Seven Red

I had a conversation with a colleague about my Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post, for which I had planned a follow-up, but the conversation convinced me that I needed a bit of a clarification before I get to that. Since that post is also apparently linked on some Indiana discussion forum to which I have no access, I guess this will have to serve as a pseudo-response as well.

The problem for my colleague, as I take it, is that I spent so much time in critique that it was not quite clear what I liked. So, my colleague first brought up a situation in which Adobe users both identified a bug or vulnerability and developed a patch for it. So, you like that sort of thing, right? Well, sure, but that’s the kind of relationship that I’m interrogating in that post. Oh. Alright, how about crowdsourcing? Isn’t that more democratic? Well, maybe, I guess, but that’s the kind of relationship that I’m interrogating in that post. (And truly, I identified Lessig and similar writers as “ideologists of free culture,” but they are almost a breath of fresh air next to Tapscott, Howe, and Company, though the latter writers tell us everything we need to know about the former). The frustration is at this point clear. Well, what’s the alternative? I’ll defer that question for later, but I’d first like to offer what might serve as a clarification, and I’ll proceed by analogy here, sort of, by referring to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. I say sort of, because it’s not merely an analogy, since the system and method of Foucault’s work really drives the analysis in the first place, but it is an analogy in the sense that I’m trying to clarify my position by demonstrating a similar shift. On to it.

Discipline and Punish, of course, opens with the torture on the scaffold of the regicide Damiens, one of the more memorable and repeated scenes in a “theory” book: the burning with the hot pincers, the removal of the entrails, the pleas for God’s mercy, and the onlookers suddenly turned to pity for the murderer. The trajectory of the study then follows a seemingly inexorable course toward a “gentle way in punishment,” the prison as a rehabilitative institution (already a distant memory today, I might add), the panopticon, and the carceral archipelago. What Foucault is tracking through this genealogy is the emergence of a disciplinary diagram, which will have been installed throughout the institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries disciplinary societies, and – obviously – still lingers with us in multiple forms and locations. But the analogy here focuses on the relationship between the torture on the scaffold and the far more “gentle” Panoptic prison. When looking at the two together, one is tempted to fall into a narrative of progress, and to praise the gentle way in punishment over and against the scaffold; it is a civilizing tendency that sent the gruesome public torture to background. Foucault suggests that such a reading is a mistake. It is a bit like saying that a Wrigley Field hot dog tastes better than an iPhone. On some level, this statement would seem true (maybe), but it is at the same time senseless, and you’d likely look askance at anyone who uttered it. It’s not merely a matter of comparing apples and oranges (although it is surely that). Or rather, it is only an apples and oranges problem because the scaffold and the prison are effects of completely distinct operations of power, forms of social organization, and attendant subjectivities. Where those who praise the prison over and against the scaffold see a continuous line of progress, Foucault sketches out, instead, a rupture, a break, a transformation that makes such comparisons senseless. (Foucault actually does retain a line of development, but that would just muddy the waters at this point, so I’ll save that for the follow-up post).

The big (and less-than-humble) claim in the user-centeredness post is that nearly all observers are making the same sort of mistake. They compare, say, proprietary software and free software as if the two constitute either a continuous line or a dialectical relationship, rather than a radical rupture in social forms. Or they compare user-centered design with system-centered design as if these were merely a set of options equally available in any sort of social configuration. Or they compare blogging with professional journalism, or user patches with in-house patches for Adobe software, or the work of vidders with studio produced television shows, or a Creative Commons license with the beefed-up copyright of the DMCA. In each case, they conceive of something like progress along a continuous line of development or conflict between available forms where instead, as I’m claiming, you have rupture, different operations of power altogether, different forms of social organization, and different forms of subjectivity.

The consequences of this mistake are likewise analogous. If the scaffold is the negative term in the liberal mythology, it of course becomes difficult to critique the prison, to spot the forms of power operating within the discourses and practices of the rehabilitative prison, the gentle way of punishment. Similarly, if the DMCA or the expanded copyright regime is the negative term, if proprietary software is the great villain, if system-centered design, the closed shop of experts, the one-way communication of mass media become the site of power itself, then it becomes difficult – outside asinine and retrograde arguments to restore those forms (say, The Cult of the Amateur) – to approach the power relations within user-centeredness. (Arguments for the restoration of public torture, which have not gone away, are similarly asinine and retrograde, in any case). If Foucault set out to track the practices and discourses that establish and operate within the disciplinary diagram, finding these in the great disciplinary institutions (the hospital, the school, the factory, the prison), any claim for a new rupture would track the practices and discourses within the new diagram (which I’m calling user-centeredness, but we might also call, after Deleuze, a control diagram).

But my last post on this submits much more modest points: the way technical communication seeks to position itself within this new diagram is both nostalgic and uncritical – nostalgic because it seeks to re-establish relationships of scarcity more proper to a fading disciplinary diagram, and uncritical because in doing so, it misses the very real operations of power within user-centeredness. The first claim, I’d suggest, is fairly solid. The second is more hyperbolic, at the very least speculative, and in some ways “false.” Tech comm is plenty critical, I suppose. It just has an aversion to two themes in what I’d consider my own critical background: the investigation of subjectivity and a critique of capital, both of which it subsumes in some rather pedestrian notions about “ethics” that verge toward the content of your After-School Special (you shouldn’t let your managerial concerns lead to space shuttle explosions, and the like). In the last post, then, I tried to sketch out one of these themes, asking how labor operates within user-centeredness in an attempt to both identify and explain the position that tech comm imagines for itself and to start to piece together some of the more curious emergences in rhetorical theory in the last thirty years (to wit, kairos as a mode of learning to labor in post-Fordist social formations). What happens if we drop the whole business of copyright and authorship and reward structures in a juridical mode and focus instead on user-centeredness and usability as labor relationships, a mode of production? If the work of Italian Autonomist Marxism has value for this sort of thing, it’s because those thinkers have gone farthest in imagining a “social factory” (which goes all the way back to Tronti, and colors the discourse in its entirety), that is, labor smeared across the whole of social life. One of the mistakes, I’d argue, in the current readings of usability and user-centeredness is the continuing segregation of work qua labor in institutionalized settings of production. To correct this, perhaps, a broader theoretical understanding of what constitutes work may provide a different view of the “mob” of users, and those who would purportedly organize and clarify their activities. Certainly, many people are working on this problem. And, yes, these are blog posts, and would require further elaboration. But I’m just needling here and thinking out loud here, after all. In the next installment, which I may get to next week, I’d like to turn more to the question of subjectivity in the user-centered diagram, picking up where I left off on the question of contribution. That post should connect to and complete some previous stuff I offered on Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures, while tying user-centeredness more directly to finance capital. How’s that for a teaser?

But since this post was primarily motivated by my discussion with my colleague, I want to turn to the question of alternatives previously deferred. Whether it’s a dodge, I’ll leave up to you.

Usable Universities from Adobe to Adorno

So, finally, back to this question of alternatives. My colleague – admittedly somewhat flummoxed by the pseudo-Marxist critique of usability and user-centeredness – asked (as he has before) for an “alternative.” If I’m “not happy” (this was the language) with this new form of capitalist social organization I’m describing, if crowdsourcing doesn’t strike me as democratic, if users inventing patches for Adobe products that they love isn’t necessarily progress, what would I put in its place? I’ll be the first to admit that, in most cases, when people sit around offering critiques without alternatives, the effect is pure fatuity. We have a desire to instrumentalize critique, and in this culture of speed, the sooner the better. But I think for some topics, it’s at least worthwhile to begin the process of interrogation and diagnosis without immediately asking for alternatives. First, on this topic in particular, the critique simply doesn’t exist. We rush headlong after the latest Boing-Boing posting on some new tech event or the latest book celebrating the advent of the user as if it is a revelation of some sort. Quite frankly, the Lessig’s of the world do it better, and that’s not saying much. So the immediate request for an “alternative” strikes me as premature: we don’t even know what this thing called user-centered culture is yet, so busy and rushed have we been in celebrating its emergence. We need diagnosis first, and we have precious little of it amid the celebration, is the major point.

Second, I wouldn’t presume to imagine something like a global “alternative” to the set of relationships I’m sketching out, a What is to be Done? for the digital age, although I think there are some practical local upshots for teaching about these things. Moreover, I don’t believe capitalist social organization is something you choose, or not, as if it is the commodity itself, just another menu item, or glittery thing on a store shelf. Hey, is state socialism more glittery? Can I get that at a discount? Such debates are pointless, and I generally seek to avoid them. In this sense, the very question “What’s the alternative?” already participates in a form of subjectivity that we must question: How would you rate our capitalist social organization? Maybe our users can find a patch for it! Well, I sure as fuck hope they can, but that’s not the point. In some cases, the question itself does nothing but stymie any real diagnostic procedure, and in that way functions as a statement disguised as a question. What it really says, and what I believe my colleague was really saying in the diplomatic mode of ideology, was this: There is no alternative, so critique itself is foolish. May as well get on with the business of describing these things and helping students get better at doing them. Maybe, maybe not. I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotations from Adorno – and there’s a long list of those (who doesn’t love “Fun is a medicinal bath”). Before delivering a set of lectures since collected as Problems of Moral Philosophy, Adorno offered the following proviso to his audience, mostly students hungry for a plan of political action:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I urge you to exercise a certain patience with respect to the relation between theory and practice. Such a request may be justified because in a situation like the present…whether it will be possible ever again to achieve a valid form of practice may well depend on not demanding that every idea should immediately produce its own legitimating document explaining its own practical use. The situation may well demand instead that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea in its logical implications so as to see where it may lead. I would even say that this ruthlessness, the power of resistance that is inherent in the idea itself and that prevents it from letting itself be directly manipulated for any instrumental purposes whatsoever, this theoretical ruthlessness contains a practical element within itself.

Adorno, fighting a pitched battle against a particular version of instrumental reason, is quite rightly suspicious of, even politely hostile to, the desire to instrumentalize the theoretical adventure. The only way of achieving a valid practice is the refusal of practicality, and Adorno will complete the dialectical move by suggesting that a particular mode of thought is itself the practice, and only the domination of instrumental reason would make things appear otherwise. (This is, incidentally, where tech comm belies its supposed attempt to distance itself from the purely instrumental, since it generally has no time for such arguments, the production cycle and various consulting deadlines being what they are…).

But the key word in Adorno’s passage, for me, is patience. What does Adorno say? Exercise a certain patience. Pair it with a theoretical ruthlessness. There’s an instruction set I can live with. But it’s not a throw-away line. Patience is itself a practice, and it’s probably the only practice that certain segments of the university still have left as a saleable commodity. If it weren’t just deadly for my own labor interests, I might tell people that you don’t particularly need a university class to learn web design, or technical writing, or grant writing, and that these things would perhaps better be learned on your own, or on an internet forum, or in a club. The structure of the “course” is far too slow, its meetings too infrequent. You want a crash course on CSS? I’ll send you some links. You’d save money, and probably get a better version of the thing if you applied yourself. Of course, we can’t say this. We’ve built our field around the opposite notion. In terms of what the internet has to offer, the university, as a factory, is like the proverbial buggy whip outfit circa 1915 – but we’re meant to argue for the superior quality of the horse. Fair enough. Now, we can certainly help students get better at doing technical writing or CSS, but they can get that anywhere, and at a much cheaper cost in time and money. To my mind, what the university has to offer, what our kind of factory can still sell, apart from tedious credentializing, is patience. Our slowness is not a deficit relative to the lightning speed of the internet, and we should stop trying to catch up with that speed. We’ll never produce content as quickly as Boing-Boing, nor will our interpretations or use of that content ever quite catch up with its rapid transformations. But we ought not try. The only thing we can do that Boing-Boing can’t, I’d suggest, is slow down. Our slowness, it turns out, is our usable strength. But only if we learn to exercise a certain patience. And yes, maybe a little of that theoretical ruthlessness, too.

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