis, in any case, it’s between the doubly legitimate claims of the technology experts and the mob – and this is very explicit here, where the authors invoke Bruno Latour’s famous analysis of the fear of mob rule from Pandora’s Hope. So what’s the solution? The rhetoricians, of course, because of their esoteric knowledge of the communicative arts. They’re experts on crowds, see? And such expertise will allow them to bridge those supposed gaps between an expert science and a participatory culture (or, between authority and a deterritorialized labor force, a new constant-variable capital, the general intellect) without subordinating either to the other (How they do this is DOGMA #3).

A very particular kind of rhetorician, though. Now, I’m not clear on what version of Pandora’s Hope the authors were reading, but in my copy, the struggle against the mob is not fought solely by the scientists. What Latour says is this:

If you make a list of all the derogatory terms with which the common crowd is branded by Callicles and Socrates, it is hard to see which of them despises it most. Is it because assemblies are polluted by women, children, and slaves that they deserve this scorn? Is it because they are made up of people who work with their hands? Or is it because they switch opinions like babies and want to be spoiled and overfed like irresponsible children? All of that, to be sure, but their worst quality, for our two protagonists, is even more elementary: the great constitutive defect of the people is that there are simply too many of them.

The struggle against the reign of the crowd (that is, participatory culture) is fought by two, Socrates and Callicles, call them Communicative Truth and Communicative Might, or call them science and rhetoric. Latour calls this the “war of two against all” (which is, admittedly, a pretty funny way to say it), noting that the two “differ only on the fastest way to silence the crowd” (Latour 234-235). One suspects that the authors would run from any characterization of rhetoric represented by Callicles, but that’s not really the point. In any case, it’s odd that the citation of Latour would leave out what – even in Latour, and on the very point they’re making about the more “radical” version of participatory culture – might be considered a slight modification to their ultimate claim that “engineers and rhetoricians together bridge the two cultures of science and culture.” Indeed, Latour calls them “allied buddies,” together in the service of evacuating any real constitutive force from the mob. In Latour you get Socrates, Callicles, and the mob. In this discourse of usability, you get Socrates, some vir bonum, and the mob, but we still have the allied buddies, and the absolute necessity of funneling any encounter between the mob and the technical artifact through some priestly interpretive framework, which will silence the participatory culture just as surely as the truthful disdain of the Neoplatonists. If the first dogma insists on a sort of republican arrangement in order to reterritorialize this participatory culture, the remaining dogmas of usability are then required to do the heavy lifting. Scarcity – which is always terrified of the notion that there are “just too many of them” – has been stabilized, but seemingly at the cost of ignoring the very transformations the discourse is meant to address. How is “participatory culture” salvaged in the face of this reassertion of expertise?

2) It’s About Democracy – It remains somewhat odd in my view that a field so immersed in various philosophies of technology would remain so tied to what I’d consider a mid-twentieth century conception of human-technical relationships. At the core of the arguments for usability, the proclamations of an Ellul or a Marcuse continue to dominate (likely through the pernicious influence of a Feenberg) , with usability (and the helping hand of the technical communicator) serving as the corrective force to technology (or really, technics) out of control. I’d offer the following, where the negative term in the comparison certainly invokes the great technophobic tropes of the 1960′s:

The challenge exists as a profound interest in creating a user-centered culture in which human beings and their attendant physiological and cognitive needs and limitations are the center of technology design, rather than centering design on efficiency and the demands of technological systems.

But, yes, democratic now! With participatory culture, the iron law of efficiency and the primacy of the technical system must give way to the slightly more organic needs of these here organisms. Two cheers for physiology and cognition. So goes the story. It depends on at least three notions: first, that there are on the one hand “needs” and on the other hand “demands of the system,” which is to say, the whole conceptual apparatus is grounded in an ontology of need that remains exclusively human, and trumps anything like desire in any case; second,  there then exists some putative social hierarchy (center/periphery) of technical design along which these ontologized human needs and “demands of technological systems” could be arranged; and third, that reversing such a hierarchy, even if we were to accept it, would somehow invert the functional primacy of efficient systems. This view, of course, makes sense in the age of the assembly line, where the logic of the line speed sets an obvious basis for thinking (and experiencing) a technical system. Does it make sense in post-Fordist work arrangements? If there is a mythic origin for modern tech comm, it can be seen through the hazy factory air and chaotic rumble of the Second World War, and the authors are quite right to locate it there. We learn that the massive influx of untrained service personnel into the military, together with the incredible pace of technological change, led to a particular condition of non-knowledge: the draftees (and the factory workers, too, we may remember), were simply unfit to handle the glorious technical innovations, and so required teaching, pedagogy. But when standard training was assumed to do the trick, the “outcome was often disastrous; many recruits suffered horrible injuries or died misusing technologies” (322):

These consequences gave birth to the first concerted efforts to understand how people read and then apply knowledge to technologies. A window was unconsciously opened for technical communicators to influence technology use and the transfer of knowledge about these technologies.

I’ll ignore for the moment that “unconsciously” is really the key ideological term here, the one that allows technical communication to retain something like a heroic, anti-authoritarian or democratic quality (for how could those who pray at the altar of technic have allowed such a thing to happen otherwise, see?). But really, how could you not love this story? And yet we might follow some of the management folks who conducted this mythical training, like the Training Within Industry (TWI) program that, under the auspices of the War Department, actually went in and evaluated and trained workers in the factories of WWII America. This was an utterly Fordist-Taylorist operation, which is to say, it proceeded by the classic de-skilling procedures of scientific management, but the more time the TWI people spent in the factories, the more they realized that the workers actually knew something about the functioning of the machines, and that that knowledge could be leveraged if only it could be formalized. What, then, happened to the TWI program? After the war, it was clear that the industries in the defeated nations, and particularly Japan, could use similar modernization techniques, so the TWI guys went over to Japan and developed – in coordination with local manufacturers, of course – what came to be known as the Toyota Manufacturing System. Its primary features are well-known: just-in-time production and a cooperative/communicative shop floor, what Takahiro Fujimoto, in The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota, calls an opportunistic learning environment through the development of kaizen, or continuous improvement of process. We thus see how post-Fordism directly emerged out of Fordist production problems, with something like technical communication at the forefront. But we see something else, too, I think: the emergence of usability as a productive procedure, as a management strategy. Where just-in-time production (with its constant flow of information from the supply chain to the consumer) and continuous improvement (with its development of affective cooperative relationships, experimentation, and non-stop communication about concrete encounters with “process”)  meet, you have something like “user-centeredness” and “usability.” It turns out that paying attention to physiology and cognition and limitations is hardly some operation opposed to efficiency: in the age of kaizen, it is the foundation of efficient systems themselves, the reappropriation of use-value as knowledge. One must at least raise an eyebrow at the mythologies of democratic action that attend the discourses of usability. As Paolo Virno says, nobody is poorer than those who see their own linguistic ability transformed into wage labor.

3) It’s About Time – Along with the temporal rhythms of the production process. Not in a silly way. Not the direct reflection of spatialized, calculable, assembly-line time on some other temporal process. Not, that is to say, the uniform stamping of the machine beating out its rhythms in the other times of life; indeed, it was the strict division between work time and non-work time that prevented any such uniformity from taking hold, even if the movies replayed a version of the punch-card in their formal structures. The temporal rhythm of the production process, but not in a silly way. Rather, a particular subjective approach to the rhythms of time as a set of capacities for acting in time. Any disruption in the line, in this model, is the direct result of labor action, either mistake or sabotage. The line only speeds up or slows down. It doesn’t tolerate rupture. Not so in post-Fordism. Already in 1980, in “Dreamers of a Successful Life,” fresh from the prisons of Italy, Virno says

In the composite structure of the social workday, in its inhomogenous and fragmented articulation, time does not pass evenly. Time is not always the empty and abstract index for assigning value, a unit of measure in itself. The simultaneous presence – and the rather haphazard combination – of work as “coordination” and “supervision,” together with the embryonic elements of counter-economy, submission to the machine or nomadism among the many and various precarious activities, establishes a pluralistic perception of time, a diversified perception clearly marked by the “space’ of the experience. Unremunerated social cooperation, of what little of it is found today – and that seeming something of a fetish – as a potent aspect of human labor, restores to production time body and quality, feeling and relationships, the pleasure of understanding and the desire to organize with the greatest possible tactical intelligence one’s own hatred (116).

What might we say about this passage, a passage that already draws in the coordination problems that will mark the prime location of temporal disruption when work becomes a matter of programming the “immaterial” commodity (see, for example, Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month)? A passage that already signals the onset of unremunerated social cooperation before Lessig and the other ideologists of “free culture” got their “hybrid” claws in it? One thing is certain: Virno already then, in prison, doing time, sees the outlines of what will become the key site of post-Fordist production: kairos, as time marked with “body and quality, feeling and relationships, the pleasure of understanding and the desire to organize.” And do we fail to find the same in Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey’s account?

Usability is effective when informing ongoing processes of design and development in a timely way. And that recognition of opportunity or kairos is part of the contribution rhetoric continues to make to the preparation of technical writers—and to usability practitioners.

Part of the contribution? Indeed, it is the primary part of the “contribution” that rhetoric makes. Already in 1980, for it is in the 1980′s that the twin foreign concepts of kaizen and kairos (both, as their experts tell us, essentially untranslatable and therefore better in the original) make their way on to the American scene. The 1980′s, when kaizen as a form of opportunistic learning on the shop floor, a feature of the larger just-in-time production, is mirrored in its influence and abrupt emergence by kairos, the opportune moment to disrupt the time of life, to interject, to stake one’s claim. Are these not all process improvements? Do they not both “inform processes…in a timely way?” Do they not, in fact, require each other, or even refer to the same thing, the careful observation of the (production) process, understanding of the whole, experimental and timely interjection, a whole new time of production? What time is it, this time of kaizen and kairos? The time of disruption, of favorable disruption, the very disruption that was only and always sabotage in the Fordist organization. This is what rhetoric has to sell, what it envisions as its contribution. It’s a mystical contribution, to be sure: time as immeasurable, the mode of organizing work and invention when time becomes immeasurable, when work itself spreads itself out across the whole of social life. In the Fordist model, the subdivision of measurable time runs the entire machinery of production. It is both the basis of extraction (average social labor time) and the basis of resistance (the strike). Because time as measure is both opportunity and threat, because labor immedately recognizes it as the point of maximum vulnerability, its effects have to be overcome. The passage to post-Fordism is just this overcoming, the becoming immeasurable of (work) time; Negri demonstrates this well in “The Constitution of Time.” But then the problem becomes one of cobbling together a new form of measure for extraction. We might say that all the ideologists of “free culture,” from Lessig, to Shirky, to Doctorow, are working on this problem. That they should develop some “hybrid” form, the equivalent of the rough admixture of the medieval workshop and nascent factory in the 17th and 18th century for those ideologists, before the factory form really came into its own, should be no surprise. The form of the new digital labor, the coming work, so to speak, is still merely virtual. So it requires these interventions and theories, no less than did the 17th century, a grasping and halting set of thoughts for what the coming labor might look like. It is, in other words, just when the form of time breaks down that kairos re-emerges as a conceptual problem. The rhetoricians have grasped at least the centrality of kairos for this historical conjuncture, even if they rarely recognize its own conjunctural quality. The problem, of course, is that kairos is the thought of conjuncture itself: it is the universal thought of the particular, and can therefore mask its own particular and contingent quality: this kairos, now, its current function, its current location in a grid of intelligibility, can always hide behind its classical conception in Greek and Roman antiquity, as if the rhetoricians have merely just re-discovered some lost map of time, an exercise in useful antiquarianism. No. Far from it.

What the TWI boys discovered in the factories, and what technical communication sells itself as today, where it reclaims its lost institutional role, explicitly, is in the deft organization of sabotage, the theft of sabotage itself from the worker and/as consumer, the putting to work of sabotage as a temporal form and subjective capacity. Creative destruction, another 80′s term for the same thing. What they discovered was a subjectivity of labor that opened work to productive rupture. What they discovered was a subjectivity that is not merely inserted into a technical system as an object, but can coevolve with it while remaining tied to an axiom of capitalist production. This is why the dogma of democratic action, which still struggles against the conception of the human reduced to objectivity by the technial system, is ultimately wrong, outdated, obsolete. It still believes that exploitation happens when the technical system is placed at the center, and human need at the periphery. And when it still imagines Fordist production as its primary enemy, it is fighting a ghost. The 1980′s, when rhetoric rediscovers kairos after a long sleep, this “neglected concept” that miraculously returns at precisely that time, just when it is most needed, and that spawns a thousand studies in 30 short years, almost all of which speak to its circulation 2000 years ago: a philological miracle, to say the least, if not outright mystification. The intermediary, the technical communicator, is the magician who transforms sabotage into continuous improvement, precisely by reanimating the timeclock where it fails to register opportunity/disruption, precisely by managing the new time of life and labor: kaizen. Where kairos forgets its Japanese twin, on the one hand, and the “simultaneous presence – and the rather haphazard combination – of work as ‘coordination’ and ‘supervision,’ together with…various precarious activities,” on the other, it is nothing but mystification.

*     *     *

But not false. The article – Johnson, Salvo, and Zoetewey’s article – is not false at all. Quite the contrary: it is the most explicit and developed form of the discourse of usability and user-centeredness, and its attendant dogmas, that I’ve seen. It correctly describes and enacts this tightly woven system of a putatively democratic potential, and a (dear God!) necessary intermediary who organizes the time of life and labor in this historical regime of production. It is, in fact, absolutely correct in all its assertions. That it is also a savvy address to the engineers themselves (it appeared in the IEEE Transactions, and we can’t forget its own rhetorical purposes, after all) only adds to this.  But its unashamed rendition and organization of user-centeredness as a form of production is its real contribution. It may be time to say something about contribution itself. What else is usability testing, or this article, about: the contribution made by the users (workers and/as consumers) to the technical production process, the value of which will only be known in the agora, the marketplace. Contribution as a gift, or contribution as the share of the remaining property. We know that user-centeredness, in practice, revolves around these contributions, and as a theoretical ideal, supposes almost universal contribution, the nth user. But, and I’d like to suggest this in closing, we might find the final reversal of the Fordist model precisely in the notion of the contribution. If Adorno and Horkeimer correctly criticized the common understanding of Fordism as the production of uniformity, they did so by suggesting, on the contrary, that capitalism’s greatest asset was its ability to diversify: something is provided for all, so that none may escape. If this being provided for is the secret of Fordism, we might call contribution the open secret of the so-called “gift economy,” with usability as the shopfloor of the social factory pledged to truly continuous improvement, and we should know by now who seeks the institutional role of the foreman. Something is provided for all, Adorno and Horkheimer say, so that none may escape. Today, then, I’d suggest a quasi-reversal of this maxim, the axiomatic quality of production remaining constant, but the direction of its strategies inverted:

Everyone may contribute, so that none may escape.

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